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On May 3, two slow moving drones flew over the Kremlin and then exploded in flames when the Russian military forced them down. Whether the drone attack was a serious attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s life or not, Moscow perceived it as one, announcing that “Last night, the Kiev regime attempted a drone strike against the residence of the President of the Russian Federation at the Kremlin. . . . We view these actions as a planned terrorist attack and an assassination attempt targeting the President.”

Western officials were quick to dismiss the dramatic event as a drama event, suggesting that it was likely a Russian false flag operation. Ukraine, for its part, denied any involvement. Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Zelensky, called the operation “predictable” and insisted that “Ukraine wages an exclusively defensive war and does not attack targets on the territory of the Russian Federation.” He then said the event occurred “definitely without Ukraine’s drones over the Kremlin.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said categorically, “We don’t attack Putin or Moscow. We fight on our territory. We are defending our villages and cities.”

But US intelligence now says that that is not true. The attack was not a Russian performance: the denials were a Ukrainian performance. Three weeks after the attack, The New York Times has reported that US intelligence agencies now believe that the drone attack was carried out by “one of Ukraine’s special military or intelligence units.”

US intelligence bases its assessment on communication intercepts that reveal Russian surprise at the attack and the findings of Moscow’s preliminary investigations that blame Ukraine as well as Ukrainian communications that reveal a belief that it was Ukraine.

The intelligence agencies say it is “unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.” But it seems questionable that such a significant and consequential act would be carried out by Ukraine’s military or intelligence with no high level approval or awareness. American officials suspect that Zelensky may not have specific awareness in advance because “Mr. Zelensky and his top aides have set the broad parameters of the covert campaign, leaving decisions about who and what to target to the security services and their operatives. In doing so, Mr. Zelensky and his top aides can deny knowing about them.” US intelligence rates its confidence that the Ukrainian government “directly authorized the Kremlin drone attack” as “low” “because intelligence agencies do not yet have specific evidence identifying which government officials, Ukrainian units or operatives were involved.”

The US assessment that Ukraine is responsible for the drone attack on the Kremlin and, more critically, the Russian assessment that it was could have three critical consequences.

The UK has recently provided Ukraine with long range Storm Shadow cruise missiles with a range sufficient to reach deep into Russian held territory, including Crimea. The US has recently authorized supplying Ukraine with F-16 fighter-bombers that have the capacity to strike deep inside internationally recognized Russian territory.

The Ukrainian government has given the UK “assurances . . . that these missiles will be used only within Ukrainian sovereign territory and not inside Russia.” US President Joe Biden says that he has received “flat assurances” from Zelensky that F-16’s won’t be used inside Russian territory. Ukraine has long promised “not to target Russian territory with weapons provided by the West.”

But Western confidence in these assurances has surely been deflated by the drone attacks over the Kremlin in Moscow. The attack demonstrates a willingness to strike in the heart of Russia. And it is not an anomaly. In May alone, Ukraine has used drones to attack a military training ground and an oil refinery in Russian territory. In December, Ukraine carried out two attacks on Russia’s Engels air base.

US assessments that Zelensky may lack awareness of these drone attacks and that he has kept his promise not to use US supplied weapons to strike inside Russia must also surely have been shaken by comments by Zelensky captured by US intelligence in electronic intercepts. In February, Zelensky was heard to complain to General Valery Zaluzhny, his top commander, that Ukraine “does not have long-range missiles capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”. On May 13, The Washington Post reported, based on intercepted internal digital communications, that in January, Zelensky suggested that Ukraine “conduct strikes in Russia.” In February, Zelensky suggested to Zaluzhny that “Ukraine attack unspecified deployment locations in Rostov,” in western Russia, using drones.

The second consequence is the danger that these attacks could provoke Russia to escalate and that, since the weapons are supplied by the US – not to mention that Moscow believes that the decision to carry out these attacks is made in Washington – it increases the risk that the US could get drawn into the war.

The recent wave of drone attacks “have made officials in the United States . . . uncomfortable,” according to the Times, precisely because of this danger. “The Biden administration is concerned about the risk that Russia will blame U.S. officials and retaliate by expanding the war beyond Ukraine.”

And there is a third concern created by the Russian statement in reply to the attack on the Kremlin that it “reserves the right to take countermeasures wherever and whenever it deems appropriate.”

In the early days of the war, Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was attempting to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. In response to Zelensky’s fear that Russia would assassinate him, Bennett says he received a promise from Putin that “I won’t kill Zelensky.”

But, to Russia, the drone attack demonstrates that that promise is not reciprocal. It demonstrates a willingness to assassinate Putin. And it is not the only evidence. In what the Kyiv Post calls “an incredibly frank interview,” the deputy head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, Vadym Skibitsky, “bluntly admitted to plans to assassinate President Putin.” “We are getting closer and closer,” he said.

Further evidence comes from the head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate and Skibitsky’s boss, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who, while not discussing Putin directly, admitted that Ukraine was responsible for a number of assassinations of prominent Russians. “We’ve already successfully targeted quite a few people,” he said. “There have been well-publicized cases everyone knows about, thanks to the media coverage.” Budanov said in an interview that “we’ve been killing Russians and we will keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine.”

The lack of reciprocity on the promise not to kill Zelensky may have canceled the promise. That is the third possible consequence. “How would Americans react if a drone hit the White House?” Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov asked. “The answer is obvious for any politician as well as for the average citizen: the punishment would be harsh and inevitable.” How harsh? “After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left except for the physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique,” Former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev said. His choice of reactions was seconded by the Speaker of the Russian parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, who said, “An attack on the president is an attack on Russia. There can be no negotiations. We will demand the use of weapons that are capable of stopping and destroying the Kyiv terrorist regime.”

The drone attack inside Russian territory, believed by Russia to be an attempted assassination on Putin and assessed by US intelligence to likely be a Ukrainian operation, accomplished little. But is has undoubtedly deflated Washington’s trust in Zelensky’s promise not to use US supplied weapons to strike inside Russia. It has also increased the danger of escalating the war, of drawing the US into the war and of attempts on Zelensky’s life in return.

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Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.

Featured image is from Caitlin Johnstone

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*** 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won a third term as President of Turkey which will extend his time in power to a quarter of a century. The authoritarian leader has won another five years at the helm of a ship struggling in a sea of economic woes, that has seen inflation rise to an annual 44%, and the Turkish lira devalued. Economic experts point the blame squarely at Erdogan who has refused to follow economic policy and raise interest rates.

Erdogan won just over 52% of the vote against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition candidate chosen to represent a consortium of six parties in the second round run-off on May 28.

The race was close, and that means Turkey is divided down the middle, with supporters of Erdogan, and the other half feeling desperate for change, unsatisfied with the state of the country, and fearful of where it is headed. The Erdogan-controlled media played a large role as they showcased Erdogan’s campaign ads, but gave almost no air time for the opposition.

The secret of Erdogan’s success

Erdogan decided to focus on an underrepresented group. Turkey is a large country, and has several sizeable and important big cities; places as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. However, the country has thousands of small villages, and the villagers are generally under-educated, Islamic fundamentalists, holding conservative values, and have felt their voices were unheard in Ankara.

Erdogan had been religious as a young man, and it was easy for him to identify with the religious people living in rural areas. People felt marginalized because their wives and daughters wore a headscarf, and this had been banned in government institutions.

A similar tactic was employed successfully by Donald Trump in 2016. He focused on supporters in rural areas, under-educated and with fundamentalist Christian values. 

Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk, is considered to be the father of modern Turkey. After the 400-year reign of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey fell at the end of WW1, Ataturk came into leadership and had a new vision for the collapsed country. He banned the headscarf and banned using the Arabic alphabet in writing, instead writing in the English alphabet and from left to right, like in Europe.  Ataturk wanted Turkey to look west, follow Europe, and turn its back on the old ways of Asia and the Middle East. He was a visionary and transformed Turkey into a secular, modern, and Western-looking nation.

However, the Turkish villagers didn’t fully embrace the secular vision Turkey came to represent; a 99% Islamic country, but organized as a secular democracy.  The villagers, the backbone of Erdogan’s support, were happy for modern improvements, but they clung to their fundamentalist religious beliefs as a badge of honor. Erdogan knew how to harvest their votes, and they kept him in power for two decades, and they got him re-elected on May 28, 2023.

Many critics of Erdogan have pointed out his support of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a global organization that supports the same goals as ISIS: to dismantle all governments and to institute the Koran as the only constitution. Islam is not only a set of religious beliefs, but it is also a life system, encompassing civil governance as well.

Egypt, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and UAE have all banned the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has tried twice to pass legislation in Washington, DC. to ban the group, but faced fierce opposition from both parties.

The Muslim Brotherhood is very powerful and connected to governments in Washington, DC., London, and Berlin. Turkey and Qatar have both been connected to the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, and this brought the two countries together as partners in the Obama administration’s attack on Syria.

Syrian conflict participation

The US Obama-Biden administration 2011 began an armed conflict in Syria for regime change. The weapons came from US sources in Libya, shipped to Turkey, and delivered over the border at Idlib, which Turkey still occupies today. Turkey had partnered with the US on the project to change the secular government in Damascus.  Obama saw the power of the Muslim Brotherhood and formulated a plan to use them in Syria to overthrow the government. The weapons and training were administrated by the CIA program Timber Sycamore in Turkey.

Erdogan’s supporters in Turkey were sold the idea that the Syrian citizens wanted an Islamist leader, like Erdogan, and they bought into the idea of supporting the ‘freedom fighters’ in Syria. But, the project came with a cost to Turkey: they had to accept 3.6 million Syrian refugees, and they have overstayed their welcome since 2011 because the US-NATO attack on Syria failed.  It was the lack of support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria which caused the plan to fail. The Free Syrian Army dissolved, and Al Qaeda and ISIS took its place. 

Both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu promised their supporters that all the Syrian refugees will be sent back to Syria.  The refugees have been willing to work for very low wages, taking jobs away from Turkish workers who have Unions that set the wages higher. Syrians and Turks may share Islam, but they do not share a common language, and their cultures are very different.

Why the opposition lost the race

The opposition to Erdogan was formed of a coalition of six parties who banded together to remove him from power.  Among the parties were several young, intelligent, and charismatic leaders. Ekrem Imamoglu, Mayor of Istanbul, was a leading contender to remove Erdogan, but Erdogan engineered a legal case that prevented Imamoglu from running as a candidate. Analysts also pointed to the Mayor of Ankara, Mansur Yavas, and politician Ali Babacan as able to beat Erdogan in a race, but the coalition of opposition parties instead went with an older, accountant Kemal Kilicdaroglu as their candidate to back, and he lost.

But, was it his age and looks which caused him to lose? Or, was it because he had promised the voters he would stand fully with the US and cooperate with any plans and orders they have for Turkey? The Turkish voters blame the US for their forced participation in the attack on Syria which didn’t benefit Turkey, but has proven to be a significant factor in their economic demise, and contributed to Turkish families having to go without meat or chicken most days because they couldn’t afford what they had previously become used to.

Erdogan has turned away from being the lap dog of Washington and has formed alliances with Russia and Iran. Ankara is not afraid of being independent, or buying military products not “Made in USA”. In this successful race won, Erdogan had the winning strategy of standing as the ‘anti-American’ candidate, and he included plenty of jabs at the LGBTQ community in Turkey, which have been supported by the US and the opposition.  The US meddling in the election went so far that US President Biden publically said he wanted Erdogan to lose, and that one statement might have been the secret to the success of Erdogan.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Most Important Medical History Lesson We Must Never Forget

May 30th, 2023 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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One of the most egregious lies spread by mainstream media hosts and health authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky was that the COVID “vaccine” would stop the spread of infection, thereby ending the pandemic. It was a provable lie, because none of the COVID shots had ever been tested to see if they could prevent the spread of infection

As hospitals filled up with “vaccinated” individuals who were supposed to be immune, the PR slogan “Pandemic of the unvaccinated” was endlessly circulated — until the reality of the situation finally became too obvious to ignore. Then, suddenly, hospitals and health authorities simply quit keeping track of COVID hospitalizations

The list of COVID measures that were arbitrary, unscientific and plain stupid is a long one. For example, in Michigan, hardware stores that were allowed to remain open were not allowed to sell carpet, flooring, furniture, garden supplies or paint. Businesses were also prohibited from advertising any product other than “groceries, medical supplies, or items that are necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation and basic operation of residences”

In South Africa, shops could only sell closed toe shoes (no sandals). In Victoria, Australia, people were prohibited from venturing more than 5 kilometers from their home, and in Great Britain, you had to order a substantial meal if you wanted a pint of ale

Among the most laughably absurd measures were having school children play instruments wearing masks with holes cut around their mouth, or playing inside one-man tents

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The video above features a compilation of some of the most absurd COVID narratives we were indoctrinated with over the past three years. For example, “No one is safe until everyone is safe” was one of several lies we heard repeated across media platforms.

First of all, there were and are vast differences in risk depending on your age and general medical history, and this was evident within weeks of the outbreak. Secondly, the data showed that 99.5% of the population would survive COVID.

So, the reality was the complete opposite of this fabricated PR campaign slogan. Had we been told the truth, we would have been told that “Most of us are safe,” rather than “None of us are safe.”

One False PR Slogan After Another

Next, the “no one is safe” slogan morphed to “No one is safe unless everyone is vaccinated.” With that, it became open season to harass, intimidate, threaten and discriminate against the unvaccinated. Every COVID case and death was blamed on them, no matter how irrational. And while the talking heads paid lip service to the desire to “save lives,” they had no qualms about wishing death on the unvaccinated.

As questions about the safety of the experimental gene transfer shots mounted, another campaign slogan was concocted: “Don’t do your own research.” At the same time, “Trust the science” was trending. What that meant was that you were supposed to trust that what you were told WAS “the science.” Actually looking at published science, that made you a dangerous moron. 

One of the most egregious lies spread by mainstream media hosts and health authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci alike was that the COVID “vaccine” would stop the spread of infection in its tracks, thereby ending the pandemic.

It was a provable lie, because anyone who had gone against the grain and done their own research knew that none of the COVID shots had ever been tested to see if they could prevent the spread of infection. The only “promise” they ever held was that they might reduce the symptoms of infection. Have any of these people apologized for spreading lies? I can’t think of one.

Even Fauci and Walensky, then-director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stated that you could not get COVID if you got the shot. Both later got sick with COVID several times, as did countless others who fell for and vigorously promoted this false propaganda.

Still, the brainwashing continued. As hospitals filled up with “vaccinated” individuals who were supposed to be immune, the PR slogan “Pandemic of the unvaccinated” was endlessly circulated — until the reality of the situation finally became too obvious to ignore.

Then, suddenly, hospitals and health authorities simply quit keeping track of COVID hospitalizations. Problem solved. This way, they didn’t have to admit that what we had was a pandemic of the vaccinated.

Ridiculous and Arbitrary COVID Restrictions

In a March 15, 2021, article,1 attorney at law Glenn Roper also reviewed a long list of arbitrary COVID measures that “bore little connection to health and safety” and were nothing more than “an exercise of raw government power to control its citizens.” Six of the worst offenders in this regard were:

Similarly absurd rules can be found across the world. In South Africa, for example, government officials ruled that shops could only sell closed toe shoes (no sandals), and short-sleeved shirts could only be worn if you had a jacket or long-sleeved jersey on top.2

In Victoria, Australia, people were prohibited from venturing more than 5 kilometers from their home,3 and in Great Britain, you had to order a substantial meal if you wanted a pint of ale.4 In Scotland, the crowd size for public events was limited, but not for private ones, and in Peru and Panama, men and women were only permitted to go outside on alternate days.5

Absurd Enforcement of Arbitrary Rules

“But it wasn’t just the measures themselves that were troublesome. The enforcement of these new laws was also overzealous and absurd,” Roper wrote.

For example, in Encinitas, California, police cited 22 people for “watching the sunset” and “having picnics near the beach.” “Violations carry fines of up to $1,000 and up to six months in jail,” Roper noted.

California police officers also chased down and arrested lone paddleboarders and surfers, and in Brighton, Colorado, a man was arrested for playing with his 6-year-old daughter on a near-empty softball field.

The same insanity was taking place in other countries. A family in England was told by a policeman to go back indoors because “people died yesterday.” They were in their own front yard.6 All of this is extremely problematic, as it points to a breakdown of the very structure of our government. As noted by Roper:7

“In each case, COVID restrictions were imposed by executive branch officials — governors, mayors, sheriffs, and law enforcement — relying on broad grants of power delegated by legislatures.

The legislators did not write or vote on the restrictions themselves. Instead, it was left to the officials who are responsible for enforcing the restrictions to decide what is banned and what is allowed.

That approach is contrary to the separation of powers that underlies the American system of government. Under our system, power is supposed to be divided among different branches that check and balance each other, for the protection of our rights and freedom.

Laws are supposed to be enacted by the legislative branch. The executive branch is supposed to enforce the laws, not make them. It is that constitutional structure that helps protect our liberty and freedoms.”

Insanity on Display

Roper’s list of absurd and arbitrary COVID measures could have been far longer. Remember these images? This was how a high school band in Wenatchee, Washington, was forced to practice in early 2021.8

high school band practiced holed up in one man tents

high schoolers practiced holed up in one man tents

According to officials, singing or blowing into an instrument could spread the COVID virus, so high schoolers practiced holed up in one-man tents. It was mindbogglingly stupid when it first happened, and it’s not getting any less absurd with the passing of time.

Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. ~ Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch

Other schools took the absurdity to even higher levels, having the kids practice wearing masks with holes cut out for their mouths.9

kids wearing masks with holes cut out for their mouths

Supreme Court Justice Critiques Government

In mid-May 2023, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch leveled harsh criticisms against government’s response to the COVID pandemic, from local to federal. In his eight-page ruling in the case of Arizona v. Alejandro Mayorkas, he stated:10,11

“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private.

They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct.

They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

Federal executive officials entered the act too … They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans. They threatened to fire noncompliant employees and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement.

Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress — the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws — too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few — but hardly all — of the intrusions upon them …

Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces.

They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force.

We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties — the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes …

Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.

But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.

Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate. Decisions announced on the fly are rarely as wise as those that come after careful deliberation.

Decisions made by a few often yield unintended consequences that may be avoided when more are consulted. Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe, hopefully, we have relearned these lessons too.”

Gorsuch also calls for a review of the National Emergencies Act, and for state legislatures to reexamine the scope of emergency executive powers at the state level, because “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

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Notes

1, 7 Pacific Legal Foundation March 15, 2021

2, 3 Traveller August 18, 2020

4, 5, 6 The Sun December 22, 2021

8 Twitter Ari Hoffman February 24, 2021

9 Twitter Liz February 24, 2021

10 Supreme Court, 597 US 2023 Arizona v. Alejandro Mayorkas Ruling

11 AP May 19, 2023

Featured image is from Red Voice Media


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 Get yours for FREE! Click here to download.

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After Bakhmut

May 30th, 2023 by Douglas Macgregor

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*** 

 

 

Until the fighting begins, national military strategy developed in peacetime shapes thinking about warfare and its objectives. Then the fighting creates a new logic of its own. Strategy is adjusted. Objectives change. The battle for Bakhmut illustrates this point very well. 

When General Sergey Vladimirovich Surovikin, commander of Russian aerospace forces, assumed command of the Russian military in the Ukrainian theater last year, President Vladimir Putin and his senior military advisors concluded that their original assumptions about the war were wrong. Washington had proved incurably hostile to Moscow’s offers to negotiate, and the ground force Moscow had committed to compel Kiev to negotiate had proved too small.

Surovikin was given wide latitude to streamline command relationships and reorganize the theater. Most importantly, Surovikin was also given the freedom of action to implement a defensive strategy that maximized the use of stand-off attack or strike systems while Russian ground forces expanded in size and striking power. The Bakhmut “Meatgrinder” was the result. 

When it became clear that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government regarded Bakhmut as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Russian military power, Surovikin turned Bakhmut into the graveyard of Ukrainian military power. From the fall of 2022 onward, Surovikin exploited Zalenskiy’s obsession with Bakhmut to engage in a bloody tug-of-war for control of the city. As a result, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers died in Bakhmut and many more were wounded. 

Surovkin’s performance is reminiscent of another Russian military officer: General Aleksei Antonov. As the first deputy chief of the Soviet general staff, Surovikin was, in Western parlance, the director of strategic planning. When Stalin demanded a new summer offensive in a May 1943 meeting, Antonov, the son and grandson of imperial Russian army officers, argued for a defensive strategy. Antonov insisted that Hitler, if allowed, would inevitably attack the Soviet defenses in the Kursk salient and waste German resources doing so.

Stalin, like Hitler, believed that wars were won with offensive action, not defensive operations.

Stalin was unmoved by Soviet losses. Antonov presented his arguments for the defensive strategy in a climate of fear, knowing that contradicting Stalin could cost him his life. To the surprise of Marshals Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, who were present at the meeting, Stalin relented and approved Antonov’s operational concept. The rest, as historians say, is history.

If President Putin and his senior military leaders wanted outside evidence for Surovikin’s strategic success in Bakhmut, a Western admission appears to provide it: Washington and her European allies seem to think that a frozen conflict—in which fighting pauses but neither side is victorious, nor does either side agree that the war is officially over—could be the most politically palatable long-term outcome for NATO. In other words, Zelensky’s supporters no longer believe in the myth of Ukrainian victory.

The question on everyone’s mind is, what’s next? 

In Washington, conventional wisdom dictates that Ukrainian forces launch a counteroffensive to retake Southern Ukraine. Of course, conventional wisdom is frequently high on convention and low on wisdom. On the assumption that Ukraine’s black earth will dry sufficiently to support ground maneuver forces before mid-June, Ukrainian forces will strike Russian defenses on multiple axes and win back control of Southern Ukraine in late May or June. Roughly 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers training in Great Britain, Germany, and other NATO member states are expected to return to Ukraine and provide the foundation for the Ukrainian counterattack force.

General Valery Gerasimov, who now commands the Russian forces in the Ukrainian theater, knows what to expect, and he is undoubtedly preparing for the Ukrainian offensive. The partial mobilization of Russian forces means that Russian ground forces are now much larger than they have been since the mid-1980s. 

Given the paucity of ammunition available to adequately supply one operational axis, it seems unlikely that a Ukrainian offensive involving two or more axes could succeed in penetrating Russian defenses. Persistent overhead surveillance makes it nearly impossible for Ukrainian forces to move through the twenty- to twenty-five-kilometer security zone and close with Russian forces before Ukrainian formations take significant losses. 

Once Ukraine’s offensive resources are exhausted Russia will likely take the offense. There is no incentive to delay Russian offensive operations. As Ukrainian forces repeatedly demonstrate, paralysis is always temporary. Infrastructure and equipment are repaired. Manpower is conscripted to rebuild destroyed formations. If Russia is to achieve its aim of demilitarizing Ukraine, Gerasimov surely knows he must still close with and complete the destruction of the Ukrainian ground forces that remain. 

Why not spare the people of Ukraine further bloodletting and negotiate with Moscow for peace while Ukraine still possesses an army? Unfortunately, to be effective, diplomacy requires mutual respect, and Washington’s effusive hatred for Russia makes diplomacy impossible. That hatred is rivaled only by the arrogance of much of the ruling class, who denigrate Russian military power largely because U.S. forces have been lucky enough to avoid conflict with a major power since the Korean War. More sober-minded leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO capitols should urge a different course of action.

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Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.

Featured image: Ukrainian trench during the battle, November 2022 (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

Meta and Privacy: The Economy of Data Transgressions

May 30th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?)

On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine on the company for transferring the data of EU users to the United States. In so doing, the company had breached the General Data Protection Regulation, which has become something of a habit for information predators from Silicon Valley.

The data in question is the bread-and-butter of such companies, packed with the names of users, email and IP addresses, message content, viewing history, geolocation and the whole gamut of information used for targeted advertising. As the European Data Protection Board’s Chair, Andrea Jelenik, stated, “the EDPB found that Meta’s IE’s [Meta Platforms Ireland Limited’s] infringement is very serious since it concerns transfers that are systematic, repetitive and continuous.  Facebook has millions of users in Europe, so the volume of personal data transferred is massive.”

The outcome resulted from a binding decision by the EDPB of April 13, 2023, which instructed the Irish Data Protection Authority (IE DPA) to revise its draft decision and impose a fine upon the company, despite initial reluctance to do so. The board also instructed IE DPA to order Meta to bring its “processing operations into compliance with Chapter V [of the] GDPR, by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US of personal data of European users transferred in violation of the GDPR, within 6 months after notification of the IE SA’s final decision.”

The implications for Meta, beyond the inconvenience of a fine, is the operational difficulty of removing the transferred data. “This order to delete data is really a headache for Meta,” reasons Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.  To remove the digital material gathered from millions of EU users stretching back a decade posed seemingly insuperable problems regarding compliance.

The response from Nick Clegg, President of the company’s global affairs arm, and Chief Legal Officer, Jennifer Newstead, is coldly practical on the issue. (Clegg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister, has long been on the dark side.) Data is key; data is everything. Privacy, goes the insinuation, is an impediment, a needless intrusion by sentimental bleeding hearts. “The ability for data to be transferred is fundamental to how the global open internet works. From finance and telecommunications to critical public services like healthcare or education, the free flow of data supports many of the services that we have come to rely on.”

A favourite argument is mustered by the knight-in-digital-armour: the idea of an internet balkanised and fractured in the face of meddlesome regulations and bureaucrats. “Without the ability to transfer data across borders, the internet risks being carved up into national and regional silos”. This would leave the “citizens in different countries unable to access many of the shared services we have come to rely on.”

Clegg and Newstead also lament those privacy business bodies in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), who dared invalidate the Privacy Shield mechanism agreed upon between the US and EU on the transfer of personal data to the US.  “This [2020] decision created considerable regulatory and legal uncertainty for thousands of organisations, including Meta.”

What the court left intact was the Standard Contractual Clauses mechanism, which could function on the proviso that various safeguards were put in place regarding data processing. (An agreement reached on EU-US data transfers between Brussels and Washington on a revised Privacy Shield has yet to be signed off by European officials.) Meta proceeded to use these “believing them to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).” While the Irish Data Protection Commission initially found that Meta had acted in good faith and that no fine would be necessary, moans the company, the Data Protection Board thought otherwise.

Clegg and Newstead also expressed aggrievement at Meta being “singled out when using the same legal mechanism that thousands of other companies looking to provide services in Europe.” Brazenly, they praise the US for doing much “to align with European rules via their latest reforms, while transfers continue largely unchallenged to countries such as China.” The company intends filing appeals both on the substance of the decision and its orders, seeking a stay in the courts.

Other US tech behemoths have also drawn the ire of the EU, demonstrating the divergence of views between the money hungry dictates of the information market and the importance of a user’s privacy. Between 2017 and 2019, Google caught their attention in the only way it could. That attention, based on the sheer scale of the company’s market dominance, brought the ledger of fines to 8 billion euros.  In 2021, Amazon received a 746 million euro fine for violating data protections.

Despite the coos of satisfaction coming from EU officials, such companies have integrated the occasional spanking fine into their operating models, the laceration nullified by a thumpingly large financial base to work from. An economy of data transgressions has emerged, one permitted to thrive, despite the punishments and orders. That penalties run into the billions of euros or dollars hardly affects the overall business rationale. As a consequence, the respective world views of US corporatism and EU data protection find some peculiar, if uncomfortable accord, an economy that tolerates surveillance capitalism while occasionally punishing its excesses.

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

Featured image is from Shutterstock/mundissima

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Seeing Through the Eyes of “Our Enemies” and Paving a Path Toward Peace.

By Michael Welch, Dimitri Lascaras, Radhika Desai, and Ivan Katchanovski, May 26, 2023

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, like the rest of Global Research, we are endeavoring to see the conflict through the eyes of Russians and others not drowning in a sea of media propaganda about finding a way to peace, rather than “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

“Free Trade” as Revealed in the China-United States Paradigm

By Wei Ling Chua and Kim Petersen, May 30, 2023

In the eyes of the US, China is threateningly making major headway in 6G, AI, robotics, supercomputing among other technology fields. This has scared the Biden administration, so Biden has sought to cut off Chinese access to semiconductor chips below 14 nanometers. Foreign Policy called it going for China’s jugular after one term of ex-US president Donald Trump inflicting “flesh wounds” to China.

Biden Regime Faces First-ever U.S. Lawsuit Over COVID “Vaccine” Injuries, Deaths

By Ethan Huff, May 30, 2023

Now that the dust is finally settling, those who became injured from Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “vaccines” are taking action against the monsters who harmed them, including fake president Joe Biden and his murderous regime.

Russian Fascist with Ties to Leading German Neo-Nazis Led Ukrainian-backed Incursion of Russia

By Clara Weiss, May 30, 2023

According to the Kremlin, a substantial military operation, involving the army, the air force and the national guard, killed 70 members of the far-right extremist Russian Volunteer Battalion and the ultra-nationalist Legion for a Free Russia after over 24 hours of fighting.

Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings

By Nick Turse, May 30, 2023

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported.

First Documented Case of Pegasus Spyware Used in an International War Context. Report

By Arzu Geybullayeva, May 30, 2023

The report, released on May 25, is a joint investigation between Access Now, CyberHUB-AM, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (the Citizen Lab), Amnesty International’s Security Lab, and an independent mobile security researcher Ruben Muradyan.

Died Suddenly: COVID-19 Vaccine Injured Swimmers: 37-year old Italian Swimming Champion Claudio Rais Was Driven to Suicide by His Moderna COVID-19 Booster Injuries, Plus Nine Other Swimmers Collapsing & Dying

By Dr. William Makis, May 28, 2023

When it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, Big Pharma isn’t very concerned about the vaccine injured. They are collateral damage in a multi $100 billion profit scheme and their plight can always be blamed on Long COVID or Climate Change.

Russia’s “Return to Africa”: “Strategic Decision” or “Post-Soviet Policy Slogan” by the Russian Establishment

By Kester Kenn Klomegah, May 28, 2023

Extensively speaking on several questions with the media on the eve of Africa Day, the Russian diplomat noted that some African countries were more dependent on Western aid than others, but Russia was not imposing anything on anyone, because it proceeded from the sovereign equality of the UN member states. Moscow’s role is to help African countries in the UN Security Council and other UN structures, as well as on a bilateral basis, Bogdanov explained.

Imperialist Hegemony and the Class Struggle in Africa and the Diaspora

By Abayomi Azikiwe, May 28, 2023

May 25, 2023 represents the 60th anniversary since the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the forerunner of today’s African Union (AU). During 1963, over 30 independent African states held a summit meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where they agreed to put aside differences in order to initiate a continental organization.

Eye Witness Crimea

By Daniel Kovalik and Rick Sterling, May 28, 2023

In May of this year, we took the long, 27-hour train ride from Moscow to Crimea to see how life is there and what the sentiment of the people are as the US and Ukraine sharpen their threats to “recapture” this peninsula from Russia.  And, while we were there, these threats were backed by a series of terrorist drone attacks in Crimea which, while doing little serious damage, signaled an escalation in the US/Ukrainian assault on Crimea.

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*** 

So many Americans want to put mRNA out of their minds after the COVID-19 vaccine debacle. Dreams of injections gone bad with side effects including heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and nerve damage have so many people around the world fearful of the next technological step. On cue with a bad dream Tao and coworkers from Harvard published on a “mechanical pill” to directly inject the stomach lining. If this was a sci-fi movie, people would be heading for the exits!

The authors summarize the technology in this key figure. In a nutshell, a pill would be swallowed and the devices would orient to the wall of the stomach or intestine (which would be difficult to control) and then the payload (mRNA) would be injected into the gastrointestinal epithelium and submucosa. The rich blood supply would immediately take the products into the blood stream. From there, the portal circulation would take blood to the liver via the hepatic portal vein. No one knows what a direct shot of mRNA would do to the liver. I can tell you as a doctor, I would be very concerned this could lead to even bigger complications than injection in the arm. Let’s hope this remains a bad dream for now.

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Source

Wei Tao, Nicholas A. Peppas, Robotic pills for gastrointestinal-tract-targeted oral mRNA delivery, Matter, Volume 5, Issue 3, 2022, Pages 775-777, ISSN 2590-2385, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2022.02.008. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S25

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*** 

Now that the dust is finally settling, those who became injured from Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines” are taking action against the monsters who harmed them, including fake president Joe Biden and his murderous regime.

Five people whose health was damaged, along with the father of a 16-year-old boy who died after suffering covid jab-induced cardiac arrest, are suing Biden and his henchmen for allegedly colluding with social media companies to silence their voices in trying to warn others not to make the same mistake of getting injected like they did.

Biden and other top-ranking White House officials, including from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), are accused of violating the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights, in partnership with Big Tech, by keeping a lid on the deadly truth about Fauci Flu shots.

“I have never sued anyone in my life,” tweeted Brianne Dressen, one of the plaintiffs who suffered nerve damage after taking the viral vector-based covid injection developed by AstraZeneca.

“[M]ight as well start with POTUS, U.S. Surgeon General, CDC, etc.”

You can peruse a copy of the lawsuit for yourself at the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) website.

Will the Biden regime finally be held accountable for its crimes against humanity – and better yet, removed from the White House for stealing the election via a coup?

A non-partisan, non-profit civil rights group, the NCLA filed Dressen et al.’s lawsuit against the Biden regime in an effort to help stamp out the “sprawling censorship enterprise” that has stolen away from Americans their First Amendment right to free speech.

The scheme involved the “combined efforts of numerous federal agencies and government actors – including within the White House – to coerce and induce social media platforms to censor, suppress, and label as ‘misinformation’ speech expressed by those who have suffered vaccine-related injuries” according to an NCLA press release about the matter.

“In Brianne Dressen, et al. v. Rob Flaherty, et al., NCLA urges the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas to enjoin this government-sponsored censorship and declare this state action unlawful to prevent these Defendants from further censoring such free speech and free association.”

Named in the suit as co-conspirators in the Biden regime’s Censorship Industrial Complex are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and GoFundMe, all of which are accused of blocking the plaintiffs “when they attempted to share” their personal experiences, or those of a loved one, who “were medically harmed after taking the vaccine.”

The NCLA also lists the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project as another co-conspirator, the job of which is to “monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”

This is an extremely serious matter because it shows that great lengths were taken by the Biden regime to keep a lid on the truth about the jabs and what they really were, and still are, doing to people who were unfortunate or ignorant enough to take them.

Kim Mack Rosenberg, the acting outside general counsel at Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a project of presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr., described the scheme as “a massive censorship program to control the narrative and promote the government’s Covid-19 propaganda.”

“Silencing those who have been injured, like the plaintiffs in this case, by the very product promoted – and in some cases mandated – by the government is particularly egregious and causes further, albeit, different injury to those individuals, whose First Amendment rights have also been violated,” she further stated.

“Moreover, censoring these injured individuals injures the public, depriving them of important information and discourse on these issues.”

The latest news about the growing number of lawsuits being filed against those behind the covid jabs can be found at VaccineWars.com.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 Get yours for FREE! Click here to download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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A WHO Pandemic Treaty Would be a Threat to Our Freedom

May 30th, 2023 by Prof. Karol Sikora

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*** 

Charting a course through a pandemic is not easy. Trusting those who are doing so is equally difficult, but given the choice between an elected government in Westminster and the World Health Organisation (WHO) bureaucrats in Geneva, the decision is easy.

Having spent two years as director of the WHO cancer programme, I am more informed than most about the eye-watering waste and incompetence that oozes from every crevice of that organisation. Very strong on politics, very weak on expertise. Just look at how China was treated throughout a pandemic that some say was of their own making, albeit accidentally. Ironically, I was having a beer by the Yangtze River with the cancer centre director in Wuhan in October 2019. We were putting the world to rights, admiring the beautiful sunset and wondering what the next global health problem would be. Little did we know.

Every year the World Health Assembly is held in the main United Nations building in Geneva. Everybody who is anybody in health is there. Health ministers, bureaucrats, and hangers on from the 194 member states arrive in an impressive line of black chauffeured cars, complete with flags and diplomatic plates – quite a sight. But the intellectual content inside the chamber is just appalling. There is more knowledge and lively discussion to be had with a group of first-year medical students. Expensive meals and cocktail party gossip about who’s in and who’s out are high on the agenda – not what’s needed for improving global healthcare.

Now the WHO is considering proposals for a “pandemic treaty”. Last year, its member states agreed to develop a zero draft of what would be a legally binding accord if agreed by all 194 member states. The whole thing fills me with suspicion and dread, because we know that many of its leading member states have embraced lockdowns, vaccine passports, travel bans and border closures in recent years. All were disastrous policies which should never see the light of day again. Even on a basic level, to place the power of implementation into the hands of inept and overpaid administrators would be a catastrophic decision which no responsible elected government should sign up to. Let’s work with our international friends and allies on how best to tackle cross-border health threats, but that does not mean handing the keys to Geneva.

If the WHO is given any level of binding control and made a global authority on public health measures, then I really do fear for all freedom-loving societies. A pandemic response can only be a national decision, considering all different medical, cultural, and societal factors that are so wonderfully different across the globe. It can never be one size fits all – it cannot be done in negotiation with communist states like China.

Sure, the British government handled the pandemic dreadfully and made one bad decision after another. But at least we all have the power to go to our local church or school on election day and register our displeasure. The same cannot be said for treaties embedded into international organisations. The power to take decisions should be as close as possible to the individual affected, especially when it involves health and livelihood across generations.

Critics will say that international co-operation is positive and I agree. Yet that can be done very effectively without the use of the word “binding” anywhere. Scientists and policymakers can be encouraged to share ideas across borders, but we simply cannot sign up to something that we may seriously regret in the years to come.

Right now, just focus on the many, many questions that our government needs to answer about its own disastrous lockdowns.

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Professor Karol Sikora is a consultant oncologist.

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In the days after the Russian military was reported to have put an end to the two-day-long incursion of Russia’s Belgorod region, more and more information has come to light that proves the openly neo-Nazi character of the forces involved.

According to the Kremlin, a substantial military operation, involving the army, the air force and the national guard, killed 70 members of the far-right extremist Russian Volunteer Battalion and the ultra-nationalist Legion for a Free Russia after over 24 hours of fighting.

Hundreds of buildings were reportedly destroyed in Russian villages during the attack, which included drone strikes, US-produced armored vehicles and a cyber-attack. In a clear indication that the attack was coordinated and planned by the Ukrainian army, which operates de facto under the command of NATO, the assault by the saboteur units was prepared by a series of Ukrainian air strikes. It was the largest incursion of Russian territory since the beginning of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine.

The forces carrying it out were blatant neo-Nazis with vast international connections, above all in Germany. Of particular significance is Denis Kapustin, alias Denis Nikitin, a leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC). The RVC was formed last August in Ukraine. Its declared aim is the establishment of an “ethnically pure” Russian nation state, without the tens of millions of Russian Muslims and members of other national, religious and ethnic minorities that are citizens of the Russian Federation. The RVC uses symbols of the Vlasov Army which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II in their war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, and various insignia of the international far right.

According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Kapustin, who is known as “Rex,” is considered “one of the most influential figures” in the European neo-Nazi scene by German authorities. Kapustin moved to Germany as a teenager in 2001 and was banned from entering the country in 2019. However, his ties to the German neo-Nazi scene, which is closely intertwined with the state apparatus, remain extensive.

Since 2008, he has run the far-right apparel brand “White Rex” which has grown to become a major force in the international neo-Nazi scene, and is involved in the organization of many large-scale far-right events in Europe. In Russia, Kapustin was for years involved in the notoriously violent and far-right soccer hooligan scene.

In Germany, Kapustin is known to maintain ties to two leading neo-Nazis, Tommy Frenk and Thorsten Heise. Heise is a leader of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP) and also believed to play a central role in Combat 18, an international neo-Nazi terrorist network. Heise also had ties to the German neo-Nazi terrorist network NSU, which murdered at least 10 immigrants. The NSU was largely built up and covered up for by the German state and especially the secret service, the Verfassungsschutz.

Other members of the RVC are also notorious neo-Nazis with ties to the Ukrainian states and NATO. Thus, the Russian Alexei Liovkin (or Levkin) is a member of the Black Metal Group “m8181th,” which supposedly means “Hitler’s Hammer,” and a former member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that has played a major role in Ukrainian politics since the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev.

The denials issued now by Kiev of direct ties to these neo-Nazi forces lack any credibility. According to the Spiegel, one week before the attack, Kapustin and a leader of the Legion for a Free Russia had their pictures taken in Kiev right next to the headquarters of Ukraine’s military intelligence. In interviews in 2022, Kapustin also bragged about having met half of the leadership of Ukraine’s military and claimed to be enlisted as a regular soldier of the Ukrainian army.

The incursion provides an object lesson in the character of the war waged by NATO against Russia. Contrary to what the New York Times and the White House would have workers believe, this war was neither “unprovoked” nor has it anything to do with the defense of “democracy.” It was provoked and prepared for decades, including by the NATO expansion to Russia’s borders but also the promotion and arming of neo-Nazi forces who have been built up systematically as the principal basis for an “insurgency” and a regime change operation in Moscow. The ultimate war aim is the carve-up of Russia and the entire former Soviet Union along national and ethnic lines, in order to bring the region under the direct control of imperialism.

In Russia, the incursion has provoked significant criticisms of the army leadership. A comment in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta pointed out that a new “barrier wall” that was erected for 10 billion rubles in March to preempt further incursions from Ukraine had failed to prevent the attack. The governor of the Belgorod region, Viacheslav Gladkov, said on Thursday that he too had “a lot of questions” for the army leadership.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary force which was built up by and operates as part of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, gave an extensive interview this week, sharply criticizing the army leadership. The Wagner group played the principal role in the seizure of Bakhmut but has now announced it would withdraw from the city and hand it over to the regular army.

In the interview, Prigozhin called for the replacement of both Defense Minister Sergei Shuigu and the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. He said, “I love my motherland, I serve Putin, Shoigu should be judged and we will fight on.”

Prigozhin said that the military leadership had “f***ed up” repeatedly and cited the incursion of the Belgorod region as an example for yet another failure of the military. He warned that Ukraine would seek to strike even deeper into Russia. He insisted that Russia had to transition completely to a full war economy and mobilize many more men than the 300,000 mobilized last fall based on Putin’s partial mobilization order.

Prigozhin’s most remarkable statements in the interview testified to the counter-revolutionary and reactionary traditions in which not just Prigozhin but the oligarchic Putin regime as a whole places itself. In attacking the army leadership, Prigozhin evoked Joseph Stalin, the long-time head of the Soviet bureaucracy, who spearheaded the nationalist reaction against the October Revolution and was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of socialist revolutionaries and workers in the Terror of the 1930s, as a positive example for Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin said that, in cases of such failure of the army leadership, “Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] would have drawn conclusions—he would have shot 200 people… But so far, no one here has drawn any conclusions.”

Then, he explicitly warned of a repetition of the October Revolution. Ranting against the lifestyle of the children of Shoigu and other ministers, Prigozhin warned that the lavish lifestyle of the elites amidst war “can end just as it did in 1917 with a revolution, when first all the soldiers will rise up, and then their loved ones will. There are already tens of thousands of them—relatives of those killed. And there will probably be hundreds of thousands—we cannot avoid that.”

Prigozhin’s warnings reveal the main fears of the Russian oligarchy: Having emerged out of the Stalinist reaction against the socialist October Revolution, which culminated in the destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism, the Russian oligarchs fear nothing more than that this war, like World War I, will lead to an eruption of revolutionary movements and that workers in Russia and Ukraine will revive their powerful and shared Marxist and internationalist political traditions. This path—that of independent revolutionary struggle—is precisely the path that workers throughout the region and internationally must take in order to stop the further escalation of the war toward a nuclear Third World War.

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Featured image is from Attentie, Anastase Maragos, Kadr, Okolosport News, Youtube via Zaborona

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At the end of a dusty path snaking through rice paddies lives a woman who survived multiple U.S. airstrikes as a child.

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of previously unreported attacks that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger’s tenure in the White House. When questioned about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents — assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S. National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. The documents also provided a rudimentary road map for on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia that yielded evidence of scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been reported to the outside world.

The road to Tralok Bek, Cambodia, in 2010, left. Meas Lorn, right, poses for a portrait in Ta Sous, Cambodia. Photos: Tam Turse

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

The incidents detailed in the files and the testimony of survivors include accounts of both deliberate attacks inside Cambodia and accidental or careless strikes by U.S. forces operating on the border with South Vietnam. These latter attacks were infrequently reported through military channels, covered only sparingly by the press at the time, and have mostly been lost to history. Together, they increase an already sizable number of Cambodian deaths for which Kissinger bears responsibility and raise questions among experts about whether long-dormant efforts to hold him accountable for war crimes might be renewed.

The Army files and interviews with Cambodian survivors, American military personnel, Kissinger confidants, and experts demonstrate that impunity extended from the White House to American soldiers in the field. The records show that U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments.

Together, the interviews and documents demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives: failing to detect or protect civilians; to conduct post-strike assessments; to investigate civilian harm allegations; to prevent such damage from recurring; and to punish or otherwise hold U.S. personnel accountable for injuries and deaths. These policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia but also set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.

“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands

All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In 1973, during his Senate confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, Kissinger was asked if he approved of deliberately keeping attacks on Cambodia secret, to which he responded with a wall of words justifying the assaults. “I just wanted to make clear that it was not a bombing of Cambodia, but it was a bombing of North Vietnamese in Cambodia,” he insisted. The evidence from U.S. military records and eyewitness testimony directly contradicts that claim. So did Kissinger himself.

In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)

At a 2010 State Department conference on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia from 1946 through the close of the Vietnam War, I asked Kissinger how he would amend his testimony before the Senate, given his own contention that tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians died from his escalation of the war.

“Why should I amend my testimony?” he replied. “I don’t quite understand the question, except that I didn’t tell the truth.”

“Anything That Flies on Anything That Moves”

One night in December 1970, Nixon called his national security adviser in a rage about Cambodia. “I want the helicopter ships. I want everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them,” he barked at Kissinger, according to a transcript. “I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters. … I want it done! Get them off their ass. … I want them to hit everything.”

Five minutes later, Kissinger was on the phone with Gen. Alexander Haig, his military aide, relaying the command for a relentless assault on Cambodia. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?”

Two years earlier, Nixon had won the White House promising to end America’s war in Vietnam, but instead expanded the conflict into neighboring Cambodia. Fearing public backlash and believing that Congress would never approve an attack on a neutral country, Kissinger and Haig began planning — a month after Nixon took office— an operation that was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even top Pentagon officials via a conspiracy of cover stories, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged airstrikes in Cambodia as occurring in South Vietnam. Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.

Kissinger, who went on to serve as secretary of state in the Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In the decades that followed, he has continued to counsel U.S. presidents, most recently Donald Trump; served on numerous corporate and government advisory boards; and authored a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he came to the United States in 1938, amid a flood of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he continued on to an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954. He subsequently joined the Harvard faculty, working in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs until 1969. While teaching at Harvard, he served as a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before his senior roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations. A believer in Realpolitik, Kissinger heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.

Through a combination of relentless ambition, media savvy, and the ability to muddy the truth and slip free of scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and government functionary into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. While dozens of his White House colleagues were engulfed in the swirling Watergate scandal, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger emerged unscathed, all the while providing fodder for the tabloids and spouting lines like “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership cannot be exonerated for committing genocide on the Cambodian people, said Kiernan, the Yale scholar, but neither can Nixon nor Kissinger escape responsibility for their role in the slaughter that precipitated it. The duo so destabilized the tiny country that Pol Pot’s nascent revolutionary movement took over Cambodia in 1975 and unleashed horrors, from massacres to mass starvation, that would kill around 2 million people.

Kaing Guek Eav (known as “Duch”) who ran the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s, made the same observation. “Mister Richard Nixon and Kissinger,” he told a United Nations-backed tribunal, “allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities.” After he was overthrown in a military coup and his country was plunged into genocide, Cambodia’s deposed monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leveled similar blame. “There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia,” he said in the 1970s. “Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.”

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, and Chile to East Timor, Laos, and Uruguay. But Hitchens reserved special opprobrium for Kissinger’s role in Cambodia. “The bombing campaign,” he wrote, “began as it was to go on — with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect.”

Others went beyond theoretical indictments. As a teenager, Australian-born human rights activist Peter Tatchell felt greatly affected by the U.S. war — and war crimes — in Indochina. Decades later, believing that there was a strong case to be made, he took action. “It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go,” he told The Intercept by email.

In 2002, with Slobodan Miloševic, the former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on trial for war crimes, Tatchell applied for an arrest warrant at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957, an act of Parliament that incorporated some components of the laws of war as defined by the 1949 Geneva Conventions into British law. He alleged that while Kissinger “was National Security Advisor to the U.S. President 1969-75 and U.S. Secretary of State 1973-77 he commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” Judge Nicholas Evans denied the application, stating that he was not “presently” able to draft a “suitably precise charge” based on the evidence Tatchell submitted.

When the arrest warrant was denied, Tatchell tried to engage international humanitarian organizations to help or take over the case, he told The Intercept, but they “did not see it as a priority.” He tried unsuccessfully to contact potential American witnesses and engage U.S. human rights groups.

But Tatchell maintains that Kissinger should still have his day in court. “I believe that age should never be a barrier to justice. Those who commit or authorise war crimes should be held to account, regardless of their age,” he wrote, “providing they have the mental capacity for a fair trial, which I understand is the case with Kissinger.”

Five Decades of Impunity

Kissinger and his acolytes frequently cast blame for the American war in Cambodia on the North Vietnamese troops and South Vietnamese guerrillas who used the country as a base and logistics hub, while giving short shrift to U.S. involvement there. “What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards,” wrote former Kissinger aide Peter Rodman. But three years earlier — long before most Americans knew their country was at war in Southeast Asia — U.S. “bombs hit a Cambodian village by accident … killing several civilians,” according to an Air Force history. And the “accidents” never stopped. Between 1962 and 1969, the Cambodian government tallied 1,864 border violations; 6,149 violations of its air space by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces; and nearly 1,000 civilian casualties.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

In 2010, I traveled to Cambodia to investigate decades-old U.S. war crimes. I searched the borderlands, looking for villages mentioned in U.S. military documents, carrying binders filled with photos of Cobras, Loaches, and other aircraft, asking villagers to point out the military hardware that killed their loved ones and neighbors. My interviewees were uniformly shocked that an American knew about attacks on their village and had traveled across the globe to speak with them.

For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have documented systemic killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity extending from the drone pilots who slay innocent people to the architects of America’s 21st-century wars in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan — which revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people — finally forced the Defense Department to unveil a comprehensive plan for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian casualties. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks a concrete mechanism for addressing past civilian harm.

The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.

