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“Casserian Engeri?”  translated from the Maasai language means, “And how are the children?” This is a traditional greeting among a Maasai tribe in Africa. One hoped to hear, “Sepati Ingera!” which means, “The children are well.” A good indicator of the health of a society is the health of its children.

Sadly, in the U. S. now, with the former Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Robert Redfield saying publicly in July 2020 that deaths from suicides and drug overdoses among high school students far outweighed their deaths from Covid and failures among school children, especially high school students, is at epidemic levels, the answer to this question would have to be,

“No. The children are not well. Not well at all.” And I am astounded by the lack of outcry among most of our public officials.

For more than a year now, children and teens have been robbed of most of what gives their lives value and meaning – seeing their friends at school, club meetings, church groups, camps, family gatherings, singing groups, playing with school bands and orchestras. Some schools have continued sports programs, but many have not, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences, such as the death by suicide of Dylan Buckner, age 18, as reported in the April 21 edition of The Epoch Times. Dylan’s father, Chris, said he is certain that his state, Illinois’, school closures and extended stay-at-home orders worsened his son’s mental health and contributed to his death. Dylan had a 4.7 grade point average, loved playing football, which his father said helped him keep a structured routine, according to the article, “The Cost of Lockdowns.” He was on his way to college with football scholarships. And yet this year, the school system cancelled the football program because of fears of Covid. Dylan attempted suicide in September 2020 and succeeded in ending his life in January 2021.

For more than a year, fearful adults and misguided politicians have discouraged children and teens from getting together with friends and from living their lives normally.  Child development experts agree that peer relationships are among the most important to teens’ mental and emotional health. How could we have done this to a nation of children? For a virus that even former CDC Director James Redfield said poses almost no risk to them. He has said that the flu is 5 to 10 times more dangerous to children and that they have a 1 in a million chance of dying from Covid.

Early death projections from the virus have been shown to be overstated and terribly wrong. Yet, most politicians have not publicly issued retractions and corrections to calm fears and help people, especially children, resume normal lives. Instead, they let the fear-mongering and harm remain.

In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, politicians and bureaucrats stated publicly that children could infect their parents or grandparents with Covid, even if the child had no symptoms. Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, said that children, teens, and young people, just by living their normal lives – socializing with friends, playing sports, attending school events and parties – could unknowingly catch and then carry the virus to older family members and possibly cause death — even if the young person was not sick, even if they did not have so much as a sniffle. This was called “asymptomatic spread,” one of the many bizarre terms we have been forced to learn and think about for more than a year now.

Politicians and bureaucrats stood at the U.S. White House podium at the start of this crisis and said that after infecting an older family member and perhaps causing sickness leading to death, a child would “have to live with that.”

What a devastating, harmful, and irresponsible thing to say within hearing of children, teens, and young adults – that they could be a danger to others merely by breathing, by being, by living their normal lives. What an especially horrible and harmful thing to say when we were not even sure it was true.  It sounded unbelievable from the start. And it turns out that it was not true. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said at a June 7, 2020 press conference that from the known research, “asymptomatic spread was very rare”.

A more recent Chinese study of 10 million people, published in Nature magazine found that asymptomatic spread was not only rare but almost non-existent. (See this). On November 22, 2020, Jeffrey A. Tucker published a comprehensive article on the American Institute for Economic Research web site, tracing information on asymptomatic spread over the past year. (See this)

When I read Tucker’s article and then the study published in Nature magazine, I wondered: where are our elected officials now? Where are those same high-paid politicians, bureaucrats, and public health authorities who had touted these terrible and alarming messages that had so comprehensively devastated the lives of young people for more than a year? Why were they not retracting these statements about asymptomatic spread, reassuring children, teens, and young adults that it is simply is not a worry.  That they, just by living their lives and being themselves, are not and never were “super spreaders,” are not automatic disease carriers. Why were officials not issuing calming and strengthening messages to young people – after more and different information on this virus has emerged? Where was the outcry to protect the mental and emotional health and academic lives of young people, especially teenagers?

Another article by Micha Gartz for the American Institute for Economic Research reminds us that the median age for death from this virus is 80 years old. Most people who contract the virus recover at home, while many become only mildly ill. Harm to communities from widespread lockdowns has been very real, however. The Crisis Text Line, a non-profit organization that provides free mental health texting to people in crisis, received 180,00 texts in November 2020, their largest number ever, Gartz notes in her article. (More “Covid Suicides” than Covid Deaths in Kids – AIER)

Even strong students, who have historically earned good grades, have been failing classes at alarming levels during school this past year’s school shut downs and predominantly online classes, according to published studies, including one from Fairfax County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in the U.S. (See this)

Parents, who had previously heeded advice from groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics’ to limit children and teen’s screen time, for their health, to a maximum of two hours of quality content per day, have now succumbed to allowing their children to spend several hours per day on computers while missing friends, failing classes, and losing hope. Too much computer time can be a health hazard to young people, especially those who may be vulnerable to addiction. In 2019, the WHO listed computer gaming addiction as a disease, one that harms children, teens and young adults mostly. How are the children? Not well at all.

Lockdowns, massive fear, and school shutdowns have had a devastating effect on children and teens’ health.  A national independent non-profit organization called Fair Health that studies health care costs, reported in March 2021 a 333 percent increase in intentional self-harm claims among young people ages 12 – 18 from the period August 2019 to August 2020. The study, The Impact of COVID-19 on Pediatric Mental Health: A Study of Private Healthcare Claims, analyzed 32 billion private health care claims.  Claims have also increased dramatically for overdoses, obsessive compulsive disorders, depression, and anxiety among children 12 – 18, according to the study. The CDC reported over the summer of 2020 that 25 percent of young adults, ages 18 – 25 had seriously considered suicide. (See this).

Many experts have said publicly that lockdowns, including school closures, have been a disastrous and unnecessary mitigation strategy, causing immeasurable harms and countless deaths. Dr. Jay Battacharya, Professor at Stanford University Medical School, called the lockdowns, “the biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” in a March 2021 Newsweek article. Battacharya is one of the authors of a petition called The Great Barrington Declaration, published in October of 2020, which calls for safety strategies for older people while calling for an end to lockdowns of whole societies, stating that lockdowns cause far more harm than benefit. “Keeping children out of school is a grave injustice,” states the declaration, which has been signed by 14,000 medical and public health scientists, 43,000 medical practitioners, and almost 800,000 citizens. Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor at Oxford University are also authors of the petition.

Many studies now published show that states that remined opened for the past year fared no worse, and some better, than states that had the most restrictive closures and shutdowns. Further, there have been treatments for this virus, all along, such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that, if given early, could have saved tens of thousands of lives, according to many sources. Dr. Peter McCollough spoke before Congress on early treatment and on the criminal silencing of doctors, including preventing doctors from treating Covid patients with drugs that work. These drugs were instead politicized with doctors barred from prescribing them.  (Senate Hearing on COVID-19 Outpatient Treatment | C-SPAN.org) With more courage and independent thinking, fear and harm could have been contained; instead many simply stood by and watched the light go out in children’s eyes, month after month for more than a year.

Children in sports have been made to wear masks though masks deplete oxygen and may impede focus and cause more accidents, some parents have complained, while professional athletes on TV do not have to wear them. While many schools have reopened to in-person classes, government-created school re-opening documents, with the repressive six-feet apart, sanitizing, and mask mandates, read almost like manuals for operating a concentration camp. I have taught in a prison, and these public school re-opening plans read and feel more repressive than conditions inside a prison. I have seen children in school this past year eating, spaced six feet from one another, only allowed to remove the mask to eat and not being permitted to eat with their friends. I can hardly keep from crying seeing them this way. School rooms and cafeterias these days look like more like rooms where children are sent to serve detention. Students look like they are being punished when they have done nothing wrong. How can this be? How can we remain silent?

Some students may feel so depressed with these conditions that they do not even want to attend school.  It can be almost overwhelmingly sad to not see human faces and smiles for extended periods. For years, teachers have studied and promoted the importance of children’s social and emotional learning, and now we expect children to attend schools like look and feel like prison camps. Or worse. How can we treat our children this way?

We want to believe that the information we receive about this virus is unbiased and nonpartisan — especially if government mandates have affected children and young adults so severely. Surely the measures must have been neutral and necessary.  But sadly, information we receive is not unbiased; we have to keep questioning, reading, listening, and thinking. Writer and researcher Dr. Namoi Wolf notes that the CDC created a foundation to receive money from big pharmaceutical companies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and from technology companies that profit from online education.

While some politicians and high-paid bureaucrats still promote fear, panic, and paranoia,  others have begun speaking up on failed lockdown policies. In an April 21 Epoch Times article, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that elected officials, establishment media, and Big Tech have been to blame for perpetuating fears and selectively censoring one side of the mitigation debate. Why? Because they have made money off the fear, panic, and paranoia. “Media and big tech giants benefitted from lockdowns as people stayed home and consumed their products,” DeSantis said. Google removed videos of DeSantis talking to doctors who criticized failed lockdown policies. “Google and YouTube have been throughout this crisis censors in service of the ruling elite,” he said. While millions of people lost their businesses or jobs, and school children, teens, and young people struggled with despair, loneliness, and school failures, 614 U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by 931 billion dollars, according to a December 1, 2020, USA Today article. (During coronavirus pandemic, billionaires added $931B to net worth (usatoday.com)

For the health of our communities and our children, we have to keep rising above fear, confusion, paranoia, and even shame and guilt for getting the virus response so wrong. We have to keep returning the question, “And how are the children?” And if the children are not well, we must change course to stop harming them while working diligently to mitigate the harms that have already been done.

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Christine E. Black’s poetry has been published in Antietam Review, 13th Moon, American Journal of Poetry, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod International, Red Rock Review, The Virginia Journal of Education, Friends Journal, The Veteran, Sojourners Magazine, Iris Magazine, English Journal, Amethyst Review, St. Katherine Review, and other publications.

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This article was originally published on Global Research on February 1, 2004.

Contrived behind closed doors in July 2001, the Dagan Plan was slated by its IDF and Mossad architects to be “launched immediately following the next high-casualty suicide bombing, would last about a month and is expected to result in the death of hundreds of Israelis and thousands of Palestinians.”

Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz presented the government [in July 2001] with an updated plan for an all-out attack on the Palestinian Authority. The London-based Foreign Report reported that the plan calls for an invasion of Palestinian-controlled territory by some 30,000 Israeli soldiers, with the clearly defined mission of destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian leadership and collecting weaponry currently possessed by the various Palestinian forces, and expelling or killing its military leadership. As reported in the Foreign Report and disclosed locally by Maariv, Israel’s invasion plan — reportedly dubbed Justified Vengeance — would be launched immediately following the next high-casualty suicide bombing, would last about a month and is expected to result in the death of hundreds of Israelis and thousands of Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat would no longer be in control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip at the end of the military action, the IDF assumes, according to the London weekly. The report also discloses the assumption that the massive Israeli military action would result in the stationing of an international peacekeeping force in the territories, but by the time that such a force would arrive, facts on the ground would be quite different, with improved security conditions for Israel.

The Foreign Report suggests that the outlook of the top echelon of IDF commanders has changed recently, and reflects the position of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who wants a more active role for the army. While Prime Minister Sharon insists that he is not leading Israel into war, and that he will continue with Israel’s policy of restraint in the face of repeated Palestinian terrorist attacks, he has reportedly been leading an international campaign to discredit Arafat.

Also in July 2001, Knesset Member Michael Kleiner (Herut) called on Israel to either assassinate or topple Arafat. Kleiner’s words came in response to a Maariv article that reported Arafat instructing his forces to “kill a settler every day.” Kleiner suggested replacing Arafat, even if it meant the Hamas would take his place. According to Kleiner, the entire world recognizes the Hamas as a terrorist organization so Israel’s continued efforts against a radical Palestinian leadership would not be condemned.

Commentators have noted similarities between the invasion plan and the one that was implemented by Sharon as Defence Minister in Lebanon during 1982, [which led to the murder of up to 1700 Palestinians]. (See below.) Then, too, the goal was to destroy PLO infrastructure and weapons, and to expel or kill Arafat and his armed forces. The trigger for that invasion was the assassination attempt against Israel’s Ambassador in London.

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The Infamous “Dagan Plan”

The so-called “Dagan Plan” which carries the name of its author, Reserve General Meir Dagan had been drawn up prior to Sharon’s election as Prime Minister in February 2001. General Meir Dagan, was Sharon’s security adviser during his election campaign.[1] According to Alex Fishman writing in Yediot Aharonot, the Dagan Plan consisted in destroying the Palestinian authority and putting Yasser Arafat “out of the game”.[2]

“The ‘Dagan Plan’ was based on two unalterable premises:

“One, Arafat is a murderer, and one doesn’t negotiate with a murderer. Two, the Olso accord [mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO, 1993] is the greatest evil that has ever fallen upon Israel, and everything should be done to destroy it.”

Its objective was directed, by means of a vast operation of increasing intensity, toward progressively isolating the Palestinian president just as much domestically as diplomatically.”[3]

In the wake of the elections General Dagan was assigned a key role. He became Sharon’s “go-between” in security issues with President’s Bush’s special envoys Zinni and Mitchell.

The Bush Administration was in all likelihood familiar with the Dagan Plan and did nothing to block its implementation.

There were close consultations between US and Israeli military and intelligence officials. In turn, CIA Director George Tenet, had been put in charge of so-called “peace negotiations”. The hidden agenda was to stall the stall the peace process and implement the Dagan Plan.

In July 2001, an updated Dagan plan dubbed “Operation Justified Vengeance” was formally presented by the Israeli Defence Force to the government. (See above).

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Ellis Shuman is Israel Insider’s Senior Editor. The above text is a shortened version of Ellis Shulman’s article “Is Israel preparing to dismantle the Palestinian Authority?”Israel Insider, 12 July 2001 All rights reserved .Copyright Israel Insider, Koret Communications Ltd, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

Notes

1. for further details see, Sylvain Cypel, Sharon’s plan for getting rid of Arafat, according to Yediot Aharonot, Le Monde 17 December 2001

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

Featured image: Graffiti on the Israeli separation wall dividing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis (Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler via shutterstock.com)

The Power of Romanticism Today: 21st Century Irrationalism

May 17th, 2021 by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin

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“Christianity defeated and wiped out the old faith of the pagans. Then with great fervour and diligence it strove to cast out and utterly destroy every last possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvelous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods; and as well as this it destroyed countless memorials and inscriptions left in honor of illustrious persons who had been commemorated by the genius of the ancient world in statues and other public monuments …. their tremendous zeal was responsible for inflicting severe damage on the practice of the arts, which then fell into total confusion.”
Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), Lives of the Artists.

The development and spread of Enlightenment ideas in the eighteenth century instituted new movements based on a scientific approach to the pursuit of happiness, sense evidence as the primary source of knowledge, and which believed in progress, liberty, constitutional government and separation of church and state. However, while the growth of Romanticism in the nineteenth century was a new movement emphasising the non-rational, or irrational, this was not new. Irrationalism stressed feeling, will and instinct over or against reason and its influence stretched back through time to the early Greeks. For example: “In ancient Greek culture—which is usually assessed as rationalistic — a Dionysian (i.e., instinctive) strain can be discerned in the works of the poet Pindar, in the dramatists, and even in such philosophers as Pythagoras and Empedocles and in Plato. In early modern philosophy — even during the ascendancy of Cartesian rationalism — Blaise Pascal turned from reason to an Augustinian faith, convinced that “the heart has its reasons” unknown to reason as such.”

Here I will look at the relationship between science and irrationalism throughout history showing that at times rational investigation complemented irrational ideas, and at other times irrational ideas arose that conflicted with rational analysis. Early polytheistic society was less dogmatic in its attitude to science compared with Christian theology. Science slowly regained a foothold over the centuries and church ideology weakened. However, Romanticism took the place of the church as the main irrationalist ideology to hinder the growing influence of science in many different fields. Similarly with Christian ideology, it was the conservative elites who advanced and benefitted from the irrationalist ideas of Romanticism, using the various offshoots of Romanticism (Nationalism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Metamodernism etc.) to try and hold back the progressive development of societies towards genuine democracy and freedom, the essential ideas that originated in the Enlightenment. However, as globalised hegemonic culture today becomes ever more saturated with Romanticism – in parallel with Romanticist political movements – there is a real fear that another wave of extreme irrationalist ideas and violence could be provoked and sweep the world within a short period of time.

Early religion and rational investigation

In early societies the irrational ideas of polytheistic religion were aided by rational investigation that helped with human understanding of nature, for example, the Mesopotamians studied scientific subjects, like astronomy, that helped with their religious system.

Astronomy was of utmost importance to some civilizations who left behind large artifacts (proto-observatories e.g. Newgrange in Ireland, Stonehenge in Great Britain, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Abu Simbel in Egypt etc.) connected with the longest and shortest days of the year. This would have helped in determining the seasons and understanding the length of the year and when was the best time to plant crops. Early religion was polytheistic and rooted in nature which can still be seen today amongst the indigenous peoples of many countries. In Ancient Greece, worshipping the gods centred around fertility, childbirth, farming, harvest and death:

“Peasants worshipped the omnipresent deities of the countryside, such as the Arcadian goat-god Pan, who prospered the flocks, and the nymphs (who, like Eileithyia, aided women in childbirth) who inhabited caves, springs (Naiads), trees (dryads and hamadryads), and the sea (Nereids). They also believed in nature spirits such as satyrs and sileni and equine Centaurs. Among the more-popular festivals were the rural Dionysia, which included a phallus pole; the Anthesteria, when new wine was broached and offerings were made to the dead; the Thalysia, a harvest celebration; the Thargelia, when a scapegoat (pharmakos) assumed the communal guilt; and the Pyanepsia, a bean feast in which boys collected offerings to hang on the eiresiōne (“wool pole”).”

Pan teaching his eromenos, the shepherd Daphnis, to play the pan flute, Roman copy of Greek original c. 100 BC, found in Pompeii. Pan is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, and  connected to fertility and the season of spring. Pan’s goatish image recalls conventional faun-like depictions of Satan.

The desire to systematize the connection between nature and farming resulted in the many-century long scientific endeavour to create an accurate calendar. The Greek poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 BC developed the Works and Days calendar “in which the farmer was to regulate seasonal activities by the seasonal appearances and disappearances of the stars, as well as by the phases of the Moon which were held to be propitious or ominous.”

Thus, the calendar would help people more accurately mark the seasons with celebrations and rituals that integrated their activity with the earth’s cycles:

“The cycle of the year, at both the change of the four seasons as well as the height of each season, used to hold great importance. The winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, was a time of new birth. Often it was symbolized by the birth of an annual male fertility figure, a representation of the year’s new sun. The height of the winter, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, was a time to nurture that new life. Spring was about encouraging fertility, when the sun and earth would unite to later bring forth the abundance of the harvest and the bounty of the hunt. From the summer solstice through autumn the sun’s energy transferred to the crops. The height of summer and the fall equinox were celebrations of the year’s harvest and bounty. The end of the year when fields lay dormant and the earth seemed to die at the height of autumn was a time to honor the dead and release the past.” [1]

From the later sixth century BCE onward, myths and gods were subject to rational criticism on ethical or other grounds as the early Greek philosophers such as Thales of Miletus and later Anaximander and Anaximenes tried to explain natural phenomena without relying on the supernatural.

The rise of irrationalism

The spread of Christendom from the Middle East to Africa and Europe by 600 CE was to have huge consequences not only for polytheistic religions but also on burgeoning scientific exploration. The struggle to convert the Roman Empire to Chrisatianity was perceived by Christians as a struggle between the forces of darkness and light, between God and Satan.[2]

Saint Aemilianus, known for his destruction of ancient temples and libraries is shown using ropes to pull down a statue.
His followers are breaking up statues with picks and axes.

As Christianity gained more and more power it worked to not only convert the polytheists to monotheism but also to eradicate scientific learning through attacks on books, libraries and the philosophers themselves. The only thing that mattered in life was worshipping god and any threat to the ideology and theology of Christianity, like, for example, Epicurean (341–270 BC) atomic theory, was to be eradicated. Atomic theory stated that everything in the world was made by the collision and combination of atoms and not created by a divine being.Thus, according to Catherine Nixey:

“The intellectual consequences of this powerful [atomic] theory were summarized succinctly by the Christian apologist Minucius Felix. If everything in the universe has been ‘formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, what God is the architect?’ The obvious answer is: no god at all. No god magicked up mankind out of nothing, no divinity breathed life into us; and, when we die, our atoms are simply reabsorbed into this great sea of stuff. ‘No thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing,’ wrote Lucretius in his great poem, On the Nature of Things, and ‘no single thing returns to nothing’. Atomic theory thus neatly did away with the need for and possibility of Creation, Resurrection, the Last Judgement, Hell, Heaven, and the Creator God himself.”
[3]

Marble relief from the first or second century showing the mythical transgressor Ixion being tortured on a spinning fiery wheel in Tartarus. Epicurus taught that stories of such punishment in the afterlife are ridiculous superstitions and that believing in them prevents people from attaining ataraxia (“tranquility”). 

While the classical philosophers had variously argued multiple positions on the existence of gods (“that there were countless gods; that there was one god; that there were no gods at all, or that you simply couldn’t be sure” [4]), they were tolerated by the general polytheistic populace. This could be because the general population and the philosophers had the same aim in common: to understand nature. This was also because the Greeks saw their gods as being similar to themselves:

“it is important not to forget the fact, which Hannah Arendt stressed (quoting Herodotus), that whereas in other religions God is transcendent, beyond time and life and the universe, the Greek gods are anthropophyeis, i.e. have the same nature, not simply the same shape, as man. If therefore one takes into account the Greeks’ absence of belief in supernatural God, their lack of belief in fixed and revealed truths and the consequent absence of given moral codes, one may assume that Greeks were, in a sense, atheists.”

In Christianity, irrationalism is founded on the idea that human reason cannot fully grasp the meaning of the human condition, and that God and evil coexist in a way that cannot be rationally explained. Therefore, only prayer and faith were necessary for salvation and all earthly necessities and desires were to be swept aside to focus on the promise of eternal life. The Christians attacked classical monuments and shrines, razed temples, burned books and sacred groves, imprisoned and executed ‘idolaters’. As a result, according to Helen Ellerbe, “As the Church assumed leadership, activity in the fields of medicine, technology, science, education, history, art, and commerce all but collapsed. Europe entered the Dark Ages. Although the Church amassed immense wealth during these centuries, most of what defines civilization disappeared.” [5]

The effect of the Church on classical learning was devastating. While a lot of classical literature was preserved over the centuries “it has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.” [6] Instead of celebrating nature directly, people eventually prayed to the Christian “saints for good crops, rain and healthy children almost as pagans once prayed to specific gods assigned to oversee agriculture or fertility.” [7]

Chart of Pagan traditions and Christian adaptations from The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe

Christian eschatology (study concerned with the ultimate destiny of the individual soul and the entire created order) and the idea of linear time took over from the people’s strong connection with nature and the ever-changing seasons. Although, according to David Ewing Duncan, in early medieval times the peasants still lived and died “in a continuous cycle of days and years that to them had no discernible past or future.” [8] Old habits die hard and the church eventually had no choice but to incorporate polytheistic nature-based traditions of the solstice, the Nativity, Saturnalia, Yuletide, the Easter hare and Easter eggs into their own traditions over time.

Science makes a comeback – the Renaissance 

By the twelfth century things began to change. The intellectual revitalization of the Renaissance in Europe led to a new intelectual reinvigoration. Universities were set up and Europeans gained access to scientific Arabic and Greek texts, including the works of Aristotle, Alhazen, and Averroes. There was a huge increase in the rate of inventions and economic growth. As Jean Gimpel writes in The Medieval Machine:

“The Middle Ages was one of the great inventive eras of mankind. It should be known as the first industrial revolution in Europe. The scientists and engineers of that time were searching for alternative sources of energy to hydraulic power, wind power, and tidal energy. Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, western Europe experienced a technological boom. […] Energy consumption increased considerably. Technological innovations brought about improvements in the efficiency of existing methods and also led to a successful search for new sources of energy. Many of the tasks formerly done by hand were now carried out by machines. Concurrently, there was a revolution in agricultural methods, which enabled farmers to produce enough food for an expanding population and provide a more varied diet. There was a marked increase in the general standard of living.” [9]

The reemergence of Aristotelian scientific ideas exerted pressure on the Catholic Church to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) believed that: “Faith and reason, while distinct but related, are the two primary tools for processing the data of theology. Thomas believed both were necessary—or, rather, that the confluence of both was necessary—for one to obtain true knowledge of God. Thomas blended Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine by suggesting that rational thinking and the study of nature, like revelation, were valid ways to understand truths pertaining to God.” Like the pagan festivals, scientific or rational thinking was incorporated into Christian thinking to bolster Christian theology.

The influence of the Renaissance was long lasting and allowed for the growth of scientific communities which by the sixteenth century produced profound results. The Scientific Revolution is believed to have been initiated by the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and ended in 1632 with publication of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It was a process that started with the recovery of what was left of the knowledge of the ancients and was completed by “the “grand synthesis” of Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia. This work formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, thereby completing the synthesis of a new cosmology.”

Isaac Newton’s copy of Principia from 1687. Newton made seminal contributions to classical mechanics, gravity, and optics. Newton also shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus.

The Scientific Revolution progressed into the Age of Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason) which became the main intellectual and philosophical movement in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and covered a range of ideas “centered on the pursuit of happiness, sovereignty of reason and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state.”

The Romanticist reaction

The revolutionary significance of such progressive ideas was not lost on the wealthy elites who discussed universal ideas of freedom, equality, and fraternity but soon limited them to their own class. They reacted to progressivism by looking back to medieval times and society (to a non-threatening peasant class) as an ideal, hoping to divert or divide the developing new revolutionary working class. They rejected collectivist ideals and emphasised emotion and individualism. Romanticist ideas had a profound negative effect on the liberatory and progressive aspects of the arts, and Romanticist thinkers influenced liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism. In contrast to the usually very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, emphasised a belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity, the artist’s own unique, inner vision, ultimately melting away the very notion of objective truth.

Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard emphasised the idea that the world of rationalism was deceptive and ill-equipped to grasp the ‘essence’ of things.

The rise of Romanticist irrationalism in the twentieth century led to the Nationalist conflicts of the First Word War and the aggressive Fascism of the Second World War. Since then irrationalism has been a more subtle part of many social and political movements. Takis Fotopoulos, for example, has discussed two types of irrationalism: old and new irrationalism. Old irrationalism which has flourished since the Second World War “has taken various forms ranging from the revival, in some cases, of the old religions (Christianity, Islam etc) up to the expansion of various irrational trends (mysticism, spritualism, astrology, esoterism,  neopaganism,  ‘New Age’ etc) which, especially in the West, threaten old religions.”

Fotopoulos describes three aspects of the new irrationalism in terms of the universalisation of the market/growth economy, the ecological crisis, and the collapse of ‘development’ in the South. He writes:”at the cultural level, the liberalization and de-regulation of markets have contributed significantly to the present cultural homogenization, which led to an irrational reaction, in the form of the rise of various fundamentalisms [and], at the ideological level, the emergence of the neoliberal consensus was associated with the rise of postmodernism.” He sees the ecological crisis in terms of “the ‘instrumental’ or ‘pragmatic’ approaches versus the ‘spiritual’ ones [and] the deep ecology approach considers the present non-sustainable development as a cultural rather than as an institutional issue, as a matter of values rather than as the inevitable outcome of the rise of the market economy, with its grow-or-die dynamic, which is to blame for the present growth economy.” This led to collapse of ‘development’ in the South:

“Under these circumstances, the return to tradition and, particularly, to religion seemed very appealing to the impoverished people in the South, whose communities and economic self-reliance were being destroyed by the internationalized market/growth economy. Particularly so, when religion was seen as a moral code preaching equality of all men before God set against the injustices of the market/growth economy.  Similarly, the return to spirituality looked as the only way to match an imported materialism which was associated with a distorted consumer society, i.e. one that was not even capable of delivering the goods to the majority of the population, as in the North.”

Thus, the influence of irrationalism in society today is very broad and deep, and affects so many people and movements negatively. It pervades culture, society and politics. This is partly because of the chameleon-like nature of Romanticism which reacts to any progressive ideas or movements by appearing as a radical opposite while it soaks up dissent (e.g. medieval crafts in opposition to modern industry), or, by appearing progressive when it copies the form while substituting in an opposite content (e.g. the Church incorporating polytheistic nature-based traditions of the solstice, the Nativity, Saturnalia, Yuletide, Easter etc.). This means that the insidious nature of irrationalism must be constantly exposed and dealt with before it develops its own momentum again and leads to the kind of socio-political disasters we have seen in the past.

However, the importance of the legacy of the Enlightenment is not so much its support for and development of science, but how particular philosophers used that scientific learning to fight against injustice (an older legacy of many centuries of exploitation and oppression). The idea that knowledge would not just make one aware of how exploitation and oppression worked, but would develop into ideas and practices that could eventually bring such exploitation and oppression to an end was the truly revolutionary legacy of the Enlightenment movement.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

Notes

[1] Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (1995) p145

[2] Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Chriistian Destruction of the Classical World (2017) p9

[3] Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Chriistian Destruction of the Classical World (2017) p36

[4] Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Chriistian Destruction of the Classical World (2017) p147

[5] Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (1995) p41

[6] Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Chriistian Destruction of the Classical World (2017) p166

[7] David Ewing Duncan, The Calendar: The 5000-year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens – and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, (2011) p142

[8]  David Ewing Duncan, The Calendar: The 5000-year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens – and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, (2011) p137

[9] Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1986) pviii/ix

Featured image: Book burning in Berlin, May 1933 (All images in this article are from the author)

Israel Charged with War Crimes and Genocide. Complete 2013 Judgment of the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal

By Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, May 16, 2021

The government of Israel headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has committed extensive crimes against humanity. President Trump in his “Deal of the Century” has endorsed this criminal agenda directed against the people of Palestine.

History: Israel’s Move to Destroy the Palestinian Authority Is a Calculated Plan, Long in the Making

By Tanya Reinhart, May 16, 2021

In mainstream political discourse, Israel’s recent atrocities are described as ‘retaliatory acts’ – answering the last wave of terror attacks on Israeli civilians. But in fact, this ‘retaliation’ had been carefully prepared long before.

The Criminalization of War: Gaza

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 16, 2021

Two million Palestinians live  under an Israeli siege. Israel controls the entry of essential goods including food, water, energy and medicine. Israel also controls Gaza’s territorial waters in derogation  of international law.

Covid Vaccine: The Same Pattern Everywhere?

By Mike Whitney, May 16, 2021

Mass vaccination was supposed to reduce the threat of Covid but– in the short-term– it appears to make it much worse. Why? And why is Covid now “surging in 4 of 5 the most vaccinated countries”?

Middle East and “Greater Israel”: There Will be War

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, May 16, 2021

At this point, there is no hope for peace in the Middle East, I know it sounds pessimistic but it’s fair to say that a new war has officially begun.  Israel’s aggressive behavior against the Palestinians, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Syria and of course, Iran has increased over the years.

Israel Isn’t Entitled to “Self-Defense” Against the People Under Its Occupation

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, May 16, 2021

As Israel continues to pummel the Palestinian people with bombs and artillery shot into Gaza from troops amassed along its borders in preparation for a ground invasion, the Biden administration has reaffirmed its unwavering support for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians.

Video: Early Treatment With Hydroxychloroquine Would Have Significantly Lowered COVID Deaths. Dr. Philippe Brouqui

By Kristina Borjesson and Dr. Philippe Brouqui, May 16, 2021

As the head of Infectious Disease and Tropical Medicine at France’s Mediterranean University Hospital and Medical Director of the hospital’s Infection Institute, Dr. Philippe Brouqui is a member of a French team that has successfully treated thousands of covid patients and been attacked for using hydroxychloroquine as part of their early treatment protocol.

How the Rich Hide Their Wealth: Tax Havens and Capital Flight

By Rod Driver, May 16, 2021

The power and wealth of the biggest banks and financial institutions is one of the most under-reported issues in society. They control so much money, and they can move it between countries so easily, that they can destabilise whole countries.

Palestinians in Israel Now Face Far-right Mob Violence Backed by the State

By Jonathan Cook, May 16, 2021

With Jerusalem ablaze and Gaza on the brink of another major Israeli onslaught, it has been easy to overlook the rapidly escalating ethnic violence inside Israel, where one in five of the population is Palestinian. These 1.8 million Palestinians – Israeli citizens in little more than name – have spent the past week venting their frustration and anger at decades of Israeli oppression directed at their own communities inside Israel, as well as at Palestinians under more visible occupation.

Video: Pfizer’s Criminal Record. Largest Medical “Fraudulent Marketing” Case in US History

By US Department of Justice, May 15, 2021

How on earth could you trust a Big Pharma vaccine conglomerate which pleaded guilty to criminal charges by the US Department of Justice including “fraudulent marketing” and “felony violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act”?

We Must Awaken from “Corona Coma”, Reject “Great Reset” Robotic Technocracy and Assert Our Common Humanity

By Jack Dresser, May 15, 2021

While imagining breakneck progress, we’ve been backing off a cliff.  This is no surprise to those whose historic knowledge is not limited to the stifling propaganda dispensaries called American History class, mainstream news and Hollywood blockbusters that animate the anodyne story lines of comic books.

A Timeline of “The Great Reset” Agenda

By Tim Hinchliffe, May 15, 2021

Say it’s 2014 and you’ve had this idea for a technocratic Great Reset of the world economy for some time now, but it only works if the entire planet is rocked by a pandemic. How do you go about selling your idea?

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Why Is the FDA Funded in Part by the Companies It Regulates?

May 17th, 2021 by Prof. C. Michael White

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The Food and Drug Administration has moved from an entirely taxpayer-funded entity to one increasingly funded by user fees paid by manufacturers that are being regulated. Today, close to 45% of its budget comes from these user fees that companies pay when they apply for approval of a medical device or drug.

As a pharmacist and medication and dietary supplement safety researcher, I understand the vital role that the FDA plays in ensuring the safety of medications and medical devices.

But I, along with many others, now wonder: Was this move a clever win-win for the manufacturers and the public, or did it place patient safety second to corporate profitability? It is critical that the U.S. public understand the positive and negative ramifications so the nation can strike the right balance.

The FDA blocks thalidomide

Americans in the early 20th century were outraged when they found out that manufacturers used poor-quality methods for producing food and medication, and used unsafe, ineffective and undisclosed addictive ingredients in medications. The resulting Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 gave the taxpayer-funded Food and Drug Administration new authority to protect the U.S. consumer.

One of the FDA’s most shining successes occurred in the late 1950s when the agency refused to approve thalidomide. By 1960, 46 countries allowed pregnant women to use thalidomide to treat morning sickness, but the FDA refused on the grounds that the studies were insufficient to demonstrate safety. Debilitating birth defects resulting from thalidomide arose in Europe and elsewhere in 1961. President John F. Kennedy heralded the FDA in 1962 for its stance. An FDA driven by the data – and not corporate pressure – prevented a major tragedy.

How AIDS changed how the FDA is funded

The FDA continued its work fully funded by U.S. taxpayers for many years until this model was upended by a new infectious disease. The first U.S. case of HIV-induced AIDS occurred in 1981. It was rapidly spreading, with devastating complications like blindness, dementia, severe respiratory diseases and rare cancers. Well-known sports stars and celebrities died of AIDS-related complications. AIDS activists were incensed about long delays in getting experimental HIV drugs studied and approved by the FDA.

In 1992, in response to intense pressure, Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. It was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

With the act, the FDA moved from a fully taxpayer-funded entity to one funded through tax dollars and new prescription drug user fees. Manufacturers pay these fees when submitting applications to the FDA for drug review and annual user fees based on the number of approved drugs they have on the market. However, it is a complex formula with waivers, refunds and exemptions based on the category of drugs being approved and the total number of drugs in the manufacturers portfolio.

Over time, other user fees for generic, over-the-counter, biosimilar, animal and animal generic drugs, as well as for medical devices, were created. As time passed, the FDA’s funding has increasingly come from the industries that it regulates. Of the FDA’s total US$5.9 billion budget, 45% comes from user fees, but 65% of the funding for human drug regulatory activities are derived from user fees. These user fee programs must be reauthorized every five years by Congress, and the current agreement remains in effect through September 2022.

Have user fees worked?

The FDA and the drug or device manufacturers negotiate the user fees. They also negotiate performance measures that the FDA has to meet to collect them, and proposed changes in FDA processes. Performance measures include things such as how quickly the FDA responds to meeting requests, how quickly it generates correspondence, and how long it takes from submission of a new drug application until the FDA approves or refuses to approve a drug or product.

Because of the additional funding generated by user fees and performance measures that the FDA has to meet, the FDA is quicker and more willing to discuss what it wants to see in an application with manufacturers. It also offers clearer guidance for manufacturers. In 1987, it took 29 months from the time a new drug application was filed by the manufacturer for the FDA to decide whether to approve a medication in the U.S. In 2014, it only took 13 months and by 2018, it was down to 10 months.

Changes in more recent years have also increased the number of standard new drug applications approved the first time around by the FDA from 38% in 2005 to 61% in 2018. In diseases where there are not many medication options for patients, the FDA has a priority review process, where 89% of new drug applications were approved the first time around and the approvals were completed in eight months in 2018. All this occurred while the number of new drug applications have been increasing over time.

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the FDA provide emergency use authorization for potential treatments in a matter of weeks, not months. The infrastructure and capacity to review the available information so rapidly is due in large part to the funding from user fees.

While the number and speed of drug approvals have been increasing over time, so have the number of drugs that end up having serious safety issues coming to light after FDA approval. In one assessment, investigators looked at the number of newly approved medications that were subsequently removed from the market or had to include a new black box warning over 16 years from the year of approval. These black box warnings are the highest level of safety alert that the FDA can employ, warning users that a very serious adverse event could occur.

Before the user fee act was approved, 21% of medications were removed or had new black box warnings as compared to 27% afterwards.

Some potential reasons that more adverse effects are coming to light after drug approval include senior FDA officials overturning scientist recommendations, a lower burden of proof for medication approval, and more clinical data in new drug applications coming from foreign clinical trial sites that require additional time to assess in an environment where regulators are rushing to meet tight deadlines.

Lack of money limits FDA

User fees are a viable way to shift some of the financial burden to manufacturers who stand to make money from the approval and sale of drugs in the lucrative U.S. market. Successes have occurred and provided U.S. citizens with medication more quickly than before.

[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

However, without careful consideration of what is being negotiated, the FDA can become weak and ineffective, unable to protect its citizens from the next thalidomide. There are some signs that the pendulum may be swinging too far in the direction of the manufacturers. Additionally, while drug approval functions at the FDA are well funded, the FDA is insufficiently funded to protect consumers from other issues such as counterfeit drugs and dietary supplements because they cannot collect user fees to do so. In my view, these functions need to be identified and require additional taxpayer funding.

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 is a distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Pharmacy Practice, University of Connecticut.

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Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie

May 17th, 2021 by Chris Hedges

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Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba(LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state.

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country.  The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.  Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.

The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.  These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel.  This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites.

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.  It is not only bad for the Jews.  It is bad for everyone.  It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes.  Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other.  They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence.  The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence.  These extremists are ideological twins.

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society.  It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security.  Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States.  It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.”

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.

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

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The European database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, which also tracks reports of injuries and deaths following the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines.”

Here is what EudraVigilance states about their database:

This website was launched by the European Medicines Agency in 2012 to provide public access to reports of suspected side effects (also known as suspected adverse drug reactions). These reports are submitted electronically to EudraVigilance by national medicines regulatory authorities and by pharmaceutical companies that hold marketing authorisations (licences) for the medicines.

EudraVigilance is a system designed for collecting reports of suspected side effects. These reports are used for evaluating the benefits and risks of medicines during their development and monitoring their safety following their authorisation in the European Economic Area (EEA). EudraVigilance has been in use since December 2001.

This website was launched to comply with the EudraVigilance Access Policy, which was developed to improve public health by supporting the monitoring of the safety of medicines and to increase transparency for stakeholders, including the general public.

The Management Board of the European Medicines Agency first approved the EudraVigilance Access Policy in December 2010. A revision was adopted by the Board in December 2015 based on the 2010 pharmacovigilance legislation. The policy aims to provide stakeholders such as national medicines regulatory authorities in the EEA, the European Commission, healthcare professionals, patients and consumers, as well as the pharmaceutical industry and research organisations, with access to reports on suspected side effects.

Transparency is a key guiding principle of the Agency, and is pivotal to building trust and confidence in the regulatory process. By increasing transparency, the Agency is better able to address the growing need among stakeholders, including the general public, for access to information. (Source.)

Their report through May 8, 2021 lists 10,570 deaths and 405,259 injuries following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:

Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. This subscriber has volunteered to do this, and it is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.

Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.[1]

Here is the summary data through May 8, 2021.

Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2,Comirnaty) from BioNTechPfizer: 5,368 deathand 170,528 injuries to 08/05/2021

  • 12,435   Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 54 deaths
  • 8,551     Cardiac disorders incl. 636 deaths
  • 62           Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 4 deaths
  • 4,828     Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 3 deaths
  • 153        Endocrine disorders
  • 5,413     Eye disorders incl. 9 deaths
  • 37,167   Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 270 deaths
  • 115,627General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1719 deaths
  • 279        Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 24 deaths
  • 4,047     Immune system disorders incl. 25 deaths
  • 12,099   Infections and infestations incl. 589 deaths
  • 4,142     Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 72 deaths
  • 8,904     Investigations incl. 196 deaths
  • 2,961     Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 109 deaths
  • 59,217   Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 58 deaths
  • 194        Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 11 deaths
  • 73,4       Nervous system disorders incl. 535 deaths
  • 231        Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 9 deaths
  • 83           Product issues
  • 7,002     Psychiatric disorders incl. 81 deaths
  • 1,143     Renal and urinary disorders incl. 82 deaths
  • 1,241     Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 deaths
  • 16,257   Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 619 deaths
  • 18,516   Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 46 deaths
  • 564        Social circumstances incl. 9 deaths
  • 142        Surgical and medical procedures incl. 9 deaths
  • 9,851     Vascular disorders incl. 197 deaths

Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273(CX-024414) from Moderna: 2,865 deathand 22,985 injuries to 08/05/2021

  • 1,047     Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 19 deaths
  • 1,674     Cardiac disorders incl. 301 deaths
  • 8             Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 2 deaths
  • 535        Ear and labyrinth disorders
  • 29           Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
  • 793        Eye disorders incl. 4 deaths
  • 4,952     Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 100 deaths
  • 16,192   General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1255 deaths
  • 98           Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 6 deaths
  • 587        Immune system disorders incl. 4 deaths
  • 1,906     Infections and infestations incl. 151 deaths
  • 1,042     Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 53 deaths
  • 1,395     Investigations incl. 68 deaths
  • 670        Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 58 deaths
  • 7,143     Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 58 deaths
  • 60           Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 11 deaths
  • 9,617     Nervous system disorders incl. 294 deaths
  • 62           Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions
  • 11           Product issues
  • 1,118     Psychiatric disorders incl. 45 deaths
  • 383        Renal and urinary disorders incl. 32 deaths
  • 135        Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 1 death
  • 2,822     Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 255 deaths
  • 2,901     Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 22 deaths
  • 214        Social circumstances incl. 9 deaths
  • 131        Surgical and medical procedures incl. 16 deaths
  • 1,526     Vascular disorders incl. 100 deaths

Total reactions for the experimental vaccine AZD1222/VAXZEVRIA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/ AstraZeneca2,102 deaths and 208,873 injuries to 08/05/2021

  • 6,221     Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 86 deaths
  • 8,504     Cardiac disorders incl. 261 deaths
  • 83           Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 2 deaths
  • 5,774     Ear and labyrinth disorders
  • 174        Endocrine disorders incl. 2 deaths
  • 9,158     Eye disorders incl. 7 deaths
  • 62,739   Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 99 deaths
  • 158,518General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 604 deaths
  • 319        Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 18 deaths
  • 2,135     Immune system disorders incl. 8 deaths
  • 12,002   Infections and infestations incl. 138 deaths
  • 4,991     Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 33 deaths
  • 11,441   Investigations incl. 38 deaths
  • 7,621     Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 31 deaths
  • 93,094   Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 24 deaths
  • 178        Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 5 deaths
  • 125,892Nervous system disorders incl. 318 deaths
  • 128        Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
  • 64           Product issues
  • 10,895   Psychiatric disorders incl. 17 deaths
  • 1,976     Renal and urinary disorders incl. 20 deaths
  • 2,519     Reproductive system and breast disorders
  • 18,411   Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 228 deaths
  • 26,202   Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 13 deaths
  • 475        Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
  • 431        Surgical and medical procedures incl. 14 deaths
  • 10,653   Vascular disorders incl. 131 deaths

Total reactions for the experimental COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson235 deaths and 2,873 injuries to 08/05/2021

  • 79           Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 7 deaths
  • 169        Cardiac disorders incl. 22 deaths
  • 3             Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
  • 45           Ear and labyrinth disorders
  • 3             Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
  • 110        Eye disorders incl. 1 death
  • 783        Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 6 deaths
  • 2,071     General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 67 deaths
  • 20           Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 1 death
  • 35           Immune system disorders
  • 140        Infections and infestations incl. 6 deaths
  • 117        Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 2 deaths
  • 507        Investigations incl. 11 deaths
  • 56           Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 6 deaths
  • 1,348     Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 9 deaths
  • 4             Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps)
  • 1,852     Nervous system disorders incl. 32 deaths
  • 5             Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions
  • 4             Product issues
  • 116        Psychiatric disorders incl. 2 deaths
  • 35           Renal and urinary disorders incl. 3 deaths
  • 29           Reproductive system and breast disorders
  • 366        Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 18 deaths
  • 172        Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 1 death
  • 20           Social circumstances incl. 1 death
  • 80           Surgical and medical procedures incl. 10 deaths
  • 502        Vascular disorders incl. 29 deaths

What is the Worldwide Effect of COVID-19 Shots on Mortality?

Mordechai Sones of America’s Frontline Doctors published a video yesterday illustrating the effects of the COVID-19 shots in various countries with mortality rates.

The video is posted on YouTube (let us know if it disappears) with credit given to @britishbennyboy on Twitter for creating the animation.

The data was compiled from healthdata.org, and The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent population health research center at UW Medicine, part of the University of Washington.

In almost every country, death rates INCREASED just after the COVID-19 “vaccine” roll outs.

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Notes

[1] These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database, and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.

Featured image is from Health Impact News

This article first published eight years ago on March 5, 2013 reveals issues pertaining to the vaccination of children and the role of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

***

Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg were interviewed on Charlie Rose on February 28th, 2013 that mainly focused on the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and how “new approaches” to their agenda can be utilized.

Bill Gates along with Michael Bloomberg has contributed large sums of money to numerous causes such as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative originally launched in 1988 by the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Bill Gates has been in the forefront for the depopulation agenda which he publically stated in 2010 during a conference for TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) that:

“The world today has 6.8 billion people… that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

The Charlie Rose interview was an indication on how new technological advances can possibly help them vaccinate the majority of children in the Third World including Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries throughout Africa.

The technology used to track children for vaccinations is dangerous.  It sets the precedence to target children in many Third World countries.  Charlie Rose asked Bill Gates about the “New Approaches” used in the process:

Charlie Rose: You mentioned the five or a six year plan the new initiative has learning from old lessons and therefore, coming up with new approaches.  What are the new approaches?

Bill Gates: Well, we’re able to use new technology like satellite photos to see are there people moving around, nomadic roots.  You know we see if when we go out to get all the children, if there’s some settlement areas that we’ve actually missed.  We also put a – – a phone in the vaccine box they carry around that looks where they’re located every three minutes and so it has that GPS data.  At the end of the day you plug that in and compare it to where they were asked to go, and you can see if you’re – you’re really covering all the kids.

