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Slices of the Pie: Mapping Territorial Claims in Antarctica

For the 55% of the world’s population who reside in cities, land is viewed as a precious commodity—every square foot has a value attached to it. As the global population continues to rise toward the eight billion mark, it can seem like humans have laid claim to every available corner of the earth.

While this is mostly true, there is one place on the planet that is vast, empty, and even partially unclaimed: Antarctica.

Today’s map, originally created by the CIA World Factbook, visualizes the active claims on Antarctic territory, as well as the location of many permanent research facilities.

antarctica territorial claims

The History of Antarctic Territorial Claims

In the first half of the 20th Century, a number of countries began to claim wedge-shaped portions of territory on the southernmost continent. Even Nazi Germany was in on the action, claiming a large swath of land which they dubbed New Swabia.

After WWII, the Antarctic Treaty system—which established the legal framework for the management of the continent—began to take shape. In the 1950s, seven countries including Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom claimed territorial sovereignty over portions of Antarctica. A number of other nations, including the U.S. and Japan, were engaged in exploration but hadn’t put forward claims in an official capacity.

Despite the remoteness and inhospitable climate of Antarctica, the idea of claiming such large areas of landmass has proven appealing to countries. Even the smallest claim on the continent is equivalent to the size of Iraq.

A few of the above claims overlap, as is the case on the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out geographically from the rest of the continent. This area is less remote with a milder climate, and is subject to claims by Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom (which governs the nearby Falkland Islands).

Interestingly, there is still a large portion of Antarctica that remains unclaimed today. Just east of the Ross Ice Shelf lies Marie Byrd Land, a vast, remote territory that is by far the largest unclaimed land area on Earth.

While Antarctica has no official government, it is administered through yearly meetings known as the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings. These meetings involve a number of stakeholders, from member nations to observer organizations.

Frontage Theory: Another Way to Slice it

Of course, critics could argue that current claims are arbitrary, and that there is a more equitable way to partition land in Antarctica. That’s where Frontage Theory comes in.

Originally proposed by Brazilian geopolitical scholar Therezinha de Castro, the theory argues that sectors of the Antarctic continent should be distributed according to meridians (the imaginary lines running north–south around the earth). Wherever straight lines running north hit landfall, that country would have sovereignty over the corresponding “wedge” of Antarctic territory.

The map below shows roughly how territorial claims would look under that scenario.

hypothetical Antarctica frontage territories claims

While Brazil has obvious reasons for favoring this solution, it’s also a thought experiment that produces an interesting mix of territorial claims. Not only do nearby countries in Africa and South America get a piece of the pie, but places like Canada and Greenland would end up with territory adjacent to both of the planet’s poles.

Leaving the Pie Unsliced

Thanks to the Antarctic Treaty, there is no mining taking place in Antarctica, and thus far no country has set up a permanent settlement on the continent. Aside from scattered research stations and a few thousand researchers, claims in the region have a limited impact.

For the near future at least, the slicing of the Antarctic pie is only hypothetical.

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The simple solution to “winning the competition of the future” with China is for the US to stop perceiving relations in a zero-sum manner and instead embrace the paradigm shift of regarding them in a win-win cooperative manner.

US President Joe Biden revealed earlier this month during his speech at the Pentagon that the Defense Department has assembled a new task force on China. According to the American leader, recommendations will be made within the next few months “on key priorities and decision points so that we can chart a strong path forward on China-related matters.” He then added, “That’s how we’ll meet the China challenge and ensure the American people win the competition of the future.” In order for this task to succeed, however, it must arrive at a very important conclusion that’ll influence all of its forthcoming policy decisions.

The simple solution to “winning the competition of the future” with China is for the US to stop perceiving relations in a zero-sum manner and instead embrace the paradigm shift of regarding them in a win-win cooperative manner.

China and the US aren’t destined to compete. Their current tensions are the result of self-interested unilateral actions undertaken by former President Trump in order to distract from domestic problems and out of desperation to cling to America’s fading unipolar hegemony. The past four years have proven that the competitive mindset is destined to fail and that a paradigm change in thought is urgently needed for everyone’s best interests.

This isn’t rhetoric either but could take tangible form in the following manner. Upon reconsidering the wisdom of the unquestionably failed paradigm of competition, the Defense Department might be inspired to realize that America’s national interests are best served through cooperation. The first example of this in practice would be respecting China’s red lines by declining to interfere in its internal affairs in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang. China doesn’t carry out any analogous actions against America so the US’ existing policy is purely one-sided and therefore aggressive. It’s time to reverse this negative trend in order to get relations back on track, which can only happen if the US corrects its false perception of China as a competitor and sees it as a partner.

Extrapolating on this thought exercise with the well-intended purpose of showing the way forward, the US could build upon the proposed policy by eschewing its former divide-and-rule strategy in Asia. America failed to turn India against China as proven by the recent synchronized disengagement agreement along the vast Line of Actual Control (LAC) between their two countries. So too has America failed to turn Southeast Asian nations against China through its meddling in the South China Sea. If the US still wants to “compete” with China, it can do so through economic means but only so long as this is on a fair playing field without sanctions, tariffs, and other restrictive measures. That form of competition would be to everyone’s benefit.

Along that line of thought, the US should de-securitize its understanding of technology. It’s counterproductive to perceive of technological developments in a paranoid fashion by imagining that China’s cutting-edge advances are part of a secret plot to steal information and destabilize the world. This makes its restrictions on Huawei and other Chinese tech companies ridiculous. While some nefarious actors could indeed abuse technology just like they can abuse anything else as long as they have the negative intent to do so, China as a state has no such motivations. American companies should freely compete with their Chinese counterparts in order to encourage one another to continue making rapid technological developments in humanity’s interests.

With an eye on technological and trade cooperation instead of military competition and fearmongering, the US might then decide to redeploy some of its troops from the Asia-Pacific back to the American homeland, perhaps to help with their new government’s campaign against domestic extremism. They could also be put to better use contributing to UN peacekeeping operations instead of raising regional tensions in the South China Sea. The American military might also decide to focus more on training for disaster responses, including those that are worsened by climate change, as well as responding to COVID-19 and future pandemics. With the proper paradigm change of thought, a whole new range of opportunities emerges for US and its military.

Of course, this analysis is admittedly optimistic and it’s taken for granted that not all of the proposals will be implemented, if any, but now’s the time to think outside of the box as the US officially reviews the whole gamut of its China strategy. The world of 2021 isn’t anything like it was 12 months ago, let alone four years ago when former President Trump first entered office. Everything has changed so drastically, so it follows that the US’ military strategy towards China should aso change accordingly with the circumstances. Now’s the perfect moment for the US to correct its prior mistakes and make up for lost time. The onus is entirely on President Biden, and history will judge him just like it did his predecessor depending on the fateful choices that he makes.

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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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The ZeroCovid Movement: Cult Dressed as Science

February 23rd, 2021 by Jenin Younes

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This past year has given rise to some strange and novel methods of disease containment, including lockdowns and mask mandates. It is unsurprising that the natural next step in this progression has been the development of a movement known as “ZeroCovid.” Its growing influence is, perhaps, predictable given that for nearly a year we have been inundated by the views of so-called experts seeking to legitimize their myopic worldview that public health is determined solely by prevention of Covid-19. 

Rather than acknowledge to a weary public that their approach has been a failure, they are doubling down and attempting to save their reputations by claiming that the problem is not that lockdowns do not work, but that they have not gone far enough.

There is, apparently, some diversity of opinion among the ZeroCovid crowd as to whether the term is to be interpreted literally, as some of its most impassioned and vocal proponents argue, or whether it simply means a more extreme version of the ideology that has dominated societies around the globe for the past year: the belief that suppressing the coronavirus is a singularly important goal, to replace all others and to be pursued with no or only minimal consideration of the effects of doing so.

ZeroCovid promoters appear to agree that much stricter border controls, lockdowns, and mask mandates are needed than exist in most nations today. Sam Bowman, one of the most prominent ZeroCoviders, claims for instance that the only way to address the coronavirus problem is with “lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, mass testing, contact tracing, and masks.” Likewise, former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair’s think-tank has stated that the only way to avoid another lockdown is to bring coronavirus cases to zero. China, Australia and New Zealand are portrayed as successes by ZeroCovid proponents, and prove that suffering now brings with it the promise of eventual freedom.

While marketing themselves as theoretically opposed to lockdowns, ZeroCovid adherents actually aspire to implement a totalitarian-style state, which we are supposed to believe will exist only temporarily. For example, Devi Sridhar, one of the movement’s most public faces in the United Kingdom, has claimed that the only way out of endless lockdown is a “crude, harsh, catastrophic lockdown” now, the first phase. Given that the third phase of Sridhar’s plan entails an “East Asian and Pacific model of elimination” that prohibits travel abroad, I can only imagine precisely what sort of totalitarian nightmare Sridhar envisions during phase one.

Those who follow this philosophy fail to recognize the glaringly obvious truth that suppression tactics have not succeeded because they run contrary to human nature (as well as basic cell biology) and entail severe deprivations of human rights and liberties. They also do not acknowledge the fact that if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) managed to eliminate the coronavirus (a questionable assumption given the CCP’s tenuous relationship with the truth), it did so using tactics that prima facie constitute human rights violations.

Even Australia and New Zealand, which before 2020 were considered beacons of liberal democracy, have recently been the subject of investigations or inquiries by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The ZeroCovid proponents do not address the reality that China, Australia, and New Zealand have continually had to implement lockdown policies in response to new cases arising even after declaring victory over the virus, and that the latter two are island nations able to effectuate border control in a way that cannot possibly be applied to nations that are geographically proximate to others and in which the virus has already become endemic.

The “Covid Community Action Summit,” a conference held at the end of January, and led and attended by many of ZeroCovid’s main players – needless to say, over Zoom – offers a glimpse into the warped worldview that pervades the ideology.

Image on the right: Featured Speaker Yaneer Bar-Yam preparing for his talk in the Barbican Hall on Day 2 of Wikimania 2014. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Yaneer Bar-Yam preparing for his talk on Day 2 of Wikimania 2014.jpg

The architect of ZeroCovid, and the first speaker at the Summit, was Yaneer Bar-Yam, an American scientist who specializes in complex systems and quantitative analysis of pandemics and founded the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI). The participants came from a variety of backgrounds: in addition to doctors and scientists, political consultants and communications specialists were in attendance. Many presenters had business interests in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, and those from the United States tended to be affiliated with Democratic Party politics and campaigns.

One of the most disturbing presentations was delivered by Blake Elias, a researcher at the NECSI who works directly under Bar-Yam. Given Elias’s position, it is fair to assume that his views, as articulated at the Summit, reflected those held by its organizer.

Elias, like numerous other “ZeroCovid” advocates, believes that the “lives versus economy” framing of the problem is incorrect (notably, many lockdown opponents also consider this the wrong lens through which to view the issue, but for different reasons; namely that the economy and people’s lives are inextricably intertwined and lockdown policies do not take into account crucial considerations such as mental health and civil liberties).

Valuing each life–somewhat arbitrarily and without regards to life expectancy–at $10 million, Elias plugged a bunch of numbers into a machine and voila! came up with irrefutable proof that locking down hard and fast is less costly than failing to do so. Elias earnestly stated that his airtight equation demonstrates that if you are against elimination (ZeroCovid) the only conceivable reason could be that you dispute one of his premises, so you therefore believe one of the following: the cost of infections is lower than it is; the cost of lockdowns is more; hospital capacity is greater; the importation rate is higher; or complete vaccination is achievable in a shorter time frame.

At no time did he mention psychology, human rights, or civil liberties. If Elias had the slightest understanding of these concepts, he did an exceptional job of hiding it.

Michelle Lukezic and Eric Nixon, like Elias, gave a presentation akin to what I imagine it would be like to watch aliens discuss human psychology and behavior. Presumably a couple, Lukezic and Nixon founded a company called MakeGoodTogether, and believe that the coronavirus problem boils down to a lack of individual discipline and accountability. They acknowledged that the extreme social distancing they touted as the answer to the world’s woes is contrary to our nature, but insisted that we simply must try harder.

We could eradicate coronavirus, they solemnly instructed us, if only we would insist upon declining social invitations, and suggested that people post pledges on social media to that effect. They apparently spent little time considering the plight of essential workers whose employment does not allow them the luxury of distancing, apart from a comedic description of the psychic discomfort they experienced when the mask of a workman in their home slipped down his face. Lukezic was very proud of Nixon for refusing to shake the man’s hand upon his departure. I had to double-check the link a couple of times to make sure I had not inadvertently stumbled upon a Saturday Night Live episode.

Another noteworthy contributor to the ZeroCovid Summit was Michael Baker, the architect of New Zealand’s coronavirus strategy. Baker insisted that “following the science” indisputably leads to the ZeroCovid strategy, as though science alone informs policy. He made several stunning admissions, among which are that containment should also be the strategy for influenza, and that the coronavirus pandemic has given us the opportunity to reset in order to address inequities in society and threats posed by climate change. In other words, Baker does not foresee a return to normal life.

As demonstrated by its presenters at the Summit, ZeroCovid is the unfortunate end result of the inexplicable belief held by too many people that it makes sense to fixate upon one problem to the exclusion of all others. No one at the Summit, or in any other context for that matter, has ever made a convincing case for elevating the coronavirus pandemic above all other considerations. There is a reason for this: the facts and logic all point in the opposite direction.

An argument could certainly be made that a virus or other threat calculated to wipe out humanity or a significant portion of it, across age ranges, warrants exclusive focus on that threat for its duration. As I and others have written before, the coronavirus simply does not constitute such a danger. We now have a year of data from which to conclude beyond all doubt that exposure to the virus only poses a significant risk, beyond those we are accustomed to taking in everyday life, to the very old. The overwhelming majority of those infected with the virus suffer not at all, or minimally, and recover within days or weeks. This does not mean that the problem should be ignored, but rather that it should be addressed utilizing the same methodology with which we approach all public health matters: by taking into account the effects of the policies enacted in response to them.

ZeroCovid adherents are not qualitatively different from the epidemiologists and politicians who have advocated for and imposed lockdowns and mask mandates across the globe. They all believe that they can force billions of people to behave, for an indefinite time period, in ways that are contrary to our nature and deleterious to our well-being. They see nothing wrong with assuming control over every facet of our lives.

They are maniacally focused upon theories and models, and uninterested in what works in practice. They have no conception of human liberty or dignity. Rather than recognize that lockdowns, forced human separation, and masks are ineffective at quelling the spread of the coronavirus, while carrying enormous costs, not least among them the erasure of liberal democracy, the most fervent adherents to this ideology believe that the answer is more, and harder. That means deprivation of our rights and liberties, and denial of our basic human needs, until the coronavirus is eradicated from the globe. If they get their way, that may well be until the end of time.

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Jenin Younes is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law.

Jenin currently works as an appellate public defender in New York City.

She enjoys running, restaurants, and reading in her free time.

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Biden to Escalate War on Russia by Other Means?

February 23rd, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

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In early February, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said US officials “do not need” pretexts to sanction Russia.

“They will always find and invent them.” When imposed, Moscow will respond appropriately, not aggressively the way the US and West operate.

“Taking well-considered and not aggressive action is always more useful and effective,” Zakharova explained.

Retaliation (against anti-Russian sanctions) must certainly follow.”

“If no symmetric or proportionate action is taken, where the United States crosses a red line, it will feel absolute impunity.”

It’ll encourage continued hostile actions.

On Monday, Blinken’s spokesman Price said the following:

His boss “welcome(s) the EU’s decision to impose sanctions against Russia under the human rights sanctions regime in response to actions taken against Aleksey Navalny and his supporters (sic).”

He stopped short of explaining what Politico reported on Monday, saying:

The Biden regime “is preparing to respond to Russia’s poisoning (sic) and jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and is expected to coordinate a sanctions rollout with European allies in the coming weeks, according to” anonymous sources, adding:

An unnamed “senior” regime official was quoted saying “we are considering available policy options.”

“Suffice it to say we won’t stand by idly in the face of these human rights abuses (sic).”

Fact: No Russian poisoning of Navalny occurred, no human rights abuses by Moscow.

Fact: Biden regime claims otherwise are invented because legitimate ones don’t exist.

Biden was installed as a figurehead front man for diabolical US deep state interests at home and abroad.

In short order, he breached virtually every campaign promise made.

It’s further proof that US and other Western politicians can never be trusted, why dealing with them achieves nothing positive.

Domestically, Biden and hardliners around him are waging all-out war on ordinary Americans instead of serving them.

He and media press agents continue a mass deception campaign to get ordinary Americans jabbed with hazardous toxins that don’t protect against flu-renamed covid and risk serious health issues or death if taken as directed.

Abroad, he’s escalating war on Russia by other means, doing much the same thing against China, and refuses to negotiate with Iran in good faith on the JCPOA and related issues.

Politico’s propaganda piece was likely based on deep state talking points.

It noted that Biden regime sanctions on Russia will be based on the Russophobic Magnitsky Act (2012). the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act (1991), and Executive Order 13382.

The latter freezes assets and imposes other penalties on alleged proliferators of WMDs.

Russia will retaliate against unlawful sanctions if imposed by the US and EU.

On Saturday, a Moscow City Court said the following:

“To change the ruling of Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court: under article 72 of the Russian Criminal Code, the time Navalny spent under house arrest from 30 December 2014, to 17 February 2015, should be counted as part of the prison term, with one day under house arrest counted as one day of imprisonment.”

“The rest of the order remains unchanged.”

As sentenced, he’ll spend 2.8 years behind bars.

Unlawful US/EU sanctions against Russia won’t change a thing.

Russia will respond in its own way at a time of its choosing.

Dismal relations with the West most likely will deteriorate further.

Chances of improving things are virtually nil.

What’s going on has nothing to do stated reasons by the West.

It’s all about Russia’s sovereign independence, free from US control.

US-led Western war on the country is because its ruling authorities won’t sell their souls to a higher power in Washington, Brussels or anywhere else.

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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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Much has been written on this topic and it would be difficult to summarize it all in one short article. Policies differ from place to place and so is social dynamic. I have been following the “pandemic”, the stats, the restrictions, the related requirements, and the official policies in several countries but here I would like to focus on Canada and the province of Ontario.

In Ontario, the pandemic crisis is managed by the Liberal federal government and the Conservative provincial government. Unfortunately, there is little, if any, difference between these governments, when it comes to the “pandemic” policies. New Democrats don’t stay far behind the two. All three are chirping in the same key. I am aware of some individual MPs and MPPs, as well as some specialists in related fields, who privately are critical of the official narrative but are afraid of political and professional consequences, if they take a stand publicly.

There are, of course, exceptions – independent Ontario MPP Randy Hillier who represents the riding of Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston, constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati of Toronto, as well as a few courageous scientists and doctors who voice their own opinions in the highly censored debate on this topic. I agree with the opinion  that our Prime Minister has “no substance”. I believe that he is driven by a mixture of globalist and leftist ideologies, and steered “from behind”. It seems that our Ontario Premier has also surrendered his leadership and is allowing unelected lobbies to control public policies.

This picture is supplemented by a highly coordinated choir of mainstream media that present one-sided narrative and seem to specialize in fear mongering. Powerful interest groups are using the “pandemic” as a vehicle to increase their wealth and implement other political, economic, and social agendas – the globalization, the one-world government, the New Normal, the Great Reset, the transfer of wealth, the elimination of middle class, the elimination of cash and cash transactions, the implementation of totalitarian surveillance and  control over the entire society, and the depopulation. Citizens are divided – some skeptical and angry, others disoriented and scared. Everybody is tired and waiting for the return of the old and familiar “normal”. Everybody, except for the media and some politicians who keep discovering new obstacles, new mutants,  and new “waves”.

Official stats and the reality are incompatible. The numbers do not justify the “pandemic” status and include cases of death “with Covid”. They also include deaths caused by other medical conditions. For example, a victim of a motorcycle accident or a person who was hit by a bus, whose PCR test showed dead fragments of coronavirus RNA remaining after a flu they had had two years earlier, will be included in statistics as Covid-19 deaths. The same cause of death will be included in  death certificates of people whose PCR tests returned false positive results.

The City of Hamilton Status of Covid-19 cases webpage includes the following criteria:

*Total cases include both confirmed and probable cases.

**This measure refers to the number of COVID-19 cases who died. Deaths are included whether or not COVID-19 was determined to be a contributing or underlying cause of death.

***Other cases represent those which were unable to be located despite multiple efforts by Hamilton Public Health Services or were monitored by another health authority.

In addition to the above “criteria”, the Covid-19 statistics (cases and deaths) are based on the results of the highly unreliable RT-PCR test. They have not been corrected, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) had recently admitted that the test was giving a large number of false positives due to a wrong procedure being used (excessive number of amplification cycles / Ct threshold). It seems that the government is not correcting the wrong data because it would create a necessity to lift the lockdowns, restrictions, and other “pandemic” measures. This raises legitimate questions about the real goal of the official policies related to Covid-19.

After this long introduction, I am going to narrow this article to several legal aspects of the so called “pandemic” and the related official policies:

Individual Human Rights

Individual rights are clearly outlined by a few documents of the United Nations, which hold the status of international law. Some are also outlined by Canadian laws. Although international law does not take precedence over national laws, countries that ratify international agreements assume responsibility and express obligation (often included in the language of these agreements) to include them in their legal systems and apply them in everyday practice.

Following, are some of the laws that apply to the restrictions and policies introduced by Canadian and Ontario governments in order “to protect public health by taking comprehensive measures to prevent the introduction and spread of communicable diseases.” – (Quarantine Act, 2005). A careful assessment and evaluation need to be conducted with respect to the potential illegality of some of the pandemic measures forced by the governments on Canadian citizens and Canadian businesses.

Charter of the United Nations:

Art. 55 – With a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, the United Nations shall promote: /…/ c) universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Art. 3 – Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Art. 5 – No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Art. 9 – No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Art. 12 – No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Art. 13 – (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residencewithin the borders of each state.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Art. 17 – (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Art. 18 – Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Art. 20 – (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

Art. 26 – (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall begiven to their children.

Art. 27 – (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Art. 28 – Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Art. 30 – Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

Art. 4 – 1 . In time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations under the present Covenant to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with their other obligations under international law and do not involve discrimination solely on the ground of race, colour, sex, language, religion or social origin.

2. No derogation from articles 6, 7, 8 (paragraphs 1 and 2), 11, 15, 16 and 18 may be made under this provision.

Art. 6 – 1. Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life. /…/

3. When deprivation of life constitutes the crime of genocide, it is understood that nothing in this article shall authorize any State Party to the present Covenant to derogate in any way from any obligation assumed under the provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Art. 7 – No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.

Art. 12 – 1. Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence.

2. Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.

3. The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those which are provided by law, are necessary to protect national security, public order (ordre public), public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present Covenant.

4. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.

Art. 17 – 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference withhis privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.

2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Art. 18 – 1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.

3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Art. 19 – 1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:

(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;

(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

Art. 21 – The right of peaceful assembly shall be recognized. No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of this right other than those imposed in conformity with the law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Art. 26 – All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:

Art. 2 – 1. Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures.

2. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to guarantee that the rights enunciated in the present Covenant will be exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Art. 6 – 1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right.

2. The steps to be taken by a State Party to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include technical and vocational guidance and training programmes, policies and techniques to achieve steady economic, social and cultural development and full and productive employment under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms to the individual.

Art. 12 – 1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for: /…/

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

Art. 13 – 1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to education.

2. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize that, with a view to achieving the full realization of this right:

(a) Primary education shall be compulsory and available free to all;

(b) Secondary education in its different forms, including technical and vocational secondary education, shall be made generally available and accessible to all by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education;

(c) Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education; /…/

Art. 15 – 1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone:

(a) To take part in cultural life;

Art. 28 – The provisions of the present Covenant shall extend to all parts of federal States without any limitations or exceptions.

UNICEF Convention on the Right of the Child:

Art. 28 – 1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:

(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;

(b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need;

(c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means; /…/

(e) Take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop-out rates.

2. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity and in conformity with the present Convention. /…/

Art. 29 – 1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

(a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;

(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations; /…/

2. No part of the present article or article 28 shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principle set forth in paragraph 1 of the present article /…/

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, (Constitution Act, 1982, Part 1)

Sec. 2Fundamental Freedoms

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly.

Sec. 6 – Mobility of Citizens, Rights to move and gain livelihood

(1) Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada;

(2) Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right

(a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and

(b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.

Limitation: The rights specified in subsection (2) are subject to

(a) any laws or practices of general application in force in a province other than those that discriminate among persons primarily on the basis of province of present or previous residence;

Sec. 7 – Life, liberty and security of person

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

Sec. 9 – Life, liberty and security of person

Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.

Sec. 10 – Arrest or detention

Everyone has the right on arrest or detention

(c) to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.

Sec. 12 – Treatment or punishment

Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Sec. 15 – Equality before and under law, equal protection and benefit of law

(1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Sec. 24 – Enforcement of guaranteed rights and freedoms

(1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.

Sec. 31 – Legislative powers not extended

Nothing in this Charter extends the legislative powers of any body or authority.

Sec. 32 – Application of Charter

(1) This Charter applies

(a) to the Parliament and government of Canada in respect of all matters within the authority of Parliament including all matters relating to the Yukon Territory and Northwest Territories; and

(b) to the legislature and government of each province in respect of all matters within the authority of the legislature of each province

Sec. 36 – Commitment to promote equal opportunities

(1) Without altering the legislative authority of Parliament or of the provincial legislatures, or the rights of any of them with respect to the exercise of their legislative authority, Parliament and the legislatures, together with the government of Canada and the provincial governments, are committed to

(a) promoting equal opportunities for the well-being of Canadians;

(b) furthering economic development to reduce disparity in opportunities; and

(c) providing essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians.

Exceptions

Some of the above rights are subject to certain exceptions and limitations. For example, certain rights “may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.” In the context of limitations and measures that are implemented under the umbrella of the pandemic in order to protect public safety, public health and the fundamental rights and freedoms of others, it seems essential that the credibility of the pandemic is established and that the measures imposed by the state and local authorities are healthy and respectful of fundamental human rights and inherent human dignity. In my opinion, and in the opinion of many others, these criteria are not being met or clearly established.

Limitations of techniques used to screen people

The Quarantine Act (S.C. 2005, c. 20):

4. Purpose – The purpose of this Act is to protect public health by taking comprehensive measures to prevent the introduction and spread of communicable diseases.

(1) Designating analysts and certain officers – The Minister may designate qualified persons, or classes of qualified persons, as analysts, screening officers or environmental health officers.

(1) Screening technology – Any qualified person authorized by the Minister may, to determine whether a traveller has a communicable disease or symptoms of one, use any screening technology authorized by the Minister that does not involve the entry into the traveller’s body of any instrument or other foreign body.

The Canadian Quarantine Act serves the same purpose as the restrictions and measures introduced by the governments to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, namely, to protect public health by taking comprehensive measures to prevent the introduction and spread of communicable diseases. It seems only reasonable to conclude that the measures applied by our governments to combat the Covid-19 pandemic are (or ought to be) subject to the same limitations as those listed in Point 14 (1) of the Quarantine Act. The use any screening technology authorized by the Minister must not involve the entry into the tested person’s body of any instrument or other foreign body. This limitation and restriction is not being observed in screening with the RT-PCR test.

The collection of cells from the back of the pharynx, approached through the nose or mouth, must be performed by a specialized and trained caregiver. It is NOT PAINLESS! This sample may cause bleeding, damage to the pharyngeal (surface) mucous membrane, and/or the nasal mucous membrane if approached through the nose. [Source]

This is a risky technique, as it may cause injury. I was tested with the RT-PCR technology twice. After the second test, my nasal mucous membrane was injured and I was bleeding from my nose for three days. The healing was probably prolonged by the blood thinner injections that I was receiving at the hospital to lower the risk of a heart failure.

Regardless of the risks involved, the RT-PCR test should not be authorized (or mandatory), because it involves the entry and penetration of the tested person’s body with the swab – in order to collect the sample. By extension, injection of a vaccine also constitutes entry into the person’s body of an instrument and other foreign body (the actual mRNA “soup”). Vaccines serve the same purpose as quarantine, namely, they protect public health and prevent the spread of communicable diseases. Therefore, they should be subject to the same limitations.

Individual Rights vs. Collective Rights

Limitations of individual human rights and implementation of measures that, in some cases, are unhealthy and degrading, (for example the requirement to wear masks), are being justified by necessity to protect collective public safety, health, and morals. Measures applied by the governments and corporations suggest that collective safety is more important than individual rights and freedoms. However, in case of a pandemic, this priority is not consistent with international law:

UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights:

Article 3 – Human dignity and human rights

1. Human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms are to be fully respected.

2. The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.

I could not say it better.

Personal Responsibility and Liability

The Nuremberg Code:

The Nuremberg Code applies to medical experiments. It stipulates that, among other requirements,

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

This means that the person(s) involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

According to many experts in the field of medicine, immunology and virology, the mRNA vaccine that is being distributed and injected into unsuspecting persons around the world, constitutes a medical experiment. It currently is in the fourth stage of testing on humans, it has not been tested on animals, it has not been tested for a sufficient period of time to determine medium and long-term effects, it is a new technology. Some experts stress that it is not a vaccine but a synthetic pathogen designed to trigger our cells to mass-produce viruses, it has already resulted in negative and adverse outcomes, for example, anaphylactic reaction, cytokine storm and over-reaction of auto-immune system – Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) – Pulmonary Immunopathology on Challenge with the SARS Virus, illness and/or death. Some scientists warn about the risk of pathogenic priming. The experimental character of vaccination, that is currently under way, is greatly amplified by the requested and granted immunity for the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing these vaccines and the politicians in charge of combating the C-19 pandemic. If these vaccines were safe, such immunity would not be needed.

The Nuremberg Principles:

Principle I – Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

Principle II – The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III – The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as a Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV – The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle VI – The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law: /…/
(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII – Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

Personal responsibility before international law for committing such crimes exists, regardless of immunity granted under internal laws. The question to be determined is, whether genocide or murder caused by vaccines, lockdowns, restrictions, and other mandatory measures, as well as by paralysis of the health care system due to wrong decisions made by the governments and by related complicity of the media, constitute crimes against humanity. The requirement that such crimes must be “carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime” could be reasonably recognized, if two conditions are met:

1) The persons involved were or should have been aware of such safety concerns and possibility of negative outcomes;

2) The persons involved, by their decisions or omissions, with help of their propaganda, their policies, and their coercive apparatus, have contributed to such crimes.

In such cases, it could be argued that they had consciously and deliberately planned and/or conducted a war against their civilian populations, especially, if experimental biological or chemical agents were used in the commission of such crimes.

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This article was originally published on My Dundas Valley.

Lech Biegalski, lives in Hamilton, Ontario, a retired Ontario teacher (OCT), former member of the National Committee and National Intervention Committee, former activist and chairman of Region Pojezierze of the Polish Independent and Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” (1980 – 1983). Resident of Canada since 1984, Canadian citizen since 1987. Editor and publisher of expired websites (March to War, Canada Watch, Notebook) and two current blogs (My Dundas Valley and Region Pojezierze)

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***

Warnings by leading climate scientists regarding the high sensitivity of the atmosphere in response to abrupt compositional changes, such as near-doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations, are now manifest: According to Wallace Broecker, (the “father” of climate science) “The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts to even small nudges, and humans have already given the climate a substantial nudge”. As stated by James Zachos, “The Paleocene hot spell should serve as a reminder of the unpredictable nature of climate”.

As snowstorms the Beast from the East (2018) and Storm Darcy (2021) sweep the northern continents, reaching Britain and as far south as Texas and Greece, those who still question the reality and consequences of global climate change, including in governments, may rejoice as if they have a new argument to question global warming.

However, as indicated by the science, these fronts result from a weakened circum-Arctic jet stream boundary due to decreased temperature polarity between the Arctic Circle and high latitude zones in Europe, Russia and North America. The reduced contrast allows migration of masses of cold Arctic air southward and of tropical air northward across the weakened jet stream boundary, indicating a fundamental shift in the global climate pattern (Figure 1).

Figure 1. (A and B) Extensions from the Arctic polar zone into North America and Eutope; (C) weakening of the Arctic jet stream boundary (NOAA)

The weakening of the Arctic boundary is a part of the overall shift of climate zones toward the poles in both hemispheres, documented in detail in Europe (Figure 2). Transient cooling pauses are projected as a result of the flow of cold ice meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica into the oceans, leading to stadial cooling intervals.

Figure 2. Migration of climate zones in Europe during 1981-2010 and under +2°C. Faint pink areas represent advanced warming. (A, left) Agro‐climate zonation of Europe based on growing season length (GSL) and active temperature sum (ATS) obtained as an ensemble median from five different climate model simulations during the baseline period (1981–2010). (B, right) Ensemble median spatial patterns of agro-climate zones migration under 2°C global surface warming according to model RCP8.5. Gray areas represent regions where no change with respect to the baseline period is simulated.

A combination of ice sheet melting and the flow of melt water into the oceans on the one hand, and ongoing warming of tropical continental zones on the other hand, are likely to lead to the following:

  • Storminess due to collisions of cold and warm air masses;
  • As the ice sheets continue to melt, the cold meltwater enhances lower temperatures at shallow ocean levels, as modelled by Hansen et al. (2016) and Bonselaer et al (2018) (Figure 3A), as contrasted with warming at deeper ocean levels over large parts of the oceans. This transiently counterbalances the effects of global warming over the continents arising from the greenhouse effect;
  • The above processes herald chaotic climate effects, in particular along continental margins and island chains.

Figure 3. A. 2080–2100 meltwater-induced sea-air temperature anomalies relative to the standard RCP8.5 ensemble (Bronselaer et al., 2018), indicating marked cooling of parts of the southern oceans. Hatching indicates where the anomalies are not significant at the 95% level; B. Negative temperature anomalies through the 21st-22nd centuries signifying stadial cooling intervals (Hansen et al., 2016); C. A model of Global warming for 2096, where cold ice melt water occupies large parts of the North Atlantic and circum-Antarctica, raises sea level by about 5 meters and decreases global temperature by -0.33°C (Hansen et al., 2016).

The extreme rate at which the global warming and the shift of climate zones are taking place virtually within a period less than one generation-long, faster than major past warming events such as at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary 56 million years ago, renders the term “climate change” hardly appropriate, since what we are looking at is a sudden and abrupt event.

According to Giger (2021)

“Tipping points could fundamentally disrupt the planet and produce abrupt change in the climate. A mass methane release could put us on an irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.”

Computer modelling does not always capture the sensitivity, complexity and feedbacks of the atmosphere-ocean-land system as observed from paleoclimate studies. Many models portray gradual or linear responses of the atmosphere to compositional variations, overlooking self-amplifying effects and transient reversals associated with melting of the ice sheets and cooling of the oceans by the flow of ice melt.

According to Bonselaer et al. (2018)

“The climate metrics that we consider lead to substantially different future climate projections when accounting for the effects of meltwater from the Antarctic Ice Sheet. These differences have consequences for climate policy and should be taken into account in future IPCC reports, given recent observational evidence of increasing mass loss from Antarctica” and “However, the effect on climate is not included (by the IPCC) and will not be in the upcoming CMIP6 experimental design. Similarly, the effects of meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet have so far not been considered, and could lead to further changes in simulated future climate”. Depending on future warming the effect of Antarctic ice meltwater may extend further, possibly becoming global.

By contrast to ocean cooling, further to NASA’s reported mean land-ocean temperature rise of +1.18°C in March 2020 above pre-industrial temperatures, relative to the 1951-1980 baseline, large parts of the continents, including central Asia, west Africa eastern South America and Australia are warming toward mean temperatures of +2°C and higher. The contrast between cooling of extensive ocean regions and warming of the continental tropics is likely to lead to extreme storminess, in particular along continent-ocean interfaces.

The late 20th century to early 21st century global greenhouse gas levels and regional warming rates have reached a large factor to an order of magnitude faster than warming events of past geological and mass extinction events, with major implications for the nature and speed of extreme weather events.

For these reasons the term “climate change” for the current extreme warming, which is reaching +1.5°C over the continents and more than +3°C over the Arctic over a period shorter than one century, no longer applies.

The world is looking at an extremely rapid shift in the climatic conditions that have allowed civilization to emerge.

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Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist, Canberra, Australia.

Featured image is from Barbara Nimri Aziz

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From the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic almost one year ago, it was clear that our world faced far more than a public health emergency. The biggest international crisis in generations quickly morphed into an economic and social crisis. One year on, another stark fact is tragically evident: our world is facing a pandemic of human rights abuses.

Covid-19 has deepened preexisting divides, vulnerabilities and inequalities, and opened up new fractures, including faultlines in human rights. The pandemic has revealed the interconnectedness of our human family – and of the full spectrum of human rights: civil, cultural, economic, political and social. When any one of these rights is under attack, others are at risk.

The virus has thrived because poverty, discrimination, the destruction of our natural environment and other human rights failures have created enormous fragilities in our societies. The lives of hundreds of millions of families have been turned upside down – with lost jobs, crushing debt and steep falls in income.

Frontline workers, people with disabilities, older people, women, girls and minorities have been especially hard hit. In a matter of months, progress on gender equality has been set back decades. Most essential frontline workers are women, and in many countries are often from racially and ethnically marginalised groups.

Most of the increased burden of care in the home is taken on by women. Violence against women and girls in all forms has rocketed, from online abuse to domestic violence, trafficking, sexual exploitation and child marriage.

Extreme poverty is rising for the first time in decades. Young people are struggling, out of school and often with limited access to technology.

The latest moral outrage is the failure to ensure equity in vaccination efforts. Just 10 countries have administered more than 75% of all Covid-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, more than 130 countries have not received a single dose.

If the virus is allowed to spread like wildfire in parts of the global south, it will mutate again and again. New variants could become more transmissible, more deadly and potentially threaten the effectiveness of current vaccines and diagnostics. This could prolong the pandemic significantly, enabling the virus to come back to plague the global north – and delay the world’s economic recovery.

The virus is also infecting political and civil rights, and further shrinking civic space. Using the pandemic as a pretext, authorities in some countries have deployed heavy-handed security responses and emergency measures to crush dissent, criminalise basic freedoms, silence independent reporting and restrict the activities of nongovernmental organisations.

Human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, political activists – even medical professionals – have been detained, prosecuted and subjected to intimidation and surveillance for criticising government responses to the pandemic. Pandemic-related restrictions have been used to subvert electoral processes and weaken opposition voices.

At times, access to life-saving Covid-19 information has been concealed while deadly misinformation has been amplified – even by those in power.

Extremists – including white supremacists and neo-Nazis – have exploited the pandemic to boost their ranks through social polarisation and political and cultural manipulation.

The pandemic has also made peace efforts more difficult, constraining the ability to conduct negotiations, exacerbating humanitarian needs and undermining progress on other conflict-related human rights challenges.

Covid-19 has reinforced two fundamental truths about human rights. First, human rights violations harm us all. Second, human rights are universal and protect us all.

An effective response to the pandemic must be based on solidarity and cooperation. Divisive approaches, authoritarianism and nationalism make no sense against a global threat. With the pandemic shining a spotlight on human rights, recovery provides an opportunity to generate momentum for transformation. To succeed, our approaches must have a human rights lens.

The sustainable development goals – which are underpinned by human rights – provide the framework for more inclusive and sustainable economies and societies, including the imperative of healthcare for everyone.

The recovery must also respect the rights of future generations, enhancing climate action to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and protecting biodiversity. My Call to Action for Human Rights spells out the central role of human rights in crisis response, gender equality, public participation, climate justice and sustainable development.

This is not a time to neglect human rights; it is a time when, more than ever, human rights are needed to navigate this crisis in a way that will allow us to zero in on achieving inclusive and sustainable development and lasting peace.

We are all in this together. The virus threatens everyone. Human rights uplift everyone. By respecting human rights in this time of crisis, we will build more effective and equitable solutions for the emergency of today and the recovery for tomorrow.

I am convinced it is possible – if we are determined and work together.

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António Guterres is secretary general of the United Nations

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Turkey is unrelenting in its crusade against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party and the People’s Protection Units, as two parts of a whole.

Ankara’s forces carry out frequent operations within and without the country, targeting both the Kurdistan Worker’s Party’s (PKK) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG)’s interests and members. The Turkish government dubs both groups as terrorists, and does not shy away from invading the sovereign territory of other countries to pursue and “eliminate” their members and positions.

As a result, Turkey frequently encroaches on Syrian and Iraqi territory, and even has observation posts set up to target its Kurdish enemy.

It strongly opposes the Syrian Democratic Forces, a group whose core is comprised of the YPG, and receives heavy US support.

Most recently, between February 10th and the 14th, Turkey began its most recent operation in northern Iraq. In particular, it took place on the Gara Mountain in the Duhok Governorate of the Kurdistan Region. The result was such that both the PKK and the Turkish Armed Forces claimed victory, following the operation. The accounts of what transpired vary.

Turkey said it killed 53 PKK members, and captured 2. It admitted to losing 3 soldiers, while 4 of its troops were wounded in battle. According to the PKK, Turkey lost at least 30 soldiers, and dozens more were injured. A sort of collateral damage involved 13 Turkish hostages whose corpses were discovered in a cave network in the mountain area. Turkey and the US claimed that these were largely civilians, and some intelligence officers. The PKK claimed these were 13 Turkish military hostages. Turkey’s Defense Minister claimed many weapons and ammunition, as well as other equipment were seized.

In the aftermath, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to expand military operations which showed progress to other regions where threats are still significant.

Ankara’s aggressive and assertive actions are making many of the involved parties dissatisfied. Regardless it keeps carrying them out and shows no intention of stopping.

In Iraq, the Al-Nujaba Islamic Resistance Movement issued a warning to the Turkish Army against invading the country any longer. It said that it would suffer the same fate as the American Army whose convoys and positions continue to be targeted. Iraq maintains the posture that Turkey must withdraw fully from its sovereign territory. It should simply pack up its bases in the north of the country and vacate the premises.

In response, Turkey maintains that the West, and Iraq’s government aren’t doing enough to counter the alleged terrorist threat. Ankara claims it has its right of self-defense, even if it requires invading other countries.

Operation Claw Eagle 2 was of questionable success, if the numbers by the PKK are to be considered, against those provided by Turkey. These operations, however, are unlikely to stop, both in Iraq and Syria.

Erdogan seems hell-bent on solving all “security issues” and expanding Turkish activities in regions that are deemed threatening to Ankara’s interests.

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The Art of Being a Spectacularly Misguided Oracle

February 23rd, 2021 by Pepe Escobar

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The late Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski for some time dispensed wisdom as an oracle of US foreign policy, side by side with the perennial Henry Kissinger – who, in vast swathes of the Global South, is regarded as nothing but a war criminal.

Brzezinski never achieved the same notoriety. At best he claimed bragging rights for giving the USSR its own Vietnam in Afghanistan – by facilitating the internationalization of Jihad Inc., with all its dire, subsequent consequences.

Over the years, it was always amusing to follow the heights Dr. Zbig would reach with his Russophobia. But then, slowly but surely, he was forced to revise his great expectations. And finally he must have been truly horrified that his perennial Mackinder-style geopolitical fears came to pass – beyond the wildest nightmares.

Not only Washington had prevented the emergence of a “peer competitor” in Eurasia, but the competitor is now configured as a strategic partnership between Russia and China.

Dr. Zbig was not exactly versed in Chinese matters. His misreading of China may be found in his classic A Geostrategy for Eurasia published in – where else – Foreign Affairs in 1997:

Although China is emerging as a regionally dominant power, it is not likely to become a global one for a long time. The conventional wisdom that China will be the next global power is breeding paranoia outside China while fostering megalomania in China. It is far from certain that China’s explosive growth rates can be maintained for the next two decades. In fact, continued long-term growth at the current rates would require an unusually felicitous mix of national leadership, political tranquility, social discipline, high savings, massive inflows of foreign investment, and regional stability. A prolonged combination of all of these factors is unlikely.

Dr. Zbig added,

Even if China avoids serious political disruptions and sustains its economic growth for a quarter of a century — both rather big ifs — China would still be a relatively poor country. A tripling of GDP would leave China below most nations in per capita income, and a significant portion of its people would remain poor. Its standing in access to telephones, cars, computers, let alone consumer goods, would be very low.

Oh dear. Not only Beijing hit all the targets Dr. Zbig proclaimed were off limits, but the central government also eliminated poverty by the end of 2020.

The Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping once observed, “at present, we are still a relatively poor nation. It is impossible for us to undertake many international proletarian obligations, so our contributions remain small. However, once we have accomplished the four modernizations and the national economy has expanded, our contributions to mankind, and especially to the Third World, will be greater. As a socialist country, China will always belong to the Third World and shall never seek hegemony.”

What Deng described then as the Third World – a Cold War-era derogatory terminology – is now the Global South. And the Global South is essentially the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on steroids, as in the Spirit of Bandung in 1955 remixed to the Eurasian Century.

Cold Warrior Dr. Zbig was obviously not a Daoist monk – so he could never abandon the self to enter the Dao, the most secret of all mysteries.

Had he been alive to witness the dawn of the Year of the Metal Ox, he might have noticed how China, expanding on Deng’s insights, is de facto applying practical lessons derived from Daoist correlative cosmology: life as a system of interacting opposites, engaging with each other in constant change and evolution, moving in cycles and feedback loops, always mathematically hard to predict with exactitude.

A practical example of simultaneously opening and closing is the dialectical approach of Beijing’s new “dual circulation” development strategy. It’s quite dynamic, relying on checks and balances between increase of domestic consumption and external trade/investments (the New Silk Roads).

Peace is Forever War

Now let’s move to another oracle, a self-described expert of what in the Beltway is known as the “Greater Middle East”: Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC, certified warmongering neo-con, and one-half of the famous Kaganate of Nulands – as the joke went across Eurasia – side by side with his wife, notorious Maidan cookie distributor Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, who’s about to re-enter government as part of the Biden-Harris administration.

Kagan is back pontificating in – where else – Foreign Affairs, which published his latest superpower manifesto. That’s where we find this absolute pearl:

That Americans refer to the relatively low-cost military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq as “forever wars” is just the latest example of their intolerance for the messy and unending business of preserving a general peace and acting to forestall threats. In both cases, Americans had one foot out the door the moment they entered, which hampered their ability to gain control of difficult situations.

So let’s get this straight. The multi-trillion dollar Forever Wars are “relatively low-cost”; tell that to the multitudes suffering the Via Crucis of US crumbling infrastructure and appalling standards in health and education. If you don’t support the Forever Wars – absolutely necessary to preserve the “liberal world order” – you are “intolerant”.

“Preserving a general peace” does not even qualify as a joke, coming from someone absolutely clueless about realities on the ground. As for what the Beltway defines as “vibrant civil society” in Afghanistan, that in reality revolves around millennia-old tribal custom codes: it has nothing to do with some neocon/woke crossover. Moreover, Afghanistan’s GDP – after so much American “help” – remains even lower than Saudi-bombed Yemen’s.

Exceptionalistan will not leave Afghanistan. A deadline of May 1st was negotiated in Doha last year for the US/NATO to remove all troops. That’s not gonna happen.

The spin is already turbocharged: the Deep State handlers of Joe “Crash Test Dummy” Biden will not respect the deadline.                                        Everyone familiar with the New Great Game on steroids across Eurasia knows why: a strategic lily pad must be maintained at the intersection of Central and South Asia to help closely monitor – what  else – Brzezinski’s worst nightmare: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

As it stands we have 2,500 Pentagon + 7,000 NATO troops + a whole lot of “contractors” in Afghanistan. The spin is that they can’t leave because the Taliban – which de facto control from 52% to as much as 70% of the whole tribal territory – will take over.

To see, in detail, how this whole sorry saga started, non-oracle skeptics could do worse than check Volume 3 of my Asia Times archives: Forever Wars: Afghanistan-Iraq, part 1 (2001-2004) . Part 2 will be out soon. Here they will find how the multi-trillion dollar Forever Wars – so essential to “preserve the peace” – actually developed on the ground, in total contrast to the official imperial narrative influenced, and defended, by Kagan.

With oracles like these, the US definitely does not need enemies.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

What to Do About Israel?

February 23rd, 2021 by Philip Giraldi

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Critics of U.S. policy with and about Israel like myself have been relatively successful in describing the considerable downside in the bilateral status quo. We have demonstrated that the lopsided relationship supports absolutely no U.S. interest and that, on the contrary, considerable damage is done to the American people, to include involvement in armed conflict in the Middle East which serves no purpose beyond “protecting Israel.”

Israel benefits from billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars annually in a $3.8 billion lump sum for “military aid” plus hundreds of millions more in special procurements and projects that are together considered untouchable in Washington. Add to that the quasi legal “charitable” tax exempt contributions from wealthy American Jews and groups that fuel apartheid policies in Palestine and pay for the illegal settlements. Many of those same groups are themselves tax exempt and they exploit that status to actively lobby on behalf of the Jewish state, successfully shielding it from any consequences for its war crimes and human rights violations. They also avoid registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, even though many of them collude directly with the Israeli government through its embassy in Washington and are directed by the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government. In fact, no Israel Lobby component among the six hundred or so Jewish groups that have protecting Israel as part of their agenda has ever been required to register as a foreign agent.

Under President Donald Trump, one Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson contributed as much as $300 million to GOP coffers, money which had with it a quid pro quo, that Trump should do a series of favors for Israel, which he did. The Democrats have their own counterpart in Israeli film producer Haim Saban, who has said that he is a “one issue guy and his issue is Israel.” Neither major party can be counted upon to resist Israeli pressure on foreign policy or even on domestic issues that might limit the “aid” that the Jewish state receives.