I share some responsibility for the delay in publishing these accounts. For 13 years — while I was reporting on drone strike victims in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and civil wars from Libya to South Sudan — survivors’ accounts from Cambodian villages like An Lung Kreas, Bos Phlung, Bos Mon (upper), Doun Rath, Doun Rath 2, Mroan, Por, Sati, Ta Sous, Tropeang, Phlong, Ta Hang, and Udom were lodged in my notebooks. Other projects and imperatives, coupled with the vagaries of the news industry that doesn’t always view past atrocities as “news,” kept them there.

When I conducted my interviews, in 2010, the life expectancy in Cambodia was about 66 years. Many of the people I spoke with — their ages in this article pegged to the date we spoke — are likely dead. Few in these rural villages had cellphones 13 years ago, so I have no way to reach them. But their accounts remain vibrant and the horrors they recounted have not diminished. Nor has their pain necessarily passed on with them from this world. We know from Holocaust survivors, for example, that trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on — along with the architect of that country’s agony.

Map: The Intercept

Memories of Atrocity

Crossing a bridge over the Mekong River, I sped into the Cambodian countryside, along highways where SUVs passed tiny carts pulled by tiny ponies, motorbikes loaded with sheaves of bamboo or brightly colored textiles or baskets of squealing pigs, and ancient flatbed trucks piled high with rough-hewn, ochre bricks. I rolled through market towns of open-air butcher shops and wooden stalls selling cases of motor oil or motorcycle helmets or child-sized bags of rice or cases of Angkor Beer. I raced past thick, unruly forests and rubber plantations and rice fields where you could spot lines of water buffalo loping, single file, along the paddy dikes. Finally, I turned off the pavement onto a path of rutted, red dirt, looking for villages unknown even to the local police. At the end of one of these dusty, pitted trails, I found a hamlet straddling the border with Vietnam.

The air in Doun Rath was dry and musty during the day and punctuated, in the late afternoon, by the comforting smell of cooking fires that wafted up to wooden homes built on stilts to maximize air circulation on sweltering days like these.

I came looking for members of a ravaged generation who had survived both the American war and the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed. One of them, Phok Horm, spry and 84 years old at the time of our meeting, with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, told me: “Bombing was very common in this area. Sometimes, it happened every day. Sometimes there were dive bombers. Sometimes, the aircraft with the legs of a lobster would fly over and shoot at everything.”

Vietnamese guerrillas operated in the nearby forest, Phok and fellow village elders recalled. They came to Doun Rath to buy supplies from residents already living hard lives, growing rice and selling it across the border in Vietnam, before the war flooded the hamlet with refugees from other bomb-ravaged Cambodian villages. But the guerrillas generally weren’t present during the attacks. “Many people here were shot,” said Chneang Sous, who was in his 20s during the conflict. “Most of them were Cambodian.”

When the shooting started, villagers would scatter, running for the uncertain protection of paddy dikes and, as the war dragged on, subterranean bunkers that families dug beside their homes. Min Keun, a teenager in 1969, remembered the regular intrusion of “lobster legs” in the skies over the village. “People would panic. They would run. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they would be killed,” she recalled. “There was so much suffering.” Min and others remembered helicopters firing on fleeing villagers. Water buffalo and cattle were repeatedly machine-gunned. At night, the helicopters’ bright search beams lit up the darkness as they hunted for enemy forces. Bombs might fall at any time.

Around 1969, Phok’s husband was caught in the open during a “bombardment” and hit in the neck with shrapnel. He hung on for seven days before succumbing to his wounds. Chneang recalled an instance when an American Huey gunship popped up from behind a tree line, forcing villagers to bolt for safety. The helicopter raked the area with machine gunfire, killing his aunt and uncle. Nouv Mom told me that his younger sister was gravely wounded in a 1972 bombing. Vietnamese guerrillas arrived after the attack and took her away for medical treatment, but his family never saw her again. All told, survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks.

In nearby Doun Rath 2, former village chief Kang Vorn said residents led a simple life before the war, growing rice, beans, and sesame seeds. They began to see Vietnamese guerrillas around 1965, but the bombing didn’t begin until about 1969. Vet Shea, a one-eyed woman, recalled that the attacks intensified as time went on. “Sometimes we were bombed every day. Once, it was three or four times in one day,” she said. She herself survived a helicopter attack targeting farmers working in the nearby fields. “I ran flat out when I saw it,” Vet told me. “One person was wounded. A few others died.”

Thirteen elders of Doun Rath 2 did their best to recall the names of the dead. “Nul, Pik, Num, Seung,” said Sok Yun, an 85-year-old who relied on a weathered walking stick, as she ticked off the names of four villagers killed when their bomb shelter collapsed under a direct hit from an airstrike. Vet said her aunt was slain in another attack. Tep Sarum was just a teenager when a bomb hit his aunt’s house, killing her. Mom Huy, 80 years old at the time of our interview, said deaths and injuries from the bombs were common, while Kang, the former chief, estimated that at least 30 villagers were wounded by airstrikes but survived.

Just how many people in and around Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 were killed by Nixon and Kissinger’s war was already lost to history when I visited. The U.S. documentary record is quite sparse, but it does exist. On the night of August 9 and the morning of August 10, 1969, according to an Army inspector general’s report, a U.S. “Nighthawk” helicopter team — consisting of one Huey, equipped with a spotlight and high-powered M-60 machine guns, and a Cobra gunship outfitted with a powerful Gatling gun, rockets, and a grenade launcher — was operating in a so-called free fire zone near the South Vietnamese border with Cambodia.

The previously unreported investigation reveals that while only some members of the helicopter crews mentioned sporadic ground fire that night, they all agreed that lights were seen in “living structures.” Helicopter crew members claimed that radar operators told them they were over South Vietnam, but the radar operators said otherwise. One of them, Rogden Palmer, speaking to investigators about the Huey commander, said:

[H]e told his Tiger bird (the cobra accompanying him) that he thought he saw a light. At this time I advised him that he was close to the Cambodian border, and he rogered my transmission. Night Hawk and Tiger started circling … about the same time I advised him that he appeared to be over the border. I don’t remember if he rogered my transmission, but I beleive [sic] he did. At one time I told him he was over the border.

Apparently undaunted, the Huey focused its searchlight on the houses and the Cobra gunship commenced a firing run, blasting three of what the Pentagon documents referred to as “hooches” — shorthand for civilian dwellings — with machine gunfire and rockets filled with “flechettes,” tiny nails designed to tear through human flesh.

The U.S. investigation determined that the helicopters “did engage a target in the vicinity of the Cambodian border which could have been the village of Doun Rath.” The survivors in Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 didn’t recall this particular incident, emphasizing that attacks were so common for so long that they blended together. The report concluded that the “aircraft commander exercised poor judgement [sic] in engaging a target under these circumstances.” The inspector general, however, recommended that “no disciplinary action be taken,” and until I arrived decades later no one, apparently, had tried to investigate what actually happened in Doun Rath.

Fifty years on, most U.S. attacks in Cambodia are unknown to the wider world and may never be known. Even those confirmed by the U.S. military were ignored and forgotten: cast into history’s dustbin without additional reviews or follow-up investigations.

On January 6, 1970, for example, five helicopters breached Cambodian airspace and fired on the village of Prastah, killing two civilians and severely wounding an 11-year-old girl, according to an Army inspector general’s summary report. That perfunctory review found that helicopter gunships from the 25th Infantry Division had fired on enemy forces, who allegedly withdrew into Cambodia. The inquiry determined that the “gunships continued to engage and rounds did impact in Cambodia.” As to the question of civilian casualties and property damage resulting from the attack, the report stated only that “it was possible that civilian personnel … could have been struck by fire from the gunships and some crops could have been destroyed.” There is no indication that anything was done to compensate the survivors.

In the early evening of May 3, 1970, a helicopter circled the Cambodian village of Sre Kandal several times, scaring villagers and forcing them to flee, according to a formerly classified Army report. The file states that witnesses said a “helicopter of unknown type circled their village several times. They became frightened and started to run, at which time the helicopter allegedly fired.” According to Cambodians who the U.S. military encountered just after the attacks, three people suffered burns when a home was set ablaze in the attack and one person was wounded by shrapnel. One of the burn victims, his name likely engraved in the hearts of his Cambodian relatives but otherwise lost to history, later died.

“Everything Was Completely Destroyed”

Less than a month after Kissinger and Haig began planning the secret bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. launched Operation MENU, a callously titled collection of B-52 raids codenamed BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK, DINNER, DESSERT, and SUPPER that were carried out from March 18, 1969, to May 26, 1970. The attacks were kept secret through multiple layers of deception; Kissinger approved each one of the 3,875 sorties.

Survivors say that living through a B-52 bombing is unimaginably terrifying, bordering on the apocalyptic. Even within the confines of a deep, well-built bomb shelter, the concussive force from a nearby strike might burst eardrums. For those more exposed, the earth-shaking strikes could be extraordinarily lethal.

One morning, at the end of a busted dirt and gravel road near the Vietnamese border, I found Vuth Than, 78 years old at the time, with a shorn head of bristly gray hair and a mouth stained red with juice from betel nut, a natural stimulant popular in Southeast Asia.

Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,” Vuth Than told me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It was so terrible. Everything was completely destroyed.”

Exposed by North Vietnam’s Hanoi Radio and confirmed by the New York Times in May 1969, the secret bombing of Cambodia was officially denied and unknown to the public and the relevant congressional committees at the time. Congress and the American people were kept so deep in the dark that on April 30, 1970, as he announced the first publicly avowed U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia to strike at suspected enemy base areas, Nixon could baldly lie, telling the country: “For five years neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.”

It was only in 1973, during the Watergate scandal, that the secret bombing allegations came to the fore, prompting the first effort to impeach Nixon on the grounds that he had waged a secret war in a neutral nation in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Eventually, that article of impeachment was voted down in the name of political expediency. In the face of the other charges, however, Nixon resigned from office.

“That was in essentially unpopulated areas and I don’t believe it had any significant casualties,” Kissinger told me at the 2010 State Department conference, titled “The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975,” when I questioned him about the bombing. It was effectively the same reply he offered British journalist David Frost during a 1979 NBC News interview in which Frost charged that Kissinger’s Cambodia policy set in motion a series of events that would “destroy the country.” Kissinger stormed out of the studio after the taping and Frost quit the project, alleging interference by NBC, which was then also employing Kissinger as a consultant and commentator. NBC later released a transcript of the interview but allowed Kissinger to amend his comments through an attached letter to NBC News President William Small.

“We did not start to destroy a country from anybody’s point of view when we were bombing seven isolated North Vietnamese base areas within some five miles of the Vietnamese border, from which attacks were being launched into South Vietnam,” Kissinger told Frost. In typical fashion of seizing on discrepancies and muddying debates, he accurately denied Frost’s contention that Base Area 704 was bombed — a mistake stemming from a typographic error in a Pentagon document — during the secret B-52 attacks, noting that “base area 740” was actually attacked. He said recommendations of targets were accompanied by a statement “that civilian casualties were expected to be minimal.”

There were in fact 1,136 civilians living in Base Area 740, according to the Pentagon; a formerly top secret Air Force report, declassified decades after the Frost interview, noted that only 250 enemy forces were present there. An Army document I discovered in the National Archives also notes that the military was aware that civilians “were wounded/killed by B-52 strikes in Base area 740” between May 16 and 20, 1970, around the time of the SUPPER attacks. According to the confidential case file, those slain and injured were “Montagnards,” members of an ethnic minority whose “hamlets were not accurately reflected on commonly used maps.”

Meak Hen, left; Koul Saron, center; and Meak Nea, right, speak with reporter Nick Turse in Tralok Bek in 2010. Photos: Tam Turse

“I Was the Only Survivor of My Whole Family”

In 2010, the village was officially known as Ta Sous, but to its inhabitants it was still known by its name during the American war: Tralok Bek. “Every house had a bunker during the war. But during the day, if you were out tending to the cows, your life might depend on a termite hill and whether you could hide behind it,” Meas Lorn explained. “Planes dropped bombs. Helicopters strafed. Many people died,” said Meak Satom, a gray-haired man with a gold tooth. A B-52 strike in 1969 killed about 10 people, including a young friend, he recalled.

While I interviewed locals about the many attacks that occurred there during the war, Sdeung Sokheung said little. But when I brought out a binder filled with photographs of many different types of American aircraft, she zeroed in on an F-4 Phantom. Pointing at it, she said that as a girl, she had witnessed the bombing of Ta Hang village, about eight kilometers away, by that type of plane.

After finishing our interviews in Tralok Bek, I traveled winding dirt roads, past stunted bushes and the occasional thin, tan-colored cow, until we reached an area of dry, rock-hard rice paddies and towering palms. A few minutes later, in a rustic wooden home, I found 64-year-old Chan Yath, a woman with a substantial head of dark hair and teeth stained from chewing betel nut. I asked if there had been a bomb strike in the area during the war. She said yes; a family had been nearly wiped out. The lone survivor, she explained, was her cousin, An Seun. A younger woman was dispatched to find An and, 20 minutes or so later, we saw her — a tiny, aging mother of 10 — ambling along a narrow paddy dike path leading to the rear of Chan’s home. “During the time of a full moon,” said An, referring to a Buddhist holy day, she was off visiting her grandfather’s house. “At around 10 a.m., an airplane dropped a bomb on my home. My parents and four siblings were all killed,” she told me with wet eyes and a catch in her throat. “I was the only survivor of my whole family.”

During these same years, the U.S. was also conducting clandestine, cross-border ground operations inside Cambodia. In the two years before Nixon and Kissinger took over the war, U.S. commandos conducted 99 and 287 missions, respectively. In 1969, the number jumped to 454. Between January 1970 and April 1972, when the program was finally shut down, commandos carried out at least 1,045 covert missions inside Cambodia. There may, however, have been others, ostensibly launched by Kissinger, that were never disclosed.

From January to May 1973, between stints as deputy assistant to the president for national security and White House chief of staff, Al Haig served as the vice chief of staff of the Army. Retired Army Brig. Gen. John Johns told me that during this time, he was in Haig’s office at the Pentagon when an important call came in. “I was briefing him on something, and the red phone rang, which I knew was the White House,” Johns recalled. “I got up to leave. He motioned me to sit down. I sat there and heard him tell them how to cover up our intrusions into Cambodia.”

Johns — who had never before revealed the story to a reporter — was relatively sure that Haig was referring to past covert actions, yet did not know if the operations were made public or who was on the other end of the phone line. But Kissinger was responsible for many of the cross-border missions, according to Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council. “A lot of the time, he was authorizing the ongoing covert excursions into Cambodia,” he told me. “We were running a lot of covert ops there.”

“How Could the People Escape?”

After two days of driving local roads asking for directions, I turned off a highway onto a red dirt track that cut through lush farmland and finally spilled into a border village of simple wooden homes amid a sea of variegated greenery. During the war, these houses had looked much the same, said village chief Sheang Heng, a wiry man with calloused hands and bare feet wearing a loose dress shirt that had once been white. The only real change was that corrugated metal had replaced most of the old thatch and tile roofs.

In 1970, when Sheang was 17 years old, this village was on the front line of America’s Cambodian incursion. Halfway around the world, at Kent State University, members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during a May 4, 1970, protest against this new stage in the war. While that massacre received worldwide attention, a larger one in Sheang’s village three days earlier went unnoticed.

On May 1, 1970, helicopters circled the Cambodian village of “Moroan” (an American’s phonetic spelling of the name) before opening fire, killing 12 villagers and wounding five, according to a formerly classified U.S. document that, until now, has never been publicly disclosed. After the assault, another helicopter landed and carried off the injured; the survivors fled their village to another named “Kantuot,” located in a neighboring district.

There is no village in Cambodia named “Moroan,” but the hamlet near the Vietnamese border where I located Sheang was, he said, called Mroan. As in the other Cambodian border villages I visited, focusing on a lone attack cited in U.S. military documents left residents baffled, given that they had endured many airstrikes over many years. Still, when asked about the date, Sheang gestured toward what is now the far edge of the village. “Many died in that area at that time,” he recalled. “Afterward, the people left this village for another named Kantuot.” 

Mroan, Cambodia, in 2010. Photo: Tam Turse

Sheang and Lim South, who was 14 years old in 1970, said that many types of aircraft battered Mroan, from helicopter gunships to massive B-52 bombers. As Sheang — who lost his mother, father, a grandfather, a nephew, and a niece, among other relatives, to airstrikes — told me about the relentless attacks, his eyes reddened and went vacant. “The explosions tossed the earth into the air. The ‘fire rocket’ burned the houses. Who could survive? People ran, but they were cut down. They were killed immediately. They just died,” he said, trailing off as he moved to a far corner of the room and slumped to his knees.

Each survivor told a similar story. Lim’s sister and three brothers were killed in bombing raids. Thlen Hun, who was in her 20s in the early 1970s, said her older brother was killed in an airstrike. South Chreung — shirtless in dress pants with a vibrant orange krama, the traditional Cambodian scarf, around his neck — told me that he had lost a younger brother in a different attack.

Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.

Sheang and Thlen said that about half the families in Mroan — some 250 people — were wiped out by U.S. attacks. They led me to the edge of the village, a riot of foliage in every shade of green that sloped into a depression, one of several remaining nearby bomb craters. “About 20 people were killed here,” said Sheang gesturing toward the crater. “It used to be deeper, but the land has filled it in.” Thlen — slim, with graying hair, her brown eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint — shook her head and walked to the crater’s edge. “It was disastrous. Just look at the size,” she said, adding that this hole was just one of many that once dotted the landscape. “How could the people escape? Where could they escape to?”

A boy stands at the edge of a bomb crater in Mroan in 2010. Photo: Tam Turse

The Stolen Suzuki and the Girl Left to Die

The results of Nixon’s December 1970 telephone tirade and Kissinger’s order to set “anything that flies on anything that moves” were immediately palpable. During that month, sorties by U.S. helicopters and bombers tripled in number. Soon after, in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.

How many similar killings occurred will never be known. Cover-ups were common, investigations were rarely undertaken, and crimes generally evaporated with the fog of war. But there were ample opportunities for mayhem and massacre. In the two years before Nixon took office, there were officially 426 helicopter gunship sorties in Cambodia, according to a Defense Department report. Between January 1970 and April 1972, there were at least 2,116. In January 1971, Congress enacted the Cooper-Church amendment, which prohibited U.S. troops, including advisers, from operating on the ground in Cambodia, but America’s war continued unabated. Evidence soon emerged that the U.S. was violating Cooper-Church, but the White House lied about it to Congress and the public. “As long as we didn’t set our foot on that ground, we basically weren’t there, even though we did missions there every day,” Gary Grawey, an Army helicopter crew chief who flew daily missions in Cambodia during the spring of 1971, including the May mission that killed the young girl, told me.

“They attacked that village,” Grawey said, noting that both the South Vietnamese and American troops shot up the hamlet. “They were shootin’ and they didn’t even know who they were shootin’ at,” he recalled, adding that the victims were “women and children,” just “regular villagers.”

It started at half past noon on May 18, 1971, according to an Army investigation file and previously unreported summary documents produced by a Pentagon task force in 1972, when three U.S. helicopters — a “hunter-killer team” conducting a reconnaissance mission — skimmed the treetops inside Cambodia. The team came upon a village where they spotted motorcycles and bicycles that, according to crew members’ testimony, were suspected of being part of an enemy supply convoy. Hovering above, the Americans tried to motion for people on the ground to open packs on the vehicles. When the villagers instead began moving away, the highest-flying helicopter fired two incendiary rockets, a numbingly common tactic to draw out enemy personnel who might be hiding nearby. While the crew of one of the helicopters reported taking isolated ground fire, no Americans were killed or wounded, nor were any enemy personnel or weapons ever found.

According to a confidential report discovered in the U.S. National Archives and published here for the first time, the high-flying helicopter then “rocketed and strafed the buildings and surrounding area with approximately 15 to 18 rounds of high explosive rockets and machine gun fire.”

Capt. Clifford Knight, pilot of the “low bird,” said that his gunner shot an apparently unarmed man, clad in civilian clothes, who was “trying to run away.” The gunner, John Nicholes, admitted it, noting that the killing took place after the initial rocket barrage.

Capt. David Schweitzer, the “high bird” commander, testified to rocketing and strafing the area and calling for the insertion of South Vietnamese, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, troops to search for suspected enemy forces. According to a summary of the testimony of Grawey, the helicopter crew chief who ferried an elite ARVN Ranger team and an American captain, Arnold Brooks, to the village:

CPT Brooks and the ARVN Rangers acted “hog wild” when they deplaned, shooting up the area although they received no return fire. … [H]e did observe 5 to 10 Cambodian personnel that appeared to be wounded, but that he did not know if they were wounded from air or ground fire.

Decades later, Grawey reconfirmed details of the incident in an interview, noting that, as the ARVN deployed from the helicopter, he told Brooks that “he was not to get off my bird.” But Brooks, whom Grawey described as “gung ho,” pulled rank and ignored him. Brooks — who he said was carrying a non-regulation “machinegun” — started shooting indiscriminately.

Davin McLaughlin, the commander of a replacement “low bird” that was called in when the first helicopter ran short on fuel, similarly noted that the South Vietnamese met no resistance and, according to the documents, “grabbed what they could.” A summary of the testimony of his gunner, Len Shattuck, in the investigation file adds:

The ARVN Rangers appeared melodramatic when they were inserted and in his opinion fired excessively in the area. … He stated that there were approximately 15 wounded personnel in the area and that he observed 2 males 50-60 years of age, and one female 8-10 years of age, that appeared to be dead.

In a 2010 interview, Shattuck told me that he didn’t fire a shot that day and stressed that he only saw one section of the village. What he saw there, however, stayed with him. “We came into a smoking village,” he said. “I witnessed dead bodies. I witnessed some wounded people that appeared to be civilians. … We didn’t evac[uate] anybody.” Shattuck remembered the little girl as even younger than indicated by his testimony, just 3 to 5 years old, and that she was covered with blood. “She was pretty badly shot up,” he recalled.

As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents. Brooks acknowledged his service in Cambodia during a telephone conversation and asked for a formal interview request by email. He did not respond to that request or subsequent ones.

Agness, according to an Army investigator’s summary, said that he received “a radio request to evacuate a wounded girl [but] denied on instructions of CPT Brooks since he was fully loaded with the ARVN Ranger team, a motorcycle and he was low on fuel.” The stolen Suzuki was presented as a gift to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Carl Putnam, who was later seen tooling around base on it, according to the investigation documents. The Army concluded that the wounded girl, left behind for the sake of the Suzuki, died.

Furious, Gary Grawey resolved to report Arnold Brooks. “I was really pissed at the time,” he told me. “I said I would report him, which I did.” A previously unreported final status report on the “Brooks Incident,” contained in the files of the Pentagon war crimes task force, concluded that allegations of excessive bombardment, pillage, and a violation of the rules of engagement had been “substantiated.” While no enemy weapons or war materiel were found in the village, according to the report, civilian casualties “were estimated at eight dead, including two children, 15 wounded and three or four structures destroyed. There is no evidence that the wounded were provided medical treatment by either U.S. or ARVN forces.”

Putnam and a direct subordinate were issued letters of reprimand — a low-grade punishment — for their “actions and/or inactions” in the case. (Putnam died in 1976.) While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.

Backing the Genocidaires

When Henry Kissinger hatched his plans for the secret bombing of Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge numbered around 5,000. But as a 1973 CIA cable explained, the Khmer Rouge’s recruitment efforts relied heavily on the U.S. bombing:

They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda. … The [Khmer Rouge] cadre tell the people … the only way to stop “the massive destruction of the country” is to remove [U.S.-backed junta leader] Lon Nol and return Prince Sihanouk to power. The proselyting cadres tell the people that the quickest way to accomplish this is to strengthen [Khmer Rouge] forces so they will be able to defeat Lon Nol and stop the bombing.

The U.S. dropped more than 257,000 tons of munitions on Cambodia in 1973, almost the same amount as during the previous four years combined. A report by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that “the intense American bombing in 1973 increased the cumulative number of refugees to nearly half of the country’s population.”

Those attacks galvanized Pol Pot’s forces, allowing the Khmer Rouge to grow into the 200,000-person force that took over the country and killed about 20 percent of the population. Once the regime was in power, the political winds had shifted and Kissinger, behind closed doors, told Thailand’s foreign minister: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” He then clarified his statement: The Thai official should not repeat the “murderous thugs” line to the Khmer Rouge, only that the U.S. wanted a warmer relationship.

In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.

That same year, Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”

In 2001 and again in 2018, the late chef and cultural critic Anthony Bourdain offered sentiments shared by many, but rarely put so eloquently:

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic.

In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he ducked investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and quickly leaving Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths in Cambodia or anywhere else.

“Play With It. Have a Good Time.”

“To spare you is no profit; to destroy you, no loss” was the cold credo of the Khmer Rouge. But it could just as easily have been Kissinger’s. In 2010, I followed up with Kissinger, pressing him on the contradiction in his claims about only bombing “North Vietnamese in Cambodia” but somehow killing 50,000 Cambodians, by his count, in the process. “We weren’t running around the country bombing Cambodians,” he told me.

The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates otherwise, and I told him so.

“Oh, come on!” Kissinger exclaimed, protesting that I was merely trying to catch him in a lie. When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

Cambodians in villages like Tralok Bek, Doun Rath, and Mroan didn’t have the luxury of such an easy escape.

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A new investigation reveals the use of Pegasus spyware in an international war context.

The report, released on May 25, is a joint investigation between Access Now, CyberHUB-AM, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (the Citizen Lab), Amnesty International’s Security Lab, and an independent mobile security researcher Ruben Muradyan.

According to its findings, at least 12 Armenian citizens were targeted with the spyware between October 2020 and December 2022. The list includes Armenia’s Ombudsperson, two Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Armenian service journalists, a United Nations official, a former spokesperson of Armenia’s Foreign Ministry, and seven other representatives of Armenian civil society.

The evidence collected and presented in the report demonstrates that “the targeting is related to the military conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Forensic investigation of devices indicated the following exploits used in Armenia: PWNYOURHOME, FINDMYPWN, FORCEDENTRY (also referred to as Megalodon by Amnesty’s Security Lab), and KISMET. All these exploits were revealed and under investigation by Citizen Lab since 2020, but it were Armenian cases that helped Citizen Lab to first identify PWNYOURHOME exploit which was at the center of the most recent investigation published in April 2023.

According to the joint recent investigation published on May 25, the timing of infections was an indication of its relevance to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and was likely “the reason for the targeting”:

The backdrop of the first cluster of civil society Pegasus infections found in Armenia is the bloody 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war with Azerbaijan, the associated peace talks in October 2020, and the November 9, 2020 ceasefire agreement. At the same time, the Karabakh conflict itself began to intensify again with the Azerbaijan May 12, 2021 offensive and more clashes in July and November 2021. The majority of the Armenia spyware victims were infected during this time period in 2020-2021; between them, there were over 30 successful Pegasus infections.

In total, the forensic investigations identified over 40 infections and one failed attempt.

The report then dives into the identified cases, presenting the findings of the investigation. Five of the identified targets preferred to stay anonymous at the time of the report’s release.

The culprits

The authors of the report note that they have not been able to “conclusively link this Pegasus hacking to a specific governmental operator.” According to investigations published to date, Armenia was not among the list of clients identified as having purchased NSO’s Spyware. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, was. The use of Pegasus and other spyware technology used against civil society in Azerbaijan has been widely documented in recent years.

According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), one of the 17 media partners involved in the global Pegasus investigation, out of the 1,000 phone numbers from Azerbaijan, the project researchers were so far able to identify 245 numbers that were targeted, one-fifth of which belonged to reporters, editors, or media company owners. The list also includes activists and their family members.

The new investigation also notes that:

“The Citizen Lab’s ongoing internet scanning and DNS cache probing has identified at least two suspected Pegasus operators in Azerbaijan that they call “BOZBASH” and “YANAR.” According to the Citizen Lab, The YANAR Pegasus operator appears to have exclusively domestic-focused targeting within Azerbaijan, while the BOZBASH operator has targets including a broad range of entities within Armenia.”

The NSO Group

NSO Group was set up in Israel in 2010 by Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio, and Omri Lavie. On its website, the company claims to develop technology “to prevent and investigate terror and crime.” But the surveillance technology appears to have been used against dissidents, journalists, and activists across the world.

“NSO Group insists that it sells its software only to governments, suggesting that the clients in these countries represent intelligence services, law enforcement agencies, or other official bodies,” the OCCPR has noted. Citizen Lab investigations reveal that NSO’s Pegasus was used against dissidents at least since 2016 in numerous countries.

In 2019, the company came under fire when accusations emerged that it was infecting users’ devices with malware by hacking WhatsApp. In response, WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook (now Meta) sued the NSO Group. In July 2020, a U.S. federal court judge ruled that the lawsuit against NSO Group could proceed despite the company’s defense that “its business dealings with foreign governments, granted it immunity from lawsuits filed in U.S. courts under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA).” In December 2020, Microsoft, Google, Internet Association, GitHub, and LinkedIn joined as parties in Facebook’s [Meta’s] ongoing legal battle against NSO. The most recent hearing took place in April 2021 and according to the news site Politico, the NSO Group appeared “unlikely to prevail.”

Josh Gerstein, Politico’s Senior Legal Affairs Reporter, noted:

Even if the firm’s effort to head off the suit fails, it could continue to fight the case in the trial court, but will likely be forced to turn over documents about its development of Pegasus and make executives available for depositions.

In April of this year, nine international human rights and press freedom organizations penned a letter to Chaim Gelfand, Vice-President for Compliance at NSO Group, asking the company “to deliver on its commitments to improve transparency about sales of its advanced spyware, and due diligence to protect human rights.” The letter also rejected the NSO Group’s claims “of their unverified compliance with human rights standards.”

Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, considers NSO’s claims that they adhere to human rights standards to be “pure theater.”

The spectacle might be a mildly entertaining farce were it not for the very real and gruesome way in which its spyware is abused by the world’s worst autocrats. NSO’s irresponsible actions have proven their words are nothing more than hand-waving distractions from the harsh reality of the unregulated marketplace in which they, and their owners, thrive and profit.

Two years ago, the then-UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called for a moratorium on the sale of NSO-style spyware to governments until viable export controls could be put in place. Despite Kaye’s warnings, the sale of surveillance software continued without any transparency or accountability.

The most recent investigation not only brings the company to the spotlight but also highlights the importance of control mechanisms imposed on spyware companies. The authors of the new investigation go further, concluding that despite the scandals, lawsuits, and sanctions, “NSO Group continues to ignore how its technology is used in violation of human rights to target civil society, including journalists and human rights defenders.”

In a comment to Global Voices, Natalia Krapiva, the Tech-Legal Counsel at Access Now said:

“This investigation is key to understanding the full scope of harms of invasive Pegasus spyware and the entire industry which has been operating with little to no oversight for years. We have seen Pegasus used to intimidate the free press, destroy the civic space, silence dissidents, undermine democracy, suppress independence movements, and more. Now we have evidence of Pegasus being used against civil society and humanitarian actors in a major international military conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. I am confident that our report will lead to more research and investigations as well as legal cases to bring accountability to the NSO, the spyware industry, and states who use these invasive technologies to attack human rights and humanitarian actors, journalists, and regime critics.”

At the time of writing, no official statements on the investigation have yet been made in Azerbaijan. On May 25, leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan were meeting in Moscow to discuss final peace agreement.

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Address (never given due to technicalities) at the 2023 Belt and Road Forum for Interconnected Land-Sea Development from 17 to 18 May, 2023 in Chongqing.[1]

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Madame Yue Yanghua, Director General, Secretariat, Silk Road Think Tank Association,

Distinguished Organizers of the Belt and Road Forum,

Distinguished Guests,

My sincerest thanks for the honor of inviting me to be part of this important Forum.

The concept of what was originally called the “Silk Road Economic Belt” was announced in September 2013 during a state visit by President Xi Jinping to Kazakhstan.

However, I first learned about this extraordinary initiative when President Xi visited in March 2014 the Port of Duisburg in Germany, one of the world’s most important inland ports. The Belt and Road is a modern version of the ancient Silk Road of more than 2100 years back. I was – and still am – impressed beyond words.

The Duisburg event’s highlight was when a fully-loaded train originating from Chongqing, China slowly pulled into the Duisburg railway station — the ending point of the Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe International Railway, connecting Asia and Europe, going through Xinjiang and Eurasia and terminating in Europe.

This had a significant symbolic meaning – linking regions and countries through joint infrastructure projects is a means of common development between and among countries in a myriad of sectors that benefit the local economies, local communities and people. It is a strategy for peaceful cooperation and cohabitation.

On the Duisburg occasion, President Xi Jinping said,

“The initiative of building the Silk Road Economic Belt, proposed by China, follows a philosophy of common development and common prosperity. It aims to link the two big markets of Asia and Europe together, giving new substance of the time to the ancient Silk Road, and benefit the people along the Road.”

He was right.

Although the target date for completion of the BRI is 2049, coinciding with the centennial celebration of the People’s Republic of China, the BRI’s potential in time and space is almost endless.

By January 2023, 151 countries had signed up to the BRI. The participating countries include almost 75% of the world’s population and account for more than half of the world’s GDP. In addition, many national and international organizations are also members of the New Silk Road Initiative.

In 2018, the B&R Initiative was included in China’s Constitution.

Today, the Belt and Road forms a central component of President Xi’s “Major Country Diplomacy” strategy, meaning for China to assume a more important leadership role in international affairs.

The Belt and Road is also China’s “grand political-economic project”.

The combination of diplomacy and economic cooperation is a formidable tool for promoting peace and for bringing about more harmony and equilibrium to a world plagued by conflict.

“Diplomacy” as an integral part of the Belt and Road, has already been demonstrated in recent times, including by President Xi’s visit to the Middle East, where he recently managed bringing together two feuding neighbors, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The two countries re-established diplomatic relations and, hopefully, an added and important benefit of this Chinese initiative  may be the end of the atrocious war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Mind you, this war is a proxy war carried out by the Saudis on behalf of Washington and London. Yet, there is hope, thanks to China.

Already years ago, when I was still working with the World Bank, high-level country officials mainly in Africa and the Middle East told me that they prefer by far dealing with China and Russia, then with the ever conflictious west, referring to the United States and Europe.

With her colonial past – in many ways still ongoing today – Europe does not have the best reputation in the Global South.

Today, China’s drive for international diplomacy is already an important element of the Belt and Road. It is a Peace Initiative that no super-power has broached in the last century. China has already removed divisions between several Middle Eastern countries, that were remnants from colonial times, or more recently, of western instigated wars and conflicts.

What President Xi calls “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future” is already happening.

The Silk Road Economic Belt has already established several routes of connectivity. Three land routes – the northern Trans-Siberian Route, the central Khorasan Route, and the southern Karakoram Route. In addition, there are several Sea Routes, the Arctic Route, the Gulf Route, the Red Sea Route, and the Swahili Coast Route, connecting East Asia with Eastern Africa.

Maritime routes are also in the process of connecting China with Latin America. While China is Brazil’s primary trading partner, Brazil, so far, has abstained from signing on to the BRI.

On the other hand, in February 2022, Argentina joined the BRI, signing a memorandum of understanding with China.

By the end of 2022, seven countries in South America participated in the Belt and Road: Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

As of March 2022, 215 cooperation agreements had been signed with 149 countries and 32 international organizations.

By March 2023, a mere ten years after it was launched, BRI had already created more than 420,000 jobs, and lifted 40 million people out of poverty.

Various World Bank studies estimate that the Belt and Road may boost trade flows in participating countries by more than 4%, and cut global trade costs by about 1%.

According to London-based Center for Economic and Business Research, BRI is likely to increase the world GDP by US$7.1 trillion equivalent per year by 2040. The CEBR also estimates that benefits will be “widespread” since improved infrastructure reduces “frictions that hold back world trade”.

With such brilliant predictions, it is likely that more countries will be attracted to join the New Silk Road. Even against objections and opposition from the west, the prospects for a worldwide success story for peace and prosperity through the New Silk Road are superb.

Observing the world today from a distance, it looks like the west with its multiple wars and constantly instigated conflicts is on a steady course of destruction, while China with her Belt and Road is constructing, building alliances, and promoting peace, prosperity, and diplomacy throughout the world.

Thank you.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing. 

Note

[1] Visa could not be secured in time.

Featured image is from iStock

Introduction

Globalization is the process of political, cultural, and economic integration of national economies and societies at the regional and international levels. This phenomenon arguably threatens the primacy of the state as the main actor on the international stage, supplanted by multinational organizations, governing bodies, and corporations that have proliferated since roughly the 1980s.

Globalization – characterized by political and economic integration both among European Union (EU) member states and between the EU bloc and the world at large — has produced three observable domestic sociopolitical consequences in European states explored in this research. These include increased transnational immigration rates, the perceived loss of national/ cultural/ ethnic identity among the affected populations, and uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata, which will be explored and measured in the literature review section of this study.

These three phenomena induced by globalization may have produced domestic political backlash from the populations affected by them. For whatever benefits globalization might confer, the process necessarily requires some concessions from nationalists who identify culturally and politically with the state and from the states themselves, which must surrender some degree of sovereign control over their economies and national borders. This research will examine whether “far-right” (defined herein) electoral success in France and Hungary from 1990-2020 is the result of popular domestic blowback against globalization and liberal ideology broadly. France and Hungary will serve as the case studies here, the results of which may be extrapolated and tested in the context of other European states in future studies.

The thesis tested in this research is that three factors (immigration to EU member states, perceived loss of national identity and sovereignty, and uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata) resulted in increased electoral votes for “far-right” parties as a percentage of the total vote in France and Hungary from 1990-2020.

Literature review

 This literature review is broken into three main sections: globalization (and the liberal ideology that underpins the process of globalization), “far-right” politics and parties, and the effects of globalization on domestic politics and populations in France and Hungary, respectively.

The section on globalization contains a trio of subsections: globalization’s effects on inequality, globalization’s potential to undermine national sovereignty, and the inherent conflict between protectionist policies and globalization. The section on effects of globalization on domestic politics and populations in France and Hungary is likewise comprised of three subsections: transnational immigration, perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity, and uneven distribution of economic benefits across economic strata.

Globalization

 Globalization – popularly defined as “the increase in international transactions in markets for goods, services, and some factors of production, plus the growth and expanded scope of institutions that straddle national borders – including firms, governments, international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)” (Deardoff & Stern, 2001, p. 2-3) – has resulted in unprecedented levels of interconnection between economies and societies throughout the world. Proponents of globalization such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) have claimed that the increase of international trade and the opening of national markets is “essential to support growth, development and poverty reduction,” (Gonzalez, 2016) particularly for developing economies (e.g., those mainly found outside of the European Union). Critics of globalization dispute its net benefit for reasons discussed in detail here. What is undisputed is that this increased interconnectivity has markedly transformed the function of the state as well as the relationship between the state and the domestic electorate in arguably unforeseen ways that will be explored here.

The integration of the function of the state into broader governing bodies at the regional and global levels is termed is a key feature of globalization – otherwise known as “transnationalism.” The Geneva Centre for Security Policy summarizes globalization as “a process that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities.” (Carminati, 2017) Since the 19980s, “one of the most striking features of the international economy… has been the proliferation and intensification of regional trading agreements around the world.” (Hanson, 1998, pg. 55) Beyond the regional level, so-called “mega-regional” trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which encompass huge swathes of the global economy, .have also proliferated in the increasingly globalized economy. (Gonzalez, 2016)

Globalization has impacted most of the world, including European Union (EU) member states. The EU was a post-WWII project to integrate Western Europe – and, later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Eastern Europe. Prior to the advent of the European Union, the states of Europe existed in a realist anarchy at the international level in which economic competition had historically led to war. Per interdependence theory, of the neoliberal school of thought, offered as an alternative to realist conflict, transnational institutions that facilitate trade have the capacity to enhance cooperation between states and reduce the likelihood of war as a result. (Jervis, 1999, p. 62)

The initial iteration of the EU was the supranational European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), founded shortly after World War II which “pooled the coal and steel resources of six European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (BENELUX)” (Carleton, 2023) in order to control the German steel and coal industries. The main motivation for the creation of the ECSC was to prevent another outbreak of war on the continent by constraining Germany. The next big change in European integration came with the 1985 Schengen Agreement, which abolished internal borders within the EU to allow the free flow of people and capital across member states. The Schengen Agreement included the original six members of the ECSC plus Denmark, Ireland, the UK, Greece, Portugal, and Spain. (Traynor, 2016)

In 2004, a major expansion of the EU welcomed member states from Eastern and Central Europe that had once been behind the Iron Curtain before the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s. With such a huge block of new members, some analysts called it the “big bang” of EU expansion. Europe had never achieved anything close to this level of political integration. The new EU members included Cyprus, Malta, Poland, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Hungary. Along with this enlargement came concerns relevant to this research, such as “government responses to perceived cultural threats and anti-immigration sentiments in public opinion” (Sedelmeier, 2014, p. 2) among member states. These concerns over popular backlash to the EU’s rapid development would bear out in later conflicts between EU member states, particularly between Eastern European states such as Hungary and EU leadership in Brussels.

The process of the integration of Europe into a supranational political body (in the form of the EU) and the process of globalization are distinct phenomena. However, in Europe, the expansion of the EU is paramount to the process of globalization because former lent the mechanisms needed for the latter, as “the EU developed a policy of regulated globalism in part because the union had to put in place regulatory frameworks for the governance of European integration, meaning that these frameworks offered themselves as templates when interdependence gathered pace at the global level.” (Youngs & Ulgen, 2022) So, since its inception, the EU has been outward-facing in its orientation, which has put it at the forefront of globalization. Per the KOF Globalisation Index, the top three most globalized countries in the world – the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland — are located in Europe (although Switzerland is not a member of the EU). (Swiss Economic Institute, 2021)

Despite its dubious record of achieving stated aims, globalization is normatively attractive to adherents of liberal ideology such as the European Liberal Forum who prize internationally-oriented policies to reduce inequality and promote human welfare: “Over the course of the development of the EU, we have stressed how important cooperation and coordination among its Member States is to defending and enhancing the freedom and prosperity of their citizens.” (European Liberal Forum, 2014, p.3) The European Union has been described by some analysts as “a bulwark of the liberal international order” (de Paiva Pires, 2022) because of its emphasis on transnational governance.

Accordingly, “liberal political parties and organisations throughout Europe traditionally have a strong pro-European profile,” (European Liberal Forum, 2014, p.3) meaning they support greater political integration of the continent. Attenuating the destabilizing effects of inequality, according to liberal doctrine, produces stability and promotes prosperity and peace; Rodrik cites the importance of “social policies to address inequality and exclusion,” concluding that nations that implement these policies will fare enjoy greater economic and social benefits than those that do not (Rodrik, 2013, p. 447). Globalization is one such development “propagated by the international development agencies [that] focuses on the shift in thinking which occurred in the 1980s… known as the ‘Washington Consensus.'” (Gore, 2001, p. 318), which encouraged national governments to open up trade with the outside world and to liberalize capital accounts to enable free movement of capital as a means to achieving mutual prosperity among states.

Globalization has been a dominant and major international phenomenon following the political and economic devastation wreaked by World War II: “Since the Second World War, globalization has been underpinned by a liberal international order, a rules-based system structured around the principles of economic interdependence, democracy, human rights and multilateralism.” (Money, 1997) Neoliberalism, a branch of the liberal school of thought that gained popularity among Western political elites and policymakers in the late 20th century, “postulates that the reduction of state interventions in economic and social activities and the deregulation of labor and financial markets… have liberated the enormous potential of capitalism to create an unprecedented era of social well-being in the world’s population.” (Navarro, 2007) Coinciding with the rapid increase in globalization beginning in the 1980s, “one of the most marked changes in the sociopolitical landscape of European societies since the 1980s has been the rapid and widespread adoption of neoliberal policies across the continent.” (Mijs, et al., 2016, p. 1)

Although globalization is largely favored among elite policymakers and academics, especially in the West where liberalism is arguably ideologically hegemonic, it does have its detractors. According to one critique, for instance, “neoliberal globalization is comprised of four processes: accumulation by dispossession; de-regulation; privatization; and an upward re-distribution of wealth” that, taken together, create numerous sociopolitical dilemmas such as “rising global inequality” and “threats to identity,” (Gandesha, 2018) both of which will be explored here.

Because “European governments and the EU collectively played important roles in shaping globalization… over many decades, the EU was a powerful force in extending international trade,” (Youngs & Ulgen, 2022) Europe is regarded as one of the foremost supranational organizations driving the phenomenon forward. As such, its member states have been among the first and most heavily affected by some of the (largely unintended) consequences of globalization, such as its effects on inequality, its diminishing impacts on national sovereignty, and strain on certain domestic industries within member states, explored now.

Globalization vs inequality

Policymakers within EU member states who favor the free flow of capital and people face the political task of selling their policies to their domestic constituents that theoretically exert electoral control over their implementation and continuation. They are obliged to justify their liberal ideological commitment to globalization to their constituents by promising middle-class economic growth and bridged wealth gaps between the wealthy and the middle and working classes. As the argument goes, “a liberal free-market economic policy regime — nationally and globally — is good for economic growth and poverty reduction and for keeping income inequality within tolerable limits.” (Wade, 2006)

The evidence of globalization’s neutralizing effects on poverty and wealth inequality is mixed and nuanced. It does, importantly, bear out globalization’s neutralizing effect on inequality in certain contexts but, upon further examination, this claim is misleading when applied generally. Branko Milanovic, in “Global Income Inequality in Numbers,” parsed global inequality by applying three separate formulas to analyze global inequality numbers – “Inequality 1,” “Inequality 2,” and “Inequality 3.” Inequality 1 measures inequality between states without regard to population. Inequality 2 factors population into the otherwise same equation as Inequality 1, weighing countries with higher populations more heavily. Inequality 3, finally, the most data-intensive, uses an individual-level approach to measuring inequality without breaking the data up by nationality. (Milanovic, 2013, p. 417)

Milanovic then charts measurements of the three concepts, respectively, across time to determine whether, and to what extent, if any, inequality has declined using each metric. He found that, while Concepts 1 and 2 have declined precipitously since 1990, the same cannot be said of Inequality 3, which has remained more or less unchanged in the past several decades.

To summarize the relevancy of Milanovic’s findings to this research, globalization has produced reductions in inequality between nations, as promised. But an individual-level analysis of wealth inequality, as indicated in Concept 3 in the above illustration, shows that inequality between the ultra-wealthy and the ultra-poor regardless of nationality has remained elevated since the advent of globalization in the 1980s. 

Analysts often point to reductions in Inequality 1 and 2, on the heels of massive economic development in developing countries like India and China, as globalization success stories – and arguably deservedly so. Indeed, developing low and middle-income countries have, on average, economically benefitted significantly from globalization by many estimates, as “a government committed to economic diversification and capable of energizing its private sector can spur growth rates that would have been unthinkable in a world untouched by globalization.” (Rodrik, 2011)

As a result of the inflow of foreign investment and reduced trade barriers facilitated by globalization, worldwide “between 1990 and 2015… some 900 million people entered the $10-per-day middle class and another one billion people escaped dire poverty of just $2 a day or less.” (Birdsall, 2017, p. 130) Taking these numbers alone, it would appear that globalization is a boon for reduced inequality.

However, those bullish assessments of globalization’s economic benefits frequently neglect to mention that globalization has produced no such decrease in Inequality 3 – the kind that, again, measures individual inequality levels across the board, in both developed and developing countries. Since the 1990s, “the larger (and still far richer) middle class in the West has declined in size, and the prevailing mood among many of its members is one of anxiety and pessimism about their future prospects including those of their children,” (Birdsall, 2017, p. 131) indicating negligible benefits for the middle and working classes of developed countries, many of which are located in Europe.

This reality comes with electoral consequences for the states that champion pro-globalization, pro-liberalization economic policies. Although they might not necessarily begrudge the gains of the middle and working classes in other states, humans are not by nature altruistic. If the economic gains enjoyed by developing countries conferred by globalization are perceived to come at the expense of the electorates in developed countries such as Europe, far be it for the average European member of the middle or working class, whose life has not materially improved due to globalization based on Milanovic’s Inequality 3 model, to celebrate the relative gains of the working classes in India or China with the same level of enthusiasm.

Austerity – the practice of attempting to reduce national debts through tax hikes or spending cuts or a combination thereof, often under coercion from international creditors –

“lead[s] to sharp reductions in welfare spending, cancellation of school building programs, severe reductions in local government funding, increased VAT and tax levels, the abolition of governing bodies and reduced spending on public services.” (McMahon, 2017)

Austerity is increasingly relevant as a political issue, as by some estimates, “by 2023, 85% of the world’s population will live in the grip of austerity measures.” (Abed, 2022)

There are many potential domestic causes of austerity, including the collapse of internal tax revenues and national debt accumulation. (Maldowitz, 2014). However, globalization arguably plays a role in spurring austerity policy in developed countries, as evidenced by the international global financial crisis of 2007-2008 that “changed the post-war observation that sovereign debt burdens were largely the concern of emerging market countries. As government balances deteriorated, public debt-to-GDP ratios in advanced countries surpassed those of emerging markets, rising to levels not seen since World War II.” (Bosner-Neal, 2015, p. 545)

As Martell notes, “austerity has a lot to do with globalization… in terms of the global nature of the financial crisis.” (Martell, 2014, p. 12) In other words, national economies that are interconnected through globalization to other economies suffer the negative consequences of foreign economic downturns, in turn driving a need for political solutions that are often presented as austerity measures.

Globalization opened up new economic vulnerabilities to instability in the global banking system that previously did not exist, as “even countries that have benefited from globalization in the past… are vulnerable… globalization increases vulnerability through a variety of channels, including trade and financial liberalization.”  (United Nations, 1999, p.1)

As a result of the 2007-2008 economic crash and its aftermath, austerity policies were instituted across Europe: “either of their own volition or at the behest of the international financial institutions, [national governments in Europe] adopted stringent austerity policies in response to the financial crisis.” (McKee, et al., 2012)

Austerity is recognized to hit working-classes and middle classes, which depend more heavily on the public welfare system, the hardest:

“austerity measures aimed at curtailing public debt have impacted tremendously on the living standards of the middle class. Even in some of Europe’s most stable economies, the middle class is struggling.” (Ulbrich, 2015)

Specifically in the context of the EU, “austerity policies have expanded inequalities and undermined rights… Disparities in income have widened, the poorest getting poorer as welfare support declines and incomes are cut, while the rich continue accumulating income and wealth.” (Martell, 2014, p. 15) Some analysts have issued even starker warnings on the detrimental impacts of austerity on inequality and poverty in Europe: “austerity measures are weakening the mechanisms that combat inequality. Income is being increasingly unequally distributed; rising for the richest and falling for the poorest.” (OxFam, 2013a, p.11)  

Does globalization undermine national sovereignty?