The “New Technology” used to locate children to administer vaccinations is a method that will be introduced to many countries targeted for depopulation.  It is a scenario that poses a threat to humanity.

The Polio vaccine has contributed to the more deadly ‘Non-Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis (NPAFP)’.  NPAFP is not any different from polio paralysis, but it is twice as dangerous.

In an article titled “Study: Polio vaccine campaign in India has caused 12-fold increase in deadly paralysis condition” by alternative health website naturalnews.com staff writer Ethan A. Huff reported that:

“The mainstream media has been busy hailing the supposed success of India’s polio vaccine campaign over the past few years, with many news outlets now claiming that the disease has been fully eradicated throughout the country. But what these misinformation puppets are failing to disclose is the fact that cases of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP), a much more serious condition than that caused by polio, have skyrocketed as a result of the vaccine’s widespread administration”

What the polio vaccine has done was increase a more severe condition called non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP).

In 2011, for instance, the year in which India was declared to be polio-free, there were 47,500 known cases of NPAFP, which is a shockingly high figure under the circumstances. And based on data collected from India’s National Polio Surveillance Project, cases of NPAFP across India rose dramatically in direct proportion to the number of polio vaccines administered, which suggests that the vaccines were responsible for spurring the rapid spread of this deadly condition.

Not only has NPAFP increased 12 times due to the Polio Vaccine campaign, the cost to India increased 100 times more than the original amount as well.  Huff wrote:

According to the IJME report, the entire polio vaccine scam in India was spawned from initial grants made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and various other groups that claimed the program would eventually pay off. But the overall costs once India started paying for the program quickly ballooned to more than 100 times the initial investment amount, with more than $2.5 billion and counting still being funneled into it.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a fraud.  But more importantly, it is a dangerous step towards forced inoculations by the global elites who claim that their philanthropies are supposed to help people.  Overall, it sets a dangerous path towards an Orwellian society that will be monitored and targeted for vaccinations that do more harm than good.  The ultimate goal is depopulation, not saving populations.

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***

Steve Hendrix, Shira Rubin and Michael E. Miller at WaPo report that Israeli air strikes on the densely populated urban areas of the Gaza Strip had by Thursday evening killed 109 Palestinians, among them 28 children, and had wounded 621 persons.

The Israeli Air Force deliberately destroyed some of Gaza’s taller buildings, alleging that the ruling Hamas party had offices in them. They gave advance warning so that families could leave their homes. But the huge bombs falling on a civilian city inevitably did damage also to nearby buildings and have left families homeless. Flying glass and debris injured noncombatants.

Claire Parker and Adam Taylor at WaPo report that Hamas and other militant groups in the Palestinian Gaza strip have fired a thousand rockets into Israel since Monday. Almost all landed uselessly in the desert or were intercepted by Israeli Iron Dome interceptors. Despite being unguided, some landed on buildings or parked cars, apparently more or less by accident, and they killed seven Israelis, including a teenage boy and a young girl. These are war crimes on the part of Hamas and the other groups in Gaza, since indiscriminate fire into civilian areas is strictly forbidden in international law.

It has to be underlined, however, that the thousand rockets did not damage a thousand buildings. More like a handful. Most Gaza rockets only travel 3 to 6 miles, and at that range they just stir up desert sand. Hamas has deployed a few longer range rockets, and hit Tel Aviv.

But the rockets are still primitive and there weren’t many longer distance ones.

This is psychological warfare. The organization is letting Israelis know that it can strike relatively distant targets. The barrage was provoked by the Israeli attack on worshipers in the al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas styles itself and Islamic party and could not let this defilement of Muslim sacred space go unanswered.

The rockets killed Israeli noncombatants, which is terrorism.

But there is also a principle of proportionality in the law of war. and Israeli fighter jets have killed many times the number of Palestinians as Hamas rockets had Israeli civilians. That is state terrorism.

Since the situation in Gaza is not well understood in the outside world, it is worth reviewing it.

Nearly two million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, roughly the population of Houston inside city limits. It is one of the more densely populated places on earth.

Some 50% of the population consists of children. One in 10 children there are stunted, in part because of food insecurity imposed by the Israeli blockade.

Over 70 percent of the families in Gaza are refugees, having been ethnically cleansed from southern Israel.

Gaza is not an independent state. Its people are stateless and at the mercy of the Israeli military.

Here are the facts and figures given by the UN Relief and Works Agency:

1.46 million registered refugees out of 1.9 million total population (approximately 73 per cent)

8 refugee camps

22 health centres

16 relief and social services offices

11 food distribution centres for almost one million beneficiaries Figures as of 31 December 2019

Ashkelon, for instance, was the Palestinian town of Majdal, a town of some 9,000 in 1945, mostly Muslim but with some Christians. They were farmers or weavers and Majdal fabrics were famous. Some 8,000 were forced to flee advancing Zionist forces in 1948. Some slipped back in after the Israeli conquest, but in 1950 Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered their expulsion. Some 2,300 were expelled to Gaza, joining townspeople who had already fled there two years before.

Other Palestinians in Gaza come from Beersheva, Ashdod, and other southern towns. Israelis now live in their homes and farm their land, while the Palestinians huddle in refugee camps. About a third of the Gaza population, 600,000, still live in eight refugee camps. Israel ruled Gaza directly 1967-2005 (doing nothing to improve their lives), and since 2005 has kept it as an open air concentration camp.

The Israeli Air Force destroyed the Gaza airport and port. Israel is considered in international law the Occupying power in Gaza, but often takes steps inconsistent with its responsibilities in this regard. At one point in the zeros the Israeli military made a plan to only allow enough food into Gaza to keep the population from becoming malnourished, but nothing more. No chocolate for the children. It was one of the creepiest moments in the history of colonialism.

The unemployment rate in Gaza is 50%, the highest in the world. Half the population depends on food aid. The aquifer is polluted and increasingly salty from rising seas owing to climate change, so truly clean water is available to only about 5 percent of the population. Israel has several water purification plants. The Palestinians of Gaza do not.

There is no equivalence between Israel and Gaza. Israel has the best-equipped military in the Middle East and has several hundred nuclear bombs, Its gross domestic product (nominal) per capita is on the order of $42,000 per year.

The nominal GDP per capita in Palestine is $3000, and those who live in Gaza earn less yet.

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Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Featured image is from Informed Comment

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***

On Saturday afternoon, the al-Jalaa Tower in Gaza City, which housed a number of media offices used by outlets including Middle East Eye, was bombed by the Israeli air force. 

Shortly before the strike, Al Jazeera aired a phone call between the owner of al-Jalaa and an Israeli intelligence officer. The owner, named by Al Jazeera as Abu Hossam, asked to be given more time to evacuate equipment from the offices.

The intelligence officer declined his request. Occupants of the building were given a one-hour notice before the air strike took place. (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)

Journalists search through the rubble of al-Jalaa Tower in Gaza city on Saturday after it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike.

The 12-storey building contained 60 residential units, with a number of offices for international media including Al Jazeera and the Associated Press, as well as Arab and local press.

In a statement, the Israeli army said it had struck the building becuase it housed “entities belonging to the military intelligence of the terrorist organization Hamas” without elaborating. (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)

Journalists gather near the rubble of al-Jalaa Tower after an Israeli bombardment on Saturday.

Mohammed al-Hajjar, a photojournalist for MEE, was among those who left the building. He said the evacuation was a scene of panic and chaos as people rushed to take whatever they could and get out as quickly as they could.

He later returned to the site to inspect the wreckage: “There’s nothing left but our memories.” (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)

A media worker gathers what he can find of his belongings amid the rubble of  al-Jalaa Tower in Gaza city, after it was destroyed in an Israeli air strike on 15 May 2021.

Middle East Eye has released a statement condemning Saturday’s attack:

“Bombing the offices of journalists providing eye-witness accounts of what is happening on the ground is not an act of self-defence.

Targeting journalists by attempting to prevent them from reporting what is going on is not the act of a self-declared democracy which claims to be the unique champion of freedom of information in the Middle East.” (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)

Journalists search through the rubble of what used to be their workspace in al-Jalaa Tower in Gaza city, which was destroyed in an Israeli air strike on 15 May 2021. 

In a statement released on Twitter, the White House said it had communicated to Israel that “ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.”

Health officials in the enclave said Israeli air and artillery strikes since Monday have killed 139 people including 39 children in Gaza while more than 1,000 have been wounded. (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)

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***

“This is truly a massacre that cannot be described,” said Dr. Al Reesh at the al-Shifa Hospital which received the bodies of 10 Palestinians killed, including eight children, and 15 people wounded by an Israeli air raid on the Shati Refugee Camp in the Gaza strip in the hours of Friday night and Saturday morning.  Among the dead were visiting relatives of a family on the second day of the Al-Fitr holiday. 

Shati is the third largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight refugee camps and one of the most crowded, with more than 85,000 refugees, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

The crisis began Monday, following days of protests against the forced expulsion of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Israeli security forces brutally crackdown on the peaceful protests, and further inflamed tensions with a raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque, preventing prayers in the holy month of Ramadan. This unprovoked Israeli aggression led to Hamas firing rockets at Israel.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed at least 139 Palestinians, including 40 children, and wounded more than 920 since Monday. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank began protesting at security checkpoints in solidarity with their countrymen in Gaza under siege. Israeli forces have killed at least 13 in the West Bank while Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship rose in protests in mixed cities such as Lod, where Jews attacked their Palestinian neighbors and damaged homes and businesses.

To better understand the current crisis, and the underlying root causes, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse reached out to Jafar Ramini, a Palestinian writer and political analyst and activist born in May 1943 in Jenin, northern Palestine. He was educated at Jenin local secondary school and then completed his education in London where he has resided for the past 53 years. In January 2021 he moved to Perth, Western Australia. Jafar lectures, and writes, and appears regularly on various international TV networks explaining both the history and modern-day politics of the Palestinian NAKBA.  At 78 years old he is still as passionate and as vocal as he has always been and has traveled extensively through Europe, the Middle East, and North America looking for the answer to a question that still eludes him.  Why have successive US Administrations since Harry Truman, supported Israel and its land-grabbing theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestine so blind-folded? And why do the UK, Canada, and Australia follow their lead without question? It would seem, says Jafar that we look at a country and a people with no moral compass and no sense of justice or fair play.

Steven Sahiounie (SS):  What is your opinion of the report by Human Rights Watch labeling “Israel” as an Apartheid state?

Jafar Ramini (JR):  Of course I support the Human Rights Watch declaration that Israel is an Apartheid state.  It is about time it was recognized as such having been practicing Apartheid, albeit undercover, since the inception of the Zionist state.  Now with the Nation-State Bill passed into law on1 May 2018 declaring that only Jews in Israel have the right to self-determination it is an unapologetic, unashamed admission of Apartheid as you could get. Israeli Arabs may have, so far, the right to vote but their vote is of little consequence and in all other matters they are second or even third-class citizens in Israel. As for the West Bank, occupied since the six-day war of June 1967 with citizens having no rights of any kind and for Gaza, continually under siege and especially now with this latest savage bombardment the Palestinian people have been described by Bishop Desmond Tutu under a worse version of Apartheid than South Africa in the 60s and 70s.

SS:  The war between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation is escalating, do you think other resistance groups will interfere?

JR:  It depends on what you mean by other resistance groups.  All the resistance factions in Gaza are engaged and I hope that they are tightly coordinating their efforts.  Other resistance groups in the area might get involved if they feel that their interests will be served.

SS:   US President Biden seems to not want to be involved in the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. In your opinion will he be forced to get involved?

JR:  No President can afford to be uninvolved, at least on the Israeli side. AIPAC is watching and pushing. Mr. Biden’s credentials and those of his Vice-President, Ms. Kamala Harris is very steeped in Zionism and supporting Israel.  He is the one who in the 1980s bluntly declared that the three billion dollars in annual aid the US gives Israel is the best investment for America.  Had Israel not existed, he said, we would have invented it. Need I say more?

SS:   While President Trump was in office several Arab countries normalized their relationship with Israel.  In your opinion, after the latest escalation and the success of the Palestinian resistance do you think that the Arab people will realize that Israel is the enemy?

JR:  The leaders of those so-called Arab countries are the ones who were coerced by Trump and his son-in-law, Kushner to normalize with Israel.  The Arab people as a whole would never consider this.  I give you two obvious examples: When Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 the people of Egypt never accepted it.  The same goes for the people of Jordan, when King Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, the Wadi Araba Jordanians never accepted it either. The same goes for us Palestinians in regards to the Oslo Accords.

SS:   In the current conflict in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank are all united in their resistance to occupation. Will this bring about Unity among various Palestinian movements?

JR:  Unity amongst all Palestinian people of all persuasions has been what I dreamt of and fought for all my life.  The divisions between Fatah and Hamas for the last fourteen years have brought the Palestinian Cause nothing but damage.  After this latest savage attack by Israel on all aspects of Palestinian society, I dearly hope that this might bring them all together to face our common enemy. Unity is the only answer.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Photo of Jafaar Ramini Palestinian political analyst and journalist (Source: Mideast Discourse)

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***

As Israel continues to pummel the Palestinian people with bombs and artillery shot into Gaza from troops amassed along its borders in preparation for a ground invasion, the Biden administration has reaffirmed its unwavering support for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians.

Israel could not commit its crimes without the overwhelming support of the U.S. government. U.S. officials are aiding and abetting Israel’s crimes with massive military aid and scotching any criticism of Israel in the UN Security Council.

President Joe Biden said he didn’t think Israel’s attack on Gaza has been a “significant overreaction.” He expressed his “unwavering support” for Israel’s“right to defend itself” from rocket attacks from Gaza, but he did not condemn Israel’s airstrikes that are killing Palestinian civilians and destroying residential buildings, or the Israeli attacks on worshippers at the Al Aqsa Mosque.

“Blanket statements like these with little context or acknowledgement of what precipitated this cycle of violence — namely, the expulsions of Palestinians and attacks on Al Aqsa — dehumanize Palestinians & imply the U.S. will look the other way at human rights violations,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) tweeted, and said Biden was giving Israel a “green light” to continue its onslaught.

“By only stepping in to name Hamas’ actions — which are condemnable — and refusing to acknowledge the rights of Palestinians, Biden reinforces the false idea that Palestinians instigated this cycle of violence,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This is not neutral language. It takes a side — the side of occupation.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that there is a “fundamental difference between a terrorist organization in Hamas that is indiscriminately targeting civilians and Israel, which is defending itself.” But as Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, wrote in an email to this writer, claims like Blinken’s obscure the fact that nearly all of Israel’s targets have been civilians. And the vast majority of those killed have been Palestinians. Moreover, as an occupying power, Israel cannot use military force against the occupied Palestinian people because under international law, the occupier has a duty to protect the territory it occupies.

On May 13, Israeli troops bombed the Gaza Strip with artillery, tanks and war planes, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prepared at least three brigades of troops for action.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who served as chief of general staff for the IDF during Israel’s 2014 massacre of 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza, threatened to commit additional war crimes. Gantz warned that “Gaza will burn” if Israelis have to sleep in shelters.

Hamas has fired rockets into Israel in response to the Israeli attack on worshipers at the holy Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. Seven Israelis have been killed. But 120 Palestinians have been killed and 900 people wounded, according to Palestinian health officials.

“This is the worst I witnessed in my life,” Sourani wrote in his email. “No safe haven in Gaza, so bloody and brutal; all the targets, almost are civilians, the most intention to exert pressure on resistance.” Sourani added:

They are terrorizing the two million in Gaza day and night, the peak this morning. We did not believe we will see the sunshine again. Everything is shaking in the house including our bodies. They destroyed the civilian police stations and headquarters, internal security, infrastructure, big building towers, etc. None of these, to the best of our knowledge, has any security significance.

The International Criminal Court Is Investigating Israeli War Crimes in 2014

On March 3, 2021, Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that her office was launching a formal investigation into war crimes committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip since Israel’s 2014 “Operation Protective Edge,” in which Israeli forces killed 2,251 Palestinians.

Bensouda found a reasonable basis to believe that Israeli forces committed the war crimes of willful killing, willfully causing serious injury, disproportionate use of force, and the transfer of Israelis into Palestinian territory. She also found a reasonable basis to investigate possible war crimes by Palestinians, including intentional attacks against civilians, using civilians as human shields, and torture and willful killing.

Seven years after Operation Protective Edge, Israeli officials are once again committing war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. In its current “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” Israeli leaders areperpetrating the same war crimes as those they committed in 2014.

Israeli Apartheid Is a Crime Against Humanity

Under the ICC’s Rome Statute, “inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutional regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group, with the intent to maintain that regime” constitutes the crime against humanity of apartheid.

In 2001, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) sent a delegation to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and subsequently published a report documenting a system of apartheid.

Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Virginia Tilley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University, co-authored a report for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia in 2017. It found “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians constitutes “the crime of Apartheid.”

In January 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem issued a report titled, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid.”

Like B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch had long resisted charging that Israeli leaders were committing the crime of apartheid. But on April 27, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report describing Israel’s “intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” including East Jerusalem. The report added that this Israeli government intent “has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.”

Palestinians Have a Lawful Right to Resist Israeli Occupation

Under international law, the Palestinians have a lawful right to resist Israel’s occupation of their lands, including through armed struggle. In 1982, the UN General Assembly “reaffirmed the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

The Biden administration is claiming that Israel is acting in self-defense against the Hamas rockets, but under international law, Israel, as an occupying force, does not have the right to use military force in self-defense against its occupied territory.

Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and associate professor at Rutgers University, wrote in Jadaliyya, “A state cannot simultaneously exercise control over territory it occupies and militarily attack that territory on the claim that it is ‘foreign’ and poses an exogenous national security threat. In doing precisely that, Israel is asserting rights that may be consistent with colonial domination but simply do not exist under international law.”

As Falk said in an interview with Truthout, “It is always deceptive to treat the oppressor and the oppressed as if equal.” In the current situation, he added, “the oppressor acts contrary to applicable international law and elementary morality while the oppressed is countering by exercising rights of resistance and suffering the deprivation of basic rights. Of course,” Falk added, “the tactics of resistance should be scrutinized by reference to legal and moral constraints, but without losing sight of overwhelming structures of dominance and the far greater harm done bystate violence than by the violence of resistance.”

Yet the Biden administration maintains a false equivalency between Palestinian rockets and Israeli bombs.

The Biden Administration Is Aiding and Abetting Israeli Crimes

An individual can be convicted of a war crime or a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute if he or she “aids, abets or otherwise assists” in the commission or attempted commission of the crime, “including providing the means for its commission.”

The U.S. government gives Israel $3.8 billion in military aid annually. Israel could not maintain its occupation of Palestinian lands and persecution of the Palestinian people without U.S. assistance.

Moreover, the United States regularly prevents the UN Security Council from issuing resolutions or statements that criticize Israel. The U.S. was the only country on the Security Council to oppose a statement urging Israel to prevent the evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The proposed statement, endorsed by 14 of the 15 Council members, called on Israel “to cease settlement activities, demolitions and evictions, including in east Jerusalem in line with its obligations under international humanitarian law” and refrain from taking unilateral actions “that exacerbate tensions and undermine the viability of the two-state solution.”

Between 1967 and 2017, the United States used its veto in the Security Council 43 times to protect Israel from international accountability.

End U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Countries that receive U.S. military aid can only use weapons for legitimate self-defense and internal security, according to the Arms Export Control Act. In addition, the Leahy Law forbids military units that commit human rights abuses from receiving U.S. weapons or training.Moreover, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits U.S. assistance to any country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” U.S. military aid to Israel violates all three of these laws.

There is growing opposition in Congress to U.S. funding of Israeli violence and human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin) tweeted,

“We cannot just condemn rockets fired by Hamas and ignore Israel’s state-sanctioned police violence against Palestinians — including unlawful evictions, violent attacks on protestors, and the murder of Palestinian children.” Pocan added, “U.S. aid should not be funding this violence.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, tweeted,

“American taxpayer money is being used to commit human rights violations,” adding, “Congress must condition the aid we send to Israel, and end it altogether if those conditions are not followed. Statements aren’t working, Blinken. Enough is enough.”

Twenty-three members of Congress joined Representatives Marie Newman (D-Illinois) and Pocan in signing a letter urging the Biden administration to pressure Israeli leaders to “desist from its plans to demolish Palestinian homes in Al-Bustan and evict Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah,” two neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

On April 13, Rep. Betty McCollum introduced H.R. 2590,

To promote and protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and to ensure that United States taxpayer funds are not used by the Government of Israel to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law.”

The National Lawyers Guild issued a statement in solidarity with the Palestinian people. It notes that May 15 is the 73–year anniversary of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.In 1948, the Zionist settler colonial movement with the support of imperialist powers established the state of Israel through the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, waged through massacres and the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages,” the statement reads. “This colonial project continues today as we are witnessing the forced expulsion of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem by armed settlers, indiscriminate violence against Palestinian protestors, attacks on Palestinian holy sites, and the ongoing devastating closure and indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.”

As Israel continues its assault on Gaza, congressional disapproval and international opposition will increase. Those who oppose Israeli war crimes should pressure their congressmembers and the White House to halt U.S. military assistance to Israel and stop blocking UN Security Council action to end Israel’s human rights violations.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues

Featured image is from Desertpeace

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***

The destruction of two important Gaza buildings housing 20 media outlets was both shocking and predictable. History shows that if the media aren’t around to document Israel’s war crimes, it’s a lot easier for it to commit them.

On Tuesday, Israel bombed the 10-storey Al-Jawhara Tower, causing it to collapse. Before doing so, it had ‘benevolently’ warned that the airstrikes were coming. The following day, it bombed the 14-storey Al-Shorouk Tower, also giving warning it was going to do so.

Most reports have the buildings as evacuated before being levelled. But without these media offices, reporting on Israel’s other war crimes will be left largely to what little media remain and citizen journalists.

The buildings were significant. A statement by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) noted the Al-Jawhara building housed the offices of 13 media institutions and NGOs. And an advisory by the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that the Al-Shorouk building housed at least seven media outlets.

A further statement by the same committee said that the Israeli military had defended its bombing of the building via email, bizarrely claiming it had “acted within international law,” alleging the Al-Jawhara building housed Hamas’ intelligence and military offices, and saying the Al-Shorouk building was a base for Hamas’ military intelligence offices and “infrastructure to communicate tactical-military information.”

Just minutes after the Al-Shorouk building was destroyed, I spoke by phone with Shadi Ali, a producer who had worked there for ten years and was understandably devastated at what had happened. He told me of previous occasions when Israel had bombed the building, in 2009, 2012, and 2014.

I was there in 2012. My office was on the 14th floor when it was hit at 6am. I was sleeping; I had only slept for one-and-a-half hours when it was hit by two missiles on the top floor,” he told me. “When it was bombed in 2014, we had taken precautions and left it already. They struck the 15th floor, destroying it completely. Our floor became the top floor after that.”

The building was on a main Gaza street, Omar Mukhtar, surrounded by residential apartment buildings. I asked whether he knew if there had been casualties this time. He replied, “We’re waiting, because often they’ll strike again soon after, knowing that people have come to search for casualties.”

I’ve witnessed this tactic with my own eyes. In January 2009, while I was accompanying Palestinian Red Crescent medics, one of the bodies the medics retrieved was that of a Kiffah Lum Towwak, 35, killed by an Israeli missile strike on her backyard in Jabaliya, just minutes after a strike which killed a family member living in the same house.

The same month, I was inside the now-destroyed Al-Shorouk building, having just finished an interview with RT about what I’d seen while riding in ambulances in the extremely dangerous areas of Gaza’s north. Shortly after concluding the interview, Israel shelled the building at least seven times. Thankfully, the tank shelling didn’t destroy the building, and we were able to run down the stairs to “safety” (although in reality nowhere was safe).

The Al-Shorouk building was again bombed a week after this. Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the bombing and noted that the Israeli military had contacted Reuters (which had an office inside) “minutes before the attack to confirm the location of its Gaza office,” and had explained it would not be targeted.

In November 2012, I reported from a hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, after Israeli attacks, and documented thedestruction of bridges and other infrastructure as well as visiting the media buildings which had been targeted. I wrote at the time, “At least three Palestinian journalists were killed in the November 2012 Israeli attacks on Gaza, and at least 12 reported injured. The Sharook building suffered damage on its upper floors from a number of bombings including drone and possibly Apache helicopter missiles. The building housing Aqsa TV and various other media offices likewise suffered major damage on its upper floors.”

The CPJ reported, “A series of airstrikes beginning early Sunday and continuing today targeted two buildings, Al-Shawa and Housari Tower and Al-Shuruq Tower, which are well-known for housing numerous international and local news organizations, news reports said. At least seven journalists were injured in the first attack. Khader al-Zahhar, a cameraman for Al-Quds TV, lost his right leg.”

Having journalists on the ground in a place like this is critical. In previous wars on Gaza, Israel has committed a litany of war crimes, including in 2009 targeting with a flechette bomb and killing a uniformed Palestinian medic as he worked to save injured civilians; firing more dart bombs on mourners the following day, killing six, including a pregnant woman; targeting with sniper fire two medics I was with, during ceasefire hours; assassinating children and infantsdrone-striking a 14-year-old during ceasefire hours; raining white phosphorous down heavily on civilian areas throughout Gaza; bombing a school sheltering the displacedbombing hospitals and repeatedly shelling a home Israeli soldiers had forced 60 members of an extended family into, killing 26, including 10 children and seven women.

And that was only in 2009. In 2012 and 2014, Israel again committed more unspeakable crimes of war, destroying entire neighbourhoods and massacring the residentsshelling children on a beach, and drone-striking a teen hours before ceasefire, among many others.

And now, after a few days of Israeli bombardment, horrific reports are emanating from Gaza, including accounts of Palestinians killed by what is believed to be toxic gas, and Israeli precision bombings killing entire families. As of May 14, Gaza’s health ministry reports at least 119 killed, including 31 children.

Meanwhile, across occupied Palestine, Israelis are calling for Palestinians’ deaths, with a rabbi allegedly saying, “I call on you to kill all Arabs!” and others using Facebook and Telegram to organize attack mobs. And it was recently reported, “Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz threatened more destruction than he ordered in Gaza in 2014. At that time, he was Israel’s chief of staff commanding the 51-day assault that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children.”

Also reported is an Israeli MP’s call for the Israeli army to “flatten the Strip.” That is nothing new. As I wrote in 2014, “During the eight days of slaughter, Israeli figures called to ‘blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water,’ and to ‘Flatten all of Gaza. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing,’ said the deputy Israeli Prime Minister Eli Yishai and Gilad Sharon respectively.”

Israel’s bombing spree of media targets has been rightly condemned. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate stated that, “the targeting of media headquarters in the brutal bombardment of Gaza is part of the full-fledged war crimes committed by the Israeli occupation authorities against the Palestinian people,” and called for the United Nations and the Red Cross “to provide urgent protection to journalists and the media, and to activate Security Council resolution 2222 (which includes the protection of journalists) and oblige the occupation to fulfil [sic] this.”

The CPJ stated, “It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to bomb and destroy the offices of media outlets and endanger the lives of journalists, especially since Israeli authorities know where those media outlets are housed.” And the International Federation of Journalists said, “The international community cannot turn a blind eye to the systematic violations of human rights and the deliberate targeting of media and journalists. Urgent actions must be taken to hold those responsible for these crimes internationally accountable”.

However, while journalist protection committees have condemned the recent Israeli bombings of media buildings in Gaza, Western corporate media generally haven’t. Imagine, though, if this was taking place in Syria: if Syrian or Russian planes premeditatedlybombed and levelled media buildings there. That would be front page news for days, if not weeks.

I would go back to Gaza to report on this horror if I could enter, but that’s impossible: Israel would not let me in, and is not allowing journalists in in general.

In December 2008, RWB reported, Israel declared the Gaza Strip a “closed military zone” and denied access to journalists working for international media. And now, as Shadi Ali told me the other day, Israel knows there are not many foreigners in Gaza to report what is going on. There is a media blockade, on top of the brutal siege of Gaza and Israel’s bombardment.

Israel will commit so many crimes in Gaza, while foreign media are not present,” Ali predicted. And he’s right. As Israelthreatens to invade by land, the protection of media buildings and journalists becomes all the more important, because Israel will commit more war crimes. They’ve already pledged to make Gaza burn.

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Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett

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Middle East and “Greater Israel”: There Will be War

May 16th, 2021 by Timothy Alexander Guzman

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***

At this point, there is no hope for peace in the Middle East, I know it sounds pessimistic but it’s fair to say that a new war has officially begun.  Israel’s aggressive behavior against the Palestinians, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Syria and of course, Iran has increased over the years.  The US embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was the straw that broke the camels’ back for the Palestinians because it was a step towards Israel’s expanded control in one of the world’s oldest and holiest cities for Arabs, Christians and Jews alike.  Israel’s vision for hegemonic power in the center of the Arab world is written in Oded Yinon’s ‘The Zionist Plan for the Middle East’ which describes the long-term goal of Israel expanding beyond its borders deep into Arab territories. 

This current situation is the result of what Theodore Hertzl (the father of Zionism) who had envisioned a country for the Jewish people.  He said that “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” Rabbi Fischmann  reiterated what Hertzl had dreamed of also said that “the Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”  The Yinon plan makes it clear on what Israel’s main objective is and it is disturbing:

The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation. 

This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme. This theme has been documented on a very modest scale in the AAUG publication, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach. Based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former Prime Minister of Israel, Rokach’s study documents, in convincing detail, the Zionist plan as it applies to Lebanon and as it was prepared in the mid-fifties

 

Israel’s expansion into Palestinian territories is part of that plan and the Palestinians understand this very well.  The US under the Biden regime like every American regime before it will support its closest ally in the Middle East and that is Israel.  There is one important group of people worth mentioning and that is the 50 million plus American Christian Zionists who support Israel because they believe that the chosen people of God shall return to the Holy Land.  According to the Christian Zionists, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 follows prophesies from the Holy Bible, therefore some Christians believe that Jews uniting in Israel will bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ.  With that type of support coming from the bible belt in America and Washington’s political establishment who are all in the pockets of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) allows Israel to continue its aggressive behavior towards their Arab neighbors.

It is also possible to consider the fact that within Israel’s circle of power, economists and political scientists have been sounding the alarm of a US economic collapse that won’t be able to support Israel’s future financially and militarily and that is a harsh reality that the Israelis do not want to face anytime soon, therefore, time is short for Israel. So they will continue to bomb the Palestinians and that will eventually lead into an expanded war against Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Syria. In the meantime, Israel will continue its war against the Gaza strip because they want the Palestinians to suffer the consequences of resisting occupying forces on their own land. The Israelis want Gaza, the West Bank and other areas to be totally destroyed in an effort to force the Palestinians into exile.

This new war will lead into something catastrophic for the world in the foreseeable future, it’s inevitable.  I hate to be pessimistic, but the reality is that war is already here, and it will be brutal.  The world needs to speak out against this injustice and stop this escalating war in Gaza from becoming a world war that can spin out of control.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Silent Crow News.

Timothy Alexander Guzman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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***

With Jerusalem ablaze and Gaza on the brink of another major Israeli onslaught, it has been easy to overlook the rapidly escalating ethnic violence inside Israel, where one in five of the population is Palestinian.

These 1.8 million Palestinians – Israeli citizens in little more than name – have spent the past week venting their frustration and anger at decades of Israeli oppression directed at their own communities inside Israel, as well as at Palestinians under more visible occupation.

Already the protests, which have been sweeping Palestinian communities inside Israel, have been greeted with a savage backlash – a combination of official violence from Israeli police and vigilante-style violence from far-right Jewish gangs.

Israeli politicians have been warning noisily of “Arab pogroms” against the Jewish population. But with the rising influence of the openly fascist far-right in Israel – many of them armed settlers, some with ties to military units – there is a much greater danger of pogroms against the Palestinian minority.

Israel’s Palestinian citizens have been at the heart of the wave of protests in occupied East Jerusalem that began a month ago, at the start of Ramadan. With the aid of their Israeli ID cards and relative freedom of movement, many travelled to East Jerusalem in organised bus convoys. They bolstered numbers in the demonstrations at Sheikh Jarrah, where many Palestinian families are facing expulsion from their homes by Jewish settlers, backed by the Israeli state. They also participated in the defence of al-Aqsa Mosque.

But last weekend, as social media was flooded with clips of police storming al-Aqsa and of Jewish extremists excitedly cheering a fire near the mosque, protests erupted inside Israel too. There have been nightly demonstrations in larger Palestinian towns, including Nazareth, Kafr Kanna, Kafr Manda, Umm al-Fahm, Shefa-Amr and Beersheva. Police have responded in familiar fashion, firing stun grenades into the crowds and smothering them with tear gas. There have been large numbers of arrests.

Boiling point

Some of the most violent clashes, however, have been taking place elsewhere, in communities misleadingly described by Israel as “mixed cities”. Israel has traditionally presented these cities – Lod (Lydd), Ramle, Jaffa, Haifa and Acre (Akka) – as examples of “Jewish-Arab coexistence”. The reality is very different.

In each, Palestinian citizens live on the margins of a former Palestinian city that was ethnically cleansed upon Israel’s founding in 1948 and has been aggressively “Judaised” ever since.

Palestinian residents of these cities have to deal daily with the racism of many of their Jewish neighbours, and they face glaring institutional discrimination in planning rules designed to push them out and help Jews – often members of the settler movement or extremist religious students – take their place. All of this occurs as they are tightly policed to protect Jewish residents’ rights at their expense.

Resentment and anger have been building steadily for years, and now seem to have reached a boiling point. And because the “mixed cities” are among the few places in Israel where Jewish and Palestinian citizens live in relatively close proximity – most other communities have been strictly segregated by Israel – the potential for inter-communal violence is especially high.

The roots of what some still view as a potential new intifada, or Palestinian uprising, risk being smothered in areas of Israel. The more the Palestinian minority protests against the structural discrimination it faces, the more it risks inflaming the passions of the Jewish far-right.

These Jewish fascists are riding high after their parties won six parliamentary seats in Israel’s March election. They are seen as integral to any coalition government that caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may put together.

Driving Palestinians out

For years, the settler right has been trying to drive remaining Palestinian families out of the “mixed cities”, especially those in the centre of the country, next to Tel Aviv. They have received state help to set up extremist religious seminaries in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods.

Now under cover of protests, the far-right has the chance to up the stakes. Its newest legislator, Itamar Ben Gvir, has claimed, fancifully, that police are being prevented from dealing with the protests firmly enough. The barely coded message is that the far right needs to take the law into its own hands.

More surprisingly, Ben Gvir was echoed by the government’s police minister, Amir Ohana, who called on “citizens carrying weapons” to work on the authorities’ behalf by “immediately neutralising threats and danger”. Social media has also been awash with calls from activists to arm themselves and attack Palestinian communities in Israel.

On Wednesday, the results of the incitement were all too evident. Jewish gangs, many of them masked, smashed and looted Arab-owned shops and food stalls south of Tel Aviv. Hundreds of onlookers were filmed by an Israeli TV crew watching as a driver was dragged from his car and severely beaten. Though the rampage had been going on for much of the evening, police were nowhere in sight.

Palestinian residents of mixed cities have been hurriedly organising defence patrols in their neighbourhoods. But with many members of the Jewish far right licensed to carry firearms, the reality is that Palestinian communities have few ways to protect themselves effectively.

Some of the worst scenes have emerged from Lod, where local Palestinians live in a few ghettoised neighbourhoods stranded in the midst of what is now effectively a Jewish city next to Tel Aviv.

‘Iron fist’

Confrontations on Monday led to an armed Jewish resident fatally shooting a Palestinian father-of-three, Musa Hasuna. The next day, his funeral escalated into a riot after police tried to block the mourners’ route, with the torching of cars and visible symbols of the Jewish takeover of central Lod, including a synagogue.

On a visit to the city, Netanyahu denounced the events as “anarchy” and warned that Israel would use an “iron fist if necessary”.

On Wednesday night, a curfew was imposed on the city, and under a state of emergency, control passed from the local council to police. Netanyahu said he had been working to overcome legal obstacles to give police even greater powers.

Echoing Netanyahu and the Jewish fascist parties, Israeli Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai argued that the explosion of Palestinian unrest had been caused by police being “too soft”.

Over the past few days, there have been tit-for-tat violent attacks on both Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with beatings, stabbings and shootings that have left many dozens injured. But claims of an imminent “civil war” in places such as Lod, as its Jewish mayor characterised the situation this week, fundamentally misrepresent the dynamics at play and the balance of power.

Even if they wanted to, Palestinian communities have no hope of taking on heavily armed security forces and Jewish militias.

Eruption of anger

What the state is doing in Lod and other communities – through the police and proxy settler allies – is teaching a new generation of Palestinian citizens a lesson in Jewish-state civics: you will pay a deeply painful price for demanding the rights we pretend to the world you already have.

Certainly, Netanyahu seems to have no real commitment to calming the situation, especially as violence between Jewish and Palestinian citizens takes his corruption trial off the front pages. It also feeds a right-wing narrative that is likely to serve him well if, as expected, Israel heads back to yet another general election in a few months’ time.

But other Israeli officials are stoking the flames, too – including President Reuven Rivlin, who unlike Netanyahu, is supposed to be a unifying figure. He denounced Palestinian citizens as a “bloodthirsty Arab mob” and, in an inversion of the rapidly emerging reality, accused them of conducting what he called a “pogrom” in Lod.

For decades, Israel has tried to cultivate the improbable notion for western audiences that its Palestinian citizens – restyled as “Israeli Arabs” – live happily as equals with Jews in “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

Israel has carefully obscured the minority’s history as Palestinians – clinging on to their lands during Israel’s mass ethnic cleansing operations in 1948 – as it has the systematic discrimination they face in a self-declared Jewish state.

As a consequence, the eruption of anger in Palestinian communities inside Israel is always difficult for Israel to manage narratively.

Treated as an ‘enemy’

Since the grip of a military government was loosened in the late 1960s, the Palestinian minority has staged constant protests. But massive, nationwide street demonstrations have erupted only once every generation – and they are always brutally crushed by Israeli forces.

Badly bloodied, Palestinian citizens have been forced to retreat into unhappy, and temporary, quiescence.

That was what happened in the 1970s during Land Day, when Palestinian communities launched their first one-day general strike to protest the state’s mass theft of their historic farming lands so that Jewish-only communities could be established on them. Israeli officials, including then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, were so incensed by the strike that they sent in tanks. Six Palestinian citizens were killed as a result.

The protests returned in October 2000, at the start of the Second Intifada, when the Palestinian minority took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians under occupation who were being killed in large numbers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Within days, 13 demonstrators had been gunned down, and hundreds more were seriously wounded as Israeli police used live ammunition and rubber-coated metal bullets as their first-line of crowd control.

A subsequent judicial inquiry, the Or Commission, concluded that police viewed the minority as an “enemy”.

Double discrimination

The new generation protesting this week knows of the October 2000 protests chiefly as stories told by their parents. They are finding out first-hand how much has changed in Israel’s racist policing in the intervening two decades.

In fact, questions about the role of Israeli police and their relationship to Palestinian communities inside Israel have been at the forefront of political debates raging among Palestinian citizens over the past two years.

The Palestinian minority has long suffered a doubly discriminatory approach from Israeli security forces. On one hand, police have shirked a normal civilian policing role in Palestinian communities in Israel. That has allowed criminal elements to flourish in the vacuum created by this neglect. Murders and shootings are at an all-time high.

On the other hand, police are quick to crack down when Palestinian citizens engage in political dissent. The current arrests and police violence are part of a familiar pattern.

Many of the factors that brought Palestinians out into the streets in 2000 have not gone away. Violent, politically repressive policing has continued. House demolitions and racist planning policies still mean that Palestinian communities are chronically overcrowded and suffocated. Incitement from Jewish politicians is still the norm. And Palestinian leaders in Israel continue to be excluded from the government and Israel’s main institutions.

Permanent underclass

But in recent years, matters have deteriorated even further. The passage of the 2018 nation-state law means the minority’s legal position is formally worse. The law has explicitly relegated Palestinian citizens to a permanent underclass – not really citizens at all, but unwelcome guest workers in a Jewish state.

Further, the ascendant Jewish far-right has a mounting grievance against the Palestinian minority for standing in the way of its securing a solid electoral majority in a run of elections over the past two years. The success of Palestinian parties is seen as effectively blocking Netanyahu from heading a stable coalition of the ultra-nationalist right.

And, with a two-state solution firmly off the table for all of Israel’s Jewish parties, Palestinian citizens are staring at a political and diplomatic cul-de-sac. They have no hope of emerging from under the shadow of an Israeli security paradigm that readily views them as a fifth column, or a Palestinian Trojan horse inside a Jewish state.

It is that very paradigm that is currently being used against them – and justifying police and settler violence in places such as Lod, Jaffa and Acre.

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Covid Vaccine: The Same Pattern Everywhere?

May 16th, 2021 by Mike Whitney

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***

Covid cases have risen sharply in nearly every country that has launched a mass vaccination campaign.

Please watch this short video before You Tube removes it.

Why is this happening?

Mass vaccination was supposed to reduce the threat of Covid but– in the short-term– it appears to make it much worse. Why? And why is Covid now “surging in 4 of 5 the most vaccinated countries”? According to Forbes magazine:

“Countries with the world’s highest vaccination rates—including four of the top five most vaccinated—are fighting to contain coronavirus outbreaks that are, on a per-capita basis, higher than the surge devastating India, a trend that has experts questioning the efficacy of some vaccines … and the wisdom of easing restrictions even with most of the population vaccinated.” (Covid Surges…Here’s why the US should Worry”, Forbes)

Worse than India? How can that be? And why have 8 “fully vaccinated” members of the New York Yankees tested positive for Covid? Here’s the story from the Associated Press:

“New York Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres tested positive for Covid-19 despite being fully vaccinated and having previously contracted the coronavirus during the offseason. Torres is among eight so-called breakthrough positives among the Yankees — people who tested positive despite being fully vaccinated.” (NBC News)

And if that’s not confusing enough, check out what’s going on in Cambodia. Cambodia began its vaccination campaign in early February after having compiled zero fatalities. That’s right, the country had no Covid deaths until March, a few weeks after it started its vaccination program. And that’s when the deaths started piling up as you can see in the eye-popping chart below.

chart from Joel Smalley Twitter

chart from Joel Smalley Twitter

So, let’s see if we can figure this out. There were zero fatalities before the launching of the vaccination campaign, but soon after the injections began, the fatalities started to mount. Do you think there might be a connection here? Do you think that, perhaps, the deaths are linked to the vaccines?

Of course, they are. And, that’s why the media is trying to sweep this story under the rug. It doesn’t fit with the “official narrative” about the vaccines, so they’ve decided to “vanish” the story altogether. “Poof” and it’s gone! And, actually, it’s worse than a cover-up because– shortly after Biden took office– the CDC changed its testing methodology making it harder to test positive. In other words, they rigged the system so it would look like fewer “fully vaccinated” people had contracted Covid after inoculation. Dr. Joseph Mercola explains what’s going on behind the scenes:

“Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lowered the CT even further, in what appears to be a clear effort to hide COVID-19 breakthrough cases, meaning cases in which fully vaccinated individuals are being diagnosed with COVID-19.” (“CDC embarks on a new Covid Coverup”, Mercola. com)

It’s all a big shell game. They’re gaming the system to make it look like the vaccines are stopping infection when the evidence proves the opposite. And notice the deliberately-misleading moniker the media invented for the people who get Covid after being vaccinated. They call them “Breakthrough cases”.

“Breakthrough”? Really?

If cases surge in nearly every country that launches a mass vaccination campaign, then there’s nothing “breakthrough” about it. It’s the predictable result of a failed experiment. Here’s more from an article titled: “Covid rates post-vaccination around the world:

“… the government assumed that if ‘you vaccinate lots of people and the problem goes away’, but the questioners among us did not assume that. Especially having read the FDA Briefing Document for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for example, many of us had questions after reading it; on Page 42, it states:

“Suspected COVID-19 cases that occurred within 7 days after any vaccination were 409 in the vaccination group vs 287 in the placebo group. It is possible that the imbalance in suspected COVID-19 cases occurring in the 7 days post-vaccination represents vaccine reactogenicity with symptoms that overlap with those of COVID-19. Overall though, these data do not raise a concern that protocol-specified reporting of suspected, but unconfirmed COVID-19 cases could have masked clinically significant adverse events that would not have otherwise been detected.” (“Covid rates post-vaccination around the world”, Inform Scotland)

WTF!?!

So, the FDA KNEW that vaccinated people were more likely to contract Covid than those in the placebo group, but they approved the vaccines anyway?!? Is that criminal negligence or just plain old stupidity?

Please. read the above paragraph again and decide whether you would have given these sketchy injections the “green light” or not? Here’s more from the same article:

“The following show data from around the world from some selected locations. It is, of course, vital to stress that correlation is not causation. And that there are countries where vaccine rollout does not precede or coincide with increased infections. However, I have been unable to find any nation where covid rates have begun to drop after vaccination started, or where a drop coincided with vaccination starting. In Indonesia, for example, the covid rate was falling when vaccination started and seems to have been unaffected in its trajectory by the vaccine being rolled out. The reader can look up these charts for him/herself on the website. Have a look at these and see what you make of them.” (“Covid rates post-vaccination around the world”, Inform Scotland)

Okay, so the author is trying to put the most charitable spin on vaccine performance as possible. He says, “correlation is not causation”, which means, ‘Don’t trust your eyes when you look at the charts’ because– if you do– you’ll draw the obvious conclusion that the vaccines greatly increase your chances of getting Covid in the few weeks afterwards.’ The charts will also convince you that Fauci, Biden and the media have been lying through their teeth about the effectiveness of the vaccines. (Please, check out the charts in the article and judge for yourself.) Here’s more:

“What is very clear looking at data worldwide, is that vaccinations are certainly not associated with a reliable fall in covid cases in any predictable timeframe. This, alongside the observations in the trial, surely must be addressed. What is happening here? Is it just that vaccinations are coincidentally being rolled out at the same time as outbreaks are due? In very many places? Or is the vaccine not working immediately? If not, why not? … Or is the vaccine making people more susceptible to infection? If this is the case … is this a temporary effect? What causes it? … How long does it take for any increased susceptibility to diminish?”…We are told that everyone must be vaccinated (but) How can free informed consent be given under these conditions?” (“Covid-rates Post Vaccination around the World”, Inform Scotland)

These are all good questions, unfortunately, Dr. Fauci and Co. don’t plan to answer any of them. Instead, their allies in the media are doing everything they can to disappear the story and deflect attention to the elusive ‘variants’, which is the diversion du jour. Am I being too harsh?

Maybe, but maybe not harsh enough. Take a look at this clip from a piece at Conservative Woman titled “Every reason to doubt the vaccine makers’ reassurances”:

“I have reported previously on an astonishing spike in deaths that occurred alongside an intensive vaccination campaign in Gibraltar, where the small community consequently developed the highest Covid death rate in the world. We also know that thousands of deaths have been seen in the US, EU and UK in the wake of Covid vaccinations, often immediately after the jab has been administered.

The manufacturers, leading medical journals and most governments insist these deaths are unrelated to the vaccine. In many instances, the deaths and serious illness have been attributed to coincidental infection with the virus. But evidence is mounting that for some, especially the weak and elderly, the vaccine itself is creating or worsening the very illness against which it is supposed to be protective….