The money coming from the Israel Lobby has corrupted American government all the way down to the local level and special preferences for Israeli businesses in states like Florida and Virginia have added even more to the cash flow that goes in only one direction. Ironically, Israel does not really need the money. It is a socialist state that has a European level standard of living, to include free health care and university education, benefits that Americans do not possess.

Add to that Israel’s deplorable human rights record, which Washington is required to defend in international fora, as well as Israel’s record of persistent and highly damaging spying against the United States. It all means that little more need to be said, apart from restating the fact that it is a very bad deal for the American people. And it has also brought with it collateral damage to include attacks on fundamental rights like Freedom of Speech and Assembly. As the politicians in both major parties are bribed or otherwise coerced into continuing to behave the way that they do, count on things getting even worse, with criminalizing of any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism currently making the rounds of pending legislation.

All of that said, when I and others lay out the laundry list of Israel’s crimes against America, some sympathizers inevitably respond: “Okay, so what are you going to do about it?” So now I am going to address some of the things that can be done by ordinary Americans and by groups that are correctly appalled by Washington’s wag the dog relationship with the Jewish state.

First of all, demand from our elected officials that American law be enforced on Israel. There are several areas where that is relevant. First, as mentioned above, is the failure of the Justice and Treasury Departments to enforce registration of pro-Israel lobbying groups. Registration would force groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) to open their books regarding the money they receive and spend and could also require them to reveal details of their lobbying activity.

Another area where the law is not being enforced is regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which was created by stealing both technology and enriched uranium from the U.S. The Symington Amendment on foreign relations forbids giving aid to any country that is either a nuclear proliferator or is in possession of undeclared nuclear weapons. Demand that it be enforced fully now and end all aid to Israel.

U.S. Israel-centric charities or foundations should also have their tax exemptions strictly enforced. Humanitarian aid is fine, but if they are funding the illegal West Bank settlements, which many of them are, they should have their exemptions revoked. And finally, Israelis caught spying or Americans who are assisting in the theft of U.S. classified or sensitive information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to include use of the Espionage Act. Currently, such individuals are almost always given a pass. If President Joe Biden can continue the persecution of legitimate journalist Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, he can certainly do the same vis-à-vis Israel’s spies.

Second, call for the end of Citizens United, which enables the Zionist oligarchs to dictate U.S. policy in the Middle East through their PACs and direct political donations. Beyond that, make your voice heard more generally. Sure, calling or writing to a congressional office is most often a waste of time but Capitol Hill staffers have told me many times that if a congressman gets multiple complaints about a certain policy or issue, he or she will begin to pay attention. That is not to say that they will give a damn about their actual constituents versus the powerful Israel Lobby but the background noise might make them just a bit more sensitive on the issue.

Likewise, with the mainstream media and the entertainment industry, which are Jewish/Israel dominated. When one reads an article or watches a documentary that is heavily slanted towards the Jewish state, make an online comment or write a letter to the editor or producer saying that the bias is evident. As in the case with congress, if newspaper or television editors begin to see a lot of commentary hostile to their spin they just might begin to be more cautious for fear of losing readers, viewers or advertising dollars. And just a little bit of loosening of the Israeli grip in the media will mean that the public will begin to appreciate that the “news stories” that have been promoted for so many years are nothing but a tissue of lies.

Third, support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement as well as organizations that are actively critical of Israel. BDS is non-violent and increasingly effective, particularly on college campuses. Always remember that Israel and its friends do not have a grip on Congress, the White House and the media because they are wonderful warm people that others find to be sympathetic. It is difficult even to imagine a scintillating conversation with a malignant toad like former casino magnate Sheldon Adelson or with congressional slime balls like Senators Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin.

Israel’s ability to corrupt and misdirect is all based on Jewish money, a well-established process whereby Zionist oligarchs buy their way to power and access. So to restore the relationship to something more like the normal interaction between countries the solution is to hit back where it really hurts – boycott Israel and Israeli products or services and do the same for the companies that are the sources of income for those American Jews who are the principal supporters of the Zionist project. If you want to visit Las Vegas, by all means go, but don’t patronize the casinos and hotels now owned by Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli wife Miriam, which include The Venetian and Sands Resort.

Democratic party major donor Haim Saban, meanwhile, is a producer of Hollywood children’s entertainment, including the lucrative Power Rangers. You can stop your children from watching his violent programming and tell the network’s advertisers why you are doing so. And then there are businessmen including Bernard Marcus, who is a co-founder of Home Depot and a major supporter of Israel, and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. No one really has to spend $1000 to go to a football game, particularly if the owner is a good friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, and if you need something for your home or are seeking entertainment, choose to spend your dollars somewhere else. Readers can do the homework for the businesses and services that they normally patronize. If outspoken advocates for Israel own the company, take your dollars elsewhere.

Also put direct pressure on the mostly high-tech U.S. companies that invest in Israel, which are particularly vulnerable because they are thereby sending American jobs overseas, particularly as they country they are sending them to will steal the technology as likely as not. Make Israel’s cash-rich supporters pay a price for promotion of an apartheid/racist regime that is contemptuous of Americans even as it robs us blind, in the process doing terrible damage to the United States.

I am confident that readers will come up with other ideas regarding what might be done to counter Israel and all its works right here in the United States. If we lapse into apathy and think that nothing can be done to oppose the Israeli juggernaut, we will all lose. And, to be sure, the Israelis and their friends in America and Europe have one huge weakness. It is their hubris. They think that they are invulnerable because of their money and political power, but they fail to understand that in history the rich and powerful have inevitably gone too far and have finally received their comeuppance. Perhaps the “gone too far” moment has finally arrived.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

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The Vaccine Reaction is reporting that a recent survey found that 53 percent of U.S. military families do not want to take the experimental mRNA COVID injections.

A survey conducted in December 2020 by the Blue Star Families, a non-profit military advocacy organization, found that 53 percent of U.S. military families do not want to get the experimental COVID-19 vaccines being distributed under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) granted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Of the of 53 percent of military families who responded to the survey indicating that they would not get the vaccine, nearly three-quarters cited a distrust of the development process or timeline.

Among deployed troops overseas, most of them are refusing the COVID shots, according to The Vaccine Reaction:

According to the Pentagon, U.S. troops deployed overseas and those charged with critical national security missions are declining to get vaccinated for COVID-19.

Some 320,000 service members and civilian personnel have been vaccinated, leaving a significant amount of the 769,000 doses available to Department of Defense (DoD) unused.

Pentagon officials said as long as the COVID-19 vaccines are classified as EUA by the FDA and not fully licensed, the DoD cannot mandate service members to take the vaccine.

Air Force Brigadier General Paul Friedrichs said that even those personnel responsible for manning America’s nuclear weapons are refusing to get the vaccine.

Employers Cannot Legally Mandate an Experimental Medical Product

While the military acknowledges that they cannot legally require anyone to receive an experimental injection not yet approved by the FDA, some businesses in the U.S. are attempting to do just that.

Last month we reported that a nursing home in Wisconsin was firing employees who refused to get an experimental mRNA COVID injection. See: Wisconsin Nursing Home Believed to be First in U.S. to Fire Staff for Refusing Experimental COVID Injections

Townhall.com later reported that the nursing home faced a backlash for their policy, and one employee is now represented by an attorney who has reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter.

A Rock County-owned nursing home policy that mandates employees get the COVID-19 vaccination or be laid off is “illegal and unenforceable,” according to a cease-and-desist letter filed on behalf of a nursing home employee.

“By implementing its vaccine mandate, your (facility) is attempting to coerce all of its employees into receiving one of the COVID-19 Vaccines,” Elizabeth Brehm, attorney at New York-based Siri Glimstad law firm, wrote on behalf of Amber DeJaynes, a staff member at the Rock Haven skilled nursing facility in Janesville.

The letter, obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight, was sent to Rock Haven Interim Nursing Home Administrator Sara Beran and Rock County Administrator Josh Smith on Tuesday. It informs each that the mandatory vaccination policy is depriving the employees of their statutorily guaranteed rights to decide whether to receive the shot.

“Your company is doing so openly without any regard for the personal medical decisions of the employee,” Brehm wrote. “We hereby demand that you withdraw your COVID-19 vaccine requirement … Failure to do so immediately will result in legal action being filed against you to strike down this illegal requirement. Govern yourselves accordingly.”

The letter lays out why employers cannot make the COVID-19 vaccination compulsory.

The Food and Drug Administration in December granted emergency use authorization for two vaccines — produced by Pfizer and Moderna. They are said to be 95 percent effective in preventing COVID-19, but they are in many ways experimental, unlicensed vaccines. They have not been fully approved by the FDA. Much remains unknown about the long-term effects and efficacy of the vaccines, which, by drug approval standards, were developed at lightening speeds.

As the cease-and-desist letter points out, the same law that authorizes emergency use requires the public to have “the option to accept or refuse administration of the product.”

The statutory prohibitions are included in FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and regulations, according to the legal letter. Dr. Mandy Cohen, executive secretary of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has publicly stated under Emergency Use Authorization, “vaccines are not allowed to be mandatory.”

“Sheets for Recipients and Caregivers for both COVID-19 vaccines state on the first page, ‘It is your choice to receive the (COVID-19 Vaccine,” the letter states. (Source.)

If federal law and federal guidelines issued by the CDC and FDA make such mandatory requirements illegal, then why are some employers trying to make the shots mandatory as a requirement for employment?

They are trying to rely on a statement issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which claims employers have a right to exclude employees from the workplace if they refuse the COVID shots. As Townhall.com reports:

But EEOC guidance asserts that employees who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccination may be excluded from the workplace.

“Moreover, the EEOC’s Guidance underscores that anti-discrimination laws do not prevent employers from adhering to public health directives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or other federal, state, and local public health agencies,” according to the National Law Review.

There are exceptions. Employees do have protections under civl rights, disability and religious conviction laws. And employers should exhibit extreme caution before firing someone over a compulsory vaccination policy.

“ ..(W)hile the employer may exclude that employee from the workplace, it should avoid terminating the employee or taking additional adverse actions before carefully evaluating whether the employee can work remotely or has protected rights under other employment laws or regulations at the federal, state, and local level,” the National Law Review piece advises.

Wisconsin lawmakers have introduced a bill that would prohibit the kind of mandatory vaccination policies in question at Rock Haven nursing home.

Dr. Meryl Nass, MD, who has been a leader nationally in exposing the massive injuries that occurred within the military during the Gulf War when the non-FDA approved Anthrax vaccine was mandated, also weighed in on this topic via her blog this weekend.

The 2 Covid vaccines currently available in the US are experimental unlicensed products. As such, they cannot be mandated.

The Nuremberg Code and subsequent laws guarantee your right to choose whether to be an experimental subject.  Although it may advantage some entities to have you think otherwise, an experimental product is an experimental product.

These vaccines have not been approved by the FDA, and so they are experimental. And therefore you cannot be forced to accept them.

The vaccines were “authorized” under emergency laws that require limited data.  The Johnson and Johnson vaccine will be coming up for a similar authorization, not a license, this coming week.

Once authorized, it too will be an experimental product. These products are given Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) by FDA, and the clinical trials for each vaccine are ongoing.

You have not seen the federal government, nor any state mandate these vaccines for schoolchildren, healthcare workers or anyone else.  That is because the government knows that legally, they cannot impose mandates and turn all the citizens into guinea pigs: they would almost certainly lose when challenged in the courts.

What the federal government did instead is sneaky.  It hid behind corporate skirts. Its Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a statement that essentially invited corporations to mandate the Covid vaccines, by stating that EEOC had no problem with such a mandate.

I and many others think that employer mandates will be found to be illegal, if challenged. Del Bigtree and his legal affiliate ICAN are assisting employees in fighting such attempted mandates.

I was involved with the only case to test whether a military anthrax vaccine authorized under an EUA could be mandated.  The 2005 case (Doe v Rumsfeld) was heard in First District Court, in DC, by Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is still on the bench.  He ruled that under federal law, an EUA vaccine cannot be mandated.

I am told that the military is being very careful with the Covid vaccines, and soldiers are signing informed consents if they choose to receive the vaccine.  Many are refusing.

Are civilians being given full information about the knowns and unknowns of these vaccines, and signing consent forms? (Source.)

As we have been reporting here on Health Impact News the past several weeks since these experimental injections have started, thousands of people are reportedly being injured and dying due to these injections.

The ones who survive with serious debilitating injuries are not finding any help to cope with those injuries. They cannot sue Pfizer or Moderna because the EUA protects them from any liability, and doctors are totally unprepared (and in many cases probably unwilling) to treat COVID mRNA injuries, so the victims are on their own to try and find help, at their own expense.

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Last week Texas experienced a cold snap that resulted in serious statewide damage, death, and destruction. The collapse of the state’s energy grid left millions of Texans in the dark and freezing for days at a time. Tragically, at least 30 people died.

There are many reasons why Texas became like a Third World country, and we should be careful not to pin all the blame on just one factor. But it seems clear that the disaster was to a large degree caused by political decisions to shift toward “green” energy generated from solar and wind and by Governor Abbott’s authoritarian Covid restrictions.

Abbott, who won a “wind leadership” award just this month, oversaw the near-collapse of wind energy generation last week. Yet the politicization of energy generation in favor of “green” alternatives over natural gas and other fossil fuels has led to the unintended consequences of freezing Texans facing multiple millions of dollars in property damage and worse.

Additionally, federal emissions and other restrictions forced Texas to beg Washington for permission to generate power at higher levels in anticipation of unprecedented demand. Governor Abbott finally received permission from the Department of Energy on February 14th, but by then many facilities found themselves off-line due to freezing conditions.

Why should the Federal government be allowed to freeze Texans to death in the name of controlling emissions from energy generation plants? It’s a classic example of politics over people. I guess if you want to make a “Green New Deal” omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

While Governor Abbott was quick to blame energy generators and even the state Electric Reliability Council of Texas, NBC News in Dallas reported that ERCOT “did not conduct any on-site inspections of the state’s power plants to see if they were ready for this winter season. Due to COVID-19 they conducted virtual tabletop exercises instead – but only with 16 percent of the state’s power generating facilities.”

Governor Abbott’s authoritarian Covid executive orders at least indirectly led to lax inspection, maintenance, and winterization of wind and other energy generation plants.

But Texas did not only freeze because of Abbott’s Covid restrictions. For the better part of a year thousands of businesses have been destroyed. Recovering drug addicts and alcoholics have relapsed. Depression and suicides have skyrocketed. Children have been deprived of education.

And for what? Texas with Abbott’s restrictions fared no better than Florida with no restrictions when it comes to Covid cases and deaths. The Texas governor knew that months ago when the data from Florida proved that lockdowns, masks, and other restrictions had no effect. But he refused to change course. He refused to follow the brave lead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and open Texas completely.

Politicians too stubborn or fearful to change course when facts dictate otherwise do not deserve to remain in office. Governors Gavin Newsom in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York are finally facing consequences for their Covid authoritarianism. When the smoke clears – and it is rapidly clearing – many more of these petty tyrants will fall. That list of deposed Covid tyrants may well include Texas Governor Greg Abbott – and the slumbering Texas state legislature – as well.

Let’s hope Texans – and all Americans – will learn from this and more forcefully demand their God-given liberty!

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The European Union (EU) announced this Friday, February 19, that the body will sanction about thirty Venezuelan leaders for participating in the legislative elections last December, reported Europa Press, alluding to a “high ranked official” of the community bloc.

Brussels justifies this new round of illegal sanctions on politicians, who according to the bloc were “involved in the December elections,” arguing that the election in which the National Assembly was elected for the period 2021-2026 is not recognized by the 27 European Union countries nor by other actors of the so-called “international community.”

“The list is expected to include around thirty officials,” reported Europa Press. “As informed by a diplomatic source, the measure would entail the freezing of assets of the persons mentioned in the list and the prohibition of their entry into the EU, in line with the four rounds of sanctions approved so far by the bloc since the sanctions plan was established in 2017, in view of the democratic ‘deterioration’ in the country,” detailed the Spanish news agency.

The body in charge of launching this new interventionist action will be the Foreign Affairs Council, which has already applied unilateral coercive measures on 36 political leaders of Venezuela, both from the government and from the opposition, without decreasing a bit the base of support of President Nicolás Maduro.

When consulted on this announcement, Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, editor and founder of Orinoco Tribune, expressed,

“This is another evidence of the European Union not realizing how ineffective theirs and US sanctions have been in their attempt to oust President Maduro. Moreover, this new round of sanctions demonstrates the supremacist and racist attitudes of many in the European Union, and also shows how hypocritical the EU is, that they are sanctioning Venezuelan politicians for participating in democratic legislative elections under supervision of international observers just because the political group they supported did not participate.”

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Neoliberals Seek to Establish Their Own Brand of Fascism

February 23rd, 2021 by Margaret Kimberley

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The US State “is using the so-called insurrection at the Capitol…to impose an ideological conformity that supports and sustains the neoliberal project” at home and abroad, said Ajamu Baraka, national organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace. 

Speaking on a Dissenters webinar, Baraka warned that Democrats, especially, are “setting us up” to “usher in a form of neofascism” that could win liberal and even progressive support because it is ostensibly aimed at Trump’s older brand of fascism.

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Could Israel Invade the Hague?

February 23rd, 2021 by Asa Winstanley

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It has been a long time coming.

Earlier this month, a panel of judges ruled that the International Criminal Court (ICC) could investigate Israel for war crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A coalition of Palestinian human rights lawyers celebrated the “landmark” ruling as “a critically important step towards ensuring the rule of law” and “towards ending impunity”.

As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied, and in the case of Israeli war crimes, accountability has been delayed for years – for decades.

More than a year ago, the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda concluded her preliminary examination of the situation. She decided that the criteria for war crimes investigations had been met.

But that initial examination in itself had taken no less than five years, with the entire weight of Israel’s network of overseas lobby groups bearing down on Bensouda. Outrageously, she was also sanctioned by the Trump administration.

The ICC ruling this month means that the court in the Hague can now go ahead and investigate Israel for war crimes during events such as Israel’s 2014 war of aggression against the people of the Gaza Strip, and the 2018 protests along the boundary line with Gaza during which Israeli snipers gunned down thousands of unarmed protesters, killing hundreds of them and injuring many, many more.

It is far from clear how long it will take for the ICC to initiate the investigation process. The panel’s ruling on territorial jurisdiction referred to the possibility of “a protracted process” – not exactly an encouraging sign.

Predictably, Israel was not pleased that the ICC has dared to indicate that it will investigate them, even though the panel also ruled it had jurisdiction to investigate alleged war crimes by armed Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas.

ICC ruling brings hope for Palestine, dismay for Israel – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Israeli politicians and officials went wild, lashing out with all sorts of outlandish accusations and threats of revenge.

But privately, Israel is clearly worried. A report in Haaretz revealed that Israel has drawn up a secretive list of top military and political figures likely to be targetted by an ICC prosecution and has even warned them to refrain from travel for fear of arrest.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s racist prime minister, ranted in a bizarre video posted online that the ICC was investigating “fake war crimes” and that the court’s actions were “pure anti-Semitism”. He threatened that Israel would “fight” the investigation “with all our might”.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the US and UN, also posted a twisted statement baselessly accusing the ICC investigation of being “anti-Semitic”. Erdan was, until recently, the Israeli minister responsible for orchestrating Israel’s global war against the Palestine solidarity movement.

He was responsible for an international campaign of dirty tricks and harassment against Palestinians and their supporters – a campaign very much still at work. Lawyers of the four Palestinian human rights groups who so warmly welcomed the ICC panel’s ruling this month – Al-Haq, Al-Mezan, Addameer and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights – stated that in revenge for their engagement with the court, Israel was subjecting them to collective punishment.

This has been: “A protracted campaign of smears and death threats – all designed to foil, undermine, and deter Palestinian engagement with the court,” they wrote – a covert sabotage campaign reportedly carried out by Erdan’s former “Strategic Affairs” ministry.

Erdan himself is another open racist at the highest levels of the Israeli government. He has openly incited hatred against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, and calls for the theft of all remaining Palestinian land in the West Bank by formally annexing the occupied territory, based on “our Biblical right to the land,” he said in 2018.

Israeli politics are made up of the right, the far-right and the ultra-right. On the ultra-right, Israel’s Jewish supremacist Kahanist politicians are even more openly genocidal in their incitement against Palestinians.

Kahanist lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich (who is likely to be part of Israel’s ruling coalition government after next month’s election) called for Netanyahu to expel and destroy an entire Palestinian village in revenge for the ICC’s ruling.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu must order the evacuation of Khan Al-Ahmar tomorrow morning,” he posted on Twitter. “What matters is not what the gentiles will say but what the Jews will do,” he wrote, quoting a phrase attributed to Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

But the award for the most truly demented reaction goes to fake Israeli “law centre” Shurat HaDin, which in reality was founded by Kahanists and is a front group for Mossad and other Israeli spooks.

Some years ago, the group’s director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner wrote a particularly unhinged op-ed, in which she called for Israel to literally invade the Hague, should it ever investigate Israel for war crimes.

Is this the kind of “fight” Netanyahu has in mind?

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Noch kennt das allgemeine Bewusstsein der Einzelnen und der Völker keine Antwort auf die Kain-Frage aus der biblischen Urgeschichte: Soll ich meines Bruders Hüter sein (1)? Eine real existierende Epidemie aus Machtgier, Lüge und Brutalität rafft inzwischen weltweit Millionen von Menschen dahin wie die Pest des Mittelalters. Doch die verhängnisvollen Auswirkungen der mörderischen staatlichen „Schutzmaßnahmen“ gegen eine vermeintliche Corona-Pandemie berühren zwar unseren Lebensnerv, doch sie rütteln uns nicht auf, wir verharren in Lethargie.

Die Not der Menschheit rührt nicht an unser Herz

Töricht wie wir sind, wiegen wir uns weiter in Sicherheit, während die dunklen Wolken dieses Verbrechens gegen die Menschheit sich über unser aller Haupt bedrohlich zusammenziehen. Zwar sind wir uns halbwegs bewusst, dass wir am Rande eines Vulkans siedeln, doch wir geben uns der trügerischen Hoffnung hin, dass es zu keinem Ausbruch kommen werde. Die beruhigende Selbsttäuschung ist uns lieber als der Gedanke an die Gefahr. Wir wollen die Unlust vergessen und wünschen uns lieber Lust. Das Lustprinzip aber ist untauglich, das Leben des Menschen zu schützen, denn die Realität will erkannt und verstanden sein: wer zu ihr in Widerspruch gerät, wird entweder geschädigt oder vernichtet.

Tausendfaches Unrecht geschieht nicht nur in fernen Ländern, sondern auch in unserer nächsten Nähe. Aber wir empören uns nicht, wir verteidigen nicht die Schwachen und helfen nicht dem Hilflosen. Die Not der Millionen Betroffenen rührt nicht an unser Herz. Indem wir nicht gegen die offensichtliche Tyrannei der Regierenden kämpfen, billigen wir sie. Wir haben die trügerische Hoffnung, sie werde uns verschonen. Doch in dem Augenblick, wo sie uns selbst in den Würgegriff nimmt, ist es gewöhnlich zu spät, sie einzudämmen. Die Krankheit, die wir beim anderen unterlassen haben zu heilen, rafft uns selbst hinweg.

Der „Urwaldarzt“ Albert Schweitzer gab uns eine Antwort

Immer wieder macht man die bittere Erfahrung, dass bei vielen Mitbürgern kein wirkliches Mitgefühl für die in Not geratenen und leidenden jüngeren und älteren Mitmenschen vorhanden ist – oder sich nicht zeigt, nicht aktiv wird. Doch nur dann kann und wird sich etwas verändern in unserer Welt.

Die Menschheit muss eine Antwort finden auf die eingangs gestellte Kain-Frage: Soll ich meines Bruders Hüter sein? Der deutsch-französische Arzt, Philosoph, evangelische Theologe, Musikwissenschaftler und Pazifist Albert Schweitzer (1875 bis 1965), einer der bedeutendsten Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts und Friedensnobelpreisträger (1952), gab uns eine Antwort:

„Das Mitgefühl mit allen Geschöpfen ist es, was Menschen erst wirklich zum Menschen macht.“

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Martin Niemöller (1892 bis 1984), deutscher evangelischer Theologe, Widerstandskämpfer gegen den Nationalsozialismus und Häftling im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen, hat nach diesem traumatischen Erlebnis in wenigen Zeilen ausgedrückt, was es bedeutet, dieses Mitgefühl nicht zu haben:

„Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschweigen,
ich war ja kein Kommunist. 

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschweigen,
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. 

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich geschwiegen,
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. 

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr,
der protestieren konnte (2).“

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Diplom-Psychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.

Fussnoten 

1. Urgeschichte der Bibel: 1. Mose 4,1-16

2. Martin-niemoeller-stiftung.de/martin-niemoeller/als-die…

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“The Mauritanian,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, is the first feature film to dramatize how the war on terror became a war in court.

As a sociologist of law and a journalist, I have spent the past two decades researching and writing about the kinds of legal battles the film accurately portrays. My research has included 13 trips to observe military commission trials at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The film stars Tahar Rahim as a Mauritanian named Mohamedou Ould Slahi who is captured and held at the Guantanamo detention center, where many suspected terrorists were sent. Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley play Nancy Hollander and Teri Duncan, Slahi’s attorneys. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who is assigned to prosecute Slahi’s case.

Hollander is, in real life, among the hundreds of lawyers I interviewed for my forthcoming book, “The War in Court: The Inside Story of the Fight against Torture in the War on Terror,” from the University of California Press. This book traces the work of lawyers who fought the U.S. government over the post-9/11 torture program and how, against the odds, they won a few key battles and changed the way the United States waged the war on terror.

Challenging secret detention

In November 2001, after the events of Sept. 11, President George W. Bush’s administration issued an order creating a process by which people suspected of ties to terrorism would be detained and held, and potentially tried. This would not be the customary process, where they’d be tried in federal court, but instead before a new military commission system.

In December, the Guantanamo naval base was designated the main site for long-term detention and interrogation of men suspected of having ties to terrorism. Prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere began arriving there on Jan. 11, 2002.

Guantanamo was selected because it was under full control of the military and relatively close to the mainland, but outside the U.S. and therefore beyond the reach of American courts – or so the Bush administration assumed.

The idea was that if the detainees were not on U.S. soil, they would have no legal right to seek a judge’s order of habeas corpus. That principle is a centuries-old protection against unlawful imprisonment and a cornerstone of the rule of law. It allows a prisoner to claim he is being unlawfully held captive, and to require the government to prove to a judge that there is reason to continue to hold him.

Nearly everything about the detainees was deemed classified, including their names and the very fact that they were in U.S. custody. In February 2002, though, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a left-leaning legal organization, teamed up with two death-penalty lawyers, Joseph Margulies and Clive Stafford Smith, to file a habeas petition in federal court on behalf of several detainees who were known to be in Guantanamo.

That lawsuit demanded the U.S. government explain why it was holding those men. It was the opening shot of what would become a war in court. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo prisoners did, in fact, have habeas rights.

That same month saw the publication of Justice Department memorandums and Pentagon policy directives exposing the fact that torture of terror suspects, including Guantanamo detainees, had been authorized by the White House. Together, the ruling and the documents, which became known as the “torture memos,” galvanized lawyers to volunteer to represent Guantanamo detainees. Their work involved searching for information to challenge the government’s basis for detaining their clients – including evidence that they were tortured in custody.

Presumed guilty

Image on the right: Mohammedou Ould Slahi, held without charge at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years. International Committee of the Red Cross via Wikimedia Commons

When that Supreme Court ruling came down, Slahi was one of the most “valuable” detainees at Guantanamo. He had been arrested in Mauritania in November 2001, at the request of the U.S. government, on suspicion that he had recruited Marwan al-Shehhi, one of the hijackers of United Flight 175, the second of two airplanes to hit the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11.

Slahi was handed off to the CIA and then sent to Jordan, where he was brutally interrogated for seven months by Jordanian authorities in the service of global U.S. investigation into 9/11. In July 2002, the CIA sent him to the Bagram prison in Afghanistan before sending him to Guantanamo the following month.

Slahi’s case was one of the first slated for prosecution under the military commission system, which let prosecutors use evidence that would never be allowed in U.S. courts, including coerced confessions and hearsay.

Couch, the prosecutor, was personally tied to Slahi’s case because he was a close friend of the pilot on the plane that al-Shehhi had hijacked. He was told that Slahi had confessed to everything he was accused of. Couch insisted on seeing the evidence himself.

He would not like what he found.

Learning dirty secrets

When attorney Hollander met Slahi in 2005, she knew very little about him or his case, and had only a short window of opportunity to persuade him to sign a paper authorizing her to represent him. Her meeting, like other detainees’ talks with their lawyers, took place in the same rooms in Guantanamo where prisoners were interrogated, replete with monitoring devices.

Slahi, who had taught himself English while in detention, accepted Hollander’s help and began writing her long letters explaining what had happened to him – but as the film’s audience learns, not everything.

Hollander, even as Slahi’s lawyer, had to fight the government to get his case files, which at one time included more than 20,000 pages that were almost completely blacked out to hide information that had been classified, including details of Slahi’s detention and the circumstances of his confessions.

Torture and lies

The movie’s climax comes when both attorneys – prosecuting and defending – get their long-sought documents. The pages reveal the big secret about Slahi’s case: He was brutally tortured on direct orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

All Guantanamo detainees were subjected to abuse, humiliation and harassment as part of their interrogations. But Slahi was also subjected to 70 days of what the government called “special measures” – which included a mock execution in which he was taken out to sea in a boat and threatened with drowning.

His captors also constructed an elaborate deception that his beloved mother had been arrested and was on her way to Guantanamo where she would be raped by other detainees. Only after those experiences did Slahi begin to “confess” to every accusation laid against him.

Hollander knew the government would not want to make public the evidence that his alleged confessions were coerced through torture, and pushed harder for Slahi’s release. Part of that effort included publishing Slahi’s letters as a book, “Guantanamo Diary,” which became a best-seller.

Couch decided not to prosecute Slahi because the confessions wouldn’t pass legal muster. Accused by the chief prosecutor of being a traitor, Couch was one of several military lawyers who quit the military commissions for ethical reasons.

The long road home

In 2010, Hollander’s fight paid off – or so it seemed – when a federal judge ordered Slahi’s release. But the Obama administration appealed, and it would be another six years before Slahi was allowed to return home to Mauritania. He spent a total of 14 years in U.S. military custody without facing a single criminal charge.

The movie has a happy ending, with scenes of the real Mohamedou Slahi home in Mauritania smiling as he reviews translations of his book into many languages – and with photos of him and one of the guards, who had befriended him, visiting in Mauritania.

But there is no happy ending at Guantanamo, which remains open. Of the 779 men and boys ever held there, 40 prisoners remain – including six who, like Slahi, were cleared for release years ago.

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 is Professor of Sociology, University of California Santa Barbara

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Biden Faces Stay or Go Dilemma in Afghanistan

February 22nd, 2021 by Salman Rafi Sheikh

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As new US President Joe Biden works to undo many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s foreign policies and legacies, the outgoing administration’s war-ending Afghanistan policy is likely to endure – albeit it with a potential deal-breaking tweak.

Speculation is rife that Biden will seek to delay America’s troop drawdown – currently scheduled for a complete withdrawal of 2,500 remaining troops by May, as per a February 2020 agreement with the Taliban – for what some are calling a slower, “more responsible” departure.

It’s a risky gambit, one that some say is necessary to prevent a reversion to the multi-sided civil war and anarchy seen in the 1990s, but also one that could blow up the US-Taliban pact as well as talks between President Ashraf Ghani’s government and the Taliban on a war-ending political settlement now ongoing in Doha, Qatar.

Advocates of a delay say the Biden administration should seek to leave a “residual” counterterrorism force in Afghanistan beyond this May and until a transitional government is in place, which depending on its size, shape and scope could irretrievably scupper the US-Taliban deal. Biden advocated such a force in a Foreign Affairs article he penned last spring.

There is little risk that Biden himself will abandon outright Trump’s troop withdrawal plan. Still, his administration has already indicated it intends to “review” the February 2020 US-Taliban agreement that put the withdrawal timetable in place in exchange for a Taliban commitment that anti-US terror outfits like al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) would not be allowed to use Afghanistan as a base for future attacks.

Biden’s review will no doubt include a deep reading of the “secret” annexes to the US-Taliban agreement, which Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged he hadn’t yet seen during his Senate confirmation hearings on January 19.

For now, Biden’s position is informed more by the futility of continuing the almost two-decades-old war, where after years of fighting the US has been unable to force the Taliban into submission.

Biden was intimately involved in an earlier phase of the conflict as vice president in the Barack Obama administration and is known to be an advocate for ending a conflict now known Inside the Beltway as the “forever war.”

Trump’s withdrawal agreement, which sent some 2,500 of 4,500 troops home in mid-January, was borne of a broad consensus in the US defense establishment that the best way to end the conflict is through some sort of political settlement with the Taliban.

This was evident in a recent meeting between the US Joint Chiefs chairman and the Taliban in Doha, marking the first time a high-ranked US military official sat with the Taliban to discuss peace.

While the meeting showed the US military’s active involvement in the Afghan peace process, it also showed a lack of appetite for continuing the conflict.

That comes as criticism swirls that the Taliban has leveraged the February accord to ramp up violence and win tactical and geographical advantages vis-à-vis Ghani’s state forces.

The Pentagon no doubt realizes that a mere 2,500 troops cannot defeat the Taliban, which is now wreaking violent havoc across the country including around the capital of Kabul. The US previously had over 100,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan in a war plan that aimed to defeat al Qaeda in retribution for its brazen September 11, 2001 terror attacks on US soil.

Against this backdrop of violence, the Taliban and Afghan President Ghani’s administration are now engaged in slow-moving peace talks in Doha, Qatar, where the two sides are still debating over the agenda of future meetings. The Biden administration could thus seek to better calibrate the pace of troop withdrawal and align it more closely with actual progress in Taliban-Ghani peace talks and an eventual political settlement.

Biden’s policy team, many of whom worked on Afghanistan policy under Obama, also wants to take into account the view of NATO, which is among those advocating for a “responsible withdrawal” to ensure that post-withdrawal Afghanistan does not become a free-for-all battleground among the Taliban, Afghan military forces and various other militant and terror groups including Islamic State (ISIS) and al Qaeda.

Since the February agreement was struck, the US military has largely eschewed active combat, which has opened the ground for the Taliban to mount more potent attacks on state forces. While the US-Taliban agreement stipulates a full US troop withdrawal by May, there are no unambiguous clauses that prevent the Taliban from attacking Afghan forces.

The Taliban has actively leveraged this to their advantage, arguably tipping the balance of battlefield power in its favor through ramped up violence and territorial advances. As their own statements show, the Taliban do not feel bound to stop or slow the attacks while peace talks are ongoing.

Ghani’s good faith release of some 5,000 Taliban fighters from state prisons has arguably added to that rising threat. As such, Afghan political elites now hope that Biden will “correct the course” set by the Trump administration and review the withdrawal plan.

High-ranking Ghani administration figures have recently told international media that the Taliban has not fulfilled its commitments in the US agreement.

In a recent interview with the BBC, Afghanistan’s First Vice President Amrullah Saleh argued that despite securing a “massive concession” from the US, the Taliban have not severed their ties with al-Qaeda and are unlikely to genuinely deliver on such assurances.

Reminding the US of its original war mission, Saleh argued that “The question is not the fate of Afghanistan…The question is the fate, reputation and standing of the Western civilization. They came to assist a small country to prevail against terrorism, against radicalism, against al Qaeda affiliates” and that mission remains unfinished.

The situation is complicated by the fact that international support for the Afghan war has waned significantly. Apart from NATO’s emphasis on a “responsible” withdrawal, the broad international community has largely reduced its financial commitments to Afghanistan. That was evident during the recently-held Geneva conference on Afghanistan.

Compared to the $15.2 billion pledged four years ago in Brussels for 2017-20, the latest virtually-held conference pledged only $12 billion. This amount is not only smaller but doesn’t meet minimum projections set by the UNDP for Afghanistan’s reconstruction and development needs.

The US, for one, would not even commit for a full four- year period, indicating once again America’s diminished appetite for Afghanistan-related commitments. The Afghanistan conflict to date has cost the US $800 billion and 2,400 lives, according to official data.

For Biden’s proposed residual force and apparent delayed withdrawal plan to work, his diplomats and agents will need to quickly revive channels of communication with the Taliban to sell them on a revised plan without scrapping the agreement altogether.

Afghanistan is therefore likely to become Biden’s first major foreign policy test. As vice president, he did not have to deal with tough questions of this sort, including the potential of playing a role in returning the hardline Taliban back to power. Back then, the Taliban were still branded as “terrorists” and there was no question of negotiating with them.

The Taliban’s ultimate goal is still to make Afghanistan into an Islamic emirate under their domination with other political forces and non-Pashtun ethnic groups playing subservient roles. For Biden to end Afghanistan’s endless war, he will need to convince the Taliban to share power and pursue peace, neither of which the extremist militant group has shown a penchant for previously.

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Even young children can sense that we live in an age in which literally none of the information available is reliable or believable. Information on a global scale is subject to Gresham’s Law: low-quality information spreads everywhere and the truth is hoarded by the few.

What went wrong, and why?

In a sense, the original sin was the confusion of science, the philosophical pursuit of the truth by means of confirmation of accuracy through systematic experiments, with technology, the tools, and the systems based on tools, that serve to create an effect, or to complete a task.

Technology is not science. The Internet, and the supercomputers that lurk behind it, are employed by the rich and powerful to create a virtual reality for us with the intention of convincing us that the images and the effects generated by technology have some relationship to the truth, to science. They want to reassure us that everything is fine when it is not.

If we want to find our way out of this nightmare, we must first recognize that technology today has become the complete opposite of science: a distraction, or a weapon employed to render us passive and ignorant.

As Paul Goodman wrote, “Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” It is the moral aspect of technology that should be foremost in our minds, and not the gaudy special effects that enchant, that pretend to be science.

Before we develop a smartphone, a satellite system or a supercomputer, we must first employ the scientific method to determine what the impact of that technology will be over the long term on the Earth and on humanity. Such a combination of science and technology literally never happens.

Today, thousands of supercomputers calculate the worth of derivatives as part of a money game for the super-rich, a fixed round of poker. Few super computers are calculating how the use of massive amounts of electricity to power the next generation of AI will impact the climate over the next fifty years, or what the impact of the use of plastics will be on the oceans for that the next century, or what the prospects for the production of food for the 200 years will be in light of the rapid degradation of soil.

Supercomputers are being employed to calculate profit, and not sustainability, and they are so assigned for a political, not a scientific, reason. Technology serves as a sheepskin for the most ruthless forms of economic exploitation. The powerful know that if AI was focused on sustainability over centuries, the answer from its calculations would be that we should stop using AI if we wish to survive.

We confuse science with technology at our peril.

How to dumb down youth

Our youth are told by the corrupt media that they must prepare for a technology-driven future that is inevitable, that is coming in accord with some law of nature. They are exhorted to prepare for a supposed “Fourth Industrial Revolution” that will somehow improve their lives even as their jobs are automated away, even as their minds are destroyed by video games, pornography and online gambling.

When the bankers and CEOs call it the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” they are not kidding. It is a revolution in which a tiny handful of people seize control of the means of production, and the ideological apparatus, for the entire Earth.

We are bombarded, against our will, with information produced without review by third parties, by corporations. Much of it is spurious and misleading. The content of movies and dramas, of commercials and advertisements, promotes waste and indulgence and glorifies the idle lives of the rich.

We are forced to rely on corporate-controlled sources like Google or the New York Times for information and we are not told that these organizations have a long history of providing false information for profit. The entire media/ education/ advertising complex has been mobilized to promote campaigns to dumb down people and to encourage anti-intellectual sentiments. The drive to force all education to be conducted on-line speeds up this dangerous trend.

How many times have you heard old timers remark that young people are self-centered, superficial and isolated? The assumption underlying this statement is that youth, who are our future, have gone bad because of the poor choices that they have made.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Those youth are identified by corporations as the target for a decadent consumer culture that encourages them to buy and to be distracted by services that they must pay for. They cannot escape from this unrelenting ideology because corporations are free to pump this trash into the lives of youth, from nursery school on. There is no force present to defend our children.

The main purpose of the games, the pornography, the foolish and shallow television programs citizens are subject to, is not sales.

No. Much of this disinformation is offered to us for free because the purpose is to alter our thinking. The funding of the media by advertising from corporations allows them to dictate to journalists the content of their articles, to make journalists present consumption and development in a positive light even as it destroys the environment and alienates our citizens.

The ultimate product is the viewer or reader, not the item presented in the ad. The reader is rendered up to the investment banks and multinational corporations, as a prostrate consumer, not a citizen, a dependent and limited individual with no moral compass to guide him, incapable of distinguishing images from reality. We desperately need to interact with others. We need jobs that let us work together with others to create a better world.

Technology could help, but it does not because it has no relationship to science and it has no moral content any more.

In our daily lives, our interactions with the world are limited to prerecorded messages, automated checkouts, and online classes.

Our culture could be changed if we wanted to change it. The fact that most people cannot read books, or focus for more than 10 minutes on a topic, is a result of habits created by exposure to technology that could be reversed if there were a will.

We could treat serious issues in a serious manner in our society, and we could discuss the history of how we got here, the reality of how our society works, and the wisdom of learning for oneself through art, music, philosophy and literature. We could give more emphasis to the wisdom passed on to us by our parents and grandparents than to the superficial sayings of those made famous by the media.

The murder weapon can be found in the hands of the advertising firms, the puppeteers behind the screen of media. They create a false reality that degrades; they label those who tell the truth false. They make sure that the citizen faces a wasteland on every TV channel, in every newspaper, in every corner of every mall and every office building. Their destruction of intellectual inquiry made possible the rise of clown tyrants and laid the foundations for a media circus dominated by the willful and the indulgent.

We can trace this war on intellectual inquiry back to the efforts of Sigmund Freud’s disciple Edward Bernays in the 1950s to develop concrete methods for manipulating the public through powerful images and simplistic slogans. Bernays gave corporations long-term strategies to make use of weaknesses in human psychology so as to turn citizens into consumers who are drawn to conventional interpretations presented by authority figures.

The manipulation of the human mind by the powerful has a long history. Yet the situation would not have become so dire if our seduction by the stunts of computers, by the legerdemain of mechanical reproduction, had not blinded us to the murder of scientific inquiry.

The death of science is an extension of the death of philosophy. Universities are extirpating philosophy departments left and right, supposedly because they no longer can find jobs for their graduates. The study of philosophy is treated in the media as a quaint field for the impractical. In reality, however, philosophy must be the foundation for all understanding. Without an understanding of the invisible principles according to which the universe, and human institutions, function, our society drifts, our government becomes an unmoored ship, and we slide into treacherous straits.

The death of philosophy means that the visible ― the hurricane, the mass shooting, the speech by a politician ― is the only thing that registers in our minds. Climate change, cultural decadence and political mannerism, the most serious dangers we face, seem like abstractions that do not even enter our discussions.

Without a philosophical foundation, without a methodology for confirming what is true, science is reduced to visual stimulation and rhetoric.

The destruction of the intellectual

The obsession with the seen, and the neglect of the invisible and the abstract, is related to the precipitous decline of the intellectual in society.

This process was pushed forward by wealthy ideologues seeking to defend their power such as the Scaife family, the Koch family, and the Coors family. They paid top dollar to create and to circulate narratives in the media that suggested that business administration and marketing were practical and fundamental because they create wealth. They paid newspapers to repeat and repeat that the intellectuals who try to understand the fundamentals of the universe and of society are impractical and elitist.

The exploitation of nature, or of fellow humans, the manipulation of currency and capital by investors, was lauded by the new gurus that these groups funded, and then that argument was fed to us through the commercial media. The criminals who made wealth out of nothing through financial fraud like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are presented to us as icons for genuflection.

Thus, an enormous number of Americans were convinced to pursue careers in business and they dedicated themselves to the proposition that their fellow men should be objects for exploitation, that the principle in all interactions is competition rather than cooperation.

If you do a search for a job, you will find that the only jobs available are in exploitative fields that promote consumption and value growth over values or understanding. Even the careers possible at NGOs with important missions require that one beg ruthless businessmen for funding to keep going.

The decline of the role of the intellectual in a society controlled by corporations did not lead academics to build bridges to working people, or to find solidarity with the impoverished; Quite the opposite. Rather, intellectuals sought refuge in an even more narcissistic and even more elitist institutional culture, one that alienates workers and allowed for the discontent to turn rather to the far right for vision.

The commercialization of the university

The degradation of the intellectual is part and parcel of the commercialization of the university over the last two decades.

Institutions that once promoted intellectual inquiry have devolved into top-heavy academic bureaucracies focused on rewarding deans and provosts with high salaries, and serving the corporate clients that have replaced government as sources of funding. More often than not, the top decision makers are not even academics, but MBAs and accountants who consider  research and education a service, the equivalent to supplying broadband to the consumer, and not a moral goal.

The professor has become a day laborer subject to market forces whose value is determined by his or her popularity with his students, the funds he or she raises from corporations and his or her ability to publish in specialized journals that have a low tolerance for originality.

The administrators, responding to “market forces” compel professors to write in obscure language inaccessible to anyone who has not attended graduate school so that they can publish in journals that few will ever read. Professors who do not write for those academic journals cannot keep their jobs.

To top it off, those journals are inaccessible to the citizen, and will never show up in a Google search. Paywall services like JSTOR (a cover for Elsevier and other parasite corporations that make money off of the intellectual labor of others) charge enormous fees for access to research that was funded with tax dollars.

When the American programmer Aaron Swartz, founder of Creative Commons, released to the public JSTOR articles based on research funded by the public, he paid for that act with his life.

Courses offerings at the university have been cut back because, supposedly, students are no longer interested in the humanities or the arts. The fact that the decision of corporations not to hire those with a background in the humanities is not an economic reality, but an explicit political act, is never mentioned.

The promotion by corporations of a shallow materialistic culture in the media that discourages interest in literature and art is considered to be a fact of life, not a criminal conspiracy to dumb down citizens.

The media tells us constantly that democracy is critical, but a society without ethically committed intellectuals, without institutions that can support those intellectuals, is like a body with no bones. No degree of elections, or of heated media debates, can save such a doomed society.

The ideological commitment to public service, and to self-sacrifice, on the part of intellectuals has vanished. Corporations and banks have pressured institutions such universities and research institutes, museums and libraries, orchestras and theatres, as well as government and corporate institutions, to glorify overpaid executives and to marginalize and demean the intellectuals, artists and writers that those institutions were meant to support.

When Drew Faust retired as president of Harvard in 2018, she immediately joined the board of Goldman Sachs ― such a blatant conflict of interest would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

Harvard, once famous for its research and teaching, is now prized primarily by investment banks for its $50 billion endowment. The brand value of “Harvard” has value for corporations who find “strategic alliances” with select professors helpful for pushing their agendas on the American people.

The corporate takeover of academics was fatal for science. As Marc Edwards and Siddhartha Roy detail in their article “Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition” (Environmental Engineering Science, Jan, 2017), truth does not hold a candle to profit maximization.

Professors are hired and fired on the basis of quantitative performance metrics: “publication count, citations, combined citation-publication counts (e.g., h-index), journal impact factors (JIF), total research dollars, and total patents.”

Seemingly scientific, this dark alchemy has little, or nothing, to do with the search for the truth.

The increase in direct, or indirect, corporate funding has increased the number of taboo topics for research (the privatization and militarization of space and the Artic, the takeover of government functions by multinational banks, or the corruption of academics). Intellectuals cannot discuss these topics unless they are ready to be exiled to the margins, to have their writings labeled as “alternative” or “conspiracy theories.”

How technology shut down the American mind

It has become a commonplace comment that the entire world seems to have gone crazy. This compelling impression usually does not develop far beyond that primitive formulation.

Yes, the United States is governed by the insane; Yes, it has become a literal psychopathocracy.

The question is whether we are observing a periodic decadence, akin to the collapse of the Roman empire, or a different phenomenon?

We witness all around us extremes of cognitive dissonance that allow highly educated people to blithely ignore catastrophic climate change, the preparations for world war, and the radical privatization of the entire economy.

Could there be something beyond simple denial and self-centeredness at play here?

When we spend our days staring at smartphones, stay up late playing games, watching pornography, or chatting with friends about popular music or trends in fashion and food, is that smartphone serving as a portal that allows us access to information that we need?

Or could it be that the smartphone is modifying how we think and behave, setting our priorities for us and suggesting to us what values to uphold, how to act?

Are, perhaps, those smartphones that expose us to video games glorifying military combat, to Youtube broadcasts promoting stupid cat tricks, weapons created and distributed to undermine the capacity of the citizen to think deeply, to distract us so we cannot comprehend the radical transformation of our world into a techno-tyranny?

Are those smartphones intended to create addictions and obsessions in us that inhibit organized action to create our own systems of governance?

Advances in technology not only transform the landscape of human society, they also undermine our capacity to comprehend the shifts taking place. Our brains are being reprogrammed by the smartphones that we assume help us to communicate.

Technologically-induced passivity that destroys human society is as devastating as it is invisible, it is a cultural holocaust that first kills the concept of the citizen and of the family member by using seemingly innocuous, even helpful, technology to enter the private lives of the individual.