 Dovetailing with the issue of internationally-driven economic downturns resulting in austerity measures, the question of whether globalization objectively undermines national sovereignty – as well the subjective question of how its adverse impact on national sovereignty from the perspective of domestic constituents — is essential for understanding how it affects electoral politics. Prior to the era of globalization beginning in the post-WWII era, national governments enjoyed near-total control over the goings-on in their respective internal economies. This has changed, as the reality that “national monetary sovereignty has been significantly compromised by financial globalization is clear… in financial matters, it is said, states have become essentially impotent.” (Cohen, 2008, p.216) Capital flows into and out of the national economy beyond the regulatory capacity of the government. Accordingly, “an unintended consequence of financial globalization is the growing exposure of developing countries to financial instabilities associated with sudden stops of inflows of capital, capital flights, and deleveraging crises.” (Aizenman, 2010, p. 217) The health of the national economy is no longer entirely or mostly dependent on domestic policymaking for globalized economies, for better or worse.

People move more freely across national borders in a globalized state as well. In addition to trade liberalization and capital flows, globalization is characterized “by transnational movements of people in search of better lives and employment opportunities elsewhere.” (Cholewinski, 2005) Globalization has resulted in the increased freedom of movement of workers and tourists alike without regard for national borders: “The unprecedented volume and speed of human mobility are perhaps the most conspicuous manifestations of the present era of globalization…. the phenomenon’s main driving force is the global expansion of capitalism and the free-market system.” (Knobler, et al., 2006)

Increased freedom of movement is most evident in the case of the European Union, given the previously outlined, unprecedented transnational Schengen Area, joining together dozens of European states in a free movement zone with no internal migration controls. One of the “fundamental principles” of EU membership is the “free movement of workers… enshrined in Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and developed by EU secondary legislation and the Case law of the Court of Justice.” (European Commission, n.d.) Under these provisions, EU citizens (which include every citizen of every EU member state) “are entitled to look for a job in another EU country, work there without needing a work permit, stay there even after employment has finished, [and] enjoy equal treatment with nationals in access to employment, working conditions and all other social and tax advantages.” (European Commission, n.d.) This has important implications for domestic workers that will be explored further in a later section of this research.

Global capital, along with post-nuclear geopolitics, environmental danger, and identity politics, is considered by some analysts to be one of the four principle threats to the state in the modern era. (Mann, 1997, p. 472) Globalization, which “has forced states into increasing competition for hi-tech industrial advantage” (Manchester Business School, 2017) in the global marketplace, weakens the position of the state. It exerts less and less influence over economic activities within its borders: “If globalization, in part, involves the emergence of supra national [sic] authorities because of new transnational problems resulting from growing trade, foreign investment, financial market interdependence and rapid technological change within a globalizing economy, then it seems only too natural that this process too will lead to supra national authorities eventually acquiring more jurisdictional power and nation states declining.” (Whalley, 1999, p. 1) This incursion of supranational authorities into areas of economic activity traditionally exclusively under the jurisdiction of states is a generally-held consensus, although some scholars like Mann point to the state’s continued social existence and the disparate impacts of globalization on various states as evidence that they maintain their primacy in the present era. (Mann, 1997, p. 472)

Protectionism vs globalization

Globalization stands in stark contrast to trade protectionism, which “protects domestic industries from unfair foreign competition… [using] tariffs, subsidies, quotas, and currency manipulation.” (Amadeo, 2022) Globalization is at odds with protectionist policies, as the latter are overwhelmingly favored by populist leaders who have “often used nationalism to justify protectionist policies that favor select domestic lobbies and have been at the forefront of trends in deglobalization.” (Ciravegna & Michailova, 2022, p. 175) There is debate regarding the extent of deglobalization and whether it exists as a phenomenon, but what is indisputable, as documented in an upcoming section on “far-right” politics and parties, globalization has increasingly become a highly relevant political issue in national politics in Europe.

Protectionism is anathema to liberalism. As Amadi notes, “a major contradiction of liberalism is ‘protectionism,’ which is the process of imposing trade restrictions such as tariffs to boost domestic industry.” (Amadi, 2020, p. 6) Under liberal theory, economic decisions are best left to the individual consumer outside of state influence to sort through cost, quality, etc. and make the most rational, self-interested decision possible. No preference is granted to domestically produced goods vs imported ones. The state does not intervene to favor domestic production over the import of foreign goods. Each nation unit produces the goods (and, increasingly in developed countries, the services) it is best suited to produce, based on its geographic location and human and natural resources. Adam Smith, one of the original purveyors of free trade, argued that if imported goods are cheaper than domestically produced ones, then importation makes good economic sense. (Smith, 1776, p.36) The EU has led the way in combating protectionism within its borders when it “implemented a program to create the world’s largest single market and embarked on creating a common currency.” (Hanson, 1998, p. 55)

Effects of globalization on domestic politics and populations in France and Hungary

Explored here are three potential effects of globalization on France and Hungary:

Transnational immigration 

Defined as “a process of movement and settlement across international borders in which individuals maintain or build multiple networks of connection to their country of origin while at the same time settling in a new country,” (Upegui-Hernandez, 2014, p. 2) transnational immigration is a consequence of globalization in highly globalized states. Academics disagree on its merits, but the fact is not disputed that globalization has been a boon for transnational immigration. Analysts note that “increased migration is one of the most visible and significant aspects of globalization.” (Tacoli & Okali, 2001, p.1)

Talani cites increasing interconnectivity between states, “resulting in more people than ever before choosing to live and work in other countries,” (Talani, 2022) as a result of globalization. Economic mandates factor heavily into the increase in transnational migration in globalized states. Demand for unskilled labor by developed economies, such as many of those in the European Union, drives transnational migration: “The global reorganisation of labour markets has an important impact on migration. In the North, demand is high for semiskilled and unskilled workers, such as cleaners and housemaids, and for seasonal agricultural workers.” (Tacoli & Okali, 2001, p. 2)

Central to the question of transnational immigration from a political perspective is whether any entity can truly control the phenomenon. And, if so, who or what is in control: “It is quite possible… that the forces unleashed by globalisation escape governance as they are structural necessities… and therefore the urge to migrate cannot be stopped by political entities,” (Talani, 2022) Essentially, it appears as if no one is steering the ship – no one or no thing is truly in control, including state authorities in charge of policing international borders. Perceived lack of control resulting from an influx of foreign migrants may aid “far-right” political parties because “sensing a lack of control tends to have a reinforcing effect on voters with nativist attitudes in support of [radical right populist parties].” (Heinisch & Jansesberger, 2022, p. 1) The connection between transnational immigration and the proliferation of populist, “far-right” parties and ideologies in Europe is explored in further detail in an upcoming section.

Perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity

How does globalization impact national identity, if at all, from the perspective of the domestic voting public? In popular perception – if not also in reality — national identity is at odds with the phenomenon of globalization in fundamental ways: “Nationalists and religious traditionalists fear that globalization will undermine cultural and other norms.” (Friedan, et al. 2017, p. 16) Often, perhaps out of social convention and discretion, the exact theoretical mechanism through which the culture will be “undermined” is not explicitly stated, but it is understood to be caused by an influx of immigrants who will introduce their own cultures and norms which will then spread throughout the population at large. According to the “clash of civilizations” theory, pioneered by Samuel Huntington, states are “differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.” (Huntington, 1996, p. 282) The differences serve to stoke distrust, resentment, and hostility between cultures. He warns that “the interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history.” (Huntington, 1996, p. 282) Peoples tend to be protective of their own cultural heritages, which necessarily excludes others. Culturally-based conflicts spill over into the political sphere.

In-group/out-group identity forming is a foundational element of sociology, predicated on the distinction between members of a social group and the amorphous, excluded “other.” Per Tajfel, et al. (1979), social groups confer identity and, with it, a sense of pride. The world is then dichotomized between “us” and “them.” Through this process, the differences between the in-group and out-group are amplified along with similarities among members of the in-group. Nationalism is, by definition, exclusive, since “the most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.” (Anderson, 1993, p. 7) That is to say, nationalist ideology – specifically, “exclusive nationalism” as defined in the following paragraph — does not allow for the same kind of assimilation into the native culture that liberal states have traditionally advocated for because it rejects new members from the out-group out of hand.

In particular, the variety of nationalism driven by an aversion to the influences of the outside world and peoples and manifest in “far-right” politics is called “exclusive nationalism” because it emphasizes in-group/out-group dynamics: “many newly ascendant nationalisms legitimate internal racial, religious, and ethnic hierarchies among citizens of their own countries…. it is not nationalism per se, but exclusionary nationalisms (also called ethnic or essentialist nationalisms) that are problematic for outcomes such as democracy.” (Mylonas & Tudor, 2021, p. 111) Because there is no interest among certain factions of the population in mingling with the outside world – and indeed, such mingling is viewed not just as undesirable but as an inherent threat — there is nothing to be gained socio-politically from globalization in the same theoretical way that it might benefit the economy, and everything to be lost in that regard.

Uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata 

The previous two effects of globalization touch on the issue of the threat to national identity. The final effect of globalization explored here is economic in nature. Specifically, globalization may exacerbate class divides by conferring disproportionate economic growth to the higher echelons of the socioeconomic ladder. As alluded to previously, globalization has disparate impacts across economic strata, tending to benefit upper-income brackets more so than the working and middle classes: “neo-liberal development aids the rich more than the poor, or at their expense… reproducing a linear rather than a relational conception of development’s co-ordinates of poverty and wealth.” (McMichael, 2012, p. 78) Various fleshed-out theories, such as trade theory, predict this dichotomy: “Trade theory tells us that the group… most likely to lose from globalization, or at best to gain less than everyone else, is labor.” (Deardoff & Stern, 2001, p. 6)

The lower economic classes, particularly low-skilled workers and the less-educated who benefit least from globalization, and the political parties that represent them, have taken note: “With growing economic inequality, low-skilled workers in the developed countries are turning increasingly against trade and immigration-feeding nationalist parties across Europe and North America.” (Friedan, et al. 2017, p. 16) Deardoff and Stern note “Growing opposition to globalization by organized labor… Because labor has lower income than those with income from other sources, and because trade lowers the relative wage, it tends to make the poor relatively poorer.” (Deardoff & Stern, 2001, p. 6) The working class – again, concentrated particularly in manufacturing and other unskilled labor-intensive economic activities — struggle with trade liberalization via globalization: “illiterate and other poorly trained workers in developing countries, designated as ‘NO-EDs/’ do not have even the minimal skills to benefit from unskilled labor-intensive exports. NO-EDs therefore may not have experienced the wage pull [from liberalization] that more educated but still unskilled compatriots might have enjoyed.” (Baker, 2005, p. 318)

Furthermore, globalization may not reduce inequality within states, despite popular perception to the contrary. Depending on the type of globalization, it may worsen inequality, as evidenced in Milanovic’s breakdown of three types of inequality explored in a previous section. To briefly rehash the results of his study, he found that, when the measure of inequality is conducted on an individual level independent of nationality, global inequality has remained the same since the 1980s. (Milanovic, 2013, p. 418)

In Heimberger’s meta-analysis of the effect of globalization on inequality, he refined the variables used to distinguish between the effects of trade globalization versus the effects of financial globalization on inequality, and concluded that “globalisation has, on average, a small-to-medium-sized effect of increasing income inequality. Trade globalisation has influenced income inequality to a lesser extent than financial globalization.” (Heimberger, 2020) Europe has become increasingly highly financially globalized: “after 1987 most of the [European] countries liberated their capital account[s]… [and] progressed significantly into financial globalization.” (García, 2012)

(Heimberger, 2020)

Globalization also makes the local population more aware of economic realities outside of their borders, as well as how the global economy at the global and regional levels of analysis is impacted by globalization in comparison to globalization’s effects on domestic national economies, partly due to “the greater influence of other people’s (foreigners’) standard of living and way of life on one’s perceived income position and aspiration.” (Milanovic, 2013, p. 416)  Domestic political awareness is also drawn to globalization’s potentially negative impact on domestic labor markets. (Dadush & Shaw, 2012) Interconnection and interdependency are a double-edged sword that is often overlooked by proponents of liberalism in order to emphasize its positive potential. The domestic electorate because increasingly aware, also, that “as the financial crisis of 2008 and the political instability that continue[d] to roil both developed and developing countries [made] clear, countries in the international economy are highly interdependent and closely integrated.” (Friedan, et al., 2017, p. 5) International economic malaise portends domestic political and economic malaise.

The economic goings-on in foreign countries impact everyone, potentially driving resentment or hostility towards foreign nationalities or ethnicities based on the damaging influences of foreign economic challenges as well as the increased competition faced in a globalized marketplace, particularly for blue-collar work: “Heightened import competition and increased offshoring… have affected the sectoral composition of employment and reduced the demand for low-skilled workers relative to medium- and high-skilled workers.” (Coe, 2010, p. 139) This trend, by its disparate impact on workers depending on skill level, will by its very nature drive inequality and potentially produce domestic political discontent within lower economic strata.

‘Far-right’ politics and parties

The previously described phenomena induced by globalization may have produced domestic political backlash from the voting populations affected by them. This backlash, in turn, may explain the largely unexpected rise in popular support for “far-right” political parties in Europe (with France and Hungary, the case studies here, serving as potential microcosms of European states across the continent as a whole).

For whatever benefits globalization might confer, the process of economic and social integration that is part and parcel of globalization necessarily requires concessions from nationalists who identify culturally and politically with the state. In popular usage, “far-right” politics are often used synonymously with “right-wing populism.” Far-right populism is defined as “a political ideology which combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. The rhetoric often consists of anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the perceived ‘establishment’, and speaking to the ‘common people’… populism of the right normally supports strong controls on immigration.” (European Center For Populism Studies, 2022) The interrelated ideologies of “nativism, authoritarianism and populism” are generally regarded as the three pillars of “far-right” ideology. (Remshardt, 2012)

There is a juxtaposition of terminologies at play that requires clarification. The term/label “liberalism” as it is used in the international realm should not be confused with domestic political ideologies of the same name in the West. At the domestic level, liberal (as in left-wing) ideology is, in fact, in the West, associated with protectionist policy positions, whereas “conservativism” (as in the right-wing) is traditionally more supportive of free trade (Friedan, et al., 2017, p. 8), arguably due to its business-friendly orientation. However, these left-right simple dichotomies in comparative politics are becoming more difficult to draw as ideologies bleed into each other and the international and national levels of analysis become more intertwined as globalization accelerates.

The “far-right” may also be referred to in social science literature as the “extremist right” (ER). Usually, although their ideological opponents use the labels, “far-right” parties do not label themselves “fascist” or “authoritarian” because of the stigma of these terms in post-WWII and post-Cold War Europe: “the spectacular growth in nationalist-populist parties in the nineties was made possible by an ideological renewal that had become necessary because of the discredit into which movements claiming to be in the tradition of fascism or authoritarian regimes… had fallen since 1945.” (Gjellerod, 2001)

In rhetoric and policy, right-wing populist parties are generally opposed to globalization. On the other hand, left-wing parties, though they criticize certain negative impacts of globalization, are more supportive of the phenomenon: “Whereas left-wingers have often been characterized as ‘new globals’ who seek to advance an alternative type of globalization, right-wingers emerge… as the true ‘no globals’, resisting any aspect of globalization.” (Della Porta & Caiani, 2012, p. 168) As previously alluded to, their principle objections to globalization is the detrimental impact on the native culture wrought by foreign influence and transnational immigration, although concern over economic impacts also features in their rhetoric.

Populism as a political ideology consists of several variants with important contrasts. The most prominent dichotomy is between right-wing and left-wing populism. Right-wing populism differs in fundamental ways from left-wing populism (sometimes described alternatively as “exclusionary” and “inclusionary” populism, respectively). Both forms of populism appeal, by definition, to the sensibilities of ordinary people – “the people” — outside of the prevailing power structure and champion their interests, at least rhetorically, against an elite governing class that is often considered corrupt or indifferent to the needs of the lower economic and social strata.

However, while left-wing populism conceptualizes “the people” in relation to prevailing institutions and social constructs – for example, to capital and the state — “right populism conflates ‘the people’ with an embattled nation confronting its external enemies: Islamic terrorism, refugees, the European Commission, the International Jewish conspiracy, and so on.” (Gandesha, 2018) In other words, right-wing populism has often been defined as “exclusionary” (of different ethnicities, religions, and nationalities, for instance) while left-wing populism is described as “inclusionary.” Left-wing populism is often internationalist in its orientation, sometimes going as far as decrying the concept of the state, while right-populism holds fidelity to the state above all as the homeland of “the people,” usually defined in ethnic/cultural/religious terms.

Research indicates that strong nationalist identity and ethnocentrism are important features of “far-right” ideology. (Falter & Schumann, 1988, p. 97)  “Far-right,” or right-wing populist, politics defies the conventional wisdom, according to which the working classes tend to support left-wing parties, which are generally considered friendlier to worker and organized labor: “Rightist parties which appeal to nationalism and traditional social issues can invoke more authoritarian values among the working class and those with less education. The consequences may be low and even ‘negative class voting’ where the conservative parties gain strong support from segments that belong to the left in contexts where the economic left–right divide” (Knutsen, 2013) is considered most relevant. “Far-right” supporters, however, need not necessarily fit any pre-conceived stereotype; activists across the ideological spectrum in Europe at large “worry that footloose corporations may undermine attempts to protect the environment, labor, and human rights,” and have accordingly embraced anti-globalization, nationalist, and protectionist political parties. (Friedan, et al., 2017, p. 16)

Daniel Oesch (2008, p. 349) explains that “during the 1990s, the working class has become the core clientele of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe.” The tendency for the poor and working classes to vote for, and identify with, the right vexes many analysts who see their economic interests represented more on the left: “across the world, blue-collar voters ally themselves with the political right – even when it appears to be against their own interests.” (Haidt, 2012) There are likely many possible reasons that the poor and working classes are predominately attracted to far-right party membership, but one clear reason is the disproportionate impact of immigrant/refugee policy on groups lower in the socioeconomic hierarchy: “The language of xenophobic discrimination in this context is often the language of perceived scarcity and competition… all over the world, the socio-economic implications of urban refugee protection disproportionately fall on the urban poor and working classes.” (Achiume, 2018)

One common argument for the often unexpected success of “far-right” populist parties in Europe in recent years is that the general “far right” at the international level (perhaps via globalization) influences and drives domestic far-right movements within European states, such as those in Hungary and France.  However, this appears not to be true because “right-wing extremist parties… are all (alleged) nationalistic movements, which would make them particularly country-specific and thus incomparable.” (Mudde, 2007, p. 226) Each nationalistic movement has its own objective of preserving the native culture, so its common cause with other nationalistic movements is limited.

Aside from a general shared European heritage, there is little that would bind far-right movements across national borders because their ideologies are so closely intertwined with local cultural and ethnic identities. Therefore, the thesis of this paper remains that there are localized phenomena — occurring at the domestic political level and induced by globalization — that explain the rapid growth of the “far-right” in Europe. Despite many illiberal facets of their ideology and governing philosophies, which would seem to eschew electoral politics, “the extremist parties and movements in Europe no longer operate outside the democratic system, which they have so often decried, but within it.” (Gjellerod, 2001)

The perception of a rigged or unfair (or both) economic system in the new century may have worsened popular anger along economic lines, and many point the finger at globalization for the relative decline of the middle-class standard of living due to austerity. Among the “multiple economic, social, cultural and political causes for the current rise in the radical right in various European countries,” Cesáreo Rodríguez-Aguilera concludes that the “economic crisis triggered in 2008 and the ensuing single-minded pursuit by EU and national authorities of neoliberal deficit-control and austerity measures are one key factor.” (Rodríguez-Aguilera, 2014)

Some analysts argue that austerity is an inevitable consequence of continued globalization: “Austerity is not just a consequence of the global financial crisis but is here to stay as states grapple with the wider impacts of globalisation and the difficulty of increasing state spending” arguing that “modern forces undermine the ability of nation states to increase both welfare and infrastructure spending.” (Alliance Manchester Business School, 2017) In the fallout of the 2007/08 crash, the media has documented “efforts of extremist parties to win support by plugging into popular discontent over the financial crisis, against the backdrop of a wider social unease and anti-immigrant sentiment.” (Smith-Spark, 2012)

Methodology 

This research will utilize a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Globalization is a cultural and political as well as an economic phenomenon. Each of these varieties of globalization has distinct impacts on the populations that experience them that might inform voting behavior and voters’ attitudes. France and Hungary — from Western Europe and Eastern Europe, respectively, and a founding member and a relatively new member of the European Union since 2004, respectively – will serve as the dual case studies examined in this research.

The three sociopolitical phenomena associated with globalization examined in this study, in the context of France and Hungary, will be: transnational immigration rates, the perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity among the populations, and uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata.

Transnational immigration rates into Hungary and France are quantifiable using EU aggregate data and data compiled by national governments at the state level. Perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity is quantifiable using public polling data. Uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata is likewise quantifiable using private and public-sector reports.

Having established and measured the metrics to indicate what sociopolitical changes globalization has caused at the state level, the research will then measure globalization’s impact on voting behavior. This study will analyze voting behavior at the national level in two European states, France and Hungary, from 1990-2020, when globalization within the EU accelerated.

The research will use the share of the total vote going to “far-right” nationalist parties in France and Hungary – the National Rally (RN) (formerly known as the National Front; the reasons for the name change will be explored in the section on “far-right” politics in France) and Fidesz-KDNP, respectively — which tend to adopt hardline rhetorical and policy stances against globalization, as the bellwethers of support for the “far-right.” In addition, this research will examine public polling data that can detail voter motivations that might otherwise be unclear based on raw vote tallies alone.

Because voters may prefer “far-right” parties over alternative candidates for any number of reasons, this research will also include exit polling in addition to electoral outcomes in national elections, in which voters express their motivations for voting the way they did. The results from France and Hungary will then be compared to identify common trends shared by the two European Union member states.

Evidence 

In this section, the research will seek to answer several relevant questions: How did the three identified consequences of globalization – increased transnational immigration, perceived loss of national identity, and uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata – specifically manifest in Hungary and France, respectively? Did “far-right” parties achieve greater electoral success between 1990-2020 than before? If so, what issues did these “far-right” parties campaign on as centerpieces of their platforms, and what motivations can be discerned on the part of voters who supported them based on polling data?

Hungary

In domestic politics, right-wing populist European parties are “known for their opposition to immigration, especially from the Islamic world, and for Euroscepticism[emphasis in original text].” (European Center For Populism Studies, 2022). In Hungary, “far-right” parties position themselves rhetorically against EU integration and globalization more broadly, framing them as threats to national sovereignty and national identity.

Hungary’s main “far-right” party, Fidesz-KDNP, headed by Viktor Orban, won power in 2010, (Gawron-Tabor, 2015, p. 290) following the 2007/08 global financial crash. It has held power since, winning parliamentary supermajorities in four separate elections from 2010 to 2022. There is good evidence that distrust in neoliberal, multinational financial institutions drove its success, as the Fidesz-KDNP campaigned on specific and relevant policy changes: “Prime Minister Orbán put forth his explicit aim to increase domestic ownership in banking to over 50% and legitimized the ensuing re-nationalization of the financial sector with resentment over neoliberal banking practices.” (Sebok & Simons, 2022, p. 1625)

Eastern/Central Europe was once ripe for liberalization and democratization in the model of the West following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unfortunately for proponents of liberalism, Cianetti et al. recommend that “this optimistic picture of democratisation in East Central Europe needs revising… the region appears to be mired in a range of negative phenomena subsumed under the label ‘democratic backsliding’ which impact on democracy as a regime threatening… an authoritarian reversal.” (Cianetti et al., 2018, p. 244) In other words, Hungry has experienced a popular rejection of liberalism and pluralism. Krekó concurs: “Since 2010, Hungary has gradually become a competitive authoritarian state or ‘hybrid regime,’ where democratic institutions exist in theory, but the rule of law and civil liberties are severely limited in practice.” (Krekó, 2022) What follows is an explanation of the electoral factors that may have driven that “democratic backsliding” in favor of more authoritarian, populist ideologies and how they may have increased the political viability of the “far-right.”

Transnational immigration to Hungary and national identity

For the past hundred years, since the end of World War I and the collapse of the Austria-Hungary Empire, Hungary has been “one of the most ethnically homogenous states” (Freifeld, 2001) in Europe. The vast majority of the Hungarian population is ethnically Hungarian, and in this way the national identity is closely intertwined with the ethnic one.

But with the ascension of Hungary into the EU in 2004, Hungary effectively opened its doors to immigration from within the EU, threatening to dilute the long-standing ethnic hegemony of Hungarians within Hungary. “Far-right” political campaigners in Hungary have seized on the ethnicity issue to declare that in the post-EU integration era Hungary “had allowed its ethnic identity to be diluted, washed too thin by the pull to the West, by urbanization, and by the heavy influence of Hungarian Jews in the culture and prosperity of the country.” (Freifeld, 2001) This, again, highlights the previously established incorporation of anti-Semitic rhetoric into “far-right” campaigning.

It is arguably true that some, if not all, of the popular support for “far-right” parties in Hungary (and, as explored in an upcoming section, France) would have materialized regardless of any marketing/electioneering efforts on the part of the parties. But we know that these types of parties historically intentionally capitalize on the growing resentment of native populations against immigration as a concept and immigrants as people: “Xenophobic discrimination cannot [original emphasis in text] be reduced to socio-economic determinants. Politically motivated scapegoating of forced migrants and even criminal opportunism, for example, may play an important role in influencing when host communities mobilize to exclude or harm refugees.” (Achiume, 2018)

With the role of political parties in fueling xenophobia in mind, Hungary’s Constitution, called the “Fundamental Law of Hungary,” passed under the ruling Fidesz-KDNP Party in 2011, explicitly outlines the ethnic and religious contours of the state: “We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago.” (Constitute Project, 2011, p. 4).

The document also gives a nod to “safeguarding” Hungarian culture: “We commit to promoting and safeguarding our heritage, our unique language, Hungarian culture, the languages and cultures of nationalities living in Hungary.” (Constitute Project, 2011, p. 4) With the usually subdued and technical official government as a contrast, one will note the comparatively brazen nature of the ethnonationalism expressed; even under the leadership of like-minded social conservatives in other Western countries, it’s rare to see commitments to “safeguarding” the culture so explicitly rendered in an ostensibly liberal state.

Asked in a 2017 poll “What do you think is the most important aspect of the EU that does not function well?”, Hungarian respondents overwhelmingly cited immigration control (20%) over any other concern. The next-biggest concerns, at 5% respectively, were “independence of countries” and “protection of the EU borders,” which also speak to concerns over transnational immigration. (Ipsos Hungary ZRT, 2017, p. 28)

In its Constitution, the Fidesz-KDNP Party, in no uncertain terms, rejects pluralism and secularism — both essential features of liberalism, especially in the context of the EU. As critics put it, the “new constitution… [passed under Fidesz-KDNP rule]… referred to… the subject of the constitution not only as the community of ethnic Hungarians, but also as a Christian community, narrowing even the range of people who can recognize themselves as belonging to it.” (Halmai, 2018)

Owing to its geographic location in Eastern Europe, the period of 2015-2019 was particularly unprecedented for Hungary as millions of immigrants coming from the Middle East and North Africa attempted to make the journey to Germany and other further West European states – first via Greece to Macedonia to Hungary — due to their migrant-friendly policies and state support. (Ayoub, 2019, p. 4) In Hungary, “net migration ranged from 4,277 persons in 2013 to 38,786 persons in 2019.” (Statista, 2022) as illegal immigration became more widespread: “almost 12 thousand third country nationals were found to be illegally present in Hungary. This represented an increase of almost 100 percent compared to 2014.” (Statista, 2022)

(Statista, 2022)

The demographic effect of an influx of transnational migrants into Hungary is exacerbated by the extremely low birth rate among the native population. In 2021, while the raw total of immigrants rises, Hungary’s overall population growth rate dropped into negative figures at -0.29%. That year saw 12.88 deaths per 1,000 Hungarians and just 8.72 births per 1,000 Hungarians. (Migration Policy Institute, 2022). The figure below depicts the downward overall population trend in Hungary.

Based on polling, the Hungarian population is overwhelmingly opposed to these demographic trends: “When it comes to Hungarians’ opinion on the topic, as of March 2020, over two-thirds of the population found illegal immigration a concerning issue.” (Statista, 2022) Expression of xenophobic attitudes expressed openly has increased along with the increase in transnational immigration and the rise of Fidez-KDNP in Hungary.

According to one analysis, “In 1992, 15 percent of Hungarians expressed xenophobic attitudes but the number increased to 39 percent by 2014 and reached a peak of 67 percent in October 2018.” (Krekó, 2022) This represents a more than four-fold increase in xenophobic attitudes in less than thirty years.

In an analysis alongside other EU member states, “Hungary… ranks extremely high compared with other European nations when it comes to exclusionary views on national identity.” (Manevich, 2016) A large majority hold negative views of Muslims and the more historic ethnic minority in Hungary, the Roma. Shockingly, one-third of Hungarians also express anti-Semitic views. (Manevich, 2016)

Xenophobic rhetoric within Hungary accelerated greatly around 2015, which coincides with “an unprecedented number of asylum-seekers” passing through Hungary,” (Krekó, 2022) mostly on their way to other EU member states perceived to be more welcoming of foreigners such as Germany. The Fidesz-controlled Hungarian government “was among the first countries in the European Union to capitalise upon the refugee crisis by politicising the question of immigration, therefore, several anti-immigration campaigns were initiated in Hungary during 2015 and 2016.” (Marton, 2017, p. 2)

Halmai (2018) notes that “The refugee crisis of 2015 has demonstrated the intolerance of the Hungarian governmental majority, which styled itself as the defender of Europe’s ‘Christian civilization’ against an Islamic invasion.” In 2015, amid criticism from the European Union and the broader international community to take in more refugees, Orban cited economic concerns in addition to the previously mentioned social ones over the question of immigration: “the stream of refugees would place an intolerable financial burden on European countries, adding that this would endanger the continent’s ‘Christian welfare states.'” (Reuters, 2015b)

In a 2015 speech, Fidesz-KDNP head and sitting prime minister Viktor Orban declared that “‘we would like to preserve Europe for Europeans…, ‘But there is something that we would not only like but we want: to preserve Hungary for Hungarians.'” (Reuters, 2015a) In his April 2022 victory speech, Orban targeted the EU, largely seen as the source of the influx of migrants and the resulting dilution of Hungarian culture: “Our win is so huge you can see it from the Moon, never mind from Brussels,” (Adler, 2022) referencing the EU headquarters in Belgium.

Moreover, in a 2022 speech Orban declared that “the great European population exchange [is] a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations – migrants.” (Garamvolgyi & Borger, 2022) He also adeptly couches his rhetoric in the language of right-populism: “the millions with national feelings are on one side [apart from] the elite citizens of the world.” (Orbán, 2018)

Popular opinion notwithstanding, political pressure came to bear from within the EU, specifically from Germany, for other EU member states – especially those publicly opposed to accepting greater numbers of refugees such as Hungary — to foster more immigrants: “It isn’t just Germany, but all of Europe has a responsibility, and we have to remember that almost all refugees, and there are millions in the world, have often found refuge in a neighboring country,” said German Social Democrat head Scholz.” (Ridgwell, 2021) This may be seen as an imposition by a foreign power on the domestic politics of the state, a sentiment that might ironically be responsible for further entrenching the Hungarian electorate in opposition to immigration.

Inequality and austerity in Hungary

The chart below depicts the share of pre-tax national income going to the top 10% in red, juxtaposed to the share of pre-tax national income going to the bottom 50% in blue in Hungary from 1990-2021. In it, we see that Hungary, coming out of the Soviet Union, experienced a surge in top 10% elite wealth and a concomitant loss in the bottom half’s share of national wealth – the latter down from 30.6% in 1990 to 22.5% in 2020. Because of the collapse of state-planned communism in 1991 and the transition to a market economy, we may infer based on these figures – barring confounding factors — that neoliberal economic policies ostensibly did not reduce inequality in Hungary and, in fact, worsened it.

Viktor Orban and the Fidesz-KDNP have shrewdly avoided any austerity measures until very recently in 2022, when the party was forced to relinquish its hardline opposition to austerity due to skyrocketing inflation associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine an energy shortages. (Varga, 2022) Prior to that, which may be considered an extenuating circumstance, austerity had come to Hungary in the aftermath of the 2007/08 financial crisis, during which time Hungary was forced into “more spending cuts following a balance of payments crisis [in 2008] that necessitated €20bn aid from the EU, IMF and World Bank,” (Traynor & Allen, 2010). Analysts compared Hungary to Greece, which was rocked by financial insolvency in the immediate past and forced to institute austerity packages. polling indicates that opposition to austerity measures was a major issue that originally won Fidesz-KDNP its 2/3 majority in parliament in 2010. (Benczes, 2014)

In Hungary, Viktor Orban and the Fidesz-KDNP, when it assumed power in 2010, following austerity, bucked International Monetary Fund orthodoxy and reversed course, refusing further austerity packages and instead levying a new bank tax to generative revenue for the public treasury. (Weisbrot, 2010) Even with concessions, the Fidesz-KDNP has continued to resist austerity measures, instead expanding state benefits to its constituents. In 2022, Orban “paid a ‘thirteenth-month’ pension to seniors, exempted people under 25 years of age from income tax, and buffered Hungarians from inflation by freezing fuel and food prices. In prior election years, such handouts have won many people over.” (Scheppele, 2022, p. 46)

Viktor Orban has consistently criticized the “left’s” penchant for austerity: “The left wing tightens belts, makes layoffs, raises taxes and lowers salaries in times of crisis, while the government does just the opposite: it supports job preservation, creates new workplaces, cuts taxes and provides wage support.” (Hungary Today, 2020) In 2018, “the [twenty] poorest villages and settlements in Hungary… voted overwhelmingly in favor of Fidesz-KDNP’s reelection.” (Vaski, 2022)

France 

The predominate “far-right” party in France is the National Rally (RN), headed by Marine Le Pen. French nationalists – sometimes described as “nativists” – founded the National Rally in 1972, led by Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Since its inception, stopping transnational immigration has been its primary focus: “Since its beginnings, the party has strongly supported French nationalism and controls on immigration, and it often has been accused of fostering xenophobia and anti-Semitism.” (Ray, n.d.) In 2018, the National Rally rebranded itself in an attempt to achieve more mass appeal. Its original name, National Front was abandoned due to its association with extreme xenohphobia, including anti-Semitism. (France 24, 2018)

Until the 1990s, when globalization began in earnest, the National Front (FN) remained relatively obscure, rarely winning more than 10% of the popular vote in national elections. But “by the 1990s the FN had established itself… In 1995 Le Pen captured more than 15 percent of the vote in the presidential contest, the FN won mayoral elections in Toulon, Orange, and Marignane, and a former FN member was elected mayor of Nice.” (Ray, n.d.)

The true turning point for the party came when it moderated its most extreme anti-Semitic views under the new leadership of Marine Le Pen: “She and a younger generation of allies initiated a process of ‘de-demonisation’, dropping some of the party’s most radical proposals… [older party members] were replaced with younger, savvier political operators.” (Phalen, 2022) Since cleaning house, so to speak, “the party has skilfully tapped into disenchantment with Macron and anger over the rising cost of living, globalisation and the perceived decline in many rural communities.” (Phalen, 2022) In France, low-income voters disproportionately vote for Nationally Rally candidates in national elections. (Thomas, 2022)

National Rally’s electoral rise from obscurity has been remarkable: “Between the National Assembly elections of 1973, which the RN was founded to contest in the name of a unified French nationalist right, and the… corresponding elections of 2012, the party increased its national vote share from 0.5 per cent (fewer than 125,000 votes) to 13.6 per cent (over 3.5 million votes).” (Shields, 2014, p. 41) By 2019, the National Rally had become the single best-performing party in France’s multi-party system.

Demographic research indicates that a strong majority of right-wing voters in France live in rural areas, whereas the cities are more populated proportionally by left-wing voters. Newly arrived immigrants, perhaps due to perceived corresponding social benefits, tend to cluster within cities: “Cities have a much higher share of people born in another country (17% of the population of 15 and older in 2019 in the EU28) than other areas do (12% in towns and suburbs, and 6% in rural areas).” (De Dominicis, et al., 2020, p. 10) Furthermore, in the West broadly, “rural people are much more likely to desire decreased immigration when compared with urban people.” (Garcia, 2013, p. 96) The National Rally and other “far-right” parties consistently outperform rivals in rural, mostly white, mostly working-class regions. In 2017, for instance, Marine Le Pen dominated the French countryside whereas Macron fared far better in the large cities, demonstrating rural areas as her party’s unquestionable seat of power:

Interestingly, the major “Yellow Vest” protest movement against the French government’s proposed gas hike and social inequality generally originated due to “a feeling of neglect and exclusion in France’s exurbs and rural regions… where the French state and many institutions representative of French society have progressively disengaged over the past decade.” (Stephens, 2019) It is likely no coincidence that the regions of France that are most disaffected with social inequality and most hostile to transnational immigrants disproportionately vote for the National Rally.

Opposition to austerity and wealth inequality were central issues that drove the yellow vest protests: “The ‘yellow vest’ protests of hundreds of thousands that have taken place every week for the past six months have been driven by opposition to rising social inequality and poverty and dominated by demands for an end to austerity and a redistribution of wealth from the rich to the working class.” (Morrow, 2019)

In 2021, while running for the top elected national office against sitting PM Emmanuel Macron, popularly conceived to be friendly to the EU and globalization broadly, Le Pen laid bare the ideological divide that she hoped to exploit on her way to a victory: “[Emmanuel Macron] stands for unregulated globalisation, I defend the nation, which remains the best structure to defend our identity, security, freedom and prosperity.” (Reuters, 2021)

Transnational immigration to France and national identity

 Immigration to France accelerated greatly following 1990, as illustrated graphically below (the blue line representing the immigrant population’s raw numbers and the green line indicating immigrants as the share of the entire population). By 1999, immigrants represented 7.3% of the total population. By 2020, twenty years later, that share had risen to over 10%.

The differential fertility rates between native-born French women and foreign-born French women exacerbate the demographic trends in France. Along with an increasing share of the population represented by immigrants, France has experienced a steady decline in birth rates since 2015. (RFI, 2020) Furthermore, while the overall fertility rate in France was 1.9 per woman (near replacement level), the fertility rate of foreign-born women was 2.6 per woman in 2017 compared to 1.8 in 2017. 19% of all babies that year were born to foreign-born women. (Volant, et al., 2019)

Even as Le Pen is considered “far-right” – despite moderating since the days of her father’s National Rally — domestic political pressure came to bear from the right of Le Pen to impose harsher anti-immigrant policies. Eric Zemmour threw his hat into the ring in 2021 as a candidate for prime minister, declaring at his campaign launch that “you feel like you are no longer in the country you once knew … you are foreigners in your own country.” (Melander, 2021)

Zemmour, following a trend within France, explicitly referenced the Great Replacement Theory, sometimes known as “white genocide.” The premise of the theory is that shadowy powers-that-be are working in secret to flood white-majority countries with immigrants. The ultimate goal is attaining the dilution and annihilation of Western culture: “These theories focus on the premise that white people are at risk of being wiped out through migration, miscegenation or violence… these concepts have come to dominate the ideology of extreme-right groups.” (Davey & Ebner, 2019, p. 4). In recent years, sensing the electoral opportunities, more center-right parties in France such as Les Républicains (LR) have hardened their anti-immigrant rhetoric: “Eric Ciotti, a hardline conservative who unexpectedly won the first round of the [Les Républicains] primary last week, has promised to set up a ‘French Guantanamo’ and espoused the far-right theory that the French people are being ‘replaced’ by foreign — Arab, black, Muslim —­ immigrants.” (Momtaz, 2021)

In a 2020 poll of French voters, 53% and 52%, respectively, of respondents believed curbing illegal immigration and the perceived social and financial costs of that immigration were priority issues that the government should be working to resolve. (Institut français d’opinion publique, 2020, p. 70) According to the results of a 2021 survey of French voters, 71% of respondents reported believing that France had fostered enough immigrants, expressing their wish for it to stop. 64% of respondents were keen to reject all asylum seekers, citing their perceived involvement in terrorism. Nearly three-quarters (74%) expressed a belief that ethnic diversity causes social problems. (Le Labo de la Fraternité, 2021, p. 7)

One analysis, studying Danish municipal elections from 1981 to 2001, found that “local ethnic diversity lead to rightward shifts in election outcomes by shifting electoral support away from traditional ‘big government’ left-wing parties and towards anti-immigrant nationalist parties.” (Harmon, 2017, p. 1043) In another 2020 survey of French voters, 60% reported a belief that assimilating foreigners is not “pragmatic” due to intransigent cultural differences. (Institut français d’opinion publique, 2020, p. 44)

The phrase “France belongs to the French” is an often-repeated expression of the “far-right,” which has strong ethnic overtones. For instance, when, in 2013, ethnically Algerian Muslims in France went on a killing spree in response to Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammed, “pork was left on the steps of a mosque with the inscription ‘France belongs to the French'” (Frydman, 2016, p. 85) – pork being a forbidden food product in the Islamic faith. In another instance of political rejection of multiculturalism, in the context of a push to include meals in public schools compatible with Islamic doctrine, Marine Le Pen said “We will accept no religious requirements in the school lunch menus. There is no reason for religion to enter into the public sphere.” (Janmohamed, 2014)

Inequality and austerity in France

The chart below depicts the share of pre-tax national income going to the top 10% in red, juxtaposed to the share of pre-tax national income going to the bottom 50% in blue in France, from 1990 to 2020.

Here, we see that France’s bottom 50% marginally improved its share of national income from 20.1% in 1990 to 23.2% in 2020 while the top 10% essentially maintained its share. In this regard, the country is an outlier, as France was one of only five countries that OECD looked at from 1988-2008 that actually reduced inequality. (OECD, 2008, p. 1)

This has not stopped austerity from coming to France due to various international political crises, including the 2007/08 economic crash. In 2010, when France had a 99.1 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, it was forced to instate austerity programs under pressure from EU headquarters in Brussels. (Elleyatt & Amaro, 2018) The effects of globalization-induced austerity on the French population are felt disproportionately by the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The economic fallout from the transnational 2007/08 financial crash and the resulting austerity measures instituted by the French government resulted in the increase of poverty rates in France from 7.8 million in 2007 to 8.6 million in 2013. Wages to the bottom twenty percent of earners in France decreased 1.3 percent while wages to the top twenty percent of wage earners increased by 0.9 percent. (OxFam, 2013b, p. 3)

French voters reject austerity in public polling. In one such survey, French voters supported increased government spending on public services: “Similarly, 59% agree that the EU’s fiscal rules should be changed to allow governments to increase spending on improving public services… Even more respondents (64%) are concerned about the potential impact of austerity should the EU try to force governments to cut borrowing to reduce their debts over the next five years.” (Syndicat European Trade Union, 2022, p. 1)

The National Rally has positioned itself consistently against austerity, including in 2019 when National Rally candidates in the European election “exploit[ed] the social crisis and anger produced by the austerity… policies of so-called ‘center-left’ or social-democratic governments over decades.” (Morrow, 2019) In that election, “Marine Le Pen’s far-right party came first in France’s European election and gained half a million more votes than last time… the far-right has steadily become a regular and unquestioned part of French political life despite political opponents condemning it as racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic and hate-mongering.” (Chrisafis, 2019) The National Rally has repeatedly framed its criticism of the French welfare state as unfairly benefitting immigrants at the expense of the native population, and, in keeping with exclusionary populist rhetoric, in her most recent presidential campaign promised a policy “prioritising French people’s access to welfare, social housing and jobs.” (Parker, 2022)

Similarities between the rise of the ‘far-right’ in Hungary and France

At the outset of this research, it was established that transnational immigration is a documented byproduct of globalization. (Tacoli & Okali, 2001, p.1) Globalization is also seen to drive perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity among the native population (Friedan, et al. 2017, p. 16) – thereby driving the political development of “exclusionary “nationalism” (Mylonas and Tudor, 2021, p. 111)  — and uneven economic benefits primarily advantaging the upper economic strata (McMichael, 2012, p. 78).

In turn, the effects of these general effects of globalization on political outcomes are examined in the two case studies here, using election results, public polling data, demographic characteristics of “far-right” voters, and “far-right” party rhetoric. There are numerous noteworthy parallels between Hungary and France that help answer the question of whether neoliberal, globalization-friendly policies within each respective space drove “far-right” political victories from 1990-2020.

Both political parties studied here, the National Rally in France and the Fidesz-KDNP in Hungary, rose to political prominence around the same time, in the context of broader political history, which coincided with a rise in transnational immigration since the early 1990s and the fallout of the 2007/08 financial crash, which included austerity measures. Fidesz won a supermajority in parliament in 2010, (Gawron-Tabor, 2015, p. 290) while the National Front won its largest-ever share of the vote (13.6%) in National Assembly elections in 2012, (Shields, 2014, p. 41). In each case, “far-right” parties have made opposition to foreign influence and international governance – transnational immigration, perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity and uneven distribution of economic benefits being three effects of globalization — central to their platforms, particularly from 2010-2020.

Anti-globalization, and particularly anti-EU, rhetoric – globalization being often cited as a nefarious and corrosive influence on their respective native cultures — features prominently in both French and Hungarian “far-right” party rhetoric, often combined with overtly racial overtones. In Hungary, “far-right” Fidesz-KDNP candidates have decried “the heavy influence of Hungarian Jews in the culture and prosperity of the country.” (Freifeld, 2001) Anti-semitic rhetoric is also seen in French “far-right” politics, and was indeed foundational in the establishment of the National Front, now known as the National Rally. (France 24, 2018)

In Hungary, the Fidesz-KDNP enshrined its commitment “to promoting and safeguarding our heritage, our unique language, Hungarian culture, the languages and cultures of nationalities living in Hungary” (Constitute Project, 2011, p. 4) in its Constitution. In France, multiple-time National Rally presidential candidate and party head Marine Le Pen, an avowed Eurosceptic, has pledged “to slash France’s contributions to the EU” if elected. (Parker, 2022) In a 2019 speech, Le Pen concluded with an admonition to “turn our backs on all that made European peoples suffer, on policies that led to the economic and social failure of the EU… the European Union is dead.” (Marlowe, 2019)

Transnational immigration rates rose steadily in each country from 1990-2020 as globalization accelerated in the 1980s. In France, immigrants as a share of the total population rose from around 4 percent in 1990 to over ten percent in 2020, a 250% increase.(L’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, 2021) At the same time, declining birth rates among non-immigrant French woman resulted in more than 19% of babies in France born to foreign-born women in 2017. (Volant, et al., 2019)

Historically “one of the most ethnically homogenous states” (Freifeld, 2001), Hungary experienced a 100% increase in transnational immigration rates from 2014 to 2019. At the same time, Hungary’s overall population has declined due to discrepancies between birth and death rates, (World Population Review, 2022) furthering the demographic impact of immigration to the country. In 2015, faced with calls to accept more immigrants to Hungary in the midst of a surge in migrants entering the EU, Orban claimed that “the stream of refugees would place an intolerable financial burden on European countries, adding that this would endanger the continent’s ‘Christian welfare states.'” (Reuter, 2015)

The effect of immigration on public political attitudes is also similar between France and Hungary. Numerically comparable proportions of the respective French and Hungarian populations respond negatively to transnational immigration in polling. In one survey in France, 60% reported a belief that assimilating foreigners is not “pragmatic” due to intransigent cultural differences. (Institut français d’opinion publique, 2020, p. 44) A full 71% in another poll among the French public believe that France has taken in enough refugees and should close the border. (Le Labo de la Fraternité, 2021, p. 7)

Similarly, in Hungary, an overwhelming plurality of poll respondents say that controlling immigration is the biggest concern they have with international governance from the EU (Ipsos Hungary ZRT, 2017, p. 28) Two-thirds of the population in one survey cite illegal immigration as a “concerning issue.” (Statista, 2022) Xenophobic attitudes within the Hungarian population spiked to 67% in 2018 from 15% in 1992. (Krekó, 2022) From 2015 to 2016, the Fidesz-KDNP-led government made Hungary “among the first countries in the European Union to capitalise upon the refugee crisis by politicising the question of immigration, therefore, several anti-immigration campaigns.” (Marton, 2017, p. 2)

“Far-right” parties in both France and Hungary couch the issue of transnational immigration and foreign cultural influences in existential, and often apocalyptic, terms. Eric Zemmour, “far-right” candidate in France’s 2021 national election, declare that “you feel like you are no longer in the country you once knew … you are foreigners in your own country.” (Melander, 2021) Zeymmour and other “far-right” figures on France have advanced the “white replacement” conspiracy theory, which espouses the claim that “white people are at risk of being wiped out through migration, miscegenation or violence.” (Davey & Ebner, 2019, p. 4) Xenophobic rhetoric such as “France belongs to the French” is now commonplace at “far-right” political events. (Frydman, 2016, p. 85)

Recently, in Hungary, Viktor Orban, Fidesz-KDNP head, claimed at American “far-right” political summit Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “the great European population exchange [is] a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations – migrants.” (Garamvolgyi & Borger, 2022) Contrasting herself with left-centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, nationally Rally candidate Marine Le Pen said that he “stands for unregulated globalisation, I defend the nation, which remains the best structure to defend our identity, security, freedom and prosperity.” (Reuters, 2021)

This research also implicates a less stark, but relevant economic factor associated with globalization in the rise of “far-right” political parties in France and Hungary from 1990-2020, particularly related to austerity measures adopted throughout Europe following the 2007/08 international financial crash. Poverty in France, largely driven by austerity, impacted nearly a million more people from 2007 to 2013. (OxFam, 2013b, p. 3) Some analysts have argued that more international-oriented, mainstream political parties in France and Hungary arguably left an electoral lane open to “far-right” parties by going along, at least partially, with international pressure to institute austerity policies in the aftermath of the 2007/08 financial crisis to make up for budget shortfalls (Rodríguez-Aguilera, 2014) (Smith-Spark, 2012) This is because public polling of the French and Hungarian publics, respectively, showed that an overwhelming majority of voters were suspicious of austerity measures. In France, this is especially true of austerity policies perceived to be promoted by the EU. (Syndicat European Trade Union, 2022, p. 1)

In Hungary, polling indicates that opposition to austerity measures was a major issue that originally won Fidesz-KDNP its historic two-thirds majority in parliament in 2010 (Benczes, 2014) and later in the same year the party rejected a proposed IMF austerity package. (Weisbrot, 2010) Fidesz-KDNP leader Viktor Orban has consistently criticized Fidesz-KDNP’s rival parties in Hungary for their support of “left-wing” austerity measures. (Hungary Today, 2020) In France, National Rally head Marine Le Pen has leveled similar accusations of “left” support for austerity measures. Characterizing them as “policies of so-called ‘center-left’ or social-democratic governments.” (Morrow, 2019)

The most important distinction between Hungary and France in the context of the economic effects on domestic politics in each country is the disparate levels of inequality. As measured by wealth disparities between the top 10% and the bottom 50%, Hungary’s level of inequality skyrocketed during the period of study, (World Inequality Database, 2021b) whereas France’s inequality diminished slightly. (World Inequality Database, 2021a) This suggests, barring confounding factors, that income inequality may not drive support for “far-right” political parties as expected.