“…a worrying phenomenon which appears consistently in Covid vaccine studies is a spike in purported ‘infections’ which occurs precisely during that three-week period, and usually immediately following the jab...The researchers raise the possibility that the jab may trigger ‘symptoms likened to Covid-19 symptoms including fever’ in those recently exposed to the virus... He suggests the mechanism may be a depression in immunity caused by a loss of white blood cells post-jab, observed in both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca trials, making the vaccinees more vulnerable to the virus in the short term.” (“Every reason to doubt the vaccine makers’ reassurances“, Conservative Woman)

Okay, so the author arrives at the same conclusion as the previous author; maybe the vaccine makes people more susceptible to the virus by lowering their defenses and, thus, inviting infection. That’s certainly one possibility, but there are other possibilities that could be infinitely more serious. Take a look:

“It has not been generally acknowledged that the jab is designed to protect us by provoking our cells into producing the very toxin that makes the virus more dangerous than its predecessors in the coronavirus family. This toxin, known as the spike protein, can damage not just the lungs but may also affect organs such the brain, heart and kidneys.

The reasoning behind administering the jab is that temporary exposure to the toxin may provide long-term protection against becoming ill from the virus. Early indications are that this strategy is working, although it is not at all certain yet to what extent the fall-off in infection rates seen in intensely vaccinated populations is seasonal and related to the waves of infection, or if it is a lasting benefit.

But there is also a very real possibility, supported by animal experiments as well as by the studies cited above, that the vaccine itself may produce symptoms in vulnerable people which are then attributed to Covid-19. The damage to health may be especially severe in an individual who has been recently or is concurrently infected with the actual virus.

There is therefore every reason to doubt the manufacturers’ assurances that the deaths and injuries seen to be accompanying vaccination, and that in some instances look like and are being attributed to Covid-19, are unrelated to the jabs. The situation is serious enough for some doctors and scientists to be calling for a moratorium on further Covid vaccinations until it has been properly investigated.” (“Every reason to doubt the vaccine makers’ reassurances“, Conservative Woman)

So, it could be, that something in the vaccine itself is killing people. That is one distinct possibility. Sure, the drug companies and public health officials dismiss the idea with a wave of the hand, but medical professionals and scientists think the danger is significant enough to demand that the mass-vaccination program be temporarily terminated.

Some readers will recall that the Salk Institute recently released a study which showed that SARS-CoV-2’s “distinctive ‘spike’ protein”.. “damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease.” Here’s an excerpt from the article dated April 30, 2021:

“In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls. (Note– “Vascular endothelial cells line the entire circulatory system, from the heart to the smallest capillaries.”)

The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented.

Previous studies have shown a similar effect when cells were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this is the first study to show that the damage occurs when cells are exposed to the spike protein on its own.” (“The novel coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness”, Salk.edu)

The significance of this report cannot be overstated. The Salk researchers are confirming that the main damage from Covid is caused by the spike protein not the virus. And, if that’s the case, then why are we injecting people with vaccines that teach their cells to make spike proteins?

It makes no sense at all.

And how does this effect our understanding of the phenomenon that we’ve seen in countries around the world, that is, the sharp rise in cases following mass vaccination?

Allow me to offer a plausible, but as-yet unproven explanation:

The sharp rise in cases and deaths following mass vaccination is NOT related to Covid “the respiratory illness”, but Covid “the vascular disease”. The vascular component is mainly the result of spike proteins produced by cells in the lining of the blood vessels (Endothilium) that are activating platelets that cause blood clots and bleeding. The other main factor is autoimmune reaction in which the killer lymphocytes attack one’s own body triggering widespread inflammation (and potential organ failure.). In short, the post-injection fatalities are caused by the spike proteins produced by the vaccines and not by Covid. Once again, look at the chart of Cambodia. There were no deaths prior to vaccination. All the deaths came afterwards. That suggests that the fatalities are attributable to the vaccines.

One final thought: 118 million Americans have now been injected with a clot-generating spike protein. At present, no one seems to know of how long these potentially-lethal proteins remain trapped in the lining of the blood vessels or what damage they might eventually do. Keeping that in mind, wouldn’t this be a good time to exercise a bit of caution? Now that cases have dropped sharply across the country, why not ease up on the vaccinations until we have a better grasp of the long-term risks? That would be the sensible approach, right? Just postpone further injections until product safety can be assured.

If there was ever a time for caution, this is it.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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As the head of Infectious Disease and Tropical Medicine at France’s Mediterranean University Hospital and Medical Director of the hospital’s Infection Institute, Dr. Philippe Brouqui is a member of a French team that has successfully treated thousands of covid patients and been attacked for using hydroxychloroquine as part of their early treatment protocol.

Dr. Brouqui also says that young people with no risk of dying from covid should not be vaccinated.

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The vaccine agenda is failing. All vaxx-fanatics have already received their shots in the United States. They make up the one-third of Americans that are “fully-vaccinated” as of today. But the U.S. needs a new strategy for convincing the rest of the population to roll up their sleeves.

A new AP-NORC poll found that 61% of Americans who have not been vaccinated definitely or probably will not volunteer for any of the experimental shots. That is mostly because 1) the shot are dangerous and 2) there are no benefits but lot of risks. Seychelles is reinforcing the fact that these shots have no genuine medical purpose that helps anyone.

The Seychelles is the most vaccinated country in the world, according to Our World in Data. More than 60% of the island nation’s 98,500 residents are fully-vaccinated. But the country closed schools, limited bar hours, and cancelled all sporting events last week after active COVID-19 cases rose from 612 on April 28 to 1,068 on May 3. Most residents received the experimental inactivated virus Sinopharm shots. The rest received AstraZeneca (Covishield) shots. The CDC says American travelers should avoid the country.

Some mainstream media are blaming so-called COVID variants for the situation in the Seychelles. Others are saying the China-made Sinopharm shots are not as effective as the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca shots. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Chile are among the top five most-vaccinated countries in the world as well. Those countries have also experienced rising COVID-19 cases with Sinopharm as their primary experimental shot.

The United States must prevent COVID-19 surges here, particularly among the so-called fully vaccinated, if it wishes to maintain this COVID-19 agenda. So the CDC is, again, changing its testing and statistical gathering methods.

Breakthrough cases about to disappear

A “fully-vaccinated” person who tests positive for COVID-19 is a “breakthrough case,” according to the CDC. Three Florida counties reported 38 such cases in March. Washington state reported 102 breakthrough cases last month, including two deaths. We covered the story of Mr. Alan Sporn, the Illinois man who died of COVID-19 two months after being fully vaccinated. These cases are happening far more often than we’re hearing about. If the trend continues, even Americans enthusiastic about the shots will start questioning their effectiveness. The CDC can’t allow that to happen.

The agency issued updated guidance on April 30 for testing vaccinated individuals for COVID-19. Breakthrough cases are now only counted in official statistics if the person is hospitalized or dies. The CDC is also lowering the PCR amplification cycle threshold for breakthrough case to 28 or less. Dr. Kary Mullis, who invented the PCR test, made clear that his invention was never intended to test for and diagnose diseases. Further, a vast majority of U.S. COVID-19 positive cases were derived from 40-plus PCR cycles.

Upwards of 90% of U.S. COVID-19 cases are/were false positives due to PCR cycle thresholds above 35. A cycle threshold of 28 for breakthrough cases almost guarantees negative COVID-19 tests for breakthrough subjects. The goal here is to make it look like the experimental mRNA and viral vector shots work in preventing the spread of COVID-19. But all the CDC is doing is utilizing statistical magic to tell the desired story.

Propaganda push to save the lie

So-called breakthrough cases are a major problem in maintaining the COVID-19 agenda. They are particularly affecting the sports world. Three New York Yankees staff members recently tested positive for COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. Jake Walman, a defenseman for the NHL’s St. Louis Blues also tested positive for COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated.

Propaganda must accelerate to counter these breakthrough revelations, if you will. Critical thinkers already know that these shots have no tangible benefits. But if these breakthrough cases continue happening, the few remaining people leaning towards getting the shots might change their minds. Mainstream media and the CDC can essentially tell any story they want; and much of the population believes it. Breakthrough cases will soon be a thing of the past thanks to statistical manipulation.

It is your responsibility to humanity to share truth, no matter the odds against you. Stay vigilant and protect your friends and loved ones.

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“I believe that banks are more dangerous than armies” (Former US President Thomas Jefferson)

The power and wealth of the biggest banks and financial institutions is one of the most under-reported issues in society. They control so much money, and they can move it between countries so easily, that they can destabilise whole countries. They are part of an exploitative financial system whose consequences are every bit as bad as war, and which contributes to death, starvation, poverty, malnutrition and ill-health on a huge scale. Despite our greater understanding since the 2007 crisis of the problems that unethical financiers can create, there is still little discussion of how banks extract huge amounts of wealth from poor countries.

Tax Havens

A tax haven is a place where anyone can open bank accounts to hide money, usually to avoid paying tax. They are sometimes called secrecy jurisdictions. They are used by big corporations, wealthy individuals, crime syndicates, money launderers, drug dealers, dictators and corrupt government officials from all over the world. They are intended to make it very difficult for tax authorities from other countries to investigate the tax affairs of their citizens and corporations.(1) One recent estimate is that $21 trillion is hidden in tax havens worldwide leading to $189 billion in tax going unpaid each year worldwide.(2)

When most people hear the phrase ‘tax haven’, they think of places like the Cayman Islands or Panama, but Britain, the US and Switzerland are considered to be the world’s most important tax havens.(3) London is at the centre of a global network of inter-connected tax havens in former British colonies. Many commentators in rich countries blame poverty in poor countries on corruption, but corruption at the highest levels could not take place on the scale it does without the assistance of international banks and other corporations from rich counties. The biggest four UK banks, HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and RBS, have over 1,600 subsidiaries in tax havens.(4) The ten biggest private banks managed more than £4 trillion in 2010, having experienced a huge increase as wealthy people try ever-harder to hide their money from the taxman.

Capital Flight 

The theft of a nation’s wealth is an extremely significant source of poverty. Leaders from poor countries transfer money into bank accounts elsewhere. This is known as capital flight. In this context, capital is just another word for money. In 1979 when inspectors looked at what had become of money loaned to Nicaragua, they found that three-quarters of it was quickly stolen and deposited abroad by the ruling dictator.(5) It is believed that a similar proportion of all loans to South America are stolen.

Detailed analysis of the wealth of poor countries shows that in most cases, a small number of rich families control most of what is important. In his book, The Blood Bankers, James Henry noted that 14 families controlled over 90% of El Salvador’s land and finance. In Nicaragua, one family owned a quarter of all the land suitable for growing crops. The same is true of many middle-income countries, such as Mexico and Argentina. Brazil’s stock market was once described as a casino controlled by 15-20 wealthy groups. At the same time, a large proportion of the population live in poverty.

International banks have advised these wealthy people, and their corporations, about hiding their money abroad for decades. This is very profitable for the banks because they know that much of the money is stolen. This enables them to charge fees of 20% knowing that their clients will not complain.(6) In a slightly ironic twist, one of those people who stole large amounts of money from her country, Imelda Marcos, wife of the former President of the Philippines, once said of Swiss banks “It was very easy to put in money there. But it was impossible to take it out.”

Banking specialists have pointed out that the amount of money that rich people in developing countries have plundered is almost certainly greater than the total debt of those countries. One expert stated:

“The problem is not that these countries don’t have any money, the problem is that it’s all in Miami…We could easily repay our loans to Mexico with their flight capital.”(7)

The use of tax havens also affects rich countries. It is estimated that at least £16 billion of taxes are unpaid each year in the UK alone due to tax havens. In relation to Europe, one journalist noted: 

“A solution to the Eurozone’s debt crisis might be within reach – if only Europe’s governments could get a grip on the wallets of their own wealthiest citizens.”(8)

Governments in Rich Countries Assist With These Crimes 

Whilst banks are occasionally prosecuted, banking authorities would mostly prefer to avoid trials regarding complex matters like commissions (bribes) and capital flight (as well as other issues like weapons sales) because they do not want the scale of the corruption to come to light. The extreme secrecy laws of banks in Switzerland and elsewhere mean that illegal flows of money cannot be controlled. In Switzerland, people have actually been locked up for telling the authorities about bank crimes.(9) Some politicians talk in general terms about closing down tax havens, but most countries do not want to close down their own tax havens because they make too much money from them, and too many powerful people use them. One commentator from the developing world said that:

“Switzerland should top the list of most corrupt nations for harboring, encouraging and enticing robbers of public treasuries around the world to bring their loot for safe keeping in their dirty vaults.”(10)

Companies in Rich Countries – Transfer Pricing and Tax Evasion

Approximately one-third of international trade involves one part of a company selling something to a different part of the same company in a different country. This enables them to do what is known as transfer pricing. By changing the prices on these transactions, the company is able to pretend that most of its profits are made in places with low or zero taxes, creating opportunities for tax evasion. This is known as profit-shifting.(11) The scale of lost taxes because of this is estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars each year. It affects both rich and poor countries.(12)

Big corporations carry out this tax evasion by structuring themselves in complicated ways using subsidiaries, shell companies and holding companies in different parts of the world. News International (Rupert Murdoch’s global media business) paid no tax on its UK operations for many years by using a network of 800 offshore companies, depriving the taxman of an estimated £350 million.(13) Many of the world’s biggest companies, such as Microsoft, Pfizer, ExxonMobil and Citigroup have avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes by using tax havens.(14) Catching companies who are bending or breaking the rules is difficult, but in 2006 the pharmaceuticals company Glaxo Smith Kline paid $3.4 billion to the US taxman for this type of cheating between 1989 and 2005.

There is a simple solution to this type of corporate tax evasion, known as country-by-country reporting (cbcr). This requires that international companies provide information about how much activity they carry out in each country. The idea was created by tax expert Richard Murphy.(15) It is gradually being implemented but there is still much to work out, and big companies are resisting.

Accountancy Firms Are Criminals 

Tax havens can be used in much more complex ways. The energy company Enron carried out numerous frauds. One of the world’s biggest banks, JPMorgan Chase, helped Enron design transactions with fake companies in offshore tax havens to create fake profits of more than $1 billion.(16) This enabled Enron to manipulate its accounts and deceive investors and regulators.

Almost all international companies have their accounts prepared by a small number of huge accountancy firms. In Enron’s case, the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen assisted with the frauds. The system of tax havens, tax evasion, money laundering and capital flight could not operate without the active participation of the big accountancy firms.(17)

The Rich Steal From The Poor 

If we add up all the money that goes from rich countries to poor countries (such as aid and investments) and then compare it with the total money going from poor to rich (such as capital flight and debt repayments) the net result is that a total of $2 trillion goes from poor countries to rich countries every year. This is the opposite of what most people expect. Rich countries are not helping poor countries. Rich countries are plundering poor countries. Capital flight is the single biggest source of wealth transfer out of poor countries.(18) The combination of capital flight and tax havens is one of the key reasons why poor countries are unable to finance their own development. The World Bank conceded in 2006 that poverty reduction is not feasible without a major crackdown on tax evasion.

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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Notes 

1) Jeffrey Robinson, The Sink: How Banks, Lawyers and Accountants Finance Terrorism and Crime, 2004

2) James S. Henry, ‘The price of offshore revisited’, July 2012, at https://www.taxjustice.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf

Nicholas Shaxson, ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited’, 17 Jan 2014, at https://www.taxjustice.net/2014/01/17/price-offshore-revisited/

3) Tax Justice Network, ‘Financial Secrecy Index’, at https://fsi.taxjustice.net/en/

4) Michael Meacher, ‘Big four banks (with 1,629 subsidiaries in tax havens) are rotten heart of UK economy’, Left Futures, 30 March 2015, at https://www.leftfutures.org/2015/03/big-four-banks-with-1629-subsidiaries-in-tax-havens-are-rotten-heart-of-uk-economy/

5) James S. Henry, The Blood Bankers, pp.179-223

6) US Senate, ‘Hearing On Private Banking and Money Laundering: A case study of opportunities and vulnerabilities’, 9 Nov 1999, at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg61699/pdf/CHRG-106shrg61699.pdf

7) James S. Henry, The Blood Bankers, p.xxvi

8) Heather Stewart, ‘Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals’, The Guardian, 21 July 2012, at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jul/21/offshore-wealth-global-economy-tax-havens

9) Juliette Garside, ‘HSBC whistleblower given five years’ jail over biggest leak in banking history’, The Guardian, 27 Nov 2015, at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/27/hsbc-whistleblower-jailed-five-years-herve-falciani 

10) Professor Aliya Fafunwa, former Nigerian education minister, cited in John Christenson, ‘Dirty Money: Inside The Secret World of Offshore Banking’, in Steve Hiatt, A Game As Old As Empire, pp.41-67

11) Jason Hickel, ‘Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries’, The Guardian, 14 Jan 2017, at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries 

12) Tax justice network, ‘What is Transfer Pricing?’, at https://www.taxjustice.net/topics/corporate-tax/transfer-pricing/

13) ‘Rupert Laid Bare’, Economist, 20 March 1999, at https://www.economist.com/business/1999/03/18/rupert-laid-bare

14) Scott Klinger et al, ‘Corporate Tax Dodgers: 10 Companies and their tax loopholes’, 2013, at https://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Corporate-Tax-Dodgers-Report-Final.pdf 

15) ‘Richard Murphy explains what Country by Country Reporting is’, 20 July 2020, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Myh-YAnIk

Richard Murphy, ‘Public country-by-country reporting has been approved in the European Union’, Tax Research UK, 26 Feb 2021, at https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/02/26/public-country-by-country-reporting-has-been-approved-in-the-european-union/

16) James S. Henry, The Blood Bankers, p.173

17) Austin Mitchell, Prem Sikka, John Christensen, Philip Morris and Steven Filling, ‘No Accounting for Tax Havens’, Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs, 2002, at https://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/AABA.pdf

18) Jason Hickel, ‘Aid in Reverse: How poor countries develop rich countries’, The Guardian, 14 Jan 2017, at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries

Dev Kar and Guttorm Schjelderup, ‘Financial flows and tax havens: combining to limit the lives of billions of people’, Global Financial Integrity, 5 Dec 2016, at https://gfintegrity.org/report/financial-flows-and-tax-havens-combining-to-limit-the-lives-of-billions-of-people/

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May 15th, 2021 by Global Research News

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While imagining breakneck progress, we’ve been backing off a cliff.  This is no surprise to those whose historic knowledge is not limited to the stifling propaganda dispensaries called American History class, mainstream news and Hollywood blockbusters that animate the anodyne story lines of comic books.  The loudly heralded “Great Reset” to a “New Normal” and “Fourth Industrial Revolution” embracing artificial intelligence is not new at all, just a reification of every tyrant’s dream.  It’s a vision of global technocratic feudalism.

About a century ago as John D. Rockefeller envisioned agriculture and medicine wrenched away from nature and replaced with oil derivatives, artists and writers saw the prospective horror ahead.

Art is powerful and dangerous to imperial victims and rulers alike. It can both transmit and transcend propaganda. Film, when conceived as more than trivial or tendentious entertainment, has served as a brilliant art form providing prescient visions of inevitable trajectories rooted in the sensed essence and enduring zeitgeist of a culture.

One such film was Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent expressionist classic, Metropolis, which leaves indelible visual memory imprints. Lang’s images ominously anticipated the vast economic stratification and dehumanizing technocracy we see taking shape rapidly nearly a century later. Lang showed us the cartoon society we have become – the rulers living far above in towering penthouses with private “pleasure gardens” (think Jeffrey Epstein) while workers labor underground in coordinated robotic motion obliterating individuality. The film can be seen online with meticulously restored footage completed in 2010.

The written word has been similarly prescient.  George Orwell’s 1949 novel, 1984, describing a totalitarian society of inescapable mass surveillance and suffocating repression, echoes clearly today. And even earlier, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World, envisioned a dehumanized technocratic society where government and citizen political participation had become superfluous and natural interpersonal sources of pleasure and comfort had been replaced by an ever-available drug, soma.  And even earlier yet, Franz Kafka’s unfinished 1926 novel, The Castle, provides a deeply disturbing metaphoric vision of society operating under arbitrary rules administered by impersonal bureaucrats on behalf of unknown and unseen rulers above.  In a striking parallel with covid-19 today, oppressed and ignored villagers invent endless justifications for their own oppression.

The forecasts have unfolded

Now, a century later, the Castle is called the Deep State.  With a massive society to control, an illusion of democracy maintained by smothering, multi-level propaganda is necessary.  One vilified figure after another is accused of  “threatening our democracy” but in fact the US has no democracy.  Late Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin identified our system as not a democracy but a system of “inverted totalitarianism” wherein finance and industry control government in upside-down comparison with 1930s Nazi and fascist regimes wherein government dictated the conduct of finance and agendas of industry.

Political scientists Martin Gillens and Benjamin Page of Princeton and Northwestern universities,  respectively, conducted a comprehensive study that validate this picture. Examining 1,779 federal policy decisions over 20 years covering three Republican and two Democratic administrations, they compared populist with special interest influences.

Policy decision preferences reflected in public opinion surveys were compared between ordinary citizens at the 50th income percentile with “the economic elite” at the 90thincome percentile.  Influential interest groups were chosen from Fortune magazine’s “Power 25” lists (AARP, AIPAC, NRA, etc.).  The “business community” was represented by the ten key industries reporting the highest lobbying expenditures.  Their findings documented significant influence by the economic elite and both business and special interest groups, but concluded that “ordinary citizens…have little or no independent influence on policy at all.”

In his book Democracy Inc., Dr. Sheldon Wolin described our inverted totalitarian state characterized by “a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing.”

This unmistakably resonates today in our artificially manipulated “pandemic” panic used as cover for destruction of small independent “non-essential” business supplanted by massive multinationals that exploit and tyrannize employees made desperate by the economic collapse around them.  Need we look beyond our 664 billionaires who increased their wealth by over 35% ($1.2 trillion) in 2020?

Or beyond the multi-billion dollar Frankenstein-technology vaccines from Big Pharma for which simple, safe, inexpensive, effective covid prophylactics and treatments that obviate need for vaccines were recklessly and fraudulently suppressed, since absence of available treatments is a necessary precondition for Emergency Use Authorizations to release unproven vaccines upon the public?

Unfortunately yes, we do need to look even further. We must examine, deconstruct and dismember the “Great Reset,” “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “New Normal” toward which this is leading, ominously preached and pronounced inevitable by Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, Joe Biden, and their automaton acolytes.

They follow a long line of ideological predecessors from John D. Rockefeller through Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations before which, confident of his patrician impunity, Biden proudly described his shakedown of Ukrainian President Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor investigating an energy company where his son enjoyed an obscenely generous sinecure. Such is their unbridled arrogance and contempt for laws and rules of conduct that govern commoners.

We commoners increasingly face suffocating surveillance, censorship and police state control – key characteristics of fascism – including informal deputizing of citizens to police each other to enforce senseless, degrading, identity-obliterating rules of mask wearing, touch avoidance and “social distancing” within an arbitrary 6-foot spacing – for none of which is there remotely persuasive scientific evidence for pathogen protection even were covid-19 the dreaded plague it has been cast to occupy in the public imagination.

Entering the 2020s and bewitched by the ever-proliferating magic of cyber-wizardry, we become increasingly spellbound within a web of its insidiously programmed mythology packaged as entertainment, games and invented “news” easily identified as fiction to those who search behind the mesmerizing screen. The wizards are as detached and inaccessible, as opaque, as those in Kafka’s Castle. Let us remember, however, that economic bludgeons wielded by the parasitic .001% are provided by taxpayer dollars and consumer spending feeding their limitless appetites.  Thus we hold the ultimate power and must learn how to use it. To do so, we must first decline the seductive bait and ask, since these arbitrary restrictions contributed no net benefit to public health, who and what are these really for?

Criminalizing human nature

Dogs, cats, monkeys and humans, inter alia, all seek and need comforting touch for ongoing autonomic regulation and normal socialization. Psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated how young monkeys are able to progressively reduce anxiety in response to unfamiliar and unsettling stimuli by retreating to an ever-available mother figure providing tactile comfort.  Food provision alone was not enough.  With unavailability of anxiety modulation, monkeys raised without comforting touch fail to mature socially and sexually.

Most dogs and cats are born in litters and begin their lives piled together.  One of our cats was once killed on the road just as she was weaning four kittens.  Our old tom cat took over, cleaning and grooming the kittens and teaching them rough-and-tumble defense and hunting skills. TLC is not gender-specific and seems instinctively understood across most evolved species. Many animals are born already able to walk but require licking and maternal proximity to immediately launch into a maturation sequence toward full autonomy and integration into their collaborative social group.

Humans begin life snuggled with their mothers and gazing into her smiling face.  No mother should be masked at this moment, or later for many years as young children take cues from their parents in public and other uncertain situations. Children are closely attentive to both the facial expressions and voice intonations of their caretakers and surrounding adults. Deprivation or attenuation of these psychologically essential cues constitutes child neglect, which can affect brain development and be more psychologically damaging than overt abuse.  Every new developmental challenge from our first step to our first date to our first job application involves some degree of apprehension that must be soothed first by a parents hands, later a parent’s words and voice, and eventually the internalized experience of that support buried in our psyche.  Without that, human psychological growth is truncated, often irreversibly.

Psychologist James Prescott examined 49 of 400 pre-industrial societies comparing violence among cultures at the high and low end of a scale measuring physical affection to infants. He found that this and another developmental variable – permissiveness around adolescent sexuality – differentiated more from less violent societies.  Both involve generosity of touch during developmentally crucial periods and were the only cultural variables associated with prediction of societal violence. His paper, published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – a profession deeply concerned with human aggression following our bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was titled “Body Pleasure and the Origin of Violence.”

Expanding beyond Prescott’s findings, anthropologist Ashley Montague comprehensively documented the central importance of touch in human development and ongoing social life.  The 6-foot distance (just beyond two outstretched arm-lengths) prescription – obviously irrelevant to aerosolized virons – appears diabolically designed to maintain unrelieved states of distress by keeping us literally “out of touch” with this natural source of distress reduction. Predictably, it’s been a good year for alcohol sales and psycho-pharmaceuticals treating depression.

“Social distancing” and promotion of touch phobia is beyond absurd.  This is a targeted attack on our innate human sensibilities. Our psychological warfare developers cannot be unaware of this and have been free to secretly cultivate methods prohibited to ethical behavioral scientists due to our careful protection of human subjects in recent decades following the Milgram and Zimbardo research that exposed participants to unsettling truths about their predispositions to abuse authority or passively comply with abuse by others.

Application of other familiar psychological control mechanisms from behaviorism are obvious, however insidiously disguised, in this manufactured program of fear induction joined with fear relief prohibition including self-isolation.  Virus-terrorized citizens have been manipulated into administering punishment-by-shaming  to other citizens who resist or refuse compliance with their own dehumanization.

Those with displayed faces, unmuffled voices, and stubborn affinities for skin contact with other humans are physically avoided, treated with varying degrees of hostility, or reported to store managers or clerks informally deputized as enforcement agents of the state under threat of business sanctions.  Communications challenging formal authorities are subjected to the “cancel culture” by their media stooges.  Survivors of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the Stalinist Soviet Union, and American Senator Joseph McCarthy quickly recognize these control mechanisms and are accordingly alarmed.

The distinct facial expressions characterizing emotional states that “amplify” cognition – and the emotional cost when suppressed – were investigated extensively in the Affect Theory of Princeton psychology professor Silvan Tomkins and his associates.  Each affect has “its innately programmed neurophysiological substrate, universally recognized facial expression, and motivational subjective experience.”  Masking disables this fundamental, innate mechanism of human communication, which inherently increases interpersonal discomfort. Since an extensive body of research discredits any value of masks in contagion prevention, it is reasonable to presume this social disabling and increased discomfort are weapons of psychological warfare against our own populations being primed to accept the “new normal” to get the imperial boots off our throats.

Tomkins came to focus intensive analysis on the core affect of shame at the base of personal identity, associated with internally and externally activated self-disapproval.  Ambivalence over masking certainly evokes this widely.  Those who compliantly mask up are signaling their fearfulness and blind submission to authority.  Those who don’t are stigmatized as socially irresponsible.  We risk social attack and self-esteem demotion with either choice.  We are being subjected to a diabolical psyops.

Sealing our vulnerabilities and restoring natural wisdom

These informal social control mechanisms work because humans are a highly sociable species and seek inclusion and acceptance into groups, from which personal identity is drawn along a continuum of self-differentiation.  In observational experiments of problem solving interactions by families with disturbed children, psychiatrist Murray Bowen reported greater problem severity in the IP (“identified patient” in a dysfunctional family system who is the primary symptom-bearer) within families with greater “ego fusion” – identifying as “we” – in contrast with “ego differentiation” where family members express and are validated by their individual identities.  Those who draw identity largely from collective sources (e.g., “I am an American, a Democrat/Republican, or Presbyterian/Catholic/Jewish”) are less likely to exercise independent judgment and values than those who identify themselves primarily as differentiated individuals.  The more ego fusion, the more easily we are manipulated by stereotypic targeted propaganda.

To maintain cohesion, stable groups become self-reinforcing echo chambers, exchanging transactional “strokes” (units of social recognition) in mutually familiar formats with predictable payoffs.  Two fundamental environments with differing stroke contingencies are work and family.  Both involve structured interactive agendas with self-imposed limitations to protect valued relationships.

A third environment is the informal, less structured and less stratified public space – cafes, taverns, and recreational settings – called “The Great Good Place” by sociologist Ray Oldenburg.  These provide a safety valve for the other two, both of which include duties, performance expectations, and responsibilities that must be met for positive recognition. Oldenburg writes, “daily life, in order to be relaxed and fulfilling, must find its balance in (those) three realms of experience.” Already weaker in the US than elsewhere, this third, freer, less conditional area of life with less influence of institutional hierarchy has been deeply attacked and damaged by the covid-19 psyops agenda.  Restoring and expanding that vital sector of our society is essential to recover from fraud-induced psychological conditions of fear and passive intimidation.  We must unmask, undistance, and uncensor ourselves.  We must dethrone the high priests of Science-by-Fiat who have lied and manipulated us out of our humanity.

Most importantly, the phobias induced within children must be undone. It is appalling how our young citizens are being trained to fear rather than understand our microbial environment, to fear infecting their families and teachers and peers, and to fear normal play with each other.  This is an unspeakable crime for which the perpetrators should be stripped of rank and riches and quarantined from human company until they make full confession and apology to the children of the world.

The remedy will require, at the very least, a thorough and carefully designed curriculum. The Year of Covid-19 provides a focused educational opportunity, first realistically addressing the ubiquity and functional importance of microbes. We must give due credit to our resident microbes evolved over countless millenia to protect us, their host organisms.  Children must learn that our 30 trillion cells are outnumbered and protected by some 39 trillion microbes located throughout each human body, highly concentrated at the entry points of  skin, mouth and gut.  Vaccines injected directly into the bloodstream recklessly bypass these natural defenses that are vastly more competent than our Frankenstein bioscientists. Almost all ambient microbes are benign protectors or simply bystanders minding their own business.

Those that aren’t are ID checked at the door by our own microbial bodyguards, and are summarily dispatched if necessary.  This is essential to collective (“herd”) immunity against widespread microbial invasions.  Attempting to prevent “infection” simply delays this natural process and provides a pathogen time to adapt and modify its strategies.  We share our environment with billions of micro-organisms, which are the origins and building blocks of life.  The microbiomes in soil produce the nutrients needed by the microbiomes within us. Rather than receiving appreciation and thoughtful nutritional support, viruses have become the latest “other” to fear, hate and destroy. If we continue along our current path and eliminate ourselves and much of life on earth, the microbes will rebuild –  hopefully toward a better-grounded intelligence than ours.

Our fellow citizens who self-righteously clamor for dehumanization to save humanity claim the sacred ground of “Science.”  To correct this, our children must learn that “science” is functionally not a noun but a verb – empirically based methods of thinking, investigation and evidence evaluation. The entire lockdown/masking/touch-me-not/self-isolation ritual has no basis in scientific findings, as I and many others have widely documented elsewhere. The word “science” has been hijacked into the realm of metaphysics, no longer a widely applicable method of rigorous inquiry and hypothesis-testing, but a word deformed and sanctified into a secular religion.

A virus with a now-legendary name has become satanic, evil incarnate, a grim reaper as invisible and ubiquitous and mysterious as the mythic Satan figure of religious mythologies.  It has passed into the realm of faith and thereby become impervious to facts and rationality.  Anthony Fauci is its High Priest, his every formal declaration a holy writ, issuing  secret knowledge and prescribing ritual protection.  No matter that over 56,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists repudiate the Faucian prescription.  Priestly dogma now prevails over rational functioning and much of human society.

This plays – not accidentally I suspect – into a deep, irrational force in the collective human psyche that anthropologist Mary Douglas explored in her book, Purity and Danger.  Impurity or pollution represents dangerous power outside our control, existentially threatening both society and its individual members, who must conform in purification rituals (e.g., masking, 6-foot distancing and obsessive-compulsive disinfectant wiping) for group survival.  Those of us outside the faith are shunned and shamed as heretics, apostates, archetypical infectious lepers. Thus, a “pandemic virus” is not unlike “communism” or “Islamic terrorism” to be identified and rooted out for individual and group survival.  PCR testing – however meaningless and unreliable – becomes a magical unmasking instrument, and vaccines – however experimental, woefully untested, unapproved, unnecessary, and already producing alarming harms while immunized from ordinary legal liability – become an exorcism ritual and its growing list of victims ritual sacrifices to the new 3-letter gods CDC, WHO and NIH.

We are a primitive society that needs to grow up, and quickly before the power-insulated priesthood including Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and the technocratic clergy takes over everything.  Once better choices are recognized, opportunities emerge for revolution of political consciousness and systemic transformation. But we have no time to waste.

How about considering real democracy?  This would require a wholly novel plan rather than simply reciting a self-congratulatory word without substance upon examination.

Democracy is for psychologically mature adults. Citizen responsibility for self-governance must involve knowledge acquisition, sober reflection, evidence examination and reasoned discussion built into everyday public life.  It must require sound collective judgment and moral responsibility for all local, regional and national decisions.  To create a grown-up nation retrieved from the grip of ruling-class psychopaths who have long disempowered, neglected, exploited and abused us along with much of the world, we must mature into political grown-ups.

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Jack Dresser, Ph.D. is a retired psychologist and NIH-funded research scientist associated with Oregon Research Institute, where he served as Principal Investigator on projects developing and evaluating high-risk behavior prevention and early intervention programs.  Before these studies he directed several projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education developing drug and alcohol abuse prevention and early intervention programs for school districts in northern and southern California and Oregon.  He began his professional career as a U.S. Army psychologist during the Vietnam War, and is national vice-chair of the Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East.  For several years he has co-hosted a weekly radio show titled “Racism, Empire and Survival” on www.kepw.org in Eugene, Oregon that focuses on the propaganda fueling and maintaining violent U.S./NATO/Israeli imperialism and the false histories packaged as education that provide the framing into which government and media propaganda is seamlessly fitted. For the past year he has focused intensively on the covid-19 debacle, which displays the characteristic earmarks of imperial psyops.

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Thousands of Canadians will be left stranded, and more than 400 workers are left without jobs after Greyhound Canada ceased operations today says the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU).

“This is devastating news for the thousands of Canadians, especially those from indigenous and First Nations communities, who have relied on Greyhound for transportation. Seniors won’t be able to visit their families, students won’t be able to get to school, and many others will be left stranded,” said ATU International President John Costa about the closure. “More than 400 workers including 305 of my brothers and sisters, are now out of a job. This adds insult to injury to these workers and their families already impacted by the pandemic and the Trudeau government and the Progressive Conservative Party MPPs are to blame. They not only failed to provide COVID-19 relief for this hard-hit industry but ignored calls for many years for critical federal funding of Greyhound Canada and the entire struggling intercity bus industry and to stop the ruinous deregulation of intercity bus lines.”

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Greyhound Canada had already suspended their services nationwide in 2020. The company claims the shutdown was due to a lack of federal COVID relief funding and omnibus Bill 213 that proposed deregulation of the intercity bus industry which if implemented as planned on July 1, 2021, will allow anyone to start an intercity bus company, cherry-pick profitable routes while bypassing rural and poor communities, and abolish safety requirements for the industry.

This comes only a few years after Western Greyhound Canada shutdown in 2018, citing a lack of financial sustainability in the face of deregulation and after the government reneged on a promise to provide funding to deal with the crisis.

In the U.S, the ATU secured $2 billion for the motor coach and school bus industries under the Coronavirus Economic Relief for Transportation Services (CERTS) Act. More than 300 Greyhound workers in the U.S. are still laid off or furloughed.

“For many years, Greyhound Canada has been the only form of transportation to connect people living in small towns across Canada with larger cities to provide opportunities for jobs, access to health care and other critical services” Costa continued. “In the U.S., we were able to secure critical relief funding for the motor coach industry that has been devastated by the pandemic and we continue to push for more. We call on the Trudeau government to do the same to save this lifeline and livelihood for thousands of Canadians.”

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Good News for Iran. And Maybe for the US?

May 15th, 2021 by J. Michael Springmann

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On the morning of May 11, 2021, Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his candidacy for President of Iran. Elections set for June 18 will determine the presidency, local councils, by-elections for parliament, and the Assembly of Experts that will have a say in choosing the next Supreme Leader.

The Good News. 

But, while the Washington Post routinely describes Ahmadinejad as a hard-liner, and “an isolationist with a talent for riling the West”, the big news is that he has chosen Nader Talebzadeh Ordoubadi as an advisor.  This demonstrates that the former president is open to an inclusive government that has the potential to reach out to the West.  In the past, he has said that presidential elections are an “empty drum”, asserting the current style of governance will not resolve the country’s woes. Ahmadinejad’s and Nader’s candidacies must be approved by the Guardian Council, a 12-man body supervising elections. All people standing for office—even for the presidency—must meet with its prior approval.

Someone Who Knows. 

However, Nader Talebzadeh’s selection as advisor is probably the wisest decision that Dr. Ahmadinejad might make.  And is likely to be the best choice for Iran.  Nader studied in the United States—at Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, at American University in Washington, D.C., and at Columbia University in New York City.  He speaks fluent, unaccented American English, can easily discourse on Medieval Europe, and has a wide-ranging interest in assembling thinkers, activists, politicians, journalists, and government officials for broad discussions on a variety of subjects.

Mr. Talebzadeh has interviewed this writer (and other Americans) a number of times, on his TV program Asr (Time) as well as on other media.  He is skilled at asking probing questions tied to current events, especially those of great international interest.  Nader is also a well-known writer and movie-maker who has produced an excellent film on Jesus Christ.

Sanctions. 

Nader Talebzadeh Ordoubadi is also an expert on sanctions—the hard way.

In February 2019, Sigal Pearl Mandelker, then Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence and, likely, an Israeli citizen, sanctioned him, his wife, Zeina Mehanna, his organization The New Horizon Conference (NHC), and some of its staff for holding a week’s program in Mashhad and other Iranian cities. Ostensibly, the reason was “anti-Semitism, Holocaust Denial, and allowing Iranian intelligence to recruit attendees”.  As a participant in the May 2018 event, this writer sat next to an Arab, a Semitic person, and listened to Miko Peled, an Israeli-American activist, and Rabbi Dovid Weiss of New York City speak.  The author heard nothing about Holocaust Denial and the only two people he knew who were “pitched” by Iranian intelligence were approached outside the Conference.

The Crime. 

Nader’s real “crime” was assembling Western dissidents, whistle-blowers, human rights activists, and global affairs analysts to provide unvarnished interviews on their areas of expertise to an astonishing number of news outlets, both Iranian and international.  Worse, the NHC had, in particular, invited former CIA officials, State Department diplomats (such as this author), and one-time Defense Department staff.

Besides permitting corrupt Lebanese banks with no ties to the U.S. to steal NHC staff funds deposited with them, the sanctions also bar American citizen participation in future NHC programs—on the pain of jail terms and asset seizure.  This was and is a blatant violation of freedom of association, travel, and speech, the U.S. Constitution be damned!

Help or Hinder? 

But how will this help Iran and the United States?  It would appear that Sigal Pearl, with her Foreign Influence and Foreign Preference security blots, would have poisoned Nader against the United States forever.  He and his wife appealed their sanctions to the Treasury Department.  But, like most American government agencies faced with inconvenient facts and hard truths, Treasury ignored their pleas.

However.

Benefits, Benefits, Benefits. 

We are dealing with a man who is neither small physically nor small mentally.  To quote Kevin Barrett, writer, talk show host, and former academic,

“Unlike Bill Moyers, Nader is unafraid of such controversial issues as 9/11 truth, false flags, political assassinations, and other matters pertaining to the Deep State. Nader has lived extensively both in the US and Iran, and understands both societies, and their overlapping histories, well. If any US president were to ever decide to atone for past crimes and heal the American-Iranian relationship, the first person to consult would be Nader Talebzadeh.”

Dr. Barrett is entirely correct.  But, this time, it’s not the American president that will consult him, it may well be the next Iranian president.  Nader Talebzadeh is not someone to hold a grudge.  His interest is not himself but the wider world in which he lives.  The whole point of his NHC programs was to use the thoughts and recommendations derived from the various fora involving international authors, activists, and experts to make the world a better place, to break down walls of misunderstanding and promote the general welfare.

As an extremely intelligent Iranian, Nader understands his own country and his own society.  He is the product of a land with a history ranging back to the Elamites of 2600 BC.  Present day Iran is the product of ancient Sumeria, the Medes, the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, the Seljuks, the Safavids, and Islam. Mr. Talebzadeh, therefore, is someone who knows where he has come from and where he is going.

He knows America.  He frequently remarks that someone who understands the origins of the United States and treasures its former emphasis on freedom of speech and other constitutional liberties is an “Old American”.   Therefore, Nader fully understands the U.S. raison d’etre and how it has become divorced from reality.  He can see how small minded, puling, professional politicians have corrupted and perverted the American ideal.

Moreover, over the years, Nader Talebzadeh has acquired a wealth of knowledgeable American contacts.  These would prove to be valuable assets in his new role as advisor to Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  They could well become his “kitchen cabinet”, providing unofficial advice should he have need of it.

Conclusion.

In the past, the Iranian government has depended on well-meaning officials who have traveled to the United States, who have acquired secondhand knowledge of that country, yet were too steeped in their own traditions to make beneficial changes.  Nader Talebzadeh Ordoubadi offers more.  He is a true Iranian yet he has acquired an intimate, far-reaching knowledge of the United States through study, travel, and personal interaction with American thinkers, activists, and former government officials.

If anyone can pour oil on the waters of a needlessly-turbulent relationship, Nader can.  His appointment as advisor to the possible president of Iran will pry open a tightly-closed, clamshell-like approach to international relations.

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Featured image: Nader Talebzadeh, Iranian filmmaker and film critic. (CC BY 4.0)

“The introduction of that study to India was made on the basis that it was going to be great investment in the health of India and the health of India’s women. But in fact, later on, during the investigation around these alleged ethical violations… the profits that would have been made had the study passed through the trials would have been enormous! I mean, and this is something that Indian people are very aware of .

“The size of their population means that if you can get a mass vaccination program going there, if you can compel people to accept the vaccine, this involves billions and billions and billions if not trillions of dollars!”

– Jo Nash, from this week’s interview

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India. Considering it is the seventh largest country by land mass, the second largest by population, and controls the fifth largest economy in the world, perhaps it does not get the attention it deserves.

But then, on November 26, 2021, 200-250 million people, a sizable chunk of humanity large enough to form the fifth largest country in the world rose up in an act of protest. It arguably marked the single largest uprising in history anywhere on the planet. The action was a reflection of farmers’ anger over new reforms pushed by Prime Minister Modi and his party the BJP. [1]

The three laws in particular passed in September of last year were proposed as a “watershed moment” for the farmers that would give them “easier access to futuristic technology that will boost production and yield better results. This is a welcome step.” But tens of millions of farmers who have shown their anger see these new  as “leaving them at the mercy of big corporations.” Even now, 40,000 committed protesters are sitting at Singhu and Tikri at the border of the capital city, Dejhi. Nothing other than the rejection of the Modi’s new farm program will convince these souls to deviate from this mission of defiance.

But another big issue in play is the explosion of cases and deaths in the country due to the second wave of the Corona Virus. Thomson Reuters reports that the population of the biggest democracy in the world is reeling with 250,000 deaths due to COVID. Deaths shot up by 4,205 over the course of a 24 hour period, with the number of cases according to conservative estimates surging up to 348,421 in the same time period. [2]

Dead bodies were reportedly burned in funeral pyres and washed up on the shores of the river Ganges. The hospitals had to turn away patients because they were overloaded with the ill. Political leaders were crying out for vaccines in order to curb the man more deaths that are sure to follow.

 Delhi’s Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia told reporters that without more vaccines:

“People will die in the same way in the third and fourth waves as they have this time.”

According to the World Health Organization’s most recent reports, 50 percent of cases in the world and 30 percent of deaths due to COVID take place in India. And yet, the vaccination roll-outs which have been in effect since January have only claimed 2.5 percent of the population as of this date! And unlike in other countries where the pandemic has essentially shut down protests, the farmers in India are sticking to their actions – at least so far. [3][4][5]

Some might think the time has come to contain the explosion before a large component of humanity perishes! Or – perhaps a different perspective is in order.

A recent article in the website for Left Lockdown Sceptics reveals that there is more going on here than a virus! She details elements in Indian society like air pollution and an oxygen market, diseases like TB and Diarrhoea claiming even more lives, and the immense number of people living in India (it is 100 times the population of the province of Ontario with 100 times the death and case total.) [6]

On this week’s Global Research News Hour we endeavor to unravel the details behind the Indian situation and truly determine where the voices of ordinary people lie in the height of popular turmoil.

In our first half hour we hear from Jo Nash, the author of the article entitled India’s Current ‘COVID crisis’ in context. She explains the media’s exaggeration of the facts given the details in her article. In our second half hour we hear from journalist Vandana K on the ground in Delhi. She relates to programmer Chris Cook of Gorilla-Radio in a February interview the details behind the farmer’s protests which for the time being is not in danger of discontinuing until Prime Minister Modi has a change of mind about his neoliberal plan.

Jo Nash is an independent researcher, writer and editor living in Scotland, UK. She previously worked as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and earned a Master’s Degree in International relations while in Sri Lanka. Jo was a Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Medicine in the UK for ten years where she earned her PhD in psychotherapy in 1998 before to moving to India to study the health benefits of meditation in 2008. She currently fundraises for a food bank in Bodhgaya, Bihar, north India.

Vandana K is a Delhi-based independent journalist and producer who writes on the intersections of environment, gender, youth and indigenous communities with a focus on climate change. She’s also covered India’s agriculture beat for nearly two years. Vandana’s articles can be found at Deutsche Welle, Resurgence & Ecologist, The Wire, and Canada’s Media Co-Op, where her recent piece, ‘The fight over agriculture in India, and how Punjabis in Canada are supporting farmers’ appears.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 316)

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CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

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Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time. 

Notes:

  1. consortiumnews.com/2020/12/04/indias-one-day-general-strike-largest-in-history/
  2. www.cbc.ca/news/world/india-covid19-death-toll-1.6023704
  3.  World Health Organization: COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update,, May 11, 2021
  4. www.cbc.ca/news/world/india-covid19-death-toll-1.6023704
  5. Anju Agnihotri Chaba (May 12, 2021), ‘At protest sites, farm unions get Covid battle-ready with team of doctors, oxygen’, Indian Express; indianexpress.com/article/india/farmers-protest-coronavirus-pandemic-7311750/
  6. leftlockdownsceptics.com/2021/04/indias-current-covid-crisis-in-context/?doing_wp_cron=1621007065.9737439155578613281250

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Butting Heads with China and Russia: American Diplomats Are Outclassed

By Philip Giraldi, May 14, 2021

With the exception of the impending departure of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, if it occurs, the White House seems to prefer to use aggression to deter adversaries rather than finesse. The recent exchanges between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Alaska demonstrate how Beijing has a clear view of its interests which Washington seems to lack.