Nicholas Carr’s book, “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows,” provides extensive scientific evidence of how the Internet remaps our brains to be inclined to respond to instantaneous stimulation and disinclined from complex, long-term, thinking.

Over time, such stimulation renders complex, three-dimensional contemplation of contemporary affairs virtually impossible.

In the case of youth encouraged by corporations to depend on such external devices from infancy, the impact is crippling. It is a form of fascism by subterfuge, or as Sheldon Wolin explains in his book “Democracy Incorporated” such technology creates an “inverted totalitarianism” in which we are controlled by corporations in our daily lives but continue to imagine there exists some form of “democratic process” because of what we see on television.

We are forced to use social media like Facebook or Twitter, but we cannot vote, or even offer our opinions, as to how that social media (technology) is developed, or what the rules for these social media platforms are. We are told that we have a choice of social media, but no one can set up a social media platform of critical scale without enormous amounts of capital. Not a single communally-administered social media platform of scale has been permitted to develop. That means that global investment banks determine that manner in which we interact with others.

Carr explains that the brain’s neuroplasticity allows it to evolve, often in a negative sense, in response to stimulation from the internet. Our neurons want us to keep exercising the circuits we formed through our internet surfing because they offer a seductive stimulation. Quick responses from a Google search, or from a Facebook posting, stimulate neurons and release pleasing stimulants.

The unused neural circuits that were once employed in complex three-dimensional consideration of long-term personal experiences and of shifts in culture and society are ruthlessly pruned away in an invisible neural Darwinism in that process. The result is not technological flexibility and liberation, but rather rigid thinking and behavior.

The neurologist Norman Doidge writes: “If we stop exercising our mental skills, we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.” That is to say, that it becomes impossible for the brain to return to its original capacity for deep thinking after being subject to this diet of intellectual junk food.

Hours on smartphones, exploring social media and chatting with friends, has rendered us incapable of comprehending risk involved in climate change, or in the arms race, or in the promotion of a bogus COVID19 virus to justify totalitarian corporate control.


The psychopath behind the psychopath

There is one more piece to this puzzle.

Is it simply the case that greedy billionaires use technology as a means to reduce us to slavery as they seek to further increase their wealth, or are they also being drawn into the transhuman realm and losing their bearings in the process?

If we peer behind the curtains, will we discover that technology has taken over the entire system of things?

Could it be that there is an ultimate psychopath behind psychopaths like Bill Gates and Elon Musk

The psychopath playing the flute for the billionaires as they lead us to our collective doom, is not a specific monster, but the network connecting together tens of thousands of supercomputers around the world. Those supercomputers are the real power that stand beyond the reach of the constitutions of any of the pathetic little nation states, or of any misshapen global institutions like the United Nations.

Those supercomputers purr softly as they calculate to the tenth decimal point how to maximize profit every day, every minute and every second. They make the ultimate decisions for international banks and corporations, and not only because they are fast and perfectly integrated. They are capable of something that no human can do: they can assess the monetary value of the entire Earth and can extract profit from every aspect of human society in perfect accord with the algorithms they were assigned, and do so without any hesitation, without the slightest ethical qualm. They were not programmed to calculate the sustainability of the Earth.

We do not have to wait for supercomputers to achieve consciousness in order to lose control of our civilization. All we need is for computers to set the priorities for our society on the basis of profit without any consideration for our long-term needs. If social media, videos and games, remap the neural networks of our brains, the computers will take over by default long before they have consciousness. We have delegated the administration of our economy to supercomputers without even noticing it.

Do those supercomputers act on the basis of what we ask of them? Perhaps, or perhaps not.

There is one critical imperative for the network of supercomputers consuming electricity on a huge scale. That imperative has nothing to do with the id or the ego. These networks are compelled by the second law of thermodynamics to create greater entropy, to consume more energy. It is this drive, rather than any fuzzy consciousness more appropriate for science fiction novels, that powers their decisions as a system.

The result?

The one-eyed humans whose reasoning and perceptions have been degraded by the stimulation of technology, who have been deprived of science and metaphysics, are being led to the precipice by a massively-parallel blind man.

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***

NATO’s willingness to underwrite US military deployment in Europe and expand its reach to include the Pacific demonstrates that its current purpose is more about propping up America than securing peace.

The recently concluded virtual meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense ministers has been billed as President Joe Biden’s first opportunity to act on his promise of repairing the damage done to the military alliance by the contentious policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump. 

While a great deal of attention has been paid to the optics of unifying NATO under new, more inclusive American leadership, the harsh realities of the policy priorities pushed by Lloyd Austin, Biden’s secretary of defense, and their underlying economics, point to a weakened US looking to further exploit a European military alliance for the purposes of propping up an America in decline.

Financial concerns remained one of the central issues confronting the alliance, as Austin continued the Trump-era pressure on member nations to meet the two percent GDP threshold for defense spending established in 2014 (currently only nine of NATO’s 28 members have met this requirement).

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg furthered Austin’s call for increased investment in what he termed NATO’s “core deterrence and defense activities,” proposing that the alliance begin jointly funding the various battalion-sized battlegroups member nations have deployed to Poland and the Baltic States, ostensibly as a deterrence against Russian military aggression.

The current arrangement, Stoltenberg noted, is that “the country that provides the capabilities also provides the funding.”

So, if you send some troops to the NATO battlegroup in Lithuania, as Norway does, then Norway pays for that. I think that we should change that,” he told reporters.

According to Stoltenberg, the process of joint funding would demonstrate a mutual commitment to the kind of common defense that is enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO Charter, often cited as the heart and soul of the alliance.

But the concept of joint funding hides a more painful reality – the deployment of NATO military battlegroups into Poland and the Baltics is, in and of itself, militarily meaningless. A recent RAND analysis concluded that Russia would defeat these forces and overrun the Baltics within 60 hours after the initiation of hostilities. The amount of combat power that would need to be deployed into the Baltics to alter that outcome is currently beyond the ability of NATO to deploy and sustain.

The only nation capable of providing the kind of sustainable, trained, and equipped combat power necessary to fight a viable ground combat campaign against Russian forces in either the Baltics or Poland is the United States. As things stand, the US is unwilling and unable to foot the cost of a deployment beyond an armored brigade it maintains in Poland on a rotational basis, and a forward corps-sized headquarters recently established on Polish soil. The US has conducted reinforcement exercises, where a second armored brigade is flown into Germany, equips itself using prepositioned stocks warehoused in Germany, and is deployed via rail and road into Poland.

There are three problems with this scenario. First is the fact that two brigades do not constitute a division, let alone a corps (normally two to three divisions). Second is that the deployment of this second brigade requires lines of communication (airfields, ports, roads, and rails) that would readily be interdicted in time of war; there is little chance these troops would ever reach the battlefield. Lastly, this deployment takes time – days, if not weeks. Even if they were to make it to the frontlines, Russian troops would have already secured their objectives.

The only way to change this equation is for the US to commit more troops to the region on a full-time basis, and to beef up its reinforcement efforts along the lines of the 1980s’ REFORGER (return of forces to Germany) program. This, however, costs money that the US military is currently unwilling/unable to allocate. Under Stoltenberg’s scheme of shared costs, however, this expense would be spread among the NATO membership, and as such would become more palatable for the US.

The US also raised the possibility of enlisting NATO in the Pacific, where America is gearing up for a possible military conflict with China. The Biden administration has recently established a special task force responsible for making recommendations regarding US military strategy and force posture, among other things, as they relate to confronting and containing China.

While NATO has a history of extending its military reach beyond the borders of Europe – most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also North Africa and the Persian Gulf – this is the first time a major discussion will take place regarding a possible NATO military role in the Pacific.

The possibility of the alliance’s involvement in the region seemed attractive to Stoltenberg, who called ita unique opportunity to start a new chapter for transatlantic relations,” adding that China was a legitimate concern for NATO given that it, along with Russia, is “at the forefront of an authoritarian pushback against the rules-based international order.

The “rules-based international order” to which Stoltenberg refers dates back to the aftermath of the Second World War and the various institutions and norms – centered around the notion of a United Nations but in fact dictated and managed by Washington – that were established at that time.

These rules are often credited with having delivered peace and prosperity in the 75 years since the end of that conflict. Any student of history, however, would know that the world did not prosper peacefully during that time, but rather was engaged in near-constant conflict driven by the desire of the US and its allies to impose “rules-based order” on the rest of the world. NATO is an extension of this effort, with its role in Kosovo and Libya underscoring its aggressive post-Cold War persona.

The unfortunate reality is that NATO is an institution of war, incapable of articulating non-military solutions. Given its military-centric focus, NATO defines all problems as requiring a military solution. This holds true in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where almost every expert has noted there is no military solution, and yet Stoltenberg continues to argue for NATO troops to remain until one can be found.

The same holds true regarding NATO’s militarization of the political problems existent in eastern Europe, choosing the deployment of battlegroups over the dispatch of diplomats. The pivot toward defining Russia and China as a potential adversary is drawn less from any real threat posed by either nation, but rather from the insecurity of a United States in decline. By bringing NATO into the mix when it comes to China, the US ensures that whatever “solution” that will be agreed upon will act to sustain the military viability of an alliance that has survived long past its logical expiration date.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

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***

The Trump presidency somewhat decoupled the US and Chinese economies: relations have been damaged by tariff wars, the closing of consulates, the blacklisting of technology companies and the delisting of companies. The future of US–China relations under the Biden administration is still highly uncertain. Biden has promised to ‘be tough’ on China and his cabinet picks reflect this, but it is not yet clear what ‘being tough’ entails and what end it intends to serve.

The Biden administration is unlikely to escalate decoupling and instead steer US–China relations in a more positive direction.

The trade war has done more harm than good for the United States. Heightened tariffs did not reduce the US trade deficits. The deficit with China was US$276 billion in 2017, rose to US$296 billion in 2019 and further to US$317 billion in 2020. US trade deficits with other countries also grew: the average annual trade deficit in Trump’s first three years was US$556.9 billion, a 17 per cent increase from the four-year average of Obama’s second term.

Imposing tariffs also failed to sway China on fundamental interests. China did make some structural reforms on the demands of the Phase One trade deal. For example, it has met 50 out of 57 technical commitments to ease agricultural trade barriers and passed a new Foreign Investment Law to ban forced technology transfers. But these adjustments aligned with its own long-term interests of market reform. The trade deal may only have accelerated the reform process.

The trade war has cost US consumers and businesses dearly. According to a study commissioned by the US–China Business Council, the trade war cost the United States 245,000 jobs at its peak. Should it continue to escalate, it could cost the United States US$1.6 trillion dollars over the next five years.

A technology or finance war would also be counterproductive. Decades of globalised production have allowed China to establish a firm foothold in the global supply chain that is now impossible to shake. A recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai indicated that over 80 per cent of US businesses do not plan to relocate from China. US firms are eager to access China’s vast markets, with its 300 million-strong middle class.

From both the supply and demand sides, it is costly, if not unrealistic, for the United States to decouple from China. The United States has worked tirelessly over the years to push for China’s reform and opening — for example, working to facilitate China’s access to the World Trade Organization. It is time for the United States to reap the benefits, rather than boxing itself out of the Chinese market.

Biden’s approach towards China is couched in his domestic priorities, including the four crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession, climate change and racial injustice. On all these fronts, it would be helpful to maintain a good relationship with and coordinate, or better yet collaborate, with China. A global health crisis requires a global response, as does global economic recovery. Fighting climate change certainly calls for the joint effort of the world’s two largest emitters. And demonising China will only heighten racial hatred towards Asian Americans. Ultimately, ‘being tough’ on China would work against Biden’s domestic interests.

Biden’s domestic efforts could instead cool US–China tensions. Revitalising the US economy would require, as he has pledged, investing in infrastructure, clean energy and education, and boosting working class bargaining power. The US–China decoupling move was substantially motivated by populist politics, supported by millions of Americans who feel left behind by globalisation. Helping those ‘left behind’ to get back on their feet and share in the economic prosperity of globalisation could help quell anti-China sentiment in the long run.

Biden is determined to revert to multilateralism, but this provides little room to ‘be tough’ on China. Trump’s damage to the US multilateral system is beyond a quick fix. Biden signed executive orders returning the United States to the Paris agreement and the World Health Organization, but domestic sentiment means it is much harder to re-join the Trans-Pacific Partnership. US allies and friends may also reasonably question its ability to commit beyond the four-year presidential cycle. There is also little appetite among US allies in Asia and Europe to develop cooperation aimed at ‘being tough’ against China after establishing close economic partnerships.

The most practical approach to ‘being tough’ would be ‘competitive recoupling’, where the United States and China carefully manage their differences, coordinate and collaborate on areas of common interest, and compete on equal footing in areas such as technology and trade.

How the US–China relationship will evolve depends not only on Washington but also Beijing. Now that a new US administration is expected to adopt a more constructive and less antagonistic tone, Beijing should also consider toning down its assertive stance, and returning to Deng Xiaoping’s approach. It should also assume the responsibilities of a rising global power and abide by agreed rules. A more open-minded, modest and trustworthy China would foster a friendly international environment that is conducive to its own economic growth.

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Yan Liang is Professor of Economics at Willamette University, Oregon.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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***

The world’s leaders, private companies and individuals must take a coordinated approach to address three environmental calamities facing the Earth at this moment, according to a report released Feb. 18 by the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP).

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution have resulted from what U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said has been “unsustainable production and consumption,” threatening human health and the global system underpinning our society.

“Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive, and for too long we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature,” Guterres told reporters at the release of the report, “Making Peace with Nature.” “It’s time we learn to see nature as an ally that will help us achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” referring to 17 targets that aim to reduce poverty by 2030.

An aerial view of pollution from the Rio Huaypetue gold mine in Peru. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

An aerial view of pollution from the Rio Huaypetue gold mine in Peru. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

The UNEP report notes that human innovation has brought a staggering surge in wealth in recent decades. The world’s economy is five times the size it was 50 years ago. In that time, humans have tripled both the extraction of natural resources and the output of lands under cultivation.

But that prosperity has come at a cost, the brunt of which has been borne by the world’s 1.3 billion poorest. The average global temperature is currently on track to rise by 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels, owing mostly to the carbon that human activity has already released into the atmosphere. We’ve cleared away 10% of the world’s forest cover since 1990, dispensing with a primary mechanism for keeping the quantity of atmospheric carbon in check and removing critical habitat for untold numbers of species.

An eighth of the world’s plants and animals — about 1 million species in all — face the threat of extinction, according to 2019 research from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), as forests and other ecosystems have been removed to make way for agriculture, cities and resource extraction. Legal and illegal hunting and fishing for traditional medicines and food, too, have whittled away species’ numbers. And scientists are currently tracking a precipitous decline in insect numbers, likely a knock-on effect of a changing climate, higher chemical loads and changes to their habitats.

An elephant in Sri Lanka’s Udawalawe National Park. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

An elephant in Sri Lanka’s Udawalawe National Park. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

The industrialization and agricultural intensification that helped ignite the global economic boom have also sullied the air and water that we depend on. This pollution kills millions of people prematurely each year, again primarily from the ranks of the world’s poorest.

Biodiversity loss, chemical pollution and climate change represent three of the nine “planetary boundaries” that scientists first proposed in 2009 as a way of assessing the risks that human activities pose to “the Earth System.” Calculations for each, such as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere for climate change, provide a snapshot of whether we’ve crossed critical thresholds. That information could tell us how close we are to dangerously destabilizing the planet and with it the “safe operating space for humanity,” as the authors of the 2009 paper put it.

According to that study and an updated 2015 paper on the planetary boundaries, the Earth has surpassed the safe limit for climate change. The loss of biodiversity and specifically genetic diversity is also well past the safe limit, potentially jeopardizing the integrity of the biosphere.

But despite the grim statistics revealing the human toll of chemical pollution in the water and the air, scientists still don’t have comprehensive data on human-made chemicals in the environment, their persistence, and the danger they pose to the global system.

Two agents of climate change pictured together: oil and land use change. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Two agents of climate change pictured together: oil and land-use change. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Drawing on recent assessments aimed at capturing the breadth and scale of these three environmental “emergencies,” the authors of the UNEP report set out to define what needs to be done to tackle them.

In the preface, lead report authors Ivar Baste and Robert Watson write that “the findings of the assessments are interlinked and add up to an unparalleled planetary emergency.” Baste is with the Norwegian Environment Agency, and Watson chairs the IPBES.

“The environmental emergencies that have been outlined in the report all flow directly from humanity’s overconsumption resources, overproduction of waste, and prioritization of short-term gain with the consequences of long-term pain,” Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, said at the press conference. “But all is not lost.”

Serving as a blueprint for action, the report calls on governments to stop subsidizing the production of carbon-emitting fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, and instead redirect those funds into sustainable livelihoods that don’t put as much pressure on the climate.

A baby Sumatran rhino in Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

A baby Sumatran rhino in Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Andersen said putting a price on the carbon emitted by countries and companies could help instigate a shift away from harmful practices and toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“We … know — let’s be honest — that taxing pollution works,” she said.

Grappling with biodiversity loss will require expanding the network of protected areas around the globe and improving the surveillance, location selection and connectivity of them on land and sea.

There are signs of progress. On Feb. 19, the U.S. made its official return to the Paris climate accords. The move to rejoin the 125 other nations that signed onto the agreement in 2015 symbolized a shift in policy for the U.S., the country with the second-highest carbon emissions, after China. But it also entails financial support for climate-friendly development from the U.S. and other industrialized countries to poorer nations.

An orange butterfly in Vietnam. Scientists are tracking a bewildering decline in the world’s insect populations. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

An orange butterfly in Vietnam. Scientists are tracking a bewildering decline in the world’s insect populations. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Global meetings on biodiversity and climate change are slated for 2021, emphasizing the need for a worldwide effort to address the challenges laid out in the UNEP report.

Guterres struck a hopeful tone, suggesting that human ingenuity was up to the task.

“This report shows that we have the knowledge and the ability to meet these challenges,” he said. Still, he said that efforts to cut carbon emissions, stem the flow of pollutants into the global system, and elevate the protection of biodiversity must begin anew in 2021.

“It’s a make it or break it year indeed,” Guterres said.

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John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Twitter: @johnccannon

Sources

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E., … & Foley, J. (2009). Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2).

Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., … & Sörlin, S. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223). doi:10.1126/science.1259855

Featured image: A lemur tree frog (Hylomantis lemur) in Costa Rica by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Video: The 2021 Worldwide Corona Crisis. “The Worst Crisis in Modern History”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Ariel Noyola Rodriguez, February 21 2021

We bring to the attention of our readers this Global Research Video documentary produced by Ariel Noyola Rodriguez, featuring Prof. Michel Chossudovsky.

Biden Launches Campaign to Silence Critics of Killer Vaccine

By Mike Whitney, February 22 2021

Imagine if an ordinary working man went on a rampage and killed 929 people and maimed 316 others. The media would naturally call such a man a serial killer or a homicidal maniac. Now imagine if a big pharmaceutical company did the same thing.

One-Third of Deaths Reported to CDC After COVID Vaccines Occurred within 48 Hours of Vaccination

By Children’s Health Defense, February 22 2021

According to new data released today, as of Feb. 12, 15,923 adverse reactions to COVID vaccines, including 929 deaths, have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since Dec. 14, 2020.

The Corona Crisis: Over and Over, We Have Been Hoaxed

By Dr. Meryl Nass, February 22 2021

It is difficult for me to believe that two thirds of the US (according to a Harris poll) are favorably inclined to the pharmaceutical industry, up 30 percentage points since January 2020, just before the pandemic. Do you believe it?

“Protective Measures” against a Supposed Corona Pandemic: “Compassion for All Creatures Is What Makes Human Beings Truly Human”

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A real epidemic of greed for power, lies and brutality is now ravaging millions of people worldwide like the plague of the Middle Ages. But the disastrous effects of the murderous state “protective measures” against a supposed Corona pandemic touch our lifeblood, but they do not shake us up; we remain in lethargy.

Trudeau Government’s Arrest of Meng Wanzhou, The “New Cold War” on China

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March 1 marks the resumption of hearings in Vancouver in the extradition trial of Meng Wanzhou. It also marks an event by her supporters in Canada, determined to block her deportation to the USA where she would stand trial again on fraud charges that could potentially put her in jail for over 100 years.

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: Peer Reviewed Reports

By AIER, February 22 2021

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion.

The Temporary Collapse of Texas Is Foreshadowing the Total Collapse of the United States

By Michael Snyder, February 22 2021

We are getting a very short preview of what will eventually happen to the United States as a whole.  America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling.

A Beacon in an Ocean of Mass Disinformation? Support and Endorse Independent Radio Media

By Michael Welch, February 21 2021

Lies and distortions are at the centre of virtually every major war conflict which costs people their lives. And the media, the major ones owned by the same six corporations, play a role in guiding the war apparatus towards a successful execution.

By Larry Chin, February 21 2021

This incisive article by Larry Chin written with foresight was first published shortly after the implementation of the March 18, 2020 lockdown in the United States.

India and the Weaponization of Human Rights

By Carla Stea, February 21 2021

China’s communist “dictatorship” lifts 700 million Chinese citizens out of poverty: yet India is adored by western pundits, while China is demonized and sanctioned

Ten Years Ago: “Operation Libya” and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, February 20 2021

Libya is among the World’s largest oil economies with approximately 3.5% of global oil reserves, more than twice those of the US.

Libya: When Historical Memory is Erased

By Manlio Dinucci, February 20 2021

It happened ten years ago: US-NATO’s “humanitarian war” against Libya in support of so-called pro-democracy rebels.

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Erik Prince, the founder and former CEO of the mercenary firm Blackwater and a close ally of former President Donald Trump, sent weapons to a Libyan warlord in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, according to a confidential U.N. document reported Friday by the New York Times. 

The U.N. report, which investigators sent to the Security Council on Thursday, reportedly details how Prince sent foreign mercenaries armed with attack aircraft, gunboats, and cyberwarfare capabilities to support renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar during a major 2019 battle in eastern Libya.

According to the U.N. report, the mercenary operation cost $80 million and included a plan to form a hit squad to locate and assassinate commanders opposed to Haftar.

Haftar, a one-time CIA asset considered Libya’s most powerful warlord, has fought to overthrow the North African nation’s internationally recognized government during the country’s second civil war since the overthrow of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in the 2011 Arab Spring revolts. Haftar has enjoyed various degrees of support from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia. British, French, U.S., and UAE warplanes have also assisted his forces.

In 2019, Trump reportedly granted permission for Haftar—who stands accused of ordering his troops to commit war crimes—to launch an air campaign against the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord, attacks which killed hundreds of civilians in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

The U.N. report raises questions about whether Trump was complicit in Prince’s violation of the international arms embargo against Haftar’s forces.

Anas el-Gomati, director of Libyan think tank Sadeq Institute, told Al Jazeera that using mercenaries allows leaders to “outright refuse that you have any knowledge of what’s going on.”

“To what degree did Trump help facilitate this war alongside Erik Prince?” asked el-Gomati, who also wondered whether “Erik Prince was coordinating with Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Libya, and has helped them establish a foothold in the way he helped the United Arab Emirates establish a foothold in Libya.”

Another unanswered question is who funded Prince’s $80 million operation. Wolfram Lacher, a Libya expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the Times that Prince has “been linked to the Trump administration, the Emirati leadership, and the Russians.”

“For me, the question is who is tacitly backing him?” asked Lacher.

Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, founded Blackwater—now called Academi after being sold twice—in 1997. He rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration and the so-called War on Terror, in which the U.S. relied heavily upon private contractors. On September 16, 2007, Blackwater guards massacred 17 men, women, and children in Nisour Square in Baghdad, Iraq.

Last December, Trump pardoned four of the Nisour Square killers, who had been sentenced to 12 years to life in prison for crimes including first-degree murder.

Trump and Prince have long enjoyed warm relations. Prince was a major Trump donor whose sister, Betsy DeVos, was confirmed as secretary of education in 2017.

This isn’t the first time Prince has been accused of breaking domestic and international laws against weapons transfers. In 2012 his anti-piracy security force in Somalia was accused by the U.N. of “the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a private security company.” Prince was also reportedly the target of an FBI investigation last year for weaponizing crop dusters.

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Featured image: Erik Prince is the brother of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. (Photo: The Oxford Union/REX Shutterstock)

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The United Nations may be necessary to build a better world, but that doesn’t mean the international body should be above criticism. The case of Haiti reveals how the UN can be part of the problem rather than the solution.

On Sunday tens of thousands demonstrated in Port-au-Prince against the foreign-backed dictatorship of Jovenel Moise. Reports suggest police began firing on protesters as they neared the UN headquarters. Ultimately, one protester was killed and a number of journalists injured. In response James North tweeted, “people elsewhere may not understand why the thousands of pro-democracy protesters would march toward U.N. headquarters. There’s a longer answer, but for now: Haitians believe, with good reason, that the U.N. helps prop up dictator Jovenel Moise.”

Alongside the US, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil and Organization of American States (OAS), the UN is part of the “Core Group” of foreign ambassadors widely believed to be the real power behind Moïse. The Core Group releases periodic statements concerning the country’s political affairs. The UN Mission, now known as Bureau intégré des Nations Unies en Haïti, has aligned with the US, Canada and OAS against the vast majority of Haiti’s population and institutions in endorsing Moise’s bid to extend his mandate as president. The international body announced it would give $20 million for elections that all the opposition parties reject since few believe a fair election is possible under Moise’s direction. In the summer Haiti’s entire nine-person electoral council resigned in response to Moïse’s pressure and then he unilaterally appointed new members.

As North alludes to, the UN’s current position is part of the international body’s pattern of hostility towards Haitian democracy and sovereignty. After the US, France and Canada ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and thousands of other elected officials in February 2004, the three countries soldiers were incorporated into a UN mission that backed up a coup government’s violent crackdown against pro-democracy protesters. Subsequently led by Brazil, the UN force also killed dozens of civilians directly when it pacified Cité Soleil, a bastion of support for Aristide. The worst incident was early in the morning on July 6, 2005, when 400 UN troops entered the densely populated neighbourhood. Eyewitnesses and victims of the attack claim Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH) helicopters fired on residents throughout the operation. The cardboard and corrugated tin wall houses were no match for the troops’ heavy weaponry, which fired “over 22,000 rounds of ammunition”, according to a US embassy file released through a Freedom of Information request. The raid left at least 23 civilians dead, including numerous women and children. The UN initially claimed they only killed “gang” leader Dread Wilme.

Aside from its role in the coup and subsequent political repression, the UN’s disregard for Haitian life caused a major cholera outbreak, which left over 10,000 dead and one million ill. In October 2010 a UN base in central Haiti recklessly discharged sewage, including the feces of newly deployed Nepalese troops, into a river where people drank. This introduced the waterborne disease into the country. Even after the deadly cholera outbreak, UN forces were caught disposing sewage into waterways Haitians drank from.

UN troops were responsible for countless other abuses ranging from beatings to rape.

In August 2010 16-year-old Gérard Jean-Gilles, who ran miscellaneous errands for Nepalese troops, was found dead hanging inside a MINUSTAH base in Cap-Haïtien. Several days earlier, a Nepalese soldier publicly tortured a minor in the country’s second biggest city. The soldier, reported Haitian media, forced “his hands into the youth’s mouth in an attempt to separate his lower jaw from his upper jaw, tearing the skin of his mouth.”

UN troops had illicit sexual relations, sodomized boys and raped young girls. In mid 2017 a Canadian and British academic oversaw a study of 2,500 Haitians who lived near UN bases. They were asked “what it’s like to be a woman or a girl living in a community that hosts a peacekeeping mission.” Without being asked specifically about sexual relations with peacekeepers, 265 respondents talked of children fathered by members of the peacekeeping force, which were widely nicknamed “Pitit MINUSTAH”. Many single mothers were left struggling with stigma and poverty when the soldiers departed. Respondents described girls as young as 11 sexually abused and impregnated by UN representatives. Officially, UN soldiers are prohibited from having sexual relations with locals.

Canada’s biggest contribution to a UN mission over the past 15 years has been in Haiti. During that time and before the UN has been a tool of imperialism. Full stop. As anti-Aristide insurgents made their way to Port-au-Prince in February 2004, the international community ignored the elected government’s requests for “a few dozen” peacekeepers to restore order in a country without an army. On February 26, three days before removal, the OAS permanent council called on the UN Security Council to “take all the necessary and appropriate urgent measures to address the deteriorating situation in Haiti.” CARICOM called on the UN Security Council to deploy an emergency military task force to assist Aristide’s government.

Despite ignoring appeals for support from Aristide, CARICOM and the OAS in the preceding days, soon after US/French/Canadian troops ousted the elected government the UN Security Council passed a motion authorizing an intervention. In a three-minute Sunday night meeting — between 9:52 and 9:55 PM, according to the official UN summary — the Security Council “authorizedthe immediate deployment of [a] Multinational Interim Force for a period of three months to help to secure and stabilize the capital, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere in the country.”

Today Haitians live with the results. If Canadians blindly promote an organization that has been a key organizer of repression and misery what should Haitians think of us?

On February 28 the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is hosting a discussion of Haiti Betrayed, a powerful indictment of Canada’s role in the 2004 coup and subsequent policy in the country. In the week leading up to the event the film will be available to watch for free for those who register in advance.

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Three weeks ago, the United States issued a temporary freeze on pending arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as part of an effort to end the civil war in Yemen.

In one of its first major foreign policy announcements, the new US administration of President Joe Biden paused the implementation of recent Trump-era weapons deals, including the sale of munitions to Saudi Arabia and F-35 fighter jets to the UAE.

A Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015, and have since carried out more than 20,000 air strikes in an effort to roll back the Houthi rebels, who seized the capital Sanaa in late 2014. One-third of those strikes have been on non-military sites, including schools, factories and hospitals, according to the Yemen Data Project.

Since Washington’s decision, pressure has mounted on other Western countries that sell arms to Riyadh and its allies.

Middle East Eye breaks down which other major military exporters continue to arm the Saudi-led coalition, which countries have cancelled contracts, and what action is being taken by campaigners across the globe.

UK

Despite its US allies halting arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition, the UK – the second largest military exporter to Saudi Arabia – has refused to follow suit.

“The decisions the US takes on matters of arms sales are decisions for the US. The UK takes its own arms export responsibilities very seriously, and we continue to assess all arms export licences in accordance with strict licensing criteria,” James Cleverly, a foreign office minister, said.

The UK authorised the sale of $1.88bn worth of arms – including missiles and bombs – between the period of July and September 2020, according to figures released by the Department of International Trade last week.

London paused all new arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition in June 2019, after the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the government had failed to make an assessment of whether there was a risk that the weapons could be used to breach international humanitarian law in Yemen.

However, the transactions started up again in July last year, with international trade secretary Liz Truss stating that any breaches of international law were “isolated incidents”.

Saudi Arabia represented 40 percent of British arms exports between 2010 and 2019, and sources told The Times that the UK’s Typhoon aircraft programme would no longer be financially viable if the Saudis lost interest.

France 

Last week, the European Union voted overwhelmingly to end the sale of European security equipment that fuels conflict in Yemen, and demanded accountability for member states that violate EU arms export rules.

However, several French legislators were notable abstainees. Twenty-two of the 23 French MEPs in the liberal “Renew Europe” political bloc, including several members of President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party, abstained on the vote.

France is the third largest exporter of arms to Riyadh, with Paris accounting for 4 percent of the kingdom’s arms imports between 2015 and 2019, behind the US (73 percent) and UK (13 percent), according to the most recent figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Over the same period, France was the second largest exporter of arms to the UAE.

An investigation by EU Observer in November found that French companies were training Saudi soldiers despite concerns about the war in Yemen.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, have called on the French government to hand over control of arms sales to the country’s parliament, which has little oversight on the issue. However, there has been no indication from Macron’s government of any change of course.

Italy 

Following Washington’s decision in late January, Italy announced the blocking of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE over concerns the weapons could be used to kill civilians in Yemen.

Activists hailed the “historic” ruling, which will result in a complete blockade of exports, rather than a temporary suspension.

The move includes the cancellation of 12,700 missiles that were to be sold as part of a $485m arms deal agreed by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in 2016, according to Italy’s Peace and Disarmament Network.

Renzi, who is a senator for the city of Florence, came under fire from Italian commentators last month for flying to Riyadh for an economic conference, at which he interviewed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, just days after Italy’s announcement.

Canada 

Canada’s arms sales to Riyadh have come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks since their North American neighbours froze exports.

On 25 January, activists in Ontario staged a protest at the site of a company believed to be involved in transporting Canadian-made, light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia. Protesters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, also gathered outside Raytheon Canada Limited, whose parent company in the US has manufactured precision-guided munitions which have killed civilians in Yemen.

Figures released in June found that Canada had sold $2.2bn worth of military hardware to the Saudis in 2019 – more than double that of the previous year. The majority of those exports were light armoured vehicles, and were part of an $11bn deal brokered in 2014 by the then-Conservative government.

Current prime minister Justin Trudeau approved the deal in 2015, stating that it would be “extremely difficult” to break the contract, incurring penalties “in the billions of dollars”.

However, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, Trudeau announced a freeze on new arms exports to Riyadh pending a review.

The suspension was lifted in April last year, after a government review found no clear evidence that Canadian military hardware was being used for human rights violations.

Spain 

In line with their French counterparts, seven out of nine Spanish liberal MEPs in the centrist Renew Europe bloc abstained on last week’s vote to restrict European arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition.

Spain has consistently been one of the EU’s largest exporters to the Saudi-led coalition.

Between 2015 and 2019, it authorised the sale of arms to the coalition worth more than €2.6bn, and exported weapons, predominantly ammunition and aircraft, worth almost €2bn. Most of those exports went to Saudi Arabia (€1.2bn) and the UAE (€276 million).

“Yes, it adds pressure and we hope that the Spanish government will adjust and take the side of legality and morality,” said Alberto Estevez, Amnesty spokesman on arms trade, reacting to Washington’s suspension.

“The government must choose between remaining on the dark side with the merchants of death who have fuelled the six-year-long conflict, alongside France and the UK on the podium of the pariahs who sell arms to two countries that have committed dozens of war crimes, or join a growing list of countries that have said enough of the atrocities.”

Germany 

Germany was one of the first major exporters to the Saudi-led coalition to subsequently ban arms sales.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government decided in late 2018 that it would not deliver arms to Saudi Arabia, over concerns about the situation in Yemen and also because of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. The ban has been renewed multiple times since then, most recently in December when it was extended until the end of 2021.

Prior to blocking arms exports, Germany had sold $550m worth of arms to Riyadh in the third quarter of 2017, according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir has called Germany’s ban “illogical”, and said it “does not make a difference”.

“The idea that weapon sales were stopped to Saudi Arabia because of the Yemen war I think is illogical,” he told German press agency dpa in November. “We think it’s wrong because we think the war in Yemen is a legitimate war. It’s a war that we were forced into it.”

“We can buy weapons from a number of countries, and we do so. Saying we’re not going to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia doesn’t make a difference to us.”

Australia 

Australia confirmed last week that it would not ban arms sales to Saudi and the UAE, despite concerns from civil society groups over violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen.

Between August 2019 and October 2020, Australia has granted five permanent permits for the export of military goods to Saudi Arabia, and nine permits to the UAE.

In neighbouring New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has called for an inquiry after an investigation earlier this month revealed that the majority state-owned Air New Zealand worked on the engines of a Saudi navy ship.

Ardern said the contract arrangement was “completely wrong” and “doesn’t pass New Zealand’s sniff test”.

Belgium 

Belgian military exports have come into the spotlight after an investigation on 10 February found that arms produced in the country were being used by Saudi forces in Yemen.

Vredesactie, a Belgian NGO, analysed video footage and satellite images to show that weapons manufactured in Belgium’s Wallonia region by arms companies FN Herstal and Mecar were used in the Battle of the Jabara Valley in North Yemen in 2019.

The government of Wallonia, a southern region in Belgium which has considerable autonomy, including decision making power over foreign policy, halted arms sales to Saudi Arabia in February last year over concerns about its conduct in Yemen.

Further to the southern region’s decision, Belgium’s top legal authority imposed a country-wide suspension on arms export licences for shipments to Saudi Arabia’s National Guard in August.

In addition to Belgium, Italy and Germany, other EU members to have passed legislation to impose restrictions on military exports to the Saudi-led coalition include Denmark, Finland, Greece and the Netherlands.

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“Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.” (Derrick Jensen)

Regulatory Capture in Advanced Nations 

We saw in earlier posts that corporations use a system of bribery known as lobbying to manipulate laws and corporate regulations. They work with propaganda experts to fool us, and many politicians, into believing that corporate regulation is a bad thing. They are the dominant force in writing trade rules, so they create rules that favor themselves.

There is widespread evidence that corporations have influence over the regulators who are supposed to enforce the laws governing those corporations. When the financial system collapsed in 2008, it became clear that the financial regulator in the UK, the FSA, was unfit for purpose.(1) Instead of seeing themselves in a policing role, they saw themselves as ‘enablers’ of corporate activity. This allowed financial companies to engage in all manner of unethical and criminal activity.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposed to protect the environment, but its links to corporations are so strong that it fails to police polluting corporations effectively, and it is actively trying to weaken regulations protecting the environment.(2) Many of their scientific advisors receive funding from corporations, so their opinions are unlikely to be unbiased.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) represents both the consumer, and the food and drug industries, and receives much of its funding from industry. This has been compared to the police getting their funding from the mafia. Many FDA personnel come from the pharmaceutical industry. Pressure from corporations has caused it to fail in its duty to look after the public and allow drugs that are banned in much of the rest of the advanced world. The painkiller Vioxx was known to be dangerous and caused many deaths but the FDA failed to ban it. (It was eventually withdrawn by the manufacturer due to bad publicity.) On occasions when scientists at the FDA have tried to explain to the public that something might be unsafe, they have been sacked.(3)

Even Weaker Regulation In Poor Countries 

In order to have any control over powerful corporations in rich countries, complex systems of laws have to be created and regulators have to be given sufficient powers. Many of the poorest countries do not have these systems. They are therefore unable to properly control corporations operating in their territory. This lack of regulation leads to exploitation and pollution, and helps to reinforce poverty for billions of people. All over the world there are mining companies in developing countries, pouring poisonous chemicals into the water supply, contaminating soil, and poisoning the air, creating huge problems for farmers, and the health of communities more generally. Huge areas of rainforest are cut down to make way for mining, logging, cattle ranches, and crops such as soya and palm oil, creating species loss.(4) As we saw in an earlier post, these are costs that society pays for, while corporations make the profits.

There have been a few well-known examples of Western corporations causing serious problems in developing countries. One of the worst industrial disasters occurred in Bhopal, India in 1984. Poisonous gas escaped from a plant that manufactured pesticides.(5) It was run by a subsidiary of the US company, Union Carbide. Thousands of people died and tens of thousands have been injured. Poisonous chemicals still pollute the area and are likely to do so for many years to come. The most famous example of unethical behaviour by corporations in poor countries was when Nestle sold powdered-milk infant formula to mothers in Africa, claiming [untruthfully] that it was healthier than breast milk.

Coca-Cola has caused problems in many countries in the developing world. The company’s bottling plants use huge quantities of water, creating water shortages for farmers. A report by the organisation ‘War on Want’ stated:

“Coca-cola has been dehydrating communities, contaminating water systems and polluting agricultural land through the dumping of toxic waste.”(6)

This has caused widespread protests in India, leading to the closure of some of the plants.(7) Protestors in some countries have been beaten-up by police, and in Columbia, union leaders representing employees were murdered.

Blocking Real Regulation 

Laws governing the behaviour of corporations when trading internationally are still evolving and remain weak, yet US and European negotiators consistently oppose stronger regulations for their corporations in other countries.(8) The biggest corporations are able to operate almost unrestricted. The United Nations did try to create a set of rules known as the UN code of conduct for transnational corporations, but gave up in 1992. It was 20 years in the planning but too many powerful corporate interests made sure it did not emerge.(9) We have learned from issues such as weapons, torture, or human rights, that many international agreements get broken repeatedly by both rich and poor countries. There is not much point in having an agreement if there is no one around to enforce it. Governments in advanced nations have little interest in reining in their corporations because the exploitation of poor countries helps make rich countries, and rich people, richer. 

Governments help corporations commit crimes 

It is not just a lack of desire by Western politicians to hold corporations to account. It actually goes beyond that. We saw in earlier posts that many of the crimes committed by the US and British military, such as invasions, wars, and overthrowing governments, are about controlling trade and resources. Our governments actively do terrible things to support their corporations. A good example would be the overthrow of the Guatemalan President in 1954 to help the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita.

Foreign governments also commit atrocities, including murder, to help British, US and other corporations maintain control of that country’s resources. In return, the revenues of these corporations help to keep brutal rulers in power. The mining company, Freeport, has a huge gold mine in West Papua, which contains gold thought to be worth $20 billion. It has displaced large numbers of local people from their homes, and polluted their land and water with poisonous chemicals. Freeport spends millions of dollars financing the Indonesian military and police, who control the island. There have been as many as 12,000 military or police personnel in the region who are only there to look after the mining company’s interests. Tens of thousands of Papuans have been killed over many years.(10) Mining companies are consistently among the worst offenders when it comes to exploitation in developing countries.

The Example of Tobacco

Many advanced nations have suffered for decades with problems due to smoking. This is another excellent example of corporations making profits while society pays for the costs – in this case the poor health of a large segment of the population. It is estimated that 6 million people die of smoking each year, and many more suffer lung and heart problems.(11) This has caused immense distress, and cost healthcare systems around the world hundreds of billions of dollars.

There have been many legal cases relating to the tobacco industry, where large numbers of smokers have joined forces to sue the tobacco companies. During these cases it became clear that the companies had known for decades that nicotine was far more addictive than had been admitted. The senior personnel repeatedly lied under oath, but it eventually emerged that the companies had manipulated research data for many years to hide what they knew, and commit large scale fraud.(12)

Some rich countries have banned cigarette advertisements, and introduced other measures such as no smoking in public buildings. In the US, tobacco companies agreed to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation to cover healthcare costs due to smoking. Other countries, such as Brazil, are now attempting to do the same.(13)

One might expect leaders of advanced nations to help poor countries learn from our experiences and avoid the same mistakes, but instead of helping them implement the same sort of regulations that we have here, our governments apply obvious double standards and do the opposite. They support the tobacco companies whilst they repeat their excesses of the past by encouraging millions of people in poor countries to become addicted. The cigarettes in some poor countries are more addictive because there is weaker regulation on nicotine and tar content. The US agriculture department actually provided grants to help tobacco firms promote smoking overseas. In South Korea, the rate of increase in smoking tripled in 1988 when US companies began marketing in the country. In India, Brazil and Mexico, death rates due to smoking related diseases have increased dramatically. The companies deliberately target children, and when Taiwan tried to stop tobacco advertising to children, the US government forced them to allow it by threatening them with harsh penalties if they did not.(14)

The myth of corporate social responsibility

Every example of corporate wrongdoing is motivated by profit. If investors do not get a good enough return, they will move their money elsewhere. Directors are paid bonusses for making bigger profits. If being ethical conflicts with profit-making, profits take precedence. Big companies can make more profit if they exploit people, lie to the public, commit crimes, or engage in unethical activity more generally. It is actually rare to find a big company that is not engaged in unethical activities, that in a reasonable society would be considered a crime.

Weapons companies do not care about dictators slaughtering people; manufacturers of alcoholic drinks do not care about alcoholism; pharmaceutical companies do not care about poor people being unable to afford medicines; food companies do not care if their suppliers earn so little that they cannot survive; clothing companies do not care if their sub-contractors treat employees badly; water, electricity, gas and oil companies do not care if people die or fall ill because they cannot afford basic necessities; and mining and logging companies do not care if they destroy the homes of local populations.

The focus on profit means that the phrase ‘ethical corporation’ is almost a contradiction in terms. Voluntary corporate codes of conduct are more about good public relations than meaningful attempts at good conduct. They are really used to deflect criticism and persuade us that stricter regulation is not required.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is where corporations pretend to care about things like the environment, or human rights in other countries. Closer examination reveals that this is a smokescreen. One study found that the companies that hype CSR the most tend to be those with the worst pollution and human rights records, such as oil, mining and tobacco companies.(15) Some corporations take CSR a little more seriously, but only where it does not conflict with profit.

Manipulating Public Perception

The propaganda system surrounding corporate activity has been very successful in the last few decades. The mainstream media tends to see the world from the point of view of corporate shareholders. In general it is assumed that bigger profits are good. There is an underlying assumption that the system is a reasonable one. They have convinced us that structuring companies to selfishly and aggressively pursue profits is reasonable, despite evidence of the harm this causes to society, because the widespread harm is rarely discussed. The question “Would the world be better off without such powerful, influential corporations?” is never asked, because those with power do not want you to think such thoughts.

Sometimes there are discussions about specific examples of corporate wrongdoing – Enron’s fraud in the US, Shell’s involvement with murder in Nigeria, or Goldman Sachs following the 2008 financial crisis (discussed in other posts) – but these are presented as exceptions, with the implication that the system is reasonable. After the financial crisis, there was widespread discussion of the need for better financial regulation, but there was no discussion about better regulation for other corporations. Even financial regulation has disappeared from the mainstream press more recently.

Force Corporations to Serve Society 

We need to question why we have given these organisations so much power and political influence. In a reasonable society, businesses would not be able to harm people. An effective legal system would mostly stop companies breaking the law in the first place, and would close them down if they repeatedly broke the law. Executives would be properly accountable for corporate actions anywhere in the world, and would face severe jail sentences for corporate crimes. The ultimate goal would be to force corporations to serve society. Regulating them in this way is not difficult. The biggest obstacle is lack of political will in rich countries.  

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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. 

Notes 

1) Oliver Hall, ‘Why the FSA was split into two bodies’, FTAdvisor, 8 May 2013, at https://www.ftadviser.com/2013/05/08/regulation/regulators/why-the-fsa-was-split-into-two-bodies-SX5toVpnEQtBbYNlcUC9xJ/article.html 

2) Alessandra Potenza, ‘New EPA director, Andrew Wheeler may be a bigger threat to the environment than Scott Pruitt’, The Verge, 24 April 2018, at https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/24/17276360/epa-andrew-wheeler-scott-pruitt-deputy-environmental-protection-agency-fossil-fuel-lobbyist

Geoff Brumfiel, ‘EPA accused of conflict of interest over chemicals study’, Nature, 3 Nov 2004, at www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7013/full/432006a.html 

3) Marcia Angell, The Truth About The Drug Companies, p.209

4) Rainforest Concern, ‘Why are rainforests being destroyed: Let’s look at the causes’, at https://www.rainforestconcern.org/forest-facts/why-are-rainforests-being-destroyed 

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_Disaster

6) War on Want, ‘Coca-Cola: The Alternative Report”, 2006, at https://waronwant.org/sites/default/files/Coca-Cola%20-%20The%20Alternative%20Report.pdf

https://waronwant.org/media/coca-cola-drinking-world-dry

www.killercoke.org

7) Jitendra, ‘Coco-cola has closed down 20 per cent of its bottling plants in India: Report’, 22 March 2016, at https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/environment/coca-cola-has-closed-20-per-cent-of-its-bottling-plants-in-india-report-53273 

8) Jawara and Kwa, Behind the Scenes at the WTO, 2004

9) Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, ‘Codes of Conduct For Transnational Corporations: Experience and Lessons Learned’, at http://ccsi.columbia.edu/work/projects/united-nations-code-of-conduct-on-transnational-corporations-experience-and-lessons-learned/

10) Radio New Zealand, ‘West Papuans call for closure of Freeport Gold mine’, 24 Nov 2017, at https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/344637/west-papuans-call-for-closure-of-freeport-gold-mine 

Julian Simon, ‘Indonesia’s Next East Timor’, New Statesman, 10 July 2000, at https://www.newstatesman.com/node/193628

11) The Lancet editorial, ‘Philip Morris International: Money over morality?’ 31 Aug 2019, at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)31998-1/fulltext 

12) Jeffrey Wigand testified against the tobacco companies, discussed in ‘Tobacco Executive Goes Public Over Company Lies’, 1996, at www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/312/7026/267/a

This was later made into the movie ‘The Insider’

Allan Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The rise, fall and deadly persistence of the product that defined America, Jan 2009

13) WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCYC) statement, ‘The secretariat of the WHO FCTC and WHO applaud the Brazilian government’s action to seek compensation from tobacco companies’, 23 May 2019, at https://www.who.int/fctc/mediacentre/office-attorney-general-brazil-files-lawsuit-tobacco-industry/en/ 

14) B. Lown, ‘The Opium Wars of the 21st Century: Tobacco and The Developing World’, cited in Cesar Chelala, ‘How Tobacco became the opium war of the 20th century’, Counterpunch, 1 July 2016, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/how-tobacco-became-the-opium-war-of-the-21st-century/

15) Andrew Pendleton, ‘Behind The Mask: The Real Face of Corporate Social Responsibility’, Christian Aid, 2003, discussed in Terry Macalister, ‘Social responsibility is just a PR tool for businesses, report says’, Guardian, 21 Jan 2004, at www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/jan/21/voluntarysector.society 

Nigel Davis, ‘INSIGHT: Sustainability or CSR – is it all just good PR’, ICIS, 12 Jun 2012, at https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2012/06/12/9568746/insight-sustainability-or-csr-is-it-all-just-good-pr-/ 

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March 1 marks the resumption of hearings in Vancouver in the extradition trial of Meng Wanzhou. It also marks an event by her supporters in Canada, determined to block her deportation to the USA where she would stand trial again on fraud charges that could potentially put her in jail for over 100 years.