Like the parties themselves, the electoral bases of the National Rally and Fidesz-KDNP in their respective populations share a trio of demographic commonalities that are more likely to be adversely affected by globalization: they tend to be more rural, poorer and less educated than the average voter. Rural voters in France are likelier to support the National Rally than their suburban or urban peers. (BBC, 2017)

Fidesz-KDNP also dominates national contests in Hungary in the rural regions. One analysis found that Fidesz-KDNP subsidies targeting rural communities in Hungary fueled a 4.3% increase in vote share in targeted areas in 2019. (Reiff & Szabó, 2022) In 2018, “the [twenty] poorest villages and settlements in Hungary… voted overwhelmingly in favor of Fidesz-KDNP’s reelection.” (Vaski, 2022)  In France, low-income voters likewise disproportionately vote for “far-right” Nationally Rally. (Thomas, 2022)

Lastly, lower levels of education in Hungary have been statistically correlated to increased support for Fidesz-KDNP. (Hungary Today, 2022) In France, low education, combined with elevated immigration levels, has been demonstrated to drive support for “far-right” political parties. (Edo, et al., 2019) (Thomas, 2022)

A note on the potential confounding variable of COVID-19 

Researchers have long noted that “the increasing cross-border and cross-continental movements of people, commodities, vectors, food, capital, and decision-making power that characterize globalization, together with global demographic trends, have enormous potential to affect the emergence and spread of infectious diseases.” (Knobler, et al., 2006) Fears associated with the COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated the popular political backlash to transnational immigration in France and Hungary and provided a boon to support of “far-right” political parties. The potential explanatory mechanism is disgust – defined as “an evolved psychological system for protecting organisms from infection through disease avoidant behavior” (Curtis, et al, 2010, p. 389) – which is universal and fundamental to human nature.

Although more mundane, fully biologically hardwired reflexes such as gagging at the smell of rotten food are often the focus of biologists, “the last two decades have seen the development of a body of literature in evolutionary psychology that attributes many present-day political attitudes, such as social or political conservatism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia, to evolved threat-management mechanisms.” (Kusche & Barker, 2019, p. 2) In other words, foreigners are perceived as a threat in much the same way as a food-borne pathogen to the health of the individual and community, thus inducing a visceral reaction of avoidance.

            The disgust mechanisms need not rise to the level of consciousness; it’s possible that the individual may not even be aware that his or her reaction occurs due to the association of foreigners with pathogenic illness., and in that way may impact those who even consider themselves otherwise open to transnational immigrants as people and immigration as a concept.

There are two potential mechanisms to explain the relationship between disgust and aversion to immigrants, “one of which emphasizes proximally avoiding outgroups, and the other of which emphasizes adherence to traditional norms. According to the former, immigrants are perceived as being more infectious because they carry novel pathogens… According to the latter, immigrants’ foreign norms are perceived as posing a pathogen threat.” (Karinen, et al., 2019)  This disgust mechanism, in the context of COVID, may have manifested in noteworthy ways elucidated in France and Hungary. Further research should examine the effects, if any, that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on voters’ attitudes toward globalization and how those changes may have affected their support for “far-right” political parties.

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban of Fidesz-KDNP has capitalized on the disgust and fear associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. When Orban was asked in March of 2020 why the Fidesz-KDNP had forced university closures but not school closures, the PM cited the presence of foreigners in the institutes of higher learning: “Our experience is that primarily foreigners brought in the disease, and that it is spreading among foreigners.” (Agence France-Presse, 2020)

Similarly, National Rally in France has also used COVID-19 to demonize foreigners and drive their anti-immigrant messaging: “Several political parties and groups, including in… France… have also latched onto the Covid-19 crisis to advance anti-immigrant, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic conspiracy theories that demonize refugees, foreigners, prominent individuals, and political leaders.” (Human Rights Watch, 2020) Numerous attacks against Asian immigrants, reportedly motivated by racial animus, have been documented in France. (Coste & Amie, 2020)

What ultimate effect the political fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, if any, will have on globalization from the perspective of state policy and national politics is still unclear. Ciravegna and Michailova argue that “the pandemic will have significant long-lasting effects on globalization” (Ciravegna & Michailova, 2022, p. 172) due a trio of factors: worsened inequality post-COVID, the pandemic’s fueling of populist and nationalist political ideologies and parties, and the undermining of international institutions that the authors cite as providing the logistics for globalization. Their prediction of the pandemic’s detrimental effects on national political support for globalization may bear fruit, but more time is needed to fully study this phenomenon.

Policy

It was once popularly believed that, following the catastrophic damage wrought by WWII, the decades-long Cold War, and finally the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, that the West had reached the “end of history,” a phrase coined by Francis Fukuyama, meaning that there was not then and would not be ever an effective ideological challenge to the predominance of liberalism “as the final form of human government”: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such.” (Fukuyama, 1992, p. 276) Under this theory, the democracies of the world would jointly prevail in the international system, and by the example of their economic and social progress, even the most hardened autocratic holdouts would eventually be compelled to sign cosign liberal ideology.

By the beginning of the 21st century, many analysts have declared “an end to the end of history”: “The grand expectation that the world had entered an era of convergence has proved wrong. We have entered an age of divergence.” (Kagan, 2008) Critics of the “end of history” theory point to such authoritarian powers as Russia and China as examples of the failure of liberalism to take root across the globe, but also look to growing illiberal and anti-democratic political movements within liberal democracies such as France and Hungary – once thought beyond imagination.

Many analysts lament the rise of the far-right because of its destabilizing nature. As the Council of Europe has noted, “extremist parties and movements are propagating and defending ideologies that are incompatible with democracy and human rights and threaten the fundamental values that the Council of Europe sets out to defend.” (Gjellerod, 2001) Whereas “extremism” of other varieties once dominated the media and vexed policymakers, such as Islamic jihad, analysts have increasingly identified “far-right” political parties as the main threat to liberal democracy: “Currently the extremist parties and movements that pose the greatest threat to democracy in member states are those of the far right, and more generally those that encourage intolerance, xenophobia or racism.” (Gjellerod, 2001)

Arguably, the reason a clear and straightforward political solution to the problem has evaded policymakers so far is because the answer would require facing fundamental assumptions such as the peacemaking and growth-fueling merits of the liberal economic policy that drives globalization. As opposed to fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, which is largely an imported foreign phenomenon, the consequences of globalization identified in this research that contribute to the rise of “far-right” ideology and political parties within European member states are domestic in nature, resulting from government policy, and the resulting political fallout is likewise entirely domestic in nature. The call, as the expression goes, is coming from inside the house. Effective solutions, therefore, would require some degree of humility and ideological flexibility from elite policymakers, which has so far not manifested in any significant way.

There is much speculation about where and how a population is radicalized to the right. The rapid ascendance of “far-right” political parties in France, Hungary, and arguably beyond is best conceptualized as a form of populist with a decidedly right-wing bent, as previously delineated in the comparison of left-wing vs right-wing populism.

The Council of Europe has identified several potential strategies to curb the proliferation of “far-right” parties. These include “depriving extremist parties of their electoral support by addressing the social and economic issues, such as unemployment, immigration and security that these parties capitalise on,” increasing funding for education to inform citizens of their rights and responsibilities in a democracy, and implementing “measures against the abuse of asylum and illegal immigration linked to organised crime… more efficiently… in order to reduce xenophobic feeling.” (Gjellerod, 2001) The Council calls as well for more integrated policing of “far-right” elements between EU member states: “Given the international dimension of extremist movements and networks of racist or xenophobic character, co-operation between the competent authorities and police forces in Council of Europe member states should be increased.” (Gjellerod, 2001)

Lastly, the Council also recommends a censorship regime “to prohibit oral or written instigation to racism, anarchy, anti-Semitism and xenophobia; freedom of expression can not be accepted as an excuse for it.” (Gjellerod, 2001) Unfortunately, freedom of expression is a fundamental tenet of liberal ideology; in this case and others, many of the proposed means to mitigate the threat posed by the “far-right” ironically, and perhaps counter-productively, involve limiting the civil liberties central to liberal ideology.

Nearly a century ago, one analyst noted that “if you don’t want to talk about capitalism, then you had better keep quiet about fascism,” (Thompson, 2013) referencing the increased class divide that occurs due to unfettered liberalism and the potential dangers it poses to civil society if left unaddressed. There is no reason to believe that, if left to the forces of the international market, the inequality, large-scale immigration, and perceived loss of cultural/national/ethnic identity will resolve themselves in a peaceful manner.

Ultimately, populations adopt increasingly extreme populist politics when they feel they are ignored or marginalized. The only effective way to prevent this phenomenon, in this researcher’s estimation, is to address through policy these perceptions among the populations of France, Hungary, and beyond to eliminate or mitigate resentment against political elites.

One way to produce this desired effect would be for Brussels to return significant governing authority to the national level. This is clearly a thorny political prospect, as much has been invested in the European Union project to integrate the whole of the continent, and would clearly be perceived as a public admission that the EU project has experienced major setbacks, if not failed entirely. Unfortunately for proponents of liberalism and globalization, it seems that, one way or another, serious geopolitical changes are on the horizon in Europe and elsewhere.

Conclusion 

The data compiled and analyzed here demonstrates that the three identified phenomena associated with globalization — immigration to EU member states, perceived loss of national identity and sovereignty, and uneven distribution of economic benefits across social strata – between 1990-2020 drove a popular domestic political backlash within the electorates of Hungary and France, respectively, that resulted in the electoral ascendance of “far-right” political parties within them.

Both nations experienced similar upward trajectories during the period studied in popular support for “far-right” political parties among their respective electorates. In both cases, public polling indicates that the reasons for this increased support — which, again, have been demonstrated to be strongly associated with globalization — are opposition to transnational immigration, perceived loss of national identity, and uneven distribution of economic benefits by class. The only significant difference between the cases is that, in Hungary, inequality worsened substantially in the period studied while, in France, inequality slightly waned. This indicates that inequality may not directly foster “far-right” politics. In both cases, the French and Hungarian “far-right” parties’ electoral bases are poorer, more rural, and less educated than the national average.

Regarding opposition to transnational immigration, the overwhelming majority of respondents to public polling in each country indicate their skepticism of the assimilability of migrants and the perceived negative effects that immigration has on the native culture, particularly of immigrants from non-European, non-white, non-Christian countries. As it relates to a perceived loss of national/cultural/ethnic identity, it was found that in each case, French and Hungarian “far-right” political parties have appealed to nativist political sentiments, frequently explicitly in official platforms and other party and government documents, by framing the debate over transnational immigration in terms of civilizational conflict, highlighting perceived deleterious or dilutive effects of immigration and foreign cultural and political influences on the native culture. Public polling of “far-right” voters indicates that a desire to protect the native culture is a major driver of their ideological disposition.

Lastly, pertaining to the economic data and the disparate distribution of economic benefits of globalization by class, it was found that in globalization reduces inequality between states but does not reduce inequality on an individual level across nationalities. The economic benefits of globalization do not accrue to the working and middle classes. Also, it is low-skill, blue-collar jobs that have primarily been outsourced to developing countries in the pursuit of lower labor costs, further highlighting globalization’s disparate impacts by class.

Public polling in each case study indicates a class consciousness of this phenomenon, with lower-class and rural populations being more likely to vote for “far-right” parties in national elections due to the perception that moderate parties as beholden to foreign power centers, particularly Brussels, the location of EU headquarters. “Far-right” parties in each country made opposition to austerity a policy platform in the aftermath of the 2007/08 financial crash amid international pressure to institute an austerity regime, a policy position that voters across the ideological spectrum support in public polling. 

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*** 

Dr. Brian Hooker has served on the board of Children’s Health Defense (CHD) since 2018 and has been their Chief Scientific Officer for two years. He has a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from Washington State University and has been involved in bioresearch and biotechnology for 35 years. His work has spanned environmental restoration and applied plant molecular biology. He has also been a researcher for the U.S. Department of Energy and operated his own biotech company. With a strong background in molecular biology and genetics, Dr. Hooker has published over 65 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. At CHD, he is supervising a team researching environmental toxins and vaccine safety.

***

The news coverage of the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. continues to discredit the known dangers of vaccines. The motives for this gratuitous denigration range from fear of Mr. Kennedy’s intentions to remove corporate influence from the U.S. Government to the intelligence community’s recognition of his defiance of their dominance over Washington. However, all who condemn Mr. Kennedy, rely on the continuing ignorance of the public and the press regarding vaccine safety.

Blind obedience to an ungrounded dogma allows Mr. Kennedy’s entire platform to be ignored with venomous disdain. Most articles about him don’t bother providing any backup to sweeping statements that he has been proven wrong in his assessment that some vaccines have inherent risks. News media that mention “proof” of “incorrect misinformation,” refers to dated and questionable studies. 

This conversation with Dr. Hooker, a scientist and father of an autistic child, was initially planned to explore the details that continue to be neglected by the press in the dismissals of RFK, Jr. While this important knowledge is presented, Dr. Hooker also offers fascinating facts and insights into autism and vaccines that have been kept from the public by government agencies and corporate mainstream media.

*

Forum: Dr. Hooker, when did you first become aware of autism? How did you get involved with research?

Dr. Hooker: Growing up, I sort of knew what autism was. I remember seeing a movie in 1979, called Son-Rise: A Miracle of Love, about Raun Kaufman, a boy with autism. Through his parents’ intervention, he fully came out of autism. It was a really interesting movie. I can remember seeing that and just sort of tucking it away in my mind. But I didn’t really think about it much until my son received an autism diagnosis in August of 1999 when he was 18 months old. It was at his well-baby checkup when the pediatrician actually coded it as autism – I’ll never forget that day. And that’s really what launched my quest to understand what caused this; how can it be reversed, and what can we do about it. 

Forum: Where did you first seek out information about autism?

Dr. Hooker: I looked at research that was coming out of institutions like the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – and I was wholly dissatisfied. This bolstered my quest to find out, especially around autism causation, what indeed was the truth.

Forum: What were your initial findings about your son?

Dr. Hooker: I was astounded to find out that the vaccines that my son received contained mercury. The first vaccine he received at two weeks of age was for hepatitis B, and that contained 12.5 micrograms of mercury. Mercury is a neurotoxin, and there continues to be a contention that this amount doesn’t exceed the safe limits. But I did the calculation, and when my son was receiving these mercury-laden vaccines, he was exceeding the EPA and the FDA limits by over 80 times. I was very, very concerned about the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that was used in many, if not most of the vaccines that my son received in the late 1990s.

I looked at what was publicly available and the prevailing thought was that mercury was responsible for neurodevelopmental disorders. And I also read the research coming out of the CDC. There was such cognitive dissonance there because mercury is neurotoxic. And looking at the dubious types of statistics on kids who received mercury, and those who didn’t receive mercury in their infant vaccines, it seemed very evident that the CDC was hiding something. 

And then a paper came out by an autism parent and an analyst, Sallie Bernard, confirming the mercury autism hypothesis. Ms. Bernard looked at all of the symptoms of mercury poisoning and she lined them up with all of the symptoms of autism. And there was such a strong overlap there that it shocked me. I was mortified because of what I had done to my son unwittingly, but it really challenged me to look further into this issue. And when I started my analysis, I was looking primarily at mercury in vaccines, and later on it expanded to the timing of the MMR – the measles, mumps rubella vaccine – and then I began looking at other vaccines as well.

Forum: When did the FDA start limiting the use of mercury in vaccines? 

Dr. Hooker: The FDA has never curbed the level of mercury in infant and childhood vaccines. The voluntary phase-out of thimerosal from infant vaccines was between 2001 and 2003 after a joint PHS statement (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) was issued asking for such a phase-down. In 2004, the flu shot — which in some cases still contains thimerosal — was added to the infant child schedule for 6 months of age and then each year thereafter. During the same year (2004) the flu shot, with or without thimerosal, was recommended for pregnant women in any trimester of pregnancy. Thimerosal has never been completely taken out of vaccines in the US.

Forum: Do we know which vaccines still contain thimerosal? 

Dr. Hooker: Some formulations of the flu shot, those in multidose vials, still contain 25 micrograms of mercury via thimerosal.  The CDC claims that 93% of all flu shots made in 2021-2022 were thimerosal-free.  However, they do not state whether that calculation is made per vaccine dose or per vaccine vial. Indeed, if this refers to individual vials, that would mean that up to 43% of all doses contain thimerosal.

Forum: What is the implication of increasing cases of autism despite the limitation of thimerosal in vaccines?

Dr. Hooker: I believe that vaccination itself is related to autism and that mercury is just one factor that can cause this multifaceted disorder. It should be noted that the vaccine schedule has expanded significantly since 2001 when the voluntary phase-out of thimerosal in some vaccines began. 

Forum: If the mercury in thimerosal is a neurotoxin, how does it cross the blood-brain barrier?

Dr. Hooker: I was astounded at the combination of detergents that are used in the manufacturing of vaccines. For example, different forms of polysorbate molecules actually poke holes in the blood-brain barrier. And that allows neurotoxins like mercury, formaldehyde, and aluminum to enter the brain of vaccinated individuals. There have been seminal studies that show when mercury gets in the brain of individuals in the form of thimerosal, its half-life is nearly infinite, so it’s really locked into brain tissues. It appeared to me that these vaccines were the perfect mechanism to inject mercury directly into the brain.

Forum: And can mercury be cleared from the brain? 

Dr. Hooker: Absolutely. We were very aggressive in finding ways to detoxify my son. But because of his genetic profile, those genes that he received from my wife and me, he had a really difficult time excreting any type of toxic heavy metals. It wasn’t limited to mercury, but mercury seemed like it was the worst offender. It’s the second most toxic naturally occurring substance on earth, bar uranium. And so we wanted to get rid of the mercury first and we were very intent on that. We did a process called chelation, and it very aggressively removed mercury from my son’s body. We also included other types of supplements that were helpful. These were over-the-counter things like glutathione and n-acetylcysteine which will actually enter into the brain and cleanse the mercury. And so we did that very aggressively probably from the time he was two years old until he was ten.

Forum: Did you see a difference in your son symptomatically? Was this helpful for him?

Dr. Hooker: Indeed, it was very good for him and I think that it really helped in terms of his challenges later on in life. Some children with autism have a horrible time with puberty and they become aggressive – they may become physically violent. My son can at times be self-injurious, but he has never really lashed out at anybody else. And during those years when you would expect this behavior because these children are in pain, some of that would ramify, but we never really struggled with that and it can be attributed to detoxifying his system. My son is very gentle and very, very kind. And we also saw that in his neurodevelopment while we were chelating him, we saw that cognitively. Even though he does not speak there was a light in his eyes. In some respects, it helped us to get cognitive. It also helped from a social-emotional perspective because we were taking him out of pain. We were removing neurological stress from his body.

Forum: What is the range of onset of autism? Some parents describe one day having a normal child, then after being vaccinated, within minutes, hours, days, or weeks, having a different child. Do you have an understanding of how often vaccination and autism are directly associated?

Dr. Hooker: There are several studies regarding how autism ramifies in young children. One type is called infantile autism where a child appears from birth to have the autistic condition. Then there’s regressive autism, where a child stops developing normally; these are children that seem fine and have eye contact, expressive and receptive language, and they have social and emotional interactions with their parents. And then suddenly there’s some type of cataclysmic event, and then rapidly after that they regress. 

There was a paper that came out of the University of California at Davis, The Mind Institute, which is a very prestigious academic-based organization that is focused on autism. The lead author was Dr. Sally Ozonoff and she found that by looking at developmental milestones in a group of children, and following them over time, that regression occurred in 80% of the cases. And that is a really strong number – showing that four out of five children have some type of event or something happens that initiates a regression. I would contend that many, if not most of those children who regress have sustained some type of vaccine or environmental injury. Although there are anecdotal reports, there’s not a lot of data, and it is a key area that needs further study.

Forum: There appears to be a growing emphasis on biomedical treatment of autism, what is the differentiation between a psychological approach and a biomedical one?

Dr. Hooker: There is the cognitive neuropsychological approach that does not consider other types of symptoms of autism except for neurodevelopmental deficits, social-emotional deficits, and things that solely focus on the neurological. The biomedical approach is different because it looks at what’s going on with the whole child. And many, if not most children with autism have other complaints, particularly gastrointestinal issues. This was actually put forward by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in the 1990s. And one of the things that he did that was very important was look at these gastrointestinal issues that were very unique in children with autism. People tend to associate Dr. Wakefield with his questioning the MMR vaccine, but perhaps one of his greatest contributions was the autism–gastrointestinal connection. And parents like myself, we were living through it. It seemed like my son’s gastrointestinal system was extremely unstable. He was going through constipation, diarrhea, distress, irritable bowel syndrome – so many different issues, including food sensitivities.

We started very early with biomedical treatment where we were looking at dietary interventions. My son responded very well when we eliminated gluten and casein from his diet by limiting his intake of wheat, dairy, and also soy. All of these interventions helped to stabilize his gastrointestinal system. On top of that, there was supplementation and chelation in order to get rid of toxic heavy metals. So this was more of a holistic approach that considered autism from a systems perspective – that we term as biomedical rather than neuropsychiatric. A lot of it is allopathic. We were fortunate to work with an integrated physician starting when my son was very young, and there are a number of effective therapies; chiropractic, naturopathic, acupuncture – there’s a real nexus. Underlying all of these approaches are nutrition and diet which are so fundamental in order to continue to heal the gastrointestinal system. It’s not a one-time thing; you just have to continue to keep the digestive system as stable as possible, and then that also helps to heal the brain.

Forum: What is the effect of mercury on digestion? Has that been studied?

Dr. Hooker: It’s actually been established that mercury toxicity will promote the overgrowth of candida yeast in the gut. It turns out that yeast is tolerant to mercury, whereas other intestinal flora are not. So when you add mercury to the microbial community, it responds by killing off those bacteria that are susceptible to mercury and allowing those organisms that are not susceptible to mercury like yeast to flourish. Also, some nasty anaerobic bacteria like Clostridia are tolerant to mercury. The gut biome is basically set out of balance when exposed to mercury.

Forum: It’s difficult enough to have digestive complaints, but intestinal disorders also diminish the ability to absorb the energy of food. Meanwhile, mercury is crossing the blood-brain barrier causing neurological symptoms, so really there are numerous fronts for the damage that is happening. Without a broad approach to understanding autism, an irrational focus dominates — on finding a single cause and a single cure.

Dr. Hooker: Absolutely. The causation of autism is so multifaceted — and there are so many different stressors. I’ve met individuals who have come up to me and said, my son or daughter never had a vaccine, yet they’re diagnosed with autism. But there are numerous toxins that pregnant mothers, infants, and our children encounter in the environment. If you’re close to coal-fired power plants, there’s mercury in the air because coal contains mercury. If you are close to manufacturing facilities or freeways, that can also be a risk factor. And then there are countless additives in our food with potential risks. We are increasingly exposed to glyphosate, which is associated with genetically modified organisms. There are so many insults to our children. And I think one of the ramifications besides just neurodevelopmental disorders in general, is this increase in autism. My son didn’t get vaccinated in a vacuum.

So there were other toxins that we had to consider. Not only were we getting rid of mercury, but he had a high load of antimony, which is in fire retardants that are applied to baby’s clothing and bedding. We had arsenic in our water, so we were looking at that. We lived in an area in the Pacific Northwest that had naturally high-occurring uranium in the soil, so we were concerned about that as well. Considering the toxic burden that these children were exposed to in the 1990s, and only increasing in this century, I think that the causes of autism are really multifaceted.

Forum: There’s some research connecting autism and acetaminophen. Have you looked at those studies?

Dr. Hooker: The connection between autism and acetaminophen has been affirmed just recently. I remember our pediatrician telling us, after a vaccine, if your child has a fever give them Tylenol. And it turns out that was the worst possible remedy that could be given. Acetaminophen also impairs sulfation, a process physiologically that actually tags and removes toxins. Sulfate groups attach to toxins directly, and that is how the body identifies them. It’s a coded tag for elimination through the renal system – or through bowels, hair, skin, and nails. If you impair sulfation, as Tylenol does, then the body doesn’t know that something is a neurotoxin and it will continue to circulate.

Forum: Are glyphosates problematic as well?

Dr. Hooker: Yes. Glyphosates are especially insidious. They become a surrogate for the amino acid glycine, they’re very similar in structure. And glyphosate gets incorporated instead of glycine. They appear especially in animal products that are rich in protein like pork products. Even in pharmaceuticals, there is sometimes a substrate of pork collagen. Because collagen is primarily glycine, it’s laden with glyphosates, which have been used so extensively. We’ve seen glyphosate in residues and foods, especially in genetically modified foods where they’re spraying massive amounts of glyphosate for weed control. We’ve seen it in vaccines and other biologics. There was a study that was initiated by Zen Honeycutt, and working with other researchers, she found extremely high levels of glyphosate in the MMR vaccine.

Forum: People continue to go to the garden store and buy Roundup and spray it around their houses, not knowing the risks.

Dr. Hooker: Absolutely. Roundup has been tied to specific types of cancers, and there was a well-publicized lawsuit regarding non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and its association with Roundup. There are now many lawsuits involving glyphosate and cancer, but yet it’s still readily available. You can go to your hardware store or your garden store, and you can pick up glyphosate. And not only is it used in genetically modified crops, but it’s also used in the drying process for grains like oats and wheat. When these crops are not quite ready for harvest, regardless of whether they’re GMO or not, they’ll spray glyphosate on them to hasten the ripening process.

Forum: When your son was diagnosed in the late 1990s, did you know about the incidence of autism? Has their been an increase since then?

Dr. Hooker: The incidence of autism has increased dramatically since the early 1980s. It was estimated as anywhere between one in 10,000 to one in 2000, at the highest level. By the time my son was diagnosed in 1999, it was one in 250. It had increased dramatically, almost tenfold in that short period of time. There’s a researcher from MIT, Stephanie Seneff, who looked at the exponential growth curve of autism. She started looking at these numbers twenty years ago, and her predictions have been verified. The latest autism numbers show that the incidence in the United States is one in 36 children, and I believe that’s one in 29 boys.

Forum: Is there an understanding of why boys are more susceptible to autism?

Dr. Hooker: Estrogen is protective against heavy metal toxicity such as mercury or aluminum poisoning, whereas testosterone is not. We’re also seeing a racial disparity. It’s actually more prevalent in African American children where the incidence now is one in 34. 

These numbers inspire many questions, but it also generates fear because if this exponential growth continues according to Dr. Seneff’s figures, in ten to fifteen years, one in every two children will be autistic – including 80% of all boys. Because the growth curve is potentially so dramatic, we’ll have a scenario in our society where you are autistic – or you taking care of somebody who is autistic. I remember thinking to myself, it’s going to taper off eventually and we’re going to hit some critical mass, but that has not happened. It does paint a very scary scenario.

Forum: There are those who say the increasing number of autistic children has to do with increased monitoring — there’s more testing and awareness. What would you say in response to that view?

Dr. Hooker: Autism is really hard to miss. When I take my son out to a restaurant, and with all due respect to him, he can’t place his own order or he’s not using utensils – it’s like missing a train wreck. Saying that it’s improved diagnosis revealing the number of cases is not only incorrect, but it also seems duplicitous. How could you really come to that conclusion? Particularly with 60% of all autistic children and adults not functioning independently without some level of lifetime care. There have also been studies, again from the UC Davis Institute, that showed over a 20-year time period that better diagnosing only accounts for under 30% of the true increase in autism. So the increase is being caused by something. There are toxic environmental factors, things that are injected, breathed, or ingested – that are driving this epidemic.

Forum: One would imagine that the CDC, aware of these increases for decades, would have some sense of where the problem lies and what the causes are. The rejection of the possibility that it’s environmental toxins including those in vaccines, suggests at a minimum, negligence. Would you agree with that?

Dr. Hooker: The CDC’S response is wholly inappropriate. I would go as far as saying that their negligence is criminal because they completely sidestep the whole issue of causation. They published a paper in March of 2023 on the autism incidence for children who were born in 2012. They look at the children until they turn eight years old, and then it takes about two or three years for them to complete their analysis, which seems excessive to me. But in that paper, there is absolutely no commentary regarding what’s driving the very stark statistically significant increase in the rates of autism.  

I worked with a whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson from the CDC. In his comment when I asked about autism causation, he said that the CDC was completely paralyzed regarding the question of autism because it always led them back to vaccinations. So because they could not ever consider that vaccines could be driving the autism epidemic, then they were simply not going to go there. And they were not even going to look at other factors. I mean, thank God that researchers outside of the CDC have actually looked at things like glyphosates and acetaminophen. At least that research is moving forward. 

Forum: Studies and reports on the MMR vaccine are extrapolated to generally confirm that childhood vaccines do not cause autism. Are these studies as conclusive as they are presented?

Dr. Hooker: There are myriad studies that attempt to indemnify the MMR vaccine, especially the CDC’s hallmark study from 2004 on the MMR vaccine and autism. The abstract concludes there’s no relationship between the timing of the MMR vaccine and autism in a cohort of children that they looked at in metropolitan Atlanta. But yet when you look at the tables, it shows something very different. Particularly for males and overall, for those children who received the MMR as infants. These children were significantly more likely to get an autism diagnosis than those where the children waited until they were at least three years of age. It’s right there in black and white and it’s statistically significant.

The authors state these higher numbers had to do with special education requirements, with those children who were already diagnosed with autism and had to get the MMR early in order to be a part of special education programs in the city of Atlanta. First of all, there’s no requirement that those children have to get the MMR. In fact, it’s illegal and goes against the  Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). And so first it was preposterous, and second of all, if that was the case, then they would see the effect in both males and females. It would be a consistent effect, but they only saw it in males. And when you look further, they saw it primarily in African American males. So it would not be a special education requirement that would drive that increase in the rates of autism. And this is one of the seminal studies that the Institute of Medicine uses to say that vaccines don’t cause autism, and it is terribly flawed. When you look under the veneer, along with what the CDC whistleblower exposed to me, it was also fraudulent. They actually hid results from the public regarding the effects of the MMR vaccine, specifically on African American children.

Forum: The New York Times reported on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential candidacy, and they used a few of these epidemiological studies to conclude that his questioning of vaccines had no basis. Yet they are all about the MMR vaccine and certainly don’t consider his other concerns about vaccine safety or environmental toxins.

Dr. Hooker: Yes. Many of these studies are designed not to find an effect. There are about 12 in total that I’ve reviewed; some of them were ecological, where you were just looking at population-based data. Some are what we would call cohort studies where you were looking at a population or a sample of children, some who received the MMR on time, and some who received it late. Others may have not received it at all, but each was designed not to find an effect. And one of the main studies was done by Dr. Christon Madson in 2002, and it appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. I went back and looked at the numbers of autistic children in that study, and the authors made simple errors – there’s an arithmetic inconsistency between the different tables that they provide.

In this often cited study from Denmark, they’ve got a variable amount of autistic children who were vaccinated versus children who are autistic and unvaccinated. And so it’s never quite clear exactly how many children in the study were already autistic who received the MMR vaccine – or how many did not receive the MMR vaccine – because none of the tables are consistent with each other. Also, there were two different types of MMR vaccines that were distributed in Denmark over the time period of the study, and there was never any type of control or allowance for that. Also, the study was funded directly by the CDC – an agency that is conflicted and appeared to be working overtime to minimize any type of relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Forum: It is unusual that safety studies aren’t presented in defense of vaccines.

Dr. Hooker: It’s very rare that you’ll find a safety study for a vaccine that used a true placebo control. When you do a study for the FDA for the approval for a drug or a biologic – and a vaccine is a biologic – then you need to make sure that you have two blinded groups in your study; one that receives the vaccine and the other group receiving a saline placebo. With vaccines, even with a double-blind study, the FDA has accepted different or flawed standards.

In the case of the Gardasil vaccine against HPV in women, approved in 2006, the control group received the same aluminum adjuvant that was in the Gardasil vaccine. So instead of having a pure saline placebo group, they had an aluminum placebo group. And this happened to be an aluminum adjuvant that had never really been tested. The results of this study showed 3% of the women in both the vaccinated and control groups responded with some type of autoimmune disorder. So they concluded there was no difference between the groups, and moved forward claiming there was no problem. But that certainly leaves a question: where did this 3% come from and what would the results be if the control group actually got a clean saline placebo?

Forum: With the growing number of recommended childhood vaccines, the possibility of side effects and damage grows. What is the number of vaccines that children are supposed to get?

Dr. Hooker: Well, right now there are 74 different individual vaccinations given to protect against 17 different diseases by the time they are 18, including COVID-19, which is on the childhood vaccination schedule for infants as young as six months of age. And I do believe that they’re approving yearly boosters now for the COVID-19 vaccine. I may be underestimating the number of vaccines, but by the time a child is one year of age, they’ve received 26, so the plurality – a very large portion of the vaccines – are given to infants.

Forum: Considering just how many vaccines are recommended, from numerous manufacturers, and how many batches there are with differentiating amounts of potentially toxic substances in them; what’s needed in order to make a better evaluation of their risks?

Dr. Hooker: First of all, I would make sure that there was always a saline placebo control. I think that that’s fundamental to any type of clinical trial or study. When you look outside of the realm of vaccines and consider the evaluation of other types of treatments, that is the norm. Yet with vaccines, there’s a willingness to skip this because there’s always an emphasis and scare that you’re delaying life-saving vaccines from children or adults. But it’s unethical to do so. Even with cancer drugs, there’s a placebo group in stage three and stage four cancer patients who don’t receive the drugs – in order to establish safety. Somehow placebos are appropriate for cancer research, but it’s not needed for vaccines. Public health officials are tolerating vaccine approval without double-blind safety studies – and are talking out of both sides of their mouths.

The other thing that I would do is make sure that these studies were long-term. We just saw how the clinical studies for the COVID-19 shots, when they were rapidly rolled out under emergency use authorization, lasted for a duration of anywhere between 10 to 14 weeks. So you do not know what’s going to happen with these patients long term if they receive a COVID-19 shot because they simply stopped following the unvaccinated individuals. In some cases, they actually got rid of their control group by offering the vaccine after 10 weeks, which appeared duplicitous to me. They essentially destroyed any type of longer comparison between individuals who received the vaccine and the control group who did not. I hesitate to ascribe motive to that, but it seemed like something was afoot there that they were possibly covering up. There were a number of questionable practices and hidden results. For example, we now know from previously unreleased clinical trial data that there were inferences from animal studies pointing to cardiac events and cardiac damage due to the COVID-19 shot.

Forum: Is there any indication that in addition to other concerns, the COVID-19 vaccination could initiate neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism?

Dr. Hooker: It’s very difficult to tell because an autism diagnosis comes later. Still today, the average age for an autism diagnosis is about 42 months or three and a half years. And so it’s difficult to know how these children will respond after getting an mRNA vaccine. I fear that it’s going to be very cataclysmic as these vaccinated children grow older. I also fear cardiac damage because repeated vaccination is associated with myocarditis and pericarditis in younger individuals. The age group that seems to be primarily affected by that is 16 to 19-year-old boys, and perhaps even slightly older males. I have not seen a robust study regarding cardiac damage in children, and that really scares me.

Forum: Is there research that confirms contaminants or metals in the COVID-19 vaccines?

Dr. Hooker: There have been studies that show particulates in the COVID-19 vaccine associated with the manufacturing process. There are also studies where they’ve looked at the vaccine microscopically, and I’ve seen some images that show particulate contamination which concerns me. Whether it’s naturally occurring or intentional, it’s just not good for you to have microscopic pieces of metal in something that is being injected into your body. 

It has also been established that the body can reverse transcribe the messenger RNA into DNA and that DNA can be incorporated into the human genome. So I’m really concerned about that. And I’m concerned for women who received the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy and for men and women who received it prior to conception. What are they passing on through their genes to an unborn child? So there are a lot of unanswered questions about mRNA, and the lipid nanoparticles accumulating selectively in women’s ovaries. It’s going to take years to be able to unravel this, not only due to possible contaminants but also the known components that are in the vaccines.

Forum: If a reporter approached you and honestly wanted to fully understand this subject before rejecting the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., how would you recommend wrapping your head around this debate?

Dr. Hooker: I direct people to studies, of which Mr. Kennedy has a full understanding, that considers the entire vaccination schedule. There are three main studies that have been done on this and the incidence of developmental delays, neurodevelopmental disorders, autism, ADHD, sleep disorders, and speech and language disorders. 

The first study was done by Dr. Anthony Mawson. He actually did a series of two papers on the vaccination schedule and different disorders, including neurodevelopmental disorders. That paper came out in 2017 in the Journal of Translational Science. And he showed that autism rates were at least five times higher in the vaccinated group compared to the completely unvaccinated group. 

I did a follow on study with Neil Miller, who’s a medical journalist, that was published in 2020. It appeared in the journal, Sage Open Medicine, and we looked at vaccines during the first year of life. And what we found was children who received any vaccine in the first year of life compared to those that didn’t, were twice as likely to get a developmental disorder diagnosis. By the time they were eight years old, they were four and a half times as likely to get a diagnosis of asthma by the time they were eight years old. And then they were twice as likely to get recurrent ear infections. 

The third study was done by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Paul Thomas, who published their findings in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. They affirmed the results of Mawson and my results with Neil Miller using a different type of analysis where they were looking at the number of doctor’s office visits for these different disorders. Unfortunately, this last paper was retracted by the journal.

The journal said that Dr. Paul Thomas, a medical doctor, was biased toward finding an association between vaccines and conditions like autism. They retracted the paper after some months after it had been on the journal’s website. It’s completely unmerited.

These are the three studies where they look at the entire vaccination schedule, where we see definitively, statistically, and significantly – a relationship between the vaccination schedule and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism. 

If you don’t look deeper, you’ll only find the CDC website page that says, Vaccines do not Cause Autism. The only things that they present are weak arguments about thimerosal and the MMR vaccine. That’s all they’ve looked at in rejecting any other association. With a herculean leap in logic, the CDC applies this to the entire vaccination schedule. They focus on one component, they look at one vaccine, and then suddenly they take that and extrapolate it – and state that vaccines don’t cause injury. It’s just a logical fallacy. 

Forum: The vehement denial from the CDC is suspicious. How do you personally deal with the aggressive defensive approach to this topic?

Dr. Hooker: I want individuals who are genuinely questioning, who want to learn about this subject, to do a deep dive into the science on both sides. That’s a message that I want to make clear – and it counters the message repeated through the COVID-19 era. We were told to trust the experts, trust the science, and the scientists. Fundamentally, we need to question everything. That’s how things move along. If we were trusting science in the Middle Ages, then the Earth would still be considered flat. Science moves on and progresses because we question it, we test it, and we generate hypotheses. We test those hypotheses and theories and learn more.

I encourage individuals to look closely at the pronouncements that say that vaccines don’t cause autism. Consider the veracity and viability of the studies on both sides. Look at the completeness of the science saying that there is a relationship between vaccines and autism. And once you do that, the important questions and answers will begin to appear.

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Free trade is much ballyhooed by the US and the capitalist world, but critics have been skeptical as to whether such trade freely takes place.

Investopedia provides a useful definition of free trade:

A free trade agreement is a pact between two or more nations to reduce barriers to imports and exports among them. Under a free trade policy, goods and services can be bought and sold across international borders with little or no government tariffs, quotas, subsidies, or prohibitions to inhibit their exchange.

The concept of free trade is the opposite of trade protectionism or economic isolationism.

In the eyes of the US, China is threateningly making major headway in 6G, AI, robotics, supercomputing among other technology fields. This has scared the Biden administration, so Biden has sought to cut off Chinese access to semiconductor chips below 14 nanometers. Foreign Policy called it going for China’s jugular after one term of ex-US president Donald Trump inflicting “flesh wounds” to China.

“This is economic coercion and is unacceptable,” said China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning of the US actions. China did not stand idly by; it banned the US memory chip Micron on security grounds.

China, correspondingly, has reduced its import of chips by $129.1 billion since 2022, harming US, Taiwanese, and Korean exporters and giving Shanghai’s SMIC a shot in the arm.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett was so bearish on the world’s largest semiconductor company, TSMC, that he sold all his shares.

The US also told ASML, producer of lithography machines used to make chips, to curb sales to China. Hence, China was forced to develop its own lithography machines to produce chips. ASML also has seen a decline in its profit picture and now is potentially faced with competition from a former customer. Telecommunications giant and leader in 5G technology, Huawei, has found itself faced with trade barriers relentlessly erected by the US. It was forced to develop its own lithography machines. Peter Winnick, president of ASML, complained that China’s development of its own lithography machine “is a ‘destructive behavior” that will cause impact and chaos to the global chip industry chain.” ASML, however, is said to be considering to ignore US directives on such technology sales.

Even US chip makers, whose businesses are adversely affected by government directives, are instead prioritizing their own business with China.

This situation is similar to what transpired when the US rejected Chinese participation in the International Space Station. China went out and built its own space station, the Tiangong, which orbits the planet 340 and 450 km above the surface.

So far protectionism has proven a double-edged sword for the US and its allies, as initially China is negatively affected, but soon enough, China winds up becoming independent for these technologies while also becoming an exporting competitor in the marketplace for such technologies.

I interviewed Wei Ling Chua, the author of 3 books including Democracy: What the west can learn from China and Tiananmen Square’s “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs Silent Evidence, for his perspective.

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Kim Petersen: The United States has always trumpeted the benefits of so-called free trade being “A rising tide lifts all boats.” That is fine when you have the biggest boat in global capitalism. But does that tide raise all boats equally? China, which eschews hegemony, now has a big boat, and that boat is portrayed as a threat to the US. The US hegemon prides itself on being exceptional, indispensable, and craving full-spectrum dominance. Yet fear of the China threat caused former US president Barack Obama to exclude China from negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was to comprise the largest free-trade region in history and include forty percent of world trade. Obama’s successor Donald Trump scuttled that deal, but he enacted various sanctions and tariffs against China. Fast forward to Joe Biden and the anti-China rhetoric continues unabated. Biden’s disdain for free trade is revealed by the continuation of sanctions against China, depicting it as a security threat, and never producing any credible evidence to support his assertion. In particular, Biden has sought to squeeze China out from access to chip technology and from the purchase of lithography machines to produce the chips. It has sought to cajole or coerce myriad countries such as Japan, South Korea, Netherlands, and the Chinese province of Taiwan to join in the denial of trade. In doing so, it appears that Biden and the complying countries have shot themselves in the foot. How do you see this denial of trade, imposing tariffs (i.e., protectionism), and sanctioning playing out?

Wei Ling Chua: Western so-called free trade was designed at a time when they had absolute advantages in many areas over the rest of the world. Why wouldn’t they? After centuries of colonialism, wars, slavery, and looting, the West enjoyed absolute advantages in wealth accumulation (they are very rich with plenty of cash to take over the assets of other and attract talents from all over the world) after WW2. The West was also more industrialized after the world war, while much of the rest of the world was war ravaged, poor, and under-developed. So, their so-called free trade is nothing more than demanding the lesser-developed world to allow the West to use money looted from them to take control of their assets, resources, market, and factories, and keep the economies of lesser-developed nations in the primitive stage of cheap labor, cheap resources, and polluting industry.

The WTO, IMF, and the World Bank are just tools that the West uses to control the rest of the world’s opportunities to freely trade with each other and access funding. The West uses these financial tools to manipulate free access to member-state markets by erecting trade barriers against countries who seek to protect local industry and, therefore, refuse to accept western-imposed trading terms.

It took China 15 years of negotiation with the US before the US allowed China to enter the WTO in 2000. During that time, the West was happy to transfer polluted and labor-intensive industries to China: they were happy to allow China to set up factories to assemble iPhones for Apple. Why not? Apple pays the price of a cappuccino to the Chinese factories for each iPhone assembled while selling the iPhones back to Chinese consumers and the rest of the world for hundreds of dollars per unit of iPhone.

There is absolutely no such thing as Western kindness in setting up factories in China or importing in a big way from China. The benefits to both sides are not equal. It is about the West eating the meat and drinking the soup, and the leftover meat on the bone is then shared among millions of Chinese wage slaves. So, in 2017, when China successfully test flies her passenger plane C919, the news heading across China is (translated): “the day China uses 800 million shirts in exchange for one Boeing Plane will become history“.

In recent years, we have witnessed how the US initiated a series of sanctions against Chinese high-tech manufacturers and products of far higher quality than US companies are able to produce. The victims include Huawei 5G, smartphones, chip imports, DJI drones, TikTok, etc. So, the so-called free market never existed in real terms under the western International rule-based order.

It is the Chinese who oblige free trade: The Chinese happily enjoy and buy quality products from all over the world. At the time of unfair US sanctions against Huawei and many other Chinese high-tech firms, China continued to allow Apple to make huge profits in China, and it openly assured the world that China will not resort to protectionism. As long as foreign companies do not violate Chinese law, they are free to conduct their business as usual in China, and they will be treated as equal as the local businesses.

As we can see, the US counters competition with protectionism in the form of sanctions and bullying, whereas China overcomes competition via innovation through investment in education, R&D, and building government infrastructure to facilitate the development of new technology. E.g., China has just overtaken Japan as the world’s top car exporter, and this was made possible by the farsighted investment of the Chinese government in laying down the foundation for EV car manufacturing with market readiness, such as offering incentives for consumers to buy EV cars and building millions of battery charging stations to facilitate the use of EV cars across the country.

As for Internet technology, after decades of paying billions and billions of dollars for intellectual property to US companies for using their 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies, the Chinese company Huawei invested heavily in R&D and produced a far more advanced 5G technology and began to collect intellectual property payments from the world for using its 5G. This is something that the West, particularly the US cannot tolerate. So, by sanctioning Huawei 5G (the world’s most affordable and advanced 5G technology), the US lost its ability to facilitate its tech companies to develop AI technology that required high-speed wifi, while the Chinese state-owned telecommunication companies heavily invested in building millions of Huawei 5G stations across the country to facilitate Chinese companies in developing AI technology. As a result, according to Nicholas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s ex-software chief: “China has won AI battle with the US.” In fact, former British Business and Industry Minister Vince Cable said in an interview in 2022, “The UK government decision to ban Huawei 5G equipment and services had nothing to do with national security, and was because of American pressure.” Cable then, regrettably, made this statement: “If Britain had kept with 5G, we would now be at the forefront of countries using the most advanced technologies, and we are not.”

In fact, in the semiconductor sector, the US-led sanctions on technology exports to China have effectively given away more than $300 billion per year worth of the Chinese chip market (the world’s biggest) exclusively to the Chinese chip industry. As a result, we have already witnessed US chip companies’ revenues being reduced, share prices dropping and a massive staff retrenchment taking place while China experienced a rise in chip production and a drop in imports.

It is not hard to predict what will happen to the US and China under US sanctions:

1) Without the world’s biggest market, many of the US high-tech companies will lose economies of scale, and be eventually unable to compete in the world market.

2) The US’s destructive behavior that violates market regulations only serves to alert the world to the risk of investing, buying, and doing business with the US. The weaponization of the supply chain will only damage the US’s credibility and reliability as a business partner in the mind of the rest of the world.

3) As for China, upholding fair trade and continuing to protect the interests of all foreign investment in China, including Apple, this will enforce the world impression of a reliable and stable Chinese business environment. Hence, China will continue to become a magnet for world investors.

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Las bases militares del imperialismo estadounidense

May 29th, 2023 by Gilberto López y Rivas

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Ongoing processor vaccine related eye disorders first reported two year ago in May 2021

First published on May 6, 2021

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In just a few months, the World Health Organization received approximately 20,000 reports of new eye disorders that occurred post covid-19 vaccination. These reports include 303 cases of blindness and 1,625 cases of visual impairment! The European drug monitoring agency had never recorded such a severe spike in eye injuries until after the experimental vaccines were launched. These reports were collected by VigiBase and analyzed by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre in Uppsala, Sweden.

About half of the new eye disorders were additionally reported to the U.K.’s Yellow Card adverse event reporting system, which was set up to monitor the influx of adverse events that were anticipated during this live, experimental vaccine study. Back in 2020, the vaccine makers had already entered into liability-free contracts with governments around the world. This has enabled mass vaccine injury with no recourse or accountability and set up the framework for a historic, worldwide holocaust.

Ophthalmologists need more training to properly recognize and report vaccine injury

These experimental vaccines are designed to cause inflammation throughout the body, by reprogramming human cells to produce inflammatory spike proteins that are derived from the bio-weapon itself. Eye damage is merely a symptom of this inflammation, a sign of more serious problems to come with capillaries and autoimmune issues. The inflammatory conditions caused by the vaccines provide a new revenue stream for various industries within the medical system, including ophthalmology.

With mounting evidence of eye injury post-vaccination, ophthalmologists are ethically obligated to denounce these covid-19 vaccines. The vaccines are causing acute eye injuries at scale and are an underlying cause of inflammation for future eye disorders and other health problems. However, ophthalmologists are not properly trained to recognize, diagnose and report vaccine injury.

When the U.S. FDA issued Emergency Use Authorization for these experimental ‘vaccines’, they did not mention eye disorders specifically. In their fact sheet, they warn, “additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.”

In the UK’s Yellow Card System, vaccine-induced eye damage includes 4,616 cases of severe eye pain, 3,839 cases of blurred vision, 1,808 cases of light intolerance, and 559 cases of double vision. These issues were not prevalent until the vaccine was used. Some of the eye issues are mild but could be a sign of more serious issues within the cardiovascular or nervous systems. There were 768 cases of eye irritation, 731 cases of itchy eyes, 788 cases of ocular hyperemia, 459 cases of eye strain, 400 cases of dry eye, and 653 cases of increased lacrimation.

The covid vaccine holocaust is destroying people’s hearing and vision

More serious issues of swelling were documented as well, including swelling around the eye (366 incidences), swelling of the eyelid (360 incidences) eyelid oedema (298) conjunctival haemorrhage or breakage of a small eye vessel (236), periorbital oedema (171), and eye haemorrhage (169). The swelling can be indicative of more serious cerebral, spinal, and/or cardiovascular issues. Blood clots and nervous system disorders are a commonly reported adverse event. The eye disorders provide a window of opportunity to understand just how severe the inflammation is. Ophthalmologists are able to identify early signs of vaccine-induced brain swelling, cardiovascular issues and stroke to help patients seek emergency care before the patient becomes another casualty to these horrid vaccines.