New Intermarium: Biden, NATO Pledge Support to NATO’s Nine-Nation Eastern Flank

By Rick Rozoff, May 14, 2021

NATO’s Stoltenberg went out of his way to fawn over President Biden, praising him twice in a brief message. In particular he celebrated the new American administration’s “commitment to rebuilding alliances” and “strengthening NATO.”

Vaccine Passports Banned in Wyoming

By Steve Watson, May 14, 2021

The Governor of Wyoming has banned vaccine passports, issuing a directive that states no person should be denied access to any places or services based on their vaccination status. Republican Mark Gordon’s directive outlines that “Vaccine passport programs have the potential to politicize a decision that should not be politicized.”

The Siege of Gaza and the Fight for Jerusalem

By Donald Monaco, May 14, 2021

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian families living in East Jerusalem and its invasion of Al-Aqsa Mosque to quell protests against this atrocity escalated tensions in the ancient city that reverberated throughout occupied Palestine.

“Gaza Will Burn”: Israel’s War Cabinet Approves Escalated Aggression on Gaza

By Stephen Lendman, May 14, 2021

Late Wednesday, cabinet members unanimously agreed to intensify IDF terror-bombing of Gaza — including strikes on civilian targets. War minister Gantz said “Gaza will burn” — meaning an intent to commit greater crimes of war and against humanity than already.

History of World War II: Operation Barbarossa. The Roots of Its Failure

By Shane Quinn, May 14, 2021

Operation Barbarossa, whose 80th anniversary falls next month, was the largest military operation ever undertaken. This German invasion of the Soviet Union proved to be the decisive confrontation of the Second World War, and the effects of its outcome lasts to the current day.

Geopolitical Projection: US Claims China Is an “Aggressor”

By Brian Berletic, May 14, 2021

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has, in a 60 Minutes interview, accused China of acting “repressively at home and more aggressively abroad,” emphasizing it as a “fact.” He repeated unfounded claims that “1 million” Uyghurs are being interned in facilities in China’s western region of Xinjiang and referred to it as “genocide.”

“The Storming of The Bastille 2021” Le Retour! “Danser Encore”. Flashmob in Paris

By Catherine Austin Fitts and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 14, 2021

“Danser Encore” in Paris confronts the lies of a corrupt French government which serves the interests of the financial establishment. What is required is to Break the Legitimacy and Authority of  the architects of the infamous Covid Project including the “Great Reset”.

CDC: Death Toll Following Experimental COVID Injections Now at 4,434 – More than 21 Years of Recorded Vaccine Deaths from VAERS

By Brian Shilhavy, May 14, 2021

The CDC released the latest death figures following the experimental COVID injections this week, and that death toll now stands at 4,434 people, adults and children, that have been recorded as dying after receiving one of the experimental COVID injections.

“Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East

By Israel Shahak and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 14, 2021

The Palestinian Catastrophe prevails. In a 2018 report, the United Nations stated that Gaza had become “unliveable”: With an economy in free fall, 70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become “unliveable”, according to the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories.”

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The U.S. Treasury Department announced on May 11 new sanctions against Hezbollah. Washington continues to attack the finances of the Shi’ite party via the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to undermine the groups influence and to maintain perpetual economic chaos and political division in Lebanon. 

According to the Treasury Department, Al-Qard al-Hassan is the financial wing of Hezbollah that oversees the groups “overall budget and spending, including the group’s funding of its terrorist operations and killing of the group’s opponents.” Those targeted by the sanctions have reportedly transferred more than $500 million to Hezbollah despite sanctions. Andrea Gacki, director of OFAC, said that Hezbollah continued “to abuse the Lebanese financial sector” and that such actions demonstrate the groups “disregard for financial stability, transparency, or accountability in Lebanon.”

The message from the Joe Biden administration to Hezbollah was clear: they do not want the Iranian-backed party to have financial autonomy that will allow it to fully dominate the political scene.

After classifying the movement as a terrorist organization in 1995, Washington made its first sanctions against them a year later. Amato-Kennedy’s law sanctioned Syria and Iran for supporting the Lebanese movement. However, since then, the measures taken by Washington have been increasingly targeted.

Seeking at all costs to cut Hezbollah’s funds, the U.S. government has already carried out a series of coercive measures against several personalities close to the group. In 2015, President Barack Obama enacted the “Hizballah International Financing Prevention Act.” This decree made it possible to freeze assets in the U.S. belonging to any individual or entity suspected of financing Hezbollah or of having any connection to them.

Since then, American authorities have directly sanctioned party leaders. Last September, the U.S. Treasury targeted two Lebanese figures – former Transport Minister Youssef Fenianos and former Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil – and accused them of having helped the Shi’ite group. Hezbollah reacted by asserting that “everything that emanates from this (American) Administration is condemned and rejected.”

Lebanese banks, which were trying to respect American directives, were tempted, for political and commercial reasons, to look away and allow such operations to be carried out for the benefit of Hezbollah. At the same time, the U.S. did not attempt to control Lebanese banks as they find themselves trapped by their own contradictions. Washington therefore did not hesitate to plunge Lebanon into an even deeper banking and economic crisis to attack Hezbollah.

By means of these new sanctions, and fearing an all-powerful Hezbollah, American logic is ultimately to make the Shi’ite party unpopular in the eyes of the Lebanese people – a policy which is also based on various forms of pressure.

In fact, regardless of economic sanctions, Washington has implemented a series of measures aimed at undermining Hezbollah’s influence. Through an associative, educational and journalistic network, American public diplomacy is trying to damage the image of the Shi’ite party. Washington has therefore funded a local humanitarian organization, the MEPI (Middle East Partnership Initiative) to counter the actions undertaken by the pro-Iranian movement. But this funding also affects hostile political parties, as well as local and regional media.

Countries which oppose Iranian influence in Lebanon and the wider region have panoply of means to contain this influence. In addition, U.S. leaders are reportedly pressuring its European partners to include Hezbollah in their list of terrorist organizations. After the United Kingdom, Germany and Serbia, Latvia granted this request last December, a decision hailed by Washington

But the question remains whether such pressure can break Hezbollah’s significant political, economic and military control over Lebanon.

Such measures do next to nothing to alleviate the significant political and economic crisis in Lebanon. A weak and divided Lebanon means that Iran (through Hezbollah) cannot gain full control of the country. Although Hezbollah says its purpose of existence is to destroy Israel, one would imagine that the current conflict between the Israeli military and Gazan militants, in addition to the breakdown of civil society as mobs of Jewish and Muslim Israeli citizens attack each other, provides Hezbollah an opportunity to embark on its self-proclaimed ambition. Yet, after many days of conflict between Palestinian militants and the Israeli military, Hezbollah is yet to make a move against what it calls the Zionist Entity.

This would suggest that U.S. sanctions and pressure to keep Lebanon weakened and fragmented achieved its goal of pacifying a major threat against Israel. As long as threats against Israel emanate from Lebanon, Washington will ensure that the country will remain in a state of permanent crisis, and the latest sanctions are a testament to that fact.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from LobeLog

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Eight New York Yankees players and staff members that recently tested positive for COVID-19 were vaccinated before getting the virus.

All of the players and staffers were given the Johnson & Johnson vaccine but not all got a shot from the same batch.

The latest player revealed to test positive this week is Gleyber Torres, MLB revealed in a press release Thursday.

“The Yankees can today confirm that INF Gleyber Torres has received a positive COVID-19 diagnosis. He was fully vaccinated and previously had COVID-19 during the most recent baseball offseason,” MLB stated.

Torres is asymptomatic, Yankees manager Aaron Boone said in a press conference Thursday.

The MLB player is “the eighth Yankees player, coach or traveling staff member to test positive this week. All of the positives are breakthrough positives, occurring with individuals who were fully vaccinated,” the MLB press release stated.

Other positive cases include Coach Matt Blake, Coach Phil Nevin, Coach Reggie Willits and four members of the Yankees’ traveling staff, MLB revealed. All eight are currently in quarantine.

“Major League Baseball, its medical experts and the New York State Department of Health are currently advising and assisting the Yankees, who continue to undergo additional testing and contact tracing,” the statement concluded.

The Yankees players and coaching staff were given the Johnson & Johnson vaccination on April 7, MLB previously reported.

However, Coach Nevin received the Johnson & Johnson vaccination during spring training in Florida in March, the NY Times and The Athletic reported.

“I think one of the things we’re seeing is that being vaccinated en masse like we are, we’re seeing the vaccinations also kind of blunt the effects of the virus,” Boone said in a press conference on Wednesday. “I feel like in a lot of ways, because we’re vaccinated, we’re kind of good and able to deal with this. So there’s a little bit of a frustrating part there, in all the testing that we’re gonna do.”

Although Torres is the latest player and staff member to test positive for COVID-19 this week, Boone said on Thursday, “Today was the first day of no new cases.”

The New York State Department of Health is investigating why and how the players tested positive a month after getting vaccinated, ESPN reported.

“While there have been anecdotal reports of New Yorkers who have had a positive COVID test 14 or more days after receiving their last vaccine dose, DOH is investigating those cases along with the ones linked to the Yankees further to determine if they meet the formal CDC definition of vaccine breakthrough,” the NY DOH told the outlet in a statement.

The NY DOH did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request to comment.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is “74.4% effective and 72% effective in preventing moderate to severe/critical COVID-19 occurring at least 14 days and 28 days after vaccination, respectively” in Americans, according to the FDA.

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The Biden administration may soon recruit an army of private snoops to conduct surveillance that would be illegal if done by federal agents. As part of its war on extremism, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may exploit a “legal work-around” to spy on and potentially entrap Americans who are “perpetuating the ‘narratives’ of concern,” CNN reported last week. But federal informant programs routinely degenerate into “dollars for collars” schemes that reward scoundrels for fabricating crimes that destroy the lives of innocent Americans. The DHS plan would “allow the department to circumvent [constitutional and legal] limits” on surveillance of private citizens and groups. Federal agencies are prohibited from targeting individuals solely for First Amendment-protected speech and activities. But federal hirelings would be under no such restraint. Private informants could create false identities that would be problematic if done by federal agents.

DHS will be ramping up a war against an enemy which the feds have never clearly or competently defined. According to a March report by Biden’s office of the Director of National Intelligence, “domestic violent extremists” include individuals who “take overt steps to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority.” Perhaps like setting up a private informant scheme to evade constitutional restrictions on warrantless surveillance?

One DHS official bewailed to CNN: “Domestic violent extremists are really adaptive and innovative. We see them not only moving to encrypted platforms, but obviously couching their language so they don’t trigger any kind of red flag on any platforms.” DHS officials have apparently decided that certain groups of people are guilty regardless of what they say (“couching their language”). The targets are likely to be simply people with a bad attitude towards Washington. That will include gun owners who distrust politicians who vow to seize guns.

The latest fuzzball standards (“narratives of concern”?) fit the post-9/11 pattern of wildly expansive threat definitions. Shortly after its creation in 2002, DHS warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government” as potential terrorists. DHS-funded Fusion Centers have attached the  “extremist” tag to gun-rights activists, anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority”—even though many of the Founding Fathers shared the same creed. The Pentagon taught soldiers and bureaucrats that people who attend public protests are guilty of  “low-level terrorism.” An Air Force report accused women who wear hijabs of “passive terrorism.” Endless enemies lists come in handy at congressional appropriations hearings.

Federal officials insist that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. FBI chief Christopher Wray perennially proclaims that the FBI never investigates Americans based solely on their ideas. But, as the Intercept reported in 2019, “Who the Justice Department decides to prosecute as a domestic terrorist has little to do with the harm they’ve inflicted or the threat they pose to human life.” But that claim is belied by the FBI’s beloved “informant loophole.” As Trevor Aaronson explained, “FBI agents must obtain supervisory approval to enter a group or gathering using an undercover agent, and to obtain that approval, the FBI must have a ‘predicate,’ or a factual basis to suspect criminal activity. But neither supervisory approval nor a predicate is required if the work is done by an informant, creating a loophole that allows the FBI to investigate Americans for virtually any reason.”

Any new informants hired by the Biden administration will operate under the same perverse incentives that have long subverted due process. Informants tend to be rewarded based on how much assets they help government seize or how many people they help prosecutors condemn. As a 2019 report by the American Bar Association noted, “The government pays cash for incriminating information and testimony. This is troubling because the financial incentive to make cases against others may be much greater than the personal integrity of the informants.” A report by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General slammed the Drug Enforcement Agency for failing to “document the reliability of informants” who helped the DEA to confiscate billions of dollars of private property. The DEA paid informants $237 million between 2010 and 2015, including $25 million shoveled out to only nine informants. DEA’s best paid informant, Andrew Chambers, Jr., was found to have given “false testimony under oath in at least 16 criminal prosecutions nationwide before he was exposed in the late 1990s,” USA Today reported in 2013. Attorney General Janet Reno banned the DEA from using him as an informant but in 2008, DEA re-hired Chambers and used him for at least the following five years.

Informants have become far more perilous to freedom and decency since the 1970s thanks to the Supreme Court effectively defining entrapment out of existence. Almost anything an informant or undercover government agent does to induce someone to violate the law is considered fair play. Craig Monteilh, an informant who was sent into mosques in southern California, was given permission by his FBI handlers to sleep with Muslim women he targeted and to secretly tape record their pillow talk. Other FBI informants browbeat their targets into discussing bombing government buildings, providing sufficient verbal rope to hang them. The vast majority of people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were not bona fide threats but were induced by the FBI or informants to behave in ways that prompted their arrest, according to Trevor Aaronson’s The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism.

One purpose of relying on private informants is to assure that there are no federal fingerprints when people are coaxed or shoved into breaking the law. The FBI admits that it formally entitles its army of informants to commit more than 5,000 crimes a year; there is no estimate of how many crimes are committed directly by FBI agents, who have been formally taught that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” Thanks to the FBI’s Iron Curtain of Secrecy, we have no idea what sort of atrocities its informants may now be committing. During George W. Bush’s reign, the White House formally invoked executive privilege to block disclosure of the FBI’s sweetheart deals for Whitey Bulger, a notorious FBI informant and Irish crime boss linked to 20 murders. The FBI knew of Bulger’s role in killings but lied in court to protect him, even providing false testimony to send innocent men to prison for life to safeguard Bulger. That debacle was summarized in a 2004 congressional reporttitled, “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants.” In 2011, a federal judge aptly labeled the FBI’s behavior in the case as “uncontrolled official wickedness.”

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Of all the nuclear weapon states, the United Kingdom has moved the furthest toward establishing a minimum nuclear deterrent. The United Kingdom has a stockpile of approximately 225 nuclear warheads, of which up to 120 are operationally available for deployment on four Vanguard-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). This estimate is based on publicly available information regarding the size of the British nuclear arsenal, conversations with UK officials, and analysis of the nuclear forces structure. The SSBNs, each of which has 16 missile tubes, constitute the United Kingdom’s sole nuclear platform, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) comprise its sole nuclear delivery system. The United Kingdom is the only nuclear weapon state that operates a posture with a single deterrence system (Table 1).

The United Kingdom’s nuclear posture

Carrying approximately 40 warheads, one of the four SSBNs is deployed at sea at all times in what is called a Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) posture. Two of the submarines remain in port and can be deployed on short notice, while the fourth remains in overhaul and could not be quickly deployed, if at all. The patrol SSBN operates at “reduced alert;” that is, its capability to fire its missiles is measured in days, rather than a few minutes (as during the Cold War). Its missiles are also kept in a “detargeted” mode—target coordinates are stored in the submarine’s launch control center instead of in the navigational system of each missile.

To safeguard against the degradation of its nuclear command, control, and communications in wartime, the United Kingdom uses a system of handwritten letters to command its submarines in the event an adversarial strike incapacitates the country’s leadership. On their first day in office, the Prime Minister is expected to offer preplanned instructions regarding the United Kingdom’s nuclear response, which are said to include options like “Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there,” “Go to Australia,” “Retaliate,” or “Use your own judgment” (Norton-Taylor 2016).

British SSBNs, which carry out secondary tasks such as scientific data collection while on patrol, are based in southwestern Scotland at the Naval Base Clyde at Faslane, which has access to the Irish Sea. Nonoperational warheads are stored at the Royal Naval Armaments Depot (RNAD) at Coulport, approximately three kilometers west of the base.

The United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons stockpile

Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has not declassified the history of its nuclear weapons stockpile size. Over the past two decades, however, the United Kingdom has made several declarations about reducing the sizes of its nuclear inventory and operationally available warheads. In 2006, the UK government announced that they would be “reducing the number of operationally available warheads from fewer than 200 to fewer than 160” (Ministry of Defence 2006, 17). It is believed that around that time, the UK nuclear stockpile included 240 to 245 nuclear warheads. In May 2010, Foreign Secretary William Hague declared, “[f]or the first time, the government will make public the maximum number of warheads that the United Kingdom will hold in its stockpile—in [the] future, our overall stockpile will not exceed 225 nuclear warheads” (Hague 2010, col. 181). The Ministry of Defence subsequently revealed that these reductions to a 225-warhead ceiling had already been completed by May 2010 (UK Ministry of Defence 2013).

Later that year, in October 2010, the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) declared that the United Kingdom would “reduce the number of warheads onboard each submarine from 48 to 40; reduce our requirement for operationally available warheads from fewer than 160 to no more than 120; reduce our overall nuclear weapon stockpile to no more than 180; [and] reduce the number of operational missiles on each submarine” (HM Government 2010, 38). In June 2011, the Secretary of Defence announced to parliament that some of these proposed changes had already been implemented: “at least one of the VANGUARD class ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) now carries a maximum of 40 nuclear warheads” (Fox 2011).

In its 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, the UK Government reaffirmed its plans to cut the size of the nuclear arsenal. By this point, the number of operationally available nuclear warheads had already been reduced from fewer than 160 to no more than 120, and all Vanguard- class SSBNs “now carry 40 nuclear warheads and no more than eight operational missiles” (Fallon 2015). The 2015 strategic review restated that the overall size of the nuclear stockpile, including non-deployed warheads, was expected to decrease to no more than 180 by the mid-2020s (HM Government 2015, 34). Despite these stated intentions, it is believed that throughout the decade the overall size of the UK nuclear stockpile remained constant, at approximately 225 nuclear weapons in total. Warheads removed from service during this time were put into storage, but not dismantled.

In its 2021 Integrated Review, the UK Government suddenly reversed decades of gradual disarmament policies and announced a significant increase in the upper limit of the United Kingdom’s nuclear inventory, up to no more than 260 warheads (HM Government 2021, 76). This decision joins the United Kingdom together with China and Russia as the three members of the so- called P5 NPT countries to increase the sizes of their nuclear stockpiles. In clarifying statements, UK officials noted that the target of 180 warheads promised in the 2010 and 2015 SDSRs “was indeed a goal, but it was never reached, and it has never been our cap,” stating that 225 remained the cap even after the 2015 SDSR explicitly declared that “we will reduce the overall nuclear weapon stockpile to no more than 180 warheads” (Liddle 2021; HM Government 2015, 34). In a speech to the Conference on Disarmament, foreign minister James Cleverly stated that the 260 warheads “is a ceiling, not a target, and is not our current stockpile” (Cleverly 2021).

Because the United Kingdom has not declassified the history of its nuclear weapons stockpile size, illustrating how the stockpile has fluctuated over the years comes with considerable uncertainty. Based on documents previously published by the British government, statements made by government officials, and analysis of the British nuclear weapons force structure over the years. Figure 1 displays our estimates for the overall size of the United Kingdom’s nuclear arsenal between 1953 and 2025.

Figure 1. Estimated United Kingdom Nuclear Weapons Stockpile, 1953-2025. Note: The United Kingdom has not declassified the history of its nuclear weapons stockpile size, so this estimate is provided for illustrative purposes.

The degree to which the Johnson’s government’s policy change will affect the United Kingdom’s targeting requirements remains to be seen; however, the Integrated Review states that the stockpile increase comes in response to “the evolving security environment, including the developing range of technological and doctrinal threats” (HM Government 2021, 76). After publication of the review, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace explained this included Russian ballistic missile defenses: “We have to . . . maintain a credible deterrent to reflect and review what the Russians and others have been up to in the last few years. We have seen Russia invest strongly in ballistic missile defense. They have planned and deployed new capabilities. That means if [the UK deterrent is] going to remain credible, it has to do the job . . . . A quite clear study of how effectively warheads work and how they reenter the atmosphere means you have to make sure they’re not vulnerable to ballistic missile defense. Otherwise they no longer become credible” (Wallace 2021).

It is notable that while Russia is singled out as “the most acute direct threat to the UK,” the Integrated Review also includes what appears to be a subtle—but clear—nuclear threat against Iran, despite the fact that Iran does not have nuclear weapons: After assuring that “the UK will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 1968 (NPT),” the document states that “[t]his assurance does not apply to any state in material breach of those non-proliferation obligations” (HM Government 2021, 77).

In addition to the warhead cap increase, the Integrated Review also reversed longstanding transparency practices and stated that the United Kingdom will “no longer give public figures for our operational stockpile, deployed warhead or deployed missile numbers” (HM Government 2021, 77). This is a mirror image of the Trump administration’s abrupt decision to keep the nuclear stockpile number secret after nearly a decade of relative transparency under the Obama administration (Kristensen 2020).

To increase its overall stockpile, the UK will likely bring warheads previously retired for dismantlement back into the stockpile. Under the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment’s (AWE) Stockpile Reduction Program, warhead disassembly is undertaken at AWE Burghfield. According to the Ministry of Defence,

The main components from warheads disassembled as part of the stockpile reduction programme have been processed in various ways according to their composition and in such a way that prevents the warhead from being reassembled. A number of warheads identified in the programme for reduction have been modified to render them unusable whilst others identified as no longer being required for service are currently stored and have not yet been disabled or modified (UK Ministry of Defense 2013).

These reserve warheads are either stored at the Royal Naval Armaments Depot Coulport or at AWE Burghfield. It is unclear how many stored warheads could be quickly reconstituted in light of the UK Government’s recent decision to raise its warhead ceiling; however, it is possible that a few dozen warheads could be returned to the stockpile over the coming years.

Nuclear modernization and the UK sea-based deterrent

Despite decades of nuclear weapons reductions, the United Kingdom—with broad parliamentary support—has committed to replacing its current fleet of Vanguard-class SSBNs with brand-new boats. The new Dreadnought-class SSBNs are expected to enter service in the early 2030s and have a service life of at least 30 years (Mills 2020). The four boats will be named Dreadnought, Valiant, Warspite, and King George VI (UK Ministry of Defence 2019).

The Dreadnought-class SSBNs will have new “Quad Pack” Common Missile Compartments that are being designed in cooperation with the US Navy to also equip the United States’ new Columbia-class SSBNs. Each “Quad Pack” Common Missile Compartment holds four launch tubes, and each Dreadnought-class SSBN will have three Quad Packs onboard for a planned total of 12 launch tubes—a reduction from the 16 launch tubes currently carried by the UK’s Vanguard-class submarines. Technical problems and quality control issues have resulted in the delayed delivery of the missile launch tubes for the Common Missile Compartment; however, in April 2020 the first four tubes were delivered and have since been welded into the first UK Quad Pack (UK Ministry of Defence 2020a). In July 2020, two more missile tubes were received by the submarine building facility at Barrow-in-Furness, meaning that half of the tubes required for the lead Dreadnought boat have now been delivered and are in the process of being integrated into the pressure hull (UK Ministry of Defence 2020a).

The United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent relies heavily on American nuclear infrastructure, to the point where its own independence has long been in question. The United Kingdom does not own its own missiles, but has title to 58 Trident SLBMs from a pool of missiles shared with the United States Navy. The UK Government is also participating in the US Navy’s current program to extend the service life of the Trident II D5 (the life-extended version will be known as D5LE) missile to the early 2060s (Mills 2021).

Additionally, the current UK warhead, which is called Holbrook, is believed to be highly similar to the United States’ W76-0 warhead—so similar that it has appeared in the US Department of Energy’s “W76 Needs” maintenance schedule (Kristensen 2006). As part of its Nuclear Warhead Capability Sustainment Programme, the United Kingdom is currently refurbishing its warheads for incorporation onto the US-supplied Mk4A aeroshell, which is an upgraded version of the Mk4 that includes an improved MC4700 Arming, Fuzing, and Firing (AF&F) system. UK officials have suggested that “the Mk4A programme will not increase the destructive power of the warhead;” however, the new AF&F system reportedly includes new technology that significantly increases the system’s ability to conduct hard-target kill missions (Norton-Taylor 2011; UK Ministry of Defence 2016; Kristensen, McKinzie, and Postol 2017).

These warhead upgrades are taking place at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) facility at Aldermaston, from where the warheads are transported on trucks north to the Royal Naval Armaments Depot (RNAD) Coulport, near Glasgow. Warhead scheduled for dismantlement are shipped to AWE Burghfield eight kilometers (4.8 miles) northeast of Aldermaston. The UK disarmament group Nukewatch has tracked these transports and assesses that by the end of 2020, two SSBNs had been loaded with Mk4A-upgraded warheads (Nukewatch 2020).

In February 2020, the UK defence secretary announced the start of a new warhead program to eventually replace the current warhead (UK Ministry of Defence 2020b). The announcement was preempted by the commander of US Strategic Command, who leaked during Senate testimony that the United States’ W93/Mk7 program “will also support a parallel Replacement Warhead Program in the United Kingdom” (Richard 2020). In April 2020, the UK defence secretary sent a letter to US members of Congress, lobbying them in support of the new warhead and describing it as “critical . . . to the long-term viability of the UK’s nuclear deterrent” (Borger 2020). The UK Ministry of Defence subsequently suggested that just like the similarities between the current US and UK warheads, the UK’s replacement warhead will be very similar to the US W93: “It’s not exactly the same warhead but . . . there is a very close connection in design terms and production terms” (Lovegrove 2020).

Concerns and issues for the future

The increasing costs and poor management of the United Kingdom’s nuclear complex have long been sources of frustration. The 2015 SDSR suggested that the costs of building the four new submarines would be £31 billion, an increase of £6 billion from 2011 estimates (HM Government 2015, 36, 2011, 10). The UK Government also set aside a contingency fund of £10 billion to cover possible cost overruns. In December 2020, the UK Ministry of Defence reported to Parliament that approximately £8.5 billion had been spent on the program as of March 2020, of which £1.6 billion had been spent over the previous 12 months (UK Ministry of Defence 2020a). Altogether, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported in 2018 that the Ministry of Defence was facing an “affordability gap” of £2.9 billion in its military nuclear spending between 2018 and 2028 (National Audit Office 2018, 36).

In addition to these longstanding cost concerns, in 2020 both the NAO and the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee published reports indicating that three crucial nuclear infrastructure projects would be delayed between 1.7 and 6.3 years, with costs increasing by over £1.3 billion due to poor management (National Audit Office 2020, 21; Committee of Public Accounts 2020, 3). One of these infrastructure projects is MENSA, a new warhead assembly and disassembly facility at Aldermaston that has been delayed by six years and overspent by 146 percent (National Audit Office 2020, 4). Other critical nuclear projects—such as Pegasus, for handling enriched uranium components, and Hydrus, for conducting hydrodynamic-radiographic experiments—have been plagued by similar issues (Plant 2020).

In a bid to resolve some of these issues related to management and oversight, in November 2020 the Ministry of Defence announced a renationalization of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which had previously been government-owned but contractor-operated via a consortium led by Lockheed Martin (Wallace 2020).

Another future concern for the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent lies with the prospect of Scottish independence. Naval Base Clyde, where the United Kingdom’s SSBNs are ported, is in Scotland, at Faslane on the Gare Loch. A 2013 Scottish government white paper clearly stated that if Scotland voted for independence the following year, “we would make early agreement on the speediest safe removal of nuclear weapons a priority. This would be with a view to the removal of Trident within the first term of the Scottish Parliament following independence” (Scottish Government 2013, 14). Although Scotland narrowly voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, it is increasingly likely that the United Kingdom’s decision to exit the European Union—a decision opposed by the majority of Scotland—could soon trigger another referendum. Although several potential relocation candidates have been identified by external analysts—such as HM Naval Base Devonport in Plymouth—the costs and logistics involved with relocating the United Kingdom’s SSBN force would be prohibitive and could prompt the UK Government to reconsider its current plans to modernize its nuclear deterrent (Chalmers and Chalmers 2014; Norton-Taylor 2013).

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Kristensen is the director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, DC.

Matt Korda is a research associate for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, where he co-authors the Bulletin‘s Nuclear Notebook with Hans Kristensen. Previously, he worked for the Arms Control, Disarmament, and WMD Non-Proliferation Centre at NATO HQ in Brussels. He is also the co-director of Foreign Policy Generation––a group of young people working to develop a progressive foreign policy for the next generation.

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Cleverly, J., Minister of State. 2021. “Conference on Disarmament: Minister Cleverly’s Address on the Integrated Review.” March 26. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/conference-on-disarmament-minister-cleverlys-address-on-the-uk-integrated-review

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Kristensen, H. M., M. McKinzie, and T. Postol. 2017. “Warhead ‘Super-Fuze’ Increases Targeting Capability of US SSBN Force.” FAS Strategic Security Blog, March 2. https://fas.org/blogs/security/2017/03/super-fuze/.

Liddle, A. (@AidanLiddle). 2021. “That cap was maintained in 2015. 180 was indeed a goal, but it was never reached, and it has never been our cap. And by the way, we’re talking about ceilings, not targets, or indeed our actual numbers.” Tweet. March 16. https://twitter.com/AidanLiddle/status/1371912132141445120.

Lovegrove, S. 2020. “Oral evidence: MoD Annual Report and Accounts 2019-20, HC 1051.” House of Commons Defence Committee. Q31. 8 December. https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/1350/pdf/.

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National Audit Office. 2020. “Managing infrastructure projects on nuclear-regulated sites.” HC 19, Session 2019-20. 10 January. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Managing-infrastructure-projects-on-nuclear-regulated-sites.pdf.

Norton-Taylor, R. 2011. “Trident more effective with US arming device, tests suggest.” April 6. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/apr/06/trident-us-arming-system-test

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Norton-Taylor, R. 2016. “Theresa May’s first job: decide on UK’s nuclear response.” The Guardian. 12 July. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/12/theresa-mays-first-job-decide-on-uks-nuclear-response.

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Plant, T. 2020. “Britain’s Nuclear Projects: Less Bang and More Whimper.” Royal United Services Institute. 22 January. https://www.rusi.org/commentary/britain%E2%80%99s-nuclear-projects-less-bang-and-more-whimper.

Richard, C. 2020. “Statement of Admiral Charles A. Richard, Commander, United States Strategic Command, Before the Senate Committee on Armed Services.” 13 February. https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Richard_02-13-20.pdf.

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UK Ministry of Defence. 2013. Response to Freedom of Information Act request made by Rob Edwards. Ref. 25-03-2013-173601-014. July 25. https://robedwards.typepad.com/files/mod-foi-response-on-dismantling-nuclear-weapons.pdf.

UK Ministry of Defence. 2016. “Defence in the media: 8 June 2016.” Blog Post. 8 June. https://modmedia.blog.gov.uk/2016/06/08/defence-in-the-media-8-june-2016/.

UK Ministry of Defence. 2019. “Defence Secretary praises 50 years of nuclear service as new submarine is named.” Press release. 3 May. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-secretary-praises-50-years-of-nuclear-service-as-new-submarine-is-named.

UK Ministry of Defence. 2020a. “The United Kingdom’s future nuclear deterrent: the 2020 update to Parliament.” 17 December. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-united-kingdoms-future-nuclear-deterrent-the-2020-update-to-parliament/the-united-kingdoms-future-nuclear-deterrent-the-2020-update-to-parliament.

UK Ministry of Defence. 2020b. “Defence Secretary announces programme to replace the UK’s nuclear warhead.” 25 February. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-secretary-announces-programme-to-replace-the-uks-nuclear-warhead.

Wallace, B. 2020. “Defence Update.” Daily Hansard, HCWS544. 2 November. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-11-02/debates/20110250000009/DefenceUpdate.

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Featured image: Nuclear submarine HMS Vanguard arrives back at HM Naval Base Clyde, Faslane, Scotland following a patrol. Photo: CPOA(Phot) Tam McDonald/MOD accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Open Government License version 1.0.

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With the exception of the impending departure of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, if it occurs, the White House seems to prefer to use aggression to deter adversaries rather than finesse. The recent exchanges between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Alaska demonstrate how Beijing has a clear view of its interests which Washington seems to lack. Blinken initiated the acrimonious exchange when he cited “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters, and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.” He then threatened

“I said that the United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be” before adding “I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back, that we’re reengaged with our allies and partners. I’m also hearing deep concern about some of the actions your government is taking.”

The Chinese Foreign Minister responded sharply, rejecting U.S. suggestions that it has a right to interfere in another country’s domestic policies,

“I think we thought too well of the United States, we thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols. The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image, and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.”

Yi had a point. Ironically, most of the world believes that the U.S. represents a greater threat to genuine democracy than does either China or Russia.

In another more recent interview Blinken has accused the Chinese of acting “more aggressively abroad” while President Biden has claimed that Beijing has a plan to replace America as the world’s leading economic and military power. U.S. United Nations envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield has also delivered the same message that Washington is preparing to take no prisoners, pledging to push back against what she called China’s “authoritarian agenda” through the various agencies that make up the UN bureaucracy. Indeed, the United States seems trapped in its own rhetoric, finding itself in the middle of a situation with China and Taiwan where warnings that Beijing is preparing to use force to recover its former province leave Washington with few options to support a de facto ally. Peter Beinart in a recent op-ed observes how the White House has been incrementally increasing its diplomatic ties with Taiwan even as it both declares itself “rock solid” on defending while also maintaining “strategic ambiguity.”

China understands its interests while the U.S. continues to be bewildered by Beijing’s successful building of trade alliances worldwide. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, reputedly an excellent chess player, is able to think about genuine issues in three dimensions and is always at least four moves ahead of where Biden and his advisers are at any time. Biden public and video appearances frequently seem to be improvisations as he goes along guided by his teleprompter while Putin is able to explain issues clearly, apparently even in English.

A large part of Biden’s problem vis-à-vis both China and Russia is that he has inherited a U.S. Establishment view of foreign and national security policy options. It is based on three basic principles. First, that America is the only superpower and can either ignore or comfortably overcome the objections of other nations to what it is doing. Second, an all-powerful and fully resourced United States can apply “extreme pressure” to recalcitrant foreign governments and those regimes will eventually submit and comply with Washington’s wishes. And third, America has a widely accepted leadership role of the so-called “free world” which will mean that any decision made in Washington will immediately be endorsed by a large number of other nations, giving legitimacy to U.S. actions worldwide.

What Joe Biden actually thinks is, of course, unknown though he has a history of reflexively supporting an assertive and even belligerent foreign policy during his many years in Congress. Kamala Harris, who many believe will be succeeding Biden before too long, appears to have no definitive views at all beyond the usual Democratic Party cant of spreading “democracy” and being strong on Israel. That suggests that the real shaping of policy is coming from the apparatchik and donor levels in the party, to include the neocon-lite Zionist triumvirate at the State Department consisting of Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Kagan as well as the upper-level bureaucracies at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, which all support an assertive and also interventionist foreign policy to keep Americans “safe” while also increasing their budgets annually. Such thinking leaves little room for genuine national interests to surface.

Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken is, for example, the perfect conformist bureaucrat, shaping his own views around established thinking and creating caveats to provide the Democratic Party leadership with some, though limited, options. Witness for example the current White House attitude towards Iran, which is regarded, along with Russia, as a permanent enemy of the United States. President Biden has expressed his interest in renegotiating a non-nuclear proliferation treaty with the Iranians, now being discussed by diplomats without direct contact in Austria. But Blinken undercuts that intention by wrapping the talks in with other issues that are intended to satisfy the Israelis and their friends in Congress that will make progress unlikely if not impossible. They include eliminating Iran’s alleged role as a regional trouble maker and also ending the ballistic missile development programs currently engaged in by the regime. The downside to all of this is that having a multilateral agreement to limit Iranian enhancement of uranium up to a bomb-making level is very much in the U.S. interest, but it appears to be secondary to other politically motivated side discussions which will derail the process.

A foreign and national security policy based on political dogma rather than genuine interests can obviously generate some disconnects, unlike in Russia or China, where redlines and national interests are clearly understood and acted upon. To cite yet another dangerous example of playing with fire that one is witnessing in Eastern Europe, the simple understanding that for Russia Belarus and Ukraine are frontline states that could pose existential threats to Moscow if they were to move closer to the west and join NATO appears to be lacking. The U.S. prefers to stand the question on its head and claims that the real issue is “spreading democracy,” which it is not. Policy makers in Washington might consider what Washington would likely do if Mexico and Canada were to be threatened with foreign interference that might bring about their joining a military alliance hostile to the United States.

The American Establishment-driven foreign policy thinking clearly has trouble in accommodating the obvious understanding that the U.S. actually becomes more vulnerable every time it interferes in China’s trade practices or gives the green light for alliances like NATO to expand. Expansion of the national security policy components often brings in another client state that rarely has anything whatsoever to contribute and which, on the contrary, becomes a burden, relying for their own security on overstretched American military resources. In return, the expansion itself guarantees that a hostile and genuinely threatened Russia will take steps of its own to counter what it sees as a potential grave threat to its own security and national identity.

Quite simply, America’s national security should dictate that the United States treat China as a competitor rather than ane enemy while also disengaging from support and encouragement of Ukraine’s irredentist ambitions as quickly as possible. A recent shipment of offensive weapons to Kiev should become the last such initiative and speeches by American politicians pledging “unwavering support” for Ukraine should be considered unacceptable. Washington should meanwhile reject any clandestine attempts to overthrow Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and make clear to Vladimir Putin that it will not support any NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, which admitted was a pledge already made when the Soviet Union collapsed that was subsequently ignored by President Bill Clinton. Thanks to Bill, America is now obligated to defend not only Western Europe but also Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, the Baltic States and tiny little Montenegro.

In short, United State engagement in complicated overseas quarrels should be limited to areas where genuine vital interests are at stake. In fact, by that standard one should begin to emphasize the security impact of the crisis on America’s southern border, which has a completely different genesis and is being driven by politics. As British statesman Lord Palmerston said in 1848 “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The United States government would be very wise to be guided by that advice.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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***

The situation in the West Bank seems to have entered the phase where it resembles a vicious cycle. Strikes from Israel, warrant an even more severe response from Gaza, and vice versa.

On May 12th, at least three buildings in Gaza city were wiped out. The last building, known as al-Shuruq Tower, collapsed after receiving multiple strikes from combat drones and fighter jets.

Throughout the day, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out strikes that took the lives of 6 Palestinian commanders.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health revealed that 56 people, including 14 children and five women, were killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza, as of the evening of May 12.

After the spike in Israeli strike activity, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas Movement, attacked an Israeli natural gas platform off the coast of the Gaza Strip.

Hundreds of Hamas rockets targeted the Israeli cities of Ashkelon, Netivot and Sderot.

The military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Quds Brigades, announced that it had fired “dozens of rockets” at Ashkelon, Sderot, Dimona and Ashdod as well as at the Israeli capital Tel Aviv.

Some of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome system. However, many others reached their targets inflicting some material losses. In Ashkelon, seven people were injured, with a child in critical condition.

Overall, Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel have resulted in five civilian deaths as of the evening of May 12th. An Israeli soldier was also killed as a result of a missile strike.

The situation is quickly deteriorating, with the United States and Egypt notably attempting to broker a truce. Israel is rejecting any such scenario.

On the evening of May 12th, the Israeli security cabinet approved a plan to intensify military attacks on Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in the Gaza Strip, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed its members that Israel has officially rejected a Hamas proposal for a ceasefire.

Tel Aviv simply said that the punitive campaign was still far from over, and strikes would continue with increasing intensity.

The situation in Israel itself is nearing a civil war in many of the Jewish-Arab mixed cities. Israeli television showed live footage of a crowd of Jewish Israelis attempting to lynch a presumed Arab man. Police was nowhere to be found.

Jewish protesters in Bat Yam, as well as the northern cities of Tiberias and Acre, marched through the streets, and footage circulating on social media captured crowds of men in multiple locations chanting “Death to Arabs” and vandalizing Arab-owned businesses.

Social media footage shows groups attempting to burst into Arab Israeli’s houses and the ensuing fights, the situation in the city of Lod is still critical, and many other towns are reaching a critical point too.

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The members of the Bucharest Nine (9) NATO eastern flank Allies (White House terminology) held a virtual summit today from the Romanian capital that lends it name to the group.

Participants also included President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The participation of that trio should establish whose interests the group serves.

Though established in 2014, the real history of the Bucharest 9 goes back more than a century as will be demonstrated below, and has ominous implications for the worsening conflict between NATO and Russia.

Today’s event was hosted by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda. The members of the group are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia; all were absorbed into NATO from 1999-2004. All are former members of the Warsaw Pact, and with the exception of former East Germany (which entered NATO through its reunification with West Germany in 1989) and Albania (which left the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s and is itself now a NATO member), they were the Warsaw Pact outside of the Soviet Union, of which Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were a part. After seven nations, six of which are now in the Bucharest 9, were admitted into the bloc in 2004, then-President George W. Bush made the pronouncement that the Warsaw Pact is now NATO. He was telling the simple truth.

The nine nations are the members of the Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), the three former Soviet Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Black Sea neighbors Bulgaria and Romania. With Ukraine connecting them (it borders Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia), the eastern flank is indeed just that. It is NATO’s cordon sanitaire along Russia’s western border.

NATO’s Stoltenberg went out of his way to fawn over President Biden, praising him twice in a brief message. In particular he celebrated the new American administration’s “commitment to rebuilding alliances” and “strengthening NATO.” Biden is the commander-in-chief the military bloc has been waiting for. Not since the inauguration of former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 has a president arrived in the Oval Office as fully NATO interoperable as him.

Biden’s own comments, as reported in a White House readout, “underscored his commitment to rebuilding alliances and strengthening Transatlantic relations,” and “conveyed his desire for closer cooperation with our nine Allies in Central Europe and the Baltic and Black Sea regions on the full range of challenges….” The full range of challenges is reducible to one toponym: Russia.

He also vowed continued support for what is euphemistically referred to as NATO’s deterrence and defense policy, and stressed the need to strengthen cooperation against both “economic and political” actions by “our strategic competitors.” Again, that should be singular.

Both Biden and Stoltenberg highlighted the upcoming NATO summit on June 14.

Last year the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine met to create a regional cooperation group named the Lublin Triangle, in part to expedite Ukraine’s Euroatlantic integration; that expression is code for NATO and European Union membership.

A report of that event includes this paragraph:

“This new format aims to bring the three countries closer together while also echoing their historical ties – namely the 17th century Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth [16th-18th centuries] which included most of today’s Ukraine in its borders.”

And another:

“According to a joint statement released by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the signatories of the Lublin Triangle support Ukraine joining NATO, and believe that providing the country with a NATO membership action plan should be next step in this direction.”

What the Lublin Triangle and the Bucharest 9 are at the least reflections of, but arguably the direct implementation of, are two projects from the early twentieth century devised and promoted by Polish political and military leader Józef Piłsudski: the Intermarium and Prometheism.

The first aimed to create a geopolitcal union of former parts of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lying on and between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name Intermariam (between the seas). Contra Russia. As first envisioned in the aftermath of World War I, the project was to include Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. Very close to what the Bucharest 9 is now.

The other though closely related plan was called Prometheism. Its purpose was to bring about the dissolution of Czarist Russia, later the Soviet Union, through the secession of non-Russian populations in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions. That was accomplished in 1991 with the emergence of independent Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, of Georgia and Ukraine on the Black Sea, and of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on the Caspian Sea.

Having achieved the objective of Prometheism, the U.S. and NATO seem to be on the verge of accomplishing that of the Intermariam as well.

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Rick Rozoff is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Internationalist 360.

Vaccine Passports Banned in Wyoming

May 14th, 2021 by Steve Watson

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***

The Governor of Wyoming has banned vaccine passports, issuing a directive that states no person should be denied access to any places or services based on their vaccination status.

Republican Mark Gordon’s directive outlines that “Vaccine passport programs have the potential to politicize a decision that should not be politicized.”

“They would divide our citizens at a time when unity in fighting the virus is essential, and harm those who are medically unable to receive the vaccine,” Gordon noted.

Gordon also urged that getting a vaccine “is a personal choice based upon personal circumstances.”

Gordon was also an early proponent of scrapping the mask mandate back in March, and allowing businesses to reopen.

Wyoming joins other states including Alabama, Minnesota, South Carolina, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Texas and South Dakota that have all either passed legislation or issued orders to prevent mandatory vaccinations or COVID passport schemes.

New York, However is still heading down the vaccine passports route.

After trialling such schemes, there are now expectations that proof of vaccination will be needed to attend events, and even to enter bars and restaurants.

*

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***

To use an old cliché, “the cat is out of the bag.”

For perhaps the first time since the COVID Plandemic started at the beginning of 2020, Americans who get most of their information solely through the corporate media, which is heavily funded by Big Pharma, got a dose of reality on just what exactly has been going on for the past 16 months or so, thanks to Tucker Carlson, and his 45-minute interview with Dr. Peter McCullough last week on his “Tucker Carlson Today” show on Fox News.

Dr. Peter McCullough is well-known to most Health Impact News readers, as we have featured his testimony before the Texas Senate as well as the U.S. Congress in previous articles. See: CENSORED: Dr. Peter McCullough, MD testifies How Successful Home Treatments for COVID Make Experimental Vaccines Unnecessary

Viewers of this Fox Network program learned that there is, in fact, a worldwide conspiracy to suppress effective treatments for COVID patients in favor of experimental COVID injections.

To be sure, neither Tucker nor Dr. McCullough used the politically explosive term “conspiracy,” but they used other terms that communicate the exact same thing.

Dr. McCullough, for example, throughout the interview when referring to why other doctors and health agencies were not educating the public about effective early treatments that have been proven to save lives, used the term “group think,” and kept saying that “something is up” worldwide, to the point where Tucker kept pressing him to state why he thought this was happening.

Dr. McCullough eventually replied: “This is the goal of investigative reporters to figure out.”

Because to discuss the “why” this is happening was not the focus of this interview, and would have led to discussions about Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, their ties to eugenics and establishing a New World Order, etc. – topics beyond the expertise of Dr. McCullough.

To his credit, however, Dr. McCullough did allude to some of these things by bringing up the Nuremburg Code, and how doctors today are violating it.

But this interview was focused clearly on one single question: Why is nobody discussing COVID treatment protocols outside of the new experimental “vaccines”?

And Tucker was brilliant in this interview.

First, he chose the correct person to discuss this, Dr. Peter McCullough.

Dr. Peter McCullough is a consultant cardiologist and Vice Chief of Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX. He is a Principal Faculty in internal medicine for the Texas A & M University Health Sciences Center.

Dr. McCullough is an internationally recognized authority on the role of chronic kidney disease as a cardiovascular risk state with over 1000 publications and over 500 citations in the National Library of Medicine.

He is the most published scientist in the history of his field.

Anyone in the corporate media who wants to now label Dr. McCullough as a “quack” will be basically shooting themselves in the foot.

Dr. McCullough is not anti-vaxx, and neither is Tucker Carlson.