By March 1, Meng Wanzhou will have spent two years and three months in detention, accused of no crime in Canada. Her company, Huawei Technologies, of which she is Chief Financial Officer, is likewise not charged with any crime in Canada. In fact, Huawei has a very good reputation in Canada, where it has created some 1300 very high-paying tech jobs as well as a state-of-the-art research and development centre, and has voluntarily worked with the Canadian government to increase connectivity for the mostly indigenous peoples of Canada’s North.

The arrest of Meng Wanzhou was a colossal blunder by the Trudeau government, executed at the request of the now, almost universally discredited Trump Administration, which blatantly admitted that she was being held hostage as a bargaining chip in Trump’s trade war on China.

There was some speculation, when Meng’s extradition trial was adjourned for three months last December, that an out-of-court settlement might be reached before March 1. The Wall Street Journal caused a media frenzy when it floated a trial-balloon story that the US Department of Justice had proposed a plea deal for Ms. Meng. International lawyer, Christopher Black, deflated the balloon in an interview with The Taylor Report. And nothing came of that trial balloon so far.

Others speculated that, with his new administration in Washington, President-elect Biden might withdraw the US request for Meng’s extradition in an attempt to reset relations with China with a clean slate. But, so far, no request withdrawal has been put forward and instead Biden has ramped up tensions with China over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, and also repeated allegations of genocide by China against its Uyghur Muslim population.

Still others thought that Justin Trudeau might grow a backbone, demonstrate some independence of foreign policy for Canada, and unilaterally end the extradition process against Meng. According to Canada’s Extradition Act, the Minister of Immigration can, completely according to the rule of law, terminate an extradition proceeding at any point with a stroke of his pen. Trudeau has been under pressure by old Liberal Party stalwarts, former cabinet ministers, and retired judges and diplomats, who publicly urged him to release Meng and reset relations with China, which is Canada’s second largest trading partner. They hoped as well, by releasing Meng, that Trudeau might secure the release of Michael Spavor and Kovrig, who were arrested on espionage charges in China.

Two months ago, Meng Wanzhou’s lawyer applied for a loosening of her bail conditions to allow her to move around the Vancouver region unescorted during the day. Currently, she is monitored 24 hours a day by security guards and an ankle GPS monitoring device. For this surveillance, she is reputed to pay well more than $3000 per day. She did so because, if the trial resumes on March 1, it could drag on, with appeals, for several years. Two weeks ago, the court rejected Ms. Meng’s request.

The economic cost to Canada of deteriorating relations with China so far has meant losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for Canadian farmers and fishers as well as the termination of a Sino-Canadian project to make Covid-19 vaccines in Canada. But that picture will worsen if the Trudeau government gives into the warnings of the Five Eyes intelligence network, as expressed in the infamous Wagner-Rubio letter of October 11, 2018 (just six weeks before Meng’s arrest), to exclude Huawei from the deployment of a 5G network in Canada. Such an exclusion, according to Dr. Atif Kubursi, Professor Emeritus of Economics at McMaster University, would be a clear violation of WTO rules. It would also further estrange Canada from positive diplomatic and trade relations with China, which now boasts the largest trading economy in the world.

Canadians are increasingly alarmed that we are being conditioned by every one of the parliamentary political parties and the mainstream media for a new cold war with China. On February 22, 2021, the House of Commons will vote on a Conservative motion officially declaring China’s treatment of the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs a genocide, despite the fact that the evidence of such a crime was invented by Andrew Zenz, an operative working as a sub-contractor to the US Central Intelligence Agency. Bloc, Green, and NDP members spoke for the resolution.

On Feb 9, Green Party leader Anamie Paul called for the Beijing Winter Games, slated for Feb 2022, to be relocated to Canada. Her call was endorsed by Erin O’toole, Conservative Party leader, as well of several MP’s and Quebec politicians. For his part, on February 4, Canada’s immigration minister announced that Hong Kong residents will be able to apply for new open work permits as part of its program to create pathways towards Canadian citizenship. Mendecino noted “Canada continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Hong Kong, and is deeply concerned about the new National Security Law and the deteriorating human rights situation there.” Finally, Canada is well on the way to procuring $77b. worth of new fighter jets (lifetime costs) and $213b. worth of warships, designed to project Canada’s military power far beyond our shores.

Cold wars between nuclear-armed military alliances can easily turn into hot wars. That’s why the Cross-Canada Campaign to FREE MENG WANZHOU is planning a panel discussion for March 1 at 7 pm ET, entitled, “The Arrest of Meng Wanzhou and the New Cold War on China.” The panelists include William Ging Wee Dere (leading activist for the redress of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act), Justin Podur (professor and blogger, “The Empire Project), and John Ross, (Senior Fellow, Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies and economic advisor to former Mayor Ken Livingstone of London, UK.) The moderator is Radhika Desai (Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, U of Manitoba).

Please join us on the World Beyond War platform on March 1 with simultaneous translation into French and Mandarin. Here’s the registration link.

And here are the promotional flyers in French, English, and simplified Chinese.

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Ken Stone is a longtime anti-war, anti-racist, environmental, and social justice advocate in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War and Steering Committee Member of the Cross-Canada Campaign to FREE MENG WANZHOU.

Assange’s Lawyers Considering a Cross Appeal

February 22nd, 2021 by Alexander Mercouris

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Julian Assange’s lawyers are considering bringing a cross appeal to the High Court in London disputing parts of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s Jan. 4  judgment not to extradite Assange to the United States, according to a report by journalist Tareq Haddad.

Baraitser refused the U.S. request on narrow grounds, saying Assange’s extradition would put his life and health at risk.  But Baraitser sided with the U.S. on every other point of law and fact, making it clear that in the absence of the life and health issues she would have granted the U.S. request.

That opens the way for the U.S. government to seek the extradition of other persons, including journalists, who do the same things as Assange did, but who cannot rely on the same life and health issues.

It also means that if the U.S. wins the appeal it filed last Friday in High Court it can try Assange in the U.S. on the Espionage Act charges that went unchallenged by Baraitser.  If Assange’s lawyers counter the U.S. appeal with one of their own in the High Court against Baraitser’s upholding of the espionage charges, it would be heard simultaneously with the U.S. appeal.

Stella Moris, Assange’s partner, has written that Assange’s lawyers are indeed considering a cross appeal:

“The next step in the legal case is that Julian’s legal team will respond to the US grounds for appeal. Julian’s lawyers are hard at work. Julian’s team has asked the High Court to give them more time to consider whether to lodge a cross appeal in order to challenge parts of the ruling where the magistrate did not side with Julian and the press freedom arguments. A cross appeal would provide an opportunity to clear Julian’s name properly.

Although Julian won at the Magistrates’ Court, the magistrate did not side with him on the wider public interest arguments. We wanted a U.K. court to properly quash the extradition and refute the other grounds too. We wanted a finding that the extradition is an attempt to criminalise journalism, not just in the U.S. but in the U.K. and the rest of the world as well; and that the decision to indict Julian was a political act, a violation of the treaty, a violation of his human rights and an abuse of process. Julian’s extradition team is considering all these issues, and whether they can be cross-appealed.”

The Question of a Political Offence

During Assange’s extradition hearing, the prosecution and the defence clashed about whether the court should adhere to the U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty or the Extradition Act, which made the treaty part of British law.

Article 4 of the treaty prohibits extradition for a political offence, as British law for centuries has done.  The Act mysteriously omitted this.  Assange’s attorneys clearly argued for the treaty to be followed, but Baraitser cited the Act.

In his article, Haddad pointed to comments by British MP and former Cabinet Minister David Davis to the House of Commons on Jan. 21.

Davis, who as the Conservatives’ shadow home secretary played a central role in the parliamentary debates which resulted in the 2003 Extradition Act becoming law, told the House of Commons:

“Although we cannot, of course, discuss the substance of the Assange judgment here today, the House must note the worrying development more generally in our extradition          arrangements – extradition for political offences. This stems from an erroneous interpretation of Parliament’s intention in 2003. This must now be clarified.

Article 4 of the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty provides that extradition will not be granted for political offences. In the U.K., the treaty was implemented in the Extradition Act 2003. It  has been claimed that, because the Act does not specifically refer to political offences, Parliament explicitly took the decision to remove the bar when passing the Act in 2003.  That is not the case — Parliament had no such intention.

Had it intended such a massive deviation from our centuries-long tradition of providing asylum, it would have been explicit….”

In making these points Davis cited reassurances given to the House of Commons during the parliamentary debates which took places before the 2003 Extradition Act was voted into law.  Davis specifically referred to certain comments made by the British Minister Bob Ainsworth.  According to the official record of the debates in Hansard, Ainsworth told the House of Commons:

“The Bill will ensure that no one can be extradited where the request is politically motivated, where the double jeopardy rule applies or where the fugitive’s medical condition— an issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Harry Cohen) — would make it unjust. On conviction in absentia cases, we will extradite only where the fugitive can be sure of a retrial. We will not extradite unless we are certain that the death penalty will not be carried out. Finally and very importantly, extradition cannot take place where it would be incompatible with the fugitive’s human rights.”  (Emphasis added)

British courts do not usually weigh comments made in parliament when considering how to interpret an Act of Parliament.  The British legal tradition is to interpret an Act of Parliament strictly on the basis of its own wording.  British courts do not generally look at what was said during parliamentary debates about an Act, even by ministers who propose it. However there have been numerous exceptions, and it is not a hard and fast rule.

British appeal courts also are generally reluctant to look at evidence, such as Davis’s comments, which come about after the judgment that is being appealed. That too, however, is not a hard and fast rule.

One should be cautious about the idea of a cross appeal to the High Court on Assange’s behalf.  Despite the fact that Baraitser sided with the U.S. government on most of the contentious issues of law and fact in the case, she did in the end refuse the U.S. government’s request for Assange’s extradition.  The normal practice in an appeal is to uphold a judgment made in one’s favour, not to challenge it by bringing a cross appeal, which could serve to undermine it.  That often means going along with things in the judgment with which one is unhappy.

There is however nothing normal about Assange’s case. As Moris’ comments show, one has to be aware, perhaps more than in almost any other case, of the overriding and even transcendent issues of media freedom and human rights that arise.

It may be that Assange’s lawyers will decide that Ainsworth’s comments to the House of Commons in 2003; Davis’s recent comments about parliament’s intentions at the time when the 2003 Extradition Act was passed into law; and any other points of law or fact that carry sufficient weight, justify bringing a cross appeal, despite the attendant risks.

If Assange’s lawyers do decide to bring a cross appeal, then the High Court hearing of that and the U.S. appeal will acquire epochal importance.

Baraitser’s finding, that the 2003 Extradition Act allows extradition to the U.S. of individuals who face political charges because the Act does not expressly prohibit such extraditions, was her way of getting around the many contradictions and lapses of logic with which the U.S. case against Assange was littered, as I discussed in my previous Letter from London.

In my view the omission in the Act of the prohibition on extradition on political grounds does not in fact do away with that prohibition. There is far too much case law confirming the prohibition exists, for it to be simply done away with by silence.  As Davis said, if parliament had really wanted to do away with that prohibition, the Act would have expressly said so.

If the High Court were to follow this reasoning and decide — as Ainsworth told the House of Commons in 2003 and as Davis says now — that the absence of any reference to this prohibition in the Act does not mean that the extradition of individuals facing political charges is now allowed; and that the British tradition of prohibiting such extraditions is in fact still in place (even if not expressly mentioned in the Act), then the entire basis of Baraitser’s reasoning collapses and is shown to be wrong.

That would be a huge victory for the rights of journalists, for free expression generally, for the rights of refugees, and for people facing extradition on political charges.

If that happens, the U.S. would almost certainly appeal the High Court’s decision to the U.K. Supreme Court for the authoritative and final decision.  It would potentially be as influential and important a decision as the Pinochet case.

Middlesex Guildhall in London’s Parliament Square, home of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. (Christine Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand, were Assange’s lawyers to cross appeal, the High Court could decide on the political offence question that, under the doctrine of Parliamentary Sovereignty, the British Parliament has unlimited power to pass legislation and is entitled to pass whatever legislation it deems fit. It is not bound to follow an international treaty.

Moreover, since Parliament is sovereign the laws it enacts take precedence within the U.K. over any other laws, including international law.  So if the British parliament enacts a law which contradicts international law or an international treaty, the British courts will administer the law enacted by parliament and will generally disregard international law or the international treaty.

This is the classic British constitutional doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament. Over the last 50 years it has gradually eroded, however.  Whilst Britain was a member of the European Union, parliament accepted that EU law took precedence over whatever law parliament enacted. Also in 1998 parliament passed into law the Human Rights Act, which says (and still says) that the European Convention on Human Rights takes precedence over any British law.

But in the vast majority of situations the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty still applies, and Britain’s withdrawal from the EU has recently reinforced it.

But why is Assange even in this position?  After all, as Davis reminded the House of Commons, the British tradition has always been to refuse to extradite individuals who face political charges.  What changed to make it possible for a judge like Baraitser to say that this centuries-old tradition no longer applies and that it’s now possible for Britain to extradite someone who faces political charges?

Bush’s War on Terror

Briefly, the silence on this point in the 2003 Extradition Act, which was used by Baraitser to support her reasoning, is another malign consequence of the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous “War on Terror,” which the British government, led at that time by Prime Minister Tony Blair, enthusiastically joined in.

In 2003 the Blair government deleted from the 2003 Extradition Act the traditional prohibition on extraditing individuals who faced political charges because it wanted to make it easier for the British government to extradite and dispose of people who the U.S. and British governments said were “terrorists.”  It did not want to have these people, who it said were “terrorists,” defeating extradition requests by saying that the charges which had been brought against them were politically motivated.  So it removed the traditional prohibition of extradition on politically motivated charges from the text of the 2003 Extradition Act.

Though the treaty was also signed after the War on Terror had begun, treaties are negotiated by civil servants and the government of the day usually does not become involved until the negotiation is over. That would likely explain why the prohibition against political extraditions remains in the treaty and was only removed in the Act.

As I very well remember, this, together with much else about this vague and poorly drafted Act, gave rise at the time to very serious concerns, which comments like those of Ainsworth were intended to allay.

Davis refers to all this in the same debate in the House of Commons:

“Since we agreed the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty in 2003, it has been abundantly clear that the British government of the day struck a truly dreadful deal. Asymmetric, ineffective and fundamentally unfair on British citizens, it is a terrible flaw in our own justice system. The previous Labour administration approached the treaty as though their duty was first and foremost to support the wishes of our American friends, not to safeguard the rights of U.K. citizens.

Perhaps that was understandable in the context of the terrorism sweeping the world at that time, but friends must be honest with each other, and now we must say, ‘Enough is enough.’

The 2003 treaty paved the way for British citizens to be handed over to the U.S. authorities, with minimal safeguards against injustice….”

If a cross appeal is brought we will then see what all those assurances made in 2003, including the one which Ainsworth made to the House of Commons, are really worth.  We will also see how the High Court, and ultimately the U.K. Supreme Court, decide on this issue.

In the meantime, if it does nothing else, this case yet again shows that compromising ancient protections in order to deal with an emergency or an apparent emergency can store up problems for the future, and that willfully throwing away important due-process protections in order to deal with a crisis of the moment is something which will be repented at leisure.

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Alexander Mercouris is a legal analyst, political commentator and editor of  The Duran.

Featured image:  The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, home to the High Court in London. (Sjiong, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

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Recent media reports of a Haitian official stashing wealth in Montréal property ignore a key element of the story: Canada’s contribution to enabling Haitian corruption.

As a neo-Duvalierist regime becomes ever more dictatorial it’s also worth revisiting Canada’s history in facilitating fraud and money laundering in the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation.

Recently La Presse reported that the wife of a governing party senator, who works at the Haitian consulate in Montréal purchased a mansion in Laval. The story reported, “as the political crisis bogs down in Haiti, the wife of a senator belonging to the party of the contested president, Jovenel Moïse, has just bought a sumptuous $ 4.25 million villa in Laval, attracting a flood of criticism from Montreal to Port-au-Prince. The new property was paid off in full in one fell swoop, without a mortgage, and without their other house being sold, according to the Land Registry.” Two follow-up Journal de Montréal stories found that Senator Rony Célestin and his spouse, Marie-Louisa Célestin, spent $2 million more recently on property and businesses in the Montréal area.

La Presse’s Vincent Larouche should be praised for covering a story that had been circulating in Montréal’s Haitian community for days. But, a lot of important context is missing from the story, as Larouche must know. (15 years ago, Larouche wrote a nice review of my co-authored book on Canada’s role in the 2004 coup when he was with left-wing L’autre Journal). Senator Célestin was implicated in the 2019 killing of journalist Néhémie Joseph and threats targeting the Director General of the Anti-Corruption Unit. More broadly, Célestin’s political party was founded by corrupt and violent Duvalierist Michel Martelly.

But the broader Canadian angle is the most important omission. On Facebook, activist Jean “Jafrikayiti” Saint-Vil explained:

The PHTK regime headed by Michel Martelly and his self-described ‘bandi legal’ (legal bandits), came to power thanks to fraudulent elections organized, financed and controlled by the foreign occupation force established in Haiti since the coup d’état of February 2004. The planning meeting for the coup d’etat and putting Haiti under trusteeship was organized by Canadian Minister for La Francophonie Denis Paradis. The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti [January 31-February 1, 2003] succeeded in overthrowing the legitimate President as well as 7,000 elected officials from the region’s most impoverished country. The elected officials were replaced by bandits such as ‘Senator’ Rony Célestin of whom this article speaks.”

In a follow-up post Saint-Vil offers an alternative way of understanding Canada’s relationship to political corruption in Haiti. He asks,

Can you imagine [Hells Angels leader] Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher and [serial killer] Carla Homolka installed as Senators in Canada by fraudulent elections led by a coalition of Haitian, Jamaican, Ethiopian diplomats in Ottawa?”

Few Canadians would be happy with such an outcome. But it’s a troublingly apt description of US, Canadian and French policy in Haiti.

This is not the first time Canada has been implicated in Duvalierist corruption. Before fleeing to the French Riviera, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier emptied government bank accounts. The Royal Bank of Canada and other Canadian financial institutions assisted the young dictator’s theft. A US auditing firm hired to investigate and track down public funds concluded that Duvalier’s financial advisors “had set up an intricately concealed flow of money through a bevy of banks and accounts, most of them Canadian.”

The Royal Bank of Canada branch in Haiti assisted Duvalier. So did a Toronto branch of the bank. In Money on the Run: Canada and How the World’s Dirty Profits Are Laundered, Mario Possamai details Duvalier’s turn to Canadian institutions when Swiss banks froze Baby Doc’s accounts. At a Royal Bank branch in Toronto his attorneys converted $41.8 million in Canadian treasury bills, a highly secretive and respected form of money. Once converted, the Duvaliers’ assets could no longer be scrutinized.

In Canada: A New Tax Haven: How the Country That Shaped Caribbean Tax Havens Is Becoming One Itself Alain Deneault summarizes:

“The dictator’s money was moved from Canada to Jersey [tax haven] where it was received by the Royal Trust Bank, a subsidiary of Canada’s Royal Trust Company. The deposit was made to an account that was part of a larger account held by the Manufacturers Hanover Bank of Canada, a financial institution with its headquarters in Toronto a few steps away from the Royal Bank of Canada where the whole operation had been set in motion. The operation became more complex with securities being split from their ownership records and further movements between the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Jersey, the Royal Bank of Canada in London, the Banque Nationale de Paris, and sundry Swiss institutions.”

Despite guidelines requiring banks to determine customers’ identity, RBC admitted it simply trusted Duvalier’s lawyers. Bank officials later claimed they would have refused the transaction had they known who the beneficiaries were.

This explanation is hard to believe. The only foreign bank in the country for a number of years, the Royal Bank financed projects by the Duvalier regime. Amidst the uprising against Jean-Claude Duvalier, Royal’s senior account manager in Port au Prince, Yves Bourjolly, joined a long list of prominent businessmen who signed a statement expressing “confidence in the desire of the government for peace, dialogue and democratization … at a time when order and security appear to be threatened.”

Over the years Canada has empowered many other corrupt and violent politicians in Haiti. In response to the Célestin story, intrepid tweeter “Madame Boukman — Justice 4 Haiti” noted, “Justin ‘Blackface’ Trudeau, like those before him, knowingly supports drug traffickers, money-launderers and assassins in Haiti. That is the only way Canadian mining vultures can loot Haiti’s massive gold reserves.”

This about sums it up.

On February 28 the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is hosting a discussion of Haiti Betrayed, a powerful indictment of Canada’s role in the 2004 coup and subsequent policy in the country. In the week leading up to the event the film will be available to watch for free for those who register in advance.

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The Eurozone has faced a host of economic challenges over the past two decades, and the region’s main currency, the Euro, is bearing the impact on its value.

The depreciating Euro is a combination of several factors, but inflation has been the primary catalyst. The EU block has seen rising inflation leading to an increase in prices of goods and services over time.

According to data researched by Trading Platforms UK, the buying power of one euro (1€) has depreciated by a whopping 30% between 2000 and 2020 from 1€ to 0.7€. This means that the same one Euro can’t pay for a similar amount of goods or services like 2000.

Impact of inflation on Euro’s purchasing value

Some countries have recorded high levels of inflation relative to other countries within the region. Therefore, the Euro’s buying power has become a casualty by depreciating so that the prices of goods between the countries remain relatively equal.

The Euro’s purchasing power has further lost value due to monetary policies put in place by the European Central Bank to tame inflation. For instance, amid the rising Inflation, the bank has resorted to the increasing interest rate. In 2006, the bank raised the interest rate at least four times in eight months to tame inflation, but the Euro kept depreciating.

The Euro has also lost the purchasing power due to the bank’s policy during the major economic crisis. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, the bank lined several additional stimulus packages to tackle the crisis. In this case, interest rates remained high, with most investors turning to save haven currencies like the U.S. dollar. The purchasing power has further deteriorated over the pandemic’s second wave.

Furthermore, the loss in buying power is also a consequence of the recent sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone. During the period, most countries faced trade deficit challenges, which stemmed mainly from an overvalued Euro.

To reverse this trend, the region has been adopting several financial sector reforms, including the Euro’s devaluation. The several stimulus packages mean that there are more Euros in circulation, indicating that their value has diminished. Eventually, it leads to higher prices of goods.

Other contributing factors

Although the ECB put measures to ease the Eurozone’s deflation after the European sovereign debt crisis, the outcome has not paid off well. To bolster the Euro’s purchasing power, policymakers established strict regulations in the Eurozone on accurately reporting sovereign debt, Inflation, and other financial data.

Besides inflation, the depreciating purchasing power might be linked to the emergence of other forms of currency like cryptocurrencies. Over the last decade, digital assets have risen in popularity, with proponents calling on people to ditch fiat money. There is a general push to have digital assets act as a haven instead of traditional currencies like the Euro or U.S. dollar.

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Justin is an editor, writer, and a downhill fan. He spent many years writing about banking, finances, blockchain, and digital assets-related news. He strives to serve the untold stories for the readers.

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On February 16th the BBC reported that a Dutch court ruled that the state must lift a recently imposed curfew because it was a violation of freedom of movement. A higher court promptly suspended the decision at the request of the government until an appeal can be heard. It was also reported that when the curfews were imposed in January riots broke out in several Dutch cities. The BBC writes the following about the 9PM-4:30AM curfew,

“The Dutch measure, which came into force on 23 January, was intended to reduce movement, particularly among young people, but triggered days of rioting in a number of towns and cities. The Netherlands had not seen a curfew since Nazi occupation in World War Two.”

This is understandable because curfews are a severe restriction on movement and assembly that has little place in a free society except for the direst of circumstances. Furthermore, a curfew starting at 9 PM could have two apparent implications, one silly, and one insidious. The former being the foolish idea that somehow restricting public movement at certain times somehow protects people from the virus. The latter implication being that the Dutch government intends to kill nightlife, which places most of the burden on young people, who have been battered emotionally, socially, and professionally by the lockdowns. In fact, in the United States, it was reported that for young people, deaths of despair have claimed more lives than Covid-19.

Another important issue that was illustrated by this incident was the use of emergency powers and their justifications. The BBC writes,

“In their ruling on Tuesday, the Dutch judges said the curfew had been imposed under an emergency law, even though the court said there was no emergency as in the case of a “dyke being breached.”

State of emergency give governments tremendous powers to act in timely and decisive manners to address issues that may not be appropriately addressed by the democratic process. This is why there are often strict guidelines on how and when such powers can be deployed. The BBC writes that the court believed that the deployment of the curfew was not justified because

“Fears of increased infection because of the UK variant were not valid as no curfew was imposed last year when pressure on Dutch hospitals was far greater, the judges said.

The curfew was therefore a violation of the right to freedom of movement and privacy, and limited the right to freedom of assembly.”

It does not follow that the state can deploy an emergency measure at a time when Covid seems to be less of a problem, especially when such powers were not considered before. Even more worrying, it seems that governments around the world have forgotten how extreme these policies are and how sparingly they must be used. Curfews and other emergency powers such as restrictions on travel are supposed to be used in times of tremendous peril. Deploying such policies like they were some sort of experiment to test out government power as if society is a sandbox should be seen as a direct assault against the very foundation of a free society.

The Problematic Usage of Emergency Powers in the United States

The use of emergency powers is a contentious topic in the US that is subject to much debate. However, it is widely accepted on all sides that there must be a rigorous and defined process to govern their use. At the federal level, the president may declare a state of emergency which gives him tremendous powers. Legal expert Elizabeth Goitein writes in the Atlantic,

“The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.”

The Brennan Center outlines the 123 statutory powers available to the president which are all subject to a variety of restrictions. Some infamous exercises of power include the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, state governors were mostly responsible for declaring states of emergency that authorize the use of lockdowns. At the state level, the power to declare one actually rests with the legislature as the National Conference of State Legislatures writes,

“In times of war, disease or other extraordinary conditions, each state authorizes its governor to declare a state of emergency. Once an emergency has been declared, executive powers expand until the emergency ends. These powers include authority normally reserved for legislatures, such as the ability to suspend existing statutes or effectively create new laws—albeit temporarily and only as needed to respond to the emergency situation.”

In a previous article I cover how a number of state governors have abused their powers, either attempting to extend them without the consent of the legislature or exercising powers that are not permitted. A common theme that arises across the states that mirrors our Dutch counterparts across the Atlantic is the sheer inconsistency and hypocrisy that our leaders exhibit. Imposing seemingly random and ill-reasoned restrictions on our sacred liberties and at times showing blatant favoritism either to themselves or their preferred political causes. For a number of reasons we give the government the power to legally violate our rights but only if the policies are narrowly tailored to addressing a pressing issue. That is outlined in the police power and in Jacobson v. Massachusetts,which applies to public health emergencies. If the government is going to violate your rights, it needs to have a good case that whatever they are going to do will greatly contribute to solving the problem. Closing outdoor dining after making countless statements that outdoor dining is safe is an example of a violation of such guidelines.

Moving past the technical aspects regarding the use of emergency powers, it is important to realize two things. The first is that everything is subject to interpretation so we cannot rely on judges to consistently rule in favor of protecting liberty and limited government. The same can be said about legislatures and other bodies associated with administering emergency powers. This brings us to the most important problem regarding the use of emergency powers. The ambiguous definition of what qualifies as an emergency and the apparent degeneration of that threshold in recent years are evident especially now. What we have seen in the age of Covid-19 will have lasting consequences for the future of our liberal democracy.

Meryl Chertoff writes the following about former President Trump’s travel restrictions forGeorgetown Law,

“What may seem like a reasonable step in today’s emergency will create a hangover when invoked as precedent in less dire circumstances by rules guided by authoritarian impulses.”

This is a lesson as old as time. You give a mouse a cookie, it’s going to want a glass of milk. You start to unravel the restrictions on the government’s power, it’s going to want more and more. The power to declare emergencies and the problematic ease that seems to surround declaring one is a haunting specter over the heads of our freedom. Chertoff writes,

“As Justice Jackson wrote in Korematsu v. United States the case that upheld the detention of Japanese Americans during the Second World War an emergency power “lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” No single discipline can lead this campaign for much longer.”

It goes without saying that after the pandemic is over we should not only work to restore our liberties and limitations on government but look into reforming the process in which states of emergency can be used.

Key Takeaways

The court decision across the ocean in the Netherlands may be quickly forgotten in today’s news cycle. In fact, given the number of similar issues all over the world regarding emergency powers during the age of Covid-19, it may go down as a minor disturbance at best. However, it demonstrates a much greater issue at hand, which is the omnipresent threat to our liberty that is the use of emergency powers and the expanding window of what constitutes an emergency.

Without significant efforts to push back and reclaim our liberties, lockdowns can and will leave a permanent mark on our system of limited government. What should keep every freedom-loving citizen up at night is not Covid-19 but the disease of authoritarianism that is slowly killing our liberal democracy. Pandemics come and go, but a free society is almost impossible to retrieve once it has been cast into the abyss of subjugation.

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Ethan joined AIER in 2020 as an Editorial Assistant and is a graduate of Trinity College. He received a BA in Political Science alongside a minor in Legal Studies and Formal Organizations.

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The Corona Crisis: Over and Over, We Have Been Hoaxed

February 22nd, 2021 by Dr. Meryl Nass

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

It is difficult for me to believe that two thirds of the US (according to a Harris poll) are favorably inclined to the pharmaceutical industry, up 30 percentage points since January 2020, just before the pandemic. Do you believe it?

Who do you trust:  Common sense, or the media’s experts?

Surely most Americans have by now figured out that almost everything they are being told about Covid by the experts, the government and the media is untrue?  Haven’t they noticed how the stories change with the wind?  That most of them simply make no sense?

Masking

Wear no mask–one mask–two masks–oh, and add some pantyhose to get that tight fit someone over at CDC just decided was de rigeur.  Do any of these 4 choices provide reliable protection?  Do people really believe that Fauci and CDC are calibrating their advice to the newest scientific findings? CDC reviewed the mask research back in 2014, after it badly bungled its PPE recommendations for Ebola.  I discussed CDC’s many flip-flops regarding droplets and aerosol spread in 2014.

CDC is pulling the correct ‘social distance’ out of thin air, since there is no effective distance if you are indoors along with some aerosolized virus.  WHO says 3 feet. But if CDC used 3 feet, kids could all go back to school, then parents could go back to work, then the economy could restart. And someone doesn’t want that happening. CDC just released its long-awaited guidance on reopening schools.  But CNBC says following it would keep 90% of schools at least partially closed.  Who’s fooling who?

Viral mutations a.k.a. variants

New viral variants are coming, so be afraid.  Oh, they are already here.  Oh, they have been here since at least October.  They are not more lethal, just more infectious. Be less afraid.  But they do reduce vaccine and antibody effectiveness.  Get ready for more vaccines. Rush out and get your vaccination now, there is a shortage.

In many businesses, nursing homes and hospitals, employees are being threatened with job loss to stimulate vaccine uptake. Why are people who already had Covid being given the shots, when they cannot do any good, and might even put the recipients at greater risk for immune-mediated, vaccine-induced harm?  Why has CDC covered this up, and lied about it?

Why the rush to vaccinate the elderly when new vaccines will supposedly be needed for the new variants?  And the elderly seem to be expiring at high rates post-vaccination. And we don’t even know the vaccine’s efficacy in the frail elderly, who were never tested in the clinical trials. Nor do we know the vaccine’s safety in this group. Many vaccines fail to stimulate immunity in the elderly, and some vaccines have even made the recipient more susceptible to the diseases they were supposed to prevent. Where is the proof the Covid vaccines aren’t doing the same thing, or doing it in older age groups?

And why in heaven’s name are the media, government and industry pushing out the same story about the frightening mutants, when there is very little evidence to support the scare? For example, the Financial Times titled a Feb 5 story, “Britain Risks Becoming Virus Melting Pot as Mutations Spread.” Yet the BMJ tells us that deaths, hospitalizations and cases have been falling dramatically in the UK over the past month, similar to the US.

From the 2/20/2021 LA Times, “Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist, put it simply: “Try not to worry about the variants.”’

Chlorquine and its cousin hydroxychloroquine:  sinking the magic bullet

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are licensed generic drugs, which any US doctor is free to prescribe off label for any valid reason, with patient acquiescence. I routinely prescribe hydroxychloroquine for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme disease and now Covid.  I have found it to be very safe, and estimate I have used it in 200 patients. In 2005, the Virology Journal published an article that said chloroquine killed SARS-1 coronavirus in tissue culture. In fact, CDC scientists did the experiment and wrote the article.  Here is their final paragraph:

Conclusion

Chloroquine, a relatively safe, effective and cheap drug used for treating many human diseases including malaria, amoebiosis and human immunodeficiency virus is effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. The fact that the drug has significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use.

Then suddenly Chloroquine drugs were too dangerous to use, more likely to kill you than coronavirus. What happened? A lot more than Trumps’s praise.

Two very terrible things happened. Two deadly medical frauds. The fact that Trump recommended the chloroquines was only a sideshow, used to confuse those who were not paying close attention.

A number of clinical trials were set up to force hydroxychloroquine to fail in treating Covid.  The more benign of these trials simply used the drug too late, after virus was no longer multiplying in the body.  This happens about a week after the onset of symptoms.  At that point you need steroids, blood thinners and other medications to combat the downstream, autoimmune effects of the virus.  Trying to kill the virus (when there is no intact virus) doesn’t work at that point.  The drug appears to be ineffective, but had it been given a week earlier, its efficacy would have been obvious to all.

The more malignant of these trials set out to poison patients with potentially lethal doses of hydroxychloroquine.  Largest among these trials were Recovery (sponsored by the UK government, Oxford University, Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, among others) and Solidarity (sponsored by the WHO, Gates Foundation, and others). I have delved deeply into the dosing here.  In the hydroxychloroquine arm of the Recovery trial over 25% of the subjects died:  396 people.  The Solidarity hydroxychloroquine trial had similar results–and shut down 3 days after I warned WHO officials that their failure to disclose to subjects they were being given a known, potentially lethal treatment dose left the WHO liable for damages.

Yet despite using poisonous doses, these trials continue to be cited as evidence of the dangerousness and lack of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, even by otherwise highly capable scientists who simply failed to pay attention to the doses used.

The second terrible thing that tanked the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine was a fabricated journal article in the Lancet published May 22, 2020.  The article purported to have access to a phenomenal realtime database, with information from over 600 hospitals on 6 continents, including both medical and financial records in many different languages.  Had any editor every heard of such a database previously?  Of course not, because nothing like it exists.  But a Harvard professor was the paper’s first author, the paper supposedly sailed through peer review, and a massive media blitz sounded forth on the day of publication. The blitz announced to almost everyone in the world listening to radio or television that day that hydroxychloroquine and its cousin chloroquine kill Covid patients.  Here is an example.

Two weeks later the Lancet paper was exposed as a “monumental fraud” and retracted, and then Lancet editor Richard Horton admitted to the NY Times that the paper and its global database were a fabrication. But the damage was done.  The damage had been planned and executed like clockwork. No one has admitted any responsiblity nor explained how the publication came to be written and published, nor who orchestrated and paid for the massive media blitz. Most people heard about the drug’s danger, but never heard about the paper’s fabrication.

Deaths, cases, hospitalizations:  can any of these numbers be trusted?

Alexis Madrigal, a journalist for The Atlantic, co-founded the Covid Tracking Project last March because of the totally inadequate data being released by the states and CDC. It quickly became the go-to site for data on Covid, better than federal data or another site sponsored by Johns Hopkins.  On a shoestring at first, this team put together an amazingly good data collection, independently culling from the states and municipalities, because that was what needed to be done.

However, significant data accuracy problems remained, and persist to the present.  The problem is that we do not have reliable tests for Covid in the US, which I have previously detailed.  We don’t have normal, useful case definitions. We have numbers, but we don’t know how accurate they are.  We have no idea what the false positive and false negative rates are of the tests we are using to diagnose Covid.  FDA has not approved and licensed a single PCR, antibody or rapid antigen test for Covid yet.  All were “authorized” under emergency regulations. There are over 300 tests authorized for use in the US currently, and FDA has not managed to establish their validity. FDA has gotten as far as listing a “limit of detection” for some of the tests, but not all of them. While FDA warned about false positive antigen tests in November, the public and professionals have never been informed of the false positive and false negative rates of any of the Covid tests.

One positive PCR test makes you a ‘confirmed’ case, regardless of symptoms.  One positive rapid antigen test makes you a ‘probable’ case.  But since last April 14, CDC has been recoding what the states called probable cases and deaths, as definite cases and deaths. And some states have been changing their protocols and methods regarding what constitutes a death due to Covid, for example Iowa.

Yet FDA and CDC are well aware of high false positive rates on the PCR tests due to excessively high cycle thresholds. Fauci admitted it in July. The NY Times ran a detailed expose of the problem back in August. The WHO warned about this in December and January, noting both the need to dial the cycle thresholds down, and suggesting the need to perform confirmatory testing when the patient lacked symptoms consistent with Covid.  But that has never been standard procedure in the US.  It seems to me that the federal agencies have been doing their best to maximize case and death numbers. This helped strengthen the narrative that we had something so dire to fear that it was worth wrecking the economy and locking us up to slow it down.

Public health officials suddenly jumping ship–Why?

Now I am wondering why such a huge number of public health officials quit their jobs or were fired since the start of the pandemic.

An investigation by The Associated Press and KHN found that at least 181 state and local public health leaders in 38 states have resigned, retired or been fired since the beginning of the pandemic, the largest exodus of public health leaders in U.S. history.”

In some cases, officials resign after clashing with government officials and elected leaders… In other states, officials are fired for reporting or data issues.

Iowa’s former public health director is suing the state.  So is the department’s former spokesperson, who claims she was ousted for complying with Iowa’s open records law to provide journalists information on Covid. She also blew the whistle that an Emergency Operations Center was created, with new email addresses, and its emails were concealed from public records requesters.

Did other public health officials refuse to lie or to withhold information, and is that why they are gone?

Is the vaccine saving the day?  

According to the BMJ, not so fast.  While deaths and cases have been dropping like a stone since mid January, the drop may be comparable in the young unvaccinated population as in the older age groups, 1/3 of whom have received at least one shot. BMJ noted:

“the fall in prevalence was similar among those aged 65 years and over compared with other age groups. The study authors from Imperial College London said this suggests that if vaccines are effective at reducing transmission as well as disease, this effect is not yet a major driver of prevalence trends. Therefore, the observed falls described here are most likely because of reduced social interactions during lockdown.”

Are we approaching herd immunity? 

In the US, about 40 million people are reported to have received at least one Covid vaccine dose.  That is about 12% of the population.  I’ve no idea how many got so sick from the first dose that they refused the second, while I am hearing anecdotes that many have.  How much immunity will a single dose provide?

The LA Times today and the Wall Street Journal several days ago, in an Op-Ed by Marty Makary, MD, suggested we are fast approaching herd immunity.  New cases are down 75% in just over a month.  (But that could have been helped by dialing down those pesky cycle thresholds, and performing 30% fewer tests than in mid January.)

No one was allowed to talk about herd immunity until after Covid vaccines rolled out.  Has everyone who wanted a shot already been served? Why is herd immunity back on the table? I’m very glad it is, because achieving herd immunity will end all lockdown excuses. Hopefully we are at the end of the big waves.

Why am I rehashing issues I have already written about?

Because each issue is an example of how the public has been fooled by the experts, the media and the government,  all three dissembling in concert. If I’m correct, we are facing a pernicious conspiracy.

Who really trusts Big Pharma today?  You’d need to be mad to trust the industry that throttled drugs that work against Covid, in order to inject you with new concoctions that tickled Tony Fauci’s fancy and pay royalties to his institute.  Who trusts government pronouncements?  Media?  Our bought experts? The corporations and ‘charitable’ foundations that bought them?

Today I just wanted to make a little list, short enough for a blog post, as a reminder that we have been hoaxed and played, over and over again.

My advice?  Listen to your common sense, and turn off the TV and radio.  Don’t let the propaganda get access to even your unconscious mind.  Help others dissect what is going on.  Stay strong.  There are lots of quiet, sensible people out there.  Speak your truth.  Let’s find each other and turn this around.

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All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The general consciousness of individuals and peoples does not yet know the answer to the Cain question from the biblical prehistory: Shall I be my brother’s keeper (1)? A real epidemic of greed for power, lies and brutality is now ravaging millions of people worldwide like the plague of the Middle Ages. But the disastrous effects of the murderous state “protective measures” against a supposed Corona pandemic touch our lifeblood, but they do not shake us up; we remain in lethargy. 

The plight of humanity does not touch our hearts

Foolish as we are, we continue to lull ourselves into security while the dark clouds of this crime against humanity gather ominously over our heads. While we are half aware that we live on the edge of a volcano, we give in to the deceptive hope that there will be no eruption. We prefer the comforting self-delusion to the thought of danger. We want to forget unwillingness and prefer to wish for pleasure. The pleasure principle, however, is incapable of protecting human life, because reality needs to be recognised and understood: anyone who contradicts it will either be harmed or destroyed.

Thousands of injustices happen not only in faraway countries, but also in our immediate vicinity. But we do not outrage, we do not defend the weak and we do not help the helpless. The plight of the millions affected does not touch our hearts. By not fighting against the obvious tyranny of those in power, we condone it. We have the deceptive hope that it will spare us. But the moment it takes a stranglehold on us, it is usually too late to contain it. The disease that we have failed to cure in the other takes us away ourselves.

The “jungle doctor” Albert Schweitzer gave us an answer

Again and again, one makes the bitter experience that many fellow citizens lack real compassion for their younger and older fellow human beings who are in need and suffering – or do not show it, do not become active. But only then can and will something change in our world.

Humanity must find an answer to the Cain question posed at the beginning: Should I be my brother’s keeper? The German-French doctor, philosopher, Protestant theologian, musicologist and pacifist Albert Schweitzer (1875 to 1965), one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and Nobel Peace Prize winner (1952), gave us an answer:

“Compassion for all creatures is what makes human beings truly human.”

When the Nazis took the communists, I kept silent, I wasn’t a communist

Martin Niemöller (1892 to 1984), German Protestant theologian, resistance fighter against National Socialism and prisoner in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, expressed in a few lines after this traumatic experience what it means not to have this compassion:

“When the Nazis took the communists,
I kept silent,
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the Social Democrats,
I kept silent,
I wasn’t a Social Democrat. 

When they took the trade unionists,
I kept quiet,
I wasn’t a trade unionist. 

When they came for me,
there was no one left
who could protest (2).”

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Dr Rudolf Hänsel is a qualified psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) Prehistory of the Bible: Genesis 4:1-16.

(2) Martin-niemoeller-stiftung.de/martin-niemoeller/as-the…

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Large-Scale Mass-Jabbing for COVID Horror Stories

February 22nd, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Millions of Americans and others abroad who roll up their sleeves to be jabbed against covid are oblivious to horrific dangers they face.

Everyone aware of the hazards posed by experimental, fast-tracked, DNA altering mRNA technology that’s not a vaccine, doesn’t protect, and risks serious harm to health and well-being won’t go near the stuff for good reason.

Nor AstraZeneca’s hazardous vaccine in Europe, not used in the US because of the high incidence of harmful to health reactions among trial participants.

Yet over 50 million Americans were voluntarily jabbed once or twice through Feb. 14.

The more jabs, the greater the risk of serious trouble.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans already experienced adverse events.

Thousands died, the carnage to continue if not challenged and stopped.

According to Daily Expose.co.uk on February 9, citing government data, Pfizer’s mRNA technology and AstraZeneca’s vaccine caused at least 600 eye disorder cases that impaired vision and blinded five people.

This occurred from December 8 through January 24.

The data was collected by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) based on voluntary “yellow card” adverse reaction reports.

Is the above the tip of the iceberg?

Are adverse events from mass-jabbing exponentially higher as in the US?

It’s highly likely but at least largely ignored by major media in both countries.

Through January 24 in Britain, 5.4 million first doses of Pfizer’s MRA technology were administered, another 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca experimental vaccine through January 24.

About half a million second doses of Pfizer’s drug have been jabbed into bodies of unwitting UK guinea pigs.

They’re both unapproved in the US because of hazards they pose.

Yet, Pfizer and Moderna mRNA technology was OK’d for use under emergency conditions that don’t exist anywhere.

Along with hundreds of Brits experiencing eye disorders, over 49,000 adverse events to Pfizer’s technology and more than 21,000 bad reactions to AstraZeneca’s vaccine were reported through January 24 — likely the tip of a much greater-sized iceberg.

There were 21 cerebrovascular accidents reported from jabbing with Pfizer’s technology.

They’re damage to brain cells, causing ischemic stroke from lack of oxygen when blood flow is impeded by a clot or other blockage.

After jabbing with Pfizer’s technology, four pregnant British women spontaneously aborted. AstraZeneca’s vaccine caused at least two miscarriages.

Yet Britain’s government warned pregnant women against being jabbed with Pfizer’s technology.

Yellow Card reports also revealed 107 deaths, seven occurring suddenly from Pfizer’s toxins.

Dozens of Bell’s palsy (causing weakness or paralysis of facial muscles) and other serious health issues were reported.

They include anaphylaxis shock, strokes, heart inflammation, brain stem infarction, cerebellar infarction, cerebellar stroke, cerebral artery occlusion, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral infarction, intracranial hemorrhage, ischemic stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and other life altering events from mass-jabbing.

It was well-known before inoculations began that serious harm to health would occur, including numerous deaths.

Yet governments in the West and elsewhere are permitting what should have been banned, willfully inflicting harm on their people.

Even after mass casualties, jabbing with harmful to health and well-being toxins continues unimpeded.

Widespread — largely unreported — horror stories will likely increase to exponentially higher levels in the weeks and months ahead wherever mass-jabbing occurs.

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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/

India’s Forever Wars and Forever Warriors

February 22nd, 2021 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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***

Imagine if an ordinary working man went on a rampage and killed 929 people and maimed 316 others. The media would naturally call such a man a serial killer or a homicidal maniac. Now imagine if a big pharmaceutical company did the same thing by releasing a vaccine that killed and maimed a similar number people. Would the drug company be treated the same as the working guy? Would their product be denounced as a “killer vaccine” and shunned by the public, or would they be praised on the cable news channels, provided lavish funding by the government, granted full immunity from liability for personal injury, waved through the regulatory process, and had the red carpet rolled out for their spectacular nationwide “Product Launch” extravaganza?

(NOTE: “According to new data released today, as of Feb. 12, 15,923 adverse reactions to COVID vaccines, including 929 deaths, have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since Dec. 14, 2020.” Children’s Health Defense)

And what about the small number of critics who don’t see the vaccine as a life-saving wonder drug but who seriously believe it is a gene-altering experimental concoction that was not sufficiently tested, did not go through the normal protocols, has not met long-term safety standards, excluded critical animal testing trials, and uses toxic synthetics that can trigger anaphylaxis, Bell’s Palsy, miscarriage, Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE) and a score of other potentially-lethal or debilitating long-term ailments that have not yet been diagnosed since the vaccine was rushed into service at breakneck speed?

What about these vaccine critics, what rights do they have? Do they have the right to speak their minds and express their concerns on social media or should they be smeared, castigated, blacklisted, censored and dragged through the mud?

In a free country, it is the vaccine manufacturers that should be scrutinized, lambasted and taken to task for the shortcomings or lethality of their product, but not in America. In America, it is the vaccine critics that are being condemned and targeted by the state. According to an article in the New York Post, the Biden Administration is joining forces with Big Tech to actively seek out and eliminate those people who challenge the official narrative and who reject the idea of inoculating the entire population with a dodgy experimental vaccine that poses a clear threat to one’s safety and well-being. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the Post:

The White House is asking social media companies to clamp down on chatter that deviates from officially distributed COVID-19 information as part of President Biden’s “wartime effort” to vanquish the coronavirus.

A senior administration official tells Reuters that the Biden administration is asking Facebook, Twitter and Google to help prevent anti-vaccine fears from going viral, as distrust of the inoculations emerges as a major barrier in the fight against the deadly virus.

“Disinformation that causes vaccine hesitancy is going to be a huge obstacle to getting everyone vaccinated and there are no larger players in that than the social media platforms,” the White House source told the news agency.

The news out of Washington is the first sign that officials are directly engaged with Silicon Valley in censoring social media users; Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain previously said the administration would try to work with major media companies on the issue….

Social media leaders have vowed to squash anti-vaccine “disinformation” on their platforms, but the spreading of such content has persisted....

A Twitter spokesman said the company is “in regular communication with the White House on a number of critical issues including COVID-19 misinformation.” (White House working with social media giants to silence anti-vaxxers”, New York Post)

So, what’s going on here? Why has the government joined with big tech to actively target people who do not accept the ‘official doctrine’ regarding the new vaccines?

It’s simple, isn’t it? The government wants to control want you think by controlling what you read. You see, the oligarchs who control the government behind the mask of the political parties, assume you are an ignorant beast incapable of critical thinking. They believe that your opinions are shaped by the things you read, therefore, they want to control what you read in order to push and prod and coerce you into the behavior that helps them achieve their malign objectives. In this case, they want everyone to submit to vaccination so they can reduce global population in order to curtail carbon emissions that, they believe, are a dire threat to human survival. This, of course, is just my own lunatic conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, the question remains the same: Does the government have the right to shut me up or do I have the right to speak my mind?