One 33-year-old pilot had severe migraines and sudden vision problems following the Pfizer vaccine. The pain migrated down the back of his neck toward the bottom of his skull. The pain lasted for several days and was accompanied by dizziness, nausea, disorientation, confusion, uncontrollable shaking, and tingling in his toes and fingers. He was ultimately evaluated by doctors. The Pfizer COVID vaccine had increased the pressure in his spinal cord and brain stem, rupturing his left inner ear, and damaging his eyesight.

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First published on November 7, 2022

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An employee at a hospital in Fresno, Calif., leaked an email to the media showing that stillbirth rates have been spiking ever since the introduction of Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines.”

In August of this year, there were 22 stillbirths at the facility, the email revealed. And the trend is only expected to continue, it went on to state. (Related: Some of Canada’s most-vaccinated areas saw a 28-fold increase in stillbirths due to covid injections.)

So far in September, there have been seven stillbirths, though at the time of reporting only eight days had passed in the month. Extrapolated to October, we would expect the total number of stillbirths at the hospital in September to be around 40, or more than twice that of August.

Prior to Operation Warp Speed, the average number of stillbirths per month at the hospital in question was less than one. Only about two deaths every three months were reported at the facility prior to the rollout of Fauci Flu shots.

The Epoch Times, which was among the first to obtain the email in question, reached out to the head nurse who sent the email for clarification. No response was received as of this writing.

As many as 28 out of 29 pregnant women who get “vaccinated” lose their babies

According to Dr. James Thorpe, a Florida physician who specializes in maternal-fetal medicine, the contents of the leaked email are consistent with the findings of more than 1,300 peer-reviewed papers that have been published in the last 15 months.

Severe complications and death are both common outcomes post-injection for the Chinese Flu. Only a fraction of these cases appears in the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), however.

“This shot was designed to cross into the ovary; this shot was designed to cross into the brain barrier. This shot was designed to go everywhere,” revealed Dr. Chris Alan Shoemaker in a powerful speech on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada.

“And that’s why people are dying in such strange circumstances, unexplained circumstances, and the numbers are horrific. Sixty-seven percent of people who get the vaccine while pregnant lose the pregnancy.”

It turns out that Pfizer’s own internal documentation shows that the figure is even higher, with 28 out of 29 pregnant women losing their babies after getting jabbed for the Wuhan Flu.

This is why Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi has repeatedly warned pregnant women against taking the vaccine(s). To do so is to basically have a death wish for the baby since the chances of stillbirth are exceptionally high.

“The vaccine package insert from Biotech even says that pregnant women aren’t allowed to be vaccinated because vaccine injury cannot be ruled out,” Bhakdi says. “And if a young woman decides to get vaccinated, she should avoid becoming pregnant for two months.”

Despite the warnings, many pregnant women have gone ahead and gotten injected anyway, resulting in many additional stillbirths and the needless suffering associated with this tragic loss of unborn human life.

“They knew and they did nothing about it,” wrote a commenter. “They knew the clot shot didn’t stop transmission and they lied. Biden lied and millions died or will die.”

“All the grandstanding and ostracization of those who were skeptical and smart. All the relatives who mocked and shamed their children into getting it. They have no shame. They think we’ll forget. I for one will never forget.”

Another pointed out that these revelations are why some, including Emily Oster of The Atlantic, are now calling for covid “amnesty” – because they know We the People want not just answers but justice for these crimes against humanity.

The latest news about Chinese Virus shots can be found at Vaccines.news.

Sources for this article include:

RAIRFoundation.com

NaturalNews.com

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Kiev asks for German Missiles to Strike Moscow

May 29th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

Kiev continues to maintain its strategy of targeting Russian non-military areas. According to information recently admitted by spokespeople for the Ministry of Defense of Germany, the Ukrainian regime have requested from Berlin long-range missiles capable of striking Moscow. The news reveals how the Ukrainian government plans to carry out attacks against Russia’s demilitarized territory, which certainly will not be tolerated by the Russian authorities.

On May 26, citing two sources familiar with the Defense Ministry, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article with the information that Ukraine had asked Berlin to send air-launched Taurus long-range missiles. These missiles are of German-Swedish manufacture and Kiev believes that they could be some kind of “game changer” on the battlefield if they are used in the F-16 fighter jets – which the Ukrainian forces also hope to receive soon from its NATO’s allies.

According to the article, the German government would be facing a “dilemma” with the Ukrainian request, as many officials doubt that Kiev would use such equipment sensibly. This doubt is due to the fact that a long-range Taurus missile reaches a distance of 310 miles, estimated at 500km. This means that depending on from where Ukrainian forces launch their missiles, it would be possible to hit Moscow and other targets close to the Russian capital. Considering that the plan is to use such weapons with F-16 jets, the chances are even greater that attacks will be carried out in depth, which would lead to unprecedented escalation.

Furthermore, the article also cites security concerns on the part of the German government. The sources reported that the Taurus missiles require detailed, accurate and up-to-date information to be used properly. Berlin is still not sure if it is really willing to share such strategic data with its Ukrainian partners, which is why there are still doubts about the supply of these missiles.

If Germany decides to send such weapons, it would follow the UK, which recently became the first country to supply the Kiev regime with long-range missiles. London has decided to send Storm Shadow missiles with a range of over 250km to Ukraine, which has been classified by officials and analysts as a serious escalation in the conflict. This scenario of intensification tends to get even worse with the possible sending of German weapons. The addition of Berlin to the list of long-range weapons suppliers will not only increase Kiev’s firepower, it will also consequently force Moscow to act more firmly to prevent the enemy from achieving its objectives.

It is important to note that, since their arrival in Ukraine, British long-range missiles have been used continuously in attacks against the stabilized and demilitarized territory of the Russian Federation. These weapons have reached the border and caused damage against civilian facilities in Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. As a result of these attacks, at least six children were injured according to information published by local authorities.

These incursions against civilian areas are not one-off cases, but a central part of the Ukrainian strategy. The neo-Nazi government operates in accordance with the anti-Russian mentality that has become Ukraine’s state ideology since the Maidan coup in 2014. Furthermore, “pragmatically”, Kiev uses these attacks to generate disinformation in the western media, accusing Russian forces of committing such crimes and “justifying” the demand for even more weapons to “repel the invaders”. In practice, the more weapons arrive for the neo-Nazi regime, the more Russian civilians die and the greater the humanitarian crisis generated by the conflict.

In this regard, Germany should take into account the recent cases of Ukrainian attacks against non-military targets using British long-range weapons in order to realize that continuing to arm Ukrainian forces will only create more suffering among ordinary people.

Russia, on the other hand, faces the possibility of a dangerous escalation. If Kiev receives more long-range missiles and F-16 jets, Moscow’s security will be at high risk. Since the defense of the capital city is the number one priority of every nation state, the Russians have the right to act preemptively to neutralize enemy forces and prevent the possibility of harmful attacks in the future. It is also necessary to emphasize that Kiev has already carried out a series of terrorist attacks on undisputed Russian territory, even trying to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin during a drone strike. This further reinforces the Russian need to act decisively to avoid losses.

It is hoped that the German authorities contribute to peace and prevent the worst-case scenario from happening. If Berlin sends Taurus missiles to Kiev, it will be consciously acting in favor of a dangerous and possibly irreversible escalation.

Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

 

The High Costs of Military Air Shows

May 29th, 2023 by Dr. Gary G. Kohls

Author’s Note and Update 

The US Navy’s “Blue Angel” fighter jet squadron are scheduled to “perform” at Duluth, Minnesota’s military air show on July 15/16, 2023. The economic and environmental costs of such pro-military propaganda stunts that heavily contribute to the trillion dollar annual “defense department” budgets and federal deficit crises and the promotion of the aggressive militarization of our nation by such things as this weekend’s National Memorial Day celebration that was sponsored by Lockheed Martin Corporation, one of the largest, most profitable military weapons manufacturers in the world that depend on war-readiness, military dominance, massive deficit spending and “keeping our nation safe”.

Incidentally, Lockheed’s stock price today is $450 per share and is scheduled to pat a $3 quarterly dividend at the end of this quarter. Witnessing the over-the-top patriotic propaganda of the Memorial Day concert in Washington, D.C. today, I felt it was necessary to re-issue an old Duty to Warn article,  which was published by Global Research on July 10, 2019.

Dr. Gary G. Kohl, May 29, 2023 

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In 1825, long before anybody even thought about air flight, the US Navy began operations in the Pensacola, Florida area, when the federal government built a naval yard on Pensacola Bay.

90 years later, in 1914, the naval yard became home to the Navy’s first permanent air station. Since that time, NAS (Naval Air Station) Pensacola has served as the primary training base for naval aviators and has housed the Blue Angels aerobatic programs, which will be giving 61 shows at 32 locations from March through November of 2019. The two Blue Angel shows in Duluth are scheduled for July 20 – 21, 2019.

The US Navy pilots that came back in one piece from World War II returned flush with pride for doing their part in winning the war in the Pacific. So, in 1946, the Navy established a base of naval air operations on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico where the Blue Angels began training pilots to perform aeronautic stunts to entertain the public (Pentagon budgetary costs partially offset by attendance fees). The airshow were done partly for recruiting future pilots, partly for raising unit morale, partly to gain the support of congresspersons who vote on military budgets and, one supposes, to further glorify America’s military conquests in the eyes of the public.

The United States Air Force (USAF) shortly established a similar air base in Texas, where the first Thunderbird team began doing air shows for public entertainment in 1953.

Image result for us thunderbirds air show

Source: salinasairshow.com

The Gulf of Mexico has been the Blue Angels’ base of operations ever since 1946, first at Jacksonville, Florida (until 1950), then at Corpus Christi, Texas (from 1950 to 1954), and finally settled into its permanent home at Pensacola, Florida. The NAS that houses the Blue Angels occupies 5,900 acres on a peninsula just south of Pensacola in western Florida.

However, all has not been well. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), base operations and maintenance activities (at 47 separate US Navy sites around the nation) have generated a variety of waste materials, including waste oils and solvents, human waste material, paints, electroplating wastes, radium paint waste, pesticides and insecticides. Supposedly the Navy is leading the cleanup and review processes, with oversight occasionally provided by the EPA and, for the NAS at Pensacola, the Florida department of Environmental Protection (FDEP)”.

N 1989 the EPA placed the Pensacola site on the National Priorities List (NPL) of contaminated sites (Super Fund sites), with no apparent end to the clean-up 30 years later. Of course, the contamination of the ground water and the contamination of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico will be impossible to clean up.

Fouling Their Own Nests

Of course, the bases of operations of the USAF Thunderbirds (now located near Las Vegas, Nevada) are no different. One can safely assume that ALL US military bases have serious environmental contamination beneath them as well as downstream and downwind, just like every military base of every nation in the history of the world.

The Blue Angels began petrochemically poisoning the Gulf of Mexico when the Department of the Navy decided to have all its jets dump their excess fuel over the Gulf just prior to landing, in order to decrease the remote possibility of a lethal fireball engulfing the plane and pilot in case of a crash landing.

No records have been kept quantifying the volume or frequency of such fuel dumps, and environmental impact study was ever done or even considered until 1989. Apparently, the Blue Angels have discontinued pre-landing fuel dumping a number of years ago when the price of fuel rose dramatically; so now they only dump fuel in certain emergency situations.

JP-5 Jet Propellant is Highly Toxic Whether Burned or Dumped

The current jets (BoeingF/A-18 Hornets) that the Blue Angels fly burns a highly toxic propellant fuel which is called JP-5. And the many additives in the fuel do not burn “clean”, no matter what the Navy (or Air Force) says.

JP-5 is actually a highly refined kerosene that contains a complex mixture of hundreds of volatile chemical additives, some of which are carcinogenic and most of which can be toxic to liver, brain, kidney and human or animal immune systems.

The post-combustion exhaust from jet engines is equally poisonous to air, water, soil animal, plant and all forms of aquatic life.

The military personnel on the ground that handle the JP-5 fuel are at high risk of being poisoned by the chronic inhalation of either the raw fumes or the engine exhaust. Those exposed can easily develop, in a delayed fashion, any or all of the multitude of common chronic illnesses, cancers, mental ill health, suicidalities, premature deaths and neuropsychiatric disabilities that are suffered by both military personnel and domestic staffers that live on, downwind or downstream of the bases.

The Sobering Economics of Military Air Shows

The fuel consumption data for the Blue Angel and the Thunderbird air shows are generally kept secret – and for good reasons. The alarmingly high fuel consumption would tend to dampen the enthusiasm of all but the most patriotic, thrill-seeking or willfully ignorant ticket-buyers.

The aviation industry says that JP-5 jet fuel costs 2-3 times more than automotive fuel. A few years back JP-5 cost the Pentagon between $8 and $12/gallon!

It was in 2014 and 2016 that the Blue Angels last flew in Duluth. During the 2014 pre-show promotional build-up, a local reporter for the Duluth News-Tribune was given a publicity ride, and he enthusiastically wrote in his column that the jet burned 1,200 gallons of fuel per hour!That number should sober up every thinking person, for a very fuel-efficient car (that gets 40 mpg) could drive 48,000 miles on 1,200 gallons of fuel.

Back in 2014, 1,200 gallons of JP-5 cost the military upwards of $12,000 (at $10/gallon). If one multiplied that consumption by 6 (the number of jets in each performing team) the fuel costs would be $72,000 per hour just for the fuel used up doing the performance. And that is not counting the essentially daily stunt practice sessions that also last an hour. It also does not factor or the fuel consumption for the round trip to Florida and back for each of the scores of air shows that the Blue Angels do in a typical year.

Do the math and you will start to reconsider the wisdom of supporting such environmentally-insensitive and earth-unsustainable entertainment events. Surely some of the “missing” $23 trillion dollars (23,000,000, 000,000 dollars) that the Pentagon recently acknowledged that it can’t account for can be blamed on fuel wastage on air shows.

On Bastille Day of 2014 (July 14) eight USAF Thunderbird F-16 jets arrived in Duluth along with the obligatory C-17 cargo plane carrying 30 support staff and spare parts for the jets (for air shows the support contingent usually numbers 50-55 members).

The next day, 6 of the 8 Thunderbird jets left Duluth to do a 10 second flyover for the start of the Major League Baseball All-Star game at Target Field in Minneapolis – the only reason for them to be in Minnesota! (No information on the economics of the event was published. Hopefully, Major League Baseball partially footed the bill.)

The flyover was to coincide with the last strains of the Star-Spangled Banner. The two spare jets, who made the trip for nothing except as back-ups, were left sitting on the tarmac in Duluth. The News Tribune reporter covering that story wrote that “each of the multi-million-dollar fighter jets will consume about 500 gallons of fuel just to make the 30-minute round trip to and from Minneapolis”.

What are the Fuel Costs for 4 USAF Thunderbirds to Fly From Duluth to Minneapolis and Back?

Here’s the math: $10 dollars/gallon X 500 gallons, X 6 Thunderbirds = $30,000!! And that is not considering the costs of the maintenance and the crews of the other planes involved, the practice sessions, the salaries and pensions and health care costs of all the military personnel involved.

We’re talking big bucks and a massive amount of fuel wastage every time the two stunt-flying teams perform or practice, even if one acknowledges that a portion of the costs are covered by civilian event sponsors. But there is more to understand about US military air shows that should raise additional concerns.

A Duluth News-Tribune reporter covering one of Duluth’s past air shows wrote that the commanding officer of one of the flight teams was required to fly a minimum of 3,000 training hours (paid for by the US taxpayer) to qualify for the role of commander. The other team members had to fly 1,350 training hours. The reporter noted in that article that there were 15 pilots in the team, although only 6 perform at a time. The team members (the subs as well as prime time flyers) practice their highly technical and dangerous stunts virtually every day of the year in order to keep their skills honed and the air shows relatively safe.

Some More Sobering Math

As of 2006, there had reportedly been 230 fighter pilots since the Blue Angels started their stunt-flying for audiences. Since the Blue Angels teams began flying in 1946, about 25 of their pilots have died in crashes, which means that as many as 25 multimillion-dollar planes went down in the crashes as well (this figure does not factor in the number of planes that were demolished while the pilot survived by ejecting safely).

In 2011, 70 Blue Angel air shows (two shows per weekend) were presented at 35 different sites, with rehearsal flights the day before each performance. When they are not touring, the Blue Angels practice their routines year-round, usually over the Gulf of Mexico at their Pensacola base of operations, while the Thunderbirds practice over Nevada’s vast desert north of Las Vegas, which is where a rookie Thunderbird pilot died in a practice session crash on April 4, 2018, just a couple of months before he was to be in Duluth. The crash was the third Thunderbird crash in the 22 months prior to the 2018 crash.

Using the figures that the journalist obtained from the Blue Angels, the 3,000 hours of training for the single Commanding Officer (CO) used up as many as 2,400,000 gallons of jet fuel just to qualify (3,000 hours X 800 gallons/hour = 2,400,000 gallons)! Of course, this training number does not include the equally enormous amounts of fuel consumed during the air show performances, the rehearsals or the flights to and from Pensacola.
The 1,350 training hours for the other pilots on the team (at one time there were as many as 15 pilots on the Blue Angels teams) consumed as much as 1,080,000 gallons for each pilot’s training (1,350 hours X 800 gallons/hour). Multiply that by 14 non-CO pilots and you get 15,120,000 gallons of fuel just for the hours spent training those pilots.

Considering the fact that in 2012, a gallon of JP-5 jet fuel cost $8 to $12/gallon (average $10/gallon), every new Navy pilot who succeeds at becoming a Blue Angel pilot cost the US taxpayer approximately $10,080,000 per pilot (1,080,000 gallons X $10/gallon) – just for the fuel used to become a member of the team! And the 10 million dollars is not factored into the airmen’s salaries, the retirement pensions or the tens of millions of dollars that each jet costs.

I challenge readers to try to estimate in dollar figures the enormous fuel costs for all of the US military shows/year, and then try to calculate the fuel used up in the flights to and from Pensacola (or Las Vegas in the case of the Thunderbirds). And then add in the costs of the huge transport planes that carry all the repair parts and the 50-55 support crew members that work in supply and maintenance. And what about retirement costs for the lifers and the lifetime VA healthcare costs for virtually everybody else that qualifies.

Of course, the costs to the American taxpayer are impossible to calculate precisely, but it must be tens of billions of dollars per year, admittedly partly offset by ticket sales. Nevertheless, since so many of America’s economic wars and military wars are for control of oil, the burning of precious fuel for whatever reason must be taken into account if and when the future of fuel-wasting military air shows are to be re-considered.

Squandering Increasingly Scarce Fossil Fuel for our Amusement

In 2016 the USAF Thunderbirds headlined the Duluth Air Show. Every year there are a number of other stunt-flying participants, all using up increasingly scarce petroleum products for purposes of entertainment and, of course, for the recruitment of starry-eyed, vulnerable young boys (and girls) who are being primed, partly because of their extensive experience with first person shooter videogames, to want to join the death-dealing military professions that make homicidal violence normal and attractive.

The world is over-populated and heading for a catastrophic economic and climate change cliff, so isn’t it about time for people to get serious about what should be the very sobering realities mentioned above? We live in a world of dwindling, irreplaceable fossil fuel resources that are already being squandered by thousands of corporate misleaders on Wall Street, War Street and Capital Hill, including Big Oil, Big Agribusiness, Big Chemical, Big Food, Big Media and Big Armaments. Each of these sociopathic industries (look up the definition of sociopathy) – in one way or another – profits from wars and rumors of war, and so the mesmerizing beat goes on.

Too many American military veterans are now physically, neurologically and/or spiritually dead or dying (often by suicide – 22 per day for active duty soldiers and veterans combined!). These once-gung-ho, now-wounded warriors were too easily seduced by the pseudo-patriotic jingoism coming from the “military-industrial complex” during the best years of their lives. And then they were sacrificed, not for American “democracy”, but for American capitalism and the money-hungry, pro-militarism, war-profiteering corporations (and their subservient politicians and presidents of both political parties) that cunningly waved the flag and dutifully wore the flag pins on their 3-piece suit coat lapels.

Now we know that these corporate entities never really cared about the well-being of their “cannon fodder” warriors who were doing the dirty work for their evil enterprises abroad. The flag that the corporation’s CEOs pledge allegiance to is NOT the Stars and Stripes, but it is a flag that has their corporate logo on it. And they are NOT our friends.

Millions of dead and dying American veterans from every war since 1898 (the year that the US military murderously captured the Philippine Islands, Puerto Rico and Cuba from Spain and started feeling their imperialist oats) joined the US military partly out of a sense of patriotic duty, partly to “see the world” and partly to get out of poverty; but most of them soon found themselves either:

1) disillusioned by the atrocities they saw or had been ordered to commit;

2) sickened from their exposures to military toxins (including the obligatory, massive over-vaccination agendas for every member, no matter how irrational);

3) malnourished or sickened from the, toxic, highly processed pseudo-food in their rations;

4) neurologically and psychiatrically sickened from the ubiquitous overuse of alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs or the cocktails of psych drugs given to them by military psychiatrists, medics and the VA; and/or

5) tormented by the post-combat demons, the nightmares, the mental ill health (of known causation) and the suicidality – while at the same time earning less than the minimum wage.

And part of the process that led many of the above victims think that there was glory involved in killing and dying for their nation’s financial elites, began with the thrill of experiencing military air shows.

America’s soldiers, airmen, seamen and Marines have been, in reality, working not for the US Constitution to which they pledged allegiance, but rather for a whole host of nefarious special interest groups that stopped supporting them when their broken bodies, their  broken brains and the body bags came home under cover of darkness.

Hopefully, honestly acknowledging the above unwelcome realities may someday set America free from the war-glorifying, war-profiteering warmongers on Wall Street and War Street. Good examples would include Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas/Boeing, the suppliers of the planes, who depend on wars and rumors of war to continue doing business and maintaining dividend payments and high stock prices for their wealthy investors.

So, while thousands of patriotic Duluthians watch in wide-eyed wonder as the highly skilled jet pilots do their breath-taking stunts, there will also be tens of thousands of Duluthians that refuse to spend their time and money attending and supporting these shows.

Sadly, the airshow sponsors are unconsciously hastening America’s moral, energy, climate and financial collapse by ignoring the wastefulness of burning up precious, expensive, non-renewable fossil fuel resources while simultaneously poisoning the planet and risking the health of everybody, including America’s progeny.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, conscienceless industrialization, militarization, racism, xenophobia, malnutrition, sea level rise, global warming, geo-engineering, solar radiation management, electromagnetic radiation, Big Copper Mining’s conscienceless exploitation of northeast Minnesota’s water-rich environment, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing, over-treating, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas (particularly of tiny infants), as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of life on earth.  Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including these four:

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

El G-7 debería cerrarse de una vez

May 29th, 2023 by Prof. Vijay Prashad

Promemoria della Guerra | Grandangolo – Pangea

May 28th, 2023 by Manlio Dinucci

Siamo alla 100ª puntata di Grandangolo, cui si aggiunge una decina di video “Dentro la notizia” e soprattutto il docufilm “Per i bambini del Donbass” di Maya Nogradi. nostra regista, e Luca Belardi, nostro collaboratore.

L’occasione non è rituale. Rivedendo queste 100 puntate ci rendiamo conto di che cosa è trascorso in questi due anni. Ci rendiamo conto di un intrecciarsi di strategie, che vedono da un lato l’attacco vero e proprio sotto forma di lockdown della pandemia e, dall’altro, varie azioni belliche, non necessariamente tutte sul campo di battaglia, ma in campo mediatico, in campo politico e in qualsiasi altro campo.

Ci rendiamo conto dell’importanza di tutto ciò che ha fatto la TV dei cittadini Byoblu in questi due anni. Se non ci fosse stato questo canale, se non fosse stato possibile entrare nelle case degli italiani con queste notizie, non saremmo a questo punto. Certo il momento è molto critico, però quello che abbiamo fatto, e soprattutto fa Byoblu, è di un’importanza che travalica la consapevolezza che la stessa redazione ha di quello che sta facendo.

Vi presentiamo quindi una sorta di promemoria di ciò che è avvenuto in questi due anni attraverso alcune puntate di Grandangolo, alcuni brani che contrastano la strategia del sistema politico-mediatico:  quella dell’orwelliano “Ministero della Verità” di cancellare la memoria. Ogni fatto è collegato: questo è il senso del promemoria della guerra che oggi vi proponiamo.

Manlio Dinucci

VIDEO :

Memorandum to War: Manlio Dinucci

May 28th, 2023 by Manlio Dinucci

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***

Here we are at the 100th episode of Grandangolo, plus a dozen “Inside the news” videos and, above all, the documentary “For the children of Donbass” (https://www.byoblu.com/2021/12/01/per-i-bambini-del-donbass/ ) by Maya Nogradi, our director, and Luca Belardi, our collaborator.

The occasion is no ritual. Revisiting these 100 episodes, we realize what happened in those two years. We see an interweaving of strategies, which see on the one hand the real attack, in the form of containment, of the pandemic and, on the other, various warlike actions, not necessarily all on the battlefield, but in the media field, in the political field and in every other field.

We realize the importance of everything that Byoblu citizens’ TV has done in the last two years. If this channel hadn’t existed, if it hadn’t been possible to enter the homes of Italians with this information, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Of course, this is a very critical moment, but what we have done, and above all what Byoblu is doing, is of an importance that exceeds even the editorial staff’s awareness of what it is doing.

We therefore present you with a kind of memorandum of what has happened in these two years, through a few episodes of Grandangolo, a few extracts that combat the strategy of the political-media system: that of the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to erase memory. Every fact is connected: that’s the meaning of the memorandum of war we’re offering you today.

Presentation of the hundredth episode of the Grandangolo international press review on Friday May 26, 2023 at 8.30pm, on TV Byoblu,

https://www.byoblu.com/2023/05/26/promemoria-della-guerra-grandangolo-pangea/

VIDEO (in italian) :

 

 

 

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***

When it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, Big Pharma isn’t very concerned about the vaccine injured. They are collateral damage in a multi $100 billion profit scheme and their plight can always be blamed on Long COVID or Climate Change.

But they fear suicides. A COVID-19 vaccine injured person driven to suicide can do tremendous damage to the fraudulent COVID-19 vaccine narrative about “safe and effective”. Especially if they document their nightmare. Such is the case of Italian swimming champion Claudio Rais.

And he is not the only swimmer to suffer COVID-19 vaccine injuries, in fact, swimmers are dying suddenly in very high numbers now.

Sassari, Italy – 37 year old personal trainer, swimmer and triathlete Claudio Rais committed suicide by jumping off the Rosello Bridge, the highest bridge in the city of Sassari in Italy, on March 14, 2023. (click here)

 

Claudio Rais had his first two COVID-19 mRNA vaccine doses with Pfizer in 2021, and then had a Moderna booster shot on Feb.10, 2022.

He had a successful swimming summer season of 2022, winning multiple championships.

 

But by September 2022, he described suffering horrible injuries from his Moderna COVID-19 booster shot. In his own words:

 

By December 2022, he was seriously contemplating suicide:

 

Claudio Rais would go on to commit suicide only 3 months later on March 14, 2023, by jumping off the Rosello bridge in his town of Sassari, Italy.

Honolulu, HI – 17 year old Tehani Kealoha, a Moanalua High School senior died suddenly after suffering a “medical emergency” during a swim meet on May 13, 2023 (click here)
 

Lanang, Philippines – 49 year old swim coach Jerry Kasim had a heart attack and died during the Davao Ironman competition on March 26, 2023 (click here)

 

US Virgin Islands – 42 year old Jamie Cail, former swimmer, was found dead by her boyfriend on the floor of their home on Feb.21, 2023 (click here)

 

Jamie Cail pictured swimming at a swim meet.

Hamilton, ON – Fully COVID-19 vaccinated 27 year old Canadian doctor, pediatrician and triathlete Dr. Candace Nayman collapsed in the water during a triathlon (and died four days later on July 28, 2022) (click here)

 

Dr. Candace Nayman is seen in this undated photograph taken from her Facebook page.

Esterhazy, SK – Fully COVID-19 vaccinated 44 year old Canadian family doctor Dr.Shahriar Jalali Mazlouman died suddenly at 1:30pm while swimming in a public swimming pool on July 23, 2022. (click here)

 

Dr. Shahriar Jalali Mazlouman

VIDEO – Budapest, Hungary – World Championships in Artistic Swimming – 25 year old professional swimmer Anita Alvarez collapsed in water on June 22, 2022. She survived the incident.

 

Naples, Italy – 27 year old professional swimmer Mariasofia Paparo died suddenly of a heart attack on April 11, 2022, just shy of her 28th birthday and a month after getting engaged. (click here)

 

Redlands, CA – 21 year old Sydney Rae Benveniste, a college swimmer at Azusa Pacific University, died suddenly on March 1, 2022 (click here)

 

Pima County, AZ – 23 year old University of Arizona swimmer Ty Wells died suddenly on Jan.27, 2022, autopsy showed a disseminated Strep infection following a protracted upper respiratory infection (click here)

 

Everything about Arizona swimmer death (Image via Instagram/Azathelic)

Ty Wells may have suffered from severe immune system injury from COVID-19 vaccines, allowing Strep to become systemic and fatal. These types of deaths (from Strep) have become common in COVID-19 vaccinated young people.

My Take…

 

Triathlon and competitive open water swimming have higher rates of death compared to other forms of endurance sport. Studies have found that sudden cardiac arrhythmia is the most likely etiology of swimming related death (click here).

Furthermore, data from triathlons have shown that most sudden deaths occur during the swimming segment of the race (click here).

This means that COVID-19 mRNA vaccine induced myocarditis is even more dangerous and deadly for Triathletes and competitive swimmers than for other athletes and regular people.

Doctors should be warning swimmers and triathletes about this elevated risk of sudden cardiac death if they’ve had any COVID-19 vaccine. However, at this time, these increased risks of sudden death are being ignored and swept under the rug.

Competitive triathletes and swimmers are dying suddenly and doctors remain “baffled”.

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***

In December 2022, founder Elon Musk gave an update on his other, other company, the brain implant startup Neuralink. As early as 2020, the company had been saying it was close to starting clinical trials of the implants, but the December update suggested those were still six months away. This time, it seems that the company was correct, as it now claims that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given its approval for the start of human testing.

Neuralink is not ready to start recruiting test subjects, and there are no details about what the trials will entail. Searching the ClinicalTrials.gov database for “Neuralink” also turns up nothing. Typically, the initial trials are small and focused entirely on safety rather than effectiveness. Given that Neuralink is developing both brain implants and a surgical robot to do the implanting, there will be a lot that needs testing.

It’s likely that these will focus on the implants first, given that other implants have already been tested in humans, whereas an equivalent surgical robot has not.

The news is undoubtedly a relief for both the staff of the company and its owner, Musk, given that Neuralink has had several negative interactions with federal regulators of late. It’s a bad sign when having an earlier bid to start clinical trials rejected by the FDA was the least of the company’s problems. The company has also been accused of being abusive toward its research animals and violating transportation rules by shipping implants contaminated with monkey tissue and pathogens.

Typically, when the FDA rejects an application for clinical trials, it is willing to communicate in detail why it found the plan for trials insufficient. It’s a positive sign for Neuralink that the company was able to address the concerns of federal regulators in a relatively short period.

***

JOHN TIMMERJohn is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

An Atlanta-based biotech company last week said it successfully concluded the first-ever clinical trial testing of a microarray injection-free vaccine on children as young as 9 months old.

Micron Biomedical tested microneedle-based delivery of the measles-rubella (MR) vaccine on children in Gambia with backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Microarray injections are administered via a microneedle patch that looks like a Band-Aid and is applied by pressing it to the skin. Once applied, microneedles penetrate the upper layer of the skin to deliver the vaccine.

The study, which researchers presented last week at the Microneedles 2023 conference in Seattle, evaluated the safety, immunogenicity and acceptability of the leading commercially available MR vaccine from the Serum Institute of India delivered by Micron’s microarray technology in adults, toddlers and infants.

Proponents of this vaccination method, such as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — of which the Gates Foundation is a founding member — call the patches “the future of vaccination, where these lifesaving interventions are delivered painlessly, without the need for syringes or perhaps even trained medical professionals.”

“Supporting innovations in vaccine delivery is critical to addressing ongoing health inequities,” James Goodson, co-investigator for the study and senior scientist and epidemiologist at the CDC’s Global Immunization Division, said in the press release.

He added that the study also is a key step toward getting the patches licensed.

Developers tout the technology as painless — it feels like Velcro, they claim — and more thermostable than traditional vaccines.

This would make widespread global distribution of the vaccines easier, they said, particularly in developing areas that may lack infrastructure, such as refrigeration, and trained professionals.

Microneedle vaccine market worth billions

Micron’s CEO, Steven Damon, said:

“Micron, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the CDC, is thrilled to accomplish a major milestone in the future of injection-free administration of necessary and potentially life-saving vaccines and therapeutics.”

With this trial, the company remains at the forefront of bringing microarray-based vaccine products to market, Damon said.

The Gates Foundation, the CDC, Unicef, PATH — another heavily Gates-funded organization — and the Georgia Research Alliance provided Micron with $40 million in funding to develop its microneedle patch technology.

In 2017, the Gates Foundation gave Micron a $2.2 million grant to develop the microneedle patch for the MR vaccine and another $900 million in 2022. Gates had previously awarded Micron $2.5 million to develop a microneedle patch for polio as part of the foundation’s effort to eradicate polio.

In the last several months, Micron also received significant funding from investors like Global Health Investment Corporation and LTS Lohmann. And less than two weeks ago, just before it presented the study results at the Microneedles 2023 conference, the company secured an additional $3 million investment from J2 Ventures, bringing its total Series A funding to $17 million.

Series A funding, the first round of equity financing for a startup company after it has demonstrated some success with seed funding, precedes a public offering.

Trials for vaccine patches against COVID-19, seasonal influenza and hepatitis B also are ongoing, while patches against human papillomavirus, typhoid and rotavirus are in preclinical development.

The microneedle vaccine market for the flu vaccine alone is projected to reach $2.3 billion by 2030.

Last year, Mark Prausnitz, Ph.D., co-founder and chief scientific advisor to Micron Biomedical presented Micron’s technology at a White House panel discussion, Innovation in Vaccine Delivery.

The panel, chaired by Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, explored “a path toward innovative, next-generation COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine delivery technologies.”

“This technology has revolutionary potential for extending the reach of vaccines in low resource settings and during pandemics,” David Hoey, president and CEO of Vaxxas, a biotechnology company based in Brisbane, Australia, told Gavi.

Hoey’s company has patches against measles and rubella, COVID-19 and seasonal influenza in human trials.

‘Safe and well tolerated with no allergic reactions or related serious adverse events’

Forty-five adults, 120 toddlers (15-18 months old) and 120 infants (9-10 months old) were enrolled in the clinical trial and randomized to receive the MR vaccine either via Micron’s microarray or through subcutaneous injection, meaning beneath the skin.

The study has not yet been published, but in a press release, Micron reported that vaccination by microarray was found to be “safe and well tolerated with no allergic reactions or related serious adverse events.”

The study reported similar seroprotection rates of approximately 90% or more after 42 days for the groups that received the microarray and subcutaneous injections.

“Generally, parents were very positive about the ability to vaccinate their young infants without a needle,” Damon said.

Transdermal patches have been available for illnesses such as motion sickness since 1979, but many types of medications cannot be delivered through the skin because the skin is an effective barrier.

According to Gavi, vaccine developer Prausnitz spent years trying to develop ways to cross the skin barrier to aid in drug delivery, but it wasn’t until he began collaborating with people who had expertise in computer microchips that he was able to find ways to penetrate the skin’s natural barrier.

Then each vaccine needs its own formulation that can work with that technology.

Relocating ‘large scale clinical trials of untested or unapproved drugs to developing markets’

According to Fierce Pharma, Micron’s decision to roll out the first-ever test of the new technology on children in Africa, “reflects a belief that microneedle technology is particularly well suited to the administration of vaccines in that part of the world.”

“Microneedle technology, such as this, is viewed as being a key component to measles control in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. This reflects, amongst other things, the potential ease of delivery, reduced cold chain requirements and absence of sharps waste,” Ed Clarke, Ph.D., said in a statement.

Clarke, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researcher leading the study, also received money from the Gates Foundation to study other vaccines in Gambia.

Many scholars have raised concerns that research conducted by international organizations in the global south, and by the Gates Foundation in particular, can lack accountability and lead to serious harms to the population being tested.

One paper published in the Annual Survey of International and Comparative Law found

“these health campaigns [carried out in India and Africa], under the guise of saving lives, have relocated large scale clinical trials of untested or unapproved drugs to developing markets where administering drugs is less regulated and cheaper.”

The Lancet’s editorial board also raised questions about Gates-funded research in low-income settings, pointing to the foundation’s limited transparency and tremendous power to direct health programs and research with its funding.

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***

The collateral damage of the pandemic response was “substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people”, a major new study has found.

Reviewing and synthesising 600 publications focused on the impact of the pandemic response, Dr. Kevin Bardosh of the Universities of Washington and Edinburgh concluded that these wide and deep societal harms “should challenge the dominant mental model of the pandemic response”.

The abstract provides a succinct summary of the study, which is currently in pre-print:

Early in the Covid pandemic concerns were raised that lockdown and other non-pharmaceutical interventions would cause significant multidimensional harm to society. This paper comprehensively evaluates the global state of knowledge on these adverse social impacts, with an emphasis on their type and magnitude during 2020 and 2021. A harm framework was developed spanning 10 categories: health, economy, income, food security, education, lifestyle, intimate relationships, community, environment and governance. The analysis synthesises 600 publications with a focus on meta-analyses, systematic reviews, global reports and multi-country studies. This cumulative academic research shows that the collateral damage of the pandemic response was substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people in the years ahead.

Many original predictions are broadly supported by the research data including: a rise in non-Covid excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviours, social polarisation, soaring debt, democratic backsliding and declining human rights. Young people, individuals and countries with lower socioeconomic status, women and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities were hit hardest.

Societal harms should challenge the dominant mental model of the pandemic response: it is likely that many Covid policies caused more harm than benefit, although further research is needed to address knowledge gaps and explore policy trade-offs, especially at a country-level. Planning and response for future global health emergencies must integrate a wider range of expertise to account for and mitigate societal harms associated with government intervention.

The project was supported by Collateral Global, a U.K. registered Charity co-founded by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta of the Great Barrington Declaration with Carl Heneghan of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, “dedicated to researching, understanding and communicating the effectiveness and collateral impacts of the mandatory NPIs taken by governments worldwide in response to the Covid pandemic”.

 

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***

The Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which is centered out of Ramstein Air Base, is an alliance of 54 countries supporting Ukraine militarily against Russia.

In a new press briefing marking the 12th meeting of the group, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revealed the total tally of funds and military aid pumped into Kiev. “In total, the Contact Group has committed nearly $65 billion in security assistance,” while stressing the Western allies are “as united as ever.” This total figure is separate from the Washington overall commitment as far as Ukraine aid goes, which is even larger.

This already huge figure is about to leap significantly higher, given that as Austin said,

“And, last week, President Biden announced that the United States will support a joint effort with our allies and partners to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation aircraft, including F-16s. We hope this training will begin in the coming weeks.” 

Henry Kissinger: The Back Story

May 28th, 2023 by Jerelle Kraus

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***

On May 27, 2023, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger will have lived one hundred years. For half of those years, he’s haunted my life.

On a Tuesday lunchtime in 1979, my third day as the New York Times’s op-ed art director, Sydney Schanberg and I had just settled down on the burgundy benches of Sardi’s, the theater-district restaurant behind the Times, when Syd told me, “I don’t believe in capital punishment, but I’d go anywhere to see Kissinger hanged.”

“That’s nervy of you to say,” I told Syd, “about a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.”

Syd had worn jeans when he reported from foreign wars. Now, as the metro editor at the Times, he wore a black turtleneck, hounds-tooth sport jacket, and smartly cropped beard. I, a California naïf newly arrived in Manhattan, wore loose hippie hair and sandals.

Syd’s blunt disclosure was triggered by the freshly drawn Kissinger portrait I’d pulled out of my bag. As a drawing, it was a far cry from the celebrity caricatures that surrounded us on Sardi’s walls, and in my effort to get it into the paper, I’d put up a fight—a fight I lost an hour ago when my editor killed the image. Now that it wouldn’t be published, I had to show it to Syd.

It was Syd who reported Pulitzer-winning dispatches on the genocide that followed the United States’ carpet bombing of non-combatant Cambodia. The brutal onslaught—an early use of B-52 Stratofortress bombers—that killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians was the brainchild of Henry Kissinger.

Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, recorded the unprovoked attack in the White House log, abbreviating Kissinger as “K” and President Nixon as “P.” Once the first bombs fell, Haldeman wrote, “Historic day. K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ finally came off at 2:00 p.m. our time. K really excited, as is P.” The next day he wrote, “K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.”

To hide the top-secret assault from Congress and the American people, Kissinger fabricated an elaborate, dual reporting system of false flight patterns. His scheme informed pilots that their target was Vietnam but diverted forty-eight of their planes across the border, where they dropped 2,400 tons of bombs on neutral Cambodia. When a leak to the Times exposed the truth about the raids—Kissinger codenamed them “Operation Menu” and continued the barrage with “Lunch,” “Snack,” “Dinner,” “Supper,” and “Dessert”—my head throbbed with images of bleeding, fleeing, falling Cambodians.

While he was growing up in Germany, Kissinger was viciously beaten by Hitler Youth gangs. How, I marveled, could he then rejoice in the slaughtering of innocents? How could he name lethal explosives after nourishment? 

I had commissioned the Kissinger portrait to illustrate a doozy of an op-ed by William Pfaff, whom Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. would call “Walter Lippmann’s authentic heir.” Pfaff’s first sentence landed a knockout punch: “Kissinger was ultimately a failure as Secretary of State.” The scathing attack continued: “Mr. Kissinger left Washington with the United States weakened. There were curiously few successes. Yet Kissinger … is taken as a success. It is a striking case of style over substance.”

When I contemplated how to illustrate Pfaff’s harsh text, the unsparing work of artist David Levine came to mind. Levine, whose caustic caricatures appeared in The New York Review of Books, jumped at the chance to draw the illustration and delivered a masterpiece. Tattooed on the über-diplomat’s back are the atrocities that studded his career. Shoulder hairs become Arabic script; “RICHARD” shares billing with “MOTHER” on the forearms; and the Shah of Iran, a holstered gun, and a Chinese dragon adorn the cheeks. Between Kissinger’s bent arms, Vietnam darkens, and bombs fall on Cambodia. It was those bombs that most shook me.

Since the image shamed America’s premier diplomat on a par with Pfaff’s prose, I felt sure it would impress my new boss, the legendary Charlotte Curtis. I grabbed the illustration, swept out of my office and up a fake marble staircase, and stood waiting at Charlotte’s door for her nod.

A petite person with a bouffant do, Charlotte’s winsome wardrobe included lace collars and petticoats. She flew to Ohio every weekend to see her surgeon husband, whom she called “Dr. Hunt.” Yet Charlotte’s low, raspy voice startled, and her traditional femininity betrayed a searing mind.

In her acclaimed reporting days, Charlotte filed merciless social commentary. Now, as op-ed editor and the first woman on the Times’s modest masthead, her young deputy handled the day-to-day while she put Brzezinski on hold to answer Mandela’s call and Halston waited in the lobby to take her to lunch. Yet Charlotte had sole authority to sanction illustrations.

The David Levine Kissinger illustration commissioned by the author in 1979.

“That’s awful!” she sneered when I presented the Kissinger drawing.

“But look at Pfaff’s text!” I countered.

Charlotte wrinkled her nose, clenched tight her normally fluttering eyelids, and spun around in her chair.

“We could crop it mid-dragon,” I offered.

That’s not it,” she snapped. “It’s the excessive midsection flesh.”

Since when is Kissinger slim? “This picture will resonate with millions of readers,” I insisted.

Charlotte’s manicured hands lit another Virginia Slim. Gazing into the distance, she inhaled. As she slowly exhaled, I bit my lip. Then Charlotte announced, with withering finality, “It’s a cheap shot.”

For me, the illustration was the opposite of cheap.

When Kissinger and Nixon were escalating things in Vietnam, I stood on the Berkeley railroad tracks waving a white flag in hopes of halting the troop trains that were taking my peers to fight an unwinnable war. I’d become friends with Ron Kovic, who entered the Marines as a gung-ho volunteer and left a paralyzed peacenik, eventually telling the story in his 1976 autobiography Born on the Fourth of July. To me, Levine’s Kissinger image seemed so right: the black-inked back of a man who turned that back on his crimes. But by assuming the image would fly, I’d miscalculated. Provocative visuals were the op-ed department’s trademark, yet I’d gone too far. It was my third day, and I’d already screwed up.

When the Times inaugurated its Op-Ed section in 1970—the term is merely printer’s jargon for the page opposite the editorial page—I was in California. Having recently returned from a Fulbright year in Munich (ninety minutes by train from Kissinger’s birthplace), I shared the Oakland block I lived on with members of the Black Panthers and worked my first publishing job as Ramparts magazine’s art director. Ramparts, recalled editor Peter Collier in Time magazine, was “the only New Left periodical that could penetrate middle-class households.” It was a magazine “printed on heavy, glossy stock with classy graphics that looked good on a Danish Modern coffee table.”

The cover stories I designed for Ramparts included the burning of the Bank of America, the subversive silkscreens of Cuban artists, and the reportage of Christopher Hitchens, which recorded evidence of “Kissinger’s crimes against humanity.” Some of the atrocities Hitchens detailed were criminal; some were simply immoral. Many were committed in concert with America’s ruthless client regimes.

Kissinger took a passionate, personal interest in promoting despotic governments throughout the globe. “I’ve always acted alone,” he told journalist Oriana Fallaci. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train . . . the cowboy who rides all alone into the town . . . . This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.”

In South Asia, Kissinger blessed Pakistan’s massacre in Bangladesh and greenlit Indonesia’s slaughter of the East Timorese. Most disastrously, Kissinger instituted a policy of unconditional support for the Shah of Iran. We’re still paying the price of his all-out embrace of Iran, which laid the groundwork for crisis in the Middle East. The Shah told Kissinger, “We are looking for a navy. We have a large shopping list.” To the delight of America’s military and arms merchants, Kissinger enabled Iran to possess the largest navy in the Persian Gulf, the largest air force in Western Asia, and the fifth largest army in the world.

To me, Levine’s Kissinger image seemed so right: the black-inked back of a man who turned that back on his crimes.

When Iran entered a border dispute with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Kissinger, as a favor to the Shah, recruited the Kurds to fight the Iraqis. Once the dispute was resolved, Iraq attacked the Kurds, killing thousands, as they tried to flee. The devastated Kurdish leader, beseeching the United States to honor his loyalty, sent his plea directly to Kissinger: “We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people.” Instead of honoring the Kurds’ faithful execution of his orders, Kissinger betrayed them. Cutting off all aid, he decreed, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

When the Chilean people, in a democratic election, seemed certain to vote physician and socialist Salvador Allende their president, Kissinger became unglued. He demanded that Nixon authorize $10 million to stop Allende from coming to power. When Allende was elected, a diabolical Kissinger plot to destroy Chile’s fledgling democracy became covert U.S. policy. Enlisting the CIA, Kissinger orchestrated a siege of Chile’s presidential palace where Allende was sitting—an attack that set the palace aflame and left Allende dead. Bloodthirsty Augusto Pinochet became dictator of Chile, and in June 1976, at the height of the murderous repression that ensued, Kissinger told him, “We are sympathetic to what you are trying to do here.”

During Argentina’s “Dirty War,” Kissinger eagerly backed the brutal military junta that was fighting against its own people. The junta targeted those citizens who were working to restore democracy, yet they “disappeared” thousands of random, apolitical Argentines, as well. In his zeal to support Argentina’s tyrannical regime, Kissinger flew to Buenos Aires to congratulate the dictatorship on “an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces.”

Disappearing is worse than dying. The military tortured their victims, loaded them onto planes, and, with “death flights,” tossed them alive into the sea. Then the military destroyed all records of their existence. Without a bone or document to prove they once lived, the junta could claim they never did.

On one morning during the war, my Argentine husband, Horacio, was walking near his home when seven soldiers assaulted him and dragged him onto a truck. Though he had since grown a beard, the only ID Horacio carried showed him clean shaven. The discrepancy would have sealed his fate were it not for a friend who chanced by. From the truck’s flatbed, my husband, surrounded by dozens of the soon-to-be-disappeared, called out to his friend, “Roberto, quick! Run to my house and ask my mother for my journalist ID. The one with a beard.” 

Heinz Alfred Kissinger, an introverted, fifteen-year-old refugee when he arrived in America, transformed himself into a suave player. He got people to refer to him as “Doctor Kissinger,” and his enormous charm captivated politicians, celebrities—and especially journalists. Wooing the Washington press corps with his wit, he would utter in a trenchant Teutonic accent tidbits like, “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Journalist Barbara Walters once asked Henry’s brother, Walter, why he, Walter, lacked an accent. “Because I’m the Kissinger who listens,” Walter replied.

Hearing Kissinger’s voice brings back my unknowable Viennese father. Both he and Kissinger were young Jewish émigrés who came to America, earned PhDs, and despite never losing their pronounced German accents, taught in universities. My father didn’t listen either.

The women on Kissinger’s arm during his Don Juan bachelor decade included Jill St. John, Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine, and Diane Sawyer. He frequently dated Liv Ullman, who called Kissinger “the most interesting man I have ever met.” Had Kissinger’s boss possessed his high-flying emissary’s charm, he might have survived Watergate. But the contrast between Kissinger and Nixon couldn’t have been starker. Before his wife Pat would date him, square, self-conscious Dick drove her to dates with other men.

I experienced Nixon’s social awkwardness up close. In August 1982, about a decade after he “resigned,” I illustrated an op-ed essay he wrote for the Times on deténte. On the day it was published, a phone call stunned me: it was Nixon. “I admire your drawing in today’s paper,” he said. “I’d like to have the original.” Intrigued, I agreed to bring him the drawing. The next morning I found myself suddenly alone with Nixon in a vast federal office, except for a secretary who sat silently in a distant corner. I searched for something positive to say.

“Thank you for opening China,” I blurted. “They’ve invited me on a cultural tour.”

“I’m going to China next week,” Nixon said.

“Then why don’t I go with you!” I joked.

Nixon curled his shoulders to his ears and stared at the floor for the longest time. Finally, he raised his head and mumbled, “You see, Jerelle, uh, uh … Pat’s not going.”

Kissinger would haunt me again in 2014. I was reading the 2001 book A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, and Anthony Bourdain’s words had hit me hard: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands . . . and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”

During the same 2014 week I read this passage, Kissinger spoke at a 100-year anniversary commemoration of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, the catalyst for World War I. I arrived at the remembrance to see Kissinger in a gray suit among four onstage panelists. Behind them was a colossal map of 1914 Europe painted in primary colors. France and Russia were yellow, the seas blue, and Austria-Hungary and the German Empire were red.