When you watch this interview, you will see two people who have been educated to believe in the medical system, but who obviously see that something is not right with the way the entire world has responded to COVID, where hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have died needlessly, because they were told to go home with COVID-19, because there was no treatment for it, when in fact there were successful treatments.

That lie has now been exposed to MILLIONS of people worldwide, thanks to the audience of Tucker Carlson.

People have asked me why Tucker Carlson is all of a sudden telling the truth about the COVID Plandemic, and if he is “controlled opposition.”

I don’t think so, after watching this interview. I think he is like the many other honest doctors in the field of medicine, like Dr. McCullough, who although they believe in vaccines and pharmaceutical products, recognize that there are evil people with evil intentions running this COVID show, and their consciences will no longer allow them to be silent.

Tucker Carlson has one of the highest rated shows on Cable TV. He is obviously putting his own career on the line to expose this, choosing to follow the truth wherever it leads, no matter what it is going to cost him.

One of the things that impressed me the most about this interview, was that even though Fox News is mostly a Right Wing/Conservative/Republican platform, partisan politics NEVER entered the discussion. Just good, solid journalism.

This is a NON-PARTISAN issue that affects EVERYONE!

Please invest in the 45 minutes it takes to watch this incredible interview, and then share it far and wide. Please watch it on Fox News here.

There is a cost, but it is well worth it, and you will be communicating to Fox News that this is the kind of information America wants and needs right now.

Because the issues discussed in this interview are life and death issues, we are invoking the Fair Use doctrine for non-commercial use, as this is a dire matter of public health that needs to be available to everyone.

The information in this interview can literally save your life, and the lives of your loved ones.

This is from our Rumble channel, and it is also on our Bitchute channel. But again, we encourage everyone to go pay to watch it on Fox News. Your small investment will help tell Fox that we want more honest journalism on the COVID issues.

*

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***

The CDC released the latest death figures following the experimental COVID injections this week, and that death toll now stands at 4,434 people, adults and children, that have been recorded as dying after receiving one of the experimental COVID injections.

Source.

To put this number in perspective, since the CDC continues to claim that these deaths do “not establish a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines,” these deaths now exceed the total number of deaths reported to VAERS following vaccination for the past 21 years!

From 1/1/2000 through 11/30/2020 (the last month before COVID shots were given emergency use) there were 4,394 deaths recorded for a span of 21 years.

Source.

Please take note that for that 21-year period, over 50% of the recorded deaths following vaccination were infants and toddlers under the age of 3, because this is the next targeted demographic to receive the experimental COVID shots: young children.

Earlier this week the FDA gave emergency use authorization to start injecting children between the ages of 12 and 15. See: Criminal FDA Authorizes Emergency Use for Pfizer’s mRNA Injections on 12-15 Year-olds – Up to State Governors to Save the Nation’s Children

Both the Moderna and Pfizer experimental COVID shots are being injected into children as young as 6 months old in their trials, with the expectation that the FDA will grant an EUA for that age group as well. Some of those infants and toddlers in the trials have already died. See: CDC Reports 2 More Infant DEATHS Following Experimental COVID Injections During Clinical Trials

We are witnessing GENOCIDE before our very eyes, as the corporate media (with few exceptions), is denying what is happening, and promoting the shots out of fear and misinformation.

Since many governors have now taken action to prevent COVID Vaccine Passports and discrimination against those who refuse the experimental shots, will they also issue executive orders to prevent their State’s local health departments from injecting children with these shots?

At this point, the fate of our nation’s children is in their hands, as the federal government health agencies are completely in bed with Big Pharma and have no regard for human life whatsoever.

FiercePharma announced today that with the FDA EUA for adolescents, the nation’s pharmacy retail chains will now begin administering the shots.

Now that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has secured approval to be administered to kids aged 12 to 15, major retail pharmacies are adjusting their policies to make the shots quickly available.

CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens and Rite Aid all announced this week that appointments would be open to adolescents following the Food and Drug Administration’s decision. Walgreens said that appointments can be scheduled online or through walk-ins up to 30 minutes before the desired time.

Both CVS and Rite Aid are now extending the option for vaccine clinics to schools to encourage greater uptake in this age group. (Source.)

Governors need to act quickly to stop the carnage that is about to happen in our nation’s children. If you are a parent, rely on NO ONE to help you protect your children (except God).

Do not allow your children to go to school or college if one of these injections is required for attendance. Make sure you have a family doctor or pediatrician who respects your right to informed consent, and be careful if you have to take your child to the hospital or emergency room, as they may deny you care if you refuse the shot for your child.

At this point, any establishment that tries to mandate an experimental COVID shot is breaking the law, as the FDA guidance documents that are supposed to be given out to everyone prior to the shots make it VERY CLEAR that these are experimental products NOT approved by the FDA, and that they are completely VOLUNTARY.

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The Siege of Gaza and the Fight for Jerusalem

May 14th, 2021 by Donald Monaco

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***

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian families living in East Jerusalem and its invasion of Al-Aqsa Mosque to quell protests against this atrocity escalated tensions in the ancient city that reverberated throughout occupied Palestine.   

In response to repeated attacks on Al-Aqsa, Hamas warned the Zionist state to cease its violent repression of protests in Jerusalem.  Hundreds of Palestinians were injured when Israeli police fired steel coated rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, and flash grenades at protesters.  When Israel refused, the military wing of Hamas fired a volley of rockets in the city’s direction.

Israel counter-attacked by bombing Gaza leading to the death of 20 Palestinians, including nine children on May 10, 2021.  One blast alone killed nine people, including three children, in Beit Hanoun.  Hamas responded by firing rockets at southern cities in the settler state killing two Israelis in Ashkelon.  The next day, fighting intensified.  Israel bombed an apartment complex in Gaza City and Hamas retaliated by firing rockets that hit Tel Aviv.  The toll has risen to 67 Palestinians and 7 Israelis dead.

Israeli attacks on Gaza constitute war crimes. They are intended to crush Palestinian resistance.  But the resistance refuses to capitulate.

The message Hamas is sending to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in Jerusalem is piercingly clear: “you do not face the occupation alone.” The pledge of solidarity is being received enthusiastically as protests spread throughout the West Bank despite a repressive crackdown by occupation forces.

Across Israeli cities, Palestinians are being subjected to vigilante violence.  In one attack near Tel Aviv, a Palestinian was pulled from his car and beaten to a bloody pulp by an angry crowd of right-wing fanatics. The horrifying attack was broadcast live on Israeli television dramatically illustrating the virulent anti-Arab racism that permeates Israeli society.  Palestinians retaliated by burning a synagogue as intercommunal violence spreads across Israel like a malignant wildfire.

The militancy of Hamas’ response to Israel’s crimes in Jerusalem stands in sharp contrast to the flaccid rejoinder of the Palestinian Authority.  Its representatives uttered rhetorical condemnations and requested a meeting of the UN Security Council.  This is the same international body that gave the United States a green light to destroy Iraq in 2003.  The Security Council will do nothing but talk as dead bodies mount up in Gaza.

The corrupt PA has acted as a collaborator with the occupation since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.  It will not, in time of conflict, effectively oppose it.  The Hamas leadership comprehends what the PA does not; Israel speaks only the language of violence and understands no other.

Israel was forced to cancel the annual ‘Jerusalem Day March’ that typically involves ultra-nationalist Zionists marching through the Arab sector of East Jerusalem ‘celebrating’ the conquest of the city during the 1967 war.  The march is a provocation that routinely witnesses attacks on Palestinians, vandalism of their property, and spewing of racist chants by the Zionist rabble.

Israel also postponed the date its High Court was set to hear appeals involving the legality of evicting Palestinian families living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem that touched off the Al-Aqsa protests.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated bluntly that any such forced evictions are illegal under international humanitarian law and “may amount to war crimes.”  Leaders of the pariah state routinely violate humanitarian law without consequence.

Israel’s repressive policies and its bombing of Gaza provoked an inevitable response from Hamas, bringing the region to what analysts are calling the “brink of war” in the besieged strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

War is a misnomer.  Israel’s attack on Gaza is a premeditated slaughter that targets the civilian population in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.  Wars are fought between countries.  The Palestinians have no modern state or military.  Palestine is under occupation.  Gaza is besieged.

Hamas is a resistance organization operating in an impoverished ghetto with homemade weaponry and whatever munitions can be smuggled into the strip.

Israel is a modern state with a powerful military armed with nuclear weapons, Arrow anti-ballistic missile and Iron Dome anti-missile defense systems, sophisticated air and naval forces, Merkava tanks, Atmos howitzers, Micro-Taver assault rifles, and armored personnel carriers.

In this conflict, the Palestinian David faces an Israeli Goliath armed and financed by the American imperialist behemoth.  The balance of forces in this ‘war’ are grossly unequal.

There have been three such recent ‘wars’.  Operation Cast Lead in 2008/2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014.  All three Israeli named operations involved military assaults and massacres in Gaza.

In each attack, the number of Palestinian casualties was appalling.  During Cast Lead, 1,398 Palestinians perished. In Pillar of Defense, 167 were killed.  During Protective Edge, 2,250 died, 300 of whom were children.  Those injured and maimed during each assault number in the thousands.  In the 2014 conflict, 11,000 Palestinians were injured and 500,000 displaced.  Israel dropped 400 tons of bombs during 6,000 air strikes.  The barbaric attack was sadistic and intentional.

During typical Gaza incursions, Israel destroys schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, factories, electrical power plants, water treatment facilities, and civilian homes plunging the Gaza Strip into a pre-industrial age, much the same as the United States did to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.

Despite its colossal fire power, Israel does not want to commit ground troops to a fourth invasion having suffered very high casualties in the third.  Instead, it will bomb Gaza relentlessly murdering a civilian population that is trapped in overcrowded cities.  Israeli troops are being massed on the Gaza border. They may be ordered into combat if bombing does not pacify resistance forces in the strip.

The fighters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have learned techniques of asymmetrical warfare from the Islamic resistance led by Hezbollah in Lebanon and now make up a formidable fighting force.  But they are outnumbered and outgunned and can only fight a war of attrition.

Military warfare supplements economic warfare.  Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip began in 2006.  The medieval blockade continues, transforming this narrow strip of land into the largest open-air prison in the world.

Gaza is the home of refugees from the wars of 1948 and 1967.  The strip was controlled by Egypt until 1967.  Gaza has always been ungovernable for the Israelis who took over the territory by defeating Egypt in the 1967 war.  As in the West Bank, settlers’ colonies were planted in the occupied territory.  But the population remained restive.  The first Palestinian Intifada began in Gaza in 1987.

In the summer of 2005, Israeli Prime Minister and certifiable war criminal Ariel Sharon pulled the settlers out of Gaza to isolate the strip from the West Bank which he had pacified by launching ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002.  The misnamed operation was a war on the Palestinian Authority and a refutation of the Oslo Peace Accords negotiated by Labor’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

Not coincidentally, Sharon’s brutal assault on the PA followed the neoconservative script outlined in a documented titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” Authored by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and company, it advocated a break from the ‘land for peace’ paradigm of Labor Zionism in favor of a policy of ‘subjugation and terror’.

Sharon’s bloody campaign was supported by Bush, Cheney, and the neocons.  Sharon broke what remained of armed resistance of Fatah and the PA.  When Mahmoud Abbas succeeded Yasser Arafat, the capitulation was complete.  Except for the occupied Palestinian people who have never accepted subjugation.

The fighting spirit of the Palestinian people was evidenced in the 2006 national election where Hamas won a stunning 74 seats in the 132 seat Palestinian Legislative Council with 45 seats going to Fatah.  Hamas took effective control of the Palestinian Authority.

The Western response was swift.  Led by the bastions of world democracy, economic sanctions were slapped on the PA.  The United States immediately froze $2 billion in economic aid.  Israel imposed a blockade closing off Gaza from the settler state in the north and east, Mediterranean Sea in the west, and Egypt in the South.

It is a starvation blockade.  Minimal food and medicine.  Minimal fuel.  No incubators or dialysis equipment.  No sanitary products such as soap, detergent, diapers, or feminine hygiene articles.  No school supplies.  No building materials such as steel, cement, or metal piping.  No agricultural supplies or equipment.  No batteries or spare parts for equipment.  No exports.  No air traffic.  No travel.

An Israeli official commented that the idea was “to put Palestinians on a diet” by just allowing enough food to enter the Gaza Strip so they do not starve.

The results of siege are constant power outages and fuel shortages, food depravation, malnutrition, childhood anemia, poisoned water, and minimal medical care.  Gaza could only endure because of construction of an elaborate tunnel system into Egypt.

The U.S. approved coup d’état of the Morsi government brought the dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power in Egypt in 2013.  Former army chief General Sisi, being a tool of the United States and Israel, immediately flooded the tunnels and closed the Rafah border, cutting Gaza off from Egypt and North Africa.

Forty percent of Gaza’s 2 million residents are under the age of 14 and fully 75 percent are under the age of 25, making treatment of the strip’s youth the largest case of organized child abuse on earth.

In 2007, war criminals led by President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams who took part in the infamous Iran/Contra terrorist affair, engineered a coup designed to topple Hamas from power.  They armed Fatah chieftain Muhammad Dahlan to provoke a civil war in the occupied territories.  Guided by Lieutenant General Keith Drayton, Dahlan and Fatah launched a war of attrition against Hamas that culminated in a Hamas victory in Gaza. The Palestinian leadership was split.  The Palestinian Authority of Abbas runs enclaves in the West Bank.  Hamas under the leadership of Ismail Haniya runs the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians have tried to end the siege of Gaza by peaceful protests and win their rights as refugees under international law.  The “Great March of Return” involved sustained peaceful protests demanding the ‘Right of Return’ of refugees to their ancestral homes and lands stolen from them in 1948 and an end to the blockade of Gaza.  The protests were staged every Friday, beginning on March 30, 2018, and continued for two years.

The settler state responded with savage repression murdering 260 protesters, many with a bullet to the head fired by a marksman.  An additional 20,000 people were injured.  Palestinians who were demonstrating and waving flags behind enclosed barriers in the Gaza Strip were simply shot down by Israel’s cowardly military forces.

There was not a whimper of protest uttered by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, or any member of the ‘international community’ ostensibly committed to defending human rights.

The occupation of Palestine has become normalized.  Zionists want the world to forget about Palestine. The project of ethnic cleansing continues unabated with full support of the Western democracies.  The sheer magnitude and duration of the suffering experienced by the Palestinian people is sanitized from political discourse.

The barbaric siege of Gaza and the Judaization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank have proceeded unrelentingly.

The rockets fired by Hamas remind the world that Gaza is connected to struggles in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.  The fighters in Gaza are part of an “axis of resistance” to imperialism and Zionism in the region.

Normalization of oppression is only broken by resistance.  What is missing in Western media reports that attempt to explain “unrest in the Middle East” by alluding to “periodic clashes”, “escalation of tensions”, and “outbreaks of violence” is any reference to the daily deprivation, humiliation, oppression, and violence suffered by Palestinians living under occupation and apartheid.

Israel would like the world to forget about Gaza.  Try as they might to strangle inhabitants of the strip, an unrelenting struggle for survival and liberation persists, resonating throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

The cynical Prime Minister of Israel may wish to escalate the conflict to save his political career.  The self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden supports Netanyahu and allows the massacre in Gaza to proceed by claiming that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Presumably, Palestinians have no right to self-defense in the eyes of America’s commander and chief, who recently vowed to support “basic human rights” during his first “State of the Union Address” to the nation.  For Zionists, the enemies of Israel are the enemies of the United States and those enemies have no rights.

The truth is at odds with duplicitous rhetoric.  An occupying power that ethnically cleanses peoples from their historic homeland and murders them when they fight back is not defending itself.  It is engaging in an act of state sponsored terrorism.

Israel is a terror state that is butchering an occupied population to defend its theft of their land.

Despite all efforts, the settler state has never extinguished resistance in Gaza.   The isolated coastal strip remains a symbol of resistance for the people of Palestine who are now more united than any time since the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000.  That unity, and the international solidarity it inspires, may doom a Zionist project that is desperately trying to prevail by reliance on force and violence.

*

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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York.  He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War.  He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective.  His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com  

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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***

Late Wednesday, cabinet members unanimously agreed to intensify IDF terror-bombing of Gaza — including strikes on civilian targets.

War minister Gantz said “Gaza will burn” — meaning an intent to commit greater crimes of war and against humanity than already.

He lied accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

Israeli warplanes continue terror-bombing civilian neighborhoods as it’s done before during preemptive wars on the Strip.

Residential and government buildings, schools, medical facilities, at least one mosque, agricultural lands, farmers in their fields, children in harm’s way, and Strip infrastructure was struck to make conditions for Gazans more untenable than already.

Mass slaughter and destruction keeps increasing by the hour.

Cold-blooded murder of Arabs is longstanding Israeli policy.

According to Defense for Children International – Palestine on Wednesday:

“Israeli forces continue to exhibit…complete disregard for international law, deploying explosive weapons and attacking densely-populated civilian areas in Gaza,” adding:

“As Palestinian children and families seek shelter from Israeli attacks, there is no safe space in the Gaza Strip.” 

“Palestinian children in Gaza increasingly bear the brunt of Israel’s repeated military offensives and a human-made humanitarian crisis as a result of Israel’s closure policy toward the Gaza Strip.”

Deputy mayor of Lod, Ami Kaufman, said “hundreds of armed settlers from the West Bank are on their way to the city.”

“I suggest to every Arab resident not to leave their homes.”

“This has potential to be a bloodbath.”

Palestinian students in Israeli universities are being attacked, including in their dorms.

The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights condemned “intentional and disproportionate targeting of civilians and civilian properties” by Israeli terror-bombing and cross-border shelling,” adding:

The organization sharply criticized  “inaction of the international community, as Gaza is pushed into perpetually worse security and humanitarian conditions.” 

On Thursday, Al Jazeera reported that “residents and shop owners in Gaza City walked among the rubble and what is left of their homes and businesses following the heavy Israeli bombardment,” adding:

Shop owner Zakria Al-Halees  struggled for words to explain damage affecting “the whole area.”

Images show widespread debris from days of ruthless IDF terror-bombing, defenseless civilians bearing the brunt of it — while the world community yawns and does nothing to hold Israel accountable for the highest of high crimes.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for Muslim countries to unite against Israel, saying:

“The tragic incidents of the last few days and the crimes of the Zionist regime, more than ever, remind us of the need for unity and cooperation of Islamic countries to confront the Zionist coercion and occupation.”

“It is necessary for the Islamic countries to work together to defend the Palestinian people, and to confront the aggression and hostile and racist actions of the Zionist regime that we have witnessed in recent days and during the holy month of Ramadan.”

“The attacks and aggressions of the Zionist regime against the people of Palestine and Gaza Strip should stop immediately and we must not allow the Palestinian people to be oppressed anymore.”

In Damascus for discussions on “bilateral, regional and international issues,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif condemned the “Israeli regime’s brutal aggression against Palestinians,” separately tweeting:

“It wasn’t enough for the Israeli regime to

-Steal people’s land & homes;

-Create an Apartheid regime; 

It had to shoot innocent worshippers inside Islam’s 3rd Holiest Mosque upon Islam’s Holiest Eid.”

On Thursday, the Syrian People’s Assembly (PA) “condemned in the strongest terms the barbaric Zionist racist practices against the defenseless Palestinian Arab people, stressing that these practices are a flagrant violation of all international pacts, resolutions and norms, and a violation of the most basic rules of the international humanitarian law” — the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported, adding:

The PA “affirmed its stand by the Palestinians in Occupied Jerusalem and in every part of the land of Palestine, indicating that the Syrians, who have faced for years and are still facing the forces of evil and terrorism, will continue to support their Palestinian brothers, as their enemy is one, and their fate and victory are the same.”

In vain, it urged the world community to intervene against Israeli aggression on their behalf.

It hasn’t happened since Israeli forces stole historic Palestine for exclusive Jewish use and development.

Nor is Israel ever held accountable for the highest of high crimes of war, against humanity, and other atrocities against Palestinians and other Arabs.

Separately on Thursday, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh said “(r)esistance responds to the crimes of the occupying regime in Quds, the Gaza Strip and everywhere.”

“If the occupying regime wants to continue its attacks, we will also continue more attacks.”

According to the Hamas Al-Qassam Brigades’ Abu Obeida:

Its forces fired a cruise “missile…at (Israel’s) Ramon airport, about 220km from Gaza.”

Reuters reported that the facility continues to operate, saying it wasn’t struck.

According to Palestinian/American writer/activist Yousef Munayyer:

“Israeli lynch mobs (are) attacking Palestinians” unobstructed while IDF warplanes terror-bomb Gaza.

Armed and dangerous, extremist settlers are assaulting Palestinians in public, storming their homes, beating and terrorizing them — including women and children — while nearby Israeli security forces do nothing to stop them. 

They’ve been roaming East Jerusalem streets, shouting “Death to Arabs.”

In Occupied Palestine, the safety and welfare of non-Jews is never secure at all times.

Today in apartheid Israel, Arabs are in mortal danger — from Netanyahu regime security forces and extremist settlers out for blood.

A Final Comment

Instead of condemning Israeli ruthlessness and demanding accountability, spokesman for UN secretary general Guterres, Stephane Dujarric, merely called on the Netanyahu regime to “exercise maximum restraint and respect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly,” according to a UN statement.

“The secretary general reiterates his commitment, including through the Middle East Quartet, to supporting Palestinians and Israelis to resolve the conflict on the basis of relevant United Nations resolutions, international law and bilateral agreements,” Dujarric added.

Time and again, Guterres disgraced himself and the office he holds by failing to denounce US/NATO/Israeli aggression and demand accountability for high crimes too serious to ignore.

Meaningless weak-kneed statements — directly or through his spokesman — are issued time and again instead of doing the right thing he consistently avoids.

*

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

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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***

Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) has reintroduced legislation to eliminate a controversial program that channels military-grade weapons and equipment to local and state police forces around the nation. The “1033” program was created in the early 1990s, and has resulted in a flood of rifles, armored personnel carriers and other instruments of war being shipped to local police departments. President Trump and his Administration fully supported the program, and former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper encouraged governors to “dominate the battlespace” in U.S. cities during ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests.

“When our police forces are equipped like an occupying army, they act like one, treating New Yorkers and the American people as an enemy force,” Velázquez said. “The deadly consequences of this policy disproportionately affect people of color and this initiative should be scrapped, completely.”

Between 2006 and 2014, local law enforcement agencies received an array of military equipment worth over $1.5 billion. This included more than 6,000 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, designed for use in warzones like Iraq and Afghanistan. Two such vehicles were sent to New York City. Nationally, the transferred equipment also encompassed nearly 80,000 assault rifles, 205 grenade launchers, 12,000 bayonets, more than 470 aircraft, camouflage and other equipment.

Studies have repeatedly found that when local police departments receive military equipment, they are much more likely to use force. One study indicated that when a county goes from having no military equipment to receiving $2.5 million worth of weaponry the following year as one locality did, civilian deaths at the hands of police are likely to double.

“In the past year, we saw footage of these military-grade vehicles being used to confront peaceful protestors who are exercising their first amendment rights to say, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and call for police reform,” Velázquez added. “Not only does deploying this military hardware fail to deescalate tensions, it actually makes the situation far more dangerous and leads to violence.”

A wide range of advocacy groups praised the measure and called for its swift enactment.

“As an international humanitarian agency, Oxfam sees firsthand how the unchecked flow of weapons fuels human rights abuses and suffering around the world,” said Noah Gottschalk, Global Policy Lead at Oxfam America. “We’re seeing the same patterns here in the US, where the weapons of war transferred through the 1033 Program have not made people safer, but instead led to increased violence against civilians, particularly Black and historically marginalized communities by increasingly militarized police forces. Oxfam fully supports the Congressional leaders who are demanding the immediate end to the 1033 Program as a key step in the urgent movement to reimagine the future of policing, community safety and justice in the United States.”

“Ensuring that our public safety officers are properly equipped to work with their communities while also taking a demilitarized approach to law enforcement are not mutually exclusive,” said Chris Purdy Veterans for American Ideals Project Manager at Human Rights First. “By taking armored vehicles and other weapons of war off our streets, we are empowering our law enforcement agencies to act in the best interests of the people they’re charged to serve and protect.”

“Demilitarizing the police is a crucial step towards the broader goals of ending institutional racism and stopping police brutality,” said Yasmine Taeb, Human Rights Lawyer and Progressive Strategist. “Militarized policing supported by weapons of war has terrorized our communities, and in particular, our communities of color. We join millions of Americans across the country calling on Congress to shut down the 1033 Program once and for all.”

“For more than 20 years, the 1033 Program has sustained and promoted a military-like culture in U.S. law enforcement, the brunt of which has been felt in communities of color,” said Maritza Perez, Director of National Affairs Office at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We know that the increased transfer of military equipment through the 1033 Program increases the number of police killings, particularly in the context of the drug war and SWAT raids, and that the Program has been grossly mismanaged over the years. To truly achieve public safety and save lives, Congress must abolish 1033.”

“The 1033 Program is one of the most visible emblems of the relationship between a violent domestic and violent foreign policy, normalizing militarized violence as part and parcel of U.S. policing, and deteriorating civil and human rights in the process,” said Mac Hamilton, Advocacy Director at Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND). “The problems facing communities across the U.S.—including hunger, housing insecurity, sexual and gender-based violence, mass incarceration, and healthcare access—will never be solved by violent policing. It’s time to take military-grade weapons off of our streets and invest in systems of care and diplomacy, both at home and abroad. Ending the 1033 Program is a critical first step towards this goal.”

Organizations endorsing the bill include:

About Face: 18 Million Rising,

About Face: Veterans Against the War,

Action Center on Race & the Economy,

Activated Massachusetts African Community,

Advocacy Without Borders,

The Advocates for Human Rights,

African American Ministers In Action,

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC),

American Civil Liberties Union,

American Family Voices,

American Friends Service Committee,

American Muslim Empowerment Network (AMEN),

Amnesty International USA,

Arab American Institute,

Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC),

Armenian-American Action Network (AAAN),

Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence,

Autistic Self Advocacy Network,

Bend the Arc: Jewish Action,

Beyond the Bomb,

Brennan Center for Justice,

Bridges Faith Initiative,

Campaign for Liberty Center for American Progress,

Center for Civilians in Conflict,

Center for Constitutional Rights,

Center for Disability Rights,

Center for International Policy,

Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP),

Center for Victims of Torture,

Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at New York University School of Law,

Church of Scientology National Affairs Office,

Church World Service,

CODEPINK,

Color Of Change,

Common Defense,

Community Alliance on Prisons,

Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd,

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),

Daily Kos,

The Daniel Initiative,

Defending Rights & Dissent,

Dignity & Power NOW,

Dream Corps JUSTICE,

Drug Policy Alliance,

Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC),

Equal Justice Society,

Equal Rights Advocates,

Essie Justice Group,

The Feminist Foreign Policy Project,

Foreign Policy for America,

Franciscan Action Network,

Friends Committee on National Legislation,

Futures Without Violence,

GLSEN,

Government Information Watch,

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance,

Greenpeace US,

Hispanic Federation,

Historians for Peace and Democracy,

Human Rights Campaign,

Human Rights First,

ICNA Council for Social Justice Impact Fund,

Indivisible,

Interfaith Action for Human Rights,

Japanese American Citizens League,

Jetpac Resource Center, Inc.,

Jewish Council for Public Affairs,

Justice For Muslims Collective,

Justice is Global,

Justice Strategies,

Juvenile Law Center,

LatinoJustice PRLDEF,

La Union Del Pueblo Entero,

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights,

Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention,

MADRE,

Massachusetts Peace Action,

Media Alliance,

MediaJustice,

Metropolitan Community Churches,

Global Justice Institute,

MomsRising,

Mothers Against Police Brutality,

Multicultural AIDS Coalition,

Muslim Justice League,

NARAL Pro-Choice America,

National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd,

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers,

National Association of Social Workers,

The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls,

National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC),

National Disability Rights Network (NDRN),

National Education Association,

National Homelessness Law Center,

National Immigrant Justice Center,

National Immigration Project (NIP-NLG),

National Iranian American Council Action (NIAC Action),

National Network of Arab American Communities (NNAAC),

National Organization for Women,

National Partnership for Women & Families,

National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies,

NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies,

Oakland Privacy,

Open Society Policy Center,

Organized Communities Against Deportations,

Our Revolution,

OVEC-Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition,

Oxfam America,

Peace Action,

People’s Action,

Poder in Action,

PolicyLink,

Poligon Education Fund,

Presente.org,

Progressive Democrats of America,

Project Blueprint,

Project On Government Oversight,

Project South,

Public Citizen,

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,

Racial Justice NOW,

Restore The Fourth,

Rethinking Foreign Policy,

Revolutionary Love Project,

Revolving Door Project,

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights,

RootsAction.org,

Secure Families Initiative,

Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI),

Sierra Club,

Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF),

The Sikh Coalition,

South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT),

Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund,

TN State Conference NAACP,

UndocuBlack Network,

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee,

United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries,

United for Peace and Justice,

United We Dream Network,

U.S. Labor Against Racism and War Veterans for American Ideals,

Voices for Progress,

Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs,

WESPAC Foundation, Inc.,

Wind of the Spirit Immigrant Resource Center,

Win Without War,

Women’s Action for New Directions,

Women Watch Afrika,

Working Families Party,

World BEYOND War,

World Can’t Wait Hawai`I,

World Without Genocide

In addition to Velázquez, the bill is cosponsored by

Chellie Pingree,

Eleanor Holmes Norton,

Ayanna Pressley,

Mark Pocan,

Ro Khanna, Kathy Castor,

Yvette D. Clarke,

Adriano Espaillat,

Barbara Lee,

Carolyn Maloney,

James P. McGovern,

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,

Ilhan Omar,

Rashida Tlaib,

Jan Schakowsky,

Cori Bush,

Don Beyer.

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Operation Barbarossa, whose 80th anniversary falls next month, was the largest military operation ever undertaken. This German invasion of the Soviet Union proved to be the decisive confrontation of the Second World War, and the effects of its outcome lasts to the current day.

The Austrian-born autocrat, Adolf Hitler, embarked upon his wars of conquest without firstly placing the German nation on a Total War footing. Hitler’s refusal from 1939, to direct the Third Reich’s full resources towards military means, was a critical reason behind the Nazis’ eventual defeat. Hitler’s regime made moves in enacting Total War policies only from early 1943, after the disaster at Stalingrad, and at least two years too late.

Hitler had ignored the theories of his predecessor as dictator, General Erich Ludendorff. He was the German Empire’s ruling warlord from August 1916 to October 1918, and during the mid-1920s he had been a political ally of Hitler. The Ludendorff biographer and historian, Lt. Col. Donald J. Goodspeed, recognised that the general “possessed outstanding military talent”. (1)

Ludendorff was a strong proponent of Total War from the early 20th century, and he believed that a country’s combined assets – including every fit man, woman and adolescent – must be engineered towards the business of war, on the battlefield or in the armament factories, and that peace is merely an interlude between conflicts. For Ludendorff, “The total state and total mobilisation provided essential preconditions for fighting successful war”. (2)

In 1935, the 70-year-old Ludendorff re-entered German national consciousness when he completed his book and life’s work titled, Der Totale Krieg (The Total War). In it he insisted, “War is the highest expression of the national will to live, and therefore politics must serve war-making”.

Hitler read Ludendorff’s book, but the latter’s beliefs pertaining to Total War were not accepted by the Third Reich’s General Staff. They felt Ludendorff’s views to be too ruthless and extreme (3). His doctrines on waging conflict were undoubtedly that, yet all wars of aggression are ruthless and extreme. By the mid-1930s Ludendorff had long since fallen out with Hitler. The general criticised the Nazis in pamphlets that he wrote from his home in Bavaria, and in a small newspaper which he established; his attacks were due, in part, because Ludendorff felt Hitler was too soft on Roman Catholic influence in Germany (4). Ludendorff was the only person in the Reich who was allowed to rebuke the Nazis with impunity.

Analysing Ludendorff’s Total War views, Dr Jan Willem Honig, a senior lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London, outlined that “Ludendorff’s concept of Total War shows how well he had internalised the shift in the political rationalisation of war, and the resulting need for its means and methods to change”. (5)

Ludendorff’s advocacy of maximising a country’s productivity to fight wars was, in effect, supported by Albert Speer, the so-called “Good Nazi” and one of the less sinister men among Hitler’s top brass. Speer was initially an architect by trade, but on 8 February 1942 he had been appointed by Hitler as Minister of Armaments and Munitions. From 1942 until war’s end, Speer was one of the Reich’s most powerful men.

In Spandau Prison on 29 March 1947, Speer wrote a highly significant passage stating,

“In the middle of 1941, Hitler could easily have had an army equipped twice as powerfully as it was. For the production of those fundamental industries that determine the volume of armaments was scarcely higher in 1941 than in 1944. What would have kept us from attaining the later production figures by the spring of 1942? We could even have mobilised approximately three million more men of the younger age groups before 1942 without losses in production – nor would we have needed forced labour from the occupied territories, if women could have been brought into the labour force, as they were in England and the United States. Some five million women would have been available for armaments production; and three million additional men would have added up to many divisions. These, moreover, could have been excellently equipped as a result of the increased production”. (6)

The above had escaped Hitler at the time, it seems. Hitler had no trade to speak of, having been prevented in his late teens from entering the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He did not have the necessary qualifications either to pursue a career in architecture, as his secondary school studies went uncompleted. Maybe it was this more than anything, which ensured that Hitler later became a superficial expert in various fields, a dilettante with an aptitude for perceptive and amateurish reasoning.

Speer noted on 6 May 1960,

“Someone ought to write on Hitler’s dilettantism some day. He had the ignorance, the curiosity, the enthusiasm and the temerity of the born dilettante; and along with that, inspiration, imagination, lack of bias. In short, if I had to find a phrase to fit him, to sum him up aptly and succinctly, I would say that he was a genius of dilettantism”. (7)

Hitler’s dilettantism extended inevitably to the military arena. Due to having seemingly no other prospects, he remained in the German armed forces until 31 March 1920. With the First World War over, he showed no ambition to rise through the army’s ranks beyond that of lance-corporal. From the spring of 1920, Hitler chose instead to enter politics and worked for the new Nazi Party. In following years, he became a skilled and unscrupulous politician but would remain inexperienced in military matters.

When Ludendorff assumed the de facto German dictatorship in autumn 1916, he almost immediately set about instituting Total War measures, at first by issuing a compulsory labour law. For the war’s remainder, every German male aged between 15 and 60 was pressed into the service of the state. The Canadian historian Goodspeed observed, “Before the year [1916] was out, the labour law considerably eased Germany’s manpower shortage”, and it was “One of his most important – and unpopular – measures” (8). Ludendorff himself acknowledged that his Total War strategy was indeed not well liked, but for him there was too much at stake, and the German masses did not revolt at his harsh methods.

Moreover, Ludendorff employed large numbers of German women in the munitions plants after August 1916. Compulsory enrolling of women in the arms industry is, of course, essential to a more effective prosecution of a modern war economy. The percentage of females in any nation’s populace amounts to at least 50%, and those of working age perhaps 30% or more. Not to make use of the considerable abilities of women is an enormous waste. Nazi policy towards women was sexist and domineering, viewing their positions in society as strictly mother and wife who belonged in the homestead.

From the Second World War’s outset in September 1939, Hitler had been afraid to implement Total War policies, for fear that it would affect his standing with the German public. He lacked the single-minded focus of the military fanatic who wants to direct everything towards winning the war. Into 1942 and beyond, the Hitler regime continued to dither and organise the war in a dilettantish fashion; most starkly, by making scant use of the millions of German females.

In the spring of 1942 businessmen met with the armaments minister Speer, and showed him statistics proving that employment of German women was much higher during World War I, when Ludendorff was in charge. Photographs were produced of female workers streaming out of factories in 1918, whereas photos of the same plants in 1942 revealed scarcely any women. (9)

In early April 1942, with this vital issue on his mind Speer went to see Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment. Speer proposed to Sauckel that they recruit women en masse to be deployed in the factories. Sauckel’s response was not conciliatory, but he sought a meeting on the topic with Hermann Göring, president of the Reichstag.

Sauckel expounded to Göring that factory work could affect the “psychic and emotional life” of German girls, along with their ability to bear children. Göring agreed with him. Speer recalled how “to be absolutely sure, Sauckel went to Hitler immediately after the conference and had him confirm the decision. All my good arguments were thereby blown to the winds” (10). Almost two years later on 28 January 1944, and 12 months after the Stalingrad defeat, Speer sent a withering message to Sauckel whereby the war minister outlined “the employment of women has progressed much further in England than here”. (11)

Regarding the manpower of Wehrmacht forces, by May 1940 as they attacked France and the Low Countries, it consisted of around 3.5 million German soldiers, according to the influential British military historian, Basil Liddell Hart (12). From 1939, a complete mobilisation could have produced another two or three million German troops by the summer of 1940, as was the case the next year. In the event, 3.5 million was more than adequate to rout a decaying French Army. In how they were used the following summer, roughly the same figure was not enough for a repeat outcome in the Soviet Union, a far larger country whose soldiers did not collapse like the French.

Hitler had in 1925 declared in Mein Kampf “when we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia, and her border vassal states” (13). Hitler first seriously began to plan out his dream of expanding eastwards 15 years later, from July 1940. His increased focus on the Soviet Union had been influenced too by circumstances, as Britain was stubbornly resisting him which he found confusing; but his decision to attack Russia was cemented before London’s rejection of his peace offer, as Captain Liddell Hart realised (14). On 21 July 1940 Hitler asked Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the German Army Commander-in-Chief, to advise him on the possibility of invading Soviet Russia in the autumn of 1940.

Operation Barbarossa Infobox.jpg

Clockwise from top left: German soldiers advance through Northern Russia, German flamethrower team in the Soviet Union, Soviet planes flying over German positions near Moscow, Soviet prisoners of war on the way to German prison camps, Soviet soldiers fire at German positions. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Eight days later, on 29 July, Hitler nevertheless informed his Chief of Operations Alfred Jodl that an attack on Russia, in August or September 1940, was no longer logistically practical. It was too late in the year, with the Russian autumn rains and winter snow on the horizon. Hitler said to General Jodl that the invasion would have to be postponed for a few months.

On 31 July 1940, an important conference was held at the Berghof residence in the Bavarian Alps. Among those in attendance were Brauchitsch and Jodl along with Hitler’s close military adviser, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Hitler said that a German victory over Russia would compel the English to come to terms with them, and he further remarked, “England’s hope is Russia and America. If hope of Russia disappears, America disappears too” (15). Keitel was one of few to later advise against attacking Russia, because the 58-year-old field marshal foresaw the risks involved, but though Hitler respected his opinion he did not accept it on this subject.

Despite having over 10 months to prepare for the invasion of Russia, the final details for Operation Barbarossa were poorly worked out and grossly ambitious in scope. German reconnaissance estimates of enemy strength were faulty and based mainly on guesswork. This lack of knowledge seeped through to the highest echelon of the German command. Austrian Lt. Col. Otto Skorzeny, who freed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity on 12 September 1943, wrote in early 1975, “Hitler certainly made grave errors in his appraisal of the war situation – but primarily because he was badly informed”. (16)

There is no doubt that Hitler was misled on Soviet fighting capacity, but he initially allowed himself to be. It suited his prejudices against Bolshevism and the Slavic race, reflected by the brutal and exploitative manner of the invasion which he stressed to his generals was necessary.

Top ranking figures such as General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff of the German Army High Command, had played a central role in unwittingly misinforming Hitler. At the invasion’s beginning, the 56-year-old Halder led Hitler to believe there were 200 Red Army divisions in existence. Subsequently on 11 August 1941 Halder admitted in his diary “up to now we have already counted 360” (17). Less than two months into the attack, Soviet troop numbers were almost double the size of what Halder had predicted. With Hitler’s agreement and input, the experienced Halder had prepared both the planning and execution of Operation Barbarossa.

Image on the right: OKH commander Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and Hitler study maps during the early days of Hitler’s Russian Campaign (Public Domain)

When receiving a solid picture of realities on the ground, Hitler demonstrated an expertise for grasping complex problems with ease and explaining them clearly. Recalling his stay at Hitler’s compound near Rastenburg, East Prussia from 10 September 1944, Skorzeny wrote that, “During my three days at the Wolfsschanze I was astonished, not only by Hitler’s extraordinary memory, but by the intuitive sense he possessed for military and political situations, their possible developments and eventual solutions of the problems associated with them. General Jodl knew how to present a military situation. But when Hitler spoke afterwards, everything was much simpler and clearer”. (18)

German military intelligence did not make Hitler aware either that, from the high summer of 1941, the Soviets were successfully achieving a vast relocation of industrial capacity further east – in order to safeguard and strengthen Russian war capabilities against the Nazi onslaught. John Sweeney, professor emeritus of geography at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote of the Soviet initiatives, “Over 1,500 industrial enterprises were transplanted between July and November 1941 alone to what were considered relatively safe refuges in the interior. The Urals (which received 667 of these enterprises), Kazakhstan and Central Asia (308), West Siberia (244), the Volga Region (226) and East Siberia (78) benefited permanently from this massive injection of industrial investment, and it was in this heartland area that urban growth during the post-war recovery period was concentrated”. (19)

Focusing on the misjudgments of people like General Halder relating to Russian manpower, there was hardly an excuse for it. The Russian Empire conducted its first census in January 1897, 44 years before Barbarossa, and it stated that its population amounted to 125 million (20). This was more than the 109 million living in Nazi Germany and its occupied regions in 1940. Tsarist Russia could have fielded more divisions than Hitler’s Reich, and Russia’s population would grow in coming decades.

The next full census was held under the Soviets in December 1926 – before Joseph Stalin had consolidated his rule in 1928 – and it showed that the USSR’s population was 147 million (21). The results were soon published, and military figures or historians in Nazi Germany could have unearthed it if they had tried.

Another Soviet census was taken in January 1937, which found that the population had climbed again and was 162 million; this census result was unknown outside of the Kremlin, Stalin refused to put it to print as he expected the total to be higher; a final pre-war Soviet census was conducted in January 1939, claiming that 170 million people lived there.

The population of the USSR’s two largest cities, Moscow and Leningrad, had together risen by 3.6 million from 1926 to 1939. Sweeney, who is commonly regarded as Ireland’s foremost climate scientist, wrote that the rapid population increase in Moscow and Leningrad was “a remarkable fact considering the very low contribution made to this total by natural increase”. (22)

Sweeney noted that the unprecedented growth in Soviet urban populations occurred largely due to “a massive influx to the older centres of European Russia” and was “primarily attributable to an exodus from the land rather than any natural increase in the pre-existing urban population”. (23)

Some details of the 1939 Soviet census were printed in the Russian press. Key passages from it were discussed, for example, in a spring 1941 study published in London with the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, weeks before Barbarossa (24). Apparently no-one in positions of power in Berlin were made aware of such accounts.

This report printed with the Royal Statistical Society was written by a Russian-born lecturer and naturalised British citizen, named Sergey Petrovich Turin, or S. P. Turin (originally Tyurin). In his account, Turin revealed that the Soviet population in 1941 “is about 193 million people” (25). Its populace had increased further since 1939, because Stalin absorbed into USSR territory the eastern half of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, while he also took over 9% of Finnish land.

As the German invasion was launched, the Soviet population was nearly twice larger than the Third Reich’s. Huge numbers of Soviet divisions should have come as little surprise to the German hierarchy. All too late, General Halder wrote in his diary on 11 August 1941, “we destroy a dozen of them [Soviet divisions], then the Russians put another dozen in their place”.

Hitler was likewise misinformed by Nazi intelligence on Soviet armament strength. In mid-August 1941, Hitler confided to the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels that he had “estimated the number of Soviet tanks as 5,000, when in reality they had around 20,000. We thought they had about 10,000 aircraft, in fact they had over 20,000” (26). On 4 June 1942 Hitler told Finland’s Commander-in-Chief, Gustav Mannerheim, that he had since learnt the Soviets actually possessed “35,000 tanks” in the second half of 1941. (27)

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Donald J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Soldier: Dictator: Revolutionary (Hart-Davis; 1st edition, 1 Jan. 1966) p. 248

Jan Willem Honig, “The Idea of Total War: From Clausewitz to Ludendorff”, published in 2012, Moodle.suttongrammar.sutton.sch.uk

3 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 247

4 Ibid.

5 Honig, “The Idea of Total War: From Clausewitz to Ludendorff”

6 Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (Fontana, London, 1977) pp. 62-63.

7 Ibid., p. 366-367

8 Goodspeed, Ludendorff, p. 157

9 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Simon & Schuster; Reissue edition, 1 April 1997) p. 220

10 Ibid., p. 221

11 Ibid., p. 540

12 Basil Liddell Hart, “Battle of France, World War II [1940]”, Britannica.com

13 John Simkin, “Operation Barbarossa”, Spartacus Educational

14 Basil Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (Pan Macmillan Australia, 1973) p. 143

15 Klaus P. Fischer, Hitler and America (University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 23 June 2011) p. 126

16 Otto Skorzeny, My Commando Operations: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando (Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1 Jan. 1995) p. 198

17 Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Biography (Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition, 3 Oct. 2019) p. 749

18 Skorzeny, My Commando Operations, p. 309

19 John Sweeney, Regional Patterns of Urban Growth in the USSR, Geographical Association, p. 3 of 8, Jstor

20 David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made (Routledge; 1st edition, 16 July 2014) p. 12

21 Dimensions of Soviet economic power; studies, United States Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 1 Jan. 1962, p. 508

22 Sweeney, Regional Patterns of Urban Growth in the USSR, p. 2 of 8, Jstor

23 Ibid.

24 S. P. Turin, Some Observations on the Population of Soviet Russia at the Census of January 17th, 1939, published by Wiley for the Royal Statistical Society, p. 1 of 3, Jstor

25 Ibid.

26 Longerich, Hitler: A Biography, p. 749

27 ElMehdi El Azhary, “Hitler’s Only Known Interview”, Medium, 15 March 2021

Napoleone tra guerra e rivoluzione

May 14th, 2021 by Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

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.

***

La Rivoluzione francese non fu un semplice “evento” storico, ma un processo lungo e complesso all’interno del quale si possono identificare diverse fasi. Alcune di queste, comprese le importanti fasi iniziale e finale che indicheremo in seguito, furono di natura più contro-rivoluzionaria che rivoluzionaria. E, per quanto riguarda gli stadi veramente rivoluzionari, è possibile individuarne due.

Il primo fu “il 1789”, la rivoluzione moderata. Questa pose termine all’Ancien Régime, caratterizzato dall’assolutismo reale e dal feudalesimo o, detto in altro modo, al monopolio del potere da parte del monarca e ai privilegi della nobiltà e della Chiesa. Tra le realizzazioni importanti de “il 1789” sono da annoverare la Dichiarazione dei diritti dell’uomo, l’uguaglianza di tutti i francesi di fronte alla legge, la separazione tra Stato e Chiesa, un sistema parlamentare basato su un diritto di voto seppur ristretto e la creazione di uno Stato francese “moderno”, centralizzato e “indivisibile”. Queste realizzazioni che, complessivamente, costituirono un enorme “passo in avanti” nella storia della Francia, vennero iscritte in una costituzione che, non senza un qualche ritardo, sarà promulgata nel 1791.