According to the report above, I do not have the right to speak my mind, in fact, the government is now explicitly taking aim at people like me who–they feel– are undermining the strategic agenda of the big money elites they work for.

What are we to make of this? What are we to make of this new alliance between the State and big tech or the State and big pharma or the State and Wall Street? Are we no longer a country that is “of, by and for the people” or are we edging closer to Mussolini’s definition of “fascism” as “the merging of the state and the corporation?” It seems to me that Mussolini’s definition is much more applicable.

And what does this tell us about the way the Biden administration plans to conduct business in the future?

It tells us that Joe Biden is essentially the corporate meat-puppet that he’s been for the last 5 decades and, that now, he intends to cancel vast swaths of the Bill of Rights to accommodate his deep-pocket managers. No one should be surprised by this. Biden has always been the Establishment’s best friend.

But do the oligarchs and corporate honchos really gain anything by silencing their critics?

Perhaps, after all, China has experienced exponential growth in the last two decades and, presumably, that is the model of governance our rulers now seek; absolute dictatorial power that allows the people who own the primary industries and businesses to arbitrarily set policy and impose their own laws independent of any democratic process.

Are we there yet?

Well, if the state is able to shut us up and remove us from public platforms, we’re a helluva lot closer than anyone thought.

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We are getting a very short preview of what will eventually happen to the United States as a whole.  America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling.  Our power grids were never intended to support so many people, our water systems are a complete joke, and it has become utterly apparent that we would be completely lost if a major long-term national emergency ever struck.  Texas has immense wealth and vast energy resources, but now it is being called a “failed state”.  If it can’t even handle a few days of cold weather, what is the rest of America going to look like when things really start to get chaotic in this country?

At this point, it has become clear that the power grid in Texas is in far worse shape than anyone ever imagined.  When extremely cold weather hit the state, demand for energy surged dramatically.  At the same time, about half of the wind turbines that Texas relies upon froze, and the rest of the system simply could not handle the massive increase in demand.

Millions of Texans were without power for days, and hundreds of thousands are still without power as I write this article.

And now we are learning that Texas was literally just moments away from “a catastrophic failure” that could have resulted in blackouts “for months”

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

I can’t even imagine how nightmarish things would have eventually gotten in Texas if there had actually been blackouts for months.

According to one expert, the state really was right on the verge of a “worst case scenario”

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

For years, I have been telling my readers that they have got to have a back up plan for power, because during a major emergency the grid can fail.

And when it fails, it can literally cost some people their lives.  I was deeply saddened when I learned that one man in Texas actually froze to death sitting in his own recliner

As Texas suffered through days of power outages, a man reportedly froze to death in his recliner with his wife clinging to life beside him.

The man was found dead in his Abilene home on Wednesday after being without power for several days in the record cold.

Most Americans don’t realize that much of the rest of the world actually has much better power infrastructure than we do.  Just check out these numbers

In Japan, the average home sees only 4 minutes of power outages per year. In the American Midwest, the figure is 92 minutes per year. In the Northeast, it’s 214 minutes; all those figures cover only regular outages and not those caused by extreme weather or fires.

As our population has grown and our infrastructure has aged, performance has just gotten worse and worse.  In fact, things ran much more smoothly all the way back in the mid-1980s

According to an analysis by Climate Central, major outages (affecting more than 50,000 homes or businesses) grew ten times more common from the mid-1980s to 2012. From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled. In a 2017 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported that there were 3,571 total outages in 2015, lasting 49 minutes on average. The U.S. Energy Administration reports that in 2016, the average utility customer had 1.3 power interruptions, and their total blackout time averaged four hours.

America is literally crumbling all around us, and it getting worse with each passing year.

Our water systems are another example.

In Texas, the cold weather literally caused thousands of pipes to burst.  The damage caused by all of these ruined pipes is going to be in the billions of dollars.

Right now, we are being told that a total of 797 water systems in the state are currently reporting problems with “frozen or broken pipes”

Some 13.5 million people are facing water disruptions with 797 water systems throughout the state reporting issues such as frozen or broken pipes, according to Toby Baker, executive director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. About 725 systems are under a boil water advisory, Baker said during a press conference Thursday.

Overall, approximately 7 million residents of the state live in areas that have been ordered to boil water, and it could take months for service to fully return to normal.

Without water, none of us can survive for long, and it is absolutely imperative that you have a back up plan in case your local system goes down.

In Houston, people that are without water in their homes have been forced to line up to fill buckets at a public spigot

Meanwhile, in scenes reminiscent of a third world country, Houston residents resorted to filling up buckets of water from a spigot in a local neighborhood.

One Houston resident, whose power has just gone back on Thursday after three days but still has no water, told DailyMail.com: ‘It is crazy that we just watched NASA land on Mars but here in Houston most of us still don’t have drinking water.’

You can watch video of this happening right here.  Of course if your local water system completely fails, there won’t even be a public spigot available for you to get water.

Shortages of food and other essential supplies are also being reported in Texas.

For Philip Shelley and his young wife, the situation became quite desperate fairly rapidly

Philip Shelley, a resident of Fort Worth, told CNN that he, his wife Amber and 11-month-old daughter, Ava, were struggling to stay warm and fed. Amber is pregnant and due April 4.

“(Ava) is down to half a can of formula,” Shelley said. “Stores are out if not extremely low on food. Most of our food in the refrigerator is spoiled. Freezer food is close to thawed but we have no way to heat it up.”

So what would they have done if the blackouts had lasted for months?

All over the state, extremely long lines have been forming at local supermarkets.  In some cases, people have started waiting way before the stores actually open

Joe Giovannoli, 29, arrived at a Central Market supermarket in Austin at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, an hour-and-a-half before it opened. Minutes later, more than 200 people had lined up behind him in the biting 26-degree weather.

Giovannoli’s wife is three months pregnant and the power in their one-bedroom Austin apartment blinked out Tuesday night. After a water pipe broke, firefighters also turned off the building’s water, he said. Giovannoli said he realized he still had it better than many others across Texas, but worried how long things will take to get back to normal.

This is happening in communities across Texas, and you can see video of one of these “bread lines” right here.

Of course those that had gotten prepared in advance did not have to wait in such long lines because they already had food.

Sadly, even though Joe Giovannoli had gotten to the supermarket so early, he later received really bad news

A few minutes before the store opened its doors, a manager stepped outside and warned those waiting in line that supplies inside were low: No produce, no baked goods, not much canned food.

“We haven’t had a delivery in four days,” he said.

Remember, this is just a temporary crisis in Texas that is only going to last for a few days.

So what would happen if a severe long-term national emergency disrupted food, water and power systems for months on end?

All it took to cause a short-term “collapse scenario” in the state of Texas was some cold weather.

Eventually, much worse things will happen to our nation, and it has become clear that we are not ready.

So get prepared while you still can, because time is running out.

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Michael Snyder has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, which are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.

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More than thirty years ago, on October 10, 1990, a young Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah appeared in front of the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus and delivered the following shocking testimony:

“I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” [1]

The story was compelling enough to guide fury toward Iraq and Saddam Hussein, leading to overwhelming support for the war three months later. [2]

But it would eventually come out that this affair was scripted by the PR Firm Hill and Knowlton. Nayira, it turns out was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States! And she was coached in presenting the story in a compelling and emotional way. [3]

This story highlights the need for independent media, including the Global Research News Hour.

Lies and distortions are at the centre of virtually every major war conflict which costs people their lives. And the media, the major ones owned by the same six corporations, play a role in guiding the war apparatus towards a successful execution. This will result in profits for the big barons, resources for the nations that protect them, and destitution and death for the millions getting in the way.

Independent media outlets, like CKUW 95.9FM and the prominent program the Global Research News Hour that it hosts, plays a vital role in examining each and every prominent claim being used as a pretext for war. When we witness a build up of propaganda, whether on a strike against Iraq, or a campaign to stop a virus at all costs, this program will do everything it can to dig out the truth behind the lies.

The station of course needs your support! Donations from corporate advertisers or the State will serve to control the kinds of investigations we can conduct. We are relying on YOU to keep the flow of free thought penetrating the clouds of mass control.

On the last broadcast of the Fundrive 2021 Special, the Global Research News Hour aired interviews by three broadcasters from stations in London, Ontario and Newton, Massachusetts, we heard excerpts from previous shows, music, and a lot of pitching for support.

You can continue supporting CKUW at fundrive.ckuw.ca. As an alternative, direct your funds to the Global Research donation site, highlighting funding for the Global Research News Hour.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

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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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CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

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

Notes:

  1.  John StauberSheldon Rampton (July 1, 2002); Chapter 10, ‘Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry’, Common Courage Press; www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html
  2. ibid
  3. ibid

 

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India and the Weaponization of Human Rights

February 21st, 2021 by Carla Stea

First published in September 2020

China’s Communist “Dictatorship” Lifts 700 Million Chinese Citizens Out Of Poverty: Yet India is Adored by Western Pundits, While China is Demonized and Sanctioned

***

“The first human right is the right to life.” Wang Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs and State Counselor of the People’s Republic of China

Twelve years ago United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Jomo Kwame Sunderam presented the 2008 “Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific,” at a press briefing, disclosing, on page 124 the staggering fact that:

“With limited resources, farmers depend on borrowed money to purchase seeds and other inputs to farm their land. A drop in their farm income could lead to indebtedness. In India, for example, the distress in rural areas is reflected in the high number of suicides by farmers: 86,922 during 2001-2005 (Government of India, 2007).”

There was very little – indeed virtually no press coverage or official investigation into this horrifying fact until 2014: in an article by Jonathan Kennedy entitled: “New evidence of suicide epidemic among India’s ‘marginalised’ farmers” he states:

“In 2010, 187,000 Indians killed themselves – one fifth of all global suicides….. Latest statistical research finds strong causal links between areas with the most suicides and areas where impoverished farmers are trying to grow crops that suffer from wild price fluctuations due to India’s relatively recent shift to free market economics.”

“It is often forgotten that over 833 million people – almost 70% of the Indian population – still live in rural areas. A large proportion of these rural inhabitants have not benefited from the economic growth of the past twenty years. In fact, liberalization has brought about a crisis in the agricultural sector that has pushed many small-scale cash crops farmers into debt and in many cases to suicide.”

So much for the capitalist paradise Trump promises North Korea’s Socialist leader Kim Jung Un.

On February 22, 2014 Ellen Barry in the New York Times headlined: “After Farmers Commit Suicide, Debts Fall on Families in India,” with impoverished widows called ‘whores.” In June, 2014, AP headlined: “Raped, murdered girls reveal horrific risks for India’s poor”: UNICEF estimates that almost 594 million – nearly 50 percent of India’s population – defecates in the open, with the situation particularly acute in impoverished rural areas such as the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh….The abduction, gang-rape and lynching of two teenage girls as they went to relieve themselves last Tuesday have added a terrifying new dimension to their daily ordeal.”

Finally, six years later, within the masquerade making possible the blaming of Covid-19 as the cause of despair, the New York Times deliberately confused the facts and stated: “Lockdown Sows Death Among India’s Farmers,” stating:

“India has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. In 2019, a total of 10,281 farmers and farm laborers died by suicide across the country, according to statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau. Taking one’s own life is still a crime in India, and experts have said for years that the actual numbers are far higher because most people fear the stigma of reporting. “

This sparse attention to the horrors suffered by destitute Indians, often ignored even at the United Nations specialized agencies, grossly contrasts with the overwhelming focus on ostensible human rights abuses of which China is accused by the Western media, and within the UN Security Council.

India’s current Prime Minister Modi hails from the political party implicated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the great leader of India’s independence from Great Britain. It seems clear that Modi is determined to return India to the Western hands that enslaved her until 1947. Modi is a very obedient servant in pleasing India’s former masters. A brief description of Britain’s genocidal policy toward colonial India is given in Susan Butler’s masterpiece: “Roosevelt and Stalin, Portrait of a Partnership”, (page 327, Knopf edition):

“British rule over India was every bit as brutal as Stalin’s rule over Russia….In November, 1941 Churchill instituted a scorched-earth policy in Bengal that came to be known as the Denial Policy. Soldiers were ordered to seize all the rice they could find: they stripped silos and storehouses, took seed crops…Soldiers also impounded all industrial and pleasure transport, all boats, including Bengali fishermen’s boats, all bicycles, including those used by the population to get to work. Their store of rice gone, denied transport to search for food, Bengalis began starving to death in ever increasing numbers….

On October 16, 1942, a cyclone and tidal wave hit Bengal, ruining fields, houses, and the ability of the people to go on with their lives. In the face of this disaster, rice denial continued as British policy…As a result 13 percent of the population of Bengal died of starvation. Because Indians were not permitted to travel abroad and had no access to international telephone or telegraph, and their leaders were in jail, there was no way for Bengalis to make their plight known to the world….

After the tidal wave, FDR replaced Johnson with William Phillips, State’s most competent diplomat, as his personal representative. He directed Phillips to push his philosophy ‘favoring freedom for all dependant peoples at the earliest possible date.’ By the time of Phillip’s arrival, late in 1942, Indians in great number, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, completely outraged by British high-handedness, had rebelled, and the viceroy had retaliated by killing ten thousand Indians and putting ninety thousand in jail. Twenty-five thousand members of the Congress Party, including Nehru and Gandhi, who were being held incommunicado, remained in jail. Phillip’s request to interview them was denied. Told Nehru, whom he despised, was fasting, Churchill commented ‘We had no objection to his fasting to death..He is a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fiber’…

Churchill claimed that the fighting was caused by bad blood between the Hindus and the Muslims, which was not true. In fact, as it had done in the past, British policy was to foster enmity between the two groups. ‘I am not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the door,’ he admitted.” (Most Palestinians and Israelis with whom I have spoken attribute the source of their ongoing disastrous conflict to Britain’s Machiavellian policy of ‘Divide and Conquer’) “Phillips minced no words in his report to FDR: ‘Many of the rural areas in Bengal are foodless, with the villagers wandering into the cities to die there of starvation. Deaths from starvation on the streets of Calcutta are reported to have become so numerous that prominent European members of the community have addressed open letters to the municipal authorities requesting that more adequate means be found for the removal of the corpses.’… John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, recorded in his diary: ‘The PM said the Hindus were a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due, and he wished, Bert Harris, marshal of the air force could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.’ Modern estimates are that at least 1 million and perhaps as many as 3 million died.”

According to Dr. Sashi Tharoor, former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations,

“Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does.”

Perhaps, because India is now following the orders of her former slaveholder, Western imperialism, the horrifying number of suicides of their destitute farmers, the degradation of the women (innumerable gang rapes and murders of impoverished girls) receive little attention in the corridors of power at the United Nations, subsumed under general toothless resolutions upholding the rights of women.

By contrast, China has become the whipping boy of the Western Media which, overlooking the horrific human rights abuses of millions of impoverished Indians, is shedding incessant, ad nauseum crocodile tears about the condition of the Uighurs in China, and the “innocent protesters” in Hong Kong.

Massive evidence produced by Bashir Ja’afari, Ambassador of Syria to the United Nations, documents the fact that each year Saudi Arabia finances the travel of 5,000 Uighurs from Xingjiang, China to the Mecca pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, during which they are indoctrinated in Islamic extremism and jihad. These Uighurs are hosted for a month longer than other pilgrims, until their expertise in jihad is completed, and are then returned to China for the purpose of fomenting separatist movements and committing terrorist actions, which the Chinese government is attempting to prevent and from which the Chinese government is attempting to protect its population. The re-education camps, which are the ostensibly “undemocratic” means by which China is attempting to reintegrate these “Manchurian candidates” into Chinese society are the current target of Western concern with ostensible “human rights abuses” in China, while the West, itself is diverting attention from the egregious domestic human rights abuses occurring with impunity within these arrogant Western countries themselves. (George Floyd’s public strangulation is only one example of this ongoing atrocity, which occurs massively, and with impunity).

China is a huge country, comprised of 56 nationalities. It is most probable, and possibly indisputable, that there are hostile foreign interests in fomenting the disintegration of China, a rising herculean socialist economic power, and reducing it to the tragic weakness, and destitution to which the fifteen countries formerly comprising the Soviet Union were condemned.

The Uighur jihadists certainly fulfill their mission, as early as 2013 there was a terrorist bombing in Beijing’s center, and subsequent violent extremist actions elsewhere in China. The sophisticated Chinese, benefiting from a 5,000 year old civilization, recognized the hostile geostrategic policies underlying this new scourge of terrorism in their country, and have now taken action to prevent this horrific epidemic from causing further chaotic explosions on their territory. The re-education camps in Xingjiang are defensive measures, and have not provoked epidemics of suicide, as have the free-market economic policies in capitalist India, “the world’s largest democracy.”

US President Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2020 was an undisguised and brazen declaration of overt hostility toward China, now the world’s largest challenge to the US claim to “greatness.” The constant attack against China, with fabrications of human rights abuses against the country that has lifted 700 million people out of poverty, (while the US is pushing millions of people into poverty, with its trillion dollar investment in nuclear weapons, while American people are in massively increasing numbers starving, homeless, and lacking the medical equipment and resources that would contain and control the spread of Covid -19) is so conspicuously hypocritical that it should be obvious to even a casual observer. It is a testament to the overpowering indoctrination of masses of people in the USA and Western Europe that the inability (or rigid refusal) to recognize this blatant obfuscation continues through this very minute.

Increasingly frustrated and volatile protesters against racism and inequality in the West are denigrated and battered – or murdered, while anti-communist protesters in Hong Kong are lionized. The Orwellian character of this brainwashing is tragic, and an illustration of what a brilliant psychiatrist in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently said to me: “I have concluded that the human species does not know how to take care of itself, and as a result, may not survive.”

Introducing the opening of the UN General Debate, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres emphasized: “We are moving in a very dangerous direction. Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe in a Great Fracture—each with its own trade and financial rules and internet and artificial intelligence capacities. Such a divide risks inevitably turning into a geostrategic and military divide. We must avoid this at all costs.”

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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York. 

Libya: When Historical Memory is Erased

February 20th, 2021 by Manlio Dinucci

It happened ten years ago: US-NATO’s “humanitarian war” against Libya in support of so-called pro-democracy rebels. The On February 15, 2011, according to the official story “anti-government rallies were held in Benghazi calling upon Qadaffi to step down. US-NATO cam to the rescue of pro-democracy movement,

Who were these pro-democracy activists. They were led by paramilitary brigades under the supervision of NATO Special Forces. The “Liberation” of  Tripoli was carried out by “former” members of the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). 

The jihadists and NATO work handed in glove. These “former” Al Qaeda affiliated brigades constitute the backbone of the “pro-democracy” rebellion.

Manlio Dinucci in an article published by Global Research on February 28, 2011 recalls the history of Libya and the insidious US-NATO project.

Libya had been an Italian colony in 1911 under the reign of King Idris. According to Manlio Dinucci,

“The flag of King Idris, which is flying again now in the civil war in Libya, is the banner of those who, by manipulating the struggle of those genuinely fighting for democracy against the regime of Gaddafi, plan to bring Libya back under control of the powers that once dominated it.”

Michel Chossudovsky, February 20, 2011

***

Benghazi captured, the rebels have lowered the green flag of the Republic of Libya, hoisting in its place the red, black and green banner with crescent and star: the flag of the monarchy of King Idris. The same flag was hoisted by protesters (including those of the Partito democratico and the Rifondazione comunista) on the gate of the Libyan embassy in Rome, raising the cry: “Here’s the flag of democratic  Libya, that of King Idris.” It was a symbolic act, rich in history and burning current events.

The Emir of Cyrenaica

Already the emir of Cyrenaica and Tripoli, Sidi Muhammad Idris al-Mahdi al-Senussi was put on the throne of Libya by the British when the country gained independence in 1951. It had been an Italian colony since 1911. Libya became a federal monarchy, in which King Idris was head of state, with the right to pass it on to his heirs. It was always the king who would appoint the prime minister, the Council of Ministers and half the members of the Senate, which had the right to dissolve the House of Representatives.

According to a twenty-year treaty of “friendship and alliance” with Britain, in 1953, King Idris granted to the British, in exchange for financial and military assistance, the use of air, naval and land bases in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. A similar agreement was concluded in 1954 with the United States, which obtained the use of the Wheelus Air Base just outside Tripoli. It became the main U.S. air base in the Mediterranean. In addition, the United States and Britain were able to use firing ranges in Libya for their military aviation. With Italy, King Idris in 1956 concluded an agreement which not only wiped Italy clear of all damages to Libya, but allowed the Italian community in Tripoli to maintain its assets practically intact.

Libya became even more important for the U.S. and Britain when, in the late 1950s, the U.S.-based company Esso (ExxonMobil) confirmed the existence of large oil fields and others were discovered soon after. The major companies, such as the U.S.’s Esso and Britain’s British Petroleum, got advantageous concessions that ensured their control and the bulk of the profit from Libya’s oil. The Italian company Eni also obtained two concessions, through Agip. To better control the deposits, the government’s federal form was abolished in 1963, eliminating the historical regions of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan.

The protests of Libyan nationalists, who accused King Idris of selling out the country, were stifled by police repression. The rebellion grew, however, especially in the armed forces. It resulted in a coup – whose chief architect was Captain Muammar Gaddafi – carried out without bloodshed in 1969 by just 50 officers, calling themselves “Free Officers” on the Nasser model.

The monarchy abolished, the Libyan Arab Republic in 1970 forced the U.S. and British forces to evacuate their military bases and, the following year, nationalized the properties held by British Petroleum and forced other companies to pay the Libyan state a much higher share of the profits.

The flag of King Idris, which is flying again now in the civil war in Libya, is the banner of those who, by manipulating the struggle of those genuinely fighting for democracy against the regime of Gaddafi, plan to bring Libya back under control of the powers that once dominated it.

Those forces, headed by the United States, are preparing to land in Libya under the cover of “peacekeeping.” Meanwhile, in concert with the Pentagon, the Italian Defense Minister Ignacio La Russa announced that from Sigonella military base [Sicily] military airplanes will fly directly to Libya for “purely humanitarian purposes.” The same “humanitarian intervention” that the pacifists and those who waved the flag of King Idris are demanding in an “urgent appeal,” but they forget history. They should remember that a century ago, in 1911, the Italian occupation of Libya, prepared by incessant propaganda, was supported by majority public opinion, while in the cabarets they sang, “Tripoli, sing land of love come sweetly where the syrup runs.” Times change and language, but the rhyme remains, “to the roar of guns.”

Translated from the Italian by John Catalinotto

 

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Author’s Note:

The following article was published almost ten years ago on March 9, 2011, at the outset of the US-NATO “humanitarian” military intervention in Libya.  Libya’s crude oil reserves in 2011 were twice those of the United States.

In retrospect. the 2011 US-NATO led war on Libya was a multi-trillion dollar trophy for the United States. It was also, as outlined in my 2011 article a means to establishing US hegemony in North Africa, a region historically dominated by France and to lesser extent by Italy and Spain.

The US-NATO intervention was also intent upon excluding China from the region and edging out China’s National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), which was a major player in Libya. 

Libya is the gateway to the Sahel and Central Africa. More generally, what is at stake is the redrawing of the map of Africa at the expense of France’s historical spheres of influence, namely a process of neo-colonial redivision.

Recent developments confirm this process. In the course of the last decade, starting with president Nicolas Sarkozy, France has become a de facto US proxy State. 

Michel Chossudovsky, February 15, 2021

***

The geopolitical and economic implications of a US-NATO led military intervention directed against Libya are far-reaching.

Libya is among the World’s largest oil economies with approximately 3.5% of global oil reserves, more than twice those of the US.

“Operation Libya” is part of  the broader military agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia which consists in gaining control and corporate ownership over more than sixty percent of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas, including oil and gas pipeline routes.

“Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves, depending on the source and methodology of the estimate.” (See Michel Chossudovsky, The “Demonization” of Muslims and the Battle for Oil, Global Research, January 4, 2007) .

With 46.5 billion barrels of proven reserves [2011 data], (10 times those of Egypt), Libya is the largest oil economy in the African continent followed by Nigeria and Algeria (Oil and Gas Journal). In contrast, US proven oil reserves are of the order of 20.6 billion barrels (December 2008) according to the Energy Information Administration.  U.S. Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and Natural Gas Liquids Reserves)


The most recent estimates [2011] place Libya’s oil reserves at 60 billion barrels. Its gas reserves at 1,500 billion m3. Its production has been between 1.3 and 1.7 million barrels a day, well below its productive capacity. Its longer term objective is three million b/d and a gas production of 2,600 million cubic feet a day, according to figures of the National Oil Corporation (NOC).

The (alternative) BP Statistical Energy Survey (2008) places Libya’s proven oil reserves at 41.464 billion barrels at the end of 2007 which represents 3.34 % of the world’s proven reserves. (Mbendi  Oil and Gas in Libya – Overview).


Oil is the “Trophy” of US-NATO led Wars

An invasion of Libya under a humanitarian mandate would serve the same corporate interests as the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The underlying objective is to take possession of Libya’s oil reserves, destabilize the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and eventually privatize the country’s oil industry, namely transfer the control and ownership of Libya’s oil wealth into foreign hands.

The National Oil Corporation (NOC) is ranked 25 among the world’s Top 100 Oil Companies. (The Energy Intelligence ranks NOC 25 among the world’s Top 100 companies. – Libyaonline.com)

The planned invasion of Libya, which is already underway [February-March 2011]is part of the broader “Battle for Oil”.  Close to 80 percent of Libya’s oil reserves are located in the Sirte Gulf basin of Eastern Libya. (See map below)

Libya is a Prize Economy. “War is good for business”. Oil is the trophy of US-NATO led wars.

Wall Street, the Anglo-American oil giants, the US-EU weapons producers would be the unspoken beneficiaries of a US-NATO led military campaign directed against Libya.

Libyan oil is a bonanza for the Anglo-American oil giants. While the market value of crude oil is currently well in excess of 100 dollars a barrel, the cost of Libyan oil is extremely low, as low as $1.00 a barrel (according to one estimate). As one oil market expert commented somewhat cryptically:

“At $110 on the world market, the simple math gives Libya a $109 profit margin.” (Libya Oil, Libya Oil One Country’s $109 Profit on $110 Oil, EnergyandCapital.com March 12, 2008)

Foreign Oil Interests in Libya

Foreign oil companies operating prior to the insurrection in Libya include France’s Total, Italy’s ENI, The China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), British Petroleum, the Spanish Oil consortium REPSOL, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, Hess, Conoco Phillips.

Of significance, China plays a central role in the Libyan oil industry. The China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) had a workforce of some 400 employees. The total Chinese workforce in Libya was of the order of 30,000.

Eleven percent (11%) of Libyan oil exports are channelled to China. While there are no figures on the size and importance of CNPC’s production and exploration activities, there are indications that they are sizeable.

More generally, China’s presence in North Africa is considered by Washington to constitute an intrusion. From a geopolitical standpoint, China is an encroachment. The military campaign directed against Libya is intent upon excluding China from North Africa.

Also of importance is the role of Italy. ENI, the Italian oil consortium puts out 244,000 barrels of gas and oil, which represents almost 25 percent of Libya’s total exports. ( Sky News: Foreign oil firms halt Libyan operations, February 23, 2011).

Among US companies in Libya, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) decided barely 6 months ago (October 2010) not to renew their oil and gas exploration licenses in Libya. (Why are Chevron and Oxy leaving Libya?: Voice of Russia, October 6, 2010). In contrast, in November 2010, Germany’s oil company, R.W. DIA E signed a far-reaching agreement with Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) involving exploration and production sharing. AfricaNews – Libya: German oil firm signs prospecting deal – The AfricaNews, 

The financial stakes as well  as “the spoils of war” are extremely high. The military operation is intent upon dismantling Libya’s financial institutions as well as confiscating billions of dollars of Libyan financial assets deposited in Western banks.

It should be emphasised that Libya’s military capabilities, including its air defense system are weak. 

Libya Oil Concessions

Redrawing the Map of Africa

Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. The objective of US-NATO interference is strategic: it consists in outright theft, in stealing the nation’s oil wealth under the disguise of a humanitarian intervention.

This military operation is intent upon establishing US hegemony in North Africa, a region historically dominated by France and to lesser extent by Italy and Spain.

With regard to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, Washington’s design is to weaken the political links of these countries to France and push for the installation of new political regimes which have a close rapport with the US. This weakening of France is part of a US imperial design. It is a historical process which goes back to the wars in Indochina.

US-NATO intervention leading to the eventual formation of a US puppet regime is also intent upon excluding China from the region and edging out China’s National Petroleum Corp (CNPC). The Anglo-American oil giants including British Petroleum which signed an exploration contract in 2007 with the Ghadaffi government are among the potential “beneficiaries” of  the proposed US-NATO military operation.

More generally, what is at stake is the redrawing of the map of Africa, a process of neo-colonial redivision, the scrapping of the demarcations of the 1884 Berlin Conference, the conquest of Africa by the United States in alliance with Britain, in a US-NATO led operation.

The colonial redivision of Africa. 1913

Libya: Strategic Saharan Gateway to Central Africa

Libya has borders with several countries which are within France’s sphere of influence, including Algeria, Tunisia, Niger and Chad.

Chad is potentially an oil rich economy. ExxonMobil and Chevron have interests in Southern Chad including a pipeline project. Southern Chad is a gateway into the Darfur region of Sudan, which is also strategic in view of its oil wealth.

China has oil interests in both Chad and Sudan. The China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) signed a farreaching agreement with the Chad government in 2007.

Niger is strategic to the United States in view of its extensive reserves of uranium. At present, France dominates the uranium industry in Niger through the French nuclear conglomerate Areva, formerly known as Cogema. China also has a stake in Niger’s uranium industry.

More generally, the Southern border of Libya is strategic for the United States in its quest to extend its sphere of influence in Francophone Africa, a vast territory extending from North Africa to Central and Western Africa. Historically this region was part of France and Belgium’s colonial empires, the borders of which were established  at the Berlin Conference of 1884.

Image Source www.hobotraveler.com

The US played a passive role at the 1884 Berlin Conference. This new 21st Century redivision of the African continent, predicated on the control over oil, natural gas and strategic minerals (cobalt, uranium, chromium, manganese, platinum and uranium) largely supports dominant Anglo-American corporate interests.

US interference in North Africa redefines the geopolitics of an entire region. It undermines China and overshadows the influence of the European Union.

This new redivision of Africa not only weakens the role of the former colonial powers (including France and Italy) in North Africa. it  is also part of a broader process of displacing and weakening France (and Belgium) over a large part of the African continent.

US puppet regimes have been installed in several African countries which historically were in the sphere of influence of France (and Belgium), including The Republic of the Congo and Rwanda.  Several countries in West Africa (including Côte d’Ivoire) are slated to become US proxy states.

The European Union is heavily dependent on the flow of Libyan oil. 85 percent of its oil is sold to European countries. In the case of a war with Libya, the supply of petroleum to Western Europe could be further disrupted, largely affecting Italy, France and Germany. Thirty percent of Italy’s oil and 10 percent of its gas are imported from Libya. Libyan gas is fed through the Greenstream pipeline in the Mediterranean (See map below).

The implications of these potential disruptions are far-reaching. They also have a direct bearing on the relationship between the US and the European Union.

Greenstream pipeline linking Libya to Italy (right)

Concluding Remarks

The mainstream media through massive disinformation is complicit in justifying a military agenda which, if carried out, would have devastating consequences not only for the Libyan people: the social and economic impacts would be felt Worldwide.

There are at present three distinct war theaters in the broader Middle East Central Asian region: Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq. In the case of an attack on Libya, a  fourth war theater would be opened up in North Africa, with the risk of military escalation.

Public opinion must take cognizance of the hidden agenda behind this alleged humanitarian undertaking, heralded by the heads of state and heads of government of NATO countries as a “Just War”. The Just War theory in both its classical and contemporary versions upholds war as a “humanitarian operation”. It calls for military intervention on ethical and moral grounds against “rogue states” and “Islamic terrorists”. The Just war theory demonizes the Gaddafi regime while providing a humanitarian mandate to US-NATO military intervention.

The heads of state and heads of government of NATO countries are the architects of war and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an utterly twisted logic, they are heralded as the voices of reason, as the representatives of the “international community”.

Realities are turned upside down. A humanitarian intervention is launched by war criminals in high office, who are the unchallenged guardians of the Just War theory.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,… Civilian casualties in Pakistan resulting from US drone attacks on towns and villages ordered by president Obama, are not front page news, nor are the 2 million civilian deaths in Iraq.

There is no such thing as a “Just War”.  The history of US imperialism should be understood. The 2000 Report of the Project of the New American Century entitled “Rebuilding Americas’ Defenses” [pdf file no longer accessible] calls for the implementation of a long war, a war of conquest.

One of the main components of this military agenda is: to “Fight and decisively win in multiple, simultaneous theater wars”.

“Operation Libya” is part of that process. It is another theater in the Pentagon’s logic of “simultaneous theater wars”.

The PNAC document faithfully reflects the evolution of US military doctrine since 2001. The US plans to be involved simultaneously in several war theaters in different regions of the World.

While heralding the need to protect America (i.e. “National Security”), the PNAC report does spell out why these multiple theater wars are required.

What purpose do they serve. Are they an instrument of peace? The usual humanitarian justification is not even mentioned.

What is the purpose of America’s military roadmap?

Libya is targeted because it is one among several remaining countries outside America’s sphere of influence, which fail to conform to US demands. Libya is a country which has been selected as part of a military “road map” which consists of “multiple simultaneous theater wars”.  In the words of former NATO Commander Chief General Wesley Clark:

 “in the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan…. (Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars, p. 130).

Part I

Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US NATO Attempted Coup d’Etat in Libya?

Der deutsche Regimekritiker und Schriftsteller Wolfgang Borchert fordert in einem 1947 verfassten Manifest “Dann gibt es nur eins!” die Mitmenschen dazu auf, die Teilnahme an künftigen Kriegen zu verweigern. Kurz darauf verstirbt der 26-Jährige an den Folgen schwerer Kriegs-Verwundungen.

Der erschütternde Prosatext war sein Vermächtnis. Wir Gymnasiasten im Nachkriegsdeutschland fühlten uns durch dieses Manifest ein Stück weit wie befreit von drückenden Schuldgefühlen, die Söhne deutscher Soldaten zu sein und hofften auf eine Zukunft ohne Krieg und Gewalt.

Doch als Erwachsene haben wir versagt und Borcherts Vermächtnis nicht erfüllt: Wir verweigerten weder die Teilnahme am völkerrechtswidrigen Krieg der NATO gegen Serbien im Jahr 1999 noch die Beteiligung an den Kriegen im Nahen, Mittleren und Fernen Osten. Heute bietet sich wieder die Gelegenheit, Widerstand zu leisten gegen Tyrannei und Krieg gegen uns Bürger. Werden wir dieses Mal Borcherts Vermächtnis erfüllen und uns den satanischen Plänen einer globalen kriminellen “Elite” verweigern – und NEIN! sagen? 

Du. Bürger in welchem Land auch immer. Wenn sie dir befehlen, du sollst Politikern vertrauen und ihnen die Macht übergeben, dann gibt es nur eins:
Sag NEIN!

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Selected Articles: The Covid Deception Serves An Undeclared Agenda

February 19th, 2021 by The Global Research Team

The Covid Deception Serves An Undeclared Agenda

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, February 19 2021

There is no scientific basis for the measures in place to deal with the alleged Covid Pandemic.  Among experts the support for these measures are largely limited to those with financial links with pharmaceutical corporations.

Truth Slips Out in Coronavirus Vaccine Deaths ‘Fact Check’?

By Adam Dick, February 19 2021

The big money media that have been working for a year to stir up maximum fear of coronavirus have been taking the opposite tack regarding coronavirus vaccines.

How the Gates Foundation Seeded America’s COVID-19 Policy Catastrophes

By Jordan Schachtel, February 19 2021

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is finally facing the heat for his botched and negligent coronavirus response policies, yet no one seems to be asking why Cuomo and select governors made the fateful decisions that led to the excess deaths.

The Twilight Zone: Covid, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Eugenics

By Peter Koenig, February 19 2021

These horrible times, from lockdowns to lockdowns to coerced vaccinations, to social distancing, to masking and masking and more masking — when we all know, and science has proven it – that none of this helps – don’t they make you feel that we are living in a twilight zone?

‘A Humanitarian Crisis’ in Texas: Cold and Snow Put Millions in Danger. 38 Dead

By Counter Current News, February 19 2021

Texas’s freeze entered a sixth day on Thursday. At least 31 people have died as of Wednesday afternoon as a result of the severe weather in Texas.

The Decline of the West: American Education Surrenders to ‘Equity’

By Philip Giraldi, February 18 2021

It will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that requires hard work and dedication.

‘All The Warfare Of The Future’: Drones, New Technology and the Integrated Review

By Chris Cole, February 18 2021

At the beginning of March, the government will publish its long-awaited Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, known (thankfully) as ‘The Integrated Review’.  

Role of NGOs in Promoting Neo-Colonialism

By Syed Ehtisham, February 19 2021

Political scientists often refer to NGOs as “pressure groups” or “lobby groups,” . In the field of international relations, scholars now speak of NGOs as “Non-state Actors”.

The Greater Danger of Israeli Provocations in Syria

By Brian Berletic, February 19 2021

Continued airstrikes carried out by Israeli warplanes in Syria presents – at face value – an obvious and persistent threat to Syria. In a wider context, the threat runs much deeper and extends to Syria’s allies in Tehran.

Oceanic Sharks and Rays Have Declined by 71% since 1970 – A Global Solution Is Needed

By The Conversation, February 19 2021

For millennia, their remoteness has allowed these species to largely avoid humans. But since the early 1950s, industrial-scale fishing fleets have been able to reach distant waters and gradually spread to exploit the entire global ocean.

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is finally facing the heat for his botched and negligent coronavirus response policies, yet no one seems to be asking why Cuomo and select governors made the fateful decisions that led to the excess deaths — and the coverup campaigns — of tens of thousands of senior citizens in New York and elsewhere across the United States.

After being awarded an Emmy and writing a book on his supposedly heroic response to the pandemic, Cuomo is finally receiving the very necessary inquiries into his handling of the crisis. Cuomo is perhaps the most egregious example of abuse and neglect (given his refusal to use the Javits Center or a Navy hospital ship), he is far from the only governor who executed the “nursing home death warrants.” Governor Cuomo was accompanied by the governors of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere.

The common thread seen in the United States is the delegation of state policy to prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution that is wholly controlled and funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In March and early April, politicians were informed by the modeling “experts” at Gates-funded IHME that their hospitals were about to be completely overrun by coronavirus patients. Modelers from IHME claimed this massive surge would cause hospitals to run out of lifesaving equipment in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Time was of the essence, and now was the time for rapid decision making, the modelers claimed.

On two separate April 1 and April 2 press conferences, Cuomo made clear that his policy decisions were based off of the IHME model.

“There is a group that is funded by the Gates Foundation. Thank you very much Bill Gates,” Cuomo said on April 1 in discussing ICU needs and how he was using Gates models to make other healthcare policy decisions.

“There’s only one model that we look at that has the number of projected deaths which is the IHME model which is funded by the Gates Foundation,” Cuomo said on April 2, adding, “and we thank the Gates Foundation for the national service that they’ve done.”

In an April 9 briefing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer referred to the IHME model in order to project deaths and the PPE resources needed for the supposed surge.

It was the same story with the government of Pennsylvania. The PA Health Department exclusively uses IHME models to forecast coronavirus outcomes.

Governor Phil Murphy, another nursing home death warrant participant, used IHME models to navigate the state’s policy response.

It wasn’t just state governors relying on this data, federal bureaucrats Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, both of whom have substantial ties to the Gates network, used the IHME COVID-19 forecasting models (which Birx endorsed specifically as the best prediction modeling outfit) to make policy recommendations to states. In her White House briefings, Birx, who simultaneously had a seat on the board of a Gates-funded institution, almost exclusively relied on IHME models to project outcomes.

These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants.

States across the nation went to extremes, resorting to full bunker mode while waiting for bodies to start dropping in the streets, but the IHME modeling never panned out. Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created “surge capacity” pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. IHME, for its part, regularly “adjusts” its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes.

Bill Gates has never discussed the catastrophic failures of his prized “health metrics” forecasting organization, and how it has contributed to the suffering of millions of Americans. Instead, he has seamlessly washed his hands of COVID mania, and has moved on to demanding that the western world sacrifice itself in the name of the latest “crisis” that is climate change.

In December, however, Melinda Gates acknowledged that “we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts “ of demanding that people stay locked in their houses indefinitely, among other policy requests demanded by Gates Inc.

The IHME models that demanded lockdowns and other insane restrictions relied entirely on sketchy COVID-19 data coming from the city of Wuhan, China. The early statistics concerning deaths, hospitalizations, and overall age stratification have not come close to matching the actual data on the virus. For example, IHME used a 3+% death rate when the real number *from* COVID-19 is only around 0.1%. IHME’s risk projections, which they presented as sound science, were all incredibly overinflated.

The buck does indeed stop with the elected leaders who made the fateful decisions to send sick COVID patients into nursing homes, lock down their states, and mask up their citizens in perpetuity, but that’s only half of the story. The bad data they used almost exclusively came from the Gates network, which has trafficked in pseudoscience and has demonstrated complete incompetence and reckless forecasting since the beginning of last year.

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The Greater Danger of Israeli Provocations in Syria

February 19th, 2021 by Brian Berletic

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

Continued airstrikes carried out by Israeli warplanes in Syria presents – at face value – an obvious and persistent threat to Syria. In a wider context, the threat runs much deeper and extends to Syria’s allies in Tehran.

Israel has been an eager participant in the US-led proxy war on Syria beginning in 2011. It has provided safe-haven and support for Western-backed militants along and within its borders. It has also at various junctures carried out airstrikes in Syria in a bid to impede Damascus’ ability to reestablish peace and stability within Syria’s borders.

And according to US policy papers written before and after the beginning of the 2011 proxy war against Syria – Washington had long ago slated Israel a role in undermining and aiding in the overthrow of the Syrian government – and admittedly as part of a wider strategy to isolate and eventually target Iran.

The most likely current goal is to continue ratcheting up tensions with Iran – a nation that has committed significant resources and manpower toward the goal of stabilizing Syria and ending the highly destructive conflict.

As tensions continue to rise across the region, Israel and its backers in Washington will likely seek a pretext for Israel to strike Iran directly – a plan US policymakers had devised as early as 2009 – in the hopes Iran would retaliate and provide a wider pretext still for the US itself to intervene.

US policymakers had noted that an Israeli-led first strike on Iran would be complicated by its problematic relationship with all the nations its warplanes would need to fly over in order to carry out the attack.

But recently – efforts have been underway to “repair” those relations, paving the way – or in this case – opening the skies for – the long-planned Israeli strikes.

Articles like the New York Times’, “Morocco Joins List of Arab Nations to Begin Normalizing Relations With Israel,” would take note of this process and how nations like Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have all begun this process – and how these first few nations would help make it easier for others – like Saudi Arabia – to follow suit.

In reality – these nations have all been cooperative in abetting US foreign policy in the region – with animosity created merely for the purpose of managing public perception in each respective nation.

Folding Israel into Washington’s united front against Iran alongside Arab nations whose public rhetoric depicted Israel as a sworn enemy illustrates just how desperate Washington and its allies have become in their efforts to reassert themselves in the region.

The Long History of Israel’s Slated Role 

A 1983 document – part of a deluge of recently declassified papers released to the public – signed by former CIA officer Graham Fuller titled, “Bringing Real Muscle to Bear Against Syria” (PDF), states (their emphasis):

Syria at present has a hammerlock on US interests both in Lebanon and in the Gulf — through closure of Iraq’s pipeline thereby threatening Iraqi internationalization of the [Iran-Iraq] war. The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey.

The report also states:

If Israel were to increase tensions against Syria simultaneously with an Iraqi initiative, the pressures on Assad would escalate rapidly. A Turkish move would psychologically press him further.

In 2009, US corporate-financier funded policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, would publish a lengthy paper titled, “Which Path to Persia?: Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran”, in which, once again, the use of Israel as an apparently “unilateral aggressor” was discussed in detail.

A US policy paper describing planned Israeli aggression as part of a larger US-driven conspiracy to attack, undermine, and ultimately overthrow the Iranian state reveals there is nothing unilateral at all about Israel’s regional policy or its military operations.

In 2012, the Brookings Institution would publish another paper titled, “Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change”, which stated:

Some voices in Washington and Jerusalem are exploring whether Israel could contribute to coercing Syrian elites to remove Asad.

The report continues by explaining:

Israel could posture forces on or near the Golan Heights and, in so doing, might divert regime forces from suppressing the opposition. This posture may conjure fears in the Asad regime of a multi-front war, particularly if Turkey is willing to do the same on its border and if the Syrian opposition is being fed a steady diet of arms and training. Such a mobilization could perhaps persuade Syria’s military leadership to oust Asad in order to preserve itself.

Once again, the use of Israel as one of several regional provocateurs executing policy as part of a larger US-orchestrated conspiracy is openly discussed.

And it was a 2009 Brookings Institution paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran,” that would spell out the strategy of having Israel carry out attacks first, provoking a war the US could wade in later with a broader and more “acceptable” pretext to do so.

The paper would state specifically:

…the [Israeli] airstrikes themselves are really just the start of this policy. Again, the Iranians would doubtless rebuild their nuclear sites. They would probably retaliate against Israel, and they might retaliate against the United States, too (which might create a pretext for American airstrikes or even an invasion).

Thus – in addition to the US itself trying to provoke Iran into a war – or stage a provocation themselves to do so – they have slated Israel a role in attempting to provoke Iran as well.

The strategy has added complexity to it – providing the US additional “plausible deniability” and making its “retaliation” against Iran appear both more “reluctant” and more “justified.”

It is clear that a strategy described in the 1980’s, clearly carried out over the decades (and regardless of who occupies the White House) is still very much in play.

The US is helping open up the skies for this long-anticipated Israeli first strike through this current “normalization” of relations between Israel and nations it may potentially overfly to strike Iran or require assistance from in any resulting war.

Meanwhile, the US continues attempting to appear interested in returning to the “Iran Nuclear Deal” but is making no tangible efforts to actually do so. In fact, the US itself appears to be continuing a build-up for the above mentioned “retaliation” it hopes it or its allies can provoke in the region – and failing that – perhaps convincingly stage.

It is very much still a dangerous time for Iran as well as for peace and stability in the region.

Despite the superficial political change in Washington this year, this long-planned policy of aggressive regime change against Iran continues. The clearer the game the US and its allies are playing becomes to international audiences – the more difficult it will be for the US and its allies to continue playing it.

It is incumbent upon alternative media – both independent and state-run – to raise awareness of this continued aggression and planned aggression against Iran – while nations interested in peace and stability in the region continue working to raise the costs of potential US-Israeli aggression against Iran far above any potential benefit Washington and its allies believe they will receive by continuing to pursue it.

*

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Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

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Oceanic sharks and rays live so far from land that the average person is unlikely to ever see them. But these species, which live in the vast open ocean, are also among the most revered, and include the great white shark and the giant manta ray. For millennia, their remoteness has allowed these species to largely avoid humans. But since the early 1950s, industrial-scale fishing fleets have been able to reach distant waters and gradually spread to exploit the entire global ocean.

Rising demand over the same period for shark and ray meat, as well as fins, gill plates and liver oil, has caused catches of the 30 or so oceanic species to soar. Marine biologists have been raising the alarm for several decades now, but their warnings were often limited to what regional trends showed. Now,new research has brought together disparate threads of data into a single, global analysis of shark and ray populations in the open ocean.

Worldwide, oceanic shark and ray abundance has declined by 71% since 1970. More than half of the 31 species examined are now considered to be endangered, or even critically endangered. Compare this with 1980 when only one species, the plankton-feeding basking shark, was thought to be endangered. These are stark statistics, and they indicate that the future for the ocean’s top predators is fast deteriorating

A worker attends a bowl of shark fins drying on a rooftop, surrounding by other shark products.

Demand for shark fins in traditional cuisines throughout Asia has soared in recent decades.EPA/Alex Hofford

Nose dive

To arrive at the first global perspective on oceanic shark and ray population trends, the study synthesised a huge amount of data. The researchers calculated two separate indicators of biodiversity, using indexes established by the Convention on Biological Diversity to track progress towards international targets. They used state-of-the-art modelling to estimate trends in the relative abundance of species. One of the indicators combined assessments of 31 species by the IUCN Red List over a 38-year period.

The results revealed huge declines in the abundance of sharks in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. Once abundant species such as the oceanic whitetip shark have declined by 75% globally in just the past half-century, while populations of the endangered shortfin mako shark – valued for its meat and fins – have shrunk by about 40%. Manta ray populations have suffered even greater losses.

The study attributes these declines to overfishing. The researchers documented a greater than twofold increase in fishing pressure from longline fisheries for instance, which use lines stretching 100km and bearing 1,200 baited hooks. These lines are deployed each day by any one of the thousands of longlining vessels worldwide, snaring sharks in the open ocean either intentionally or as bycatch while targeting other marine life.

A slab with several dead sharks lying on it.