Upon the event’s conclusion, fellow former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the other panelists joined the audience at an elaborate buffet. Kissinger, ever the cowboy who rides alone into town, started toward the back exit. A throng of reporters and photographers rushed toward him. I did too. When he was about to duck out, I jumped onto the stage and addressed him in German. Hearing his native tongue, Kissinger swiveled to face me. Wikipedia lists Kissinger’s height as 5’8”, but at 5’4” I felt taller, which emboldened me.

Looking into the eyes of a war criminal who has not once faced the bar of justice, I asked, “Do you feel guilty?”

Kissinger glowered at my brazen effrontery.

Quickly, I pulled a book from my bag and offered it to him. Kissinger ignored the book, elbowed through the stage’s bulky black curtains, and vanished. Alas, he never saw his crime-emblazoned back, which finally found publication on the cover of All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page. But now’s the perfect moment to send it to him. It’ll make a great centennial gift.

Happy hundredth birthday, Henry!

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During the Africa Day celebrations on May 25th, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov reiterated that Moscow took the strategic decision to ‘return to Africa’ due to the current geopolitical changes and its return has become a popular post-Soviet slogan by the Russian establishment. The second Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg this late July is a strategic decision by Moscow in connection with its long-term goal of regaining presence on the continent,
According to Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov: 
 
“This is not a one-time event. It is a strategic decision. It is our long-term policy and practice under the slogan of Russia’s return to Africa. Of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union some things were lost. There was stagnation in our relations. A number of embassies were closed. Now we are actively working to reopen and restore the work of our embassies,” said Bogdanov. (TASS)
 
Extensively speaking on several questions with the media on the eve of Africa Day, the Russian diplomat noted that some African countries were more dependent on Western aid than others, but Russia was not imposing anything on anyone, because it proceeded from the sovereign equality of the UN member states. Moscow’s role is to help African countries in the UN Security Council and other UN structures, as well as on a bilateral basis, Bogdanov explained.
 
“In principle we have equal, good relations with all countries. With some, of course, they are more advanced,” he added, and wished African friends, especially on Africa Day, stronger sovereignty and further development, so that this sovereignty is supported by economic opportunities. This will let them strengthen political sovereignty in accordance with their genuine national interests and not to listen to some outside noise,” Bogdanov said.
 
What is referred to as Africa Day is celebrated on May 25, the day on which the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) was established in 1963. Until 2002, when the organization was transformed, it had been Africa Liberation Day. The African Union’s headquarters is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
 
In practical terms, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov’s critical assessment of Russia’s return to Africa, the goals of signing several bilateral agreements which remain unimplemented, decades-old pledges and promises undelivered, anti-Western rhetoric and hyperbolic criticisms foreign players which form the main component of Russia’s policy – these indicating the slogan of Russia’s return to Africa. Beyond its traditional rhetoric of Soviet-era assistance rendered to sub-Saharan African countries, Russia has extremely little to show as post-Soviet achievements in contemporary Africa.
 
At least, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Foreign Minister Qin Gang have indicated on their side that Africa is not the field for confrontation but rather the field for cooperation, to uplift its development to an appreciable level. China has heavily invested in developing infrastructure, in different economic sectors. Its slogan ‘win-win’ cooperation and ‘share common future’ have shown visible results across Africa.
 
During these past years, there have been several meetings of various bilateral intergovernmental commissions and conferences both in Moscow and in Africa. Official visits to and from proliferate, only end up with the display of eternal passion for signing documents called Memoranda of Understandings and bilateral agreements with African countries. From the highly-praised historic first summit held 2019, there are 92 agreements.
 
Currently, the signs for Russia-African relations are impressive – declarations of intentions have been made, a lot of important bilateral agreements signed; now it remains to be seen how these intentions and agreements entered into over these years will be implemented in practice, argued Professors Vladimir Shubin and Alexandra Arkhangelskaya from the Institute for African Studies.
 
“The most significant positive sign is that Russia has moved away from its low-key strategy to vigorous relations, and authorities are seriously showing readiness to compete with other foreign players. But, Russia needs to find a strategy that really reflects the practical interests of Russian business and African development needs,” said Arkhangelskaya, who is also a Lecturer at the Moscow High School of Economics.
 
Several  researched reports have criticised the Kremlin’s policy in Africa. Those reports have been compiled by Professor Sergey Karaganov, Faculty Dean at Moscow’s High School of Economics.
With its about 1.3 billion people, Africa is a potential market for all kinds of consumable goods and for services. In the coming decades, there will be an accelerated competition between or among the external players over access to the resources and for economic influence in Africa. Despite the growth of external players’ influence and presence in Africa, says the report, Russia has to intensify and redefine its parameters as it has now transcended to the fifth stage. Russia’s Africa policy is roughly divided into four periods, previously after Soviet’s collapse in 1991.
 
Now in the fifth stage, still marking time to leverage to the next when it would begin to show visible results. While the number of high-level meetings has increased, the share of substantive issues on the agenda remains small. There are little definitive results from such various meetings and conferences. Apart from the absence of a public strategy for the continent, there is shortage of qualified personnel, the lack of coordination among various state and para-state institutions working with Africa. The report lists insufficient and disorganized Russian-African lobbying, combined with the lack of “information hygiene” at all levels of public speaking among the main flaws of Russia’s current Africa policy.
 
Another policy report, titled ‘Ways to Increase the Efficiency of Russia’s African Strategy under the Crisis of the Existing World Order’ (ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022), co-authored by Professors Irina O. Abramova and Leonid L. Fituni castigated or reprimanded authorities who are squeezed between illusions and realities with policy ambitions in Africa. Against the backdrop of geopolitical changes and great power competition, Russian authorities really need to have an insight/understanding into the practical investment and economic possibilities on the continent.
 
The authors said that: “It is time for Russia, which over the past 30 years has unsuccessfully sought to become part of the West, to abandon illusions and reconsider its foreign economic and policy strategy, reorienting itself to states that are turning from outsiders into significant players in the international political and economic space and are willing to interact with our country on a mutually beneficial and equal basis.”
 
In addition, the report underlined the fact that Russia’s elite demonstrates a somewhat arrogant attitude toward Africa. High-ranking officials have often used the phrase ‘We (that is, Russia) are not Africa’ to oppose attempts at changing the status quo, to change the approach toward Africa. Despite the thoughtless imposition of the idea that Africa is the most backward and problematic region of the world in Russian public opinion, qualified Africanists – including Western experts, call Africa the continent of the 21st century: attributing this to the stable growth rates of the African economy over the past 20 years, and the colossal resource and human potential of the African region.
 
The report acknowledges the fact that African countries consider Russia as a reliable economic partner, and it is necessary to interact with African public and private businesses on a mutually beneficial basis. In this regard, Russian initiatives should be supported by real steps and not be limited to verbal declarations about the “return of Russia to Africa,” especially after the Sochi gathering, which was described as very symbolic.
 
The authors, however, warned that failure on Russia’s side to show financial commitment, African leaders and elites from the Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone nations will still be loyal and inseparably linked by nostalgic post-colonial master relationships. And this relates to furtherance of economic investment and development, education and training – all to be controlled by the former colonial powers as African leaders choose development partners with funds to invest in the economy.
 
South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) has its latest policy report on Russia-African relations. It shows the dimensions of Russian power projection in Africa, new frontiers of Russian influence and provides a roadmap towards understanding how Russia is perceived in Africa. It highlights narratives about anti-colonialism and describes how these sources of solidarity are transmitted by Russian elites to their African public. For seeking long-term influence, Russian elites have oftentimes used elements of anti-colonialism as part of the current policy to control the perceptions of Africans and primarily as new tactics for power projection in Africa.
 
The reports delved into the historical fact that after the collapse of the Soviet era, already more than three decades, Russia is resurgent in Africa. While Russia has been struggling to make inroads into Africa these years, the only symbolic event was the first Russia-Africa summit held in Sochi, which fêted heads of state from 43 African countries and showcased Moscow’s great power ambitions.
 
The authors further wrote that “Russia’s growing assertiveness in Africa is a driver of instability and that its approach to governance encourages pernicious practices, such as kleptocracy and autocracy promotion, and the dearth of scholarship on Moscow’s post-1991 activities in Africa is striking.” Records further show that Russia indeed kept a low profile for two decades after the Soviet collapse. Russia’s expanding influence in Africa are compelling, but a closer examination further reveals a murkier picture. Despite Putin’s lofty trade targets, Russia’s trade with Africa stands at just $20 billion, which is lower than that of India or Turkey.
 
In the context of a multipolar geopolitical order, Russia’s image of cooperation could be seen as highly enticing, but it is also based on illusions. Better still, Russia’s posture is a clash between illusions and reality. “Russia, it appears, is a neo-colonial power dressed in anti-colonial clothes,” says the report. Simply put, Moscow’s strategic incapability, inconsistency and dominating opaque relations are adversely affecting sustainable developments in Africa. Thus far, Russia looks more like a ‘virtual great power’ than a genuine challenger to European, American and Chinese influence.
 
Of course, Russian-African relations have been based based on long-standing traditions of friendship and solidarity, created when the Soviet Union supported the struggle of African peoples against colonialism. Since Africans are struggling to transform their economy and take care of 1.3 billion population, the bulk still impoverished. African leaders have to remember their election campaign pledges made to the electorate while still holding political power.
 
Unlike Western countries, European Union members and Asian countries which focus particularly on what they want to achieve with Africa, Russia places the anti-colonial fight at the core of its policy. In short, Russia knows what it wants from the continent: access to markets, political support against Ukraine and general influence in the continent. Now it is time for African leaders to clarify what it wants concretely from Russia during the July 2023 Russia-Africa summit.
 
Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS) and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

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***

Getting Donald Trump to admit his mistakes is the sort of thing that most people by now understand requires nothing short of a miracle.

And as it would happen, a miracle is also what was largely required if you were in the United States military during the COVID coup and wanted to avoid taking the poison poke.

Somehow, Iowa state Senator and Air National Guard Colonel Kevin Alons won the lottery on the latter, and now, feeling like he’s got the hot hand, he has decided to do what he can to use the Iowa Caucus process to turn Trump back from the dark side. Alons, whose late father was one of the state legislature’s conservative stalwarts for many years, posted a video on his nascent Twitter account that up until now has largely gone unnoticed — ironically, just like the escalating excess deaths, whose increase just happens to coincide with the mass injecting of Americans with a certain experimental mRNA sacred cow we’re supposed to ignore.

The video, which Alons titled “I want to endorse Trump for president but I need a fighter against medical tyranny,” hasn’t made anyone click-rich off its number of views. However, underneath the surface of all the bravado and poll-driven predictions that the presidential primary is already over, it symbolizes the silent sword of Damocles hanging over Trump’s presidential aspirations — particularly in a state with a significant medical freedom contingent like Iowa. And they all vote.

Alons is probably a name many in the media have never heard of, but he speaks for a lot of people who were caught in the crosshairs of Operation Warp Speed, which Trump has repeatedly bragged is one of his crowning achievements as president. In fact, one of Trump’s favorite pollsters, Rasmussen, released a survey back in January that found a whopping 28% of Americans “say they personally know someone whose death they think may have been caused by side effects from the Covid-19 vaccines.” Another 49% told Rasmussen they believe “it is likely side effects to the Covid-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.”

“Biden essentially treated us as a felon [for refusing the jab],” said Alons, 54, who has served 29 years in the Air National Guard as a pilot. “I guess that was supposed to scare me, but it galvanized me. And it pushed me to run for office.”

Alons’ hesitancy to instantly support Trump again, especially the reason for it, is one of the major reasons why Trump now faces a formidable challenge for the nomination from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Florida remains the only state in the country that has issued any kind of safety alarm against the COVID mRNA shots, and earlier this year the Florida Supreme Court approved DeSantis’ request for a grand jury to begin both fraud and criminal investigations into the vaccine makers’ claims and associated risks.

“A lot of people say that having to take the COVID vaccine was just ‘one of those things’ that you had to give up when you signed up,” Alons said. “But that’s just terrible. How could that ever be? We are all supposed to be defending the Constitution. But people have already taken so many vaccines, they can’t accept the government is deceiving them. They don’t even understand how brainwashed they’ve become by the whole medical system.”

Unlike Alons, too many military personnel still have not had their rank, pay, and benefits restored after refusing the experimental genetic serum. Some of their stories are highlighted in my best-selling book, “Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial so This Never Happens Again,” which I co-wrote with my Blaze Media colleague Daniel Horowitz.

Those subjected to the tyranny and tragedy spawned by Operation Warp Speed demand and deserve justice. They have been more than patient with Trump to hear their pleas, but time is running out for the former president to show them the empathy they’re requesting. Sooner or later, they are likely to seek justice elsewhere.

And one of those places could be voting for his main rival, DeSantis, on caucus night.

“It’s a matter of how many cards you have to play, and I’m not sure how many I have,” Alons said. “But we are racing to the point where people have to make hard choices instead of avoiding them.”

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May 25, 2023 represents the 60th anniversary since the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the forerunner of today’s African Union (AU).

During 1963, over 30 independent African states held a summit meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where they agreed to put aside differences in order to initiate a continental organization.

Since the early 1960s, two distinct blocs had come into existence in the post-colonial period of historical development. The Casablanca Group, which included states such as Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Egypt, Algeria, among others maintained an anti-imperialist posture in regard to their foreign policy imperatives.

Contrastingly, the Monrovia Group, which constituted the majority of states on the continent at the time, took a far more moderate position in relations to national development and international relations. Developments during the early 1960s witnessed the escalation of the armed struggles for national independence in Algeria along with other European colonies and settler states such as Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, South Africa, Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), Southwest Africa (later Namibia), etc.

The overthrow and assassination of the first democratically elected prime minister of the former Belgian Congo, Patrice Lumumba, during 1960-1961, served to heighten anti-imperialist sentiments among progressive and socialist oriented states as well as among the masses of workers, youth and farmers on the continent.

Therefore, from the onset, the OAU represented a compromise between the moderate and anti-imperialist states.

There were both positive and negative aspects of the OAU policy in its formative years. An OAU Liberation Committee was established to provide material and political aid to those liberation movements and political parties still fighting for national independence.

However, the OAU position of non-interference in the internal affairs of member-states allowed for the destabilization and overthrow of governments by imperialist forces which backed counter-revolutionary elements within African societies. Within less than three years, the revolutionary Pan-Africanist government of the Republic of Ghana headed by President Kwame Nkrumah was forcefully and undemocratically removed in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) instigated coup by lower-ranking military officers and the police.

Nkrumah was a leading co-founder of the OAU, which in actuality stemmed from the ideological views expressed by the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government in Accra. Even prior to taking power as Leader of Government Business in 1951, Prime Minister in 1954 and as an independent head-of-state beginning on March 6, 1957, Nkrumah was a strong advocate of African unity.

As early as 1947 in his first book entitled, “Toward Colonial Freedom: Africa and the Struggle Against World Imperialism”, which was reprinted in 1962 when he was President of the First Republic of Ghana, Nkrumah identifies the economic machinations of European domination as the basis of African oppression and exploitation. In later years, Nkrumah would publish “Africa Must Unite”, which was released at the founding summit of the OAU in May 1963, “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization” released in 1964 and “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism”, issued in 1965, which proved too powerful for the United States since it pointed to the central role of Washington and Wall Street in the continuing underdevelopment of Africa and many other geopolitical regions of the world.

Contained in these texts are severe indictments of imperialism and the imperatives of African unification under socialism. Although these books were published six decades ago, their perceptions of the African situation remain relevant.

Today, across the continent, efforts by imperialism to stifle African development and unification abound. In West Africa we have experienced the recrudescence of military coups carried out by military elements with close ties to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

In the Republic of Sudan, a major center of destabilization, the imperialists and their cohorts have armed and politically empowered military structures which have left millions traumatized and displaced. Hundreds of officially documented deaths have occurred in Sudan, an oil-rich and geostrategic state which could play a monumental role in the struggle for anti-imperialism and African unity.

As was illustrated in neighboring Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, there must be African solutions to African problems. At the initiative of the AU, a series of negotiations were held in South Africa and Kenya which resulted in the existing peace accord between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

Yet in the Republic of Sudan, the leadership of the Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) refused to meet in neighboring Republic of South Sudan for peace talks. Instead, it would take the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. to convene the talks. Nonetheless, the peace has still not been won.

The role of military interests in African politics was explained by Nkrumah in his seminal work entitled “Class Struggle in Africa”, published while he served as Co-President of the People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea in 1970. Most of the armed forces and police structures in independent states were inherited from the colonial era. Their political orientation is often dominated by capitalism and neo-colonialism. This set of social circumstances require a revolution from below which establishes the rule of the majority class interests of the workers and farmers of Africa.

Socialist Revolution in Africa and the Diaspora is the Ultimate Solution

In the chapter entitled “Socialist Revolution” in the book “Class Struggle in Africa” openly proclaims that the transformation of society from capitalist to socialist relations of production provides the only solution to the continental crisis. However, imperialism and their surrogates will not relinquish power without a struggle to overcome their control of the oppressive capitalist and colonial states.

Nkrumah says in this regard that:

“The highest point of political action, when a revolution attains its excellence, is when the proletariat—compromising workers and peasants—under the leadership of a vanguard party the principles and motivations of which are based on scientific socialism, succeeds in overthrowing all other classes. The basis of a revolution is created when the organic structures and conditions within a given society have aroused mass consent and mass desire for positive action to change or transform that society. While there is no hard and fast dogma for socialist revolution, because no two sets of historical conditions and circumstances are exactly alike, experience has shown that under conditions of class struggle, socialist revolution is impossible without the use of force. Revolutionary violence is a fundamental law in revolutionary struggles. The privileged will not, unless compelled, surrender power. They may grant reforms but will not yield an inch when basic pillars of their entrenched positions are threatened. They can only be overthrown by violent revolutionary action.” (p. 80)

In this same book, Nkrumah views the African Revolution as part and parcel of the world socialist movement against capitalism and imperialism. He views the African revolutionary struggle as being worldwide encompassing the people of African descent in the Diaspora of the Western Hemisphere.

According to Nkrumah:

“The African revolutionary struggle is not an isolated one. It not only forms part of the world socialist revolution but must be seen in the context of the Black Revolution as a whole. In the U.S.A., the Caribbean and wherever Africans are oppressed, liberation struggles are being fought. In these areas, the Black man is in a condition of domestic colonialism and suffers both on the grounds of class and of color. The core of the Black Revolution is in Africa, and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the Black man throughout the world lacks a national home. It is around the African peoples’ struggles for liberation and unification that African or Black culture will take shape and substance. Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation…. The total liberation and the unification of Africa under an All-African socialist government must be the primary objective of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world.” (pp. 87-88)

These observations and conclusions remain elusive but compelling in the third decade of the 21st century. Nonetheless, the existing crises of capitalism and imperialism provide openings for Africans and other oppressed and exploited peoples to wage a protracted struggle for genuine liberation and socialism.

***

Note: The following solidarity statement was prepared and delivered in part to the African Liberation Day program organized by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, (A-APRP-GC) under the theme “Pan-Africanism:  Waging Class Struggle in Africa and the Diaspora, Fighting for the One United Socialist Africa!” on Sat. May 27, 2023. The event was broadcast over the “Africans on the Move” internet radio program hosted by Lee Robinson of the African Awareness Association based in Richmond, Virginia. Speakers from various organizations made presentations including the Million Women March, the Committee to Free Jamil al-Amin, the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Movement, among many others. You can listen to the podcast of the event at the following link:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/africa-on-the-move/2023/05/27/african-liberation-day-nakba-day–may-27-2023

Eye Witness Crimea

May 28th, 2023 by Daniel Kovalik

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In May of this year, we took the long, 27-hour train ride from Moscow to Crimea to see how life is there and what the sentiment of the people are as the US and Ukraine sharpen their threats to “recapture” this peninsula from Russia.  And, while we were there, these threats were backed by a series of terrorist drone attacks in Crimea which, while doing little serious damage, signaled an escalation in the US/Ukrainian assault on Crimea.

Despite such threats and attacks, what we found in this historic peninsula on the Black Sea was a beautiful, almost idyllic place with a bustling economy and a general sense of prosperity and hopefulness.  We also found a people who seem quite content to remain a part of Russia just as Crimea has been, except for a brief interval, since 1783.

During our trip, we visited the three major cities of Simferopol, Sevastopol and Yalta.

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Crimea has rugged but beautiful coastline.

The Capital Simferopol 

Simferopol is an inland city with about half a million residents. There are universities as well as Crimea’s parliament and  industry.  When we visited it, most people were enjoying the holidays. We saw multiple groups of teenagers singing patriotic songs on the street and in front of memorials. It is difficult to imagine something comparable happening in the US or Canada. The difference may be partly the result of education but it also shows the different consciousness and experience. Approximately 1 in every seven citizens died in WW2 so every family in the Soviet Union lost family members.  The Nazi invasion and occupation were horrible, real and impacted every one.

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Theater students sing patriotic songs on the street, 6 May 2023.

In Simferopol we met two women, Larisa and Irina,  who described  in detail what happened in early 2014. Confrontations started when a small group of ultra-nationalists tried to demolish the statue of Lenin in the capital center. Seeing this as an attack on their Soviet and Russian heritage, a much larger group gathered and stopped them.  

Then, three police who were residents of Crimea were killed in Maidan protests. As their corpses were brought home, there was increasing fear that  the violence in Kiev could come to Crimea. Volunteers formed self-defense battalions. 

Hundreds of Crimeans went to Kiev on chartered buses to peacefully protest against the Maidan chaos and violence  The violence climaxed with the killing of police and protesters by snipers located in opposition controlled buildings on February 20.  The Crimeans realized that peaceful protests were hopeless and departed back to Crimea on the chartered buses. At the town of Korsun, the convoy of eight buses was stopped  by a gang from the Neo-Nazi “Right Sector”. Dozens people were beaten and seven Crimeans killed.  

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Crimean Bus Passengers were beaten with seven killed on 20 February 2014.

On February 22 the elected Ukraine government was overthrown. On its first day in power,  the coup government enacted legislation to remove Russian as a state language.  These events provoked shock, fear and the urgent desire to re-unify with Russia. According to Larisa and Irina, there was a huge popular demand to hold a referendum to secede from Ukraine.  

The Crimean parliament agreed and first proposed to have the referendum in May. The popular demand was to have it much sooner. Larisa says that on February 27 the Russian flag was flying over  parliament. She does not know how, but says, “It was like a miracle.”  People sensed then that Russia might accept Crimea. Suddenly there were Russian flags all over the city. 

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Crimea Parliament in the capital Simferopol

There was still the fear of violence. Soldiers in green uniforms without insignia, known as the “polite men” appeared at  key locations such as the airport and parliament.  It is generally understood these were Russian special forces. They were heartily welcomed by nearly all and events proceeded without violence. Larisa laughed at western journalists who used the photograph of a WW2 tank in a park, to suggest that Russian tanks were in the capital. 

There was  no involvement by Russia in the referendum; it was organized and carried out by the traditional election council on March 16. The results were decisive: with 83% voting, 97% voted to rejoin Russia. 

Two days later the Crimean  parliament appealed to the Russian Federation. Two days after that the agreement was signed in Moscow.  Larisa and Irina say, “Everyone was happy”;  they call it “Crimea Spring”. 

Nuclear Submarines Museum 

We visited many  amazing places in Crimea. In the port town of Balaklava, we visited a museum  which reminded us of the increasing danger of  nuclear war. The first class museum is located in the site where Soviet submarines were repaired, refitted and nuclear missiles installed. The site is a tunnel at sea level under a mountain. The tunnel goes from the open Black Sea to the protected Balaklava harbor.  Under the mountain, the submarines could survive any attack and respond if necessary. When we visited, many school children were also there, learning about the dangers of nuclear war, how and why Russia felt the need to develop their own nuclear capacity. The educational graphics start with the fact that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, and why Russia must be prepared to defend itself.  Today this site is an educational museum.  We don’t often think about nuclear weapons and the likelihood they could be used if war was to break out between Russia and the US. The museum shows they take this very seriously. Russia’s active nuclear armed submarines are located in Vladivostok and elsewhere.   

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Nuclear submarine base under mountain in Balaklava (now a museum).

The Valley of Death

Driving north from Balaklava, we paused at a memorial overlooking a valley that was scene of an important battle in the Crimean war of 1854.  It was immortalized in Alfred Tennyson’s poem
”The Charge of the Light Brigade” where British cavalry charged embedded Russian forces and suffered many losses. The poem says “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.” A famous photograph taken by one of the first war time photographers shows a barren hillside strewn with cannon balls which mowed down the British attackers.

The great Russian author Leo Tolstoy was a volunteer fighter in the Crimean War, and he himself documented his experiences in battle.  As one Crimean told us in making the point that Crimea has been part of Russia for a very long time, “the Crimean War was a Russian war; it wasn’t a Ukrainian war.”

Today those valleys have grazing sheep and  vineyards with premier wineries comparable to those in Napa Valley, California. Visitors do wine tasting just like in California. The past war and bloodshed seem far away. 

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Crimea War “Valley of Death” today.

Sevastopol – A Special City 

Further  north  is Sevastopol,  a thriving city and the base of the Russian Black Sea naval fleet. Sevastopol is known as “the most Soviet City in Russia and the most Russian City in Ukraine,” and even the City Hall continues to bear the hammer and sickle emblem on its gates.

When Ukraine seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991,  Russia negotiated a long term lease for the naval port.  The Russian military has been in this port for 240 years. Along with Russian navy ships, there are locals fishing from the docks. There is a laid back, casual air to the port although the war hit close to home when Russia’s naval ship “Moskva” was sunk early in the conflict. 

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Fishing from dock in Sevastopol….. Russian Navy vessels in distance.

Tanya introduced us to former Soviet and Ukrainian Navy captain Sergey.  He described how, when the decision was made to secede from Ukraine in spring 2014, many enlisted sailors and officers chose to be in the Russian rather than Ukrainian navy. Throughout our visit it was emphasized that Crimea has been Russian since 1783 and the large majority of the population have Russian as their native language and consider themselves Russian. 

People in Russia are very conscious of war and fascism.  They call WW2  the Great Patriotic War.  The Soviet Union caused by far the most losses of Axis soldiers. The US, Canada, and other allies supported the war with troops and supplies but it was the Soviet Union that bore the brunt of the war and was the primary cause of victory over Nazi Germany. 

Crimea was a major target of the Nazi Axis and was the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of WW2. Despite stiff resistance the peninsula was temporarily defeated. After 250 days of siege, Sevastopol was captured by the Germans in June 1942. Crimea was retaken by the Soviet Red Army in 1944.  

This history may explain why Crimeans are adamantly opposed to ultra nationalist hate filled rhetoric and why they decisively chose to re-unify with Russia following the overthrow of the elected Ukraine government in February 2014. 

In Sevastopol we visited the Partisan Museum which is a house where anti-fascist Crimeans organized resistance to the Nazi occupation.  The house had a hidden basement where fliers were printed and partisans organized the sabotage campaigns. 

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Partisan Museum in Sevastopol.

A few miles south of Sevastopol is the hilltop where Nazi German command was based.  It has been converted into a memorial and during our visit on Saturday prior to May 9 Victory Day, there were educational exhibitions and military displays along with miniature tanks driven by kids in a 50 foot track. 

Yalta

In a palace at Yalta, the leaders of the US, UK and Soviet Union negotiated the spheres of influence in Europe after the defeat of the axis powers. The three countries were allies in WW2 but in just a few years the Cold War emerged. 

Yalta is a thriving tourist city. The palace where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met is open for visitors.  During our visit, the hotels in Yalta were  near capacity and the promenade and city streets were full of locals and visitors.  Russians who used to travel to West Europe are now travelling about their own huge country and Crimea is especially popular. 

Reflections on Crimea

Crimea is incredibly beautiful and historic. Today, despite occasional sabotage actions, the situation in Crimea is calm and inviting. 

Following Crimea’s secession, Ukraine tried to punish Crimeans by cutting off the electricity supply to the peninsula. They were without power for five months. Next Ukraine blocked the fresh water supply. 

Despite these hostile actions, Crimeans display no hostility to regular Ukrainians. They say, “They are our brothers and sisters.” Ukrainian is a state language in Crimea and Ukrainians are respected.  There are statues honoring Ukrainian writers and artists. Many Ukrainian civilians have come to Crimea to escape the war. 

Sergey says that Crimeans are sad about the conflict in Ukraine but will continue, slowly and patiently, to victory.  

Irina says, “Zelensky will sooner take back the Moon than take back Crimea.” 

———

Dan Kovalik is a human rights attorney and author of seven books.  

Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Charter Schools Are Not State Actors

May 28th, 2023 by Dr. Shawgi Tell

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Eleven months ago a critical education case came before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in North Carolina (Peltier v. Charter Day Sch., Inc., 37 F.4th 104, 116, 4th Cir. 2022). A main issue in the case pertains to the dress code at “Charter Day School” in Leland, North Carolina, specifically, whether the privately-operated but publicly-funded charter school had violated the rights of female students by stipulating what they could and could not wear. The ACLU reports that, “Girls at Charter Day School, together with their parents, challenged the skirts requirement as sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and Title IX.”

For general purposes and for the purpose of this case in particular, it is first important to appreciate that, while all non-profit and for-profit charter schools are privately-operated schools, many, including “Charter Day School,” are also owned-operated by a private educational management organization (EMO).[1] This is another layer of privatization, another level of private ownership and control. In this vein, it is important to grasp that the legal framework that applies to private entities differs qualitatively from the legal framework that applies to public entities. Private actors and state actors operate in different legal spheres. The U.S. Constitution, for example, does not apply to the acts of private entities; it applies mainly to acts of government. Indeed, the private-public distinction shapes the laws and institutions of many countries. As a general rule, no public schools in America are operated by an EMO.

It is also legally significant that the parents of the students suing “Charter Day School” voluntarily enrolled their daughters in the privately-operated charter school. No one is forced or compelled to enroll in a charter school in the United States. Nor is the state compelling, encouraging, or coercing “Charter Day School” to adopt any particular dress code or educational philosophy for students.

As a general rule, privatized education arrangements in America (e.g., private Catholic schools that charge tuition) have always been able to adopt the dress code they want without any government interference. It is generally recognized that, as private schools, they can essentially adopt whatever dress code or educational philosophy they wish to enforce, and that parents are under no obligation to enroll their child in a private school if they do not wish to do so. This has been the case for more than a century. It is one of many expressions of the long-standing public-private distinction in law, education, and society.[2]

It is also important to consider that the capital-centered ideologies of choice, individualism, and the free-market encompass the notion of doing something voluntarily, i.e., willingly and freely. It is the reason why charter school promoters repeat the disinformation that charter schools are “schools of choice” (even though charter schools typically choose parents and students more than the other way around).[3] This neoliberal logic is also consistent with the “free market” notion that parents and students are not considered humans or citizens by charter school operators, they are viewed instead as consumers and customers shopping for a “good” school that won’t fail and close, which happens every week in the crisis-prone charter school sector.[4]

Charter schools, to be clear, represent the commodification of education, the privatization and marketization of a modern human responsibility in order to enrich a handful of private interests under the banner of high ideals. For decades, neoliberals and privatizers have painstakingly starved public schools of funds so as to set them up to fail. Then they have mass-tested them with discredited corporate tests to “show” that they are “failing.” This is then followed by a sustained media and political campaign to vilify and demonize public schools so as to create antisocial public opinion against them, which then eventually “justifies” privatizing public education because “privatization will improve education.” Suddenly “innovative” charter schools appear everywhere, especially in large urban settings inhabited by thousands of marginalized low-income minorities.

The typical consequences of privatization in every sector include higher costs, less transparency, reduced quality of service, greater instability, more inefficiency, and loss of public voice. Privatization essentially undermines social progress while further enriching a handful of people driven by profit maximization. To date, whether it is vouchers, so-called “Education Savings Accounts,” or privately-operated charter schools, education privatization (“school-choice”) has not solved any problems, it has only multiplied them.[5]

With this context in mind, let us return to the court case at hand. In a 10-6 vote on June 14, 2022, the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “found that that the dress code [at “Charter Day School”] ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.” Girls at the K-8 charter school, it was concluded, should have the freedom to wear pants and not just skirts because they have “the same constitutional rights as their peers at other public schools – including the freedom to wear pants.”

Marking the first time a federal appeals court has ever done such a thing, the Richmond Court found that “Charter Day School” is a state actor (i.e., it is a public school), which means that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does apply to the school.

Consistent with numerous other court rulings over the years, however, the lawyer for “Charter Day School,” Aaron Streett, maintained that the Richmond court issued a flawed ruling because the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply to the charter school because the charter school is a private entity and not a state actor like a public school.

According to legal precedent, as a private actor, “Charter Day School” did not deprive any person of their constitutional rights. This view stems in part from the long-standing premise that charter schools are “independent,” “autonomous,” “innovative” schools under the law, that is, they are deregulated “free market” schools, meaning that they are exempt from most of the laws, rules, policies, and regulations that govern public schools. They do not operate like public schools. They are not so-called “government schools.” They are not arms of the state.[6] They are not connected to state authority in the same way public schools are. They are not governed by elected officials like public schools are. Charter schools operate in their own separate sphere. The fact that many charter schools are also owned or operated by private EMOs only adds an additional wrinkle to the public-private dynamic.

“Charter Day School” is currently appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which may hear the case this summer (2023).

The issue of whether a charter school is a state actor or not is critical because it hits at the core issue about charter schools. This point cannot be overstated. If it is the case that “Charter Day School” is not a state actor, as the lawyer for the privately-operated school argues, then the Virginia court’s ruling represents a form of “harmful government interference” because the 14thAmendment does not apply to private actors.

Under U.S. law, “state action” is defined as “an action that is either taken directly by the state or bears a sufficient connection to the state to be attributed to it.” Another source states that a state actor is “a person who is acting on behalf of a governmental body, and is therefore subject to regulation under the United States Bill of Rights, including the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which prohibit the federal and state governments from violating certain rights and freedoms.”[7]

However, as private actors charter schools are not in fact “acting on behalf of a governmental body.” Private actors are not controlled or directed by the state, at least not in the way agencies and arms of the state are, which means that the actions of privately-operated charter schools cannot be called actions taken directly by the state. State action doctrine holds that government is not responsible for the conduct of a private actor.

Even most of the entities that authorize charter schools are not public or governmental in the proper sense of the word. Many charter school authorizers are operated or governed by unelected private persons. Many of the wealthy individuals who operate or govern such entities are hand-picked by wealthy governors. The public, as a matter of course, is omitted in these arrangements. The public has no meaningful say in any part of this set-up. This is on top of the fact that charter schools themselves are not governed by publicly elected citizens either, whereas public schools are. Unelected private persons governing a deregulated private entity (which may also be owned by another private entity) is not the same as elected public school officials governing a public school that serves no private interests, admits all students at all times, has unionized teachers, can levy taxes, and is accountable only to the public.

Unlike charter schools, regular public schools, which have been around for 180 years and educate 90% of America’s youth, are in fact state actors; they are political subdivisions of the state because they not only carry out a public function but are also explicitly delegated authority by the state to carry out various public responsibilities. “Function” and “authority” are not synonyms; they are different concepts. Carrying out a role is not necessarily the same thing as having power to carry out that role. A role can be carried out by a person or entity that derives its responsibility from a higher political power. Its role can be delegated by a more influential power.

Properly speaking, charter schools are not exercising state prerogatives. Nor do they enter into what may be called a symbiotic relationship with the state. Unlike public schools, they are not state agencies proper, which explains why the state does not coerce, encourage, or compel charter schools to act in the same way it coerces, encourages, or compels public schools to act. The state has more influence and control over public schools than it does over privately-operated “free-market” charter schools. In this neoliberal legal setup, the state is not responsible for the policies and operations of deregulated charter schools; charter schools can do as they please; “no rules;” “laissez-faire;” “hands-off,” “autonomy.”  This usually means no meaningful accountability.

Charter schools are intentionally set up to operate outside the parameters and framework governing public schools. This is what makes them “innovative,” “independent,” and different. It is worth stressing again that, in the case of “Charter Day School,” the state played no direct role in creating, directing, or shaping the dress code being challenged by parents who voluntarily enrolled their children in the school. The charter school’s dress code policy was not therefore an expression of state action.

Unlike public schools, charter schools fall under private law, specifically contract law. Charter, by definition, means contract: a legally-binding agreement between two or more parties to do or not do something in a specified period of time with associated rewards and punishments. For state action doctrine this means that just because a private entity has a contract with the government that does not mean that the actions of private contractors like charter schools can be attributed to the state. Simply “partnering” with the state does not make the conduct of a private entity a form of state action. A private actor does not become public, does not become a state actor, just because it contracts with the state.

The issue of whether a charter school is public or not is often confusing to many because there is relentless disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are public schools when in reality they are privatized independent entities. Charter schools remain private, independent, deregulated, segregated entities even though they receive public money, are often called public, and ostensibly provide a service to the public. Interestingly, when asked what they think a charter school is, most people say they are not really sure or they think that charter schools are some sort of private school. The average person rarely thinks charter schools are public schools.

To be sure, charter schools cannot be deemed public just because they are called “public” 50 times a day. Under the law, this is not what makes an entity public. Simply labelling something a specific thing does not automatically make it that thing. In the U.S. legal system, merely labeling private conduct “public” does not make it a form of state action. Moreover, receiving public funds does not spontaneously make an entity public under the law. Thousands of private entities in the U.S. receive public money, for example, but they do not suddenly stop being private entities.[8]

Only narrow private interests benefit from obscuring the distinction between public and private. Public and private mean the opposite of each other. They are antonyms. They should not be confounded.

Public refers to everyone, the common good, all people, transparency, affordability, accessibility, universality, non-rivalry, and inclusiveness. Examples include public parks, public libraries, public roads, public schools, public colleges and universities, public hospitals, public restrooms, public housing, public banks, public events, and more. These places and services are available to everyone, not just a few people. They are integral to a modern civil society that recognizes the role and significance of a public sphere in modern times.

Private, on the other hand, refers to exclusivity, that is, something is private when it is “designed or intended for one’s exclusive use.” Private also means:

-Secluded from the sight, presence, or intrusion of others.

-Of or confined to the individual; personal.

-Undertaken on an individual basis.

-Not available for public use, control, or participation.

-Belonging to a particular person or persons, as opposed to the public or the government.

-Of, relating to, or derived from nongovernment sources.

-Conducted and supported primarily by individuals or  groups not affiliated with governmental agencies or corporations.

-Not holding an official or public position.

-Not for public knowledge or disclosure; secret; confidential.

In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion;[9] it is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, or benefiting everyone. This is why when something is privatized, e.g., a public enterprise, it is no longer available to everyone; it becomes something possessed and controlled by the few. This then ends up harming the public interest; it does not improve efficiency, strengthen services, lower costs, increase accountability, or expand democracy.

Charter schools are labeled “public” mainly for self-serving reasons, specifically to lay claim to public funds that legitimately belong to public schools alone. If charter schools were openly and honestly acknowledged as being private entities they would not be able to place any valid claim to public funds and they would not be able to exist for one day. This presents a contradiction for defenders of charter schools who want to “have it both ways,” that is, be public when it suits them and act private when it serves them. This is the definition of arbitrary and irrational.

To be clear, the relationship between the state and charter schools is not the same as the relationship between the state and public schools. This is one reason why the rights of students, teachers, and parents in charter schools differ from the rights of students, teachers, and parents in public schools. Thus, for example, while the vast majority of public school teachers are unionized, about 90% of charter school teachers are not unionized. Charter schools are notoriously anti-union. They energetically fight efforts by teachers to unionize to defend their rights. Teachers in charter schools are considered “at-will” employees, meaning that they can be fired at any time for any reason. This is not the case in public schools where due process, tenure, and some collective security still exist. Conditions are more humane and more pro-worker in public schools, even when these chronically-underfunded and constantly-vilified schools face one neoliberal assault after another. This is also linked to why many charter schools across the country can legally hire numerous uncertified and unlicensed teachers.

Another profound difference between charter schools and public schools is that the former cannot levy taxes while the latter can. A tax, as is well-known, can only be laid for a public purpose, which means that charter schools do not possess the characteristics of a political subdivision of the state; they are not fully exercising a public function.

Many other legal differences could be listed.

It would be more accurate to say that charter schools resemble traditional private schools far more than they resemble regular public schools, yet they continue to be mislabeled “public schools.”[10] In practice, charter schools are quintessentially private schools. See Outlaw Charter Schools: Can A Charter School Not Be A Charter School? for additional analysis of these themes.

The question of whether a charter school is a state actor or not also has big implications for thousands of other organizations (e.g., hospitals, utility companies, colleges, etc.) across the country because various constitutional provisions typically do not apply to private entities and businesses. This case is therefore of national importance. The public-private distinction at stake in this education case goes beyond the issue of the dress code at “Charter Day School.”

The “Charter Day School” case is currently in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The issue at stake—the public-private distinction—is so significant that, on January 9, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court asked President Joe Biden’s administration to give their view on the case. The U.S. Supreme Court States that the key issue at stake is: “Whether a private entity that contracts with the state to operate a charter school engages in state action when it formulates a policy without coercion or encouragement by the government.” This move is seen by charter school promoters as a positive sign that the highest court in the land is willing to consider the case.

On May 22, 2023, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar filed a brief responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 9, 2023 request. Prelogar essentially reinforced the 10-6 ruling of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in North Carolina. She urged the U.S. Supreme Court to view “Charter Day School” as a state actor and to decline to hear the school’s appeal.

In the final analysis, with or without a ruling from any court, as privatized, marketized, corporatized arrangements that celebrate consumerism, competition, and individualism, charter schools have no legitimate claim to the public funds, facilities, resources, and authority that belong only to public schools. No court ruling, one way or the other, will change this fact. Claiming that charter schools are public schools for the purpose of laying claim to public wealth that belongs solely to public schools, damages public schools, the public interest, the economy, and the national interest. It does not help low-income minority youth or close the long-standing “achievement gap” rooted in poverty, racism, inequality, and disempowerment.

Charter schools do not raise the level of education or improve society. Thirty plus years of evidence shows that charter schools mainly enrich narrow private interests. Without charter schools, public schools would have tens of billions of additional dollars to pay teachers and improve learning for all students, especially low-income minority students enrolled in urban schools. This would make a huge difference. No charter schools would also mean that thousands of students, teachers, and parents would no longer have to feel angry and abandoned by charter schools that close every week (often abruptly).

Neoliberals have never cared about public schools or the public interest; they are masters of disinformation and self-serving to the extreme. Neoliberals have worked ceaselessly over the last few decades to methodically privatize public education in America under the banner of high ideals while actually lowering the level of education, increasing chaos in education, and enriching a handful of people along the way. The so-called “school choice” political-economic project has little to do with advancing education and improving opportunities for millions of marginalized youth and more to do with profit maximization in the context of a continually failing economy. “School choice” has brought immense suffering to public education and the nation. “School-choice” does not have a human face.

The only sense in which charter schools may be called state actors is that they are neoliberal state actors because they are actively organized by wealthy individuals and groups that control and influence many state positions, levers, institutions, and individuals. In this sense, charter schools are indeed acting on behalf of the neoliberal state and are therefore neoliberal state actors. This is bound to happen in a society where Wall Street and the state become indistinguishable.

About 3.5 million students are currently enrolled in roughly 7,600 charter schools in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at [email protected].

[1] It is also worth recognizing that the non-profit/for-profit distinction is generally a distinction without a difference, that is, both types of charter schools engage in enriching a handful of private interests under the veneer of high ideals; profiteering takes place in both types of schools.

[2] See the works of Jürgen Habermas for further discussion and analysis of the origin and evolution of the public

  sphere in the Anglo-American world.

[4] See 5,000 Charter Schools Closed in 30 Years (2021). This is a high number of charter school closures

  given that there are only about 7,600 charter schools operating in the U.S. today.

[6] In March 2023, in a separate case, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that IDEA, a charter school operator, is not an arm of the state.

[7] The phrase “state action” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

[8] As a matter of principle, no public funds should flow to any private organization because such funds are produced by working people and belong rightfully to society as a whole.

[9] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

[10] In Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830 (1982), the court held that “Even when a private school is substantially funded and regulated by the state, it is not a state actor if it is not exercising state prerogatives.”

Birthdays: War Criminal Henry Kissinger Turns 100

May 28th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002)

If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen.  The list of butcheries attributed to his centurion, direct or otherwise, is extensive, his hand in them, finger fat and busy.  There were the murderous meddles in Latin America, the conflicts in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  (The interventions in Laos and Cambodia are said to have left 350,000 Laotians and 600,000 Cambodians dead.)  Then came the selective turning of blind eyes in Indonesia and Pakistan, and the ruthless sponsorship of coups in Africa.

Regarding the Vietnam War, this pornographer of power’s deviousness, and attempt to inveigle himself into the favours of Richard Nixon, running as presidential candidate in 1968, knew no bounds.  With privileged access as an advisor to the US State Department, he became the conduit for information to Nixon’s campaign to sabotage the Johnson Administration’s efforts to broker an earlier peace with North Vietnam.  This involved convincing South Vietnam that the peace terms they could negotiate would be far more favourable under a Nixon administration.  Peace prospects were scuppered; the war continued, eventually yielding a wretched Nobel Peace Prize for the Doctor in 1973.  The US forces soon withdrew, leaving the impotent South Vietnamese to be overrun by their stronger Northern opponents.

Nixon’s electoral victory in 1968 ushered in an era of ruthless subversion of the international order, and one that bears repeating in these testy times of China ascending and US Imperial anxiety.  Kissinger, working with Nixon, thought that convincing North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to return to talks would be helped by targeting North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos and Cambodia.  With stomach-churching cynicism, these bombing operations were given various gastronomic names: Operation Menu; Breakfast Plan.  When the covert bombing program was exposed by the New York Times on May 9, 1969, Kissinger put the wind up FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to not only place a number of journalists under surveillance, but a select number of government officials, including his aides in the National Security Council.  One of the latter, Morton Halperin, would subsequently sue his former boss, Nixon and the Department of Justice for illegal wiretapping of his home and office phones.

In Chile, Nixon and Kissinger poisoned the waters of that country’s politics, destabilising the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende and paving the way for a bloody coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet.  A mere eight days after Allende’s election in September 1970, Kissinger, in conversation with CIA director Richard Helms emphatically stated that, “We will not let Chile go down the drain.”  Three days later, Nixon, in a meeting including Kissinger, infamously told the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream.”

In November 1970, Kissinger demonstrated an almost callow level of expertise in claiming in a memorandum that Allende’s election “would have an effect on what happens in the rest of Latin America and the developing world; on what our future position will be in the hemisphere; and on the larger world picture”.  To permit democratically elected socialist governments in the Americas along the “Titoist” lines of Allende’s government “would be far more dangerous to us than in Europe”, creating a model whose “effect can be insidious.”

Kissinger’s venality, and complicity as a deskbound suited thug, supply us a bottomless reservoir.  To commemorate the occasion of his hundredth natal day, Nick Turse of The Intercept revealed a number of unreported attacks on Cambodian civilians during the secret war, suggesting that the program has been more expansive, and vicious, than had been previously assumed.  “These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopters gunships and burned and looted by US and allied troops.”

The incidents are too numerous to list, leaving us a catalogue of cruelties ghoulish and despairing.  Yet his own accounts do little to shed light on such exploits. The White House Years are barren on his blood-soaked achievements, the doorstop memoirs being a selective account drawing from memos, memcons and telcons that this faux Metternich had generated while in office.  In 1977, in typical fashion, Kissinger made off with over 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of phone conversations he was involved in, documents he deviously called “personal papers”.  In self-reflective glory, he could pilfer, cut and adjust.

Efforts to seek his richly deserved arrest have been made, though all have ended in a legal and practical cul-de-sac.  In January 2015, CODEPINK protesters ventured to make a citizen’s arrest during a US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.  In the UK, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell also had a stab in April 2002, seeking a warrant from the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957.  The charges asserted that “while he was national security adviser to the US president 1969-1975 and US Secretary of State 1973-1977, [Kissinger] commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”.

The presiding District Judge Nicholas Evans was not willing to play along, hampered by higher powers.  To proceed, the Attorney-General’s consent was needed.  Lacking that, “there is nothing I can do.”  That’s HAK’s way of operation, an oleaginous Brahmin above others.  Let the likes of Pinochet be nabbed; the backer always makes his getaway.

Best, then, to conclude this natal day salutation to the man by reflecting on the remarks of that most raw yet delicate of culinary (and social) commentators, Anthony Bourdain.  In visiting Cambodia for his Cook’s Tour series, he could only reflect about why such a man was not sharing dock space at The Hague with other war criminals.  “You will never be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking.”  Sadly, for many in the Kissinger cosmos, they continue to do so without so much as flinching.

***

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University.

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Our thoughts are with the victims of the mRNA vaccine, which has been applied Worldwide. More than 14 billion doses for a World population of 8 billion people  

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, May 28, 2023

***

This may seem like a strange topic for an article, however, enough of these incidents have actually occurred. Family members often go together to get a COVID-19 vaccine and now we are seeing multiple sudden deaths in the same family.

If multiple family members die suddenly following COVID-19 vaccination, the big question is: did they get the same bad vaccine batch or vial?

Here are 11 families that had multiple sudden deaths:

CASE 1 – Halifax, NS – Fully COVID-19 vaccinated Dr. Hesham Lakosha, a physician & ophthalmologist died on April 9, 2023, allegedly from ALS and his ex-wife Latifa Alabdy (age 68) died two weeks later on April 23, 2023.

 

CASE 2 – Ontario – Kevin Aaron Meehan (age 36) died on March 28, 2023, and his sister Kerri Anne Meehan (age 49) died 3 weeks later on April 17, 2023.

 

CASE 3 – St.Cloud Florida – Patrick Kelly (age 20) died April 18, 2022 and his mother, a nurse, Francesca Kelly (age 50) died Feb.5, 2023. Mother believed her son died from the COVID-19 vaccine

 

CASE 4 – 33 year old soccer player Omar Achadoud died suddenly in his sleep, he played a soccer match and had cardiac arrest after, died on Jan.28, 2023, and his father died 3 days later (click here)

 

CASE 5 – Wailly-Beaucamp, France – 46 year old Frederic Wibaut was found dead in the carpooling area, victim of a heart attack, on Jan.24, 2023. His wife Albane Wibaut, a 44 yo national swimmer died on June 16, 2022 (click here)

 

CASE 6 – North Tonawanda, NY – 16 year old lacrosse captain Tayler Marie Woolston died in her sleep on Jan.1, 2023. “this is the 2nd death of a young family member in my family in less than a week” (her aunt Barbara Woolston died a few days earlier on Dec.30, 2022)

 

CASE 7 – Pittsburgh, PA – 25 year old Dr. Lindsay Heck, a pharmacy graduate from UPitt died suddenly on Dec.20, 2022 and her father, Carl Heck (age 63) died 2 weeks later on Jan.15, 2023

 

CASE 8 – New York, NY – Mother and son both took J&J COVID-19 vaccine in March 2021, son David Malone died June 2021 and mother Karen Malone died April 2022

 

CASE 9 – Italy – Vaccinated siblings died of cardiac arrest: soccer player Alessandro Campo (age 25) died Sep.1, 2021 and his sister Vittoria Campo (age 23) died Nov.1, 2021 after COVID-19 vaccination (click here)

 

Case 10 – Eau Claire, WI – 24 yo Sage Rajnar Brost died 3 days after getting COVID-19 vaccine, from pulmonary embolism on April 20, 2021. 8 days later, his partner, Katie Walters (age 22) died suddenly on Apr.28, 2021 (click here)

 

Case 11 – NSW, Australia – Mother and daughter buried side by side within 7 months of each other.