L’Ancien Régime, ossia la Francia prima del 1789, era associata alla monarchia assoluta e il sistema rivoluzionario del 1789 avrebbe potuto trovare una sua collocazione adeguata anche all’interno di una monarchia parlamentare e costituzionale. La cosa non fu possibile a causa della condotta di Luigi XVI e così nel 1792 nacque una nuova forma di stato, la repubblica. Il “1789” fu possibile grazie all’intervento dei sans-culottes di Parigi, ma il suo sbocco fu fondamentalmente opera di moderati, quasi esclusivamente membri della borghesia facoltosa. Furono questi ultimi che, sulle rovine dell’Ancien Régime già al servizio degli interessi della nobiltà e del clero, fonderanno uno stato che doveva essere invece al servizio dell’(alta) borghesia.

Sul piano politico, questi solidi borghesi, originari di tutta la Francia, troveranno subito una sede nel club dei Foglianti e in seguito in quello dei Girondini, il cui nome riflette le loro origini : erano membri della borghesia della regione di Bordeaux , la cui ricchezza proveniva essenzialmente, oltre che dal vino, dal commercio degli schiavi.

Il secondo stadio rivoluzionario fu “il 1793”, che vuol dire rivoluzione “popolare”, radicale, egualitaria, con i diritti sociali come il diritto al lavoro e riforme socio-economiche relativamente spinte – rispecchiate in una costituzione, quella dell’anno Io o1793, che tuttavia non entrerà mai in vigore. In questa fase, personificata da Massimiliano Robespierre, la Rivoluzione si orientò in senso sociale e si apprestò a regolare l’economia del paese – e perciò a limitare in una certa misura la libertà individuale a favore del “bene comune”, vale a dire a profitto della “comunità”. Dato che, contemporaneamente, il diritto di proprietà venne preservato, il “1793” si può qualificare come “social-democratico” piuttosto che “socialista”. Il “1793” fu opera di Robespierre, del gruppo dei Montagna e di altri Giacobini, ossia di rivoluzionari radicali, essenzialmente piccola-borghesia i cui principi, al fondo, erano altrettanto “liberali” di quelli dell’alta borghesia. Le loro misure cercavano di soddisfare anche i bisogni elementari della plebe parigina, soprattutto artigiani e altri lavoratori sans-culottes, punta di lancia della rivoluzione. I sans-culottes erano persone comuni che portavano calzoni lunghi al posto di mutandoni (culottes) cui venivano aggiunte delle calze impreziosite di sete, modo tipico di vestire degli aristocratici e dei ricchi borghesi. I sanculotti furono in effetti gli alleati indispensabili ai Giacobini nella loro lotta non solo contro i Girondini, i rivoluzionari moderati, ma anche e soprattutto contro la contro-rivoluzione.

Sotto molteplici aspetti, la fase radicale della rivoluzione fu un fenomeno parigino, una rivoluzione fatta da e per Parigi. L’opposizione veniva essenzialmente da fuori della capitale, ovvero dalla grande borghesia residente nelle città di provincia, rappresentata e diretta dai Girondini e sostenuta dai contadini delle campagne. Con il “1793”, la rivoluzione diventa una sorta di conflitto tra Parigi e il resto della Francia.

La contro-rivoluzione si poneva invece contro sia “il 1789” che ”il 1793” e non voleva niente di meno che un ritorno all’Ancien Régime. I suoi campioni – emigrati della nobiltà, preti recalcitranti e contadini in rivolta in Vandea e in altre province – si battevano per il re e per la Chiesa. La borghesia facoltosa, concentrata soprattutto nelle grandi città francesi di provincia, dimostrava ostilità al “1793”, ma favore al “1789”. La borghesia era contro “il 1793” perchè, al contrario dei sanculotti parigini, non aveva nulla da guadagnare e tutto da perdere da uno sviluppo rivoluzionario radicale volto nella direzione indicata dai Montagnardi e dalla loro costituzione del 1793 con il suo egualitarismo e statalismo. La borghesia rimaneva comunque ugualmente contraria ad un ritorno dell’Ancien Régime nel quale lo Stato sarebbe di nuovo stato messo al servizio di nobiltà e clero. “Il 1789” voleva invece dire Stato francese per la borghesia e “il 1789” era in effetti stata la rivoluzione della borghesia per la borghesia.

Un “ritorno all’indietro” verso la rivoluzione borghese e moderata del 1789 – ma con una repubblica al posto di una monarchia costituzionale – ecco l’obiettivo e, sotto molti aspetti, il risultato della “reazione del Termidoro” del 1794, il colpo di stato che pone fine al regime – e alla vita – di Robespierre. Il Termidoro produsse la costituzione dell’anno IIIo che, come ha scritto lo storico Charles Morazé, “garantì la proprietà privata e le idee liberali, [ma] soppresse tutto quello che andava oltre la rivoluzione borghese, nella direzione del socialismo”. L’aggiornamento termidoriano del “1789” produsse di conseguenza uno stato descritto come la “repubblica borghese” o la “repubblica dei proprietari”. Nacque così anche il “Direttorio”, un regime autoritario dissimulato da una mano sottile di vernice democratica sotto forma di assemblee legislative. Il Direttorio, tuttavia, trovò estremamente difficile sopravvivere nel destreggiarsi tra una Cariddi realista di destra, che mirava a un ritorno all’Ancien Régime, e una Scilla di Giacobini e sanculotti di sinistra che militavano per una nuova radicalizzazione in senso rivoluzionario. Ci furono delle insurrezioni, sia dei realisti che dei Giacobini, e una di queste venne soffocata nel sangue da un generale ambizioso e popolare, Napoleone Bonaparte.

Tutti questi problemi vennero risolti dal colpo di stato del “18 Brumaio”, vale a dire con l’istituzione di una dittatura militare affidata a Bonaparte. Si può dire che il “18 Brumaio” la borghesia facoltosa di Francia trasferì a Bonaparte il potere politico che possedeva allo scopo di non perderlo nè sul fianco dei realisti né su quello dei Giacobini.

Ci si aspettava che il Corso avrebbe messo lo Stato francese, d’ora in avanti una dittatura, al servizio della (alta) borghesia e prendesse le misure che ci si attendeva. Il primo compito fu l’eliminazione della duplice minaccia che tormentava i suoi padrini dell’alta borghesia. Il pericolo realista e pertanto contro-rivoluzionario poteva essere essere tenuto a bada con l’aiuto del “bastone” della repressione, ma anche soprattutto con la “carota” delle concessioni, dei compromessi e della riconciliazione. Napoleone permise agli aristocratici emigrati di tornare in Francia, di recuperare le loro proprietà e di approfittare dei privilegi che aveva concesso non solo ai grandi borghesi, ma ai “benestanti” in generale. Inoltre trovò un modus vivendi con la Chiesa cattolica firmando un concordato con il Papa.

Allo scopo di esorcizzare la minaccia (neo-)giacobina, ovvero il rischio di una rinnovata radicalizzazione della rivoluzione, Napoleone si servì di uno strumento immaginato dai Girondini e diligentemente utilizzato dal Direttorio, ossia la guerra. In effetti, se pensiamo alla dittatura di Bonaparte non ci tornano alla mente, contrariamente a quanto aveva contrassegnato gli anni dal 1789 al 1794, eventi rivoluzionari o contro-rivoluzionari accaduti nella capitale francese, quanto piuttosto un’interminabile serie di guerre condotte lontano da Parigi e, in molti casi, al di fuori dalle frontiere francesi. Non fu per caso. Queste guerre dette “rivoluzionarie” e “napoleoniche” erano estremamente funzionali all’obiettivo primario dei partigiani della rivoluzione moderata, compresi i bonapartisti e i loro sostenitori : conservare le acquisizione del “1789” ed impedire sia un ritorno all’Ancien Régime che a una riedizione del “1793”.

Con il loro Terrore, Robespierre e i Montagnardi avevano voluto non solo proteggere la rivoluzione, ma anche approfondirla, radicalizzarla, intensificarla, cosa che significava contemporaneamente “internalizzarla” nel seno della stessa Francia e, innanzitutto, nel cuore della sua capitale, Parigi. Non era accidentale che le esecuzioni mediante ghigliottina, strettamente associate alla rivoluzione radicale, avessero luogo nel centro della piazza della città situata nel centro del paese. Per concentrare le proprie energie e quelle dei sanculotti e di tutti i veri rivoluzionari su questa “internalizzazione” della rivoluzione, Robespierre e i suoi amici Giacobini – al contrario dei Girondini e di Napoleone – erano contrari per principio alle guerre oltre confine in quanto le ritenevano un dispendio di energie rivoluzionarie e un pericolo per la rivoluzione. Di contro, la serie interminabile di conflitti che vennero scatenati in seguito, inizialmente sotto gli auspici del Direttorio termidoriano e poi sotto Bonaparte, rimandavano ad una “esternalizzazione” della rivoluzione, ad una esportazione della rivoluzione borghese del 1789 che serviva contemporaneamente a bloccare la sua “internalizzazione” ovvero la “radicalizzazione” della rivoluzione del 1793.

La guerra internazionale, il conflitto con lo straniero, serviva a liquidare la rivoluzione nazionale in due modi. In primo luogo, la guerra fece sparire i rivoluzionari più appassionati dalla patria della rivoluzione, Parigi. Dapprima volontariamente, innumerevoli giovani sanculotti scomparvero dalla capitale Parigi per andare a battersi all’estero e, in troppi casi, senza farvi più ritorno. In questo modo, per le azioni rivoluzionarie collettive, come la presa della Bastiglia, non restavano a Parigi, oltre alle donne, che un pugno d’uomini, troppo pochi per poter ripetere i successi della massa dei sans-culottes del 1789, come dimostreranno i fallimenti delle insurrezioni giacobine che avevano tormentato il Direttorio. Inoltre, sotto Bonaparte, l’introduzione del servizio militare obbligatorio rese permanente questa situazione. “Fu lui [Napoleone]”, scrive lo storico Henri Guillemin, “che inviò i giovani plebei potenzialmente pericolosi lontano da Parigi e li mandò persino fino a Mosca – con gran sollievo dei benestanti.”

In secondo luogo, la notizia delle grandi vittorie suscita nella massa dei sanculotti, anche tra i suoi membri rimasti in patria, un orgoglio patriottico che va a soppiantare l’entusiasmo rivoluzionario. Con qualche aiuto da parte del dio della guerra, Marte, l’energia rivoluzionaria della sanculotteria e del popolo francese potè venire convogliata su percorsi meno radicali, dal punto di vista rivoluzionario. Abbiamo qui a che fare con quello che in inglese viene denominato un displacement process, un processo di transfert : il popolo francese, compresi i sanculotti parigini, perse progressivamente il suo entusiasmo per la rivoluzione e per tutte le idee di libertà, uguaglianza e solidarietà tra i francesi e con i popoli vicini e si rivolse sempre più verso l’adorazione del vitello d’oro dello chauvinismo nazionale, dell’espansione territoriale nella direzione di frontiere considerate “naturali” come il Reno, e della gloria internazione della “grande nazione” e – dopo il 18 brumaio – del suo capo, Bonaparte.

Questo ci porta anche a capire la reazione ambivalente dei popoli europei di fronte alle guerre ed alle conquiste della Francia in quelle circostanze. Mentre certuni – le élite dell’Ancien Régime, ad esempio, e i contadini – respingevano nella sua totalità la Rivoluzione francese, e altri – innanzitutto i Giacobini locali come i “patrioti” olandesi – l’applaudivano abbastanza incondizionatamente, ma molti e indubbiamente la maggior parte passeranno dalla Cariddi dell’ammirazione per le idee e le realizzazioni della Rivoluzione francese alla Scilla della ripulsa nei confronti del militarismo, dello chauvinismo senza freni e allo spietato imperialismo della Francia dopo Termidoro, durante l’epoca del Direttorio e sotto Napoleone.

Numerosi non francesi lotteranno tra ammirazione e repulsione simultanee nei confronti della Rivoluzione francese. Per altri, l’entusiasmo iniziale lasciò presto o tardi il passo alla disillusione. Gli inglesi, ad esempio, accolsero con favore il “1789”, perché interpretarono non senza ragione la Rivoluzione francese nel suo stadio moderato come l’importazione in Francia di una sorta di monarchia costituzionale e parlamentare che loro stessi avevano già introdotto circa cent’anni prima all’epoca della loro famosa Glorious Revolution. Il poeta William Wordsworth tradusse questo entusiasmo dell’inizio in questi versi famosi :

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven !

Che benedizione essere vivi in quest’alba,

Ma essere giovani allora fu il vero paradiso !

Dopo il “1793”, la rivoluzione radicale e il Terrore, tuttavia, la maggior parte, o almeno un buon numero di inglesi prese a considerare con esecrazione gli eventi che si stavano svolgendo dall’altra parte del Canale (Channel). Il loro porta-parola fu Edmund Burke, il cui libro Reflections on the Revolution in France – già pubblicato nel novembre del 1790 – divenne una vera Bibbia per i contro-rivoluzionari, non solo in Inghilterra, ma in tutto il mondo. Un secolo e mezzo dopo, George Orwell avrebbe potuto scrivere che “per l’inglese medio, la Rivoluzione francese non aveva altro significato che una piramide di teste mozzate”. Avrebbe potuto dire la stessa cosa della quasi totalità degli altri non-francesi sia della sua epoca che di oggi.

Fu per mettere fine alla Rivoluzione nella Francia stessa, che Napoleone strappò la rivoluzione – quella del 1789 – dalla sua culla, Parigi e l’esportò verso il resto d’Europa. Fu per porre ostacoli e impedire alla potente corrente della rivoluzione di scavare ancora più in profondità il suo alveo – a Parigi e nel resto della Francia – che dapprima i Girondini, poi il Direttorio, ma soprattutto Bonaparte, fecero straripare le turbolente acque rivoluzionarie fuori dagli argini delle frontiere francesi per inondare tutta l’Europa.

Per togliere la rivoluzione dalla sua culla parigina, per porre un termine a quello che fu per molti aspetti un progetto radicale dei Giacobini, dei sanculotti piccolo-borghesi di Parigi e, di contro, per consolidare la rivoluzione moderata cara alla borghesia, Napoleone Bonaparte era stato sapientemente scelto sul piano simbolico. Era nativo di Ajaccio, la città di provincia più lontana dalla capitale. Inoltre, Napoleone era un “figlio della cerchia dei gentiluomini corsi”, in altre parole il rampollo di una famiglia di cui si poteva ugualmente dire che apparteneva all’alta borghesia con pretese nobiliari o anche alla piccola nobiltà ma con lo stile di vita dell’alta borghesia. In ogni caso, a ben vedere, i Bonaparte facevano parte dell’alta borghesia, la classe che, in tutta la Francia, grazie al “1789”, aveva raggiunto i suoi obiettivi e cercava di consolidarli con una dittatura militare di fronte alle minacce provenienti sia dalla sinistra che dalla destra. Napoleone incarnava la (alta) borghesia di provincia che, sul modello dei Girondini, privilegiava una rivoluzione moderata, cristallizzata in uno Stato, più o meno democratico se possibile ma rigorosamente autoritario se necessario, che facilitasse l’allargamento del potere e delle ricchezze di questa classe. Le esperienze del Direttorio avevano dimostrato le deficienze, da questo punto di vista, di una repubblica fornita di istituzioni relativamente democratiche e per questa ragione la borghesia optò alla fine per una dittatura.

Questa dittatura militare, che prese il posto della “repubblica borghese” post-Termidoro, nacque a Saint-Cloud, un sobborgo parigino, il “18 brumaio” dell’anno VIII, ossia il 9 novembre 1799. È notevole che questo passaggio politico decisivo nel processo per bloccare la rivoluzione abbia contemporaneamente segnato un passaggio geografico in cui ci si allontanava da Parigi, dal crogiolo della rivoluzione, dalla tana del leone dei Giacobini e dei sanculotti fin troppo rivoluzionari, in direzione della campagna ben meno radicale o anche più o meno contro-rivoluzionaria. Ed ecco un altro piccolo dettaglio ironico : Saint-Cloud si trova sulla strada che va da Parigi a Versailles, la residenza dei re assoluti di prima della Rivoluzione. Il fatto che il colpo di stato che instaurava un sistema autoritario avvenne in quel luogo fu il riflesso topografico del fatto storico che dopo l’esperienza democratica della rivoluzione, la Francia imbocca di nuovo la via verso un sistema politico assolutista come quello di cui Versailles era stato il “sole”. Questa volta, tuttavia, la destinazione era un sistema assolutista sotto la direzione di un Bonaparte e non più di un Borbone e, ancora più importante : un sistema assolutista al servizio della borghesia e non più della nobiltà.

The coup d’état of Saint-Cloud on a British caricature by James Gillray (Public Domain)

Nei confronti della rivoluzione, la dittatura di Bonaparte è ambivalente. Da un lato, con il suo avvento la rivoluzione termina, è liquidata, nel senso che si decreta la fine non solo del genere di esperimenti ugualitari del “1793”, ma anche della facciata democratica repubblicana del “1789”. D’altro canto, le realizzazioni essenziali del “1789” vennero preservate ed anche consolidate. Alla domanda se Napoleone sia stato o meno un rivoluzionario si può rispondere in questo modo. Era per la rivoluzione nello stesso senso in cui era contro la contro-rivoluzione realista e siccome due negazioni si elidono a vicenda, chi è ostile alla contro-rivoluzione è automaticamente un rivoluzionario. Ma si può anche dire era allo stesso tempo per e contro la rivoluzione : era per la rivoluzione borghese moderata del 1789, quella dei Foglianti-Girondini-Termidoriani, ma contro la rivoluzione radicale del 1793, quella dei Giacobini e dei sanculotti di Parigi.

Nel suo libro La Révolution, une exception française ?, la storica Annie Jourdan cita quanto scrive nel 1815 un commentatore dell’epoca, un tedesco o più precisamente della Prussia, che aveva già allora compreso come Bonaparte “non era mai stato altro che la personificazione di una delle diverse fasi della rivoluzione”. Questa fase era quella della rivoluzione borghese, “il 1789”, che Napoleone consolidò in Francia e poi esporterà nel resto dell’Europa.

Napoleone eliminò pertanto i pericoli realisti e giacobini, ma rese un ulteriore grande servizio alla borghesia incidendo nel marmo della legislazione il diritto alla proprietà privata, pietra angolare dell’ideologia liberale cara al cuore della borghesia. Questo diritto era già stato sancito nel 1791 nella costituzione della rivoluzione nella sua fase borghese e moderata. Aggiungendo gli atti alle parole, nel 1802 il Corso reintrodusse nelle colonie francesi la schiavitù. All’epoca, gli schiavi erano ancora considerati come una forma legittima di proprietà, tuttavia la Francia era stata il primo paese ad abolire la schiavitù, allora, nella fase radicale della rivoluzione con il favore di Robespierre e i timori dei suoi avversari, i Girondini, precursori di Bonaparte in quanto campioni della causa borghese e del pensiero liberale di questa classe.

Lo storico Georges Dupeux ha scritto che “la borghesia ha trovato in Napoleone allo stesso tempo un protettore e un padrone.” Il Corso fu indubbiamente un protettore, anche un grande campione, dell’alta borghesia, ma non ne fu mai il padrone. In realtà, egli era al servizio dei grandi uomini d’affari e soprattutto dei banchieri dell’alta borghesia del paese, gli stessi che avevano il controllo della Francia ai tempi del Direttorio, la “repubblica dei proprietari”, e che gli avevano affidato la regia del paese. Sul piano finanziario, non solo lui ma tutto lo Stato francese si ritroveranno alle dipendenze di una istituzione privata che era proprietà – e lo è tuttora – dell’élite più facoltosa del paese, anche se la cosa era stata in qualche modo edulcorata con l’apposizione di un’etichetta – Banca di Francia – che dava l’impressione si trattasse di un’istituzione dello Stato. Al prezzo di alti interessi, questi banchieri mettevano a disposizione di Napoleone il denaro che gli era necessario per dirigere la Francia, armarla, condurre la guerra – e fargli interpretare, in gran pompa, il ruolo dell’Imperatore. Alla fine, Napoleone non fu nient’altro che la figura di facciata di un regime, ed anche di una dittatura, dell’alta borghesia, un regime vero ma ben camuffato in una magnifica coreografia “romana”, dapprima consolare, in seguito imperiale.

Ed eccoci al ruolo delle interminabili guerre condotte da Napoleone, alle avventure militari che si pretende abbiano apportato tanta gloria alla “grande nazione” e al suo imperatore. Sappiamo già che questi conflitti servirono in primo luogo a liquidare la rivoluzione radicale in Francia. Permisero anche alla borghesia di guadagnare parecchio denaro. Con forniture e approvvigionamenti all’esercito di armi, uniformi, ecc., industriali e commercianti accumularono fortune. E le campagne vittoriose miravano a fonti di materie prime e a mercati di sbocco a disposizione dell’industria francese, il cui sviluppo poté accelerare considerevolmente. In questo modo, gli industriali francesi poterono giocare un ruolo sempre più importante in seno alla borghesia. In effetti, fu sotto Napoleone che, in Francia, il capitalismo industriale tipico del secolo XIX iniziò a soppiantare il capitalismo commerciale caratteristico di alcuni secoli prima. (Detto en passant : l’accumulazione di capitale commerciale era stata resa possibile soprattutto grazie al commercio di schiavi, mentre quella del capitale industriale ebbe molto a che fare con la serie quasi ininterrotta di guerre che vennero condotte, dapprima dal Direttorio e in seguito da Napoleone. In questo senso Balzac aveva ragione quando scriveva che “dietro ogni grande fortuna si nasconde un crimine”).

Le guerre napoleoniche stimolarono lo sviluppo del sistema industriale di produzione e suonarono i rintocchi funebri per l’antico sistema artigianale di fabbricazione, su piccola scala, di prodotti che gli artigiani realizzavano in modo tradizionale, non meccanizzato, nei loro laboratori. Tramite la guerra, la borghesia bonapartista non fa solo scomparire fisicamente gli sanculotti – sostanzialmente un gruppo eterogeneo di artigiani, negozianti e altri piccoli produttori – di Parigi ma li fa svanire anche dal paesaggio socio-economico. Durante la Rivoluzione, la massa dei sanculotti aveva potuto svolgere un ruolo di primo piano. Di fatto, con le guerre rivoluzionarie che liquideranno la rivoluzione, spariranno dalle scene della storia. In questo senso, la rivoluzione ha divorato i suoi figli.

Come gli antropofagi, la borghesia francese divorò il suo nemico di classe. Si trattava, tuttavia, di una vittoria di Pirro. Perché? L’avvenire economico ormai non apparteneva più ai laboratori e ai loro artigiani, “indipendenti” e pertanto piccolo-borghesi, che lavoravano manualmente, ma alle fabbriche e ai loro proprietari, gli industriali, nonché ai loro lavoratori, gli “operai di fabbrica” poveri e mal pagati. In questo “proletariato” tipico del XIXo secolo, la borghesia troverà un antagonista di classe ben più temibile che la congerie dei sanculotti caratteristica della fine del XVIIIo secolo. Questi proletari sogneranno una rivoluzione ancor più radicale di quella del “1793”, quella di Robespierre. Tutto questo, tuttavia, sarà un problema dei regimi borghesi che succederanno a quello di Napoleone il Grande, compreso quello di suo nipote, il terzo Napoleone, disdegnato come “Napoleone il Piccolo” da Victor Hugo.

Nella stessa Francia e in ben altri paesi, molti, compresi uomini politici e storici, disprezzano Robespierre e i Giacobini oltre che i sanculotti e li condannano per gli spargimenti di sangue che sono andati di pari passo con la loro rivoluzione “popolare” e radicale, con il “1793”. Queste stesse persone manifestano spesso allo stesso tempo una grande ammirazione per Napoleone, il salvatore della rivoluzione borghese, moderata del “1789”. Condannano la internalizzazione della Rivoluzione francese, asseritamente perchè è arrivata di pari passo con il Terrore che, in Francia e soprattutto a Parigi, ha prelevato un contributo di più di mille vittime e ne rigettano la colpa sull’ideologia giacobina e/o la sete di sangue ritenuta innata del “popolo”. Manifestamente non comprendono – o non vogliono comprendere – che l’esternalizzazione della rivoluzione promossa dai Termidoriani e da Napoleone, e associata alle guerre internazionali che dureranno per più di vent’anni, costò la vita a molti milioni di persone in tutta Europa, compreso un gran numero di francesi. In effetti, si può dire che queste guerre hanno costituito una forma di terrore molto più minacciosa e sanguinaria di quello che fu il potere del terrore dei Montagnardi.

Si stima che il terrore associato alla rivoluzione radicale, personificata da Robespierre, sia costato la vita a 50.000 persone, che rappresentavano lo 0,2 per cento della popolazione francese. “È molto o poco ?”, chiede lo storico Michel Vovelle che cita queste cifre in uno dei suoi libri. In confronto al numero di vittime delle guerre dovute all’espansione territoriale temporanea della “grande nazione” e per la gloria di Bonaparte, è poco. La sola battaglia di Waterloo, l’ultima della pretesa “gloriosa” carriera di Napoleone, produsse tra i 45.000 e i 50.000 tra morti e feriti. Se si aggiungono le “scaramucce” preliminari di Ligny e Quatre-Bras si arriva ad un totale di 80.000 o 90.000 vittime. Nella battaglia di Lipsia del 1813, ugualmente persa da Napoleone, ma oggi quasi totalmente dimenticata, si ebbero all’incirca 140.000 tra morti e feriti. Per quel che riguarda la catastrofica campagna di Russia, Napoleone vi lasciò centinaia di migliaia di morti e di mutilati, anche se non si parla mai di un “terrore” bonapartista e la France conta innumerevoli monumenti, vie e pubbliche piazze che dovrebbero rendere immortali i “grandi fatti eroici” del Corso.

Antoine Wiertz, “Une scène de l’enfer”, Wiertz Museum, Brussels

Nel sostituire alla rivoluzione permanente in Francia, e soprattutto a Parigi, con una guerra permanente attraverso tutta l’Europa, osservavano già Marx ed Engels, i Termidoriani e i loro successori, soprattutto Bonaparte, “perfezioneranno” il Terrore, in altri termini, faranno versare una quantità infinitamente maggiore di sangue che il “governo del terrore” di Robespierre. In ogni caso, è innegabile che l’esternalizzazione, tramite la guerra, della rivoluzione borghese, prelevò un tributo di lutti ben più pesante del tentativo da parte dei Giacobini d’intensificare e radicalizzare la rivoluzione con il terrore, di internalizzarla nella stessa Francia e, innanzitutto, a Parigi.

Molti, come parecchi uomini politici e i nostri media, ad esempio, oltre alla maggior parte degli storici continuano, tuttavia, a considerare la guerra come un’attività perfettamente legittima di uno Stato, fonte di gloria e di orgoglio per i vincitori e, in numerosi casi, anche per i perdenti, che in quell’occasione si comportano da “eroi”. Di contro, le migliaia, decine o centinaia di migliaia, se non milioni di vittime delle guerre – oggi, ad esempio, provocate dai bombardamenti aerei – non ricevono mai la stessa attenzione o simpatia delle vittime del “terrore”, molto meno numerose, colpite da una forma di violenza che non è (direttamente) sponsorizzata da uno Stato e che, per questo, viene considerata come illegittima.

Anche ora l’eterna “guerra contro il terrorismo”, una volta di più una forma di guerra permanente che, per quanto riguarda la grande potenza che-non-smette-mai-di-far-la-guerra, accende tra i “semplici cittadini” americani – i sanculotti americani, in qualche modo! – uno chauvinismo sconsiderato, fa sventolare di bandiere e allo stesso tempo riserva, ai più poveri tra di loro, tempo di lavoro sotto forma di una carriera nei marines. A profitto dell’industria americana, questa guerra garantisce nel frattempo le fonti di materie prime vitali, come il petrolio e, per i fabbricanti d’armi e ogni sorta d’altra impresa, soprattutto di quelle che hanno amici alla Casa Bianca, funziona come un corno dell’abbondanza dai vertiginosi profitti. Le similitudini con le guerre di Bonaparte sono a portata di mano. Come diceva il giornalista e romanziere Alphonse Karr : “Più si cambia e più è la stessa cosa.”.

Statue of Napoleon in Waterloo (Photo by J. Pauwels)

Con Bonaparte, la rivoluzione si conclude là dove doveva finire, almeno per quanto riguarda la borghesia francese. Bonaparte vuol dire il trionfo della borghesia francese. Non è pertanto un caso se, nelle città francesi, i “notabili”, vale a dire gli uomini d’affari, i banchieri, gli avvocati e altri rappresentanti dell’alta borghesia prediligano riunirsi in caffè o ristoranti che portano il nome “Napoleone”, come ha fatto osservare il grande sociologo Pierre Bourdieu in una delle sue opere. L’alta borghesia è sempre riconoscente a Napoleone per i grandi servizi che gli ha reso. Il maggiore fu sicuramente la liquidazione della rivoluzione radicale, del “1793”, che minacciava i guadagni considerevoli che la borghesia aveva acquisito a spese dell’aristocrazia e del clero mediante il “1789”, la rivoluzione moderata. (Di contro, l’odio della borghesia nei confronti di Robespierre, personificazione del “1793”, spiega la quasi totale assenza di monumenti, musei e nomi di strade che onorino la sua memoria.)

Napoleone è ammirato anche fuori dalla Francia, in Belgio, in Italia, in Germania, ecc., soprattutto dalla borghesia. La ragione è indubbiamente dovuta al fatto che in quasi tutti questi paesi, fino ad allora società feudali senza eccezioni, egli liquidò l’ancien régime e importò la rivoluzione moderata. Come in Fancia, questa rivoluzione portò considerevoli benefici per tutta la popolazione, ma privilegiò la borghesia. Questo spiega probabilmente perché a Waterloo, anche oggi, Napoleone è la star dello spettacolo turistico, creando persino l’impressione che sia stato lui il vincitore della battaglia !

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Traduzione di Silvio Calzavarini


Le Paris des sans-culottes: Guide du Paris révolutionnaire 1789-1799

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Tel un guide touristique, Jacques Pauwels emmène le lecteur dans un voyage à travers les années sans doute les plus orageuses de l’histoire de la capitale française. Dans un style alerte et avec le souci du détail, il sait attirer l’attention sur les événements décisifs qui bouleversèrent la France et le monde. Le déroulement historique de la Révolution devient ainsi une promenade à travers le Paris de l’époque comme celui d’aujourd’hui.

JACQUES PAUWELS, né à Gand en 1946, il réside au Canada depuis 1969. Il a enseigné dans différentes universités ontariennes, notamment aux universités de Toronto, de Waterloo et de Guelph. Outre La Grande Guerre des classes (première édition, Aden, 2014, deuxième édition mise à jour Delga 2016), on lui doit également Le Mythe de la bonne guerre (Aden, 2005) et Big Business avec Hitler (Aden, 2013), Les Mythes de l’histoire moderne (Investig’action, 2019).

Click here to order.

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US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has, in a 60 Minutes interview, accused China of acting “repressively at home and more aggressively abroad,” emphasizing it as a “fact.”

He repeated unfounded claims that “1 million” Uyghurs are being interned in facilities in China’s western region of Xinjiang and referred to it as “genocide.”

He also referred to what he and the US establishment regularly call a “rules-based” international order and insisted that the United States is not trying to “contain” China, but merely upholding this “order” he claims China is challenging.

Secretary Blinken would also claim that the US is not seeking conflict with China and that it doesn’t serve US interests to even head in that direction.

In reality – US policies of containing China have been ongoing for decades and it could easily be argued that the US is already at conflict with China.

Geopolitical Projection 

The accusations made by the US are a form of projection – the taking of one’s own unacceptable qualities or feelings and “projecting” them onto others – but on a geopolitical level.

Secretary Blinken unflinchingly made these claims about China even as the US wages multiple illegal wars of aggression and enduring military occupations around the globe including in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, while also backing several more proxy conflicts including in Yemen – a conflict the UN itself has claimed is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Claims of “1 million” Uyghurs being interned within China – even if it were true – would pale in comparison to the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq alone, in which a million Iraqis died.

In the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq the US maintained crippling economic sanctions on Iraq. In another 60 Minutes interview – this time with then US Ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright – she was asked if she had heard half a million children died because of US sanctions and if that price was worth it. Albright would respond by claiming, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

The US military intervention in Libya – transforming one of the wealthiest and most developed nations on the African continent into a divided failed state – is another showcase of US – not “Chinese” aggression.

Far from “whataboutism,” there is nothing that China has even been accused of doing this century that is even remotely comparable.

The US is already at Conflict with China 

The Chinese presence in the South China Sea cited by Blinken, is countering the uninvited presence of US warships. It can hardly be considered “aggression” rather than the logical, defensive response to the military presence of a foreign nation already in the middle of multiple wars of aggression around the globe including one directly on China’s own borders.

Indeed, US troops are still occupying Afghanistan – a nation that actually shares part of its border with China. And whether US forces withdraw or not – the US fully plans to maintain military contractors and intelligence operators within the country for many more years to come – a war by any other name.

The US presence in Afghanistan has deliberately fanned the flames of extremism across Central Asia and has been one of several vectors of extremism flowing into China’s western region of Xinjiang.

Blinken – in his 60 Minutes interview – would claim the US “doesn’t see” the terrorist threat Beijing has cited as the impetus for security operations and deradicalization programs implemented in Xinjiang.

But a causal search through even the West’s own media in previous years indicates not only a genuine terrorism problem – but one many times more widespread than alleged terrorism targeting the West.

One 2014 BBC article titled, “Why is there tension between China and the Uighurs?,” would list a multitude of terrorist attacks over just two years (emphasis added):

In June 2012, six Uighurs reportedly tried to hijack a plane from Hotan to Urumqi before they were overpowered by passengers and crew. 

There was bloodshed in April 2013 and in June that year, 27 people died in Shanshan county after police opened fire on what state media described as a mob armed with knives attacking local government buildings

At least 31 people were killed and more than 90 suffered injuries in May 2014 when two cars crashed through an Urumqi market and explosives were tossed into the crowd. China called it a “violent terrorist incident”. 

It followed a bomb and knife attack at Urumqi’s south railway station in April, which killed three and injured 79 others. 

In July, authorities said a knife-wielding gang attacked a police station and government offices in Yarkant, leaving 96 dead. The imam of China’s largest mosque, Jume Tahir, was stabbed to death days later. 

In September about 50 died in blasts in Luntai county outside police stations, a market and a shop. Details of both incidents are unclear and activists have contested some accounts of incidents in state media.

Some violence has also spilled out of Xinjiang. A March stabbing spree in Kunming in Yunnan province that killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The terrorism is part of a separatist movement the US – through its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – has openly supported. The US NED’s own webpage for programs it funds in Xinjiang (also referred to by the separatist nomenclature, “East Turkestan”) lists the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) as US government funding recipients. The WUC openly advocates separatism on its official website.

Backing separatism in China – something the US would most likely consider an act of war were China openly doing it to the US – is not the United State attempting to “avoid” conflict – but obviously already well in the middle of it.

Between the US military presence on China’s furthermost western border and tens of thousands of US forces present in Japan and South Korea to China’s immediate east – the US is also involved in multiple proxy conflicts and destabilization campaigns across the whole of Southeast Asia targeting some of China’s closest allies in the region.

Both Thailand and Myanmar current face US-backed anti-government protests with US-backed subversion in Myanmar quickly escalating into armed conflict. US-backed opposition groups in both countries have – for years – opposed and have attempted to stop joint infrastructure projects proposed by China as part of its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative.

The US funds these opposition groups through a variety of organizations, foundations, and agencies including the NED.

Matthew Twining, president of NED subsidiary – the International Republican Institute (IRI) – would admit the US government’s role and NED specifically in building up opposition groups in Southeast Asia, installing them into power and how these client regimes would then block Chinese-led infrastructure investments.

At a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) talk titled, “Supporting Democracy in Challenging Times,” Twining would admit – regarding Malaysia specifically:

…for 15 years working with NED resources we worked to strengthen Malaysian opposition parties and guess what happened two months ago [2018]? After 61 years they won. I visited and I was sitting there with many of the leaders – the new leaders of this government. Guess what the first step – really one of the first steps the new government took? It froze Chinese infrastructure investments.

US foreign policy stretching back from an openly detailed containment strategy referenced in the 1969-leaked “Pentagon Papers” – to the current Biden administration under which Blinken serves – is fully committed to the containment of China. Claiming during his 60 Minutes interview that the US is not trying to contain China is just one of many outright lies the US has increasingly needed to buttress its foreign policy objectives with.

Not only do more and more people in the world see the US and its containment strategy against China – including the demonstrable threat to global peace and stability it is creating – they now see the US openly lying about it.

If there is a “rules-based” international order – the US had demonstrated that it itself is the greatest danger to it – and not by attacking it front on as they claim China is doing – but by hiding behind it and undermining whatever principles it is supposedly predicated upon. An “international order” that is unable to hold a nation like the United State accountable is an “international order” that at the very least requires revision – but most likely needs to be displaced entirely by competing visions of multipolarism and the idea of a global balance of power to keep abuses in check versus an American empire disguised as a self-appointed arbiter “policing” the world.

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Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook”.  

Featured image: Tony Blinken At His Confirmation Hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jan. 19, 2021. Screenshot. via Mondoweiss

“Trust WHO”? Clandestine Influences Revealed

May 14th, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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“TrustWHO,” a documentary film produced by Lilian Franck, delves into the corruption behind the World Health Organization

Industry influences, from Big Tobacco to the nuclear industry and pharmaceuticals, dictated WHO’s global agenda from the start; WHO’s 2009 H1N1 pandemic response was heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry

WHO works closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a promotor of the nuclear industry, and has downplayed health effects caused by the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters

WHO’s investigation into COVID-19’s origins is corrupt, as China was allowed to hand pick the members of the WHO’s investigative team, which includes Peter Daszak, Ph.D., who has close professional ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that was being investigated

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was the biggest funder of WHO when Donald Trump stopped U.S. funding, making Gates’ priorities the backbone of WHO

Given the strong and ongoing evidence that WHO is heavily influenced, if not outright controlled, by Bill Gates and industry, WHO’s usefulness as a guardian of public health needs to be reevaluated

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The World Health Organization was created in 1948, founded by 61 member states and financed from their contributions. It appeared to be a promising start, intended to end human suffering and save lives but, according to Robert Parsons, a journalist based in Geneva, Switzerland, where the WHO headquarters are based, “it was infiltrated by industry from the very start.”

Parsons is just one expert interviewed in “TrustWHO,” a documentary film produced by Lilian Franck that delves into the corruption behind the preeminent organization that’s being trusted with public health. It started in the 1950s, a time when the scientific evidence on the harms of smoking was emerging, and has continued through nuclear disasters and at least two pandemics — swine flu in 2009 and COVID-19 in 2020.

Tobacco Industry Infiltrated WHO

It’s well known that the tobacco industry launched a public relations campaign to undermine the emerging science and keep cigarettes in a favorable light with the public.1 In its first decades, WHO did little to oppose it. As late as 1994, tobacco heads testified before U.S. congress, saying nicotine is not addictive.

Gradually, tobacco companies were required to publish their internal documents, which revealed their strategies to combat WHO. Among them was the Boca Raton Action Plan, which was developed by Philip Morris executives.2 In regard to WHO, it stated, “This organization has extraordinary influence on government and consumers and we must find a way to diffuse this …”3

WHO, put under pressure, released a report in 2000 stating that the tobacco industry worked for many years to subvert WHO efforts to control tobacco use, noting, “The attempted subversion has been elaborate, well financed, sophisticated and usually invisible.”4

WHO special envoy Thomas Zeltner was among those who investigated the tobacco industry, finding that it founded institutes and bought scientists to represent their position without disclosing their industry ties.

One prominent name in the scandal is Paul Dietrich, a U.S. lawyer with close ties to the tobacco industry. While claiming to be an independent expert, Dietrich advised the tobacco industry, spoke at conferences and wrote articles against WHO. While receiving a monthly retainer from British American Tobacco, he was appointed to the development committee of the Pan American Health Organization, which serves as the WHO’s regional office for the Americas, a BMJ report noted.5

While serving in this role, he convinced the Pan American Health Organization to focus on vaccines and cholera instead of tobacco control.6 Frank Sullivan is another example. He worked as a tobacco company consultant and, while challenging data that tobacco smoke was harmful, was also advising WHO.7

In 2000, the documentary notes, Sullivan’s collaboration with the tobacco industry became public, but he still continued to advise WHO. Franck requested to see Sullivan’s conflict of interest forms, which should have been on file, but they were never provided.

WHO’s Swine Flu Pandemic Plan Influenced by Big Pharma

The pharmaceutical industry has a similar history with the WHO, which became a glaring conflict during the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. Secret agreements were made between Germany, Great Britain, Italy and France with the pharmaceutical industry before the H1N1 pandemic began, which stated that they would purchase H1N1 flu vaccinations — but only if a pandemic level 6 was declared by WHO.

The documentary shows how, six weeks before the pandemic was declared, no one at WHO was worried about the virus, but the media was nonetheless exaggerating the dangers. Then, in the month leading up to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, WHO changed the official definition of pandemic, removing the severity and high mortality criteria and leaving the definition of a pandemic as “a worldwide epidemic of a disease.”8

This switch in definition allowed WHO to declare swine flu a pandemic after only 144 people had died from the infection worldwide, and it’s why COVID-19 is still promoted as a pandemic even though plenty of data suggest the lethality of COVID-19 is on par with the seasonal flu.9

Kracken interviewed Marie-Paule Kieny, a French virologist who at the time was WHO’s assistant director-general but is now leading the organization’s Health Systems and Innovation cluster,10asking her why severity was deleted from the criteria to declare a pandemic. She said:

“There was a series of meetings between experts in order to arrive at objective criteria for declaring a pandemic. It’s always difficult to talk about the severity of a disease, especially at the beginning.

The severity depends on the state of health of those who are infected. So the experts thought it would be better to proceed from objective criteria. Objective criteria mean that it can be proven whether transfer within the community is taking place and in how many countries this happens.”

WHO Drug Industry Ties Influenced Decision-Making

Before working at WHO, Kieny worked at the French pharmaceutical company Transgene S.A., not unlike many of the scientists advising WHO officials, who also had conflicts of interest with the industry. Transparency was a major problem, even for those on the inside.

In the documentary, German Velasquez, former WHO director in the public health department, stated that he and most of his colleagues were excluded from a meeting between the director-general and prospective vaccine manufacturers:

“I was head of department in the WHO and one of the Director-General’s closest associates — an important member of staff in the organization … Even though I was a leading official at the WHO responsible for an important topic that was under discussions there, I wasn’t allowed to enter. That demonstrates that there wasn’t enough transparency about what was being negotiated.”

The lack of transparency was investigated by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, which concluded there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO,” and that the drug industry had influenced the organization’s decision-making, “resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.”11

The Council of Europe demanded changes, but even though the WHO was found to have had serious conflicts of interest with the drug industry, nothing has actually changed since then. WHO can operate in clandestine ways because there’s no accountability.

In another example of WHO acting as little more than a Big Pharma front group, in 2019 a report — “Corrupting Influence: Purdue & the WHO”12 — produced by U.S. Reps. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., and Hal Rogers, R-Ky., concluded Purdue Pharma had influenced WHO’s opioid guidelines.13

WHO Works Closely With the Nuclear Industry

In 1959 WHO signed an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is “promoting peaceful use of atomic energy,” making it subordinate to the agency in relation to ionizing radiation. The grassroots organization IndependentWHO is calling on WHO to revise the agreement and protect people who are victims of radioactive contamination.14

WHO has downplayed the health effects caused by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, stating that only 50 deaths were directly caused by the incident and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure” from the disaster.15

Ian Fairlie, an independent radiation biologist, published “The Other Report on Chernobyl” (TORCH),16 and estimated that 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths could occur, in addition to other health effects like cataracts, cardiovascular diseases and heritable effects that could influence future generations.

Keith Baverstock, a former radiation adviser for WHO, published a study in 1992 that linked a rise in thyroid cancer in children to Chernobyl.17 WHO told him to withdraw the paper, and threatened that his career would be shortened if he didn’t.

WHO’s response to the Fukushima radiation disaster in 2011 was also criticized, with evidence of a high-level coverup.18 WHO once again downplayed the risks, stating “the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated.”19

WHO Is a Slave to Its Funders

When it was founded, WHO could decide how to distribute its contributions. Now, 70% of its budget is tied to specific projects, countries or regions, which are dictated by the funders. It’s not a coincidence, then, that Bill Gates said of WHO, “Our priorities, are your priorities,” as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation became the biggest funder of WHO when Donald Trump stopped the U.S. funding of WHO. (The Biden administration has since reinstated the funding.)

Whether he comes in first or second in funding, Gates’ priorities are the backbone of WHO. “Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus,” Gates wrote on his blog in April 2020. “Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible.”20

Gates has even stated he “suspect[s] the COVID-19 vaccine will become part of the routine newborn immunization schedule”21 and has gone on record saying the U.S. needs disease surveillance and a national tracking system22 that could involve vaccine records embedded on our bodies (such as invisible ink quantum dot tattoos described in a Science Translational Medicine paper).23,24

WHO COVID-19 Investigation Is Corrupt

WHO’s investigation into COVID-19 origins is also blatantly corrupt, as China was allowed to hand pick the members of the WHO’s investigative team, which includes Peter Daszak, Ph.D., who has close professional ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The inclusion of Dazsak on this team virtually guaranteed the dismissal of the lab-origin theory from the very start, and, wouldn’t you know, WHO has now officially cleared WIV and two other biosafety level 4 laboratories in Wuhan, China, of wrongdoing, saying these labs had nothing to do with the COVID-19 outbreak.25

Molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University and the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the state of New Jersey, called out the members of the WHO-instigated investigative team as “participants in disinformation.”26

An open letter signed by 26 scientists is now demanding a full and unrestricted forensic investigation into the origins of the pandemic.27

In response to growing critique, and in a similar move as occurred with Big Tobacco, WHO has now entered damage control mode with Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while 13 other world leaders have joined the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.”28

Given the strong and ongoing evidence that WHO is heavily influenced, if not outright controlled, by Bill Gates and industry, WHO’s usefulness as a guardian of public health needs to be reevaluated.

Decentralized pandemic planning — moving from the global and federal levels to the state and local levels — makes sense, as both medicine and government work best when individualized and locally oriented. As it stands, however, the opposite global agenda is being applied.

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Notes

1 Am J Public Health. 2012 January; 102(1): 63–71

2 The Wall Street Journal August 2, 2000

3 BitChute, TrustWHO

4, 7 WHO, Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities, July 2000

5, 6 BMJ. 2000 Aug 5; 321(7257): 314–315

8 Wayback Machine, WHO Pandemic Preparedness September 2, 2009 (PDF)

9 Greek Reporter June 27, 2020

10 WHO, Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny

11 Assembly.coe.int June 24, 2010

12 Corrupting Influence: Purdue & the WHO May 22, 2019 (PDF)

13 Washington Posts May 22, 2019

14 IndependentWHO

15 WHO, Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident September 5, 2005

16 ChernobylReport.org, The Other Report on Chernobyl (TORCH)

17 Nature volume 359, pages21–22(1992)

18 The Ecologist March 8, 2014

19 WHO February 28, 2013

20, 21 GatesNotes April 30, 2020

22 Forbes March 18, 2020

23 Science Translational Medicine December 18, 2019; 11(523): eaay7162

24 Scientific American December 18, 2019

25 The Washington Post February 9, 2021

26 Independent Science News March 24, 2021

27 Open Letter March 4, 2021 (PDF)

28 Washington Post March 30, 2021

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Wednesday they see a “plausible causal association” between the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine and potentially life-threatening blood clot disorders after identifying 28 cases — including three deaths — among people who received the vaccine.

Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the CDC’s immunization safety office, presented the new cases at a Wednesday meeting of CDC panel advisers, The New York Times reported.