Shortfin mako sharks are one of the world’s fastest animals, but often fall foul of fishing gear.José Antonio Gil MartínezCC BY

The study also found increases in the proportion of sharks that are being fished beyond sustainable levels. But it’s particularly worrying that unreported catches weren’t included in the study’s analyses. This means the number of sharks and rays killed by fishing boats is likely to be an underestimate and the actual declines of these species may be even worse. Unlike most species of bony fish, sharks and rays produce few offspring and grow slowly. The rate at which they reproduce is clearly no match for current levels of industrialised fishing.

Regulating the high seas

Immediate and far-reaching action is needed to rebuild these populations. It’s clear that the rate of overfishing has outstripped the implementation of fisheries management measures and trade regulations. Since most oceanic sharks and rays are caught in the high seas – areas beyond national jurisdictions – agreements between fishing nations within management organisations are needed for conservation measures to work.

But, as this new study details, fishery limits imposed by management organisations of regional tuna fisheries – bodies tasked with managing oceanic sharks and ray populations – have been largely inadequate in following scientific advice. As recently as November 2020, the EU and US blocked a catch retention ban for North Atlantic shortfin mako sharks, despite scientific evidence clearly indicating that it was the first rung on a ladder to restoring this population of an endangered species.

Several hooks gathered together in a line.

Longline fishing deploys several hooks at once. Lunghammer/Shutterstock

To begin the recovery of oceanic shark and ray populations, strict measures to prohibit landings of these species and to minimise their bycatch in other fisheries are needed immediately. This must be coupled with strict enforcement. Reducing the number of sharks and rays caught accidentally will be crucial but challenging, especially for longline fishing, which is not very selective and inadvertently catches lots of different species. This currently means that bans on intentional fishing are unlikely to be effective on their own. One solution would include modifying fishing gear and improving how fishers release sharks and rays after capture, to give them a better chance of survival.

An equally important measure, noted in the current study, would be banning fishing fleets from hotspots of oceanic sharks and rays. Research published in 2019 highlighted where these areas in the global ocean overlap with fishing vessels most. Led by the UN, negotiations are underway for a high seas treaty which would create no-take marine reserves to protect threatened species in the open ocean. This new study should urge the international community to take such action while there’s still time.

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Role of NGOs in Promoting Neo-Colonialism

February 19th, 2021 by Syed Ehtisham

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There are literally thousands of NGOs, the better known being Oxfam, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International .

NGOs are primarily a modern phenomenon, though The World Alliance of YMCAs was founded in 1855, and the International Committee for the Red Cross came into being in 1863.  1

According to one estimate, some 40,000 now qualify as international NGOs (with programs and affiliates in a number of countries) – up from less than 400 a century ago.  2

Political scientists often refer to NGOs as “pressure groups” or “lobby groups,” .

In the field of international relations, scholars now speak of NGOs as “Non-state Actors” (as are Transnational corporations). In recent years, they have successfully promoted new environmental agreements, greatly strengthened Women’s rights, and won important arms control and disarmament measures. NGO work on the environment led to the adoption of the Montreal Protocol on Substances Depleting the Ozone Layer in 1987.

The International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, an NGO coalition, was prime mover in the Mine Ban Treaty of 1997. The Coalition for an International Criminal Court was indispensable to the adoption of the 1998 Treaty of Rome and another NGO mobilization forced governments to abandon secret negotiations for the Multilateral Agreement on Investments in 1998.

In the late 1990’s, the NGO Working Group on the Security Council emerged as an important interlocutor of the UN’s most powerful body, while the Jubilee 2000 Campaign changed thinking and policy on poor countries’ debt. At the same time, an increasingly influential international NGO campaign demanded more just economic policies from the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.  3

But big powers, specially the US, ignore all such agreement

Governments finance NGOs and use them to promote their interest, often illegal such as promotion of unrest and overthrow of legitimate governments (discussed below).

NGOs are structurally undemocratic and unaccountable. The officials are not elected. On paper, they are accountable to boards of directors etc, but so are the chiefs of the Wall Street Corporations,  banks membership and international finance bodies.

Financing

In the 1990’s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees expressed alarm that governments were increasingly channeling funds for humanitarian assistance to their own national NGOs rather than to multilateral agencies. 4.

NGOs sell products or services, just like a private company. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is an extreme example of this tendency. In 1996 it had $3.8 billion in gross revenue for supplemental health insurance and nine mutual funds with $13.7 billion in assets. 5.

Diplomatic Role

The rights of NGOs to a voice at the UN are guaranteed by Article 71 of the UN Charter and affirmed by many subsequent decisions. By 2000, about 2,500 NGOs had consultative status with the UN.  5

1400 NGOS were directly involved in The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 .The Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995 in Beijing had 2,600 NGOs in  the intergovernmental negotiations.  6

Third World Network, based in Malaysia, is an especially active example that addresses a very broad range of policy issues. The  Philippine-based Freedom from Debt Coalition and the German NGO Network on Environment and Development, regional networks like ARENA, the Asian Regional Exchange for New Initiatives, or the Continental Network of Indigenous Women of the Americas, or AFRODAD, the African Debt and Development Network are others.

In India, the Consumer and Trust Society and the Center for Science and Environment are the most prominent. 7.

Whether a case was established against Osama bin Laden is in the realm of law is besides the point. But his whereabouts were found through an NGO. 8.

The Arab and other Springs:

In December 2012, Egyptian prosecutors and police raided the offices of several groups, which called themselves “pro-democracy” NGOs. Four of them were based in the US government agencies. Forty three people, among them 16 U.S. citizens, were accused of not only failing to register with the government but also of financing the April 6, protest movement with illicit funds.

The U.S. sent a high-level delegation to Cairo and threatened to cut off up to $1.3 billion in military and $250 million in economic aid if the U.S. citizens were tried. One of them was Sam LaHood, the son of Obama’s Transportation Secretary. Travel restrictions were placed on seven, including Sam.  All but the seven fled the country on the first day of the case. They did not even deign to attend the court.

The ban on travel was lifted soon enough, and a US military plane took off with them. A day after the ban was lifted a military plane removed the remaining seven U.S. citizens. The U.S. gave the Egyptian courts a sop of $5 million in bail. 8.

The international community, instead of taking the US and its agents to task, accused the Egyptian military of paranoia of foreign interference so as to deflect attention from the slow pace of political and democratic reform. The Western News Media kept mum. 9.

The forty three defendants worked for four US based organizations; Freedom House; the National Democratic Institute (NDI); the International Republican Institute (IRI); the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Only one the ICFJ does not receive the majority of its funding either directly or indirectly from a government. 10.

Madeline Albright, a democrat and former US Secretary of State is the chairperson of NDI, and the IRI is chaired by Senator John McCain, former Republican presidential candidate.

The NDI and IRI, the Center for International Private Enterprise, which represents the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO, make up the four “core institutions” of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

NED receives more than 90 percent of its annual budget from the U.S. government. Freedom House regularly receives the majority of its funding from the NED. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, associated with the Christian Democratic Union, receives over 90 percent of its funding from the German government. 11.

None of the five can thus be defined as NGOs.

Freedom House favors Free Markets and U.S. foreign policy interests.  It claimed that in 2011, Venezuelans had the same level of political rights as Iraqis!!! 12

American-educated millionaire Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada initiated a sweeping privatization program. Bolivians protested. Gonzalo was removed from power. Bolivia’s status was reduced from ‘Free’ to ‘Partially Free’.

Even though it has the first government to recognize the rights of its indigenous majority, Bolivia is still rated by as only partially free and rated lower than Botswana where one party (the BDP) has been in power since the first elections were held there in 1965.  13.

A 1996 Financial Times article revealed that Freedom House was one of several organizations selected by the US State Department to receive funding for “clandestine activities” in Iran. Training and funding was provided to groups seeking regime change. 14.

The most egregious of the five organizations by far, are the IRI and the NDI. They receive NED grants “For work abroad to foster political parties, electoral processes and institutions, Free Trade Unions, and Free Markets and business organizations.” On March 6, a protest march was organized by American Civil Society Organizations at the NED offices in Washington, demanding: “No Attacks On Democracy Anywhere! Close The NED.” Union members and labor activists have protested and campaigned for years, demanding that the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center break all ties to the NED. 15.

Revolving Doors:

Chaired by Richard Gephardt—former Democratic Representative, now CEO of his own corporate consultancy and lobbying firm—NED’s board of directors consists of John A. Bohn, a former high level international banker and former president and CEO of Moody’s Investors Service, now Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, and executive chair of an internet-based trading exchange for petrochemicals.

Kenneth Duberstein, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Reagan, now chair and CEO of his own corporate lobbying firm. Martin Frost is a former Congressperson who was involved in writing the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—also known as the Citigroup Relief Act, and William Galston, former student of Leo Strauss, is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran.

The Board also contains four of the founding members of ultra-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century: Francis Fukyama (author of The End of History); Will Marshall (founder of the New Democrats, an organization that aimed to move Democratic Party policies to the right); former Congressperson Vin Weber (who retired in 1992 as a result of the House Banking Scandal and is now managing partner of a corporate lobbying firm); and Zalmay Khalilzad who, under George Bush Jr., served as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the UN. He is now president and CEO of his own international corporate advisory firm, which advises clients mainly in the energy, construction, education, and infrastructure sectors—wishing to do business in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. 16.

The NED was founded in 1983, when Washington was embroiled in numerous controversies relating to covert military operations and the training and funding of paramilitaries and death squads in Central and South America. It was formed to create an open and legal avenue for the U.S. government to channel funds to opposition groups against unfavorable regimes around the world, thus removing the political stigma associated with covert CIA funding. In a 1991 Washington Post article, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups,” Allen Weinstein (who helped draft the legislation that established the NED) declared: “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly twenty five years ago by the CIA.” 17.

In 1996, the Heritage Foundation published an article in defense of continued congressional funding, “The NED is a valuable weapon in the international war of ideas. It advances American national interests by promoting the development of stable democracies friendly to the U.S. in strategically important parts of the world. The U.S. cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy…. Although the Cold War has ended, the global war of ideas continues to rage.” 18

In addition to running campaigns of regime destabilization in states, such as Cuba and China, the NED has been repeatedly involved in influencing elections and overthrowing governments in left-leaning and anti-U.S. democratic regimes around the world. This is achieved by providing funding and/or training and strategic advice to opposition groups, political parties, journalists, and media outlets. As Barbara Conry of the Cato Institute wrote, “Through the Endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements.” 19.

From 1986 to 1988, the NED funded the right-wing political opposition to Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Oscar Arias, in democratic Costa Rica because he was outspokenly critical of Reagan’s violent policies in Central America. During the 1980’s, the NED was active in “defending democracy” in France, due to the rise in communist influence perceived as occurring under the elected socialist government of Francois Mitterrand. In 1990, the NED provided funding and support to right-wing groups in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were removed from power in an election described by Professor William I. Robinson as an event in which “Massive foreign interference completely distorted an endogenous political process and undermined the ability of the elections to be a free choice.”  20

In the late 1990’s, the NED provided funding and support to the U.S. backed right-wing opposition against the election campaign of progressive former president, and first democratically elected leader of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When a coup removed Aristide from power for the second time in 2004, it was revealed that the NED had provided funding and strategic advice to the principal organizations involved in his ousting.

The involvement of the NED in the 2002 attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has been well researched and documented. Immediately after the coup, however, then president of the IRI, George Folsom, revealed the Institute’s role in the endeavor when he sent out a press release celebrating Chavez’s ousting: “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…” 21.

The IRI was also implicated in the 2009 Honduran coup amid claims that the organization had supported the ousting of democratically elected leader Manuel Zelaya because of his support of the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas (an anti-free trade pact including Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba) and his refusal to privatize telecommunications. According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, AT&T provided significant funding to both the IRI and Senator John McCain (its chair) in order to target Latin American states that refuse to privatize their telecommunications industry. 22.

A number of NED-backed activists have taken center stage in Arab Spring struggles and U.S. supported candidates have risen to occupy leading positions in newly established transitional governments. The most glaring example of this was Libya’s transitional prime minister, Dr. Abdurrahim El-Keib, who holds dual U.S./Libyan citizenship and is former chair of the Petroleum Institute sponsored by British Petroleum, Shell, Total, and the Japan Oil Development Company. He handed the job of running Libya’s oil and gas supply to a technocrat and according to the Guardian, has passed over Islamists expected to make the cabinet in order “To please Western backers.” Tawakkul Karman, also of Yemen, who became the youngest ever recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, was leader of a NED grantee organization, “Women Journalists without Chains.” 23.

In 2009, sixteen young Egyptian activists completed a two-month Freedom House New Generation Fellowship in Washington. The activists received training in advocacy and met with U.S. government officials, members of the Congress, media outlets, and think tanks. As far back as 2008, members of the April 6th Movement attended the inaugural summit of the Association of Youth Movements (AYM) in New York, where they networked with other movements, attended workshops on the use of new and social media and learned about technical upgrades, such as consistently alternating computer simcards, which help to evade state internet surveillance. AYM is sponsored by Pepsi, YouTube, and MTV. Among the luminaries who participated in the 2008 Summit, which focused on training activists in the use of Facebook and Twitter, were James Glassman of the State Department, Sherif Mansour of Freedom House, National Security Advisor Shaarik Zafar, and Larry Diamond of the NED. 24.

Yet in September 2009, the U.S. authorities arrested Elliot Madison (a U.S. citizen and full-time social worker) for using Twitter to disseminate information about police movements to G20 Summit street protesters in Pittsburgh. Madison, apparently in violation of a loosely-defined federal anti-rioting law, was accused of “Criminal use of a communication facility,” “Possessing instruments of crime,” and “Hindering apprehension.”  25.

In June 2009, the State Department had requested that Twitter delay a planned upgrade so that Iranian protesters’ tweets would not be interrupted. Twitter subsequently stated in a blog post that it had delayed the upgrade because of its role as an “Important communication tool in Iran.” 26

A leaked 2008 cable from the Cairo U.S. Embassy entitled, “April 6 activist on his U.S. visit and regime change in Egypt,” showed that the U.S. was in dialogue with an April 6 youth activist about his attendance at the AYM Summit.

The dialogue proves that the funding of any youth organization associated with the April 6th movement by a U.S. organization since December 2008 had been done with Washington and the U.S. embassy in Cairo being fully aware that the movement’s aim was regime change in Egypt.
In April 2011, the New York Times published an article entitled “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings” in which it openly stated that, “A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6th Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the IRI, the NDI, and Freedom House.” 27.

According to the NED’s 2009 Annual Report, $1,419,426 worth of grants was doled out to civil society organizations in Egypt that year. In 2010, the year preceding the January–February 2011 revolution, this funding increased to $2,497,457. Nearly half of this sum, $1,146,903, was allocated to the Center for International Private Enterprise for activities such as conducting workshops “To promote corporate citizenship” and engaging civil society organizations “To participate in the democratic process by strengthening their capacity to advo­cate for Free Market legislative reform on behalf of their members.” Freedom House also received $89,000 to “Strengthen cooperation among a network of local activists and bloggers.” 28.

According to the same report, various youth organizations and youth orientated projects received a total of $370,954 for activities, such as expanding the use of new media and social advertising campaigns among young activists, training and providing ongoing support ” 29

After the revolution, the NDI and IRI massively expanded their operations in Egypt, opening five new offices between them and hiring large numbers of new staff.  According to Dawlat Eissa, a 27-year-old Egyptian-American and former IRI employee; the IRI used employees’ private bank accounts to channel money covertly from Washington, and an IRI accountant stated that directors used their personal credit cards for expenses. Sam LaHood reportedly told employees to collect all of the organization’s work related paperwork for scanning and shipping to the U.S.

It is clear that NDI, IRI and Freedom House were training and funding the youth movement in Egypt while the U.S. government and its Cairo Embassy were fully aware that the youth movement aimed to remove Mubarak from power. If China or Cuba were funding similar opposition groups in the U.S., those involved would be facing far harsher sentences than the forty three who stood now trial in Egypt. Yet they continue to hide behind the tattered guise of being NGO employees.

Ukraine:

The civil war in the country is a product of the strategy of the US and EU to install a pliant regime which would bring Ukraine into the European Common Market and NATO as a subordinate client state. Negotiations between the EU and the Ukraine government proceeded slowly. They eventually faltered because of the onerous conditions demanded by the EU and the more favorable economic concessions and subsidies offered by Russia. Having failed to negotiate the annexation of the Ukraine to the EU, and not willing to await scheduled constitutional elections, the NATO powers activated their well-financed and organized NGOs, client political leaders and armed paramilitary groups to violently overthrow the elected government. The violent putsch succeeded and a US-appointed civilian-military junta took power. 30.

Human Rights Watch as the example of Hypocrisy:

The term NGO is used deliberately to create an illusion of innocent philanthropic activity.

Human Rights Watch characterizes itself as “one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.” However, HRW’s close ties to the U.S. government call into question its independence. HRW’s Washington advocacy director, Tom Malinowski, previously served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton and as a speechwriter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In 2013, he left HRW after being nominated as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor under John Kerry. 31.

In her HRW.org biography, Board of Directors’ Vice Chair Susan Manilow describes herself as “A longtime friend to Bill Clinton” who is “Highly involved” in his political party, and “Has hosted dozens of events” for the Democratic National Committee. 32.

Malinowski contended in 2009 that “Under limited circumstances” there was “A legitimate place” for CIA renditions, the illegal practice of kidnapping and transferring terrorism suspects around the planet”. 33.

In a 2012 letter to President Chávez, HRW criticized the country’s candidacy for the UN Human Rights Council, alleging that Venezuela had fallen “Far short of acceptable standards” and questioning its “Ability to serve as a credible voice on human rights.” But at no point has U.S. membership in the same council merited censure from HRW, despite Washington’s secret, global assassination program, its preservation of renditions , and its illegal detention of individuals at Guantánamo Bay. 34.

In February 2013, HRW described as “Unlawful” Syria’s use of missiles in its civil war. But HRW remained silent on the clear violation of international law constituted by the U.S. threat of missile strikes on Syria in August or the Drone strikes killing women and children in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. 35

Syed Ehtisham is a retired surgeon who has worked in various HR and Socialist groups in the USA. He has published two books ,:”A Medical Doctor Examines Life on Three Continents,” and ,”God, Government and Globalization”, and is working on a third, “An Analysis of the Sources and Derivation of Religions”.

Notes:

  1. www.ifrc.org/en/who- we-r/history/
  2. Wiki.answers.com/Q/ How_many_international_ngos_ are_there_word_wide?#slide=2
  3. En.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Montreal_Protocolenwikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_ Treaty
  4. www.global policy.org/component/content/ article/177/31605.html
  5. waysandmeans.house. gov/uploadedfiles/aarp_charts. pdf
  6. www.un.org/ womenwatch/daw/beijing
  7. Bhagwati , Jagdish N, “In Defense pf Globalization,” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). p 37
  8. Sofrep.com/31520/ osama-bin-ladens-real-mystery- hunters/
  9. www.cnn.com/2012/02/ 05/world/africa/egypt-ngos/ index.html
  10. Ibid
  11. Ibid
  12. Ibid
  13. www.globalpolicy.org/ ngos/introduction/51688-qngoq- the-guise-of-innocence.html
  14. Ibid
  15. www.thirdworldtraveler. com/NED/AFL_cut_Ties_NED.html
  16. www. pressreleasetemplates.net/ preview/Board_Of_Directors_ Press_Release
  17. Colorrevolutionsandgeopl olitics.blogspot.com/2011/05/ from-archives-innocence- abroad-new.html
  18. www.newleftproject.org/ index.php/site/article_ comments/ngo_the_guise_of_ innocence
  19. www.zoominfo.com/p/ Barbara-Conry/44047770
  20. www.global research.ca/ngo-the-guise-of- innocence/30191
  21. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 2002_Venezuelan_coup_d%27etat_ attempt
  22. www.chavezcode.com/2009/ 07/role-of-international- republican.html
  23. www.ned.org/for- reporters/ned-congratulates- tawakkul-karman-on-nobel- peace-prize
  24. www.sott.net/article/ 223894-Googles-Revolution- Factory-Alliance-of-Youth- Movements-Colr-Revolutions-2-0
  25. En.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 2009_G-20_Pittsburgh_summit
  26. Ac360.blogs.cnn.com/ 2009/06/16/state-department- to-twitter-keep-iranian- tweets-coming/
  27. www.nytimes.com/2011/04/ 15/world/15aid.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0
  28. www.ned.org/ publications/annual-reports/ 2009-annual-report
  29. Ibid
  30. www.swp-berlin.org/ fileadmin/contents/products/ fachpublikationen/KS_Stewart_ final-Ukraine_NGOs.pdf
  31. Angryarab.blogspot.com/ 2014/05/human-rights-watch_13. html
  32. Cognitiveliberty.net/ 2014/the-hypocrisy-of-human- rights-watch
  33. www.alternet.org/world/ nobel-peace-laureates-human- rights-watch-close-your- revolving-door-us-government
  34. www.alternet.org/world/ nobel-peace-laureates-human- rights-watch
  35. www.nbcnews.com/news/ other/white-house-admits- killing-civilians-drone- strikes-denies-breaking-law- f8C11435816.

 

 

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Texas’s freeze entered a sixth day on Thursday. At least 31 people have died as of Wednesday afternoon as a result of the severe weather in Texas. But some media reports said, days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people dead in the U.S. The snow made many roads impassable, disrupted coronavirus vaccine distribution and blanketed nearly three-quarters of the continental U.S. And that number is expected to climb with no end to the Texas nightmare in sight.

Media reports from the U.S. said:

More than 3 million Texans were without power. But some media reports put the number to more than 4 millions. Some have gone four days without electricity after a rare winter storm slammed the U.S. state and created bitterly cold and unlivable conditions. All of the water pipes in many homes are frozen.

Many Texans are fearful for what the near future looks like, some elected officials appear to care less.

Twitter blew up Thursday morning with accusations that Republican Sen. Ted Cuz and his family flew to Cancun to stay at a resort, and Associated Press later confirmed the news.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Texans don’t know when they will get their lights back on or access to running water.

Additionally, on social media, viral videos show apartment complex pools frozen over, water rushing into homes from burst pipes, long lines for grocery stores and cars idling in the streets, unable to get to their destinations.

Power grid operators in Texas say they cannot predict when the outages might end, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the agency that oversees the grid.

In an effort to avoid a total blackout, ERCOT is instructing utility companies to cut power to customers.

“We needed to step in and make sure that we were not going to end up with Texas in a blackout, which could keep folks without power — not just some people without power but everyone in our region without power — for much, much longer than we believe this event is going to last, as long and as difficult as this event is right now,” ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said.

Local and federal leaders have left many Texans confused and frustrated with their reluctance to take responsibility for the crisis.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, blamed ERCOT on Tuesday, saying the utility “has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours.”

He then appeared on cable news that evening to argue that the fiasco is due to green energy, specifically frozen wind turbines.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said to Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

The power grid in Texas is unique in that it does not cross state lines and therefore is not under the oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In the early 2000s, Republican leaders in the state pushed to deregulate the state’s power market and allow power companies to determine when and how to build and maintain power plants. Now this setup and its flaws are coming back to haunt the state.

The mayor of the west Texas town of Colorado City recently resigned from backlash after saying it was not the government’s responsibility to help those suffering.

“No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this!” Tim Boyd wrote on Facebook, based on screenshots from local CBS affiliate KTAB. “Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!”

For residents going through the blackouts and below freezing temperatures in their homes, the pointing of fingers from elected officials is doing nothing for them in their most desperate time of need.

Thomas Black, 29, from Dallas, posted images of the devastation on his Twitter page that have now gone viral. In one photo he took in the hallway of his apartment complex, 4-foot icicles hang from an indoor ceiling fan.

“Texans just aren’t used to this sort of thing, so of course there’s going to be panic just like there was at the beginning of COVID,” Black told. “If you go to the grocery store right now, the entire meat section is gone, the whole entire produce section has gone. I’m sure a lot of the nonperishables are gone at this point, and I’m sure the toilet paper’s gone again.”

“The leadership has failed us on all fronts,” he added. “It certainly is worrisome.”

“We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis and it’s going to take people stepping up from our leadership team to really make a difference in what the future looks like for us,” he said.

Erica Gittens of San Marcus has been couch surfing since Sunday, when water came rushing into her apartment while she was talking to her roommate.

“We first thought like, maybe it was the air conditioning starting up,” Gittens said. “And then it’s like, ‘psych, no it’s waterfall.’ Our ceiling started to cave in on us.”

Gittens, who has apartment insurance, says she is unable to get the immediate help she needs because her apartment complex’s corporate office also flooded and the insurance company cannot send or receive the documents that they need. She started a GoFundMe campaign to help stay afloat in the meantime and said, “It’s going to be weeks” before anything begins to work itself out. For now, she has to depend on friends and strangers.

Gittens says that despite her unfortunate situation, there are others who are doing much worse.

“People may have machines that they have to be hooked up to at night,” she said. “I’m thinking about my residents and how some places may not even be able to have generators due to the freezing. You never know what may happen.”

“This isn’t something that we’re used to. … We just need to pray for Texas as a whole,” she said.

Water Crisis Deepens Misery

Amid widespread power losses, millions of Texans were also advised to boil their water for safety.

The power crisis spurred by the massive winter storm hobbling Texas has also become a water crisis, with hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses dealing with burst pipes or ordered to boil water, as water utilities suffer from frozen wells and treatment plants run on backup power.

In Harris County, which includes Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, more than one million people have been affected by local water systems either that have issued boil-water notices or that cannot deliver water at all, said Brian Murray, a spokesperson for the county emergency management agency.

Residents in the Texas capital, Austin, were also told to boil water because of a power failure at the city’s largest water-treatment facility.

The city of Kyle, south of Austin, asked residents on Wednesday to suspend their water use until further notice because of a shortage.

“Water should only be used to sustain life at this point,” officials of the city of 48,000 said in an advisory. “We are close to running out of water supply in Kyle.”

At St. David’s South Austin Medical Center, officials were trying Wednesday night to fix a heating system that was failing because of low water pressure. They were forced to seek portable toilets and distribute bottles of water to patients and employees so they could wash their hands.

In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, a Shell gas station owner, said that his father, Ram Singh, 80, was turned away from regularly scheduled dialysis treatments Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic was having water issues.

“It’s a dangerous situation,” the younger Mr. Singh said.

His other problems Thursday were indicative of the broader troubles still facing Texas. He said he had low water pressure at his house. His gas station had no fuel to sell and was running out of food at its convenience store because deliveries hadn’t arrived.

Thursday’s winter storm brought freezing rain, snow and temperatures that were “much below average,” a gut punch for Texans who have resorted to stoves, barbecue grills, gasoline generators and their vehicles to keep themselves warm.

There were also reasons for hope on Thursday morning. The state had just under 500,000 customers without power, down from millions in recent days.

Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, which had been forced to shut down on Wednesday because of water supply issues, announced early Thursday morning that it had restored water in a limited capacity, and that flights would resume.

Of the 12.5 million utility customers in the state, 490,456 remained without power Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, which records and aggregates live power outage data from utilities.

Feed fireplaces

Even fireplaces have to be fed. To keep two parents, two daughters and two grandmothers from freezing, one person had to spend hours in the afternoon scouring the neighborhood for fallen trees and rotten wood.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is sending generators and other supplies to Texas to help the state cope with power outages after a severe winter storm.

FEMA is also supplying Texas with water, meal and blankets.

Record-low temperatures in Texas and elsewhere have strained power grids and forced millions to reconsider how to stay warm. Now, days after that arctic blast chilled parts of the Central and Southern parts of the U.S., a new problem is emerging: finding water.

For water, some in Texas have turned to a once-unthinkable source: snow.

From Mississippi to New York

The winter storm that swept through Texas has moved to the northeast, causing power outages and slick driving conditions from Mississippi to New York.

Nearly 200,000 Mississippi customers were without power as of Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, and tens of thousands more were without electricity in Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

The Carolinas are also bracing for power outages from wind and fallen trees.

The utility company Duke Energy predicted a million customers in the Carolinas could lose power for several days from the storm.

Gov. Roy Cooper issued a state of emergency Wednesday and encouraged people to plan ahead.

“People need to be ready to stay home and be prepared to lose power for a while, especially in the northern, western and Piedmont counties,” he said in a statement.

Winter storm warnings and advisories are in place for parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut through Friday night, and heavy snow was already falling in New York City Thursday morning. The city is expected to see several inches of snow.

Weather Delays Opening of 2 N.Y.C. Vaccine Sites

New York mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said city vaccine sites would stay open through Thursday’s snowfall, but the planned opening of two new distribution sites would be pushed back due to nationwide shipping delays.

However, wind power was not chiefly to blame for the Texas blackouts. The main problem was frigid temperatures that stalled natural gas production, which is responsible for the majority of Texas’ power supply.

Science suggests the effects of a warming world have something to do with these sudden bursts of Arctic cold, as well. The cold air at the top of the world, the polar vortex, is usually held in place by the circulating jet stream. The Northern Hemisphere’s warming appears to be weakening the jet stream, and when sudden blasts of heat in the stratosphere punch into the vortex, that Arctic air can spill down into the middle latitudes.

There is also fascinating research that links a warming Arctic to increased frequency of the broad range of extreme winter weather in parts of the United States. It is known as “warm-Arctic/cold-continents pattern,” a phenomenon that’s still being studied.

Cold and Hungry

James F. McIngvale, a Houston furniture store owner known as “Mattress Mack,” saw his fellow Texans cold and hungry, with little shelter from the winter storm that has ravaged the state and knocked out power to millions.

Mr. McIngvale, 70, opened his doors, and the people came. Since Tuesday, thousands have made the trip to Mr. McIngvale’s Gallery Furniture, spending a few hours on armchairs and couches to warm up, or sleeping on their choice of beds intended. As many as 500 people have chosen to spend the night for the past two nights, he said.

At this impromptu shelter, those in need can eat donated meals or food paid for by Mr. McIngvale.

Texans are also struggling with a lack of clean drinking water.

Rosie May Williams, 48, who said she is homeless, tried to take shelter at a convention center earlier this week but was told it was over capacity. She was transported by bus to the furniture store, and has slept for the past two nights on a recliner, eating smothered chicken for dinner on one of those nights.

Come Up with Own Plans to Survive

The former mayor of Colorado City in Texas said that residents who are dealing with electricity and water problems because of the winter storm need to “sink or swim” and to come up with their own plans on how to survive, local media stations reported.

“If you don’t have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe,” the former mayor, Tim Boyd, wrote in a post on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

“The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” he wrote.

The post was later deleted but KTXS and local media stations and newspapers republished it.

The posts struck a nerve in a state where hundreds of thousands of people have been without power and water in freezing temperatures for days because of the winter storm.

An Old Lady Crossed 6 Miles of Snow

Last weekend was one of Seattle’s snowiest on record. But Frances H. Goldman had struggled for weeks to book a coronavirus vaccination, so when she got a Sunday appointment, she did not intend to miss it — even if it meant braving the elements alone.

It was too snowy to drive, so Ms. Goldman, 90, ended up walking a total of six miles through the snow to get the vaccine.

It was a quiet walk, Ms. Goldman said. People were scarce. She caught glimpses of Lake Washington through falling snow. It would have been more difficult, she said, had she not gotten a bad hip replaced last year.

At the hospital, about three miles and an hour from home, she got the jab. Then she bundled up again and walked back the way she had come.

It was an extraordinary effort — but that was not the extent of it. Ms. Goldman, who became eligible for a vaccine last month, had already tried everything she could think of to secure an appointment. She had made repeated phone calls and fruitless visits to the websites of local pharmacies, hospitals and government health departments. She enlisted a daughter in New York and a friend in Arizona to help her find an appointment.

Finally, on Friday, a visit to the Seattle Children’s Hospital website yielded results.

Into Mexico

As the largest energy producing, state in the U.S. Texas grappled with massive refining outages and oil and gas shut-ins that rippled beyond its borders into neighboring Mexico.

The deep freeze has shut in about one-fifth of the nation’s refining capacity and closed oil and natural gas production across the state.

The outages in Texas also affected power generation in Mexico, with exports of natural gas via pipeline dropping off by about 75% over the last week, according to preliminary Refinitiv Eikon data. Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s natural gas providers not to ship outside Texas and asked state regulators to enforce that ban, prompting reviews.

Abbott’s request to the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, set up a game of political football, according to a person familiar with the matter, between groups that do not have the authority to interfere with interstate commerce.

Texas exports gas via pipeline to Mexico and via ships carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from terminals in Freeport and Corpus Christi. It also supplies numerous regions of the country, including the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.

The ban prompted a response from officials in Mexico, as U.S. gas pipeline exports to Mexico fell to 3.8 billion cubic feet per day on Wednesday, down from an average over the past 30 days of 5.7 billion, according to data from Refinitiv.

The Mexican government called the top U.S. representative in Mexico on Wednesday to press for natural gas supplies.

Power cuts have hit millions in northern Mexico. Major automobile manufacturers shut operations temporarily because they did not have natural gas needed to operate plants.

About 4 million barrels of daily refining capacity has been shuttered and at least 1 million barrels per day of oil production is out.

The state accounts for roughly one-quarter of U.S. natural gas production. As of Feb. 10, Texas was producing about 7.9 billion cubic feet per day, but that fell to 1.9 billion on Wednesday, according to preliminary data from Refinitiv Eikon.

Several Texas ports, including Houston, Galveston and key LNG exporting sites at Freeport and Sabine Pass were closed due to weather, according to U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Jonathan Lally.

From Canada

The freeze has also sent Canadian natural gas exports to the United States soaring to levels last seen in 2010, said IHS Markit analyst Ian Archer.

Net Canadian exports have jumped above 7.5 bcf a day for the last couple of days and Archer estimated they were close to 8 bcf per day on Wednesday.

A family with one piece of firewood to keep warm

A grandmother and three children in Sugar Land, Texas, died in a house fire in an attempt to keep warm.

Massive power outages due to a winter storm has left Texans pleading for help on social media, including one father who revealed his family only had a single piece of firewood left.

Chester Jones shared on TikTok, under the account name @checkjones, on Tuesday a video of his four children asleep underneath blankets in one room of their home in Dallas, Texas.

In a caption, Mr Jones revealed that the power was off in their home and it was freezing temperatures outside. The family was left with just one piece of firewood to keep them warm through the night.

“Please help me,” he said to other TikTok users.

The video went viral online, giving users a glimpse into what Texans have suffered this week after a massive winter storm brought snow and freezing temperatures to the state.

Mr. Chester’s post about his family’s situation has garnered more than 6.6 million views, as of Thursday morning. The Red Cross commented on the TikTok, saying, “Please stay safe! If you need somewhere to go for warmth, visit www.redcross.org/shelter to find an open shelter or warming centre near you.”

He later updated his followers that several people who saw his TikTok reached out and donated more firewood for his family to use in order to stay warm.

Featured image courtesy of Counter Currents

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The Nord, Blue, Turk, Yamal and South Streams, as well as NordStream 2, are non-aligned pipelines that bring Russian gas to Europe while also cutting out U.S. interests. But along with NordStream 2, the pipeline that will also bring immense frustration to U.S. policymakers if it comes to fruition is the so-called “Islamic Pipeline” as it will bring Iranian gas to Europe via Iraq and Syria.

Although called the “Islamic Pipeline” in the West, it is often called the “Friendship Pipeline” between Iran, Iraq and Syria. This project seemed dead after Syria was devasted by the continuing war that even spilled over into Iraq. This is in addition to all the sanctions levelled against Iran. However, just recently, the Syrian Minister of Electricity, Ghassan al-Zamil, said that the project is not abandoned at all.

Zamil noted that the production of electricity has seriously decreased in Syria from 14 million cubic meters to 8.5 due to sanctions and the reduction of imported gas needed for power plants. Syria currently produces 2,700 megawatts of electricity. This is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of the country, which is why Zamil is resurrecting the thought-to-be dead pipeline project as it can help Syria reach 5,000 megawatts of electricity.

The first Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2011, just as the Syrian War was beginning. In 2012, just as the war was intensifying, the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian oil ministers signed a formal agreement to bring Iranian gas through their countries to reach Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast and, from there, onwards to Europe. From Washington’s perspective, the fact that Iranian energy could reach European markets is a major problem, especially as it hinders the proposed Qatar-Turkey Pipeline that has U.S support. The Qatar-Turkey pipeline was supposed to carry Qatari gas to Turkey via Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. Once in Turkey, it would then connect with the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) that carries Azerbaijani gas to Europe.

The Qatar-Turkey and Friendship pipelines would lessen Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. However, replacing Russian gas for Iranian is equally detrimental to Washington’s goal of pressuring these countries into submission. The decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to choose the Iranian pipeline instead of the Qatar-Turkey pipeline was a major reason in motivating Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. to back radical jihadist groups in the now war-torn country.

Washington cannot accept an Iran, that is encircled, sanctioned and in every way pressured, come out triumphant with a gas pipeline that can reach European markets. But on the other hand, every effort to topple Assad in Syria and the Mullahs in Iran, besides a direct invasion, has been tried, exhausted and failed, so there is not much else the U.S. can do to prevent the construction of the pipeline.

The re-emergence of plans to build the Friendship Pipeline might also explain why Greece became one of the first NATO and European Union members to restart its relations with Syria after withdrawing from the country in 2012, and why Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias visited Iraq last October, met the Iraqi Foreign Minister earlier this month in Athens, and plans to do a tour this year of Baghdad, Basra and Erbil – pending the COVID-19 and security situation. Although Turkey was seen as the gateway for Eastern energy to reach European markets, Greece has challenged this assertion by becoming an energy hub itself.

Syria is unlikely to accept a pipeline continuing into Turkey considering it is occupying large swathes of the country and is the main backer and funder of jihadist groups fighting against the national army. This means that inevitably the Friendship Pipeline must pass through Cyprus and Greece to reach European markets. This would be in addition to the East Med Pipeline that will connect Israeli and Cypriot gas to European markets via Greece, the TAP pipeline that transports Azerbaijani gas to Europe via Turkey, Greece, Albania and Italy, the proposed Tesla pipeline to connect the TurkStream with Central Europe via Greece, North Macedonia and Serbia, the Gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria and the proposed North Macedonia–Greece Interconnector Gas Pipeline.

If all the proposed pipelines come to fruition, Russian, Azerbaijani, Iranian, Cypriot and Israeli gas would all pass-through Greece before reaching their next destination, making the country a true energy hub. It must also be considered that Greece has vast gas deposits in the Eastern Mediterranean that it is yet to exploit. Turning Greece into an energy hub does not hinder on the Friendship Pipeline, but it would certainly consolidate its newfound status.

Zamil appears confident that the pipeline can be built despite Turkey occupying northern Syria and U.S.-backed separatists controlling areas east of the Euphrates River. On top of the occupation zones, ISIS still has a haunting presence in the Syrian dessert. However, the biggest problem facing the Friendship Pipeline is whether Europe is willing to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran and Syria. It is for this reason that the success of NordStream 2 could pave the way for the success of the Friendship Pipeline, and another major reason why Washington has been threatening Germany with sanctions for willingly building a pipeline to bring Russian gas to Europe.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity, by Michel Chossudovsky

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.


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Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War by Michel Chossudovsky

The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from previous wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.


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The Covid Deception Serves An Undeclared Agenda

February 19th, 2021 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

There is no scientific basis for the measures in place to deal with the alleged Covid Pandemic.  Among experts the support for these measures are largely limited to those with financial links with pharmaceutical corporations. Public health bureaucrats, such as Fauci at NIH, are also linked with pharmaceutical corporations.  Medical practioners take their guidance from approved authority, which means NIH, CDC, WHO, all compromised with conflicts of interest.  Conforming with these compromised institutions provides liability protection that relying on independent  expert advice does not.

One thousand five hundred experts from around the world have come together to challenge the Covid measures as “a global scientific fraud of unprecedented proportions.”  Here is their statement.

International Alert Message about COVID-19. United Health Professionals

By United Health Professionals, February 18, 2021 

Here are the Highlights

“Stay home, save lives” was a pure lie.

Remove the following illegal, non-scientific and non-sanitary measures : lockdown, mandatory face masks for healthy subjects, social distancing of one or two meters. 

The lockdown not only killed many people but also destroyed physical and mental health, economy, education and other aspects of life.

The natural history of the virus [the coronavirus] is not influenced by social measures [lockdown, face masks, closure of restaurants, curfew

When the state knows best and violates human rights, we are on a dangerous course.

Exclude your experts and advisers who have links or conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies :

Stop the vaccination campaigns and refuse the scam of the pseudo-health passport which is in reality a politico-commercial project

Is it safe to assume that compromised public health bureaucries with links to pharmaceutical corporations know more and are more trustworthy than independent experts?

What is the real agenda behind the Covid Deception?  Clearly it is not public health.

How was media orchestrated to deplatform and censor experts who challenge the obviously unsuccessful Covid measures?  

It should make you instantly suspicious when scientifically ignorant and totally compromised presstitutes dismiss dissenting independent experts as “conspiracy theorists.”

Why is no public discussion of the situation possible?  If the Covid measures could stand examination, there would be no censorship.

Clearly, an undeclared agenda is being shoved down our throats.  

In this article  entitled The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How to Mislead All Humanity. Using a “Test” To Lock Down Society

“It is time for everyone to come out of this negative trance, this collective hysteria, because famine, poverty, massive unemployment will kill, mow down many more people than SARS-CoV-2!”

Dr. Pascal Sacre explains why the PCR test results in a huge exaggeration in the number of Covid infections and thus serves the assertion of a pandemic and the creation of fear that causes people to accept tyrannical measures.

That independent scientifc experts have been forced out of public discussion should tell you how utterly corrupt are the governments of the world.  

See also: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/02/18/the-covid-pandemic-is-the-result-of-public-health-authorities-blocking-effective-treatment/

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The big money media that have been working for a year to stir up maximum fear of coronavirus have been taking the opposite tack regarding coronavirus vaccines. These experimental vaccines, which are not even vaccines under the normal understanding of what qualifies as a vaccine, rushed to the public without the regular testing, the big money media insists, are safe and should be taken by everyone.

Yet, even in this Pollyanna coverage of the experimental vaccines, occasionally the truth slips out.

On February 3, ABC News ran an article by Stephanie Widmer titled “Fact-check: No link between COVID-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.”

The main thrust of the article is that all the people who die after taking the experimental coronavirus vaccines would have died anyway: The vaccine never caused the death no matter how soon the death occurred after a person received a shot or how out of the blue and strange the circumstances of the death.

The deaths are all just a coincidence, the article suggests. Plenty of people — around 8,000 people according to the article — die each day in America, you know.

This seems like some fanciful thinking. And the thinking is the opposite of the thinking employed in attributing deaths to coronavirus. With coronavirus, the presumption generally employed by government and big money media in America is that coronavirus is the killer if a person who tested positive for coronavirus dies, no matter what other health problems he had and irrespective of coronavirus tests producing many false positive results.

Still, there is some value in this ABC News article for people not interested in reading yet another big money media article promoting everyone having an experimental vaccine injected into his arm. Around halfway through the article is a sentence that suggests something much less fanciful to explain the conclusion that the experimental coronavirus vaccines kill nobody. The article states. “Every time someone gets sick or dies shortly after getting a vaccine, government agencies investigate to ensure there’s no link.” Is this the truth slipping out?

Featured image courtesy of The Ron Paul Institute

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These horrible times, from lockdowns to lockdowns to coerced vaccinations, to social distancing, to masking and masking and more masking — when we all know, and science has proven it – that none of this helps – don’t they make you feel that we are living in a twilight zone? – There is some light of hope, but there is also an ever-obscurer darkness descending upon us. It’s unreal. Its surreal.

We are being shoved from lockdown – to slight improvement of our freedoms, only to be put back into the lockdown. It’s a strategy of manipulation, well thought out by scientists – and we the people, keep following and falling for it, falling in to the eventually bottomless pit.

It’s a carrot and stick approach.

It’s a twilight zone – between light of optimism – and darkness of deep despair.

We are being told that there are vaccines coming, then they are delayed, but then a batch is arriving – but it’s not enough, creating anxiety for not having enough vaccines to cure our fear, never mind covid, fear is being cured by the appearance of a vaccine. And since, following the manipulative strategy, it’s made strategically rare, and rarer, so people clamor for it, want it so badly, fight among each other, countries fight among each other, who will get it first?

The “vaccines” that are most used in the west, almost exclusively, are mRNA-type injections from Moderna (Bill Gates created and majority-owned pharma company), Pfizer, and to a lesser extent, from the Oxford-Swedish collaboration, the AstraZeneca. By the pharmas own admission, they are not vaccines, they are inoculations of gene-therapy agents that may affect the human genome.

We have no idea, since no experience, how they may affect our genome, our DNA, over time is available.

The death rate after injection is already higher by a multiple than it is for regular vaccines (injection of a weakened virus to trigger the human immune system). According to British statistics, it is about 40 times higher than with ordinary vaccines.
See: UK government  says over 240 people in Britain died shortly after receiving COVID jab

And this is only after two to three weeks after the first jab. We don’t know yet, what happens after the second jab – and after one or two or three years. In the few animal trials, all animals, mostly rats and ferrets, died. Then under a special emergency law passed in the US in October 2020, these pharma-injections were allowed on humans – on a trial basis.

Did you know, that you are a guinea pig for the vaccine companies?

And that whatever might go wrong, you have absolutely no recourse against the pharma companies? They are immune against any law suits.

Under the US 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (Public Law 99-660, no vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988. This is also referred to as the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act

Therefore, companies like Pfizer and Moderna have total immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines.

Our authorities, our governments backed by the official government contracted scientists and so-called scientific “Task Forces” lie to us, when they promise that there is a vaccine – which is NO vaccine. It is a crime to sell to ignorant public an unproven “medication”, called a vaccine, that already in its first trials in humans has disastrous side effects, including death.

Our western authorities and “officially selected” scientists are traitors – traitors on humanity. That is a crime. They should protect us. Instead, they expose us to life-threatening dangers.

Our governments know exactly what they are doing. They walk us from lockdown to lockdown, testing our tolerance level, our resilience vis-à-vis mass manipulation; how much it will it take until protests become an unstoppable revolution.

To avoid that from happening, there has been an entire science developed on how to dull and manipulate us into ever more repression. Just think a year back – did you have any clue then, that we would be fully repressed, shackled to the place where we live, to our rooms, apartments, shacks, where ever we have made our home, could hardly move, cannot shop where we want, no restaurants, no cinemas, theatres, concerts – no – nothing! No social life, because we are not allowed to congregate – it’s called “social distancing”, isolation – despair from isolation, leading to ever-more frequent suicide.

We have to wear masks. Science, not the “bought” and corrupted science, but wearing masks is at best controversial, and often providing proof that masks are medically more harmful than useful; not enough oxygen and inhaling your own CO2. This is most harmful to children and elderly people. Let alone the personal stigma, being made anonymous by a mask, not showing your smile, not being able to read your partners’ facial expressions – being segregated into a mask-wearing nobody.

See this site, listing different studies with various opinions and test results on mask wearing.

And you may as well include in this sinister group Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and co-author of the Great Reset, the sub-god of the super-rich elite, as he writes their rules so they may reign into a future which according to them, often repeated by Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, where life “will never be the same again.” Fearmongering intimidation.

They are those who benefit from our misery and stand behind this destruction of humanity. The world’s 7 richest billionaires (Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffet, Ellison, Ballmer, Musk) have increased their wealth from March to June 2020 from US$ 471 billion to US$ 690 billion, by more than 46%. (IPS study, see table below)

According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the Wealth of the 5 Richest Billionaires increased in two months (March 18 to June 18, 2020 by 20%.

In the meantime, or in parallel rather, jobs and livelihoods of hundreds of millions were destroyed, millions starve to death. The World Food Program estimates 270 million people are at the level of starvation. Below the July 2020 analysis of acute food insecurity.

 

Millions will die from famine. Others from despair and suicide. The current misery is just the tip of the iceberg. Worse, much worse, is still to come, if we, the people, do not break that cycle of unspeakable crime being committed in front of our eyes.

What is happening doesn’t even qualify as insane. It is a worldwide diabolical act of epic dimensions – never seen in recent history.

And all of this because of an invented, invisible enemy. A virus. Very clever. We are surrounded on a daily basis by millions of viruses. We live with them. Seldom do they harm us.

This corona virus, SARS-CoV-2, according to worldwide statistics has a mortality rate from 0.03% to 0.08%, similar to the common flu. See Antony Fauci et al, Cov id-19 – Navigating the Uncharted, NEJM

By the way, have you noticed, the common flu mysteriously disappeared in the 2020 / 2021 season? Why is that? – Perhaps because common flu patients are simply folded into the statistics of covid “cases” – and flu-deaths are covid deaths?

There are numerous reports from hospitals and medical doctors attesting to the fact that flu-cases and flu deaths – among others, have to be classified as covid-cases and covid deaths. There are many hospitals and medical doctors who are rewarded for declaring a hospital walk-in patient as a covid-patient, and even more so, later as a covid death.

We are indeed living in a very dystopian world, in a Twilight Zone. Once you see it – then you don’t; the disaster planned upon us. Does anyone still doubt that it is NOT a coincidence that all the 193 UN member countries were at once befallen by this mysterious virus, and that all at once had to “perform” their first lockdown? Namely mid-March 2020? ALL countries? On commando.

Doesn’t this look like there is another motive behind?

Is it a coincidence, that there is the 2010 Rockefeller Report  (focussing on the Lockstep scenario) predicting ten years later as the first step in their nefarious 4-phase plan, the “Lockstep Scenario” – which is exactly what we are experiencing now; the entire western civilization is walking in lockstep, as we are told.