 

My Take…

 

These unusual incidents of multiple sudden deaths of young people in one family, should be extremely rare.

To be clear, I did not search for these 11 cases. They were either sent to me or I stumbled upon them accidentally on social media. That means there are probably many more such situations that we haven’t heard about.

If multiple members of a family took COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and then died suddenly, this situation should be of interest to the medical community for investigation and study.

Are there genetic mutations that are heritable and predispose certain families and their members to sudden death following COVID-19 vaccination? We don’t know and the question is not even being asked.

It’s interesting that these cases are coming to me from regular people, not from doctors. Also, the website howbadismybatch.com which tracks Pfizer & Moderna mRNA vaccine serial numbers with the VAERS system to see how toxic a particular vaccine batch is, in terms of disabilities and deaths, wasn’t created by doctors.

It now has over 111 million visitors.

The A.I. Tsunami = US Strategic Success

May 28th, 2023 by Karsten Riise

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***

One more chip stock jumps 32,% driven by the AI tsunami. This time it is Marvell Technologies. Interestingly, the AI tsunami surprised even IT industry insiders like this company itself:

“In the past, we considered AI to be one of many applications within cloud, but its importance and therefore the opportunity has increased dramatically,” Murphy said. CNBC, May 26, 2023 

Marvell Technologies is specialized in connectivity, data storage, and networking technologies for data centers. It is therefore telling that even Marvell was not kept in the loop about Microsoft’s enormous investments in AI and data centers for AI.

The AI revolution is driven by Microsoft and OpenAI, obviously in coordination with the US government. Microsoft corporate clients, a few top universities, and key suppliers like NVIDIA and AMD have been fully involved in a closed circle – the rest have been kept in the dark.

Even Google seems surprised. Google is now scrambling to even stay in the AI game.

There are three reasons for this.   

  1. Just two years ago, nobody, not even OpenAI or Microsoft, knew that a technological breakthrough in AI was so close.  
  2. Microsoft wanted to take the lead with a surprise on Google and everybody else in the industry.

The US government wanted to keep China and Russia in the dark for as long as possible. 

The US government has succeeded enormously in this. Just a year ago, China thought they had the AI lead with Wu-Dao 2.0 and that the pace in AI would be slow, gradual, and set by China. China is completely hoodwinked. Russia still doesn’t get it.The US is executing the perfect strategic surprise. Surprises are seldom achievable at the strategic level, but the US pulls it off in AI. All big software developers are working high speed to integrate Microsoft’s AI into their products.

In 2024, AI will be all over work and leisure. And more than 120 enormous new Microsoft data centers will be ready all over the World to run it. We have no total figures. But the investments in AI in hardware and software in the West can easily exceed $ 200 billion or 1% of US GDP per year. And it will penetrate EVERYWHERE. 

In 2025, the social and military effects of this will be profound. By the way, Microsoft is also a key contractor to develop systems for the US Navy and Army. Amazon, another AI participant,  is also a key US security contractor.

Russia and China are still sleeping – and AI is taking off.

When they wake up, it may take even China nearly a decade to catch up. If they ever do.

Before Russia and China get in on the big use of AI everywhere, the US will have realized economic and military advantages beyond imagination.

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First published on July 17, 2022

Global Research Editor’s Note

Read carefully. Pfizer is committing crimes against humanity, specifically against our children.

The vaccine has resulted in cardiac arrest not in an elderly person but in a two month old baby.

“Why did they not follow up on the 2-month-old baby’s condition, after going into cardiac arrest an hour after receiving an experimental vaccine? Why is there no further information? Is it because he died? Or was the baby removed from an experiment? Why would the author of the report not mention this?”

We call upon the US Department of Justice to undertake a criminal investigation against Pfizer.

We call upon governments worldwide to immediately suspend the mRNA vaccine.

A class action law suit is also required on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the mRNA vaccine.

Never mentioned by the media, Pfizer has a criminal record with the US Department of Justice.

In 2009 Pfizer was indicted on charges of “fraudulent marketing”.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 6, 2022, May 27, 2023

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First published by globalresearch.ca on July 6, 2022, 

***

An analysis of VAERS reports shows that contrary to the FDA’s briefing document claiming that the majority of adverse events in Pfizers’ clinical trial were non-serious – at least 58 cases of life-threatening side effects in infants under 3 years old who received mRNA vaccines were reported. For some, it is unclear if they survived. It is also unclear why the infants were vaccinated, and whether they were part of the clinical trials. However, in the upcoming FDA meeting on Wednesday, the FDA will not be able to argue it did not know

“Chest pain; cardiac arrest; Skin cold clammy”. This short description of a cardiac arrest, which occurred one hour after receiving a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, is taken from the VAERS system – the US Vaccine Adverse Eve Reporting System ( case number 1015467), and it does not refer to an elderly person, nor to a young adult, or even a teenager. It is hard to believe, but this report refers to a two-month-old baby.

“A 2-month-old male patient received bnt162b2 (PFIZER-BioNTech COVID-19 VACCINE) lot number: EL 739, via an unspecified route of administration on 02 Feb 2021 at single dose for COVID-19 immunisation”, thus stated in the report. “Patient administered vaccination, observed for 15 minutes left the clinic then returned one hour later on 02 Feb 2021, presenting as skin cold, clammy and with chest pain, cardiac arrest event then developed, patient stabilised and transferred for further medical treatment… The outcome of the events was unknown. This case was reported as serious with seriousness criteria-life threatening from HA. No follow-up attempts possible. No further information expected”.

How did a 2-month-old baby receive the mRNA vaccine? These vaccines have not yet received EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) for approved use in children ages five and under by the FDA, or any other regulatory authority, and even if it will, the EUA will only include babies 6 months and older.

Was this baby a participant in Pfizer-BioNTech’s clinical trials, testing efficacy and safety among babies?

The answer is unclear. According to the person who wrote the report “Unsure if patient was enrolled in clinical trial”. However, the author of the report also states that the report was ”received from a contactable Other Health Care Professional by Pfizer from the Regulatory Agency”. This note implies that the infant might have actually participated in Pfizer’s trial. The regulatory agency report Safety Report Unique Identifier GB-MHRA-ADR 24687611 – indicates that the report came from Great Britain (the first 2 letters in the report ID stand for the country of origin, GB- Great Britain, and MHRA indicate that the source of reporting was its’ drug authority).

Why did they not follow up on the 2-month-old baby’s condition, after going into cardiac arrest an hour after receiving an experimental vaccine? Why is there no further information? Is it because he died? Or was the baby removed form an experiment? Why would the author of the report not mention this?

Shockingly, it turns out that this incident is not isolated, but in fact one of many in the VAERS system, describing babies and children under five exposed to mRNA Covid vaccines, who suffered life-threatening adverse reactions.

Even though children under five were not considered eligible for these vaccines unless they were part of a clinical trial, astonishingly, it appears that there are many reports in the system describing babies and toddlers who were vaccinated. Some of the children suffered from life-threatening adverse events. In some cases, it is not clear what happened to them; did they survive and recover, do they still suffer from health problems, or did they die.

In a couple of days, on June 15, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will discuss Moderna and Pfizer’s EUA requests for vaccines for infants and toddlers aged 6 months to 4 years – the only group not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccination today.

According to the FDA’s briefing document released today ahead of the VRBPA committees’ meeting, there were “245 US reports” to the VAERS system “in children 6 months through 4 years of age”, who were injected (“product administered to patient of inappropriate age” or “off-label use”) or exposed to the vaccine “via breastmilk”.  Nevertheless, both companies announced already in May that their findings indicate that their vaccines are safe and effective.

The VRBPAC Briefing Document lists a variety of adverse events reported following the exposure to the vaccine in this age group, including “pyrexia…, body temperature…, cough, headache, rash, diarrhea”. According to the document, “Among US VAERS reports for individuals aged 6 months through 4 years, which may reflect unauthorized use of the vaccine or may reflect a reporting error, the majority (96.3%) were non-serious”.

While the document specifies safety concerns identified from post-authorization safety surveillance data in VAERS, including anaphylaxis, myocarditis, and pericarditis, it does not relate to these safety concerns identified in the younger age group. Instead, it states: “No unusual frequency, clusters, or other trends for adverse events were identified that would suggest a new safety concern”.

But is that really the case? It seems that regardless of the results, and despite the disturbing and shocking findings that are being exposed from Pfizer’s documents, it is expected that both companies will receive the desired EUA very soon. In fact, the CDC website, already in April, had advertised a protocol regarding children’s vaccination, which included babies 6 month to 4 years as well.

In light of this expected approval, RT Magazine conducted an analysis of the cases reported in the VAERS system referring to babies up to 3 years old.

During the analysis, cases were removed in which it was stated that the exposure to the vaccine was through breastfeeding (these cases were analyzed separately and will soon be presented in a follow-up article), as well as cases that were identified as errors in the age registration.

The analysis shows there were at least 58 cases of severe and life-threatening adverse reactions among babies and toddlers 3 years old and younger. This finding is especially puzzling considering the fact that they weren’t supposed to be vaccinated at this age to begin with. Sadly, similarly to the case reported above, most VAERS reports do not indicate how and under which circumstances they were exposed to the vaccine – were they participants in the companies’ trials? And if not, why and in which circumstances were they vaccinated?

Both companies have not yet released the safety data from their trials on this age group. However, one thing is clear from the VAERS reports: there were many babies who were injured after receiving the vaccine. Whether they were vaccinated in the trials or illegally in their communities, Pfizer and Moderna will defiantly not be able to claim, when presenting their data to the FDA, that the vaccine is safe for babies, and that there weren’t any severe adverse events in this age group. Moreover, the FDA’s committee experts who will discuss the EUA approval will not be able to ignore those cases and argue that they did not know. The data presented in this article demonstrate beyond any doubt the complete opposite, and this time – these data are presented to the public in advance, before the EUA is granted and ahead of the VRBPAC discussion.

The outcome of the events: Did not recover

One of the most chilling reports refers to a 43-day-old female baby, who on January 30, 2021, received Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine. In the incident description (report no. 1133837) it is clearly stated that she was vaccinated and that the vaccine was injected to the muscle: “A 43-days-old female patient received bnt162b2 (COMIRNATY), intramuscular on 30Jan2021 (Lot Number: EK9788) as SINGLE DOSE for COVID-19 immunisation”. Right after the vaccination, the baby suffered a variety of life-threatening multi-system injuries, such as “Anaphylactic reaction (broad), Asthma/bronchospasm (narrow), Anticholinergic syndrome (broad), Acute central respiratory depression (broad), Pulmonary hypertension (broad), Cardiomyopathy (broad), Eosinophilic pneumonia (broad), Vestibular disorders (broad), Hypersensitivity (broad), Respiratory failure (narrow), Drug reaction with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms syndrome (broad)“. Although in the section reporting death the statement states “No”, the section reporting recovery also states “No” – meaning the baby has not recovered. What then happened to her? Is she alive or did she die?

In addition, this report, like many others, raises some difficult questions. How did a 43-day-old baby receive a vaccine not yet approved for use in babies? Furthermore, the current clinical trials conducted are supposed to include babies and children over 6 months. Was this baby a participant in Pfizers’ trial? The report does not answer to this question.

Just like this baby, it turns out that in most of the reported cases several life-threatening side effects were recorded for the same baby. The most common severe adverse events were dangerous hemorrhaging; anaphylactic shock – a life-threatening allergy that can damage the respiratory system and cause dizziness, fainting, and even death; anticholinergic syndrome- a condition that occurs when the receptor sites for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine are blocked, which can lead to coordination problems, increased heart rate, and other symptoms; encephalitis – a brain infection, that can cause headaches, vomiting, loss of consciousness and death; hypoglycemia – very low blood sugar, a condition that can quickly escalate to death in infants; and neuroleptic syndrome – which is also life-threatening , and can damage the heart muscles, other muscles, and the kidneys.

From the summary of the findings of the analysis according to age and gender groups, the following picture emerges:

In the age group of 0-6 months – there are 28 reports, in which 10 are males, 16 are females, and 2 whose gender was not specified.

9 of them (32%) suffered an anticholinergic syndrome, 9 (32%) had an anaphylactic shock, 8 (28.6%) suffered Neuroleptic syndrome, 5 suffered from heart rhythm irregularities, and 5 had hypoglycemia.

In the age group of 6-12 months – in this group, 5 reports were found – 3 males, one female, and one whose gender was not specified. This group is small compared to the other groups. The list of adverse reactions included: anaphylactic shock, anticholinergic syndrome, and Neuroleptic syndrome.

In the age group of one-to-three year old – in this group 25 cases were reported, of which 5 related to males, 19 related to females, and one to a baby whose gender was not specified.

6 of the babies (24%) had an anaphylactic shock, 6 (24%) suffered anticholinergic syndrome, 5 (20%) suffered from Neuroleptic syndrome, 4 (16%) suffered encephalitis, 3 (12%) had irregular heartbeats, one baby was hemorrhaging and one suffered from hypoglycemia.

It should be noted that the adverse events listed above are only some of the ones reported in VAERS with respect to babies. We have chosen to focus only on life-threatening and common adverse events.

Table No. 1: Analysis of reports by age and gender 

WhatsApp Image 2022 06 13 at 13.49.56

Table No. 2: Analysis of reports by adverse events

WhatsApp Image 2022 06 13 at 13.49.29

Are the babies alive?

Similarly to the previous case described, another baby, two months old, also went through anaphylactic shock after being exposed to a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on January 6, 2021, and just like her, according to the report (no. 976433), she suffered from an array of multi-system symptoms. Regarding the method of administering the vaccine, it was stated ”via an unspecified route of administration”, meaning it is not clear in what circumstances the baby was exposed to the vaccine.

Was she part of Pfizers’ clinical trial? Again, it is unclear from the report.

However, the more important question that should be asked, just like in the previous case, is what happened to the baby? Did she survive? Is she alive?

And again, in the section reporting death, it states “No”, meaning the baby did not die. However, in the report description it says, “The patient had not recovered from the event. No follow-up attempts possible. No further information expected”.

It is hard to believe, but this basic question – what happened to a baby after suffering such severe and life-threatening adverse reactions – also arises from other serious cases, such as the case of a 6-month-old baby (report # 2084418) who “received bnt162b2 (COMIRNATY), intramuscular” on December 29, 2021, and went through anaphylactic shock, anticholinergic syndrome, Neuroleptic syndrome, infectious pneumonia, other infections, and multi-system symptoms.

In this case as well, the section reporting death states “No”, meaning supposedly the baby did not die, while in the event description it says “outcome ‘unknown’…  No follow-up attempts are possible. No further information is expected”.

In another case (report no. 1012508) a one-year-old baby who also received a Pfizer vaccine, in January 19, 2021 (this case it is specified that the baby did not take part in a trial) developed a pain in her left ear that escalated to full paralysis, which was diagnosed as Guillain Barre syndrome.  In the case description it was stated that the baby suffered Guillain Barre Syndrome, face paralysis, non-infectious encephalitis, non-infectious meningitis, earaches and hearing disorders. Nonetheless, in the summary of the report, it was written, again, that “No follow-up attempts are possible”.

And another shocking case (report number 1379484) emerges from the report of a baby who was only one month old, who suffered “Vaginal bleeding/ Constant heavy vaginal bleeding with chunks of clot” the following day after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on May 19, 2021.

Although the symptoms the baby suffered from were defined as “serious as medically significant”, in the incident description it is stated that the result is “unknown” and that “No follow-up attempts are possible. No further information is expected”.

As mentioned, in some of the cases it is stated the babies were not part of a clinical trial, while in others it is not clear whether they participated in a clinical trial or were vaccinated in other unknown circumstances. But whether they were part of the trial or not, the report does not explain the absence of this critical information; what happened to these babies? Did they survive? And if so, did they recover? Why was there not a follow-up on the medical condition of babies who suffered from severe and life-threatening adverse events, while it was clearly stated that they did not recover? Is it not required in such severe cases by the FDA that the company should make every effort to locate these babies, find out what their condition is and follow up on them?

“Redness in the injection area: the clinical trial protocol does not mention severe adverse reactions”

The press release issued in February 11, 2022, in which Pfizer-BioNTech announced that they intend to apply to the FDA for approval for infants from 6 months to 4 years of age, the safety findings from the company’s clinical trials in babies and toddlers at these ages are not mentioned, not even in a word. The information brochure regarding the clinical trials testing the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine in adults, children and babies, on the FDA website, clearly states “No Study Results Posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for this Study”.  And as noted above, the newly released The VRBPAC Briefing Document only lists a handful of non-serious adverse events reported in this age group, including, and concludes that there is nothing that would suggest a new safety concern. How could the FDA not know about so many serious adverse events that were reported to the CDC’s reporting systems? Alternatively, if they do know about them – why are they ignoring them?

How were adverse events in babies tested than in the clinical trials? In an attempt to answer this critical question, intended to address the safety issues and to assure parents that the vaccine is safe for babies, we examined the study protocol found on the FDA clinical trial website.

It appears that no potential severe adverse events were listed. The list of potential adverse events that the study was supposed to evaluate according to the protocol (“outcome measure”) did include both local and systemic reactions. However, these are relatively non-serious adverse events.

The list of local adverse events that the trial was supposed to monitor includes: “Pain or tenderness at the injection site, redness and swelling”, and the systematic reactions included ”Fever, fatigue, headache, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, new or worsened muscle pain, new or worsened joint pain, decreased appetite, drowsiness, and irritability”. Moreover, although the study is scheduled to end only on June 14, 2024, the time frame set for examining adverse events is limited to seven days after each of the doses – the first and the second dose.

The vaccine is ineffective in infants. The solution: lower the efficiency threshold and add a third dose

In addition to the substantial concerns regarding the vaccines’ safety for babies, their efficacy in this age group is questionable by and large. According to the available data, healthy children are at almost zero risk for severe illness, hospitalization, or death due to COVID-19.

Hospitalization due to COVID-19 is very rare among children, and death cases are even rarer. In Germany, for instance, a large study found that not even one child died of COVID-19 among 5-11 age group without pre-existing conditions. Under these circumstances, even one case of a serious adverse event, let alone death, is crucial and outweighs any possible benefit of the vaccine.

Not surprisingly, Pfizer clinical trials in babies under 4 proved that 2 vaccine doses do not increase their antibody count significantly. The FDA commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, admitted in an interview in early April 2022 that “The antibodies that were developed were not as high, so they didn’t have the same antibody response to the two-shot series in the older kids.  It wasn’t as high as what we would have hoped for the younger as it was for the older kids”.  According to Woodcock, this is why Pfizer, which planned to apply for EUA approval for babies in February, postponed the submittal date and decided to add a third dose to the trial and wait for the findings after all babies got their third dose.

Furthermore, in a statement given on May 11, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologic Evaluation and Research at the FDA, announced that infant and toddler vaccines will not need to pass the 50% efficacy rate against Covid. A 50% efficacy rate is the threshold adult vaccines need to pass. However, Marks explains that despite the previous guidelines, the FDA will not deny companies now approval for babies and toddlers just because it did not reach the 50% efficacy in preventing symptomatic infections.

Pfizer issued a press release on May 23 announcing that “Vaccine efficacy of 80.3% was observed in descriptive analysis of three doses during a time when Omicron was the predominant variant”. According to the press release, “The study suggests that a low 3-ug dose of our vaccine…, provides young children with a high level of protection against the recent COVID-19 strains”.

Yet, the FDA’s briefing document reveals that the claim for a “high level of protection” is based on a total of 10 symptomatic cases of COVID-19 identified in the trial, that occurred at least 7 days postDose 3. Three of them occurred among participants 6-23 months of age (which included 555 participants – 376 in the vaccine group and 179 in the placebo group) – with 1 case in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine group and two in the placebo group. Seven other cases occurred among participants 2-4 years of age (which included 860 participants – 589 in the vaccine group and 271 in the placebo group) – with 2 cases in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine group, compared to 5 in the placebo group. Nevertheless, the vaccine’s efficacy was framed by the FDA as 80,4%, and the document concludes that “Available data support the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine 3-dose primary series (3 µg each dose) in preventing COVID-19 in the age group of 6 months through 4 years”. In addition, the document states that “Among infants and children 6 months through 4 years of age, rates of hospitalization and death due to COVID-19 are higher than among children and adolescents 5-17 years of age, and comparable to individuals 18-25 years of age, underscoring the benefit of an effective COVID19 vaccine in this age group”.

 How ethical is it to give a baby a vaccine for a disease that the chances of getting severely ill or dying from it is almost zero, while the benefits of the treatment are unclear and, and life-threatening adverse reactions are very significant?

This question was the topic of an article published in March this year in Bioethics. The researchers stated that not even one of the main claims argued to justify approval for babies is valid. According to them, the benefits of the vaccine for healthy children are minimal, and therefore, even though complications are rare, they outweigh the vaccine’s benefits, especially since it is highly unclear what the short and long-term risks are, and the experience with the vaccine is very short. The altruistic claim of protecting the environment is also very problematic, since as a vaccine exists, the groups at risk can defend themselves, and it was proven already that children are not the main transmitters of the virus.

Congress members demand answers

This ethical issue has been raised in recent days by 18 members of Congress in a letter issued to the FDA on June 7, demanding answers before the authority’s decision to grant an emergency permit for the infant vaccine. Members of Congress demanded to know why COVID-19 vaccines are necessary for this age group in light of the fact that the disease poses a very small risk to infants and young children, that vaccines have little efficacy, and that there are many unanswered questions regarding these vaccines’ safety and adverse events.

The letter presents 19 questions to the FDA, including, among others – why did the FDA delay the publication of the hundreds of thousands of data pages from the manufacturers’ studies, the state of adverse events, and when can all FDA data be expected to be made public? The FDA was also asked to provide the public with more details regarding children who were severely injured or died from COVID-19, and how many children in general became seriously ill. Legislators also addressed the issue of cardiac risks in giving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to children, noting that following vaccinations given to large numbers of children aged 5-18, an increase in myocarditis and pericarditis was observed, with some cases ending in death, and the long-term effects of heart-related inflammation not yet quantified by health authorities. What’s more, lawmakers demanded to know why the FDA lowered the threshold of efficacy for the vaccines specifically for infants and youngest children, thus actually allowing companies to apply for EUA without any justification.

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The FDA will not be able to argue it did not know

As stated, the data emerging from the analysis presented in this article demonstrate beyond any doubt that the vaccine is not safe for babies and toddlers. Whether these children were part of the study or not – these reports have been in the VAERS system for many months, so there is no chance that the FDA does not know them. Unfortunately, the fact that the FDA was aware of at least some of the serious adverse events, including increased risk of morbidity in the first days after vaccination, myocarditis, and increased risk of miscarriage and fetal malformations, and yet approved the vaccine for teens, children, and pregnant women, was later revealed too late – long after the EUA was granted to Pfizer and Moderna, when many have already been harmed. It only became clear thanks to FOIA (Freedom of Information) requests submitted to the FDA and other health authorities, and only after the FDA was forced by the court to disclose the documents. This time, the VAERS data presented here makes it possible to reveal this fact even before the approval. The FDA will not be able to claim that it did not know.

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First published on March 23, 2023

We are currently at the crossroads of the Most Serious Economic and Social Crisis in World History.  It is an outright war against all humanity: the Planet’s 8 billion people. 

Starting with the corona crisis in late January 2020, the global crisis (2020-2023) –which is ongoing– has literally disrupted and destroyed people’s lives Worldwide in the course of the last three years.

The scale and complexity of the 2020-2023 Global Economic and Social Crisis far surpasses all previous “depressions” including the 2007-2009 Recession which was categorized as the most serious economic meltdown since the Great Depression of 1929. 

Everything is interrelated starting with the Covid pandemic, the mRNA vaccine, the powers of Big Pharma, global governance, corrupt governments, the destabilization of the Nation State, the war in Ukraine, media disinformation, the demise of international diplomacy, the threat of nuclear war.

There are many complex features underlying the global economic crisis pertaining to financial markets, the decline in production, the collapse of State institutions and the rapid development of a profit-driven war economy.

The sugar coated bullets of the “free market” are killing our children. The act to kill is instrumented in a detached fashion through engineered derivative trade on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges, where the global prices of basic food staples including rice, wheat and corn are decided upon

“Institutional speculators” including hedge funds are involved in the deliberate manipulation of equity and currency markets.

Poverty is not solely the result of policy failures at a national level. People in different countries are being impoverished simultaneously as a result of a global market mechanism. A small number of  financial institutions and global corporations have the ability to determine, through market manipulation, the standard of living of millions of people around the World. 

What is rarely mentioned is how this global economic restructuring forcibly impinges on three fundamental necessities of life: food, water and fuel. 

Access to Food, Water and Energy pertains to the “Reproduction of Real Life” which is the very basis of  human civilization.

“Reproduction of Real Life” is not limited to “Basic Human Needs” (e.g. privatization of water, reproduction of the agricultural cycle). It also pertains to the concurrent reproduction of the institutions of civil society including schools and universities, science, knowledge, social and family relations, the structures of the nation state, justice, culture, history, international relations, all of which are currently in jeopardy. 

VIDEO: Michel Chossudovsky Interview with Caroline Mailloux

 

 

 

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The U.S. Supreme Court this week decided against hearing a lawsuit against Apple that sought to determine whether the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) radiofrequency (RF) radiation guidelines preempt state safety and health laws.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit — nearly 30 iPhone users — allege that Apple’s iPhone emitted RF radiation that regularly exceeded the federal exposure limit and that Apple violated California state health and safety laws by failing to warn consumers about the health and safety risks of holding the device close to the body.

The plaintiffs on Jan. 23 filed a petition for a writ of certiorari — or “cert” request — asking the Supreme Court to hear the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled on Aug. 26, 2022, that the plaintiffs’ claims were invalid because the FCC’s federal guidance “impliedly preempted” state health and safety law.

Commenting on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, W. Scott McCollough, Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) lead litigator for electromagnetic radiation cases, said the Supreme Court’s denial of the plaintiffs’ request was “disappointing” but there is “still hope” that the question of federal preemption of state health and safety law will be addressed.

McCollough — who in March co-authored an amicus brief submitted by CHD and eight nonprofitsin support of the plaintiffs’ request — said, “We wish the court would’ve taken it up, but it’s not over. There will be another chance.”

McCollough told The Defender there is still a “significant circuit split” — meaning that different U.S. Circuit courts have rendered differing decisions — on the issue of whether FCC guidelines on human exposure limits on RF radiation preempt state health and safety law and “typically that is something the [Supreme] Court will resolve at some time.”

An amicus brief is filed by non-parties to litigation to provide information that has bearing on the issues and to assist the court in reaching the correct decision. It comes from the Latin words amicus curiae, which means “friend of the court.”

‘If we can ever get the FCC to change the rules, then we don’t have to worry about state court law’

The Supreme Court’s decision is a blow to individuals in the Western U.S. seeking to sue telecommunication companies under state laws because it means the 9th Circuit’s August ruling remains unchallenged and “will probably be precedent-setting in the 9th Circuit,” said McCollough, who is a former Texas assistant attorney general and telecom and administrative law attorney.

“So there is now in the 9th Circuit no ability to obtain any kind of state law — and specifically tort— remedies,” McCollough added.

The 9th Circuit is the largest judicial circuit in the U.S. and covers California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

However, there are “other potential remedies,” McCollough said.

For instance, there are “other available remedies under federal statutes — and an FCC regulation cannot preempt a federal statute” established by Congress so “there can be no preemption question.”

“We might have what we call a ‘conflict of laws’ question [in which] you have two statutes that don’t fit well together,” McCollough said.

In that situation, the federal statute established by Congress “should take priority” over the FCC guidelines “but that’s not fully determinative,” he added.

There are “many reasons” why the Supreme Court may choose to not hear a case “even if they are interested” in the issue at hand, McCollough told The Defender.

For instance, the Supreme Court receives approximately 7,000-8,000 requests per annual term to hear cases and only hears arguments in about 80 cases.

Additionally, the court may have thought the case was not a “good vehicle” for addressing the question of federal preemption, said McCollough.

McCollough pointed out that by the time the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Apple had reached the 9th Circuit, they had dropped all personal injury claims and narrowed their case to focus on how Apple had failed to disclose the health risks of its devices.

McCollough said it’s possible the Supreme Court wanted to wait until it had a case seeking state law remedies for actual personal injuries rather than a claimed failure to disclose potential risks.

Finally, what the Supreme Court’s decision “really does,” McCollough said, “is make ever more important the win we [CHD] had in 2021, in the District of Columbia Circuit where that court told the FCC to re-evaluate the [RF emission] rules — the very rules whose operation were held to be preemptive.”

“If we can ever get the FCC to change the rules, then we don’t have to worry about state court law,” McCollough said.

Last month CHD petitioned the FCC to “quit stalling” and comply with the court-ordered mandate to review and explain how the agency determined its current guidelines adequately protect humans and the environment against the harmful effects of exposure to RF radiation.

The FCC’s chairwoman on May 11 sent a letter to the chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in which she said she “promises that the commission will be taking up revision of their NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] rules — which includes its RF radiation exposure guidelines — as soon as the CEQ [Council of Environmental Quality] gets finished with its rulemaking.”

According to McCollough, the CEQ has already set forth rules requiring the FCC to act.

“There are already existing CEQ rules which require them [the FCC] to act and they’re forgetting this,” he said.

Nonetheless, the FCC’s letter is significant because it indicates that “at some point” they are going to do something. “That’s the first time they’ve ever said that,” McCollough added.

Carmageddon: The Electric Car Fiasco

May 27th, 2023 by Toby Young

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If the Conservatives are hoping to get re-elected next year they may have to rethink their policy of banning the sale of new petrol- or diesel-powered cars by 2030. Electric cars are proving to be an unmitigated disaster. Indeed, scarcely a day passes without a story appearing in the Telegraph about just how terrible they are – and not just if you want to get from A to B.

For instance, we learnt last week that some electric cars are losing their value twice as quickly as petrol alternatives.

Drivers have been pushed towards electric cars by a string of government initiatives, which are intended to help the country become “net zero” by 2050. However, drivers going green risk losing thousands of pounds more than those who stick with petrol.

Some popular electric models have fallen in price at twice the rate of petrol cars. A driver who bought an electric BMW i3 in 2020 would have paid £39,000 and could sell the car for £13,900 today, a depreciation of 64%.

However, the petrol equivalent has maintained much more of its original value. A new petrol-powered BMW 3 series cost £32,000 on average three years ago but would sell for £22,360 now – a drop of just 30%.

Yesterday brought more bad news.

First, we discovered that thousands of free electric car chargers have been pulled from Britain’s roads over the past year as soaring energy costs makes them unaffordable.

The number of chargers offering free electricity has fallen from 5,715 a year ago to 3,568, a drop of almost 40%.

They now make up less than one in 10 public chargers on Britain’s roads, compared to one in five a year ago.

The drop in free top-up charging spots is the latest blow to the Government’s ambitions to attract motorists to electric cars by making it cheap and convenient to charge them away from home.

Then we learnt that because electric cars can weigh 33% more than wet cars, much of our basic transport infrastructure – such as multi-story car parks and bridges – may well collapse under their additional weight.

Last month, car park experts raised concerns about the ability of some ageing car parks ability to handle the weight as the number of electric vehicles grew.

Russell Simmons, chair of the British Parking Association’s structures group, told The Telegraph that he had carried out inspections of multi-storey car parks in the UK over the last six months which would not have been able to withstand new EV weights.

Electric vehicles are generally heavier than petrol counterparts because of the weight of their batteries, which can weigh around 500kg.

Earlier this year, Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, found that the best-selling EVs in the U.S. were on average 33% heavier than petrol counterparts.

To summarise, electric car owners have discovered in the past week alone that their cars may lose their value twice as quickly as non-electric vehicles, that free charging points are rapidly disappearing from our roads and if they park their Tesla in a multi-story carpark it might well collapse. Who knew virtue-signalling would prove to be so costly?

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

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Last Saturday the Washington Post published an exposé of classified American intelligence documents showing that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, working behind the back of the Biden White House, pushed hard earlier this year for an expanded series of missile attacks inside Russia. The documents were part of a large cache of classified materials posted online by an Air Force enlisted man now in custody. A senior official of the Biden administration, asked by the Post for comment on the newly revealed intelligence, said that Zelensky has never violated his pledge never to use American weapons to strike inside Russia. In the view of the White House, Zelensky can do no wrong.

Zelensky’s desire to take the war to Russia may not be clear to the president and senior foreign policy aides in the White House, but it is to those in the American intelligence community who have found it difficult to get their intelligence and their assessments a hearing in the Oval Office. Meanwhile, the slaughter in the city of Bakhmut continues. It is similar in idiocy, if not in numbers, to the slaughter in Verdun and the Somme during World War I. The men in charge of today’s war—in Moscow, Kiev, and Washington—have shown no interest even in temporary ceasefire talks that could serve as a prelude to something permanent. The talk now is only about the possibilities of a late spring or summer offensive by either party.

But something else is cooking, as some in the American intelligence community know and have reported in secret, at the instigation of government officials at various levels in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Latvia. These countries are all allies of Ukraine and declared enemies of Vladimir Putin.

This group is led by Poland, whose leadership no longer fears the Russian army because its performance in Ukraine has left the glow of its success at Stalingrad during the Second World War in tatters. It has been quietly urging Zelensky to find a way to end the war—even by resigning himself, if necessary—and to allow the process of rebuilding his nation to get under way. Zelensky is not budging, according to intercepts and other data known inside the Central Intelligence Agency, but he is beginning to lose the private support of his neighbors.

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Israel’s recent bombing of the Gaza Strip from May 9–13 killed 33 Palestinians, including seven children. FAIR looked at coverage of these attacks from the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN, and didn’t find a single reference to Israel as an apartheid state, despite this being the consensus in the human rights community.

Since apartheid is the overriding condition that leads to Israel’s violent outbursts, and since the US has vigorously supported Israel for the last 60 years, US media should be putting it front and center in their coverage.  Omitting it allows Israel to continue to portray any violence from Palestinians as a result of senseless hostility, rather than emerging from the conditions imposed by Israel. For audiences, that distortion serves to justify Israel’s attacks on civilians and continued collective punishment of all Palestinians.

The term apartheid originated with the South African system of systematic racial segregation, which was not unlike Jim Crow in the United States. Apartheid is considered a crime against humanity—defined in the UN’s Apartheid Convention as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

The term has been increasingly applied to the Israeli apparatus of checkpoints, segregation, surveillance, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial murders that it uses to oppress Palestinians. In particular, the exclusion of most Palestinians under Israeli control from participation in Israeli politics, under the pretense that Palestinian areas either are or someday will be independent, mirrors the disenfranchisement of Black South Africans through the creation of fictitious countries known as bantustans.

Human Rights Watch published a report in 2021 titled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. That same year, the leading Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, labeled Israel’s rule “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Amnesty International published a major report in 2022 on “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians.”

After the biggest, most respected human rights organizations labeled Israel an apartheid state, much of the US political establishment erupted in bipartisan indignation in defense of Israel. The New York Times actually refused to even mention the Amnesty International report for 52 days (Mondoweiss, 3/24/22).

‘Trading fire’

 

WaPo: Israel and Gaza militants face off for fourth day amid scramble for truce

The Washington Post (5/12/23) depicts a “face off” between a society under siege and the besieging forces.

Gaza, the Palestinian enclave between Israel and the Mediterranean, is arguably the most abused territory under the apartheid regime. Most of the water in the enclave fails to meet international standards, and was even called “undrinkable” by the United Nations. The illegal blockade regularly prevents important medicine and other supplies from being widely available in the country.

Regular Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip are a key part of the repression, killing unarmed civilians, destroying neighborhoods, schools and hospitals—most notably in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. These periodic attacks on the Palestinians, often crassly referred to as “mowing the grass,” have killed 5,460 Palestinians since 2007. International observers have often referred to Gaza as an “open-air prison,” with 2 million people being crammed into 146 square miles.

The recent Gaza coverage fails to capture this context, and instead portrays the situation as a conflict between equals. The Washington Post (5/12/23) described it as a “face off” when (at that point) 30 Palestinians, including six children, were killed by Israeli airstrikes, along with one Israeli killed by Palestinian rocket fire; a New York Times article (5/11/23) described the conflict as Israel and Islamic Jihad “trad[ing] fire.”  Another New York Times (5/12/23) headline vaguely referred to the attack as “A New Round of Middle East Fighting.”

CNN (4/12/23) used the classic whitewashing word “clash” in describing the attacks. CNN’s use of the term was even more striking because it appeared in a headline that included the incongruity between 30 dead Palestinians and one dead Israeli.

Outlets gave several “how we got here” pieces that purported to give context for the current escalation (e.g., New York Times, 5/9/23; Washington Post, 5/13/23). Again, not a single article FAIR reviewed used the term “apartheid” or referenced the recent findings from human rights NGOs to describe the current situation in Palestine.

‘Consequences of territorial ambitions’ 

UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese (Guardian, 5/12/23): Israel “cannot justify the occupation in the name of self-defense, or the horror it imposes on the Palestinians in the name of self-defense.”

On a recent trip to London, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories, criticized the the tendency to omit important context and trends in the discussions about Israel (Guardian, 5/12/23):

Guardian: Israel treats Palestinian territories like colonies, says UN rapporteur

“For me, apartheid is a symptom and a consequence of the territorial ambitions Israel has for the land of what remains of an encircled Palestine…. Israel is a colonial power maintaining the occupation in order to get as much land as possible for Jewish-only people. And this is what leads to the numerous violations of international law.”

Member states need to stop commenting on violations here or there, or escalation of violence, since violence in the occupied Palestinian territory is cyclical, it is not something that accidentally explodes. There is only one way to fix it, and that is to make sure that Israel complies with international law.

The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls.  Any obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the severity of Israeli crimes and the US complicity in them.

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Some who took vaccine with the noblest of intentions experienced unexpected debilitating aftereffects. Instead of compassion, they were met with skepticism; instead of being helped they were shunned; instead of being heard, they were silenced. Join us as we bring their stories out of the shadows so they can be heard and seen and no longer alone.
 
In the climate of a global pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out under emergency use authorization after a much shorter than normal testing period. Millions of people rolled up their sleeves because they were told they were doing their part to end the pandemic. But for some—it didn’t go as expected.
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The Unseen Crisis is a feature-length documentary that provides an intimate, uncensored look into the lives of those who live with the debilitating after-effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. It examines the issue of COVID-19 vaccine injury claims in a fresh, honest, and comprehensive manner with expert interviews, whistleblowers’ statements, and government health statistics.

This is a documentary about people, not politics.

The patients in the documentary suffered severe reactions to the shot and their health spiraled out of control. When they reached out to the public health system and pharmaceutical companies for help and support, instead of being acknowledged, cared for, and studied; they were ignored, censored, and called “anti-vaxxers” despite having gotten the shot. These patients are by no means isolated cases. The world is witnessing a growing epidemic of COVID-19 vaccine injuries that can no longer be ignored.

Fortunately, a small community of doctors are bravely trying to unravel the mystery of these injuries and how to treat them. They too were shocked to find themselves shut out of the mainstream medical community, simply for practicing what every doctor is trained to do.

But ultimately, The Unseen Crisis is a story of hope and triumph. In spite of everything, this group has learned to rely on themselves and work together to find relief. Determined, principled, and surprisingly positive, they truly embody the resilient American spirit.

For those suffering in silence, hope begins with having a voice. The “Unseen Crisis” finally gives them one.

Official Website: https://www.UnseenCrisis.com

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US Hopes to Snatch Victory from Jaws of Defeat in Ukraine

May 26th, 2023 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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The G7 Leaders’ 2700-word statement on Ukraine, issued in Hiroshima after their summit meeting glossed over the burning question today — the so-called counter-offensive against the Russian forces.

It is a deafening silence, since rumours are swirling about the disappearance of the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces. Significantly, President Vladimir Zelensky himself is making himself scarce from Kiev touring world capitals — Helsinki, Hague, Rome, Vatican, Berlin, Paris, London and Jeddah and Hiroshima. It does seem that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

As the G7 summit ended, the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on Saturday that the Russian operation to capture the strategic communication hub of Bakhmut in Donbass region of eastern Ukraine lasting 224 days, has been brought to a successful completion, overcoming the resistance by more than 80,000 Ukrainian troops. 

It is a painful moment for Zelensky, who had boasted before US lawmakers in Capitol Hill last December that “just like the Battle of Saratoga (in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War), the fight for Bakhmut will change the trajectory of our war for independence and for freedom.” 

Meanwhile, to distract attention, there is talk now about a subtle shift in the US policy regarding supply of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine in an indeterminate future. In reality, though, no one can tell what the Ukrainian rump state will look like when the jets arrive.  Unsurprisingly, the Biden Administration still seems to be in two minds. F-16 is a hot item for export; what happens if the Russians were to blow it out of the sky with their hi-tech weapons and rubbish its fame ? 

The Russians seem to have concluded that nothing short of a total victory will make the Americans and the British understand that Moscow means business on the three objectives behind the special military operations that are non-negotiable: security and safety of the ethnic Russian community and their right to live in peace and dignity in the new territories; demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine; and a neutral, sovereign, independent Ukraine freed from the US clutches and no longer a hostile neighbour. 

To be sure, the unprecedented levels of US hostility towards Russia only hardened Moscow’s resolve. If the Anglo-Saxon alliance keeps climbing the escalation ladder, the Russian campaign may well expand the operation to the entire region east of the Dnieper River. The Russians are in this war for the long haul and the ball is in the  American court.

What comes to mind is a speech last July by President Vladimir Putin while addressing the Duma. He had said, 

“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. Well, what can I say? Let them try. We have already heard a lot about the West wanting to fight us ‘to the last Ukrainian.’ This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but that seems to be where it is going. But everyone should know that, by and large, we have not started anything in earnest yet.” 

Well, the Russian operation has finally started “in earnest.” The thinking behind the delay is unmistakeable. Putin underscored in his speech that the West should know that the longer Russia’s special military operation goes on, “the harder it will be for them to negotiate with us.”  

Therefore, the big question is about the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russian forces enjoy overwhelming superiority in every sense militarily. Even if the hard core of the Ukrainian forces who were trained in the West, numbering some 30-35000 soldiers, manage to achieve some “breakthrough” in the 950-kilometre long frontline, what happens thereafter? 

Make no mistake, a massive Russian counterattack will follow and the Ukrainian soldiers may only end up in a fire trap and suffer huge losses in their tens of thousands. What would the Anglo-Saxon axis have achieved? 

Besides, the Ukrainian military will have so thoroughly exhausted itself that there will be nothing stopping the Russian forces from advancing toward Kharkov and Odessa. Herein lies the paradox. For, from that point, Russians will have no one to talk to. 

If past American behaviour — be it Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq and Syria — is anything to go by, Washington will do nothing. The well-known American strategic thinker Col. (Retd.) David MacGreggor couldn’t have put things better when he said earlier this week: 

“I can tell you that Washington is going to do nothing. And I’ve always warned… we (United States) are not a continental power, not a land power anywhere but in our own Hemisphere. We are primarily an aerospace and maritime power, much like Great Britain. And what does that mean? When things go badly for us, we sail away, we fly away, we go home… That’s what we always do. Eventually, we just leave. And I think, that’s on the agenda now.” 

The stony silence of the G7 statement on the Ukrainian counteroffensive is understandable. The G7 statement needs to be juxtaposed with a report appearing in Politico on the eve of the summit in Hiroshima which, quoting senior US officials elaborated on an audacious plan to transform Ukraine war into a “frozen conflict” on the analogy of the Korean Peninsula or Kashmir. 

A Pentagon official told the daily that recent military aid packages to Ukraine reflect the Biden administration’s “shift to a longer-term strategy.” Reportedly, US officials are already talking to Kiev about the nature of their relationship in the future. 

Principally, if Ukraine’s NATO membership bid stalls, western guarantees could range from a NATO-style Article 5 mutual defence deal to Israel-style arms deals with Ukraine so that “the conflict will wind up somewhere in between an active war and a chilled standoff.”

Indeed, the G7 statement began conceptualising the “Europeanisation” of Ukraine with reforms, market economy driven by private sector and western financial institutions, and boosting Kiev’s deterrent capability vis-a-vis Russia militarily. 

It is quite amazing. Hardly has one flawed narrative — espousing Russia’s military defeat in Ukraine and the overthrow of Putin — unravelled, another narrative is being hoisted, predicated on the simplistic notion that Russia will simply roll over and passively watch the US integrating Ukraine into the western alliance system to create an open wound festering on Russia’s western borders that will drain resources for decades to come and complicating ties with neighbours.

However, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s reaction to the G7 Summit confirms that Moscow will not fall into the trap of a “frozen conflict.” Lavrov said, “Could you take a look at those decisions which are being debated and adopted at the G7 summit in Hiroshima and which are aimed at dual containment of Russia and the People’s Republic of China?

“The objective was announced loudly and frankly, which is to defeat Russia on the battlefield, and without stopping at this, to eliminate it later as a geopolitical rival, so to speak, along with any other country that claims an independent place in the world, they will be suppressed as opponents.”

Lavrov also pointed out that the Western countries’ expert community is overtly discussing the order to work out scenarios aimed at Russia’s breakup, and “they do not conceal that the existence of Russia as an independent centre is incompatible with the goal of the West’s global domination.” The Minister said, “We have to give a firm and consistent response to the war declared upon us.”
 
Yet, it is not as if Americans are incapable of seeing the war through Russia’s eyes. Read here a letter pleading for some sanity in Washington penned by a group of distinguished former American diplomats and military officials associated with the Eisenhower Media Network. By the way, they paid to get it in the New York Times, but the rest of the establishment media chose to ignore it.

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The United States military recruits foreign fighters to serve as “proxies” in order to wage “irregular warfare” against Washington’s adversaries, and the Pentagon does not vet them to see if they have a history of committing atrocities, according to declassified documents obtained by the New York Times.

These “surrogate” fighters are armed and trained by the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command.

They are key players in a growing number of secretive “shadow wars” that Washington is waging across the planet.

US special operations commandoes were deployed to 154 countries, or roughly 80% of the nations on Earth, as of 2020.

 
 “U.S. Special Operations forces are not required to vet for past human rights violations by the foreign troops they arm and train as surrogates”, the New York Times reported on May 14.
 
“American commandos pay, train and equip foreign partner forces and then dispatch them on kill-or-capture operations”, the newspaper noted.

The Times disclosed two Pentagon programs in which “surrogate” forces are used: Section 127e, known as “127 Echo”, which gets $100 million per year to train “counterterrorism” proxies; and Section 1202, which is allotted $15 million per year to recruit proxies to wage “irregular warfare”.

This unconventional warfare is “aimed at disrupting nation-state rivals via operations that fall short of full armed conflict — including sabotage, hacking and information campaigns like propaganda”, the newspaper wrote.

 

The proxies recruited by the US military are vetted, but only “to detect counterintelligence risks and potential threats to American forces”, not for any “violations of human rights — such as rape, torture or extrajudicial killings”, the Times clarified.

The newspaper explained:

Proxy forces are an increasingly important part of American foreign policy. Over the past decade, the United States has increasingly relied on supporting or deputizing local partner forces in places like Niger and Somalia, moving away from deploying large numbers of American ground troops as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even as that strategic shift is meant to reduce the risk of American casualties and blowback from being seen as occupiers, training and arming local forces creates other hazards.

The Pentagon refused to tell the Times what countries these programs are active in. However, previous reports have noted that the US military ran its irregular warfare operation in Ukraine, where it trained forces for an eventual proxy war with Russia, years before Moscow’s 2022 invasion.

By its very nature, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has been notoriously secretive about its activities around the world.

Investigative journalist Nick Turse reported that US special operations forces were active in 154 countries in 2020, covering approximately 80 percent of the planet.

In a 2021 story in The Intercept, Turse wrote:

U.S. Special Operations Command has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. “Special operations-specific funding” topped out at $3.1 billion in 2001, compared with $13.1 billion now. Before 9/11, there were roughly 43,000 special operations forces. Today, there are 74,000 military personnel and civilians in the command. Two decades ago, an average of 2,900 commandos were deployed overseas in any given week. That number now stands at 4,500, according to SOCOM spokesperson Ken McGraw.

As the command’s global reach has grown, so has the toll on America’s commandos. While special operations forces make up just 3 percent of American military personnel, they have absorbed more than 40 percent of the casualties, mainly in conflicts across the Greater Middle East.

SOCOM’s irregular warfare campaign was previously acknowledged in reporting by Yahoo News.

“In the final month of his presidency, Donald Trump signed off on key parts of an extensive secret Pentagon campaign to conduct sabotage, propaganda and other psychological and information operations in Iran”, wrote the media outlet’s national security correspondent Zach Dorfman, in a 2021 article on Washington’s “shadow war”.

Dorfman said that Washington’s goal was “to undermine the Iranian people’s faith in their government as well as shake the regime’s sense of competence and stability”.

Former top US officials described the operation as “irregular warfare”, and it included “a 200-page package of options, involv[ing] ‘things that would cause the Iranians to doubt their control over the country’”.

Dorfman is very friendly with US spy agencies. At Yahoo News, he has also disclosed similar irregular warfare operations targeting Russia, but run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel”, he revealed in a report published in January 2022 – a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.

This CIA program training Ukrainian paramilitaries in the southern United States was initiated in 2015, Dorfman disclosed.

In March 2022, a month after Moscow invaded, Yahoo News revealed that the CIA had another program training elite Ukrainian forces inside their country. That CIA initiative began in 2014.

These operations were overseen by the CIA, however. What is unique about the New York Times’ May 2023 report is that it sheds light on similar programs in which the US military arms and trains proxy forces abroad.