Shimabukuro’s presentation identified 28 cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) among people vaccinated with the J&J shot. The cases were based on reports submitted to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, known as VAERS. TTS involves blood clots accompanied by a low level of platelets.

Shimabukuro said four of the 28 people with TTS remained in the hospital as of May 7, one of whom was in the ICU. Two were discharged to a post-acute care facility, 19 patients were discharged and three resulted in deaths.

Current evidence “suggests a plausible causal association” with the J&J vaccine and cases of TTS, Shimabukuro said.

Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) is one form of TTS reported with J&J’s vaccine where clots form in the veins that drain blood from the brain, putting patients at risk for a stroke. The condition appears similar to what is being observed following administration of the AstraZeneca COVID shots in Europe, Shimabukuro said.

Most of the J&J cases in the U.S. were among women ages 18 to 49, and six cases were in men, the CDC said. Rates among women 30 to 39 years old and 40 to 49 were particularly high — 12.4 cases per million and 9.4 cases per million — according to the presentation.

Of the 28 TTS cases, 19 affected the brain, with 10 of those patients suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage, Shimabukuro said. The other clots formed in the lower extremities, pulmonary arteries or other areas of the body.

All of the patients received the J&J vaccine before the vaccine was temporarily paused on April 13.

The CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver said the benefits of the vaccine still outweigh the risk and no updates to vaccine policy are needed at this time.

As of April 25, the CDC had acknowledged only 17 cases of clotting among nearly 8 million people given J&J vaccines.

Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for adverse events associated with blood clotting disorders between Dec.14, 2020 and April 30, and found 2,808 reports associated with all three vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S.

Of the 2,808 cases reported, 1043 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 893 reports to Moderna and 860 reports to J&J — 832 cases more than the 28 cases reported by the CDC Wednesday.

According to Shimabukuro’s presentation, the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration search VAERS daily for blood clotting disorders associated with vaccines, including rare thromboses (like cerebral venous thrombosis), deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary thromboembolism, ischemic stroke and myocardial infarction.

Using only the CDC’s search criteria, VAERS revealed 1,082 cases of blood clotting disorders associated with all three vaccines, including 315 reports attributed to J&J, 437 reports attributed to Pfizer and 328 cases to Moderna.

Yet according to the CDC, there were only 28 cases of blood clotting disorders associated with J&J’s vaccine and no confirmed cases of TTS associated with Moderna or Pfizer.

As The Defender reported May 10, a Utah teen remains hospitalized with blood clots in his brain after receiving his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

Everest Romney, 17, received the vaccine April 21 and one day later began experiencing neck pain, fever and severe headaches. After more than a week of symptoms and being unable to freely move his neck, he was diagnosed with two blood clots inside his brain, and one outside.

The Utah Department of Health told FOX 13 the CDC is tasked with investigating possible vaccine side effects. After administering nearly 100 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, the CDC reported there hasn’t been a single related case of a blood clot forming in the brain as of April 12.

The CDC’s April 12 statement contradicts numerous news reports, studies, scientists and the agency’s own system for monitoring adverse reactions.

As reported Tuesday, The Defender contacted the CDC March 8 with a list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines to discern how the CDC conducts its investigations, whether it is investigating blood clots associated with mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna and where the public can access the findings of various investigations reported in the media. It has been 66 days with no response.

The CDC said it is committed to open and transparent communication of vaccine safety information.

*

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

This Week’s Most Popular Articles

May 14th, 2021 by Global Research News

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The Big Lie Strategy of the “Global Super-Rich”. The Weaknesses of the Human Mind

By Emanuel Pastreich, May 13, 2021

The massive concentration of wealth over the last few years has made it possible for a tiny handful of individuals to control the means of extraction, production, and distribution, the sales of food and products, and the value of money.

Europe: A War Game Ground for the US-NATO Strategy

By Manlio Dinucci, May 13, 2021

In 2020 land mobility of people in the European Union was paralyzed by lockdowns, mainly following the tourism blockade. The same happened in air mobility: according to a study by the European Parliament (March 2021), it suffered a net loss of 56 billion euros and 191,000 direct jobs, plus over a million in related industries. In 2021, the recovery promises to be very problematic. Only one sector has greatly increased its mobility going against the trend: the military sector.

The Table Top “Event 201” Pandemic Rehearsal and Its Aftermath

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, May 13, 2021

Less than two months prior to Event 201 (October 19, 2019), Bill Gates invested up to 55 million dollars in BioNTech stock – the company that co-developed – with Pfizer – the first experimental (and still unapproved (by the FDA) 2-dose mRNA vaccine.)

Kissinger’s “Insider View”: The Tragedy of the US Deep State

By Pepe Escobar, May 13, 2021

Henry Kissinger, 97, Henry the K. for those he keeps close, is either a Delphic oracle-style strategic thinker or a certified war criminal for those kept not so close. He now seems to have been taking time off his usual Divide and Rule stock in trade – advising the combo behind POTUS, a.k.a. Crash Test Dummy – to emit some realpolitik pearls of wisdom.

Breaking: Hamas Fires Iranian-Made Cruise Missiles for First Time, Five Israelis Killed

By Richard Silverstein, May 13, 2021

An Israeli security source has revealed to Tikun Olam that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have used a weapon never before seen in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Iranian-made cruise missiles, perhaps of the type which wiped out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, were fired on Israeli targets and caused extensive damage in communities in the south and around Tel Aviv.

Biden Administration Reportedly Blocking UN Cease-Fire Statement as Israel Bombards Gaza

By Jake Johnson, May 13, 2021

The Biden administration is reportedly blocking the release of a United Nations Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire as Israel continues its devastating assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, killing dozens of Palestinians and injuring hundreds more.

CDC Embarks on New COVID Cover-Up

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, May 13, 2021

For many months, experts have warned that COVID-19 is not so much a viral pandemic as it is a “casedemic” — a pandemic of false positive tests — and the thing that kept the fraud going was the fact that laboratories were using excessively high cycle thresholds (CTs) when processing the PCR tests.

Two Young Mothers Paralyzed after Receiving Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine

By Celeste McGovern, May 13, 2021

Brandy McFadden in Nashville, Tennessee and Rachel Cecere in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, both experienced intense neck pain and were unable to walk shortly receiving a Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

“Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East

By Israel Shahak and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 13, 2021

The following document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government,  the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.

The Great Transformation: From the Welfare State to the Imperial Police State

By Prof. James Petras, May 13, 2021

The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.

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First published on August 30, 2018

***

Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite, in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital.

Thus, in his just-released study Giants: The Global Power Elite, Phillips, a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University in the USA, identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the ‘Giants’ of world capitalism. The seventeen firms collectively manage more than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe.

[These are the financial actors behind the “Great Reset”]

This $41 trillion represents the wealth invested for profit by thousands of millionaires, billionaires and corporations. The seventeen Giants operate in nearly every country in the world and are ‘the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global economic system’. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from ‘agricultural lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors’ to public assets (such as energy and water utilities) to war.

In addition, Phillips identifies the most important networks of the Global Power Elite and the individuals therein. He names 389 individuals (a small number of whom are women and a token number of whom are from countries other than the United States and the wealthier countries of Western Europe) at the core of the policy planning nongovernmental networks that manage, facilitate and defend the continued concentration of global capital. The Global Power Elite perform two key uniting functions, he argues: they provide ideological justifications for their shared interests (promulgated through their corporate media), and define the parameters of action for transnational governmental organizations and capitalist nation-states.

More precisely, Phillips identifies the 199 directors of the seventeen global financial Giants and offers short biographies and public information on their individual net wealth. These individuals are closely interconnected through numerous networks of association including the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference, university affiliations, various policy councils, social clubs, and cultural enterprises. For a taste of one of these clubs, see this account of The Links in New York. As Phillips observes: ‘It is certainly safe to conclude they all know each other personally or know of each other in the shared context of their positions of power.’

The Giants, Phillips documents, invest in each other but also in many hundreds of investment management firms, many of which are near-Giants. This results in tens of trillions of dollars coordinated in a single vast network of global capital controlled by a very small number of people. ‘Their constant objective is to find enough safe investment opportunities for a return on capital that allows for continued growth. Inadequate capital-placement opportunities lead to dangerous speculative investments, buying up of public assets, and permanent war spending.’

Because the directors of these seventeen asset management firms represent the central core of international capital, ‘Individuals can retire or pass away, and other similar people will move into their place, making the overall structure a self-perpetuating network of global capital control. As such, these 199 people share a common goal of maximum return on investments for themselves and their clients, and they may seek to achieve returns by any means necessary – legal or not…. the institutional and structural arrangements within the money management systems of global capital relentlessly seek ways to achieve maximum return on investment, and … the conditions for manipulations – legal or not – are always present.’

Like some researchers before him, Phillips identifies the importance of those transnational institutions that serve a unifying function. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20, G7, World Trade Organization (WTO), World Economic Forum (WEF), Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Bank for International Settlements, Group of 30 (G30), the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Conference serve as institutional mechanisms for consensus building within the transnational capitalist class, and power elite policy formulation and implementation. ‘These international institutions serve the interests of the global financial Giants by supporting policies and regulations that seek to protect the free, unrestricted flow of capital and debt collection worldwide.’

But within this network of transnational institutions, Phillips identifies two very important global elite policy-planning organizations: the Group of Thirty (which has 32 members) and the extended executive committee of the Trilateral Commission (which has 55 members). These nonprofit corporations, which each have a research and support staff, formulate elite policy and issue instructions for their implementation by the transnational governmental institutions like the G7, G20, IMF, WTO, and World Bank. Elite policies are also implemented following instruction of the relevant agent, including governments, in the context. These agents then do as they are instructed. Thus, these 85 members (because two overlap) of the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission comprise a central group of facilitators of global capitalism, ensuring that ‘global capital remains safe, secure, and growing’.

So, while many of the major international institutions are controlled by nation-state representatives and central bankers (with proportional power exercised by dominant financial supporters such as the United States and European Union countries), Phillips is more concerned with the transnational policy groups that are nongovernmental because these organizations ‘help to unite TCC power elites as a class’ and the individuals involved in these organizations facilitate world capitalism. ‘They serve as policy elites who seek the continued growth of capital in the world.’

Developing this list of 199 directors of the largest money management firms in the world, Phillips argues, is an important step toward understanding how capitalism works globally today. These global power elite directors make the decisions regarding the investment of trillions of dollars. Supposedly in competition, the concentrated wealth they share requires them to cooperate for their greater good by identifying investment opportunities and shared risk agreements, and working collectively for political arrangements that create advantages for their profit-generating system as a whole.

Their fundamental priority is to secure an average return on investment of 3 to 10 percent, or even more. The nature of any investment is less important than what it yields: continuous returns that support growth in the overall market. Hence, capital investment in tobacco products, weapons of war, toxic chemicals, pollution, and other socially destructive goods and services are judged purely by their profitability. Concern for the social and environmental costs of the investment are non-existent. In other words, inflicting death and destruction are fine because they are profitable.

So what is the global elite’s purpose? In a few sentences Phillips characterizes it thus: The elite is largely united in support of the US/NATO military empire that prosecutes a repressive war against resisting groups – typically labeled ‘terrorists’ – around the world. The real purpose of ‘the war on terror’ is defense of transnational globalization, the unimpeded flow of financial capital around the world, dollar hegemony and access to oil; it has nothing to do with repressing terrorism which it generates, perpetuates and finances to provide cover for its real agenda. This is why the United States has a long history of CIA and military interventions around the world ostensibly in defense of ‘national interests’.

Wealth and Power

An interesting point that emerges for me from reading Phillips thoughtful analysis is that there is a clear distinction between those individuals and families who have wealth and those individuals who have (sometimes significantly) less wealth (which, nevertheless,  is still considerable) but, through their positions and connections, wield a great deal of power. As Phillips explains this distinction, ‘the sociology of elites is more important than particular elite individuals and their families’. Just 199 individuals decide how more than $40 trillion will be invested. And this is his central point. Let me briefly elaborate.

There are some really wealthy families in the world, notably including the families Rothschild (France and the United Kingdom), Rockefeller (USA), Goldman-Sachs (USA), Warburgs (Germany), Lehmann (USA), Lazards (France), Kuhn Loebs (USA), Israel Moses Seifs (Italy), Al-Saud (Saudi Arabia), Walton (USA), Koch (USA), Mars (USA), Cargill-MacMillan (USA) and Cox (USA). However, not all of these families overtly seek power to shape the world as they wish.

Similarly, the world’s extremely wealthy individuals such as Jeff Bezos (USA), Bill Gates (USA), Warren Buffett (USA), Bernard Arnault (France), Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico) and Francoise Bettencourt Meyers (France) are not necessarily connected in such a way that they exercise enormous power. In fact, they may have little interest in power as such, despite their obvious interest in wealth.

In essence, some individuals and families are content to simply take advantage of how capitalism and its ancilliary governmental and transnational instruments function while others are more politically engaged in seeking to manipulate major institutions to achieve outcomes that not only maximize their own profit and hence wealth but also shape the world itself.

So if you look at the list of 199 individuals that Phillips identifies at the centre of global capital, it does not include names such as Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Koch, Walton or even Rothschild, Rockefeller or Windsor (the Queen of England) despite their well-known and extraordinary wealth. As an aside, many of these names are also missing from the lists compiled by groups such as Forbes and Bloomberg, but their absence from these lists is for a very different reason given the penchant for many really wealthy individuals and families to avoid certain types of publicity and their power to ensure that they do.

In contrast to the names just listed, in Phillips’ analysis names like Laurence (Larry) Fink (Chairman and CEO of BlackRock), James (Jamie) Dimon (Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and John McFarlane (Chairman of Barclays Bank), while not as wealthy as those listed immediately above, wield far more power because of their positions and connections within the global elite network of 199 individuals.

Predictably then, Phillips observes, these three individuals have similar lifestyles and ideological orientations. They believe capitalism is beneficial for the world and while inequality and poverty are important issues, they believe that capital growth will eventually solve these problems. They are relatively non-expressive about environmental issues, but recognize that investment opportunities may change in response to climate ‘modifications’. As millionaires they own multiple homes. They attended elite universities and rose quickly in international finance to reach their current status as giants of the global power elite. ‘The institutions they manage have been shown to engage in illegal collusions with others, but the regulatory fines by governments are essentially seen as just part of doing business.’

In short, as I would characterize this description: They are devoid of a legal or moral framework to guide their actions, whether in relation to business, fellow human beings, war or the environment and climate. They are obviously typical of the elite.

Any apparent concern for people, such as that expressed by Fink and Dimon in response to the racist violence in Charlottesville, USA in August 2017, is simply designed to promote ‘stability’ or more precisely, a stable (that is, profitable) investment and consumer climate.

 

Source: World Economic Forum

The lack of concern for people and issues that might concern many of us is also evident from a consideration of the agenda at elite gatherings. Consider the International Monetary Conference. Founded in 1956, it is a private yearly meeting of the top few hundred bankers in the world. The American Bankers Association (ABA) serves as the secretariat for the conference. But, as Phillips notes: ‘Nothing on the agenda seems to address the socioeconomic consequences of investments to determine the impacts on people and the environment.’ A casual perusal of the agenda at any elite gathering reveals that this comment applies equally to any elite forum. See, for example, the agenda of the recent WEF meeting in Davos. Any talk of ‘concern’ is misleading rhetoric.

Hence, in the words of Phillips: The 199 directors of the global Giants are ‘a very select set of people. They all know each other personally or know of each other. At least 69 have attended the annual World Economic Forum, where they often serve on panels or give public presentations. They mostly attended the same elite universities, and interact in upperclass social setting[s] in the major cities of the world. They all are wealthy and have significant stock holdings in one or more of the financial Giants. They are all deeply invested in the importance of maintaining capital growth in the world. Some are sensitive to environmental and social justice issues, but they seem to be unable to link these issues to global capital concentration.’

Of course, the global elite cannot manage the world system alone: the elite requires agents to perform many of the functions necessary to control national societies and the individuals within them. ‘The interests of the Global Power Elite and the TCC are fully recognized by major institutions in society. Governments, intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, military, and corporate media all work in support of their vital interests.’

In other words, to elaborate Phillips’ point and extend it a little, through their economic power, the Giants control all of the instruments through which their policies are implemented. Whether it be governments, national military forces, ‘military contractors’ or mercenaries (with at least $200 billion spent on private security globally, the industry currently employs some fifteen million people worldwide) used both in ‘foreign’ wars but also likely deployed in future for domestic control, key ‘intelligence’ agencies, legal systems and police forces, major nongovernment organizations, or the academic, educational, ‘public relations propaganda’, corporate media, medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, all instruments are fully responsive to elite control and are designed to misinform, deceive, disempower, intimidate, repress, imprison (in a jail or psychiatric ward), exploit and/or kill (depending on the constituency) the rest of us, as is readily evident.

Defending Elite Power

Phillips observes that the power elite continually worries about rebellion by the ‘unruly exploited masses’ against their structure of concentrated wealth. This is why the US military empire has long played the role of defender of global capitalism. As a result, the United States has more than 800 military bases (with some scholars suggesting 1,000) in 70 countries and territories. In comparison, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia have about 30 foreign bases. In addition, US military forces are now deployed in 70 percent of the world’s nations with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) having troops in 147 countries, an increase of 80 percent since 2010. These forces conduct counterterrorism strikes regularly, including drone assassinations and kill/capture raids.

‘The US military empire stands on hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and continues to support repressive, exploitative governments that cooperate with global capital’s imperial agenda. Governments that accept external capital investment, whereby a small segment of a country’s elite benefits, do so knowing that capital inevitably requires a return on investment that entails using up resources and people for economic gain. The whole system continues wealth concentration for elites and expanded wretched inequality for the masses….

‘Understanding permanent war as an economic relief valve for surplus capital is a vital part of comprehending capitalism in the world today. War provides investment opportunity for the Giants and TCC elites and a guaranteed return on capital. War also serves a repressive function of keeping the suffering masses of humanity afraid and compliant.’

As Phillips elaborates: This is why defense of global capital is the prime reason that NATO countries now account for 85 percent of the world’s military spending; the United States spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

In essence, ‘the Global Power Elite uses NATO and the US military empire for its worldwide security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, whereby the US/ NATO military empire, advised by the power elite’s Atlantic Council, operates in service to the Transnational Corporate Class for the protection of international capital everywhere in the world’.

This entails ‘further pauperization of the bottom half of the world’s population and an unrelenting downward spiral of wages for 80 percent of the world. The world is facing economic crisis, and the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security. It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to economic collapse is to print more money through quantitative easing, flooding the population with trillions of new inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction requires further spending to rebuild, a cycle that profits the Giants and global networks of economic power. It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, death, and destruction, at home and abroad.’

Where is this all heading?

So what are the implications of this state of affairs? Phillips responds unequivocally: ‘This concentration of protected wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation are reaching a species-level threat. We realize that humankind is in danger of possible extinction’.

He goes on to state that the Global Power Elite is probably the only entity ‘capable of correcting this condition without major civil unrest, war, and chaos’ and elaborates an important aim of his book: to raise awareness of the importance of systemic change and the redistribution of wealth among both the book’s general readers but also the elite, ‘in the hope that they can begin the process of saving humanity.’ The book’s postscript is a ‘A Letter to the Global Power Elite’, co-signed by Phillips and 90 others, beseeching the elite to act accordingly.

‘It is no longer acceptable for you to believe that you can manage capitalism to grow its way out of the gross inequalities we all now face. The environment cannot accept more pollution and waste, and civil unrest is everywhere inevitable at some point. Humanity needs you to step up and insure that trickle-down becomes a river of resources that reaches every child, every family, and all human beings. We urge you to use your power and make the needed changes for humanity’s survival.’

But he also emphasizes that nonviolent social movements, using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a moral code, can accelerate the process of redistributing wealth by pressuring the elite into action.

Conclusion

Peter Phillips has written an important book. For those of us interested in understanding elite control of the world, this book is a vital addition to the bookshelf. And like any good book, as you will see from my comments both above and below, it raised more questions for me even while it answered many.

As I read Phillips’ insightful and candid account of elite behavior in this regard, I am reminded, yet again, that the global power elite is extraordinarily violent and utterly insane: content to kill people in vast numbers (whether through starvation or military violence) and destroy the biosphere for profit, with zero sense of humanity’s now limited future. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ with more detailed explanations for the violence and insanity here: ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

For this reason I do not share his faith in moral appeals to the elite, as articulated in the letter in his postscript. It is fine to make the appeal but history offers no evidence to suggest that there will be any significant response. The death and destruction inflicted by elites is highly profitable, centuries-old and ongoing. It will take powerful, strategically-focused nonviolent campaigns (or societal collapse) to compel the necessary changes in elite behavior. Hence, I fully endorse his call for nonviolent social movements to compel elite action where we cannot make the necessary changes without their involvement. See ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to End Violence and Avert Human Extinction’ and Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

I would also encourage independent action, in one or more of several ways, by those individuals and communities powerful enough to do so. This includes nurturing more powerful individuals by making ‘My Promise to Children’, participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Fundamentally, Giants: The Global Power Elite is a call to action. Professor Peter Phillips is highly aware of our predicament – politically, socially, economically, environmentally and climatically – and the critical role played by the global power elite in generating that predicament.

If we cannot persuade the global power elite to respond sensibly to that predicament, or nonviolently compel it to do so, humanity’s time on Earth is indeed limited.

*

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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First published by Global Research on April 20, 2017

On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.

The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens is the cause. Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.

And it is no longer the case that mainly ‘invisible’ species are vanishing: those insects, amphibians and small animals about which you had never even heard, assuming they have been identified and given a name by humans.

You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures’.

If you want to read more about some aspects of the extinction threat, you can do so in these recent reports: ‘World Wildlife Crime Report: Trafficking in protected species’ and ‘2016 Living Planet Report’  which includes these words: ‘The main statistic from the report … shows a 58% decline between 1970 and 2012. This means that, on average, animal populations are roughly half the size they were 42 years ago.’

And if you want to read just one aspect of what is happening in the world’s oceans, this recent UN report will give you something to ponder: ‘New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries millions’. 

Of course, some of what is happening is related to the ongoing climate catastrophe and there isn’t any good news on that front. See ‘What’s Happening in the Arctic is Astonishing’.

But not everything that is going badly wrong is well known either. Did you know that we are destroying the Earth’s soil? See ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’.

And did you realise that even nitrogen is now a huge problem too? See ‘Scientists shine a spotlight on the overlooked menace of nitrogen’.

Of course, military violence has devastating consequences on the Earth’s ecosystems too, destroying land, water and atmosphere (not to mention killing human beings) in the fight over resources. You will get no joy from the article ‘Iraq’s oil inferno – government inaction in the face of eco-terrorism’ or the website of the Toxic Remnants of War Project. 

But every single aspect of military spending is ultimately used to destroy. It has no other function.

While 2.5 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. See ‘One in three people suffers malnutrition at global cost of $3.5 trillion a year’

As you read all this, you might say ‘Not me’! But you are wrong. You don’t have to be an impoverished African driven to killing elephants for their tusks so that you can survive yourself. You don’t have to be a farmer who is destroying the soil with synthetic poisons. You don’t have to be a soldier who kills and destroys or a person who works for a corporation that, one way to another, forces peasants off their land.

You just have to be an ‘ordinary’ person who pays your military taxes and consumes more than your share of world resources while participating without challenge in the global system of violence and exploitation managed by the global elite.

‘Why is this?’ you might ask.

This is because the primary driver of the human-induced mass extinction is not such things as some people hunting a particular lifeform to extinction, horrendous though this is. In fact, just two things drive most species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth’s wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic.

And do you know what drives this destruction of land and water habitats? Your demand for consumer products, all of which are produced by using land and water habitats, and the resources derived from them, often far from where you live. The most basic products, such as food and clothing, are produced on agricultural land, sometimes created by destroying rainforests, or taken from the ocean (where overfishing has savagely depleted global fish stocks). But in using these resources, we have ignored the needs of the land, oceans and the waterways for adequate regenerative inputs and recovery time.

We also participate, almost invariably without question or challenge, in the inequitable distribution of resources that compels some impoverished people to take desperate measures to survive through such means as farming marginal land or killing endangered wildlife.

So don’t sit back waiting for some miracle by the United Nations, international agencies or governments to solve this problem. It cannot happen for the simple reason that these organizations are all taking action within the existing paradigm that prioritizes corporate profit and military violence over human equity and ecological sustainability.

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, they are encouraging overconsumption by industrialized populations and facilitating the inequitable distribution of income and wealth precisely because this benefits those who control these organizations, agencies and governments: the insane corporate elites who are devoid of the capacity to see any value beyond the ‘bottom line’. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. 

If you want action on the greatest challenge human beings have ever faced – to avert our own extinction by learning to live in harmony with our biosphere and equity with our fellow humans – then I encourage you to take personal responsibility.

If you do, you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison or to drive a car or take an airline flight.

But if you want to take an integrated approach, the most powerful way you can do this is to systematically reduce your own personal consumption while increasing your self-reliance. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.

One of the hidden tragedies of modern human existence is that we have been terrorized into believing that we are not personally responsible. See ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”‘.

For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. 

It isn’t true but few people feel powerful enough to make a difference.

And every time you decide to do nothing and to leave it to someone else, you demonstrate why no-one else should do anything either.

Extinction beckons. What will you do?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected] and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

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***

The massive concentration of wealth over the last few years has made it possible for a tiny handful of individuals to control the means of extraction, production, and distribution, the sales of food and products, and the value of money.

They are free to demand at will the statements they need to justify totalitarian rule, customized to the tastes of specific communities, from their pet experts at Harvard University, at the World Health Organization, at the New York Times, and in the government of the United States, and of most other countries.   

The rate at which wealth has been concentrated is unprecedented in human history, in part because of the exponential evolution of technology that permits a global manipulation of currency and other financial products in a complex manner beyond the capacity of most to comprehend.

New AI technology allows for the promotion of false information globally through the commercial media in a confusing manner. The super-rich use this confusion to divide and to confuse the citizens of the United States, and of the world, presenting contradictory opinions through the authority figures that they promote, often opinions that lack any scientific basis.

Understanding why so many highly-educated Americans are incapable of responding to the current crisis, and endorse a vaccine regime that they do not believe in, requires us to look at the larger strategy for manipulating choices offered to establishment intellectuals. In part, it is a matter of lag time. Intellectuals are shocked by the rapid shifts in geopolitics. They find it easier to wallow in self-pity, or to bury their heads in denial. The period of time required for a new generation of committed intellectuals to emerge is not fast enough to keep up with the rate of change—and thus have failed to organize anti-fascist movements like those of the 1930s that formed the kernel of true resistance to totalitarianism.

It is helpful to focus on a few of the false choices, the baited gambits, that have been skillfully set up by the advisors to the super-rich so as to create fissures in American society that fragment the establishment, and create internal conflicts in a predetermined manner, so that no broad consensus is reached and citizens unknowingly do the dirty work for the super-rich.

Let us consider the central baited gambits being utilized today.

The New Cold War

The commercial media is pumping out a uniform story about a New Cold War between the United States and China that has been reformatted in different political flavors for distribution on hundreds of media platforms. There are conservative and progressive flavors to this story about unprecedented tensions between China and the United States born of Chinese expansionism.

Not everything about Chinese actions in Xinjiang, or in Hong Kong, is false, but for the most part the tale is so grotesquely distorted that we might as well file it under fiction in our library.

I have not found any serious discussions about how this New Cold War is being promoted by media interests whose stock is owned by the same concerns who want to make a fortune from the massive increase in the US military budget that resulted from the Defense Appropriations Bill of 2020.

Nor does anyone mention the process by which multinational banks and corporate interests have encouraged national conflicts over territory and ethnic identity so as to push for militarization in the years before the First World War, or how that cynical ploy was related to overcapacity and overproduction and how the alchemy of wartime demand was used to make liability into a godsend. French, British and German banks were happy to play footsie in that tragicomedy and the hidden profiteering continued even after the war began.

It would not take more than a few minutes of comparison between the tricks used by global finance leaders in London, Paris and Berlin in 1914, and the similar tricks being employed by US and Chinese financial interests today, for citizens to get the idea.

In place of analysis, we are force-fed the tired and trite tale of the “Thucydides trap” endlessly promoted by the highest-paid minion of the investment bankers, the made-to-order prophet lauded and feted by CEOs in New York and Shanghai, Harvard’s own éminence grise Graham Ellison.

If we want to understand what is taking place in the unhealthy “Frankenstein Alliance,” in the pact signed between elites in Washington and Beijing, we must first break out of this foolish “nation state” schemata peddled to intellectuals by global bankers and look directly at the massive collaboration between the super-rich globally for the purpose of destroying the lives of workers, and unfold and unravel their schemes to play American workers against Chinese workers so as to stop any unity of purpose on the part of citizens.

Graham Ellison and his Harvard friends are never going to talk about how Harvard’s de facto majority shareholder Goldman Sachs plans to use economic conflict between the United States and China as a means to push through the complete automation of factories and the massive implementation of AI in both countries in the name of “competition.”

The battle is not so much between Beijing and Washington, although that battle is also plenty real, but more about the drive of global finance to control the assets, the money, the activities, the identity, and the bodies of every single worker in both countries. What cannot be forced through in China, will be forced through in the United States first, or vise versa—or in another country first.

Maybe Elon Musk and Jack Ma are not voices of reason crying out against a nationalistic narrow-minded national agenda in the United States and China, but partners in a scheme to monopolize the resources and the assets of the entire world.

That process, even though it can be documented without too much effort using open-source materials, must be dismissed as a conspiracy theory beyond the pale. The only accurate means to understand the conflicts between China and the United States today, we are told by the authorities, is through an analogy to a war between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century B.C.

The possibility that neither China nor America exist today as political units in light of the radical concentration of wealth is the most likely explanation for what we witness today. You will not read that analysis anywhere.

What are the immediate results of the increase in defense spending for this “New Cold War?”

The opportunity to increase massively defense spending in the United States, China, and throughout East Asia—and now throughout the world–has the banks drooling. Many financial interests stand to benefit from all that spending, that artificially created demand. Citizens are force-fed cold war fiction without a word about who makes the money from weapon systems globally—including in China.

The spending, in the US Department of Defense, or the intelligence community, is no longer aimed at training people in Chinese, or developing a new generation of people who understand the politics and cultures of the nations of Asia. Increasingly, those who studied in China (to learn Chinese) cannot get the security clearances required to work in government.

Most of that money is tagged for ridiculously overpriced fighter planes, tanks, anti-missile systems, and satellites that, in many cases, already have been shown to be ineffective, or useless.

Those at the working-level in the military and intelligence are still trying to do their jobs in spite of the increasingly absurd orders that they receive. To some degree they can convince themselves that the reports of threats from Chinese AI, drones and robots are credible. Certainly the round-the-clock work schedule that is forced on them (similar to what was done before the Iraq invasion) makes it nearly impossible to concentrate.

What no one is going to tell citizens, or even personnel with top secret/SCI clearance, is that the AI being developed is meant to be a weapon to degrade the ability of citizens to think (starting with military personnel) through destructive stimulation of the brain using commercial media, and to divide and confuse the populations of both nations, using different time frames and agendas, so as to soften up the citizens of the Earth for the absolute rule of the super-rich.

Will the next generation micro drones and robots, energy weapons on low-orbit satellites, be used in some glorious Normandy Landing, or Athens-Sparta conflict between civilizations and nation states? Or might the final intention be to employ these weapons so as to attack the citizens of China and of the United States, if they try to resist this global power grab?

The war has already been declared. Both China and the United States, and many other countries, have become the battle ground in the drive to completely corrupt science, and to make all sources of information spigots for propaganda in support of “bio-fascist” regimes like COVID19.

Whether in Dallas or Wuhan, Osaka or Dresden, AI logarithms are being used now to shut down civil society, and stacks of drones and robots that can attack whoever they are programmed to attack, are waiting in the wings.

It is worth noting that the New York Times have taken a sudden interest in police violence over the last year after completely ignoring the issue for decades. Moreover, they are not interested in systemic corruption, but rather in gaudy incidents which are played up in the news cycle just long enough to create a consensus for a policy shift.

Perhaps the goal is not to reduce police violence, but rather to undermine public confidence in police officers as a means of defunding the human police. But, is the intention of such a move to create a more human police force with closer ties to the community? Or might this rather be the first stage in softening up the public to accept the replacement of human police with drones and robots that may have smiles on their faces but are capable of a ruthlessness beyond any human?

Your choice: Climate Change or COVID-19?

Multinational investment banks, corporations, and the super-rich that control them, have paid their operators to set up a “false choices” for citizens that are meant to divide us and to discourage organized resistance. Prefabricated liberal-conservative conflicts are core to this effort. Although this effort has gone on for decades, the classified programs to engineer conflicts based on ethnicity, culture or gender, has gone into warp drive as the blatant power grab of the elite becomes increasingly obvious.

Central among the baited gambits offered up is the false choice between addressing climate change and acknowledging that COVID19 is a massive fraud. Anyone who tries to take on both issues at once will find that he or she cannot get anything published anywhere. Everyone is given a choice or choosing one, or the other, or disappearing from public discourse altogether. For the ego-driven “public intellectuals” so accustomed to seeing their precious names in print, the compromise is of little significance.

You can either recognize that the climate is adversely impacted by emissions, the destruction of the ecosystem and by an economy driven by a dangerous model of “growth” and “consumption” or you can argue that COVID19 has no scientific basis and that the forced-vaccine regime is an attempt by rich and powerful to take control of our bodies and to deny us the right to work, to go to school, or to seek medical treatment for random reasons.

On the one side, we see progressive-flavored intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges talking about the danger of fossil fossil fuels and the ignorance of science displayed by Republicans in the pay of the oil companies. Some parts of their arguments are true. Other are tailored to the needs of investment banks. For example, they are happy to push for solar power and wind power, but they do not mention that these renewable energy projects are planned and pushed through by corporate banks. Nor do these intellectuals describe how citizens produced their own renewable energy before John Rockefeller forced them to become dependent on big oil.

These progressives also leave Bill Gates book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” alone, preferring to give the Gates Foundation all the slack it needs to use the “climate crisis” to tighten political and ideological control.

In the other corner we find those, often associated with Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who stand united in their condemnation of the COVID19 “plandemic,” the mask mandate and the vaccine regime. These forces have developed increasingly sophisticated media sources and they support their critiques with substantial scientific data. For the most part, these groups are dismissed out of hand by the Nation or Greenpeace as extremists, or anti-science, when they speak the truth.

As good as the science for these groups may be regarding COVID19 (and it is not always accurate) they are silent on, or even dismissive of, the threats of climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, the destruction of the environment by fracking and micro-plastics. They are willing to stand up to Bill Gates and George Soros, but get wobbly knees when it comes to BP and Exxon.

Another part of this scheme to drive a stake through science in the United States establishment is the engineered split in interpretive communities concerning the 9/11 incident: a powerful shibboleth in American politics. This obvious fraud, which defies the principles taught in high school physics, is a taboo for the progressive groups standing up in self-righteous indignation over climate change, social injustice and systemic racism.

9/11 is not taboo, however, for conservative groups. But there is a catch. Some of the scientific discussions of 9/11, or of COVID19, are narrated with reference to Christian philosophy concerning the nature of evil, and are supported with references to the Book of Revelations. Although such references may be valid, they inherently limit the appeal of these reports for the public.

The critiques in these reports lack a systematic analysis of the interlocking financial interests around the world that were behind that incident. These conservative news sources lack the systematic analysis of who owns what found in books like Giants: The Global Power Elite (Peter Phillips).

The focus on the trafficking of youth for pedophiles by high-ranking political figures and their alleged participation in Satanic practices, also limits the impact of these conservative reports. There is plenty of evidence of pedophilia among power players in Washington D.C., and there exists documentation that such incidents have been purposely set up to collect damaging information about politicians.

But this political practice is but one of a variety of methods for buying and intimidating, and not as central as these reports suggest.

It is possible that high ranking politicians engaged in Satanic rituals as well, but from what I have seen of the exercise of power in Washington D.C. its seems rather unlikely that Satanic practices are that prominent. I suspect that although there may be some truth to those claims, that stressing Satanism is a condition for getting the word out because it limits the audience. Perhaps secret law not only blocks reporting on COVID19 in the mainstream media, but also requires that those who are allowed to report on the topic introduce a heavy dose of Christian ideology that cuts down on circulation among progressive groups.

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

Featured image is from Emanuel Pastreich

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).

***

Less than two months prior to Event 201 (October 19, 2019), Bill Gates invested up to 55 million dollars in BioNTech stock – the company that co-developed – with Pfizer – the first experimental (and still unapproved (by the FDA) 2-dose mRNA vaccine.)

On October 19, 2019, 15 invited – and well-rehearsed – spokespersons of 15 different billion-dollar trans-national corporate entities participated in a well-rehearsed table-top “pandemic coronavirus” exercise that planner Bill Gates labeled “Event 201”.

The institutions at the exercise included among others:

  • The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC
  • The World Health Organization (WHO)
  • The UN Foundation,
  • Johnson & Johnson ( J & J),
  • John Hopkins University,
  • the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF),
  • The World Economic Forum (WEF),
  • The Central Intelligence Agency  (CIA),
  • Marriott,
  • MasterCard,
  • Lufthansa Airlines,
  • The World Bank
  • The UPS Foundation.

It should be obvious to any casual observer that each of those powerful and wealthy, for-profit entities has long-term financial or reputational conflicts of interest in any future crisis – planned or otherwise.

It is important for anyone with a shred of common sense and a little bit of suspicion about anything involving the above profiteering entities to look back at what has transpired over the past 18 months, involving any of the following 5 items:

1] The World Economic Forum’s announced its “Great Reset” (= “New World Order” outline) program for the world’s economies;

2] The Big Pharma-controlled Mainstream Media exerted total censorship control over potentially fair-minded, unbiased reporting about the epidemic;

3] Many uber-wealthy global entities (including the ubiquitous tax-exempt “Foundations”) experienced massive profits during the 2020 “Plague Year” at the same exact time when millions of small businesses (that aren’t listed on any stock exchange) suffered such serious financial losses and/or failures;

4] For the past 12 months there have been 24/7 government propaganda campaigns pushing the already-purchased, still experimental Covid-19 “vaccines”, that are still unproven to be either safe or effective long-term; and

5] Big Pharma corporations were not required to do animal lab safety testing before human (guinea pig) trials were done with the experimental vaccines.

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Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career prior to his retirement in 2008, primarily helping patients who had become addicted to cocktails of psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His column often deals with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing food industry. Those four sociopathic entities can combine to even more adversely affect the physical, mental, spiritual and economic health of the recipients of the vaccines, drugs, medical treatments and the eaters of the tasty and ubiquitous “Franken Foods” – particularly when they are consumed in combinations, doses and potencies that have never been tested for safety or long-term effectiveness.

Dr Kohls’ Duty to Warn columns are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national; https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/; and 

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

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.

***

Henry Kissinger, 97, Henry the K. for those he keeps close, is either a Delphic oracle-style strategic thinker or a certified war criminal for those kept not so close.

He now seems to have been taking time off his usual Divide and Rule stock in trade – advising the combo behind POTUS, a.k.a. Crash Test Dummy – to emit some realpolitik pearls of wisdom.

At a recent forum in Arizona, referring to the festering, larger than life Sino-American clash, Henry the K. said,

“It’s the biggest problem for America; it’s the biggest problem for the world. Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.”

In realpolitik terms, this “kind of Cold War” is already on; across the Beltway, China is unanimously regarded as the premier US national security threat.

Kissinger added US policy toward China must be a mix of stressing US “principles” to demand China’s respect and dialogue to find areas of cooperation:

I’m not saying that diplomacy will always lead to beneficial results…This is the complex task we have… Nobody has succeeded in doing it completely.”

Henry the K. actually must have lost the – diplomatic – plot. What Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are now involved in, full time, is to demonstrate – mostly to the Global South – how the American-enforced “rules-based international order” has absolutely nothing to do with international law and the respect of national sovereignty.

At first I had archived these Henry the K. platitudes out of sight. But then someone who used to hold a stellar position at the top of the US Deep State showed he had been paying close attention.

This personality – let’s call him Mr. S. – has been one of my invaluable, trustworthy sources since the early 2000s. Mutual confidence was always key. I asked him if I could publish selected passages of his analysis, not naming names. Consent was given – ruefully. So fasten your seat belts.

Dancin’ with Mr. S.

Mr. S., in a quite intriguing fashion, seems to be expressing the collective views of a number of extremely qualified people. Right from the start, he points out how Henry the K.’s observations explain today’s Russia-China-Iran triangle.

The first point that we make is that it was not Kissinger who created policy for Nixon, but the Deep State. Kissinger was just a messenger boy.  In the 1972 situation the Deep State wanted to get out of Vietnam, which policy was put in place as containment of communist China and Russia.  We were there based on the domino theory.

He goes on:

The Deep State wanted to achieve a number of objectives in approaching Chairman Mao, who was antagonized by Russia. It wanted to ally in 1972 with China against Russia. That made Vietnam meaningless, for China would become the containing party of Russia and Vietnam no longer meant anything. We wanted to balance China against Russia.  Now, China was not a major power in 1972 but it could drain Russia, forcing it to place 400,000 troops on their border.  And our Deep State policy worked. We in the Deep State had thought it through, and not Kissinger. 400,000 troops on the Chinese border was a drain on their budget, as later Afghanistan became with over 100,000 troops, and the Warsaw Pact had another 600,000 troops.

And that brings us into Afghanistan:

The Deep State wanted to start a Vietnam for Russia in Afghanistan in 1979.  I was among those against it, as this would needlessly use the Afghani people as cannon fodder and that was unfair. I was overruled. Here Brzezinski was playing Kissinger; another overrated nothing who just carried messages.

The Deep State also decided to crash the oil price, as that would economically weaken Russia. And that worked in 1985, driving the price to eight dollars a barrel, which ate up half the Russian budget. Then, we basically gave permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait as a ploy to send in our advanced army to knock him out and demonstrate our superiority to the world in weaponry, which very much demoralized the Russians and put the fear of God into Islamic oil.  Then we created the Star Wars fiction.  Russia to our surprise lost their nerve and collapsed.

Mr. S. defines all of the above as “wonderful” in his opinion, as “communism went out and Christianity came in”:

We then wanted to welcome Russia into the community of Christian nations, but the Deep State wanted to dismember them. That was stupid, as they would balance against China at least from their Mackinder point of view. It was naive on my part to hope to a return of Christianity, as the West was moving rapidly toward total moral disintegration.

In the meantime, our ally China continues to grow as we were not finished with the dismemberment of Russia and the advisors we sent to Russia destroyed the whole economy in the 1990s against my objections. The 78-day Belgrade bombing finally woke Russia up and they started a massive re-militarization as it was obvious that the intention was in the end to bomb Moscow into the ground. So defensive missiles became essential. Thus, the S-300, S-400, S-500 and soon S-600s.

The Deep State had been warned by me at our meetings on how bombing Belgrade in 1999 would cause Russia to remilitarize and I lost the argument. Belgrade was bombed for 78 days versus the vengeance bombing of Hitler for two days.  And China continues to grow.

Why balance of power doesn’t work

And that bring us to a new era – that started in practice with the Chinese announcement of the New Silk Roads in 2013 and Maidan in Kiev in 2014:

China wakes up to all of this in that they begin to realize that they have been just used, and that the US fleet controls their trade routes, and decides to approach Russia in 2014 just about the time of their witnessing the Maidan overthrow of Ukraine.  This overthrow was organized by the Deep State when they started to understand that they had lost the arms race, and did not even know what was happening. 

The Deep State wanted to draw Russia into a Vietnam again in the Ukraine to drain them and crash the oil price again, which they did.  Beijing studied this and saw the light. If Russia is overthrown, the West will control all their natural resources, which they see themselves needing as they grew into a giant economy larger than the US.  And Beijing starts to open up a warm relationship with Moscow seeking to obtain land based natural resources as oil and natural gas from Russia to avoid the seas for natural resources as much as they can. In the meantime, Beijing massively accelerates its building of submarines carrying missiles capable of destroying the US fleets.

So where does Kissinger in Arizona fit in?

Now, Kissinger reflects the Deep State angst on the Russia-Chinese relationship and wants this split up for dear life. This is interestingly covered here by Kissinger. He does not want to tell the truth about balance of power realities. He describes them as “our values”, when the US has no values left but anarchy, looting, and burning down hundreds of cities. Biden hopes to buy all these disenfranchised masses as money printing goes wild.

So we are back to Kissinger shocked at the new Russian-Chinese alliance. They must be separated.

Now, I do not agree with the balance of power intriguers in that morality or noble values should govern international relations, and not power. The US has been following balance of power dreams since 1900 and now it faces economic ruin. These ideas do not work.  There is no reason the US cannot be a friend of Russia and China and the differences can be worked out. But you cannot get to first base as balance of power considerations dominate everything. That is the tragedy of our time.

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***

An Israeli security source has revealed to Tikun Olam that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have used a weapon never before seen in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Iranian-made cruise missiles, perhaps of the type which wiped out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, were fired on Israeli targets and caused extensive damage in communities in the south and around Tel Aviv. This development is under military censorship and Israeli media may not report this major new development.   Five Israelis have been killed as well in the missile fire.  Two Israeli Palestinians were killed in a neighborhood of Lod: because it is “unrecognized” under racist Israeli regulations, its 600 residents may not build bomb shelters to protect themselves and the municipality refuses to do so.

Reports that Hamas has these advanced weapons are not new.  In fact, last year Avigdor Lieberman accused Netanyahu and defense minister Gantz of covering up this information:

“Hamas is developing cruise missiles, cluster bombs and unmanned aerial vehicles with jet engines,” Lieberman said in the Knesset. “Do you know what it means for the residents of Israel if, God forbid, a conflict breaks out?”

“Do you know what price we will pay? Why is the prime minister hiding it? If I was you I would have summoned all the (regional council heads of Gaza border communities) to a meeting with the Defense Minister, so he could explain to them what he intends to do to fight against cruise missiles and cluster bombs,” Lieberman added.

gaza attacks

Israel wantonly attacks civilian residential targets in Gaza (Source: Tikun Olam)

As you can see, his complaints were reported in Israeli media. But apparently, today the censor believes that Israelis have a short attention span; and she doesn’t want to remind citizens that the weapons killing them are ones the IDF knew about a year ago and still cannot protect against.

In the past, Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted many of the previous generation of rockets from Gaza.  But the defensive system has limited effectiveness against cruise missiles. Which is why so many have hit targets inside Israel and caused such extensive damage.

This places the latest escalation in violence in an entirely different context.   No longer are we “merely” talking about Israel incitement against Israeli Palestinians over restrictions on access to their holy site,  Haram al Sharif.   Instead,  Hamas has taken up the cause,  broadening the conflict, possibly at the behest of Iran.  The latter has many scores to settle with the Israelis: this includes key  Israeli communication intercepts which permitted the US to locate and murder Qassem Soleimani; and even the assassination of the founder of the Iranian nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Iran has been itching for a fight.  And Hamas appears eager and willing to oblige. This is a perfect example of the danger of a minor act of incitement leading to widespread conflagration.  Of course,  because Pres. Trump thumbed his nose at the Palestinians and waged a hostile campaign against Iran, the US no longer has any leverage or credibility in either place.   And because Trump did nothing but coddle the Israelis,  we have lost any capacity to jawbone them as well.

The US,  UN, EU have all been not just ineffective,  but pathetic in their attempts to ratchet down hostilities.  Their feeble expressions of concern were met with a vague shrug by Israeli leaders and IDF generals.