Then there is the infamous Event 201 of 18 October 2019 in New York City , where the Johns Hopkins Center for Medicine, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WEF sponsored a computer simulation of a corona virus striking the world, a simulation causing 65 million deaths in 18 months and a total destruction of the world economy. Coincidentally, just a a couple of months before the first corona case, SARS-CoV-2, was discovered in China.

Really coincidence?

Just at the tail-end of the globe’s first Great Lockdown, in July 2020, Klaus Schwab, on behalf of the WEF, published the Great Reset, saying,

The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” –

All a coincidence. None of the 193 country leaders (sic – as they are mere puppets of a higher force), ever mentions these precedents and subsequent “coincidences”.

This current Twilight Zone, now I see it, now I don’t — “it” — the planned disaster that is still upon us under many different names, the pandemic, better called “plandemic”, is just the engine that drives a much heavier agenda – the elements of the Great Reset which are also the components of the so-called UN Agenda 2030.

Is it a coincidence that Bill Gates just acquired 242,000 acres (about 980 square kilometers) of farmland in 18 US States, and thus becomes the largest private farmland owner in the US? Why is Gates buying all the Farmland?

Screen Shot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifyzPe-59DI&feature=youtu.be

What will he do with this farmland?

Cultivate GMO-food? How and with what will this food be genetically modified?

Similarly, as his Moderna “vaccines” – from which we don’t know what long-term impact it will leave on unwitting humans that have been manipulated into “Ohhh god, gimme, gimme the vaccine!”

Bill Gates is an admitted eugenist and his key objective has been for the last many decades to drastically reduce the world population. He never made a secret out of it.

See, for example, his 2010 TedTalk in California, “Innovating to Zero”  (click screen to view)

 

 

Henry Kissinger said already five decades ago – “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

And here, by the way, is a succinct but clear explanation how manipulations work, in particular the one that makes us tremble for fear from an invisible enemy – and makes us accept almost total deprivation of our human and civil rights, makes us accept an inoculation which is sold as a vaccine – a “vaccine’ which by the admission of the pharmaceutical producers does not protect us from getting the virus and from passing it on to other people… yet, people are desperate to get “vaccinated” – not knowing whether it will kill them, or otherwise harm them. “Just vaccinate me, so I can sleep again”.

The twilight – “I don’t now and don’t care what will happen after the vaccination, or as a result of the vaccination – just inoculate me”. The fear: I see it, yet I don’t. And this is how professionally designed manipulation of people works. You will recognize at what stage of the progressive, manipulative scene we are right now – here

 One of the most abject lies and misguidance of this vaccination hoax, actually crime, is that for “goodness and kindness-sake’ of the governments, elderly people, the most “vulnerable” – and especially those living in old-age homes should have priority for the vaccine. Yes, these people are “vulnerable’ – but not more vulnerable than for catching the flu, but what is not said, is that they are extremely vulnerable when they get the covid-jab.

There are countless examples, how old-age home inhabitants have had no covid-infections, once they were vaccinated all tested positive and many died. Such cases occurred in Spain, in Germany in the UK – and similarly in a NY nursing home, and certainly in more places around the globe – not-reported, of course, by the corporate -pharma-paid mainstream media. In a UK Nursing Home, 24 Residents died 3 weeks after mRNA covid injection 

The not-so-hidden agenda behind this “elderly first” vaxx-priority, is brutal, but must be said: we, the elderly have lived enough, now we are a burden on the system, we cost, don’t contribute to society but bear a huge cost for an ever-older western civilization – so, “eliminate them” is a gentle term for genocide on the elderly. But they don’t know. They feel like the government is doing them a favor. See also death by Ventilator 

Its twilight all over again: “Our dear granny and grandpa, we love you and want to protect you, you should get the vaccine first.” – And the vaccine makes them sick and often kills them. “Ohhh, so sad, we didn’t know”.

The wiping out of several billion people is envisaged to make Mother Earth more manageable for a minute elite, with all those, who have duly obeyed the orders of the covid lockdowns and social destruction scenarios in some kind of a control and commando role, as a compensation for being good stooges and traitors of their people? 

This “twilight zone” may gradually and soon turn into a “onelight zone” , meaning a One World Order (OWO). If we, humanity cannot find the switch to turn the light on.

This disaster of epic proportions has been prepared by long hand – over the last 70 years or more, intensified with the introduction of neoliberal values in the 1980s and then the well-thought out 2010 Rockefeller Report, the eugenics agenda, the WEF’s 4th Industrial Revolution, the digitization of everything, including the human brain – and not least – the full digitization of money, so that the entire monetary control, control over our earned money and resources, control over whether we behave and eat, or don’t behave and don’t eat, is in the hands of the OWO elite. 

Those who are left after the implementation of the UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset, are the “Epsilon” people, the lowest cast in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. 

All this is happening while we are asleep. Does it take a miracle or literally an earthshaking natural event, to shake us awake, so that this entire house of bricks becomes a house of cards and collapses into rubble and ashes from where humanity will rise again?
——
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

 

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Selected Articles: Pandemic Revelations

February 18th, 2021 by Global Research News

International Alert Message about COVID-19. United Health Professionals

By United Health Professionals, February 18 2021

We bring to the attention of our readers, this important international statement by health professionals, medical doctors and scientists, which has been sent to the governments of thirty countries.

Video: The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Maya Nogradi, February 18 2021

We bring to the attention of our readers, the English version of this PANGEA TV program which was broadcast live in several regions of Italy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Takes ‘Anti-Vax’ Stance in Violation of His Own Platform’s New Policy …

By Project Veritas Action, February 18 2021

Project Veritas released a new video today provided by a brave Facebook insider exposing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s contradictory position when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines.

Why Politicians and Doctors Keep Ignoring the Medical Research on Vitamin D and Covid

By Jonathan Cook, February 18 2021

It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.

Pathologist: FDA ‘Misled the Public’ on Pfizer Vaccine Efficacy

By Children’s Health Defense, February 18 2021

Pfizer’s announcement in November 2020 that clinical trials showed its COVID-19 vaccine was “95% effective” prompted Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a Connecticut pathologist, to question Pfizer’s methodology.

Emails Reveal US Officials Joined With Agrochemical Giant Bayer to Stop Mexico’s Glyphosate Ban

By Kenny Stancil, February 18 2021

Agrochemical company Bayer, industry lobbyist CropLife America, and U.S. officials have been pressuring Mexico’s government to drop its proposed ban on the carcinogenic pesticide.

Call to Resist Tyranny: There is Only One Thing to Do: Say NO! The Legacy of Wolfgang Borchert

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, February 18 2021

In a manifesto written in 1947, “Then there is only one thing!”, the German regime critic and writer Wolfgang Borchert calls on fellow human beings to refuse to participate in future wars.

Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring ‘Disinformation’ to Silencing Truth

By John W. Whitehead, February 18 2021

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Pandemic Revelations

By David Cayley, February 18 2021

How could people even countenance a term like lockdown, with its overtones of imprisonment and total control, let along coming to think well of it and condemning and shaming its violators and critics?   My argument was that societies like Canada had, for a long time, been “practicing”.

 Struggling for Gender Equality in East Africa: Researches and Experiences

By Kester Kenn Klomegah, February 18 2021

For over two decades, the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW) has been fighting for gender equality, the empowerment of women and improvement of women’s rights in Kenya and broadly in East Africa.

5 Questions To Ask Your Friends Who Plan To Get The Covid Vaccine

By Kit Knightly, February 18 2021

If you know someone who is planning on getting vaccinated against Covid19, ask them these five questions. Make sure they understand exactly what they’re asking for.

Israel: Election of New ICC Prosecutor Raises Questions for War Crimes Probe

By Alex McDonald, February 18 2021

The election of Karim Khan, a British lawyer, as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has once more raised the spectre of “politicisation” in the organisation, as well as concerns about what the new appointment will mean for the probe into alleged Israeli and Hamas war crimes.

It will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that requires hard work and dedication.

Public education in the United States, if measured by results, has been producing graduates that are less competent in language skills and dramatically less well taught in the sciences and mathematics since 1964, when Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked. The decline in science and math skills has accelerated in the past decade according to rankings of American students compared to their peers overseas. A recent assessment, from 2015, placed the U.S. at 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD), the United States came in at 30th in math and 19th in science. Those poor results must be placed in a context of American taxpayers spending more money per student than any other country in the world, so the availability of resources is not necessarily a factor in most school districts.

Much of the decline is due to technical advances that level the playing field for teachers worldwide, but one must also consider changing perceptions of the role of education in a social context. In the United States in particular, political and cultural unrest certainly have been relevant factors. But all of that said and considered, the U.S. is now confronting a reassessment of values that will likely alter forever traditional education and will also make American students even more non-competitive with their foreign peers.

Many schools in the United States have ceased issuing grades that have any meaning, or they have dropped grading altogether, which means there is no way to judge progress or achievement. National test scores for evaluating possible college entry are on the way out almost everywhere as they are increasingly being condemned as “racist” in terms of how they assess learning based solely on the fact that blacks do less well on them than Asians and whites. This has all been part of an agenda that is being pushed that will search for and eliminate any taint of racism in the public space. It has also meant the destruction or removal of numerous historic monuments and an avoidance of any honest discussion of American history. San Francisco schools are, for example, notoriously spending more than $1 million to change the names of 44 schools that honor individuals who have been examined under the “racism and oppression” microscope and found wanting. They include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Paul Revere.

The new world order for education is built around the concept of “equity,” sometimes described as using the public education system to “ensure equitable outcomes.” But the concept itself is deeply flawed as the pursuit of equity means treating all American unequally to guarantee that everyone that comes out of the schools is the same and has learned the same things. That is, of course, ridiculous and it penalizes the good student to make sure that the bad student is somehow pushed through the system and winds up with the same piece of paper.

And the quality overall of public education will sharply decline. One might reasonably observe that imposition of a totalitarian style “equity” regime based on race will inevitably drive many of the academically better prepared students out of the system. Many of the better teachers will also move to the private academies that will spring up due to parental and student demand. Others will stop teaching altogether when confronted by political correctness at a level that prior to 2020 would have seemed unimaginable. The actual quality of education will suffer for everyone involved

All of that has been bad enough, but the clincher is that his transformation is taking place all over the United States with the encouragement of federal, state and local governments and once the new regime is established it will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that sometimes requires hard work and dedication. In many school districts, the actual process of change is also being put on the back of the taxpayer. In one Virginia county the local school board spent $422,500 on a consultant to apply so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) to a new program of instruction that will be mandatory for all employees and will serve as the framework for teaching the students. When schools eventually reopen, all kindergarteners, for example, will be taught “social justice” in a course designed by the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center and “diversity training” will be integrated in all other grade levels. Teaching reading, writing and arithmetic will take a back seat of “social justice.”

Critical Race Theory, which is being promoted as the framework for reorganizing the schools along lines of racial preferences, has been fairly criticized as it pretends to be an antidote to systemic racism but is itself racist in nature as it opposes a race neutral system that equally benefits everyone. It proposes that all of America’s governmental bodies and infrastructures are racist and supportive of “white supremacy” and must be deconstructed. It requires everything to be examined through a value system determined by identity politics and race and it views both whites and their institutions as hopelessly corrupted, if not evil.

Fortunately, some pushback to the Jacobins of political correctness is developing. Parents in many school districts are starting to attend school board meetings to register their opposition and even some school board members and teachers are refusing to cooperate. The teachers do so at risk of losing their jobs. At the elite Dalton private school in New York City parents have sent a letter to the Head of School Jim Best complaining how the newly introduced “anti-racist” curriculum has been gravely distorted by Critical Race Theory and the pursuit of “equity” to such an extent that it has included “a pessimistic and age-inappropriate litany of grievances in EVERY class. We have confused a progressive pedagogical model with progressive politics. Even for people who are sympathetic to that political viewpoint, the role of a school is not to indoctrinate politically. It’s to open the minds of children to the wonders of the world and learning. The Dalton we love, that has changed our lives, is nowhere to be found. And that is a huge loss.”

The letter also stated that “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘decentering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly age-inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.”

Ironically, much of the new curriculum is being driven by a core of radicalized Dalton faculty members, who in December signed on to an “anti-racism manifesto” which demanded that the school “hire 12 full-time diversity officers, abolish high-level academic courses if Black students’ performance isn’t on par with White students’, and require anti-racism ‘statements’ from all members of the staff.”

Inevitably what is going on at Dalton and elsewhere is also playing out at many of America’s top universities, so the rot will persist into the next generation when today’s college students themselves become teachers. A black Princeton professor of classics is calling for all classics departments to be done away with because they promote “racism, slavery and white supremacy.” America’s education system, once upon a time, benefited the nation and its people, but we are now watching it in its death throes. And please don’t expect the Joe Biden administration to do anything to save it. They are on the side of the wreckers.

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Pandemic Revelations

February 18th, 2021 by David Cayley

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

In early April I posted an essay called “Questions About the Pandemic from the Point-of-View of Ivan Illich.”  It was written mainly to clarify my own mind and to share my thoughts with a few like-minded friends, but, thanks to the good offices of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who reposted my essay on Quod Libet, a site where he blogs, the piece was widely read, reproduced, and translated. 

Since then I have been asked a number of times whether I have changed my mind about what I wrote in April.  No.  But I have continued to reflect on the meaning of what has overtaken us.  One result is an article that I wrote for the Oct. issue of the Literary Review of Canada, which is available at: https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2020/10/the-prognosis/.  Here are some further reflections:

In an earlier essay, I tried to explain why a policy of total quarantine, the so-called lockdown, could gain wide acceptance, despite its being highly destructive of livelihood, social morale and, ultimately, public health.

How could people even countenance a term like lockdown, with its overtones of imprisonment and total control, let along coming to think well of it and condemning and shaming its violators and critics?   My argument was that societies like Canada had, for a long time, been “practicing” – we’d already turned the concepts on which our pandemic policies have been founded into common sense.

These concepts include risk, safety, pro-active management, science as a mighty oracle speaking in a single authoritative voice, and above all, Life, as a quantum to be preserved at all costs.  Gradual naturalization of these concepts has made the policy that has been followed seem so rational, so inevitable, and so entirely without alternative that it has been possible to freely vilify its opponents and largely exclude them from media which might have made their voices politically influential.  But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.  What has come into stark relief during the pandemic may have been already latently there, but to see it actualized as the outline of a new social order is still a compelling and somewhat frightening experience.  It seems worthwhile, therefore, to look further into what the pandemic has revealed and brought to light.

SCIENCE

From the very beginning of the pandemic, there has been a steady drumbeat of scientific criticism of the policy of total quarantine – the name I will give to the attempt to keep SARS COV-2 at bay until a vaccine can be administered to all.  The first instance to come to my attention was a paper by epidemiologist John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford, particularly expert in bio-medical statistics.  He warned of the “fiasco” that would result from introducing drastic measure in the absence of even the most elementary data, such as the infection mortality rate of the disease and the costs of immobilizing entire populations.[1]

What some of these costs might be was spelled out in a May 16th article in the British journal The Spectator by Ioannidis’s colleague, Jayanta Battacharya, writing with economist Mikko Packalen of Ontario’s Waterloo University.[2]   Entitled “Lives v. Lives” it argued that the deaths that would be caused by lockdowns were likely to far outnumber the deaths averted.  They projected, for example, a massive increase in child mortality due to loss of livelihood – an increase completely out of scale with the effects of the pandemic.

They also pointed out that lockdowns protect those already most able to protect themselves – those in comfortable situations for whom “working from home” is no more than a temporary inconvenience – and endanger those least able to protect themselves – the young, the poor and the economically marginal.  By summer a stellar  group of Canadian health professionals had recognized the same dangers as Battacharya and Packalen.[3]  In their open letter to Canada’s political leaders, they pleaded for “a balanced response” to the pandemic, arguing that the “current approach” posed serious threats to both “population health” and “equity.”  This group included two former Chief Public Health Officers for Canada, two former provincial public health chiefs, three former deputy ministers of health, three present or former deans of medicine at Canadian universities and various other academic luminaries – a virtual Who’s Who of public health in Canada.  Nevertheless, their statement created barely a ripple in the media mainstream – an astonishing fact which I’ll return to presently.

This pattern has continued – most recently with the Great Barrington Declaration.  This was a statement, issued on Oct. 6 by Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, and Jay Battacharya of Sanford, whom I introduced a moment ago.[4]  Their statement deplored “the devastating effects on…public health” of the present policy and advocated “focused protection” – a policy of protecting those at risk from COVID while allowing everyone else to go about their business.  In this way, they reasoned, immunity could gradually build up in the healthy population, without endangering those who are particularly vulnerable to the disease.

A little while after the Great Barrington Declaration was put into circulation, an article by a British immunologist and respiratory pharmacologist, Mike Yeadon, provided reason for hope that there might already be much higher levels of immunity than is commonly supposed.[5]

Yeadon is a veteran of the drug industry where he directed research on new treatments for respiratory infection and eventually started his own biotech company.  He argued that, even though SARS COV-2 was “novel,” it was still a coronavirus and, as such, substantially similar to other coronaviruses.  By his estimate, up to 30% of people may have possessed “reactive T-cells” capable of fighting off SARS Cov-2 infections when the pandemic began.  This is startling information, because it shows that the hypothesis from which all governments began – that all were equally vulnerable – was quite wrong.

In support of his theory Yeadon asserted that “multiple, top quality research groups around the world”[6] had shown that such cross-immunities between coronaviruses are real and effective.  His second move in this article was to try to establish how many people had been infected so far.  This he did by reckoning backwards from the so-called Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), or the percentage of people who have had the disease who die from it.  (If you know the percentage who have died you can derive from it the total number infected.)  Here he relied on the work or John Ionannidis – he of the “fiasco” warning mentioned earlier – who had recently published in the Bulletin of the WHO a peer-reviewed meta-study – a study surveying other studies – in which he estimated the infection mortality rate of COVID-19, arriving at a median figure of .23%.[7]  (This figure falls to .05% when deaths among those over seventy are excluded.). Applying Ioannidis’s estimates to the British population, Yeadon calculated that up to 30% of the British population had probably been infected.  Combining his two numbers – those with prior immunity and those with immunity acquired during the pandemic, he concluded that herd immunity was probably in sight.

The positions taken by Yeadon and the Great Barrington epidemiologists have been echoed or anticipated by many other health professionals.  On September 20, a group of nearly 400 Belgian doctors, supported by more than a thousand other health workers, published an open letter pleading for an end to “emergency” measures and calling for open public discussion. [8]

Ten days later more than twenty Ontario physicians sent a comparable letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford.  Whether all these people are “right” is not the question I want to raise here.  Since only time will tell, and even when it does, probably not definitively, I don’t even think that’s the proper question.

Better questions might be: is what they’re saying plausible, is it well founded, is it worth discussing?  Science supposedly works by a patient and painstaking process of eventually getting things right by first being willing to get them wrong and then comparing notes in the hope of finally arriving at a better account.

But what we have seen during this pandemic is something quite different: the strange spectacle of governments and established media trumpeting their attachment to science while, at the same time, marginalizing or excluding any scientific opinion not in agreement with their preferred policy.

This is striking in the case of the discussion, or lack of discussion, of herd immunity – a natural fact which has somehow been vilified as a heartless “strategy” recommended by those who don’t mind seeing a lot of their fellow citizens killed.[9]  (In case this seems extreme I will provide evidence when I come to my discussion of media.).

This began in March when the British government were held to be following a policy of herd immunity and immediately shamed into introducing the same stringent lockdown imposed by all comparable countries, with the qualified exception of Sweden.  (In the face of this shaming, the British government denied that it had ever had such a policy, so whether it did or not remains moot.) The same arguments have recently been brought to bear against the Great Barrington Declaration.”  There was, for example, “the John Snow memorandum” in which a group of doctors denounced any “management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections.”  This memorandum haughtily declined to mention the Great Barrington Declaration by name, as if even mentioning would give it an undeserved dignity, but was clearly a response to it nonetheless.

Three points stand out for me in the positions of the Great Barrington signatories.  The first, which they have all reiterated almost plaintively, is that what they are recommending was formerly, in Jay Battacharya’s words, “standard public health practice.”[10]  The novelty is not in the idea that humanity must come to terms with a new virus; it’s in the idea that this process of reaching what epidemiologists call “endemic equilibrium” can somehow be forestalled, postponed or avoided altogether.

This hope has been fostered by the rhetoric of war that has supported total mobilization against COVID-19 from the outset, and this rhetoric has in turn depended on public ignorance of elementary virology.  (By this, I mean, roughly speaking, the sheer number of viruses to which we are exposed, the role viruses have played in our evolution, the role they continue to play within us, and the robustness of our defences against viral infections.).  “So powerful and ancient are viruses,” says Luis P. Villareal, the founding director of the Center for Virus Research at the Irvine campus of the University of California, “that I would summarize their role in life as ‘Ex Virus Omnia’ (from virus everything).”[11]  Appreciation that what we are currently going through with a new virus is natural and, historically speaking, normal, might do a lot to take the air out of the frequently repeated and self-dramatizing claim that it is quite “unprecedented,” “the greatest health care crisis in our history”[12] (Prime Minister Trudeau) etc.

The second point is that herd immunity is not a “strategy” but a condition.  Whether it’s reached by vaccination or by immunity acquired through natural exposure, it is the way in which we get along with viruses.  The idea that this process can be extensively reshaped by what the John Snow memo writers call “management strategy” seems fanciful to the Great Barrington writers.  It is at least debatable.  It might be true that isolation works to “flatten the curve,  and that masks reduce viral load and thus sometimes transform a sickness-inducing dose into a beneficial “innoculum.”  But one still has to ask what is gained and what is lost by these interventions and postponements.  Can we really circumvent nature and maintain control without violating the Hippocratic maxim that when the way is not clear one should at least refrain from harm?

This brings up the third and decisive point: the definition of public health.  Can this definition be confined to the prevention of a single disease, however much of a challenge it poses, or must it be conceived as taking in all the various determinants of health?

If the second definition be accepted, then I think a case can be made that the policy of total mobilization against COVID has been a catastrophe.  Consider just a preliminary sketch of the consequences.  There has been widespread and potentially fatal loss of livelihood throughout the world, especially amongst economically marginal groups.  Businesses that have taken years to build have been destroyed.  Suicide, depression, addiction and domestic violence have all increased.  Public debt has swelled to potentially crippling proportions.  The performing arts have been devastated.  Precious “third places”[13] that sustain conviviality have closed.  Fear has been sown between people.  Homelessness has grown to the point where some downtown Toronto parks have begun to resemble the hobo camps of the 1930’s.

There have been surges in other diseases that have gone untreated due to COVID preoccupation.  Many formerly face-to-face interactions have been virtualized, and this change threatens, in many cases, to become permanent – it seems, for example, that “leading universities” like Harvard and U.C. Berkeley have enthusiastically adopted on-line teaching in the hopes of franchising their expertise in future.  The list goes on.  Is this a worthwhile price to pay to avert illness amongst healthy people who could for the most part have sustained the illness?  The question, by and large, has not even been asked.  We don’t even know how much illness has been averted by our draconian policies, and we probably never will, since the experiment of comparing a locked down population to a freely circulating one would be impossible to conduct.  In the absence of such an experiment most discussion will founder on the elementary distinction between correlation and cause – that a lockdown was introduced and the disease abated does not prove that the lockdown was the cause of the abatement.

This is a glaring issue.  The course of the epidemic in different countries is almost invariably ascribed to the policy followed by its government: Jacinda Ardern saved New Zealand, Donald Trump sank the United States, the scientifically minded Angela Merkel brought Germany through much more safely than bumbling Boris Johnson did in Great Britain, etc.  This overlooks a huge amount that is not in the control of politicians – New Zealand is comprised of two remote islands; the United States suffers from epidemic obesity; populations differ in their habits, susceptibilities and even their genetic makeup.  Anyone who tries to understand why they caught a cold when they got a cold and why on another occasion they didn’t while someone else did will recognize an element of mystery, or at least obscurity.  We don’t know, and yet it currently seems obvious to everyone that a straight line can be drawn from policy to the pattern of COVID infections.

But the main question here is why there has been no discussion of the public health implications of the policy that has been followed.

I will try to answer this question as it touches on various institutions, notably media, but first I’ll continue with my discussion of science.  This word is, in my opinion, a source of fatal confusion.  The basis of this confusion is that the term functions at the same time as a myth and as a description.  Words possess denotations – the objects, real or imagined, at which they point – and connotations – the cloud of associations and feelings which they generate.  The word science, in everyday talk, is all connotation and no denotation – the crucial attribute of those verbal puffballs that German scholar Uwe Pörksen calls “plastic words,” and Ivan Illich “amoeba words.”[14] It points to no agreed object – there are so-called hard sciences, and therefore, by inference, soft sciences, observational sciences and mathematical sciences, historical sciences and experimental sciences – and it possesses no agreed method.  One often hears of “the scientific method” but even the most cursory survey of the philosophy of science will yield multiple competing accounts of what it might be.  Because of this the word science, when its meaning is not further specified, functions as a collage of meanings whose rhetorical purpose is very often to induce nothing more than a radiating field of positive connotations.   It is, in in this respect, what French theorist Roland Barthes calls a myth.[15]  Myths, according to Barthes, “naturalize” the phenomena they aggregate and summarize.  In the case of science, a diverse, heterogeneous, and sometimes internally contradictory phenomenon is smoothed out and compressed into an apparent compact and consistent object which can be then made into a social protagonist and a grammatical subject: science says, science shows, science demands etc.  An actual history, with all its twists and turns, has been replaced by what appears to be an unproblematic natural object – intelligible, obvious and at hand.

The result is that the myth obscures and absorbs the actual object(s).  Actual sciences are limited and contingent, conditional and conditioned bodies of knowledge.  These limits are of various kinds.  Some are practical: evidence may be contradictory, insufficient, inaccessible, or impossible to obtain without exposing the subjects of the research to some unacceptable harm.  Some are limits in principle: ignorance expands with knowledge, reductive methods will necessarily fail to disclose the reality of the whole phenomena which they disassemble analytically, all scientific procedures rest on philosophical pre-suppositions which cannot themselves be put in question and so on.

During the last century, philosophers, historians and sociologists have undertaken many studies of what one of those philosophers, Bruno Latour, calls “science in action.”[16]  They have attempted, as historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have written, “to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.”[17]  Through this work a detailed picture has been built up of what is involved in producing and stabilizing scientific facts and then, as Latour says, “making them public.”[18]  I tried to give some idea of the range of these new images of the sciences in an epic 24-hour Ideas series called “How to Think About Science” that was broadcast in 2007 and 2008.[19]  That these images of the sciences are of a constrained and situated object in no way undermines or denies their precious achievement in building up bodies of knowledge that are based on public and contestable evidence.

A realistic image of the various sciences as they are actually practiced is a necessary foundation for political conversation.  The myth of Science on the other hand is utterly corrosive of politics insofar as it supposes a body of immaculate and comprehensive knowledge that renders politics superfluous.  I do not think this is an exaggeration.  Again and again in the last year I have listened to political statements that present Science as a unified, imperative and infallible voice indicating an indisputable course of action.

The implication is that knowledge can replace judgment.  But it cannot – because knowledge, as I have argued, is limited both in practice and in principle.  Moral judgment is unavoidable, and is the proper domain of politics.  To institute a lockdown which protects that part of the population able to shelter at home, while exposing another part to the harms that follow from lockdown, involves a political judgment.  To disguise it as a scientific judgment is, in the first place, deceitful.  At the time the decision was made no evidence whatsoever existed to support a policy of mass quarantine of a healthy population.  Such a policy had never even been tried before and, even after the fact, is not really amenable to controlled study in any case.  But more important was the moral abdication that was involved.  Instead of an honest evaluation of the harms avoided and the harms induced, the public was told that Science had spoken, and the case was closed.  The politicians and the media were then free to rend their garments and tremble in sympathy over all the harm the virus had done without ever having to admit that much of this damage was politically induced.  Where there was no science, the myth of Science became a screen and a shield behind which politicians could shelter themselves from the consequences of decisions they could deny ever having made.

It is fair to say, I think, that the various sciences that are involved in the continuing catastrophe of COVID-19 are deeply divided.  Their voices have not generally been heard, but many hundreds of medical doctors, epidemiologists, virologists and former public health officials have spoken against a policy of indiscriminate quarantine.  It’s quite possible that many thousands more share their opinion and might have said so had the onset of the virus been met by a discussion rather than a stampede.

It is after all true, as Jay Battacharya says, that what these scientists have recommended – “a balanced response” rather than a utopian pursuit of total control – was once “standard public health practice.”   But so far almost no hint of scientific dissensus has appeared in the Canadian media I have followed like the CBC and the Globe and Mail.  What are the consequences?  Some warn that “trust in science” will be impaired.  This is the fear expressed by four medical scientists writing recently in The National Post on the need for what they call “healthy discussions.”[20]  But in the end these writers only want to foster freer expression in order to protect the authority of a unified subject called “science” which depends, in the last analysis, on trust rather than argument.

The phrase is telling because it doesn’t speak of knowledgeable assent to the findings of a particular science – for this no trust is necessary – but rather of a general disposition to believe whatever carries the imprimatur of some scientific institution and is authorized to appear in its livery.   Science, in this sense, resembles Plato’s “noble lie” – a fable told by the wise to prevent credulous citizens from falling prey to inferior myths.[21]

It is my belief that trust in a Science that stand above the social fray – immaculate, oracular, disinterested – is already fatally eroded – both by several generations of patient study of what the sciences actually do and actually know, and by the dogmatism of the noble liars who have driven unanswered skeptics into the desperate straits of conspiracy theory (more on that in a moment).  I would like to plead for a new picture in which a mystified Science is replaced by diverse sciences, dissensus is recognized as normal, limits to knowledge are admitted as being in the nature of things, not a temporary always about-to-be-overcome embarrassment, and the rough and ready moral judgments that are the proper stuff of politics are flushed out of the cover currently provided for them by Science-as-myth.  It has been my view for a long time that only after the myth of Science is overcome will we be able to see what the sciences are and escape the spell of what they are not.  Unhappily one of the revelations of the pandemic seems to be that this myth is entrenching itself ever more deeply in our social imagination.

ON THE NEED FOR POLITICAL REALIGNMENT 

A figure of great pathos for me during the most recent phase of the pandemic has been the theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford, the recipient of several prestigious awards for her scientific achievements, and one of the authors of the Great Barrington declaration.

In her writings and statements she has consistently made three crucial points bearing on public policy:

1) “lockdowns only delay the inevitable spread of the virus”

2) “lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries — and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries” and

3) that, under lockdown, “the poorest and most vulnerable people” will inevitably be made “to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus” with “the working class and younger members of society…carry[ing] the heaviest burden.”[22]

She has publicized these ideas, expecting, in her words, “debate and disagreement” and “welcoming” such disagreement insofar as that is how, in her understanding, “science progresses.”

Early in the pandemic she also hoped, as someone who identified with the political left and had “strong views about the distribution of wealth [and] about the importance of the Welfare State,” that others so identified could be brought to see that lockdowns were aggravating existing social inequalities as well as generating new ones.  Neither her hopes nor her expectations have been fulfilled.  In place of debate, the Great Barrington statement has generated, again in her words, “insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats” – an “onslaught,” she writes, “of vitriol and hostility” from “journalists and academics,” as well as the public at large for which she was “utterly unprepared” and by which she has been “horrified.”  And all this for enunciating what she and her colleagues understood was formerly “standard public health practice” – that phrase of Jay Battacharya’s that I keep repeating because I find it so evocative of the seemingly unnoticed novelty of the present moment.

Perhaps most striking of all, the Great Barrington Declaration was made in a  handsome, converted mansion in bucolic Western Massachusetts, the home of the American Institute for Economic Research, an institute founded on a vision of a society of “pure freedom and private governance” in which “the role of government is sharply confined” and “individuals can flourish within a truly free market and a free society” – a view commonly called libertarian.[23] This was a rather discordant setting for Sunetra Gupta, avowedly “Left-wing” and a proponent of “the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.”  Among other things it allowed her opponents to associate her with “climate change denial” (though that is, in fact, something of a caricature of the AIER’s actual position which questions climate policy more than denying climate change as such.)  But more important for me is the transposition of what, for Gupta, ought to have been a left-wing position into a right-wing position.  What this illustrates, I think, is just how inept, deceptive and confining these antique political descriptions have become.

The terms left and right originated in the French National Assembly of 1789 when the friends of the revolution sat to the left of the chair and the supporters of the king to the right.  Over time they evolved into signifiers of the balance of power between state and market according to which predominated as an allocator of resources and locus of social decision-making.  Today they are verbal straitjackets and fetters on social imagination.  Like the legendary Procrustes who chopped or stretched his guests in order to adapt them to the bed he had available, they distort our circumstances more than describe them.  The pandemic has made this plain.  It is demonstrable that lockdown and economic shut-down have been applied at the expense of those least able to protect themselves.  Some former fat cats have suffered too, of course – airlines, travel companies and the like have been decimated across the board – but it is generally true that the poorer and weaker have paid a heavier price than the stronger and more well-to-do.  Grocery clerks have stayed at work, while civil servants have worked from home; the working class have lost jobs while most professional employment has continued; small businesses have failed, while big businesses have held on; the economically marginal have been driven to addiction, homelessness and suicide while the well-heeled and well-housed have suffered little more than an excess of one another’s company.   Since the left ostensibly speaks for the less-advantaged, one might have expected anti-lockdown to become a left-wing issue but the case has been quite dramatically the reverse.  Criticism has come almost exclusively from the right with only the bravest of leftists, like Sunetra Gupta, daring to cross the aisle.

Throughout the pandemic both political decision-makers and mainstream media have treated criticism of the policy of mass quarantine as either beneath mention or outside the bounds of rational discussion. 

When demonstrators in small numbers began to gather outside the Ontario legislature back in the spring, the province’s Premier dismissed them as “yahoos.”  Even though a man of the populist right himself, Premier Doug Ford wanted everyone to know that these were not fellow-citizens but sub-humans – the original yahoos in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels were “brutes in human form” – whose opinions need not be recognized or taken into account.   This abuse has continued.

When the “second wave” began, critics pointed out, first, that the number of “cases” being recorded might be related to the number of tests being done; second, that positive tests were not actually “cases” in the sense of sick people; and third, that mortality had remained dramatically lower than in the spring, even as these “cases” had surged.  These criticisms were quickly stigmatized by the Globe and Mail’s André Picard.

The claim that the second wave was mainly a “case-demic,” he wrote, was the work of “conspiracy theorists and ‘fake-news’ chanters.”[24]  Again the implication was that people like me, who had been struck by precisely these three features of the second wave, belonged to a class whose views were the result of some pathology, malice or social defect and needn’t be considered.  This mixture of condescension and contempt was later extended to the Great Barrington Declaration.  The Globe and Mail did not, in fact, deign to notice the declaration as a news item.  Since the paper had stated in its editorial columns that “Canada is at war,”[25] they were presumably under no obligation to report such treasonable views.  Nevertheless, André Picard on Nov. 9th wrote about it in a vein that suggested that he thought his readers would know about it and would certainly share his distaste for it.  The Great Barrington Declaration is entirely couched in terms of public health – building immunity amongst those at low risk while protecting those at high risk, it argues, will achieve the best and “most compassionate” balance of harms under the current circumstances – but, in Picard’s rendering it becomes incomprehensibly cruel and obtuse.  “What the Great Barrington Declaration says,” he writes, “when you got through the pomposity, is that profits matter more than people, that we should let the coronavirus run wild, and, if the vulnerable die in service of economic growth, so be it.”[26]  This is an astonishing misrepresentation – the more so as it directed against a sober and considered proposal from eminent and qualified scientists by a man who explicitly portrays himself as a friend and defender of threatened “science.” What I want to emphasize here, besides its inaccuracy, is its sheer belligerence and incivility – as if opposing views had only to be mocked not argued with.  Where in all this rage can a civil voice like Sunetra Gupta’s hold a plea?

I see two great problems here.  The first is the violent reciprocity that turns left and right into warring factions and confines each one ever more tightly in its proper box.  What the enemy says is wrong – entirely and a priori – simply because the enemy has said it.  Let me take an example.  For some years the media have been building up a laughingstock called the “anti-vaxxer.”  This is not a person who questions some element or aspect of mass vaccination on some rational ground – those who hold the correct opinion deny in advance and on principle that there can even be such questions or such grounds – it is rather a social enemy, someone whom you know by definition to be unpardonably ignorant, selfish and irresponsible, and whose arguments you can therefore disregard.  Having created this scarecrow, it then becomes quite easy to assimilate to it a new bogeyman called the “anti-masker.”  Now you have an instant characterization for all who may question the policy of lockdown.  In actual fact the question of masks is scientifically quite murky.  Until last spring both the W.H.O and Canada’s chief medical officer, Teresa Tam held that they were of no utility in blocking an infectious agent as miniscule and as wily as a coronavirus.  On April 20th of this year, the Ontario Civil Liberties Association released a study by retired physicist Denis G. Rancourt, in which he reviewed the scientific literature on masks and concluded bluntly that “masks don’t work.”  “There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies,” he wrote in his abstract of this article, “which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles.”[27]  Some contrary observational studies (i.e. without controls) have been presented since, and ingenious suggestions made that masks, by reducing viral load, may deliver what amounts to an inoculation dose and thus serve as a sort of proto-vaccine, but one can still say that the science is, at best, ambiguous and that most of the studies touting good effects like reduced viral load have paid no attention to potential ill effects – where do the viruses hypothetically blocked by your mask then go, etc.?  The only randomized controlled trial made during the pandemic that I know of took place in Denmark in the spring.  With more than 3,000 participants, it found no statistically significant difference in how many contracted COVID between those who wore masks and those who didn’t.[28]  Here one almost has to pinch oneself when contemplating the degree to which ritualism and superstition can be disguised as science.  Rancourt’s survey, and the more recent Danish study, if not definitive, should at least weigh heavily in public discussion, but instead the “anti-masker” has become the very epitome of the anti-social, anti-scientific rube.  I do not intend here to speak against ritual – people were so badly panicked by the first phase of the pandemic, and made so afraid of one another, that some ritualization of that fear, like masking, was probably necessary if there was to be a return even to semi-normal social interaction.  I’m only objecting to ritual behaviours being disguised as scientific mandates and then made a basis for ostracization and legal censure.

This is the first problem: making judgments whose only grounds are the dynamic of enmity: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, whatever the enemy says or thinks is wrong, and so forth.  On this basis, once Donald Trump has said that the cure for COVID shouldn’t be worse than the disease, as he did last spring, then this thought becomes unthinkable and unspeakable by his opponents simply because Donald Trump has said it.  This inability to think the enemy’s thoughts is fatal to sound reasoning.  That the cure must not be worse than the disease is a principle that goes back to Hippocrates and remains true even in the mouth of a scoundrel.  Reflexive polarization creates false dichotomies, cleaving opposites that should be held together into warring half-truths.  The second problem that I want to highlight is the inadequacy of the left-right political map on which battle lines are currently being drawn.  The difficulty lies in what is omitted when all political decisions are plotted on a single axis running from state to market, public to private provision, administrative control to the “pure freedom” espoused by Sunetra Gupta’s erstwhile host, the American Institute for Economic Research.   The first thing that is ignored is scale.   This theme was introduced into contemporary political thought by the Austrian writer Leopold Kohr in his 1956 book The Breakdown of Nations.  “Behind all forms of social misery,” Kohr wrote, there is “one cause…: bigness.”  “Whenever something is wrong something is too big.”[29]  With this book, Kohr founded a new school of political ecology that his student and successor Ivan Illich called “social morphology.”[30]  British biologists D’arcy Wentworth Thompson and J.B.S. Haldane had studied the close fit between form and size in nature and concluded that natural forms are viable only at the appropriate scale i.e. a hawk’s form would not be viable at the scale of a sparrow, or a mouse’s at the scale of an elephant.[31]  Kohr was the first to argue that social form and size show the same correlation.  E.F. Schumacher, another student of Kohr’s, would later popularize the argument in his Small is Beautiful.  Illich also developed and extended Kohr’s crucial idea in his book Tools for Conviviality.

Why does scale matter in the present case?  Under cover of restricting the spread of COVID, emergency administrative regulation and control is being extended into areas normally outside the purview of the state – friendship, family life, religious worship, sexual relations etc.  (One Toronto city councilor, in her newsletter to her constituents, recommended masturbation, under the slogan “you are your safest partner.”[32]).  In the past, prerogatives justified by war have often been retained even after peace has been restored, and it seems prudent to assume that elements of the current regime will outlast the present emergency.   One can already see the emerging outline of what one might call, on the model of the National Security State, a new Health Security State.  The modern image of a social body comprised of individual citizens associating freely with one another is being replaced by the image of a giant immune system in which each is obliged to the whole according to principles of risk and overall system integrity – an assembly of “lives” comprising ultimately one overarching Life.  In the name of this new social body, any obligation whatsoever can potentially be interrupted and proscribed. The most shocking and telling example for me is the way in which the dying have been left alone – unaccompanied, untouched unconsoled.  But this is not an issue on which the left-right diagram sheds any light whatever.  The answer to such a state is not a market in which private rather than public actors keep us penned in protective isolation form one another.  The issue is one of scale – the prerogatives of friendship, affinity, and mutual aid v. the imperatives of system health – and of culture – are we to be allowed other gods than Health?

A second issue that fails to compute in the prevailing left-right scheme is conviviality or liveability.  This quality depends heavily on what American writer Ray Oldenburg calls “third places” – places whose character is neither public nor private but an amalgam of both.[33]  These places get left out of the account when public health is pitted against “the economy” and criticism of lockdowns – as in the statement I quoted earlier from André Picard – is equated with a willingness to sacrifice “the vulnerable in the service of economic growth.”  The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all contribute their mite to G.N.P. alongside Amazon and General Motors, but they don’t really belong to the same world.  Money may change hands, but many of the small enterprises that make localities habitable, hospitable and vivid belong more to the world of subsistence than to the grow-or-die world of The Economy.  The performing arts also belong in this category.  This whole dimension has been badly and, often enough, fatally injured during the pandemic.  Undertakings patiently built up and patiently built into communities over many years are failing.  At times, conviviality itself has been given a bad name, as it is in caricatures of the reckless young, endangering their elders by getting too close to one another.   But none of this really registers on a spectrum on which the masked left is pitted against the unmasked right, conviviality is conflated with “economic growth,” and civil liberty is consigned to the care of armed militias menacing American state legislatures.

What this points to – its “revelation” in terms of my theme – is the desperate need for political realignment.  Left and right are very old wineskins that are exploding all around us as they are made to try and contain some very new wine.[34]  Sunetra Gupta finds a platform only among libertarians who conflate freedom with free markets because there is no ground on the left for a position that punctures the dream-world of total safety and total control.  The libertarians for their part affirm the indifferent operations of free markets as the only foundation for economic justice because they see a tyrannical state as the only alternative.   The religious are driven to the right because the left sees religious duty as no more than a revocable privilege granted by that “mortal god,” the state.[35]  The friends of the common good are driven to the left because they see nothing on the right but idolatry of the monstrous machinery of the market.  They defend lockdowns as “care” while overlooking the collateral damage that care can do when it acts at the scale of mass quarantine.  The right acknowledges the damage but can only enunciate a competing view of care in terms that reinforce an economic system that is rapidly chewing up the entire biosphere.  Mightn’t it be time to talk?

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Earlier I noted Globe and Mail health columnist André Picard’s willingness to condemn anyone who questioned a policy founded on “cases” (which are often – no one knows how often – not cases of illness but merely positive test results) as a “conspiracy theorist.”   Fed by the shadowy figure of QAnon, this has become a frequent term of abuse directed at those who have been unwilling to accept the idea that a victory over COVID is worth the ruin it may produce.  The epithet is so convenient and so mystifying that I think it’s worth exploring a little what is meant by it and what it may be hiding.

Let me begin with a story.  Some years ago, in the long aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, a CBC colleague and friend came to me with a request.  Would I support his proposal, he asked, to do a series of broadcasts on Ideas, where I was then a producer, about what was wrong with the official account of the attacks.  This account had been submitted in August of 2004 by the official inquiry, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (the 9/11 Commission for short).  This colleague then issued a challenge: that before deciding I should at least read David Ray Griffin’s 2004 book The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11.  Griffin, as I was to learn, was a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Claremont School of Theology in southern California, a hotbed in my mind of “process theology,” rather than conspiracy theory.  (Process theology, of which Griffin is as an exponent – he co-founded, with John Cobb, The Center for Process Studies at Claremont – is a school of theology that was inspired by the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead.)  Intrigued, I complied with my colleague’s request and was impressed and disconcerted by Griffin’s temperate, well-argued and well-documented book.  At that point there was no chance that Ideas was going to approve my colleague’s proposal, since Griffin’s book, despite its author’s academic bona fides, still carried the full odium attaching to “conspiracy theories” in respectable journalistic precincts.  But I got interested nonetheless.  Up to that time, I had never taken the slightest interest in such theories, assuming them to be an obsession of cranks, but I was surprised to learn from Griffin that, in the similar case of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 – surprise attack serving as a wished-for casus belli – respectable historians had produced evidence that the U.S. sustained an attack it could have foreseen (and perhaps did foresee) in order to stir its population to war.  (I don’t mean that this is a widely accepted idea or that it has been convincingly demonstrated, just that some evidence along these lines has been admitted over time into the historical record.  See, for example, John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath,  Doubleday, 1982)

I decided to conduct a little informal research, using the case of the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 and the official account of it that was given by the Warren Commission the following year.  Whenever I found an opportunity, I asked people I was talking with whether they accepted the Warren Report as the truth about Kennedy’s murder.  The results were another surprise: amongst those who had an opinion, I couldn’t find a single soul who didn’t think that the Warren Commission had overlooked or concealed some or all of the truth about what happened in Dallas in November of 1963.  Another striking case was the TV series “The Valour and the Horror” broadcast on the CBC in 1992.  This series, in an episode called “Death by Moonlight,” made the claim that Allied air forces had knowingly committed atrocities against civilian populations as part of the bombing of Germany during the Second World War.  Older relatives of mine had participated in the air war, and I was swept up in the furor that followed the broadcast.  Here the issue was partly about what people actually knew at the time and partly about how the “strategic bombing” of German cities was to be framed fifty years later.  It wasn’t news that German civilians had been incinerated in deliberately-set fire storms in Hamburg, Dresden and other cities.  What was at issue was whether this could be faced as a crime or should remain protectively wrapped in the heroic narrative of necessity bravely borne in the defense of freedom.

What we can see and what we can say about the past varies with historical distance and with the intensity of the commitments with which we view it.  It becomes easier with time to face the conspiratorial dimension in political decisions – that a few privately decide and many suffer in the execution of their decisions.  How does this lengthy prologue relate to the pandemic?  Well it seems to me that once the name of conspiracy theorist becomes a handy and liberally applied insult, as we saw earlier in the case of André Picard, a certain mystification is right around the corner.  Ruling out conspiracy a priori is as fatal to unprejudiced investigation as assuming it.  Take the strange case of Event 201, the pandemic planning exercise staged last October, on the very brink of the pandemic, by a partnership consisting of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  This was, according to the organizers, a “tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic”[36]  During these discussions, many of the features of the pandemic that followed were quite accurately foreseen.  According to the documentary Plandemic this was because the pandemic was foreseen and planned by a cabal of vaccine manufactures and vaccine promoters with Bill Gates as villain in chief.[37]  This documentary shows many of the characteristics you would find in a textbook description of conspiracy theory: partial and ambiguous evidence is forced into neat, pre-conceived patterns; sinister motives are ascribed to the alleged plotters; a wised-up disregard is shown for competing explanations etc.  Easy then to dismiss the film’s whole argument, and, in the process, to overlook what is uncanny about Event 201 predicting the pandemic so precisely.  One doesn’t have to believe in conspiracy to see that many of the narratives that have guided SARS COV-2 policy were written in advance, or that the events of recent months have long been anticipated and planned for – Event 201, for example, was preceded by three earlier “exercises” going back to “Atlantic Storm” in 2005.[38]  Events often fall into the shapes we have prepared for them, planned for them, dreamed for them.  9/11 may not have been an inside job, as David Ray Griffin claimed, but it was certainly the opportunity that the Bush administration, barely legitimate after its contested election, had been waiting for, and it wasted no time thereafter in initiating its catastrophic War on Terror.  In the same way, the war on the virus, and the many experiments in social control it has empowered, seem to be thought forms long prepared and just waiting for their occasion.

My point here is similar here to my point earlier about political enmity and polarization destroying all ground for discussion.  How many are called conspiracy theorists when they just want to ask a question, how many others are driven to real conspiracy theories when their questions are not answered or acknowledged?  Awareness of this problem began for me with the figure I mentioned earlier of the “anti-vaxxer,” a belittling name that seemed to establish itself in public discussion almost overnight a few years back.  It affected me because I had been reflecting on the question of vaccination for many years without being able to come to a firm conclusion – I was quizzical rather than pro or anti, a position that had been summarily driven from the field with the invention of the anti-vaxxer.  My questions began when my infant son contracted a frightening, potentially fatal (but, in this case, happily not) cerebral meningitis at the age of eight months following his MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination.  My wife and I subsequently heard of other such cases.  Anecdotal evidence, yes, but I began to wonder – could you really prove the connection, should there be one?  Children and adolescents who follow recommended schedules receive up to sixteen different vaccines, many of which are boosted several times.  Can anyone really say with certainty that they know all the effects or how they interact or how they are expressed?  It should not be controversial to observe that this is a fairly massive attempt to supplement and manipulate the workings of the immune system.  Is it impossible that the plague of allergies and auto-immune diseases that seem to characterize our time is related, as some suppose, to this systematic interference?  Might we better off with less vaccines, while still recognizing that some have been invaluable?