Strong measures,  such as those I advocated here,  are nowhere to be found.  Politicians seems scared of their own tails as Gaza’s children die. Pres. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken seem congenital averse to saying an unkind word to Israel.  As I noted in yesterday’s post,  we’ve even put the kibosh on the most assertive statement formulated so far by the international community–a UN Security Council resolution. The world is standing back as Gaza burns. 30 dead as of today and an entire high rise apartment building toppled by Israeli missiles.

In Israel, we are seeing developments on the ground never seen before.  Instead of universal support for military action,  Israeli Palestinians have gone on the rampage in both their own and mixed communities.  In Lod,  in particular,  Jewish residents have been told to remain locked in their homes as protesters roam the streets setting fire to vehicles and vandalizing synagogues. This level of social unrest is unheard of during wartime. Israeli police in inciting mass violence at Haram al Sharif,  have kicked a slumbering tiger.  And they are shocked when he roars in anger and seeks revenge.

The latest escalation offers a strange confluence of interests between Hamas and Bibi Netanyahu. As for the former, after canceling  yet another round of elections,  Hamas is eager to punish Mahmoud Abbas for his betrayal of Palestinian representative rights. In addition,  Hamas relies heavily on Iran for aid and is willing, if not eager, to show off the new weapons provided to them by their patrons.

Netanyahu too is more than pleased with this new round of fighting. First, whenever Israel attacks Palestine, the Israeli public credits the prime minister with toughness.   Second, as long as there are chaos, sirens and rockets in the Israeli streets, Yair Lapid can make no progress in forming a new center-right government which will exclude him.

As long as chaos reigns, it suits both Israel’s leader and Hamas.  But of course,  the victims of these cynical machinations are the Palestinians and to a lesser extent,  the Israeli public.

Finally,  it’s rather shocking that in light of the impending ICC investigation of Israel for war crimes against Palestinians since 2014, Netanyahu hasn’t realized that all of the acts of child murder seen in the past few days will bolster these charges and strengthen the chance for a court case and conviction of Israel’s military and political leadership.

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Featured image: One of the cruise missile types Iran may have provided Hamas (Source: Tikun Olam)

Europe: A War Game Ground for the US-NATO Strategy

May 13th, 2021 by Manlio Dinucci

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In 2020 land mobility of people in the European Union was paralyzed by lockdowns, mainly following the tourism blockade. The same happened in air mobility: according to a study by the European Parliament (March 2021), it suffered a net loss of 56 billion euros and 191,000 direct jobs, plus over a million in related industries. In 2021, the recovery promises to be very problematic. Only one sector has greatly increased its mobility going against the trend: the military sector.

At the moment, about 28,000 soldiers are passing from one country to another in Europe with tanks and planes: they are engaged in Defender-Europe 21, the US Army (not NATO) great exercise in Europe involving 25 European allies and partners. Italy participates in it not only with its armed forces but as a host country. At the same time, the NATO Steadfast Defender exercise is about to begin, mobilizing over 9,000 US and European soldiers, including  Italian soldiers. It constitutes the first large-scale test of the two new NATO commands: The Joint Force Command, with its headquarters in Norfolk (USA), and the Joint Support Command with its headquarters in Ulm (Germany). The «mission» of the Norfolk Command is «to protect the Atlantic routes between North America and Europe», which according to NATO would be threatened by Russian submarines; the «mission» of the Ulm Command is “to ensure troops mobility  across the European borders to allow a rapid strengthening of the Alliance on the Eastern front”, which would be threatened by Russian forces according to NATO.

For this second «mission» the European Union plays an important role, as the US Army has requested the establishment of “a military Schengen Area”. The Action Plan on military mobility, presented by the European Commission in 2018, envisages modifying “infrastructures (bridges, railways, and roads) that are not suitable for the weight or size of heavy military vehicles”. For example, if a bridge cannot carry the weight of a 70-ton tank column, it must be strengthened or rebuilt. After having earmarked an initial allocation of around 2 billion euros for this purpose, in public money subtracted from social expenses, the EU Ministers of Defense (Lorenzo Guerini for Italy) decided on May 8 to involve the United States, Canada, and Norway on the EU military mobility plan. NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg, who was present at the meeting, stressed that ” “Non-EU Allies play an essential role in protecting and defending Europe”. In this way, NATO (21 over 27 EU countries are NATO members), after having instructed the EU to carry out and pay for the restructuring of European infrastructures for military purposes, actually takes over the management of the “Military Schengen Area“.

In the European region transformed in a parade ground, the infrastructure adaptation to the US / NATO forces mobility  is tested in war trials, which include “the deployment of land and naval forces from North America to the Black Sea region“. They serve – quoting Stoltenberg’s words – to “demonstrate that NATO has the ability and the will to protect all allies from any threat“. The kind of “threat” was also declared by the G7 Foreign Ministers (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan), who met on May 5 in London. The seven Ministers (Luigi Di Maio for Italy), overturning the facts accused Russia of “irresponsible and destabilizing behavior, illegal annexation of Crimea, massing military forces on the Ukraine border, use of chemical weapons to poison opponents, malicious activities to undermine the democratic system of other countries, threaten the rules-based international order”. The fact that the G7 formulated these accusations with the same words used by the Pentagon and repeated by NATO, confirms the existence of the same matrix in the strategy of tension that pushes Europe into an increasingly dangerous situation.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

US Biolabs in Former Soviet States. Moscow Reacts

May 13th, 2021 by Andrew Korybko

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Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev told Sputnik earlier this week that the US is secretly developing biological weapons in some of the biolabs that it funds all across the world, building upon previous accusations that he made in the past regarding the danger that such facilities in former Soviet states pose to his country and the rest of the world more broadly.

Biological warfare has been on the tip of many people’s tongues since the outbreak of COVID-19 last year after many speculated that the virus was really a bioweapon that had accidentally leaked from a Chinese biolab. Although the World Health Organization’s (WHO) latest study into the matter concluded that this theory is extremely unlikely, the narrative still persists to this day. Regardless of its ultimate veracity or lack thereof, this interpretation of events sparked widespread interest in the danger that biological weapons programs pose to humanity. It’s with this in mind that everyone should listen really closely to what Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev recently had to say about such threats.

He told Sputnik earlier this week that “In recent years, the US and its NATO allies have significantly stepped up biological research in many countries across the world. The US is developing individual action plans for each country based on the needs of national biological programmes, primarily military ones.” This builds upon what he said last month in an interview with the popular Russian business daily Kommersant where he accused America of developing such weapons in close proximity to his country’s and China’s borders. Unlike what Western pundits claim about him sensationally exploiting the COVID-19 outbreak for political reasons, Patrushev has actually been warning about these threats since as early as 2015 according to RT.

So seriously does Russia take this danger that Foreign Minister Lavrov just agreed to a biosecrutiy pact with Armenia during his latest visit to the South Caucasus country which holds the ignoble distinction of hosting one of those American facilities. It also hopes to reach similar agreements with other former Soviet states that have allowed the US to so provocatively operate within their borders. The top Russian diplomat said last May that “We have reached an intergovernmental memorandum with Tajikistan, are working on a similar document with our colleagues from Uzbekistan and are in consultations with other post-Soviet countries, including Kazakhstan, Armenia and other neighbors.”

Of consistent concern for Russia has been the US biolab in neighboring Georgia. Moscow voiced concerns about that facility in 2013 and then again in 2018, during which time Russian officials claimed that the lab was linked to over 70 deaths. The South Caucasus country’s former Minister of State Security publicly speculated that same year that the site was secretly a biological weapons center. The US and Georgia both deny the allegations, but amid unconfirmed claims that COVID-19 might have leaked from a Chinese biolab despite the WHO’s latest study dismissing that theory, it’s understandable why Russia would at the very least want to ensure that such an accident doesn’t ever happen right on its own borders.

As I wrote in an op-ed in April 2020 for CGTN, “The U.S. Needs To Open Up About Its Biological Laboratories In The Former USSR”. That’s the only way to put everyone’s legitimate worries at ease and prevent any accidental leaks of whatever it is that America might really be testing there. Nevertheless, these well-intended concerns have been dishonestly misportrayed as “disinformation” by the Western Mainstream Media, which claims that any talk about those facilities is nothing more than a “conspiracy theory” that’s possibly being peddled at the behest of the Russian security services. That’s not true, and it would be equally legitimate for average Americans to demand transparency of any Russian biolabs near its borders if they were ever built there.

Patrushev isn’t pushing an information warfare narrative but is publicly expressing his country’s legitimate security concerns about the shadowy biolabs that its peer competitor built in its backyard. These facilities might be exactly what they say they are, innocuous sites for testing various diseases and whatnot, or they might really be secret bioweapon factories. Nobody really knows for sure until the US and/or its former Soviet partners finally open up about what’s truly going on there. Russia is demanding answers on behalf of the whole world, and slowly but surely, it hopes to receive them before it’s too late and an accident happens at one of those sites which might make COVID-19 look like child’s play in hindsight.

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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.

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CDC Embarks on New COVID Cover-Up

May 13th, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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COVID-19 has been a pandemic of false positive tests; the thing that kept the fraud going was the fact that laboratories were using excessively high cycle thresholds (CTs) when processing the PCR tests, resulting in false positives

Now, as nearly 100 million Americans have been vaccinated against COVID-19, the CDC is lowering the [enlargement threshold cycle] CT from 40 to 28 when diagnosing vaccine breakthrough cases — cases where fully vaccinated individuals are diagnosed with COVID-19.

While healthy people have been misdiagnosed as having COVID-19 when they really didn’t because the CT was set to 40 or 45, the CDC is now trying to minimize the recorded number of breakthrough cases by using a CT that will minimize the number of false positives

As of April 26, 2021, the CDC had received a total of 9,245 reports of vaccine breakthrough infections. Of those, 55% were under the age of 60, 835 required hospitalization (9%) and 132 died (1%)

The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System appears to be backlogged for months. Rare but serious side effects may be occurring but we just can’t see the trend, and the longer the backlog, the more people will be exposed to a potentially dangerous vaccine

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For many months, experts have warned that COVID-19 is not so much a viral pandemic as it is a “casedemic” — a pandemic of false positive tests — and the thing that kept the fraud going was the fact that laboratories were using excessively high cycle thresholds (CTs) when processing the PCR tests.1

I detailed this scheme in “COVID-19 Testing Scandal Deepens” and “Astonishing COVID-19 Testing Fraud Revealed.” Tests recommended by the World Health Organization were originally set to 45 CTs,2,3,4 and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend a CT of 40,5 yet the scientific consensus has long been that anything over 35 CTs renders the test useless,6,7,8 as the accuracy will be a measly 3%. The remainder, 97%, are false positives.9

In addition to artificially driving up the case rate, the PCR test fraud also fueled the myth that asymptomatic people posed a potential health threat, and therefore businesses had to shut down and everyone had to stay at home and self-quarantine.

January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States, the WHO suddenly lowered the recommended CT,10 thereby guaranteeing that the number of “cases,” i.e., positive PCR test results, would plummet.

Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lowered the CT even further, in what appears to be a clear effort to hide COVID-19 breakthrough cases, meaning cases in which fully vaccinated individuals are being diagnosed with COVID-19.

How the CDC Is Covering Up Breakthrough Cases

As part of its COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough case investigation, the CDC has issued guidelines11for public health, clinical and reference laboratories on how to test and diagnose cases where fully vaccinated individuals are suspected of having contracted COVID-19. In those guidelines, it specifies using a CT value of 28 or less.

So, in other words, while healthy people have, for the past year, been misdiagnosed as having COVID-19 when they really didn’t because the CT was set to 40 or 45, they’re now trying to minimize the recorded number of breakthrough cases by using a CT that will minimize false positives.12

Had a CT of 28 been used all along, we would have had nowhere near the number of “cases” currently touted and the pandemic would have been declared over sometime in 2020. Conversely, were a CT of 40 or 45 used to diagnose breakthrough cases, you can be sure the numbers would be far higher than currently reported.

Reported Breakthrough Cases Are Undercounted

As of April 26, 2021, the CDC had received a total of 9,245 reports of vaccine breakthrough infections via its national COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough REDCap database, into which state health department investigators can enter and manage data from their respective jurisdictions.13

Of those 9,245 breakthrough cases, 55% were under the age of 60, 835 required hospitalization (9%) and 132 died (1%). With an estimated 95 million Americans having been vaccinated, the reported breakthrough rate is only 0.0097%. However, the CDC also stresses that:14

“It is important to note that reported vaccine breakthrough cases will represent an undercount. This surveillance system is passive and relies on voluntary reporting from state health departments which may not be complete. Also, not all real-world breakthrough cases will be identified because of lack of testing.”

COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects Are Underreported Too

This is worth keeping in mind, as the same applies to reported COVID-19 vaccine side effects, which as of April 23, 2021, included a total of 118,902 adverse events, 12,618 of which were serious and 3,544 of which died.15

As tragic as those numbers are, these too represent an undercount, as the U.S. vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) is a passive surveillance system that relies on voluntary reporting. Historically, less than 10% of vaccine side effects are reported to VAERS.16 An investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services put it as low as 1%.17,18

What this means is side effects may actually be 10 times or even 100 times higher than reported. We could, in reality, be looking at anywhere from 126,000 to 1.2 million serious side effects, and anywhere from 35,440 to 354,400 vaccine-related deaths.

Right now, it’s also difficult to get an accurate idea of where we are with regard to side effects as VAERS appears to be backlogged for months. On Twitter, Alex Berenson19 noted that it had taken until the end of April for the CDC to respond to a report from January, which indicates the data you see on VAERS does not reflect the true, real-time numbers of adverse reactions being reported.

This is important to know, since the system’s primary goal is to “detect new, unusual or rare vaccine adverse events” as a way to monitor safety of vaccines. A backlog by months indicates that, quite possibly, there are so many reports coming in that that the CDC can’t handle them.

Rare but serious side effects may be occurring but we just can’t see the trend because the data isn’t showing, and the longer the backlog, the more people will be exposed to a potentially dangerous vaccine.

Why Are Thousands of Deaths Ignored?

In an interview with journalist Alex Newman (video above), Dr. Peter McCullough stated he believes the government’s response to the pandemic has resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and the mass vaccination program is now causing thousands more and they’re just letting it happen.

He’s baffled at the government’s nonexistent response to the thousands of deaths already logged into VAERS, noting that the 1976 swine flu pandemic mass vaccination program was pulled after just 25 deaths and a few hundred cases of paralysis. Drugs are also yanked from the market at around 50 unexplained deaths.

On average, there are 20 to 30 deaths reported following the seasonal flu vaccine, which is given to about 195 million Americans each year.20 Compare that to the COVID-19 vaccines. At 95 million vaccinations administered, the death count is already at 3,542, the highest for any vaccine in history. The contrast in response is “alarming,” McCullough says.

Even more concerning, after reviewing 1,600 of these deaths, the FDA declared not a single death was related to the vaccine. McCullough doesn’t believe it, because he knows from first-hand experience it would take months to investigate that many deaths.

“It is impossible for unnamed regulatory doctors without any experience with COVID 19 to opine that none of the deaths were related to the vaccine,” he says. “We’re sitting on, right now, the biggest number of vaccine deaths, there’s been tens of thousands of hospitalizations, all attributable to the vaccine, and going strong …

In my professional opinion, the safest vaccine on the market was the J&J vaccine. And that was pulled for very rare blood-clotting events. We had seven million people vaccinated but the estimates are for the other two vaccines available [Pfizer and Moderna], the blood-clotting rates are probably 30 times that of J&J, and these others are going strong.”

Active Vaccine Surveillance Months Away From Implementation

The FDA has also admitted that its analysis of vaccine safety data will be delayed for weeks, if not months, due to the pandemic hitting right as they were transitioning away from its Post-Licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring (PRISM) network, which was used to track side effects from the pandemic H1N1 vaccine, into a new system called the Biologics Effectiveness and Safety System (BEST).

Using a patchwork of passive reporting systems rather than one comprehensive, active and central one, may ultimately prove disastrous. As reported by Kaiser Health News:21

“Potentially dangerous, unanticipated reactions to vaccines may not be so obvious in VAERS, a system that is believed to miss many potential side effects — or in the nation’s additional monitoring systems, including the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the CDC’s new phone-based tracking program, v-safe.

‘It’s quite a hodgepodge of different systems of collecting data,’ said Dr. Katherine Yih, a biologist and epidemiologist who specializes in vaccine surveillance at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care …

The Vaccine Safety Datalink, though highly regarded, did not include enough vaccinations within its data from nine hospital systems covering 12 million people to catch the J&J issue, CDC officials said.

And enrollment in v-safe has been less than expected, with about 6 million people enrolled by the end of March, just 6.4% of those who had been vaccinated at that point.

That means that, at a time when about 100 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the U.S. continues to rely on a patchwork network of vaccine monitoring systems that may fail to monitor a large enough swath of the population, experts told KHN …

PRISM, which was repurposed for drug safety … has not been used to track vaccine reactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, said [former director of vaccine safety at the National Vaccine Program Office, Daniel] Salmon, who oversaw safety monitoring for the H1N1 vaccine. ‘With PRISM, we tested it in a crisis and it operated for a decade … I was really surprised when it wasn’t used for COVID-19. That was why we built it’ …

FDA officials said PRISM’s capabilities have been incorporated into BEST, which can examine data from 100 million people. Experts told KHN that it has not been used extensively to monitor post-vaccination effects, but [FDA spokesperson Abby] Capobianco said: ‘We disagree. BEST is built as a state-of-the-art active surveillance system’ …

The concern is that officials have leaned heavily on VAERS, a ‘passive’ system that relies on reports from patients and health care providers to flag issues after vaccination that may or may not be related to the shots. A robust ‘active’ surveillance system can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.”

CDC Ignores Reports of Serious Adverse Effects

Getting back to the CDC, it has also decided it will no longer monitor all reported vaccine breakthrough cases (perhaps because they’re overloaded with reports of side effects?) and will only investigate vaccine breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death.22

Recent complaints from medical professionals raise questions about the CDC’s ability to do even that part of the job.

As reported by Review Journal,23,24 the medical team that treated an 18-year-old girl admitted for blood clots in the brain, low platelet count and other signs of a rare blood clotting disorder shortly after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 injection, “urgently sought guidance” from the CDC, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Johnson & Johnson for ideas on how to best treat their young patient.

Their inquiries and pleas for help were ignored all around. The FDA “basically hung up on me,” Dr. Brian Lipman told Review Journal, adding, “We basically got no help from anyone.” It took more than a week before the CDC even got around to calling back. That’s hardly what you’d expect from the world’s most preeminent infectious disease experts when you’re dealing with an acutely life-threatening case.

Rules for COVID-19 Death Reporting Changes Again

Signs that other countries are also starting to manipulate data in ways that will minimize vaccine failure rates can be seen in the U.K.’s decision to drop its rule that anyone having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 within 28 days of dying are to be counted as a COVID-19 death.

Now that vaccines are out, COVID-19 is only to be listed as the cause of death if the patient actually died from an active case of COVID-19 and nothing else. The hypocrisy is nothing if not predictable at this point. As reported by iNews:25

“The daily tally of coronavirus deaths within 28 days of a positive test is likely to be dropped after scientific advisers warned the Government it will become an increasingly inaccurate measure of the pandemic and vaccine success.

The modelling sub-group of the Government’s scientific advisory committee Sage says that the 28-day definition was useful before widespread vaccination, because deaths in hospital within a month of a positive test were most likely due to COVID-19.

However now that tens of millions of the UK population have received their jabs, deaths from other causes could still show up in the daily data if they have previously tested positive for coronavirus.

A senior Sage source said: ‘If the definition remains the same, these people would be counted as ‘vaccine failures’, whereas the vaccine prevented death from COVID, but they really died from something else.’”

Compensation for COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Is Limited

In closing, it’s also worth remembering that all who are injured by the COVID-19 “vaccines” are left to fend for themselves financially.

Not only did they volunteer to be guinea pigs for an experimental gene therapy — which is what you’re doing if you get these “vaccines” now, as the studies are nearly two years out from being completed and the injections only have emergency use authorization — they’re also financially responsible for any and all medical attention they might need as a result of their generosity.

If you decide to participate in this experiment and are injured, you can try to apply for compensation from the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Act (CICP), under which COVID-19 “vaccines” are a covered countermeasure.26

You cannot apply for and will not receive compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which covers other vaccines, including the flu vaccine. You also cannot sue the vaccine manufacturer, the government, your doctor or anyone else involved in the manufacturing, distributing or administering of COVID-19 vaccines, as they have special liability protections under the PREP Act.

However, be aware that compensation from CICP is very limited, and only applies in cases of serious injury requiring hospitalization and resulting in significant disability and/or death. And, even if you meet the eligibility criteria, it requires you to use up your private health insurance before it kicks in to pay the difference.

You must also file a request for benefits within one year of the date the vaccine was administered, and it is your responsibility to prove your injury was the “direct result of the countermeasure’s administration based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence beyond mere temporal association. In other words, you have to prove what the vaccine developer has yet to ascertain, seeing how you are part of their still-ongoing study. Good luck.

Additional details and hyperlinks to benefit request forms can be found in the Congressional Research Service’s legal sidebar, “Compensation Programs for Potential COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries.”27

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Notes

1, 6 The Vaccine Reaction September 29, 2020

2 WHO.int Diagnostic detection of Wuhan Coronavirus 2019 by real-time RT-PCR, January 13, 2020 (PDF)

3 WHO.int Diagnostic detection of 2019-nCOV by real-time RT-PCR, January 17, 2020 (PDF)

4 Eurosurveillance 2020 Jan 23; 25(3): 2000045

5 FDA.gov CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel Instructions, July 13, 2020 (PDF) Page 35

7 Jon Rappoport’s Blog November 6, 2020

8 YouTube TWiV 641 July 16, 2020

9 Clinical Infectious Diseases September 28, 2020; ciaa1491

10 WHO.int Notice 2020/05 January 20, 2021

11 CDC.gov COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation Guidelines (PDF)

12 European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases April 27, 2020; 39: 1059-1061

13 CDC.gov COVID-19 Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting

14 CDC.gov COVID-19 Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting, How to Interpret These Data

15 The Defender April 30, 2021

16 BMJ 2005;330:433

17 AHRQ December 7, 2007

18 The Vaccine Reaction January 9, 2020

19 Twitter Alex Berenson April 30, 2021

20 Leo Hohmann April 30, 2021

21 Yahoo News May 2, 2021

22 CDC.gov COVID-19 Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting, Identifying and Investigating COVID-19 Breakthrough Cases

23 Review Journal April 21, 2021

24 Review Journal April 21, 2021 (Archived)

25 iNews April 26, 2021

26, 27 Congressional Research Service Legal Sidebar CICP March 22, 2021 (PDF)

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The Biden administration is reportedly blocking the release of a United Nations Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire as Israel continues its devastating assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, killing dozens of Palestinians and injuring hundreds more.

According to Reuters, which cited anonymous diplomats and sources familiar with the Biden administration’s strategy, the United States is “delaying” the U.N. Security Council’s “efforts to issue a public statement on escalating tensions between Israel and the Palestinians because it could be harmful to behind-the-scenes efforts to end the violence.”

One source told the outlet that the U.S. is “actively engaged in diplomacy behind the scenes with all parties to achieve a cease-fire,” but the official did not specify how a U.N. Security Council joint statement—which must be agreed to by consensus—would undermine those talks.

The Guardian confirmed Reuters‘ reporting, noting early Wednesday that the Biden administration “blocked a U.N. Security Council statement calling for a cease-fire” as horrifying footage of the situation on the ground in Gaza continues to emerge.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price repeatedly dodged when asked whether the Biden administration has dropped its opposition to the U.N. Security Council statement, which was first put forth by the Norwegian mission on Monday.

“The provocations that we have seen have resulted in a lamentable, deeply lamentable, loss of life—of Israeli life and of Palestinian life,” said Price, who a day earlier refused to condemn Israel’s killing of children in airstrikes on Gaza. “Our message continues to be one of de-escalation. We do not want to see any actor, be it a government or be it an intergovernmental body, take an action that could serve to escalate rather than de-escalate.”

The U.N. Security Council is set to hold another emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss the joint statement, a version of which reportedly calls on Israel to “cease settlement activities, demolitions, and evictions” in occupied East Jerusalem and elsewhere.

On Tuesday, a U.N. spokesperson said Secretary-General António Guterres is “gravely concerned by the serious escalations in the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel, including the latest escalation in Gaza, which add to the heightened tensions and violence in occupied East Jerusalem.”

“Israeli security forces must exercise maximum restraint and calibrate their use of force,” the spokesperson added. “The indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars towards Israeli population centers is unacceptable. This spiraling escalation must cease immediately.”

As the Biden administration stands in the way of the U.N. Security Council statement, Israel is reportedly refusing to accept a cease-fire offer proposed by the U.N. and Egypt as the Netanyahu regime ramps up its bombardment of Gaza, killing civilians—including children—and destroying residential buildings in what observers are calling blatant war crimes.

Citing an unnamed senior Israeli official, The Jerusalem Post reported early Wednesday that “Israel will not negotiate a cease-fire before Hamas pays a price for its attacks.”

Hamas leaders, for their part, have said they are in contact with Egypt, Qatar, and other parties seeking to deescalate the deadly violence.

“We clarified that the one who started this campaign and aggression is Israel and not us,” Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, said in a speech Tuesday. “They are the ones who murdered and hurt women and children, and Israel is responsible. We are ready for an escalation and ready for calm, on the condition that they end the aggression.”

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, the Biden administration is facing growing pressure from members of Congress to take action to halt Israel’s latest attacks on Gaza, which have thus far killed more than 40 Palestinians and wounded 300—including at least 86 children.

“The United States must call for an immediate cease-fire and an end to provocative and illegal settlement activity,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement Tuesday. “And we must also recommit to working with Israelis and Palestinians to finally end this conflict.”

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) echoed that message, tweeting late Tuesday that the Biden administration “must broker a cease-fire.”

“The violence in Israel and Gaza must end,” said Bowman. “The situation is escalating. People are sheltered, afraid to go to schools or houses of worship. The stories are heartbreaking. Congress and President Biden must act immediately. No one wins with war.”

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

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Israel’s Illusion of Normality Collapses

May 13th, 2021 by Haim Bresheeth-Žabner

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For decades Israelis have basked in the light of success. After fifty years of brutal, illegal occupation and control of the whole of Palestine, they have managed to habituate the world to the realities of Israeli Apartheid. They even started believing that they have managed to get the Palestinians to accept such success. Israel was gearing up to welcome many tourists in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis in Europe and elsewhere, being one of the only countries which have managed to control the virus successfully. Israel may not have a properly elected government for the last 28 months, its Prime Minister is facing criminal charges in court, and the ICC is preparing its case against Israeli war crimes, but none of this stopped Israel from committing more war crimes daily. 

Israelis lived under – or upon – a volcano, believing themselves to be immune from standard legal and societal norms. Their control of over six million Palestinians seems to be safe from intervention, criticism or challenge. They believed the Palestinians have been completely neutralized by their new reproachment with the Gulf dictatorships.

May 2021 has shattered such bizarre illusions.

Having succeeded in controlling the COVID-19 virus, the government returned with energy to the main task, as seen by most political parties in Israel – control of Palestine. The front is ranging across all sectors of society. The main task is not new – freeing the land of its indigenous people, removing Palestinians from their houses, fields, towns and villages – moving towards an Arabrein Israel in the whole of Palestine, through far-reaching racist legislation such as the new Nation State Law. From a de facto racist state, Israel has become an Apartheid state de jure.

This is not a simple project, but Israel has a long history in perfecting the methods of ethnic cleansing – much longer than the history of the state. For over a hundred years the task of clearing Palestine of its people has had the support of the west – the strongest entities on the planet have protected the Zionist project since 1917 and the Balfour Declaration, and continue to do so – without qualifications, legal or moral boundaries or standards of behavior. With such staunch support for illegality Israel is guaranteed success.

The three decades of British control over Palestine have imported methods of dispossession developed in Northern Ireland, employed in the country by the Black and Tans – the volunteer force supporting the British police and army in Ireland during its struggle for independence. The brutality they affected in Ireland was soon to be used in Palestine as many were sent there by Winston Churchill in 1922, to serve under the famously vicious ex-RIC commander, Henry Hugh Tudor, who became the chief of the Palestine Police Force. The racism practiced against Catholics in Ireland, has become even more virulent against the Palestine Arabs. During the Mandate years British support of the settler-Colonial project of Zionism was crucial in building a base – military, social, financial and industrial – for the future Israel. The brutal methods of the PPF and the British Army which supported it during the suppression of the Palestine Arab Rebellion 1936-39 have become the stock-in-trade of the Zionist militias, forerunners of the IDF, only to be further perfected and amplified after 1948. Israel has become “a little loyal Jewish Ulster,” in the Middle East, in the words of Sir Ronald Storrs, first Military Governor of Jerusalem; This Little Ulster proved to be much nastier and more powerful than Ulster ever was.

The war in 1948 was almost successful in offering Zionism most of Palestine – 78% of the country. Many in Israel considered it unfinished business – the rest of the country had to be taken over, they believed, like Ben-Gurion, Israel founding father and first Premier. In a letter to his son, on October 1937, he explains: “My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning.” What could not be achieved in 1948, will have to be done later. And it was.

En route to occupying the whole country in 1967, Israel has changed partners from the decrepit British empire to the French ‘colonial democracy’ ending up in De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. France has not only armed Israel, but also enabled its nuclear military option, pushing the Palestine conflict into new, uncharted territory. Israel paid back by joining the two colonial empires, Britain and France, in an illegal and outrageous attack on Egypt in 1956. This act of naked, unjustified aggression has clarified the long terms aims of Israel. Israel behaved like a foreign settler colony ever since its establishment, and since 1967 this has been the permanent modus operandi of all Israeli governments.

For over five decades, Israel has denied all rights to the Palestinians under its control, has stolen most of their resources – agricultural land, water and forced taxation which serves only the occupier. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, millions of trees were burnt or uprooted, tens of thousands of Palestinians were jailed for trumped-up charges, including thousands of children, and more than 15 thousand innocent Palestinians were killed by the IDF. Ambulances and medical teams were shot at and many were killed in the act of offering medical assistance. Schools and Universities were forced to close for years, and the vulnerable infrastructure of communication, water, health, education, electricity, roads, industry and food production and distribution were destroyed time and again in periodic attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, as well as those of Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Over 250,000 Palestinians were expelled in the aftermath of the war in 1967, and a similar number had left their land since as a result of other war crimes which made their lives insufferable. Human Rights Watch has pointed out the facts of Israel’s decades of occupation in a major report in 2019. Even the UN, so careful not to invoke Israel’s ire, has finally given up the pretense, in a report published recently. It is now official – Israel is an Apartheid state committing periodic and continuous war crimes.

None of these crimes could have taken place without the active support of the US, the European Union, the UK, Canada and Australia, who have provided Israel with a diplomatic umbrella at the UN, and made it impossible to pursue the peaceful option used in the case of Apartheid South Africa – Boycott, Divestment and Sanction against Israeli Apartheid, illegal occupation and war crimes over more than seven decades. You may wish to put BDS into a search engine, only to find that the official sites of such organizations are blocked for users. It does not take a genius to work out who is responsible for such a digital hacking of the campaign.

Every time Israel forces the situation into an explosive juncture, the US and its allies are insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, as if destroying Gaza or Beirut is a form of defense, or as if the denial of rights, and imposing an illegal total blockage is a way of resolving conflict. Not once did the western nations mention the right of Palestinians to defend themselves – apparently, they have no such right, as far as such ‘democratic’ nations are concerned. They also lack human rights of all kinds – the rights for self-determination, for living in peace, owning property, education, health or employment. Palestinians have no political rights, the right to be free of occupation and oppression – all rights invoked on behalf of other nations the west purports to support, such as the Ukraine.

What we are now witnessing is far more serious than the two intifadas and the attacks on Gaza – it is typified by the coming together of Palestinians on both sides of the erased Green Line – erased by Israel. Israel has started a fire it may not be able to extinguish. Palestinians in Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh, Haifa, Nazareth, Acre and of course in Jerusalem and Gaza, are rising against the racist, brutal and unjust settler-colonial society which has destroyed their life for over a century, ever since the start of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Israeli society has never been more conceited, racist and nationalist than in the last decade under Netanyahu. The four years of the Trump administration have greatly contributed to the illusion of total impunity, and the government has increased the tempo of land confiscation, illegal destruction of houses, and settlement building, proving that they intend to squeeze out as many Palestinians out of their country, and make the life of the remaining ones so impossible that they will leave to wherever they may be able to. The process is over a century long, and succeeded in granting Israel total control over the whole of Palestine, so why doubt its further success? Israelis, of left, right and center, do not doubt that they can continue to oppress and suppress Palestinians with impunity.

But now the streets are burning. Palestinians – those with the few rights still conferred on them by Israel, or their brothers and sisters in the ‘occupied territories’ (all of Palestine is occupied) who lack any form of rights, are now acting together against the atrocities of Israeli colonial control. What have they got to lose? Only their lives; and their lives are not safe under Israeli rule, for sure. They have had enough, much more than enough, for many generations, and those who advised them to wait, were false messiahs and snake-oil merchants.

Let us consider the dangers of this new, unprecedented situation. The so-called international community, weak and powerless at the best of times, is now less inclined than ever to move towards a just solution in Palestine, by applying sanctions against Israel. The Arab regimes of all colors are in a crisis of identity, embroiled in colonial wars started by the west – in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and most have signed up to the Trump New World Order deal with Israel, taking themselves out of the conflict and away from any support of the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority – a creature of Israel and an arm of its control –  has cancelled the first elections called since 2006, as we knew they would, under Israeli pressure. One of the ‘Arab’ parties in Israel, Ra’am, has been in talks with both sides of the political divide, prepared to work with either in defiance of the Palestinian public sentiment; This at least had collapsed within days of the Jerusalem attacks, and may lead to a more united Palestinian front. Palestinians have been abandoned by the west, by the Arabs, by Israeli liberals, and by liberals the world over. This realization is dangerous – for Palestinians and Israelis alike; dangerous times call for desperate measures.

We know that Israel has been preparing for many years for a window of political opportunity – a historical juncture which will enable it to vacate Palestine of most of its remaining indigenous population. All governments in the west have proved their fickle credentials on Palestinian rights in the last couple of decades. Israel is safe in presuming international lack of political will to intervene in case of further war crimes. The temptation may prove too much for Netanyahu – the choice between jail and becoming the national hero of racist Israelis through further ethnic cleansing is simple to work out. He will certainly be supported in any attack by his many political rivals, who are vying with him in aggressive utterances. The fire is now well lit, and will consume many innocents. Some Israelis are arguing that he only does this to stay in power, as if this explains it away.

What more is needed for an urgent, principled political intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, forcing Israel into a just peace in the Middle East? What more is required to prevent an endless series of communal massacres, war crimes and forced expulsions? Is this crisis beyond the ken and the will of the world community, tired and beaten as it is by the health crisis? Must we stand aside while Israel ignites the Middle East?

One certainly hopes this is not the case.

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Demand for shark fins and oil has led fishers in southwestern Madagascar to set gill-nets in deeper waters. They are finding — and possibly harming — previously-unknown populations of these West Indian Ocean coelacanths.

The landing of the first living coelacanth off the coast of South Africa made world headlines in 1938. Marine scientists were agog. A truly remarkable “four-legged, living fossil fish” had seemingly returned from the dead.

In the ensuing decades, more of these rare and unusual fish were caught off the coastlines of South Africa, Tanzania, and the Comoros Islands; a different coelacanth species turned up in Indonesian waters.

Living coelacanths are found in undersea canyons at depths between 100 and 500 metres. They belong to an ancient group of fishes whose origins can be traced back 420 million years. They have eight fins, large eyes and a small mouth, and a unique pattern of white spots allowing each fish to be individually identified. They weigh up to 90 kilogrammes and give birth to live young after a gestation period of 36 months.

The Western Indian Ocean species, Latimeria chalumnae, is classified as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, while a similar species found in the seas around Indonesia (L. menadoensis) is classified as Vulnerable.

Old fish caught by new fishery

Beginning in the 1980s, a new commercial market in China for shark fins and oil prompted fishers off the southwest coast of Madagascar to set large-mesh gill-nets known as jarifa in deeper waters: a startling number of coelacanths have been landed as by-catch. A new study in the SA Journal of Science reviews the data for specimens and puts forward an important hypothesis.

Lead author Andrew Cooke said that while a handful of captures had been reported at the local level in Madagascar, the international scientific literature did not reflect the number caught there.

“When we looked into this further, we were astounded [by the numbers caught]… even though there has been no proactive process in Madagascar to monitor or conserve coelacanths,” says Cooke, who is based at the Antananarivo-based marine resources consultancy Resolve sarl, adding that that well over 100 coelacanths may have been caught off the island in recent decades.

For example, one local fisherman (a Mr Tinard) told Minosoa Ravololoharinjara, one of Cooke’s co-authors, that he caught “dozens of coelacanths in a single week” during 2010, while fisherman Tine Hoe Julien was reported to have caught seven coelacanths off Nosy Ve, Sarodrano, and Andanora between May 2010 and July 2011.

Following the field survey, which was funded by Resolve, the paper’s other co-author, Michael Bruton, formally reported several additional captures to the list maintained by the Coelacanth Conservation Committee. The updated list now records 34 catches off Madagascar, including several specimens held privately or in museums. A further 40-50 anecdotal reports were left out.

While sharks have been targeted in the Indian Ocean for more than a century, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy during the 1980s had led to an “explosion” of incidental coelacanth captures in Madagascar and other countries in the western part of the Indian Ocean.

A few dozen captures may not immediately seem significant, but the Western Indian Ocean coelacanth’s is listed as critically endangered. Its population size is still unknown and the increasing frequency of catches is alarming — especially as the true catch rate by jarifa nets could be higher than current official records.

“The jarifa gillnets used to catch sharks are a relatively new and more deadly innovation as they are large and can be set in deep water,” say the researchers, noting that large-mesh nets (15cm or 24cm) are often baited with small fish.

“The introduction of market forces from abroad has often resulted in much greater pressure being placed on a natural resource that was once exploited sustainably for local use, and this appears to be the case in Madagascar. There is little doubt that large mesh jarifa gillnets are now the biggest threat to the survival of coelacanths in Madagascar,” they suggest.

Scientists are concerned that jarifa gill-nets, used to catch sharks, have become a significant threat to coelacanths in parts of Madagascar. Image by Minosoa Ravololoharinjara

Scientists are concerned that jarifa gill-nets, used to catch sharks, have become a significant threat to coelacanths in parts of Madagascar. Image by Minosoa Ravololoharinjara

This is because the nets are set in deep water, generally between 100 m and 300 m, within the preferred habitat range of coelacanths, and, unlike trawl nets, can be deployed in the rugged, rocky environments which coelacanths prefer.

As a result, it is difficult for coelacanths to detect the static nets. Because they also hunt at night and have poor eyesight, their main sense organ (electro-reception) may not be triggered by the thin strands of a gillnet.

A significant number of coelacanths have also turned up in jarifa gillnets off Tanga in Tanzania, where 19 were caught in a six-month period between 2004 and 2005, including six captures in a single night.

Revising the big picture

Based on this updated list of captures, and the extent of suitable habitat for these cave-dwelling fish off Madagascar, Cooke and Bruton hypothesize that Madagascar is likely to the “epicentre” of coelacanth distribution in the Western Indian Ocean and progenitor of a younger Comoros coelacanth population.

A map of St Augustin Bay, southwestern Madagascar, showing the locations of the cluster of coelacanths caught between 1987 and 2019 near the Onilahy canyon. Map by A. Cooke et al.

Bruton, a South Africa-based coelacanth expert and former director of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology, also believes coelacanths may occur around the entire coastline of Madagascar and that this massive island “is likely to harbour the largest populations of coelacanths in the Western Ocean”.

Tony Ribbink, former head of the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme(ACEP) and current chief executive officer of the Sustainable Seas Trust, says this hypothesis needs more research.

“It would be extremely valuable if they also considered a competing hypothesis that the large number of canyons, many of which are very big, deep and extensive, running along the northern Mozambique coast from where the Sofala Banks end northwards to the southern part of Tanzania (just south of Mtwara) offer the most extensive area of suitable habitat for coelacanths,” he told Mongabay.

“This unexplored continental area may well be the epicentre of coelacanth distribution. This area has not been studied, however and, until it is eliminated as a plausible competing hypothesis, the work of the authors will remain hypothetical.”

It would be positive news for the species if coelacanth range and population prove to be larger than had been thought, but Cooke and Bruton are worried about continued pressure of incidental capture by artisanal fishers.

Cooke and his colleagues say an additional but less significant threat is posed by the high scientific interest in the fish “which inevitably commands a price, even in the absence of a true market”.

For example, the presence of the IHSM marine research institute in the town of Toliara, had increased fishers’ awareness of the coelacanth’s significance and value. A separate report published last year reported payments of 150 000–400 000 ariary (40–110 dollars) for coelacanth specimens caught in the Toliara region.

There are also some indications that illegal trafficking of coelacanths may be taking place in Madagascar, such as the discovery of an undeclared coelacanth being hidden on board the factory ship, El Amine, on 20 September 2008.

A month later, the newspaper Les Nouvelles reported that over 300 kg of coelacanths had been captured by El Amine’s jarifa nets. Local fish biologist, Faratiana Ratsifandrihamanana, also reported that she had seen a cartful of dead coelacanths in the yard of the IHSM in April 2012. The four adults and about 5-7 juveniles had been caught by fishers from St Augustin who said they had been deliberately targeted as they could sell them to vazaha (foreigners) at 100 000 ariary per fish. However, staff at IHSM had refused to buy the fish and they were taken away.

A local fisherman from the St Augustin area, photographed with a massive coelacanth that was transported to a fisheries research centre by rickshaw in May 2010. Image: by Thierry Cordenos.

A local fisherman from the St Augustin area, photographed in May 2010 with a massive coelacanth that he brought to a fisheries research centre by rickshaw. Image by Thierry Cordenos.

Other researchers remain sceptical that jarifa nets are having a significant impact on coelacanths. Paubert Tsimanaoraty Mahatante, a marine researcher with the Madagascan government’s Institute of Fisheries and Marine Science (IHSM) said he does not believe that fishermen are deliberately targeting coelacanths for sale.

“Some fishermen from St Augustin used to bring them directly to the institute and ask for high prices. At the beginning we bought them at a high price but now we have about five or seven specimens and we don’t want to buy any more as that would incentivise fishermen.”

He expressed concern that some hotels in southern Madagascar were buying and displaying preserved coelacanth specimens to attract tourists.

Mahatante said he doubted that the gill nets deployed in southern Madagascar go beyond 100m in depth, but if they were deployed deeper than this “it could be a big problem”.

“Catching a coelacanth is totally uncommon and people are in some ways even afraid to catch something that is so uncommon. So I don’t think that coelacanths are being targeted deliberately.”

Cooke and Bruton remain concerned, nevertheless, stating that the coelacanth by-catch fishery is significant as this vulnerable species is unlikely to survive high exploitation due to its rarity, large size, high trophic level in the food pyramid, low dispersal rates, few offspring and high longevity.

They are calling for intensified research into Madagascar’s coelacanths, along with new conservation measures that are sensitive to the needs of local fishing communities.

Cooke says it would not be practical to ban jarifa nets outright as this would lead to considerable hardship and anger, but hopes the authorities can begin to negotiate management solutions – especially in places such as the Onilahy River mouth, where the largest known concentrations of coelacanth have been reported.

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Sources

Cooke, A., Bruton, M., & Ravololoharinjara, M. (2021). Coelacanth discoveries in Madagascar, with recommendations on research and conservation. South African Journal of Science117(3/4). doi:10.17159/sajs.2021/8541

Baker-Médard, M., & Faber, J. (2020). Fins and (Mis)fortunes: Managing shark populations for sustainability and food sovereignty. Marine Policy113, 103805. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103805

Featured image: Coelacanths in a cave off Grand Comore. Image by Hans Fricke.

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On May 5, Reuters reported that 14 EU countries, including Germany and France, proposed the creation of a 5,000-strong European Rapid Reaction Force. According to an unnamed senior EU official, the purpose of this military force is to “help democratic foreign governments needing urgent help.” In other words, the EU wants to demonstrate its status as a “Great Power,” something that can only be achieved through military might, which the European bloc does not have.

The 14 countries are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Greece, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. These countries, with the exception of Cyprus, Czechia and Slovenia, are often considered the “core” states of the EU’s “Old Europe.” Although there are another 13 countries in the EU, they have not been pitched to comprise part of this European military force. Notable exceptions from the proposed European force were the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as Poland – the most hostile countries in the EU against Russia.

The EU, led mostly by Germany, is undoubtedly an economic power, but lacks a force component to become a full-fledged global power center. Although some argue against the necessity of an EU military force because of the existence of NATO, it is recalled that the Transatlantic Alliance is led by the U.S. and cannot be an instrument for the establishment of an independent Europe. Although Germany tacitly supports the idea of ​​an EU army, it was developed primarily by France, who under President Emmanuel Macron is attempting to forge an independent path for Europe. This does not mean that Europe is divorcing from Washington, but it demonstrates an expressed desire of European independence from U.S. domination that has existed over half of the continent since World War II and most of the continent since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However, the fact is that this concept is very difficult to implement for several reasons.

It is difficult for the EU to reconcile the interests of many different countries – such as the Baltic States desire for hostilities against Russia.

Also, there is a large bloc of countries – the so-called post-Soviet “New Europe”- that do not want real European military independence and prefer the continent’s military structures to remain within NATO command. The EU’s core states now recognize that “New Europe” is only interested in serving U.S. interests rather than pan-Europeanism. It is for this reason that the Baltic States and Poland will not be among the founders of the European military force despite supposedly being under threat from Russia.

In fact, this talk of a new European force with the exclusion of Poland and the Baltic States, comes as DEFENDER-Europe 21 drills are being performed on Russia’s borders. Although the majority of NATO is participating in some way or another in the exercises (such as allowing the use of ports and other logistics infrastructure like those in Albania, Croatia, Greece and North Macedonia), the majority of participating states have not sent troops or equipment to the Baltics or Poland where the largest and most aggressive exercises are taking place.

According to Lithuanian Minister of National Defense Arvydas Anušauskas:

“The United States of America has not left Europe. All the more so in the last few years, their presence in Lithuania has been strengthened. And we can clearly see that.”

But what is also clearly seen is that Old Europe is mostly disinterested in hostilities against Russia, hence why the majority of NATO’s European members made the minimum contribution to the DEFENDER-Europe 21 exercises, with the U.S., UK, Poland and Baltic States making the greatest contribution.

However, as the Reuters publication and the meeting of EU defense ministers showed, the idea of ​​a European army is not dying and can become a hindrance to the defenders of transatlantic unity.

Although real European independence from the U.S. will be a long process, the fact that discussions on this are occurring in Brussels during the Biden era shows that the EU’s relationship with Washington is not ideal. It is for this reason that the French are pushing a vision of strategic sovereignty for the bloc and advocates for a Europe that stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. The French are also breaking the decades-long belief that European security is inseparable from the U.S. and NATO.

But, despite these changes in vision and ideology in Europe, the Baltic States and Poland have been deemed untrustworthy to join the path of reconfiguring power structures on the continent. Insistent hostility by Poland the Baltic States makes most other EU members hesitant to join the U.S.-led initiatives to contain Russia. And in this way, we see the irony that the core states of the EU, which mostly corresponds with “Old Europe,” having fresh and new ideas in their vision for the future of the continent, whilst “New Europe” wants to maintain the outdated and redundant American unipolar order.

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