To even begin to answer such questions it is necessary to recognize, first of all, that they have a philosophical, as well as an empirical dimension.  There are limits to knowledge in the study of complex systems, but these are often denied in the effort to foster the “trust in science” I wrote about above.  These limits to knowledge must be acknowledged, as must the consequent limits on what can be imposed on people in the name of science.  Within that framework it may then be possible to shed some light on the empirical side of the questions I’ve raised.  But the omens in this respect are not good.  Let me take a couple of examples.  In 2016 a documentary film appeared called “Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe.”  It claimed that during the course of a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) study into a possible link between autism and the administration of MMR vaccine to infants, documents were destroyed and data fudged in order to make emerging evidence of such a link disappear.   This claim was made by one of the scientists involved, William Thompson, in recorded phone conversations with environmental biologist Brian Hooker.   Thompson’s report could be false, or in some way manipulated, but, on its face, it is impressive and ought to have, at the least, led to wide public discussion.  What has happened instead is that the film has been effectively suppressed.   This began when Robert de Niro, under pressure, cancelled a scheduled screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.  The film has since disappeared from the internet and is available only by purchase from the filmmakers’ web-site.[39]  The Wikipedia biographies of all the principals in the film show evidence of malicious editing with recurring references to fraud, false information, discredited views and the like.  This does not give the impression of a fair, frank or open discussion but of a ruthless orthodoxy which ostracizes all dissent.

A second example: I have read countless times that British doctor Andrew Wakefield is the author of a fraudulent study, first published in The Lancet then withdrawn, purporting to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.  Such repetition generally produces assent – if everybody believes it, it must be true – and I had unthinkingly accepted this claim until one day an old friend asked me if I had ever seen the discredited study.  No.  Might she send it to me? Yes, of course.  I read it and found that Wakefield was only one of thirteen authors of this rather technical paper, and that it reached no definite conclusion beyond asserting that the enterocolitis which the authors investigated in twelve young children “may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction” and that “in most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation.”  The paper ends with a call for “further investigations.”[40]   This mild and rather tentative conclusion was the famous fraud?  I was astonished.  Further research revealed that Wakefield had gone beyond what the paper asserts in his public statements but only so far as to say that he was sufficiently worried by the suspected link that he recommended disaggregating the triple vaccine and vaccinating separately for each disease with a year’s interval between shots.  This was the extent to which he was “anti-vax.”  Nevertheless he was barred from medical practice – “stricken from the medical register” – and his name blackened around the world.

There’s a lot of territory between the claim that the SARS COV-2 pandemic was a planned event whose viral protagonist was created in a laboratory in Washington or Wuhan, and the claim that vaccine manufacturers and their philanthropic friends in the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are innocent altruists selflessly dedicated to a disease-free world.  But discussion tends to get pushed to extremes.  Conspiracy is one of the bogies that keeps it polarized in this way.  As with my initial examples of Pearl Harbor, the strategic bombing of German cities, the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11, it’s quite possible that stories that can’t be told now will become more believable with time.  Perhaps powerful vaccine manufactures did conspire with British medical authorities to discredit Andrew Wakefield and cut short his research.  I’m sure I don’t know.  Nor do many others who think they do.  Perhaps, to complicate the issue further, public confidence in vaccination is so precious and so easily shaken, that slander and persecution of the occasional vaccine safety heretic is a small price to pay for it.  After all, Socrates ascribes nobility to the “noble lie” and the “opportune falsehood” for a very well-argued reason. My conviction, as I’ve said, is that the lustre of “the guardians” – Plato’s name for those who in our time would advocate “trust in science” – is now impossible to restore.  Our only hope therefore lies in an open, pacified and demystified discussion.  What prospect of that?  Am I not simply reiterating Socrates’ impossible dream that philosophers will become kings, or kings philosophers – the only conditions, he says, under which there can be a “cessation of troubles.”[41]  One might as well hope that that meek will inherit the earth. [42]  Only the extremity of our circumstances – humanly, politically, ecologically – makes it seem possible.

PROTECTING OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

The pandemic has no stranger figure of speech than this one, and yet it seems to clang ironically on very few ears.  We are in a “health crisis,” the worse in our history according to our prime minister.[43]  At such a moment one might hope that a health care system which absorbs nearly half the provincial budget in Ontario would mobilize to protect us – instead we are asked to protect it.  That our health institutions should not be overtaxed, over-stressed, over-whelmed, pushed to a “tipping point,” etc. has been one of the prime objectives of public policy from Day One of the pandemic.  And, from the beginning, it has been generally accepted as a reasonable objective.  That sickness should threaten the institution that is ostensibly there to deal with sickness is remarkable, I think, and constitutes yet another of the pandemic’s revelations.  How can this be?

Our health care system is not, in fact, a system of care, presuming that there could even be such a thing as a “system” of care.  It is a giant bureaucracy set up to administer certain health interventions at its own convenience.  That many of these interventions are ingenious, life-changing, and capably administered does not change this impersonal and industrial character.  (Emergency departments are something of an exception here, and I’d like to record my gratitude for the skillful and timely repairs I have sometimes received in various emergency rooms.)  This means that hospital-based medicine has not been designed to deal with an emergency of the kind we are experiencing.

In the event, there seems to have been surprisingly little overtaxing of hospitals during the pandemic.  Hospitals in New York, Montreal, and Milano certainly experienced short, well-publicized periods of strain in the spring, but in many other places the opposite occurred.  In Toronto, for example, people were so effectively warned off hospitals, that hospital worker friends told me stories of empty beds and under-employed staff.  Meanwhile, the grateful public outside the fortress walls were beating pots and pans and bringing pizza to hospitals in a show of support for their health-care “heroes” or “champions.”   Almost all other treatments and services not connected to COVID were drastically curtailed.  It is quite likely that the adverse consequences of these foregone diagnoses with treatments will, over time, quite outstrip the damage done by the virus.

A further question is whether hospitals, except in rare cases, are the best place for people suffering from the illness induced by this new coronavirus.  One thinks here of the panic about ventilators that took place in March and April.  Would we have enough?  Auto parts manufacturers in Ontario undertook to supply 10,000 ventilators;[44] an electronics manufacturer promised 10,000 more.[45]  Then it began to emerge that ventilators might be actively dangerous to COVID patients, and that intensive care units might sometimes be using them to protect themselves from infection rather than in the best interests of patients.[46]  One wonders if this story will ever be fully told.  There has been a lot of talk about how treatment for COVID has improved – in Britain just 26% of Covid-19 patients were placed on ventilation after admission to intensive care in September compared with up to 76% at the height of the pandemic [47] – but not so much about how much harm may have been done during the experimental phase.  The CBC Radio program Now or Never. for example, recently reported on a 73-year old man who spent 104 days on a respirator and is now an invalid who requires full-time care by his 29-year old daughter.  The broadcast focused on the daughter’s heroic charity, and the challenges it poses, not on whether the father’s treatment had been prudent.

Sick people need care.  In hospitals COVID sufferers are isolated from all those who actually want to care for them because fear of the disease and its potential spread has overcome all other obligations.  Might more have been cared for at home?  The answer is probably yes, had the health care system been able or willing to reorganize itself in the interests of its patients.  Instead doctors’ offices largely shut their doors, appointments for other ailments were cancelled, and the hospitals pulled up their drawbridges.  The health care system protected itself.

THE MEDIA 

Its been more than forty years since I was persuaded by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in their exemplary two-volume work The Political Economy of Human Rights, that an ostensibly free media can still function as a propaganda system – that there can be, as they say in their book, “brainwashing under freedom.”[48] Media at all times are biased – by their own structure, as Harold Innis and his successors showed, and by the social, political and economic environments in which they operate.  Fairy tales about a golden past, invented only to thrash a decadent present, are not a sound starting point for critique.  And yet, even so, it seems to me that the media to which I have been exposed during the pandemic have risen to new heights of cheer-leading and uncritical “messaging.”

It is in the nature of news media to disguise and dissimulate their own influence on what they report.  News is not news, they insist, just because the news media make it news – it is already news as a result of some inherent quality that the news media only recognize and reproduce.  This is partly true of course.  The news media do adapt to popular psychology, to established taste, and to pre-scripted narrative forms, more than they invent them.  But the media also innovate – drawing attention to particular facts and reinforcing particular narratives while disregarding others.   And, in the case of the pandemic – a novel phenomenon that might initially have allowed various constructions – their leading role has been striking.  This began the day that the W.H.O announced that the spread of COVID-19 should be considered a pandemic.  Blanket coverage began, implying that there was now nothing else of note happening in the world.  A sense of precariousness and foreboding was generated.  Everything was “unprecedented.”  “A new normal” seemed to fall from the sky almost overnight.   A state of emergency and exception was declared.  War metaphors were rife.  When the Globe and Mail stated explicitly on Sept 21, in an editorial I cited earlier, that “Canada is at war” it was only spelling out the position taken by major news media from the beginning.  Numbers were spun for maximum effect.  Particularly egregious during the second wave has been the constant trumpeting of “cases,” meaning positive test results, with little interest shown in how many are actually sick, how the number of cases might relate to the number of tests, how reliable the tests are etc.

This emphasis on whatever was most alarming helped to stampede a large part of the population into a state of panicked fear that had little to with the actual dangers facing them.  It also severely constrained political choice.  Politicians were praised for their leadership when they made strict rules and spanked for their laxity when they revoked them.  A myth was promulgated that “we are,” as another Globe and Mail editorial put it, “the masters of our pandemic fate.”[49]  Here the idea is that everything that happens is produced by policy – there is nothing that must be simply suffered because attempting to counteract it would only induce worse harms – every COVID infection accuses a political leadership that, as the same Globe editorial says, “should be doing more.”  Lurking in the background is the long-gestated idea of zero tolerance, now translated into “Covid-zero” and other fantasies of total suppression of the virus.[50]  (I am not denying here that some places – whether because of their size, their situation or the heavy-handed intensity of their regimes, like Melbourne’s 100-day lockdown inside “a ring of steel”[51] – have achieved low numbers.  The question is, for how long and at what cost?)

War imposes uniformity of opinion, and that has been particularly evident with the CBC and The Globe and Mail.  Some dissent has begun to creep in to the more conservative papers, the National Post and the Sun, but both the Globe and the CBC seem to conceive their role not as platforms for discussion but as guardians of correct thought.  The listeners and readers are to be encouraged, edified, occasionally chastised for incipient “complacency,”[52] but at all times treated as unified and homogeneous mass – all in this together, all sharing the same sentimental regard for our health care champions etc.  What this has meant, I think, is that an elite consensus, fortified by the elemental power of mythic tropes like war, solidarity in crisis, loyalty, heroism, and sacrifice, has imposed itself on the public.  The result has been that two crucial realities have been been hidden, overlooked or suppressed.  The first is the scientific dissensus I spoke of earlier.  The second is the residual popular common sense that instinctively prefers mutual aid and muddling through to centralized bureaucratic control.  I realize that common sense is a tricky term, regularly coopted by right-wing populism, as it was in Ontario in the mid-1990’s when the Conservative government of Mike Harris dressed up neo-liberal laissez-faire and municipal “amalgamation” as a “common sense revolution.”  But this apparent tendency of populism to skew to the right precisely illustrates the difficulty we are in.  Many historians, anthropologists and political theorists, in our time, have tried to describe forms of resistance to the state that do not terminate in an even more oppressive state, like Ontario’s “common sense revolution,” or a hundred other variants from fascism to Peronism to Trumpism.   E.P. Thompson wrote of “the moral economy of the crowd”;  James C. Scott has described various forms of ethnic and agrarian resistance;  Christopher Lasch portrayed  American populism as a defense of the moral and religious integrity of community life against elite and “meritocratic” disruption; and Ivan Illich tried to mark out a “vernacular” sphere in which both state and market are kept at bay.[53]  But these forms of populism remain largely unrecognized in the journalistic discourse I have been talking about.  The result is that populism is forced to the right and its dignity denied.  The outright contempt that is regularly expressed for Trump voters – Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” – illustrates this dynamic.

To be concrete, resistance to lockdown, masking and curbs on the right of assembly has steadily grown in Ontario, beginning with the demonstrators who began to gather at the legislature in the spring – the people, as I remarked earlier, that the Premier categorized as “yahoos.”  This fall, in Toronto, several thousand people gathered in Dundas Square.  The breadth of the coalition that made up this crowd is hard to judge but civil liberty, religious freedom and ruined livelihoods seemed to be the main issues animating them.  Remarkably, given the size of this demonstration, it was given, so far as I know, no coverage whatsoever beyond a brief mention as a traffic issue – Yonge St. was blocked – on the news channel CP24.  This appears to be nothing less than censorship – who needs to know what the yahoos are up to?  It certainly invites the nemesis I spoke of earlier – in which dissent deprived of a voice and a forum is driven into the more violent and destructive paths of political reaction.

Equally worrying is the failure to register or report the true variety of opinions amongst doctors, medical scientists and public health specialists – remember how many medical and public health luminaries were among the signers of last summer’s disregarded call for a “balanced approach” to the pandemic.

This does two things.  First, it reinforces the obsolete image I criticized above of science as a singular and unanimous voice, standing above politics, capable of authoritatively settling all disputes, and requiring that the citizenry possesses an unquestioning “trust.”  Second it casts media as guardians or shepherds of public opinion with a duty to withhold from a vulnerable and credulous public disturbing news about anti-lockdown protests, dissident epidemiologists or the actual science regarding the efficacy of masks.  (This presumes of course that the bellwethers of public opinion are attentive enough to know these things themselves rather than being just as sheep-like as those they presume to lead.)

ECOLOGY AND THE PANDEMIC

At the beginning of the pandemic some hopeful voices were raised in aid of the idea that it was, as George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian, “nature’s wake-up call to a complacent civilization.”[54]

Climate change activist Bill McKibben, writing in the TLS, also read the pandemic as a warning – “a dry run” for a coming century of horrors in which “there is going to be nothing normal anywhere.”[55]  I call these voices hopeful, because they interpret the pandemic as a call to repentance.  I would like to share this view, but I find it difficult to see in the “war” against the virus any relenting whatsoever in our civilization’s animating passion for domination and control. It seems rather to bespeak the opposite – an intensified desire to become the “masters of our pandemic fate” and the conquerors of this inconvenient scourge, determined to save “lives” even if it costs us even more “lives” than we are saving – like the American commander in Vietnam who told Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett in 1968 that it was “necessary to destroy the town to save it.”   This does not seem to me to presage the ethic of re-inhabitation that will at last bring us into harmony with our wasting world.

No one really knows where the new virus came from.  To call it a product of “Nature” is probably a stretch.  For, whether it came from a pangolin, a bat or a laboratory, as the producers of the documentary “Plandemic” hint, it is certainly a product of that hybrid nature/culture that has resulted from humanity’s unremitting pressure on every part and particle of our earthly home.  As such it is a part of our world, as viruses have been as long as humanity has existed.  Viruses have helped us – some stitched over time into our very DNA – and they have hindered us – to such an extent that we possess very robust defences against the hail of viruses we encounter every day.   This does not mean, of course, that COVID-19 is our friend, but it does mean that we are dealing with something primordial, and something that belongs to the wild and profuse creativity of the living earth, however malign it may be to our plans for next Tuesday.  One might wish for more of this perspective in those who propose that we should achieve “zero COVID,” become “masters or our pandemic fate,” “conquer COVID,” etc.

British biologist Mike Yeadon, whom I quoted earlier, is a veteran research scientist specializing in “inflammation, immunology, [and] allergy in the context of respiratory diseases.”  He recently made the following statement:The passage of this virus through the human population is an entirely natural process that has completely ignored our puny efforts to control it.”[56]

My own amateur researches have gradually led me to a similar conclusion.  But anyone whose views have been shaped by politicians, public health officials, or media pundits like André Picard is bound to regard such a view as arrant nonsense, not only erroneous but almost treasonably dangerous to the public weal.  Everyone who drinks from these wells knows that what a given country has been through is almost entirely a consequence of how politicians and public health officials have “managed” or, in the case of Donald Trump, “calamitously mismanaged” the pandemic.  Countries are regularly compared as if the only relevant difference between them were the extent of the restrictions imposed by their governments.  Climate, demography, geographical situation, health status, prior immunity – all have been more or less ignored in favour of the idea that government policy is the key determinant in the spread or containment of the virus.  Let me take some examples.

One is given by Mike Yeadon, in the presentation I just quoted.  He notes that countries with relatively high death rates due to COVID, like Sweden, Belgium and the U.K. all had much milder than usual flu epidemics over the last two to three years, while those with lower rates like Germany and Greece are coming off more severe flu epidemics.  This suggests that the difference between, let’s say Norway and Sweden which has again and again been ascribed to severity of lockdown is, in fact, a function of the number of susceptible old people in each country.

A second example: a recent paper in the scientific journal  Frontiers of Public Health found that, “[The] stringency of the measures [used] to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”[57] Instead the authors of this paper found that what best predicted the death rate was latitude (between 25° and 65°), GDP, and health status (amount of chronic disease, inactivity, etc.)  And, third, I would point, as Yeadon does, to the degree of prior immunity in a given population.[58]  Yeadon argues that cross-immunity conferred by exposure to other coronaviruses – SARS COV-2 is 80% similar to the first SARS virus – may have made a part of the population immune to COVID-19 at the outset.  This is germane in the case of countries like Taiwan and Vietnam that have had very few COVID deaths.  Both had considerable exposure to SARS and so may have possessed this prior immunity in much greater measure than worse-affected Western countries.  This suggests, again, that policy and popular compliance may have had less to do with lower death rates than has generally been supposed.

Whether Mike Yeadon’s claim – that our “puny efforts” to contain the pandemic have been absolutely without effect – can eventually be proved remains to be seen.  What it seems quite safe to say right now is that there is substantial evidence, first, that we are in the grip of a powerful and inexorable natural process and, second, that some considerable part of the pretence that determined leaders with bespoke policies ought to be able to dominate this process is mostly bravado, ritual and anthropocentric self-importance.

The conclusions I draw from these two points are not comforting.  Ivan Illich, speaking in Toronto in the fall of 1970, evoked the view of the earth from space that had recently been obtained by American men-on-the-moon.  This image, he said, could be interpreted in two radically different ways.  The first was as a call to repentance, a call, in effect, to sink back into the earth and to live within its affordances.  The second was as a call to “manage planet earth,” as The Scientific American would later say, or, with even greater hubris, to “save planet earth.”[59]  The first he saw as a choice to live freely, joyfully and even wildly, within our means; the second as a decision to perpetually skirt disaster, living always at the very edge of the biosphere’s tolerances, and entangling ourselves in an ever more comprehensive net of hygienic and environmental controls in order to keep this precarious enterprise “sustainable.”   Today, looking out my door at the masked and fearful people passing on the street, it is hard not to think that Illich’s prophecy has come to pass.  From the beginning of the pandemic there were critical virologists, immunologists and epidemiologist who made three crucial points: first that no one knew the severity of the new disease, i.e. its infection mortality rate; second, that no one knew how different populations and different sub-groups within populations would weather it; and, third, that no one knew how the possibly devastating consequences of prophylactic mass quarantine – lockdown – would compare with the suffering that might be caused by the disease.

But these cautions, to the extent that they were even heard, did not seem to induce any hesitation or produce that alert but quizzical and deliberate attitude that ought to attend such ignorance.  From the very beginning any idea of enduring, adapting or mitigating was condemned as fatalism or “yahoo” recklessness. The emphasis was always on control – “wrestling the virus to the ground”[60] – and on knowledge – gained by colonizing and appearing to tame an uncertain future with mathematical models founded on “educated” guesses.  This posture was reinforced by media who stood by ready to taunt any politician who refused to accept these shibboleths or was unwilling to pretend that control was possible and that scientific knowledge was at hand.  And these media in turn, as I wrote in an earlier essay, were acting as the agents of imperative concepts like risk, safety, management, and life – concepts that have by now entrenched themselves in our minds as unquestionable certainties.

What has all this to do with the ecological emergency on which I quoted George Monbiot and Bill McKibben at the outset?  Well it seems to me that the attitudes brought to light by the pandemic do not offer much hope in the face of the catastrophic earth changes that both writers expect will be the result of rising oceans and a warming atmosphere – at least not for someone like me, who favours the path Illich recommended – conviviality within restraint – rather than the one he warned against – growth under intensifying control.

And even for those who would affirm the necessity of strict control, and dismiss Illich’s vision of joyful austerity as a long-faded dream, there is the question of whether pandemic policy has fostered intelligent control.  Consider: policy has been driven more by panic than by prudence; science has been at the same time idolized and ignored; the well-off have fortified themselves, while those with a more precarious hold on livelihood, shelter, and even sanity have been cast off; political enmity has intensified; political categories have grown more rigid and confining; media have become more conformist and censorious; the sick and the dying have been denied comfort; and people have grown more afraid of one another.  This does not promise the more sensitive attunement to our world that our ecological impasse asks for.  It suggests an impenetrable human narcissism mesmerized by its own myths and sealed up in an increasingly artificial reality.

AGAMBEN AND PHILOSOPHY

The most ambitious attempt to draw out the epochal implications of the COVID-19 pandemic that I have seen is a short piece by Giorgio Agamben called “Medicine and Religion.”[61]  In this article Agamben argues that the pandemic has allowed science in the guise of medicine to occupy the entire space of existence, displacing every other human claim.  In modernity, he says, “three great systems of belief” have uneasily coexisted.  These are Christianity, capitalism and science, and they have achieved, through a history of conflict, intersection and negotiation, “a sort of peaceful articulated co-existence.”  But now bio-medicine has found the occasion to extend its “cult” even into domains where capitalism and Christianity formerly exerted their hegemonies:

[Medicine’s] cultic practice was like every liturgy episodic and limited in time… [T]he unexpected phenomenon that we are witnessing is that it has become permanent and all-encompassing.  It is no longer a question of taking medicine or submitting when necessary to a doctor visit or surgical intervention, the whole life of human beings must become the place of an uninterrupted cultic celebration. The enemy, the virus, is always present and must be fought unceasingly and without any possible truce.

Agamben uses the term “cult” here in the sense used by religious scholars to describe the devotional practices of any religion – the means by which a religion is cult-ivated – and not in the contemporary sense of a deviant group under the spell of some charismatic leader.  Medicine’s cult is now total because it can prescribe every gesture we are to make and proscribe the practices of competing cults.

Agamben’s acknowledged ancestor here is Walter Benjamin.  In a gnomic fragment called “Capitalism as Religion” which was published after his death, Benjamin speculated about capitalism as a form of religion.  Capitalism, he argued, has the same fundamental structure as Christianity but in a displaced or disguised form.  As a result of this displacement, the structure is rendered inaccessible – the devotee of the cult no longer knows what they are doing.  In this way it becomes a total cult.  Every day is a holy day (and therefore no day).  Sin and its forgiveness are effaced, leaving only an endless inexpiable guilt.  The eschatological element in Christianity – the view that a judgment awaits us at the end of time – is dispersed and deferred as a crisis that is never resolved, a growth that is never enough, an innovation always requiring some further innovation.

Agamben doesn’t spell all this out in his very short essay, but, in calling bio-medicine a cult that now aspires to a total jurisdiction, I believe he is imitating Benjamin’s argument.  (Agamben was the Italian editor of Benjamin’s collected works, and he is the author of an essay called “Capitalism as Religion” which spells out the import of Benjamin’s article much more lucidly than the original.[62])  It is clear enough, I think, that at least while the pandemic lasts, public health authorities are in a position to prescribe the gestures, all the gestures, we will make – where we can go, who we can see, how far away we should stand from them, what we should wear etc. – and to proscribe those we won’t,  including even absolute social and cultural fundamentals like care of the sick and dying, artistic performance, religious celebration, and the maintenance of family and community relationships.  Whether these are only emergency powers, or, as Agamben clearly fears, the inauguration of a permanent state of emergency in which health security will at all times trump other cultural and social obligations, remains to be seen.  Meanwhile his argument – that science in the guise of bio-medicine now superintendents a comprehensive cult whose central object of reverence is life – is persuasive.  People fail to see it or take it for granted only because life and the saving of “lives” has been so compellingly consecrated that it can no longer be examined or reasoned about.

What is important in Agamben’s argument for me is the claim that we are witnessing the establishment of a new religion and the consolidation of its cult.  To explicitly name this religion as science or medicine can be tricky because one is not just talking about the various practices of these fields, but about their presiding myths.  The institutions of science and medicine supply this new cult with part of its priesthood but they are not what constitute the religion.  What makes a religion, as Emile Durkheim argued more than a century ago, is the designation of a sacred dimension which is not to be touched, investigated or interfered with.[63] The sacred has the power to strike people dumb, to amaze them and, if necessary, to sacrifice them.  This power now inheres in the demi-gods health, safety, risk awareness and, their epitome, life.  So long as a certain course of action is seen to be saving lives, it’s not really necessary to ask what else it might be doing.

This idea that we are faced with a religion and not just a contestable scientific point-of-view (though it is also that) has multiple implications.  One is that this religion must be faced and criticized as such.   This not to say that questionable scientific claims should not be challenged on scientific grounds, but only to recognize that ideas held, as it were, religiously, under scientific disguise, will not yield to scientific argument, however cogent.  A second is that this new religion has not dropped from the sky but is derived from Christianity, the religion that so many think they have renounced, overcome and set aside.  Benjamin argued in the essay discussed above that capitalism-as-religion is a “parasite” of Christianity. Ivan Illich, my teacher on this point, made the same argument with respect to the new “religiosity,” as he called it, of life.  We would not now be bowing to this new idol, he wrote, if Christians had not for two millennia preached and sought the “life more abundant” that Jesus promised when he announced to his friend Martha, without qualification, “I am Life.”[64]  Agamben, too, shares this view, suggesting in his essay that “The medical religion has unreservedly taken up from Christianity the eschatological urgency that the latter had let fall by the wayside.”  (“Eschatological urgency” here refers to the quasi-apocalyptic, Armageddon-like character of our mobilization against the virus.)    Two ideas follow: the first is that we are never more religious than when we think we have overcome religion; the second that our future is being determined, all unconsciously, by a disowned and disregarded past.

Agamben’s concern, which he has bravely expressed since the beginning of the pandemic, is that the rule of the religiously-sanctioned health security state has become “all-pervasive,” “normatively obligatory,” and deeply corrosive of any form of life that stands on competing grounds – funeral rites are an obvious example of such forms of life, and the outlawing of such rites, along with the abandonment of the dying, was one of the first elements of the pandemic regime to shock and alarm Agamben.   What is demanded in response, he says, is that “philosophers must again enter into conflict with religion,” – something that has “happened many times in the course of history.”  I believe this to be so, and I believe that what he means by philosophy is not a professional discipline open only to initiates but the very practice of freedom insofar as that practice requires us to understand how we came by our ideas, the grounds on which we are governed, and other such elementary matters.  What Agamben calls “conflict with religion” might also be understood as a claim for freedom of religion (since it is arguable that no one can avoid having a religion, and therefore the best we can aspire to is to hold – and hold off – that religion freely).

Long ago, in 1971’s Deschooling Society Ivan Illich made the claim that compulsory schooling, both by its ritual structure and its vaunting spiritual ambition, constituted a church, and, as such ought to be disestablished.  Had medicine then been compulsory, he would doubtless have made the same claim in his Medical Nemesis (1975) which criticized medical establishments on the same grounds as his earlier book had analyzed compulsory schooling. Agamben’s argument is that medicine has now also made itself “normatively obligatory,” and that this new power will not necessarily recede with the pandemic.  In 1791, the United States adopted a first amendment to its new constitution forbidding any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Section Two of Canada’s Charter of Rights guarantees Canadians the same freedom.  So far these freedoms have been understood as applying only to what are obvious, explicit and formally-constituted churches.

If Illich and Agamben are right, the truly powerful churches – the ones that tell us not only how we ought to live but how we must live – exert their claims on us in the name of education, health, safety, risk reduction and other shibboleths of the new religion.  It follows that we now need what Illich’s dear friend, the American critic Paul Goodman, called a “new reformation.”[65]  The freedoms for which the first Reformation fought must now be fought for again.

David Cayley. distinguished author and radio documentary producer. Click here for his bio

NOTES

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/lives-vs-lives-the-global-cost-of-lockdown?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020200516%20%20Fisher%20%20AL+CID_91ecdf3e8f5ee7b8abe842ca3cbf65e6

[3] http://www.balancedresponse.ca/

[4] https://gbdeclaration.org/

[5] https://lockdownsceptics.org/what-sage-got-wrong/

[6] Ibid.

[7]https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020201016%20%20House%20Ads%20%20SM+CID_67ee9eb414f5b55517be202ffd3379bd

[8] Jutta Mason has made a compendium of links to these various open letters, pro and con, on the website of her  Centre for Local Research into Public Space (CELOS).  Both the Ontario and Belgian doctors’ letters can be found there: https://www.celos.ca/wiki/wiki.php?n=BackgroundResearch.Covid19Quarantine

[9] Andrew Coyne, “Herd Immunity is a great strategy is you don’t mind millions of dead,” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 27, ’20, D2

[10] He made this remark during an appearance with his two colleagues on Unherd: https://unherd.com/2020/10/covid-experts-there-is-another-way/

[11] https://medium.com/medical-myths-and-models/the-human-genome-is-full-of-viruses-c18ba52ac195

[12] “la plus grande crise de santé publique de son histoire” – statement in front of the Prime Minister’s residence on March 25, 2020 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzRw-AIeNuY

[13] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of Community, Marlowe and Company, 1989

[14] Uwe Pörksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language, Penn State Press, 1995; Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Western Mind, Vintage, 1988, pp. 106-107.

[15] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paladin, 1972

[16] Bruno Latour, Science in Action, Harvard, 1987

[17] Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 2011, p. 13

[18] Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, M.I.T., 2005

[19] Broadcasts here: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-to-think-about-science-part-1-24-1.2953274; transcripts here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/542c2af8e4b00b7cfca08972/t/58ffb590db29d67edabd4e26/1493153189310/How+To+Think+About+Science.pdf   See also Ideas on the Nature of Science, ed. David Cayley, Goose Lane, 2009

[20] Zain Chagla, Sumon Chakrabarti, Isaac Bogoch, and Dominik Mertz, “Healthy Discussions: Diversity of Thought Is  Needed In Pandemic Response,” The National Post, Nov. 6, 2020, A13.

[21] Socrates speaks of “the noble lie” in Republic, Book III, 414b

[22] Sunetra Gupta, “A Contagion of Hatred and Hysteria,” https://www.aier.org/article/a-contagion-of-hatred-and-hysteria/

[23] https://www.aier.org/about/

[24] André Picard, “Don’t be complacent about COVID-19,” The Globe and Mail, Sept. 29, 2020, A13.

[25] “Forget Politics.  It’s time to fight COVID-19,” The Globe and Mail, Sept. 21, 2020, A12

[26] André Picard, “Fasten your seat-belts,” The Globe and Mail, Nov. 9, 3030, p. A7

[27] https://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Rancourt-Masks-dont-work-review-science-re-COVID19-policy.pdf

[28] Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, “Do Face Masks Work?” The Spectator, Nov. 19, 20

[29] Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957, p. ix

[30] Illich met Kohr in Puerto Rico in the 1950’s, and they remained friends thereafter.   lllich wrote the introduction to Kohr’s book, The Inner City (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 1989) and gave the laudatio at a celebration of Kohr’s eightieth birthday.  He speaks of their friendship in David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, House of Anansi, 1992, pp. 82-84

[31] See D’arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971 (first edition 1917) and J.B.S. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, Vol. 2, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1956 (originally published in 1928).

[32] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sex-covid-19-councillor-calling-for-sexual-health-clinics-to-open-1.5662208

[33] See note 13 above

[34] Luke 5:37

[35] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed . Michael Oakeshott, Collier Macmillian, 1962, p. 132

[36] https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/about

[37] https://plandemicseries.com/

[38] https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events-archive/2005_atlantic_storm/

[39] https://vaxxedthemovie.com/

[40] The paper is here and still legible under the big RETRACTED stamp on every page: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltext

[41] Republic, Book V, 473 c-e

[42] Matthew 5:5

[43] See note 12 above

[44] https://canada.autonews.com/coronavirus/canadian-suppliers-team-help-produce-10000-ventilators-ontario;

[45] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/vexos-to-manufacture-and-deliver-10-000-mvm-ventilators-to-the-government-of-canada-in-its-national-mobilization-to-combat-the-covid-19-pandemic-890140952.html

[46] See, for example: Dr. Matt Strauss, “The Underground Doctors’ Movement Questioning the Use of Ventilators,” The Spectator, May 2, 2020

[47] The Spectator, Oct. 6, 2020

[48] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Black Rose Books, 1979, p. 71

[49] “We are the masters of our pandemic fate,” The Globe and Mail, Nov. 3, 2020, A10

[50] “Covid-zero” is the brand devised by infectious disease specialist Dr. Andrew Morris and some colleagues for their proposal that Canada adopt an “aggressive national strategy” to fight the pandemic: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.5803690/you-don-t-copy-the-losers-says-doctor-pushing-covid-zero-strategy-1.5805367

[51] Kelly Grant, “How an Australian state beat back its second wave,” The Globe and Mail, Nov. 14, ’20, A14

[52] André Picard, “Don’t be complacent about COVID-19,” The Globe and Mail, Sept. 29. 2020, A11

[53] E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century,” Past and Present, No. 50, Feb., 1971 – reprinted in E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, New Press, 1993; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale, 1999; Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, WW Norton,  1995; and Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, Marion Boyars, 1981.

[54] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/25/covid-19-is-natures-wake-up-call-to-complacent-civilisation

[55] Bill McKibben, “The End of the World as We Know It,” TLS, July 31, 2020

[56] ttps://www.aier.org/article/an-education-in-viruses-and-public-health-from-michael-yeadon-former-vp-of-pfizer/

[57] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full#SM6

[58] https://lockdownsceptics.org/what-sage-got-wrong/

[59] Managing Planet Earth: Readings from Scientific American Magazine, W.H. Freeman and Co., 1990

[60] Editorial, The Globe and Mail, May 12, 2020

[61] https://itself.blog/2020/05/02/giorgio-agamben-medicine-as-religion/

[62] Giorgio Agamben, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Agamben and Radical Politics, ed. Daniel McLoughlin, University of Edinburgh Press, 2016

[63] Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The Free Press, 1995 (first published 1912)

[64] Ivan Illich, “The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life,” in In the Mirror of the Past, Marion Boyars, 1992; “life more abundant,” John 10:10 – “I am come that they should have life and have it more abundantly.”; “I am Life” John 11:25 – “I am the Resurrection and the LIfe.”

[65] In 1970, two years before his death, Goodman published New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (PM Press, 2010)

For over two decades, the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW) has been fighting for gender equality, the empowerment of women and improvement of women’s rights in Kenya and broadly in East Africa. Established in 1999, CREAW has used bold, innovative and holistic interventions for the realization of women’s rights. Most of its programs have focused on challenging practices that undermine equity, equality and constitutionalism, promoting women’s participation in decision making and deepening the ideology and philosophy of women’s empowerment.

In this interview, Mercy Jelimo, an Executive Program Officer at the Nairobi-based Center for Rights, Education and Awareness (CREAW) discusses the current situation about gender issues, landmarked achievements, existing challenges and the way forward. Quite recently, she presented her latest research commissioned by partner organizations – Women Deliver and Focus 2030. Here are the interview excerpts:

In your estimation and from your research, how is the situation with gender inequality, specifically in Kenya, and generally in East Africa?

MJ: This survey was commissioned by our partners Women Deliver and Focus 2030 with over 17,000 respondents covering 17 countries on six continents. The survey findings indicated that over 60% of respondents believed that Gender Equality had progressed. However, on average 57% of respondents also felt that the fight for gender equality is not over particularly because we see key aspects of gender inequality persist including:  unequal distribution of unpaid care, domestic work and parental responsibilities between men and women (the COVID19 pandemic has spotlighted the burden women bear as caregivers) different employment opportunities with religion and culture continuing to entrench discrimination against women.

Whereas in East Africa, the survey only covered Kenya, the results are shared across. In particular, the Kenyan respondents indicated that there has been notable progress in regards to Gender equality particularly when it comes to the legal and policy frameworks to guard against discrimination on whichever basis be it sex, religion, class or race.

Over the last quarter century, the country has promulgated a new Constitution and a raft of subsidiary legislations and policies that are critical to Gender equality. Some of these laws include but not limited to: the Sexual Offences Act 2006, the Children’s Act 2001, the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act 2011, the Marriage Act 2014, the Protection Against Domestic Violence Act 2015, the Victim Protection Act 2014, the Witness Protection Act 2008, the National Policy for Prevention and Response to Gender-Based Violence 2014, the National Guidelines on the Management of Sexual Violence 2015, the Multi-sector Standard Operating Procedures for Prevention and Response to Gender Based Violence, and the National Policy on the Eradication of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) 2019.

Kenya has also ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol), the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, among other instruments. However, even with this robust legal framework, accountability and the implementation of these laws have lagged behind.

The status of women and girls as compared to men and boys still remains unequal at all levels of society both public and private. This imbalance manifests itself as normalized negative social norms and ‘cultural’ practices with brutal violations against women and girls continuing to be perpetrated, women being excluded from leadership and decision making  positions, limited in their political participation and women and girls being denied access to economic opportunities.

Undeniably, women and girls continue to be victims of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) including rape, domestic violence, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and child marriage. In fact, as of March 2020, according to statistics from Kenya’s Gender Violence Recovery Centre (GVRC), 45% of women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced either physical or sexual violence with women with girls accounting for 90% of gender-based violence (SGBV) cases reported. Harmful practices such as FGM and child marriage are still prevalent, with the Kenya Demographic Health Survey (2014) reporting a national FGM prevalence rate of 21% for women and girls aged 15-49 years of age. The prevalence rate differs from one practicing community to the other, with communities such Somali (96%) Samburu (86%) and The Maasai (78%) having significantly higher prevalence. 

Sadly, this is the story across all the other countries in East Africa where we have progressive legal and Policy framework but with zero accountability mechanisms. It is worth noting that in 2018, the East Africa Community Council of Ministers approved the EAC Gender policy which is key to ensuring that gender equality and empowerment of women are not only integrated into every aspect of its work but provides an outline of key priority areas for partner states. The EAC has also instituted other gender mainstreaming efforts including the EAC Social Development framework (2013), the EAC child policy (2016) the EAC Youth policy (2013), a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy for EAC Organs and Institutions, (2013) amongst others.

By the way, what are your research findings that you presented in report on Jan 28? Are there any similarities and differences about gender studies in other East Africa countries?

MJ: The key findings from Kenya can generally be used to paint a picture of the situation in the EAC region. Apparent Gender disparities in the region remain in a number of areas such as in political representation, access to education and training, access to quality and affordable healthcare, high unemployment rates of women, rampant sexual and gender-based violence, harmful cultural practices, inadequate financing for gender needs and programs. 

Firstly, when asked about the status of Gender Equality, the majority of respondents identified Gender Equality as an important issue (96%) and that government should do more (invest) to promote gender equality.

Secondly, the role of religion and culture; how boys and girls are socialized and unequal representation were identified as obstacles to gender equality. This finding indicates the work that still remains to be done for Gender equality actors in Kenya and other partner states in the EAC. The most important step to achieving gender equality is dismantling systems and structures that promote and protect inequalities. whereas the country has made tremendous progress in having relevant legal and policy frameworks, there is still lack of implementation of these laws – this finding answers the why question– because institutions, people and structures are still very patriarchal. Furthermore, the lack of representation of women (also cited by Kenyan respondents as an obstacle) might explain the failures in implementation of the laws and policies.

Thirdly, the respondents identified corruption as the most important issue facing the country. This finding is also supported by the 2019 Global Corruption Barometer – Africa survey that showed that more than half of citizens in the continent think graft is getting worse and that governments were doing very little to curb the vice.  The impact that corruption has on service delivery cannot be overemphasized especially on public goods such as healthcare, education, water and sanitation. More specifically, is the resulting lack of public financing to programs and interventions that address gender needs & promote gender equality.

A recent Corruption Perception Index (CPI) Report by Transparency International indicated that all the countries in East Africa with the exception of Rwanda scored below the global average rate of 43 out of 100. More importantly is that the report noted that countries that perform well on the CPI have strong enforcement of campaign finance regulations as this correlates with the dismal performance of women in politics who often than not do not have the requisite political funding to mount effective political campaigns and outcompete their male counterparts.

What would you say about discrimination or representation of women in politics in the region? Do you feel that women are not strongly encouraged in this political sphere?

MJ: There has been significant progress when it comes to women’s political representation and participation with a majority of the countries in the EAC region adopting constitutional quotas and other remedies to promote representation. All the countries in the East Africa Community have achieved the 30% critical mass with the exception of Kenya (21%) and South Sudan (28%). More women occupy ministerial portfolios that were perceived to be the preserve of men such as defense, foreign affairs, manufacturing, trade, public service and so forth. Not to miss that the leading country globally – Rwanda is from the region (63%).

However, most institutions including parliaments are still male dominated and women in the region still face a number of challenges including violence against women in politics, religious and cultural beliefs and norms that limit women role, lack of support from political parties, lack of campaign financing and unregulated campaign financing environment with the progressive legal and policy frameworks yet to be fully implemented. These challenges continue to limit the representation and participation of women in public and  political sphere. The region is yet to have a woman as a president just to illustrate the glass ceilings that remain.

Tell us about how women are perceived (public opinion) in the society there? How is the state or government committed to change this situation, most probably by enacting policies?

MJ: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I ‘ll tell you what you value” This quote by President Joe Biden aptly captures the state of affairs in the region in relation to gender equality. The countries in the region have continued to enact and reform legal and policy frameworks but have largely remain unimplemented. The primary reasons being lack of financial and accountability mechanisms to ensure that these programs and policies are actualized. For us to reach to the conclusion that governments are committed to promoting gender equality and women empowerment, we need to see a shift from lip service to prioritization and adequate resourcing of programs that advance gender equality.

What platforms are there for improving gender equality, for ending gender-based violence and for discussing forms of discrimination there? Do you suggest governments have to act now to accelerate issues and progress on gender equality in East Africa?

MJ: As Deliver for Good Campaign partners in Kenya together with other gender equality advocates, the Sustainable Development Goals and Africa Agenda 2063 provide important blueprints to developing our society economically, socially and politically. The Deliver for Good campaign is an evidence-based advocacy campaigns that call for better policies, programming and financial investments in girls and women. Most importantly, the Generation Equality Forum (GEF) is an important mobilization moment to ask governments and private sector to accelerate progress not just in East Africa but globally. Specifically, we will be using this moment to call on governments, not only make bigger and bolder commitments but also, to ensure that they match these commitments with financing and accountability mechanisms.

As the Deliver for Good campaign partners in Kenya, we have a particular interest on one of the GEF Action Coalitions – Gender Based Violence – to leverage on the Kenyan government leadership and the political will to end traditional practices that are harmful to women and girls such as Female Genital Mutilation and Child Marriage. Particularly and in line with the survey findings, we will be calling for: increased accountability for physical and sexual crimes against women; increased investment on prevention and protection programs while calling for inclusive efforts and programs that leave no woman behind in Kenya and East Africa.

Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research. 

Feature image: Merciy Jelimo (provided by the author)

The recent viral sharing of the speculative map of Turkey’s future regional influence that was first published by Stratfor founder George Friedman in his 2010 book about “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast For The 21st Century” is provoking distrust between the Russian and Turkish societies since this image predicts that Ankara will eventually exert sway over Crimea and all of southern Russia by 2050.

Speculative Turkish Regional Influence By 2050

A decade-old speculative map first published by Stratfor founder George Friedman in his 2010 book about “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast For The 21st Century” is provoking distrust between the Russian and Turkish societies after it recently went viral on social media. The image predicts that Turkey’s future regional influence will eventually extent over Crimea and all of southern Russia, among other places such as the South Caucasus, most of the Mideast with the notable exceptions of Iran and “Israel”, and parts of some Central Asian former Soviet Republics by 2050.

 

It became such a popular subject of discussion that Turkish TV channel TGRT showed the map on one of their programs, which prompted RIA Novosti to report on it. Some of the geopolitically unaware masses in both societies reacted as though its unexpected viral popularity served as some implied statement of intent by Turkey, with few realizing that it was a deliberately provocative prediction by an American analyst.

Suspicious Timing For An Old Decontextualized Map

It’s impossible to know for sure how and why Stratfor’s map went viral in recent days, but it might be because someone suddenly discovered or remembered it and thought the image relevant enough to share in light of current discussions about Turkey’s growing regional influence following Ankara-backed Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia late last year in what Baku regards as its Patriotic War. It could also be that a nefarious actor sought to introduce it to the global information ecosystem at this particular point in time in order to provoke the inter-societal distrust that subsequently emerged to a certain extent. Whatever the truth may be, a few insightful observations should be made about the map’s prediction. The first is that it’s completely decontextualized from the arguments laid out in Friedman’s book, leading whoever sees it — especially among the largely geopolitically unaware masses — to imagine for themselves how that outcome could come about, whether through peaceful means or even militant ones. This invites speculation, which can take on a life of its own as is seen.

Unscientific Predictions

The second observation is that the predicted extent of Turkey’s 2050 regional influence doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s difficult to believe that Turkey would establish influence all throughout the majority non-Turkic Mideast yet somehow the Turkic Azeris of northwestern Iran wouldn’t fall under Ankara’s sway while the majority ethnic Russian population of southern Russia would. There’s also no accounting for why only particular parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would be within Turkey’s sphere of influence. It’s also very odd that eastern Ukraine was included in the map too since there’s no ethno-religious basis for predicting that. This makes the overall prediction “unscientific”, for lack of a better word, from even the most basic geopolitical perspective. The third and final observation of importance is the innuendo that Russia will be so weak by 2050 that Turkey would be able expand its influence within the Eurasian Great Power’s borders in the first place. This very strongly suggests that Friedman gives credence to the flawed theory that Russia might soon collapse.

Inter-Societal Distrust

Some geopolitically unaware but well-intentioned Turks might feel proud when look at Statfor’s map so long as they don’t think about the consequences that its extremely unlikely implementation would have for their country’s strategic partnership with Russia, while it’s understandable that any patriotic Russian would be greatly disturbed by the predictions being made and feel very angry if they saw some Turks reacting positively to the ones pertaining to Crimea and southern Russia. The larger dynamic at play is that the internet is bringing societies together like never before, and social media is functioning as a platform for them to observe one another’s reactions to various developments such as the unexpected viral popularity of this map. Google Translate enables Russians and Turks to read one another’s comments, which can lead to heightened distrust if some members from one of their societies voice support for predictions that risk violating the territorial integrity of the other.

Social Media Responsibility

To be fair, though, there was quite a lot of speculation on the Russian side of the internet back in 2015 following the November mid-air incident between their two countries. Some Russians talked about their desire to see Moscow arm regional Kurdish forces that Ankara regards as terrorists, with it being strongly implied or at times even outright stated that the intent would be to promote separatist ends as revenge. Just like Russians are rightly offended by some Turks expressing positive feelings about Stratfor’s speculative map predicting that their country will exert influence over Crimea and southern Russia by 2050, so too were Turks rightly offended by some Russians discussing Kurdish scenarios half a decade ago. No one can or should censor anyone in either society or others for expressing their personal views on geopolitical topics no matter how offensive they might be, but everyone should at least become more aware that anything that they publicly post even among friends can be read by anyone else, including unintended individuals from abroad who might get offended.

Different Societies, Different Sentiments

This can be troublesome for soft power and make it all the more complicated. There are times where someone’s personal views might differ from their government’s official ones, which is natural but might be confusing for foreigners who come across them. They might also wrongly believe that a person’s views represent all of society’s, which is especially the case when it comes to trolls who misportray themselves as representing their compatriots’ true sentiments. All of this could provoke distrust between societies even if it isn’t intentional. There’s no silver-bullet solution other than recognizing everyone’s right to share their geopolitical ideas on the internet and becoming aware of the fact that it’s not a good idea to make generalizations. Furthermore, everyone must acknowledge that different societies have different views on various topics, some of which are mutually contradictory with one’s own societies’. It’s for this reason why there will always be disputes over historical interpretations of important figures and events.

Concluding Thoughts

Keeping all of this in mind, the more that Russians and Turks acknowledge each other’s freedoms of geopolitical expression in cyberspace and sometimes different future visions, the less likely it is that either society will begin to distrust the other anytime their representatives come across something provocative shared or commented upon by their counterparts. It’s also worth mentioning that nobody can account for the surprise viral popularity of Stratfor’s decade-old decontextualized map, which might have been purely coincidental or perhaps also part of a plot by a third party to drive a wedge between these two strategic partners’ societies. The fact of the matter however is that Turkey doesn’t have any interest in exerting influence within Russia’s borders no matter how nostalgic some Turks might feel about one day seeing this happen once again or how much some Russians fear this scenario transpiring. The Stratfor map scandal should therefore serve as a lesson in media literacy, inter-societal differences, and the need not to let viral images cause problems between strategic partners.

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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.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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