Leaked secret US documents have revealed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been planning to escalate the current confrontation with Moscow by invading Russian villages, targeting Russia beyond the Donbass and the current conflict zone with longe-range missiles and even blowing up the Druzhba pipeline which provides NATO member Hungary with Russian oil, according to the Washington Post. Kiev’s plans for further exacerbating the crisis cross a number of red lines and should be a problem for Washington too, as US President Biden has already made clear to Zelensky that he and his Western allies want neither “to go to war with Russia” nor “a third world war”. However, paradoxically, the US seems to be pushing for precisely such escalation.

The possible scenarios are quite worrisome. In addition to the aforementioned developments, according to the same leaks, Ukraine was also planning to attack Russian forces in Syria, which would mean making the Eastern European conflict spill into the Middle East and thus risk spiraling out of control across Western Asia and subsequently maybe even the Caucasus, too.Some analysts have already pointed out that the Russian-Ukraine confrontation potentially intersects with the South Caucasus, which is already the stage for today’s Armenian-Azerbaijani war.

According to Pulitzer Prize winner American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’ report, countries in the region such as Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, led by Poland are pressuring Zelensky to find a compromise and end the crisis, even by resigning himself if needed.

The conflict had been transitioning into a protracted phase and the US seems to be encouraging Kiev to intensify its hostilities along the whole front line. However any kind of trench warfare or proxy attrition war is extremely harmful for Ukraine – and would not be such bad news for Russia, who can go on with a minimal offensive strategy further exhausting Ukrainian forces.

A major problem, from an American perspective, is that the Ukrainian political elite and its military leaders seem to be increasingly inclined to ignore the advice and instructions of their Western benefactors. Besides the aforementioned bold plans against Russia, there have been other signs of it: Zelensky refused to withdraw troops from Artemovsk, for example, which resulted in Ukrainian defeat there. Kiev’s political and military elite itself are divided however, and a rising number of voices are reconsidering Zelensky’s ideas about “reconquering Crimea” and openly talking about compromising.

Moreover, in the US itself, according to Hersh’s intelligence sources, “some of the better intelligence about the war does not reach the president” and he “is said to rely on briefings and other materials prepared by Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence”, while CIA Director William Burns “has come around in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies.” This indicates that there is division within Washington’s “deep state” also over the issue.

Calls for escalation, both in Kiev and in Washington, might also be a sign of desperation. There clearly is no consensus in the United States’ own establishment regarding the matter of aid to Ukraine itself – Republican lawmakers are opposing it also due to the debt ceiling now and former President Donald Trump, who is still a Republican favorite, has promised to end it if re-elected. Corruption scandals abound in both US and Ukraine and recent reports about a $3 billion Ukraine aid “error” are part of the latest one. The truth is that American weapons’s manufacturers as well as Western ones have been profiting from prolonging the conflict while also selling obsolete military equipment. Moreover, Zelensky’s rebellious “stubbornness” can only increase such division within Washington and across the transatlantic alliance, as seems to be already happening in Eastern and Central Europe. All of that creates a very dangerous and unstable situation which outcome is quite unpredictable.

Harvard political scientist Graham Ellison has warned that Western countries are trying to solve their own problems by escalating the Eastern European crisis and should it spiral out of control this could lead to dangerous war between the great powers involved.

The Western air defense systems Kiev is getting are in itself, for a number of reasons, not enough to protect Ukraine’s airspace, as I wrote. Neither are F-16s, for that matter. So far, Washington has been showing itself to be really willing to fight “to the last Ukrainian” (as in the cruel joke which Biden almost paraphrased in a December statement). Further escalation would show a willingness to fight if not literally to “the last European”, at least to something quite near it in terms of the damage to local economies and the migration/refugee crisis. It remains to be seen whether Europe in general and particularly Poland, Hungary and other nations in the region happen to also have a similar inclination – and for how long.

Source: InfoBrics

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(ZH) — Russia has issued another stern warning related to further potential Ukrainian attacks on Crimea. “Strikes on this territory are considered by us as an attack on any other region of the Russian Federation. It is important that the United States is fully aware of the Russian response,” Moscow’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, warned Sunday.

This was in response to an earlier weekend statement by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to CNN. He said while speaking from the G7 summit in Japan over the weekend, “we have not placed limitations on Ukraine being able to strike on its territory… What we’ve said is that we won’t enable Ukraine with US-systems to attack Russia. And we believe Crimea is Ukraine.”

Russia Issues Dire Warning After US Approves Ukrainian Strikes On Crimea

However, the US has consistently denied that it has OK’d Ukraine using US-supplied advanced weaponry to mount such attacks.

Antonov further stated on Telegram in response that “the unconditional approval of strikes on Crimea using American and other Western weapons” alongside the move among Western allies to supply Ukraine with jets “clearly demonstrate that the United States has never been interested in peace.”

He warned the US administration against “thoughtless judgments on Crimea, especially in terms of ‘blessing’ the Kiev regime for air attacks” on the peninsula.

Per Russian state media, other Kremlin officials weighed in even more forcefully, warning that even nuclear disaster could be the result:

Sullivan’s remarks likewise triggered outrage from Crimean Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Muradov, who opined that by allowing Ukraine to use US-made planes to target the peninsula, the White House had “agreed to unleashing a nuclear war.”

The official recalled that Crimea hosts Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. “An attack on one of the pillars of Russia’s strategic security legally obliges our country to use all available means to prevent it from being undermined.”

Russia has also recently accused Ukrainian forces of using UK-supplied long range rockets which are capable of hitting inside Russia.

This is also a cause for concern in terms of possible Russia-NATO direct escalation: “Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of more than 250 kilometers, give Ukraine the capacity to strike well behind Russian front lines and as far as Moscow-occupied Crimea,” US state-funded RFERLunderscores, while adding that “British media reports said Kyiv had promised not to use the missiles to strike inside Russia’s territory.”

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The phenomenon of SADS – “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” is a brand new phenomenon since COVID-19 mRNA vaccines rolled out in the general population starting in December 2020.

 Perfectly healthy, young COVID-19 vaccinated people go to sleep and never wake up. There is no struggle. They die “peacefully” and their families, who never had any warning signs, are left in utter shock and horror.

 

Here are 13 such cases of young people dying in their sleep in 2023:

 

New York, NY – 35 year old photographer & model Vincent Vega died suddenly in his sleep on May 22, 2023.

 

Iowa City, IA – 34 year old high school teacher Amylia Yeaman died suddenly in her sleep on May 20/21, 2023. She was fully COVID-19 vaccinated and boosted.

 

Markham, ON – 21 year old Jonathan Scarth died unexpectedly & suddenly in his sleep on May 13, 2023.

 

New York, NY – 29 year old Robert Little died in his sleep on May 6, 2023. Robert was a fire performer and graduated from Florida College of Natural Health.

 

Solon, OH – 40 year old high school teacher Crystal Kennedy Cespedes died suddenly in her sleep on April 27, 2023.

 

Australia – 15 year old Balin Menzies died suddenly in his sleep on April 21, 2023. (click here)

 

Milwaukee, WI – 19 year old Marquette University Student Kamrin Ray was found dead in residence by his roommate on April 17, 2023 “First responders found him unresponsive around 9:30pm, on the bed”

 

34 year old fully vaccinated Saskatchewan healthcare worker Quinn Torgunrud died suddenly in her sleep on April 12, 2023, she celebrated her birthday 2 weeks prior

 

Airdrie, AB – 25 year old Wyatt Allen Vezina Topolnicky, a former Calgary Police Cadet and hockey player, who was fully vaccinated and boosted, died suddenly in his sleep on March 26, 2023.

 

Aberdeen, Scotland – 35 year old Samantha Gilbert died suddenly in her sleep on Feb.13, 2023. (click here)

 

22 year old University of Cincinnati media production student Carolyn Frey died suddenly in her sleep on Jan.24, 2023 from pulmonary embolism.

 

Gahanna, OH – 20 year old Columbus Academy Tennis player Jack Madison died suddenly in his sleep on Jan.2, 2023. (click here)

 

North Tonawanda, NY – 16 year old lacrosse captain Tayler Marie Woolston died in her sleep on Jan.1, 2023. (click here)

 

My Take…

 

SADS (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome) didn’t really exist before COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were forced on the entire population.

There was a related phenomenon called Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome which was extremely rare and was caused by congenital anomalies that predisposed young people to sudden cardiac death.

A UK study showed these sudden deaths occurred at a rate of 1.6 deaths per million population per year, with a mean age of 32 years old (click here)

53% of SADS had an inherited heart disease, usually an arrhythmia. (click here)

30% of SADS families had a history of additional unexplained premature sudden deaths (click here)

In the cases presented here, young healthy people are dying in their sleep very likely due to COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine induced myocarditis which, in the presence of a surge of stress hormones during times such as the early morning hours when the body is waking up, can cause sudden cardiac arrhythmias which are often fatal.

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In an interview with the media outlet “Polsat TV”, Polish retired general Waldemar Skrzypczak stated that his country should help dissidents in Belarus in case of “uprisings”. According to him, it is only a matter of time before riots appear in Belarus, and when that happens, Warsaw will have to support the insurgents and incite a regime change. He even mentioned the possibility of helping “troops” against the government of Aleksandr Lukashenko, which indicates that Poland will be openly involved in case of a civil war in the neighboring country.

“Let’s prepare for an uprising in Belarus, because it will happen. The point is that we should not sleep through this moment (…) We must be ready to support the troops that will carry out the operation against Lukashenko. We have reasons to help them, just as we help Ukraine. The Belarusians will support them against [President Alexander] Lukashenko with enthusiasm”, he said during the interview.

Skrzypczak stated that Belarus does not have the military capacity to defeat rebel forces in this type of situation. Furthermore, he does not believe that Moscow would support the Lukashenko government with troops since, according to him, Russia has “its own problems.” Skrzypczak also calls on Poland to receive Belarusian refugees, preparing for a possible “exodus”, which he believes will occur soon.

Obviously, these statements are extremely worrying. The most dangerous thing is that Skrzypczak is not someone irrelevant in Poland. In addition to being a retired military man, he is a former Deputy Minister of Defense, having been the head of the armaments sector of the Warsaw Armed Forces. Since his retirement, Skrzypczak has acted as a media commentator on the conflict in Ukraine, being an influential personality in his country, able to influence public opinion and even state agencies with his opinions.

The controversy surrounding Skrzypczak’s irresponsible and bellicose pronouncement arises in the current context of the beginning of the transfer of Russian nuclear weapons to the territory of Belarus. Months ago, both countries signed a mutually beneficial joint agreement to place Russia’s nuclear weapons in the neighboring republic, thus boosting both countries’ defense capabilities against possible Western provocations. Obviously, the West considers the attitude as a risk to its destabilizing anti-Russian interests in Eastern Europe, which is why an escalation of tensions is expected for the region.

In fact, it is necessary to analyze the threat posed by Skrzypczak from a military point of view. The general believes that Belarus is not strong enough to neutralize a wave of uprisings, but this is not consistent with the country’s recent history. Belarus has for years been a major target of Western attempts at regime change, both through massive violent protests and through open and direct terrorism, which has become particularly intense since the escalation in the Ukrainian conflict. And even so, Minsk has always been able to neutralize all threats.

Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics constantly foment chaos in Belarus through contact with internal opposition groups, as seen in the recent attempted terrorist attack during the May 9 celebrations. On the occasion, Belarusian opponents received explosives from Ukrainian intelligence to kill civilians during the public event in the country, having however been quickly neutralized by the local police. Situations like this have become commonplace since last year, prompting the government to implement a national anti-terrorist operation.

The fact that the Belarusian security forces have been efficient so far in preventing the success of these terrorist groups shows that the local state has enough power to control the clandestine activities of dissident groups linked to foreign intelligence, thus making the “optimism” of Skrzypczak about a regime change in Minsk absolutely unjustified. Furthermore, Belarus’ extensive cooperation with Russia is an important factor that cannot be ignored.

Skrzypczak believes that Russia would not help Belarus in the event of an escalation into a civil conflict, but there is no argument to justify this opinion. Several Moscow’s officials have made it clear on recent occasions that Russia has an obligation to help Belarus in the face of any threat. The country receives a large number of Russian troops in its territory, which would obviously be mobilized in the event of a need to repel terrorists and foreign saboteurs in case of a civil conflict.

Russian-Belarusian cooperation is unlimited, and the “problems” that Russia already has to deal with seem insufficient to prevent Moscow from helping the friendly country, considering that only a small percentage of the Russian armed forces are acting in the current conflict. Russia has enough military strength to get involved on more fronts if needed, and Belarus would certainly be a defense priority.

Furthermore, it must be noted that Skrzypczak seems unjustifiably “optimistic” in his statement. The general ignores that, in addition to a strong internal security system, from now on Belarus will have potential for nuclear deterrence, as it is receiving Russian weapons in its territory, which will significantly increase the country’s defense potential against foreign threats.

There is also the popular factor. Lukashenko is widely approved by the Belarusian population, with a very small number of radical opponents having the potential to mobilize for possible “uprisings”, which makes a regime change unlikely.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

Source: InfoBrics

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The G7 has recently wound up its meeting in Hiroshima, and the participants joined to affirm their fear of the Threat of China. British media reported that prime minister Rishi Sunak said:

“China poses the biggest challenge to global security and prosperity of our age with the ‘means and intent to reshape the world order’.”

The global septet spoke of “de-risking” rather than “de-coupling” from China.

This was prudent because decoupling from the world’s leading manufacturing base would risk plunging all economies into recession. China leads the world in so many facets of production, particularly high technology: high-speed rail, rocket technology, their own space station, lunar and Martian probes and rovers, quantum computing, AI, robotics, bridge building, tunnel construction, chip production, hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, military armaments, nuclear technology, and on and on. Could it be that the Chinese economy is not as sturdy as it seems to be?

I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of Democracy: What the West can learn from China and Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence, his forecast for the Chinese economy.

Kim Petersen: In a recent article, “Why China Can’t Pull the World Out of a New Great Depression,” strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl writes, “… in real physical economic production, China has left the USA and everyone else in the dust. Therefore, the future course of industrial production in China is vital to the future of the world economy.”

He writes that steel production is “the single best indicator of a growing real economy” for which China crushes the competition. China leads in coal production, rare earth mining and processing, motor vehicle production, as supplier of essential cement for construction, aluminum production, and copper consumption. Engdahl adds, “The list goes on.”

Then Engdahl identifies a problem: “A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest.” He points at the inflated housing market, rising unemployment, the dubiousness of official figures for total state debt, and the lack of transparency for financial information.

It is expected that there would be bumps along the road in the development of what was once, not so long ago, a very poor country compared to the economic colossus that China has become today. In addition to the commodities exported worldwide, China has also garnered much skepticism for its growth and development over the years, and yet China has always managed to steam ahead. China has a planned economy, and assuredly the mandarins have contingency plans for the unexpected.

What is your take on the Engdahl article?

Wei Ling Chua: What does not address is the CCP series of policies and reforms. 

Unlike western, Japanese, USSR development that relied heavily on imperialism, expansionism and looting

1) In the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the sources of finance were mainly from the agricultural sector, and the hard work, delegation and sacrifices of the entire population to rebuild the nation.

The Mao era was the hardest era in the history of the PRC, as the country just managed to hold together the entire nation with virtually nothing (no technology, no money, a 90% illiteracy rate, a divided population, a population hungry and in poor health with a super short average life-expectancy of 36 years, a hostile international environment (Korean war, Sino-India war, USSR border war, plus western sanctions, and in the 1960s USSR sanctions as well).

However, Mao managed to win the Korean war with mainly foot soldiers armed with rifles and hand grenades, helped Vietnam to chase away the US occupier, and defeated India and the USSR in skirmishes. China worked herself into the UN to replace the nationalist government as the only legitimate government of China. It also completed the first stage of the Chinese industrial revolution with all types of light industry (self-made household appliances, processed food), an active agriculture sector, fisheries, etc, and heavy industry such as producing trucks, cars, buses, trains, atomic bombs, satellite, missiles, and all type of other military weapons, construction technology…

2) over the next 30 years, China financed her economic reform via opening up with massive foreign investment plus massive land mortgage financing to fund all types of infrastructure across the country.

But, unlike the rest of the developing countries, China used cheap land and labor to attract foreign investment to build factories, and used her own land allocation as a guarantee to print money and provide loans for building infrastructure, commercial and residential property, and therefore, not incurring too much foreign debt. So, most of China’s debts are domestic and are outside of foreign control.

3) Since Xi came into power, his zero tolerance towards corruption and successful anti-corruption policy very much ensured the country’s continued smooth operation with high efficiency and less waste. This is a most vital element in any nation’s development and future prosperity (whereas all western countries are down down and down at the moment due to legalised corruption in the name of lobbying, political donations, speech bureaus, privatisation, etc)

Xi’s centralised medicine approval strategy has successfully reduced all drug prices by up to more than 90%, and hence china was able to introduce sustainable nationwide medicare coverage. Such a policy freed up people’s savings for domestic consumption. This economic generator is a pillar of any advanced country.

Under Xi, the average wages of the nation basically more than doubled.

Yes, like the rest of the world, the real estate market and tax on property transactions are major sources of government revenue. But Xi knew that if the real-estate market was allowed to continue being controlled by a handful of billionaires to reap speculative profits then the housing prices would keep rising. So, he openly told the nation that housing is for people to live, not for speculative profit.

He cracked down on irresponsible real estate giants controlling too much real estate and using them to mortgage and buy more. Finally, this caused some collapse in overheated pricing. But unlike the US, there is no too-big-to-fail company in China; Xi froze these troubled giant companies from issuing dividends to shareholders, and made the owners sell their own assets to repay the interest and loans, sell their overseas companies and assets, and then domestic assets to repay the loans. And when the state bails out a company, all those assets return back to the people; i.e., state control.

4) Yes, there are debt issues in China, but debts should be distinguished between good debt and bad debt:

Across the west, they keep printing money to give away to political donors in exchange for personal benefits at the expense of the taxpayers, they also give away money to voters to win votes. These are bad debts as they produce no future return for the masses.

But, for China, the debts transform into infrastructure domestically and overseas. The outcome is apparent: more and more regions and countries with Chinese investment enjoy economic prosperity; hence, they help China to continue enjoying prosperity despite western decoupling policies.

The winning of trust and friends across the world will only pave the way for China’s Belt and Road win-win strategy to ensure mutual prosperity even without the West. We are now witnessing that the BRICS’s GDP is bigger than that of the G7, and the Chinese economy has been bigger than the entire EU (the combined GDP of 27 countries) since 2021.

Besides, the rise of China’s high-tech economy are obvious: due to China’s superiority in EV car technology, China has just replaced Japan as the world’s biggest new car exporter (the world number 1 in EV car exports), solar technology exports as well, infrastructure exports, ship building etc, and lately, overtaking the US in military armament exports to places like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Thailand… etc. Consider also the growing popularity of the RMB as a reserve currency. It is important to note that China managed to achieve these feats without firing a single shot; it’s all about investment in education, R&D, development of infrastructure, and a policy of win-win.

China’s future is very bright with the coming development, export of chips, nuclear power plants, and reunification with Taiwan. At this moment, the world has seen China managing to finally create a peaceful and Chinese-friendly Central Asia, Russia, Middle East, and ASEAN (excluding the Philippines under Marcos). We also notice that almost all African countries and Latin American countries are also very much preferring China over the West. This peace dividend will help create an entire region surrounding China to move towards the world’s biggest economic block developing in peace and harmony. It will become a magnet for the rest of the world.

 ***
Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com.

Do the emergence of a seemingly multipolar world and the declining power of the US (mainly its constant economic crises, falling rates of profit, recession, excessive debt, etc.) provide an opportunity for Puerto Rico and other nations to achieve self-determination?

The US state has been the world’s hegemon and has largely ruled with unipolar supremacy since the aftermath of World War II (the exception, during the Cold War, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s). The ascendance of the US to the global position of power was established by developing international political and economic institutions (e.g., the IMF, WB, GATT, and the UN) that stabilized the capitalist economy and legitimized the US state.

What anchored the US state hegemony was its conversion to a permanent war economy, which developed its military capacity and militarism used to enforce this international system and to hinder forces who opposed this order, which included socialists and national liberation forces. As a result, it has been next to impossible for colonies, neo-colonies, and other nations to achieve autonomy and self-governance. Efforts to bring resolutions went largely unabetted because many nations had bent to the pressures and belligerence of the US state. Therefore, the question is: does a realignment of the global order allow Puerto Rico and other nations to exercise their self-determination?

GLOBAL AND REGIONAL REALIGNMENT

The emergence of a multipolar world has been in the works for some time, with states forming associations based on mutual respect, trade, and trading in their currencies as a deliberate means to sidestep US dominance, efforts at establishing fair trade, and autonomy.

One example of this effort can be seen in BRICS nations (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which comprise over 40% of the world population, a substantial amount of trade, and roughly 32% of global GDP.

The BRICS is considered a rival to the G-7 economies and has announced an initiative to develop a New Development Bank (alternatives to the IMF and WB) and de-dollarization initiatives. The goal of the union is to promote cooperation and dialogue among themselves proactively, pragmatically, incrementally, transparently, and openly. The focus is also on building a peaceful, harmonious world with shared prosperity that serves the interests of all the people and nations that belong to it. Many other developing nations are interested in joining the BRICS, and many nations are trading in their own currencies.

Another clear example of how the US is being challenged is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure development strategy implemented by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organizations.

BRI is said to be one of the most significant infrastructure and investment projects in history. The initiative defines five major priorities: policy coordination; infrastructure connectivity; unimpeded trade; financial integration; and connecting people. Some criticisms view that countries are swapping out one imperialist power for another. In addition, a preponderance of media, primarily US-based coverage, equates the Chinese BRI with expansionism and debt-trap diplomacy. However, the Chinese have not sought to superimpose their political system on other nations.

There have been concerns by anti-capitalists that China continues to operate within the framework of the Western capitalist economic order. Yet, the current conditions may change this reality, especially with the US provocations regarding Taiwan’s sovereignty and arming neighboring nations (e.g., the Philippines, Guam, Australia, and Japan) against China. But the issue we are most concerned with is whether a multipolar world provides an opportunity for nations to work together in a mutually beneficial way and not be under the control of the US state.

Yet, the BRI has worked with many nations from East Asia to Europe to the Caribbean on essential infrastructure projects such as constructing roads, water pipelines, and railways and providing loans to many historically underdeveloped nations. According to the World Bank, by improving infrastructure and reducing trade costs, BRI investments could help lift nearly 40 million people from poverty.

In addition, US dollar supremacy and US global control have been increasingly questioned since the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, which originated in the US with worldwide ripple effects. In addition, the accelerated de-dollarization has been largely driven by the US-imposed lead sanctions placed on Russia for invading Ukraine, which signaled to other nations, such as China, the need moves away from the dollar. As important de-dollarization is to the US hegemony, many nations are invested in the dollar, the global reserve currency, which continues to be reliable. The idea or forecast of a new global currency is beyond the scope of this discussion. However, the Chinese yuan international transitions have increased, with Russia, the other BRICS, plus Iran, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia nations, to name a few. Iran has been using the yuan for some time. Even President Macron of France, a key US ally, “warned against the ‘extraterritoriality of the US dollar,'” suggesting that Europe should cut its dependence on the dollar to maintain France’s “strategic autonomy” and not become vassals should tensions between US and China heat up” (Tan 2023).  For many nations, the dollar, the internationally reserved currency backed by the US government, is increasingly viewed as a control mechanism.

United States’ lead sanctions on Russia have contributed to de-dollarization and the rise of many nations utilizing their currencies and the yuan. The Russian invasion of Ukraine can be seen in the larger context as part of the US state’s provocation and response to its declining hegemonic position and an attempt to expand its influence in Ukraine, Western Europe, and Russia. It is essential to understand here how these events create opportunities for many nations, considered non-western and parts of the Global South, to form systems that are autonomous from the US state and its state system of allies. These statements are not intended to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty but to only situation it in a larger context of US imperialism and global realignment. In the past many of these nations were reluctant to take principled political stances for nations either seeking national independence or redress for human rights violations because of the repercussions and the control that the United States and Western nations command over them.

However, a global realignment of power might allow nations such as Puerto Rico to develop associations based on mutual and equal partnerships and not remain under the domination and subordination of the United States. At least twenty-five countries in the Americas are not independent sovereign nations; they are, therefore, colonies to various official classifications, called constituent parts of sovereign states or dependent territories of sovereign states. Of course, the above represents the continued Western colonial rule of the most direct type in the Americas. This description is not too different from the rest of the world. As a result, these nations’ colonial status forbids them from exercising fundamental national rights because of the continued legacy of the colonial rule of the imperialist West and the United States.

There has also been pushback from Latin America and the Caribbean to US hegemony and its underdevelopment strategies. These nations have historically formed alliances based on their shared histories of a multitude of direct and indirect rule from Western and US imperialist powers. An example of recent pushback from peripheral nations in this hemisphere can be seen in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an example of an association and trading bloc operating autonomously from the US state. ALBA’s primary goals are to alleviate poverty and to promote socioeconomic reform through trade agreements that meet each country’s needs rather than through the neoliberal or free market. There is a long history of the US supporting military dictators and right-wing governments in repressing and overthrowing popular and leftist governments has been changing. Throughout the region, right-wing governments have been replaced by socialist and social democratic ones in the last four years. In addition, there has been a tide of leftist elected presidents in Latin America – e.g., Colombia, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The defeated presidents were largely supported by the US and failed to address the popular frustration in their respective nations with increased inequality and failed neoliberal economic policies. These political leaders reject the traditional US role in the region and are working to strengthen regional ties with their neighbors, such as Cuba and Venezuela.

A significant act of defiance from some Latin American nations came as the US refused to invite the socialist nations Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to the Summit of Americas, held in Los Angeles, CA, June 6–10, 2022. In protest, President López Obrador of Mexico called for a boycott, stating, “I don’t accept hegemonies…. Not of China, not of Russia, not of the United States. All countries, no matter how small they are, are free and are independent” (Norton 2022).  On May 5, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) announced that if any American country were excluded from the summit, its fourteen member nations would likely not attend. Ultimately, López Obrador did not participate, along with others boycotting it, such as Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala. Many have seen this act as a defiant act against the US by some of its most loyal allies. Some have gone as far as to describe this as the end of US hegemony, the Monroe Doctrine of the Americas, making the Americas the domain of the United States. This act was especially significant, as it occurred while the US attempted to solidify its alliance against China and Russia. However, it appears that many nations in Latin America and the Caribbean are seeking to exercise their self-determination by welcoming economic ties and associations with each other and with other nations such as China and Russia.

Just as the US state’ ascendance involved imperialist expansion, the creation of colonies, the use of genocide, slavery, and with its military dominance in the post-WWII period, military invasions, the overthrowing of democratically elected political officials in the name of “the fight against Communism,” its decline appears to be no different. For this, we only need a few examples to capture the continuity of this policy: the US’ invasions, bombings, and incursions in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), and Libya (2011). According to Jeffrey Sacks, since 1980, the US has been in at least 15 overseas “wars of choice” (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen, to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union (2022). According to the Military Intervention Project, the US has undertaken almost 400 military interventions since 1776, with half of these operations undertaken between 1950 and 2019; over 25% occurred in the post-Cold War period (Kushi and Duffy Toft 2023).[1]

According to John Ross, two powerful forces oppose US military aggression: China, whose economic development is not merely crucial for improving the living standards of its population, and the military as a deterrent to US military aggression and the emergence of several countries that are countering US aggression—including many in the Global South, comprising the majority of the world’s people—not merely from a moral viewpoint but from direct self-interests (2022). However, the US state continues its worldwide dominance and expansion – e.g., the “War on Terror,” the “Pivot to Asia,” “AFRICOM” (i.e., an effort to recolonize Africa), and “regime changes” such as in Ukraine in 2014. Its consequent “proxy” war intended to destabilize Russia and its aggression towards China to undermine its development. In fact, the US is covertly and not so covertly attempting to impact the political processes in Pakistan and Turkey because of political forces in their nations trying to operate in our national interests, as opposed to the United States’ interests. Many nations have been responding to the US imperialist policies and their attempt to prevent counties from achieving national independence and sovereignty.   

PUERTO RICO IN THE UNIPOLAR US-IMPERIALIST STATE WORLD 

Millions of people in the US, its colonial territories, and worldwide are influenced by the US imperialist states’ self-image. The US military and economic dominance have resulted in it achieving global hegemony. The US- state’s dominant position is constructed by various factors such as state officials, corporate media, and its global network of other capitalist states, corporate elites, and international organizations such as the WB, IMF, WTO, and the United Nations. The US-state has a history of pressuring member states at the UN to either vote with the US or to abstain from voting on the issue of Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination and to become an independent nation. Although the UN has passed some important resolutions such as the UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and People) in 1960 and most recently in 2017. The 2017 resolution by the UN Special Committee on Decolonization was to the General Assembly calling on the US “to assume its responsibility to expedite a process that would allow the people of the island to fully exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.” Yet, many see international organizations like the UN, the WB, and IMF that developed after 1945 (the post-WWII era), a period in which the US reached its apex of power as a ‘super imperialist nation,’ as instruments of the most domination nations (Harvey 2003).

The US essentially created the world in its image following WWII with the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, which provided the groundwork for the IMF, WB, and the GATT (recognized today as the WTO) and the creation of the United Nations. To varying degrees, these international organizations were designed to establish peace and stability among western and capitalist states. According to Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1990), “The US-State achieved military, economic, financial, and political dominance over the rest of the world and was able to use dollar diplomacy, the CIA, and other means to thwart off populist and socialist challengers to capitalism abroad” (in Volscho 2017:251). We must consider the US dominance and hegemony when considering the UN as an honest broker. Many of these capitalist nations formed an entity of stakeholders who have a vested interest in continuing the global capitalist system. The US hegemonic position has allowed it, in many instances, the ability to hide much of its imperialist behavior and the ability to disseminate its ideas, values, and beliefs that present itself as “the leader of the free world” and as a liberator, are but some examples of its ability to influence or win over many of the people of the world. However, when the US-imperialist state’s hegemony fails, it resorts to the violence and coercion of the military might of its state.

With some exceptions, many do not refer to the US as an empire. An empire for good (e.g., Ferguson 2004; Kagan 2003), or as the world’s “policeman,” etc. and debate its strategic course, soft power vs. hard power and unipolarism vs. multilateralism (Ikenberry 2004; Nye 2002). These views tend to reflect a patriotic academic scholarship and an adherence to Western political realist justifications. Yet, what is missing is the fact that imperialism is what empires do (Parenti 2011), and these representations of a US empire are void of the carnage and the meddling in the political affairs of the sovereign nations and peoples that the US-imperialist state as a long history of inflicting (see Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback, 2004, who argues that much of these actions have been kept hidden from the US public, however, see Ward Churchill’s The Justice of Roosting Chickens, 2002, who argues that the public is well of aware of this).

The various favorable views of the US empire persist and continue to be propagating by the media and US political officials. A current rendition holds that the US must rule – i.e., maintain dominance and uphold the international order because, without its military and economic backing, the world would collapse into chaos or authoritarianism. This sentiment was recently expressed by the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who spoke about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as tearing at the rules-based international order that “keeps us all secure.” Yet, Chomsky and Prashad argue that there are two rules-based international order, one supported by the US, which defines the system as, if you follow the US, then you are following the rules; the other is grounded in the UN Charter (2022:185).

James M. Blunt explains how imperialist states dealt with the anti-colonial struggle in the 1960s by viewing decolonization as a “smooth evolution of colonies from the condition of colonial ‘tutelage,’ through the graduation ceremony of decolonization, to the mature, adult, colonial economic and political dependency as continued evolution toward ‘modernity’ and as the only road to economic development” (1987:38). Blaut further explains how decolonized nations remain subordinated within some system in which dominant states continue to manage their affairs. This essentially is the continuation of “the principles of colonial and semi-colonial rule, along with the counterpart of this as practiced by the United States, namely gunboat diplomacy and periodic invasion and occupation of small neighbouring state plus a dollop of ordinary colonialism in countries like Puerto Rico” (Blaut 1987:38-39). Therefore, one needs to situate UN resolutions on decolonization within the context of dominant nations like the US maintaining their control over Third World nations through various means.

The hegemony of the US imperialist state must be addressed if the aim is to understand the US and its continued colonialism in Puerto Rico because of the US’ ability to shape the parameters of the discourse for the Puerto Rican national question. One significant issue before us is explaining why the Puerto Rican national question has yet to be resolved. After all, Puerto Ricans fit the definition of a culturally distinct people from a nation that is “a human group conscious of forming a community, sharing a common culture, attached to a clearly demarcated territory, having a common past and a common project for the future and claiming the right to rule itself” (Guibernau 1996:47). However, according to Blaut, five well-known conditions define the national question or the national struggle and how they occur within the context of another nation – i.e., a more powerful nation. Puerto Rico fits the first condition that captures the efforts of “a colony to win independence from the occupying colonial power, and counter-efforts by the colonial power to prevent the colony from gaining its independence” (1987:13). The objective here is to centralize the US imperialism state’s role in Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination.

To understand hegemony in the colonial context, we refer to the literature from such political theorists as Franz Fanon 1961, 1959; Albert Memmi 1955; and Aimé Césaire 1950. These political theorists have analyzed how imperialist states have used counterinsurgency; racial ideologies that foster inferior psychologies, dependent on the colonial arrangement; and an intermediate native elite that serve as a buffer between the colonized and the colonizer. According to Ángel Collado Schwarz, the term “Stockholm Syndrome” describes much of this colonial psychology…where the captive colony begins to identify with, and then embrace, the will of their masters” (2015). Even with the US’ history of counterinsurgency against Puerto Ricans with its strategies at indirect rule (i.e., “commonwealth”), gain complete intelligence information (neutralized these who support independence), and having a hearts and minds program (e.g., co-optation in the administration of indirect rule, incorporation of the oppressed into the repressive apparatus, and the distribution of social aid provisions, and employment). Yet, even after the political repression of the National Party in the 1930s-1950s, the national liberation movement, both in Puerto Rico and in the US (1960s-1980s) (Montes 2003), that struggle for real national sovereignty continues and can be seen in the victory to remove the US military from Vieques (2003), the removal of corrupt and pro-statehood Gov. Ricardo Rossello from office in 2019.

The declining influence of the US-imperialist state has been felt in Puerto Rico for some time; its ability to shore up the colony with employment and social aid while it held a captive market, source of cheap labor, control of lands it used as part of it military geostrategic operations, and a supply of soldiers due to having no control over political or economic matters, had been evident for some time. The consequences of recent events, such as the imposition of the Fiscal Control Board in Puerto Rico’s financial affairs in 2017 (because of the colonial debt crisis), and the effects of Hurricane Maria, have exposed many Puerto Ricans to the actual colonial status of Puerto Rico.

The dominant view holds, with its various interpretations, that Puerto Ricans are (or should be) eternally grateful to the US for saving them from Spanish tyranny and for its civilizing mission, and assuming the “white man’s burden” (Hitchens 2004:63-97). In more current times, the US is viewed as a modernizing force, saving Puerto Rico from Third World poverty and establishing the “Commonwealth Government” in 1952, supposedly meeting the UN’s decolonization requirement. The legal basis for the UN involvement in Puerto Rico’s national question is Article 73 of the United Nations Charter (1946); this article states that it is to administer territories that have not obtained a “full measure of self-government” (Persusse 1990:59). However, these views that Puerto Rico in some unique and mutual political agreement with the US government and being shattered, with more Puerto Ricans learning the lesions from the Hurricane Maria with the growth of mutual aid and self-sustainable collectives.

Puerto Rico must not be analyzed based on the US-imperialist state’s hegemonic self-image as a liberator, civilizer, modernizing agent, or mutual partner but as an imperialist power that employs various repressive and facilitative modes of co-optation and appeasement to maintain and conceal its dominance (Montes 2009). The global realignment of global forces will likely present viable options for Puerto Rico’s autonomy in self-governance by opening opportunities to engage in mutually beneficial associations with other nations. Of course, this is predicated on the continued decline of the US, which appears to be occurring, as discussed above, and as such, will not be able to keep the colony afloat, causing Puerto Ricans and other colonized, oppressed, and exploited peoples to relied on themselves and form more mutual aid relations. Currently, Puerto Rico cannot enter trade and development arrangements based on its own national interests because of its colonial relationship with the United States.

Vince Montes is a lecturer in sociology. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology and historical studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York, NY.

REFERENCES

Blaut, James. 1987. The National Question. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books Ltd.

Césaire, Aimé. 1950 [2000]. Discourse on Colonialism. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press

Chomsky, Noam and Vijay Prashad. 2022. The Withdrawal. New York, NY: The New Press.

Churchill, Ward. 2002. The Justice of Roosting Chickens. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Collado Schwarz, Ángel. “The Psychology of Puerto Rico.” Posted June 06, 2015. https://waragainstallpuertoricans.com/2015/06/13/the-psychology-of-puerto-rico/

Fanon, Franz. 2004. [1961] The Wrenched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Ferguson, Niall. 2005. Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Guibernau, Montserrat. 1996. Nationalisms. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hitchens, Christopher. 2004. Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo–American Relationship. New York, NY: Nations Books.

Ikenberry, John G. 2004. “Liberal Hegemony or Empire?” in Held, D. and Koening-Archibugi, Mathias (eds), American Power in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Johnson, Chalmers. 2004. Blowback: Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.

Kagan, Robert. 2003. Paradise and Power, American and Europe in the New World Order. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Kushi, Sidita, and Monica Duffy Toft. 2023. “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019.” Journal of Conflict Resolution67(4), 752–779.

Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York, NY: Onion Press.

Montes, Vince. 2009. “The Web Approach to the State Strategy in Puerto Rico.” Pp. 99-118 in Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating Problems: Advancing the Sociological Imagination, edited by D. Knottnerus and B. Phillips. Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers.

___________. 2003. Cycles of Protest: Puerto Rican Contentious Action, 1960s-1980s. Unpublished Dissertation. New School for Social Research, New York, NY.

Norton, Ben. 2022. “U.S. govt’s Summit of the Americas fails: Boycott by presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala.” MR Online. (Posted June 08)

Nye, Joseph. 2002. The Paradox of American Power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Parenti, Michael. 2011. The Face of Empire. New York, NY: Routledge.

Perusse, Roland I. 1990. The United States and Puerto Rico. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company.

Ross, John. 2022. “What is propelling the U.S. into increasing international military aggression?MRonline. (Posted April 24)

Sachs, Jeffrey. “The West’s false narrative about Russia and China.Transnational. (September 19)

Tan, Huileng. 2023. “China’s yuan is emerging as a strong challenger to the dollar’s dominance. Here are 5 countries that recently turned to the yuan instead of the USD for trade.” Insider. (Posted May 08)

Volscho, Thomas. 2015. “The Revenge of the Capitalist Class.” Critical Sociology, Volume: 43 issue: 2, page(s): 249-266

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May 25 represents the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) created by 33 independent states in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963. Nearly four decades later in 2002, the African Union (AU) came into existence with a renewed commitment to greater unity and coordinated development.

The events in Ethiopia during May 1963 represented a watershed in the struggle for national liberation and Pan-Africanism which can be traced back centuries to the heroic resistance against enslavement and colonization. A series of Pan-African Conferences and Congresses took place between 1893 and 1945 which brought together Africans from various geopolitical regions of the globe to discuss their common interests aimed at charting a methodology to win freedom and social justice.

Since 1963, many more colonies have gained their independence while the economic and military liberation of the continent remains elusive. Today, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) along with French and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops are operating in numerous states throughout the region.

As a direct result of this renewed militarization of the continent by the imperialist centers of global power, there has been deepening levels of instability and displacement. Africans are being human trafficked across North Africa and the Mediterranean in a manner reminiscent of the Atlantic Slave Trade between the 15th and 19th centuries.

The increasing presence of peoples of African descent in the nations of Europe and in North America has provided an ideological rationale for the emergence of neo-fascist organizations and political officials. On the southern border of the U.S., 1,500 troops along with thousands of law-enforcement personnel and vigilantes are patrolling to keep people of color out of the country.

Despite these harsh realities, there have been awakenings throughout the world in which Africa is very much involved. Although there is the reemergence of military coups in several West African states, the mass sentiment from the workers, farmers and youth is decisively anti-imperialist. This rising consciousness is reflected in many of the foreign policy positions articulated by African heads-of-state and envoys in their speeches annually before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

This same outlook permeated the anti-imperialist governments in existence at the time of the founding of the OAU. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the then President of the First Republic of Ghana exemplified the concept of “positive action” which was employed in the independence struggle which he led in the British colonial Gold Coast from 1947-1957.

Nkrumah’s pioneering work entitled “Africa Must Unite” was released to coincide with the inaugural summit of the OAU. The book covers all aspects of the struggle for national liberation and the dangers of disunity and the continuing threat of imperialist domination.

In the introduction to Africa Must Unite Nkrumah says

“For freedom is not a commodity which is ‘given’ to the enslaved upon demand. It is a precious reward, the shining trophy of struggle and sacrifice. Nor do the struggle and sacrifice cease with the attainment of freedom. The period of servitude leaves behind tolls beyond what it has already taken. These are the cost of filling in the emptiness that colonialism has left; the struggle and the toil to build the foundation, and then the superstructure, of an economy that will raise up the social levels of our people, that will provide them with a full and satisfying life, from which want and stagnation will have been banished. We have to guard closely our hard-won freedom and keep it safe from the predatory designs of those who wish to reimpose their will upon us.” (p. Introduction xvi)

These words written in 1963 are quite prophetic. The struggle against neo-colonialism–which Nkrumah called the last stage of imperialism, the title of a study he published in book form two years after the first OAU gathering–continues after the acquisition of national independence with the purported “departure” of the colonial powers. It was these same colonial powers in the former Belgian Congo who were instrumental in thwarting the efforts of the first democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba during 1960 and early 1961.

The collective imperialism led by Washington and Wall Street were identified by Nkrumah in 1965 as the principal enemies of the African Revolution. Despite the U.S. attempts to distance itself historically from the rise of colonialism in Africa, their ruling interests were also present at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 where the continent was carved up among the leading imperialist centers. Even prior to the establishment of independence for the 13 British colonies in what later became the U.S., Native removal and African enslavement were thoroughly entrenched into the political economy.

Successive administrations in Washington have viewed the movement towards genuine independence in Africa as a threat to U.S. interests. This is why Lumumba, Nkrumah, and many others were targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department.

In Africa Must Unite Nkrumah goes on to emphasize:

“New nations like ours are confronted with tasks and problems that would certainly tax the experience and ingenuity of much older states. They would be difficult enough if we existed in a peaceful world, free of contending powers and interested countries eager to dabble in our internal affairs and manipulate our domestic and external relations in order to divide us nationally and internationally. As it is, our problems are made more vexed by the devices of neo-colonialists. And when we attempt to deal with them in ways which, having regard to all the facts that are known to us, seem most appropriate in the endeavor to maintain the internal unity upon which our viability and progress depend, we are misrepresented to the outside world to the point of distortion.” (Introduction, xvi)

In the contemporary African context, the states of Sudan and Libya provide a clear illustration of the contradictions which have arisen since the dawn of national independence and the later founding of the OAU. Each nation-state embodies tremendous potential for the economic emancipation, sovereignty and unification of Africa. Nevertheless, the legacy of European colonialism and modern-day neo-colonialism has hampered the capacity of Sudan and Libya to claim their rightful places as leaders in the sustainable development of the AU member-states.

The Crisis of Governance in the Republic of Sudan and the Role of Imperialism

Sudan has been in the international media since the eruption of clashes between the two military structures in charge of the administration of the transitional state on April 15. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have long held a position of authority within various governments since independence from British imperialism in 1956. There have been extended periods in the post-colonial political history of Sudan where the military seized control of the government while ruling in the interests of imperialist states and their allies.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) grew out of the military campaign to end the insurgency in the western Darfur region in the first decade of the 21st century. Both institutions, the SAF and RSF, apparently had no intentions of relinquishing political power to the civilian population which had been organized through the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA), the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) and the Resistance Committees which have been essential to the mobilization of mass demonstrations and strikes since emergence of the democratic movement in 2018-19.

Peace negotiations have taken place between the armed opposition groupings in Darfur and the border areas in the Abyei, Blue Nile and South Kordofan regions of the country with the Transitional Military Council (TMC) which was headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and General Mohamed Hamden Dagalo (Hemitti). The character of these discussions over the last four years has resulted in a reconfiguration of alliances in Sudan. After the October 2021 coup carried out by the TMC against the Transitional Sovereign Council (TSC) represented by the then interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, several of the armed opposition groupings within the Sudanese Revolutionary Front (SRF) supported the SAF/RSF coup.

The popular resistance committees along with the other mass and professional organizations, opposition groupings, including the Communist Party, have been deliberately sidelined by the imperialist states along with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and the United Nations in their extensive deliberations on a transitional framework towards a democratic dispensation. A systematic policy of empowering the military apparatus of the Sudanese state has resulted in the current crisis.

Reports indicate that between 700 and 1,000 people have been killed in the fighting since April 15, with an additional 5,000 or more injured. In addition, over 1 million have been displaced with hundreds of thousands being forced across the borders into neighboring states. Hospitals, residential neighborhoods, educational facilities have been paralyzed by the clashes taking place in the Khartoum-Omdurman twin cities. There have been fierce clashes over the control of the airport, military bases and the defense ministry in and around the capital.

The recent eruptions have reignited the fighting in Darfur. Port Sudan on the Red Sea has been the focus of evacuations by foreign states as well as a further militarization by the Pentagon.

It is to be noted that efforts by the Republic of South Sudan to hold talks aimed at achieving a negotiated settlement in the first few days of the war were rejected by the SAF and RSF. Saudi Arabia and the U.S. were the only two states which were able to bring representatives of the two belligerents together in Jeddah where agreements were signed ostensibly to guarantee safe passage for convoys distributing humanitarian aid and for those wishing to evacuate.

However, heavy fighting continues while a lasting ceasefire and sustainable peace agreement has not been realized. The domination of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in the internal affairs of Sudan has complicated the transition to a democratic political system.

Since the early phase of the independent African states in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. intelligence apparatus has often preferred the rule of post-colonial military structures. Ruth First, the South African journalist and social scientist, published a groundbreaking study in 1970 on the role of the armed forces in various states. Her book entitled “Power in Africa”, later renamed, “The Barrel of a Gun”, analyzed the role of the CIA and Pentagon in the destabilization of African states. Even after the eruption of a civil war, U.S. corporations guided by intelligence provided by their operatives set out to control the process of “national reconstruction.”

When the initial Transitional Sovereign Council in 2019-2020 was set up, numerous conditions were laid down by the former U.S. administration of President Donald Trump along with his successor, President Joe Biden, for the “reentry” of Khartoum back into the “international community.” These conditions included, and were not limited to, the repayment of restitution to the survivors of those killed in attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in 2000. Sudan was also required to “normalize” relations with the State of Israel as part of the Abraham Accord initiatives aimed at undermining solidarity with the Palestinian national struggle. The commitment to officially recognize Tel Aviv goes against the Sudanese Israel Boycott Act passed by their parliament in 1958.

The absence of any type of representative government in the Republic of Sudan has opened the floodgates for foreign military and intelligence manipulation and subversion. As Ruth First wrote in Power in Africa as it relates to the role of imperialism in the former Belgian Congo:
“It was as a result of United States preoccupation with the Congo that we have the single major instance of a coup d’etat—two, in fact, in the same country, at an interval of five years—engineered by external forces. Lumumba’s offense was to have asked the Soviet Union, once the West had refused, for transport for his troops to defeat the Katanga secession. The issue was not whether the Congo should have a government headed by Lumumba, Kasavubu, Mobutu or Tshombe; but whether an African state should seek an option other than dependence on the West.” (Armies in Stalemate, p. 420)

The role of the resistance committees has been admirable as reported by some news agencies. They have sought to assist the people in their needs for medical care, food and refuge from the clashes.

An independent Sudanese news agency reported: 

“The resistance committees active in the neighborhoods of eastern Khartoum said in a press statement on Tuesday (May 2) that the usual ‘binary position (with/against the army/ militia), does not concern us as civilians in anyway’. According to the resistance committees, ‘the two positions express a direct interest for each of the parties to the conflict in power,’ while ‘our position necessarily favors the only one affected by this war, the Sudanese people – whom the conflicting parties are attempting to get on their side and their allies, in order to gain popular and political support. ‘The most important position now is the preservation of people’s lives and their livelihood, peace and security, and access to basic services’.” 

In reality, the people of Sudan will be the entity which determines the future of the country. The military and its supporters have been thoroughly exposed for their failure to place the interests of the people above their quest to maintain political and economic power in Sudan. Moreover, the imperialist powers and their allies led by Washington have forfeited the right to have any say related to the stability and development of Sudan.

Libya: A Case Study in Modern Neo-Colonial Destabilization

Twelve years ago in 2011, AFRICOM under the administration of President Barack Obama spearheaded and carried out the destruction of the North African state of Libya, the most prosperous and stable country on the continent. The overthrow of the Jamahiriya government led by Col. Muammar Gaddafi represented the first full scale operation of AFRICOM.

The destruction of Libya was given legal cover by two resolutions, 1970 and 1973, passed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). These measures provided a false narrative for the intervention by the imperialist countries prompting a migration trail which has impacted tens of millions in Africa and other geopolitical regions.

In recent years, Libya has been de facto partitioned by two political groupings in the east and west of the country, neither of which represents the national and class interests of the masses. The developments in this oil-rich North African state represents a stark lesson to the rest of the continent that imperialism and its collaborators must be defeated in order to fulfill the Pan-African project enunciated by the founding documents of the OAU and the AU.

Since 2011, the instability and displacement engineered by the CIA and the State Department has impacted the entire regions of North and West Africa. This mass migration has fueled the human trafficking industry while placing pressure on the military and security structures of the nations of Southern, Central and Western Europe. The phenomenon of conservative and neoliberal administrations is undoubtedly a by-product of the displacement caused by the interventions of the NATO countries and their allies. The campaign of former President Donald Trump in 2016, played up the fears of whites in the U.S. of being overwhelmed demographically by migrants from Mexico and Latin America as a whole.

Imperialism and the Shifting Character of World Politics

However, these regime changes and direct occupations have not brought any relief–let alone prosperity–to the working classes of Western Europe, the United Kingdom and the U.S. since the economic conditions have worsened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply chain shortages in industry and commerce along with an inflationary spiral which has skyrocketed since the early months of 2020. Consequently, the central banks of the capitalist states have raised interest rates, tightened credit availability, prompting layoffs in the high-tech, real estate and service industries. The Biden administration has not come to grips with the drastic changes within the labor market since 2020. Rather than impose price controls on the capitalist corporations, Biden has concentrated on the war in Ukraine which has drained the national treasury of at least $115 billion.

The advent of industrial actions in France and the UK in the early months of 2023 portends much for the current volatility of the world capitalist system. In the U.S., a new leadership in the United Auto Workers (UAW) has withheld—at least for now—an endorsement of Biden in the 2024 presidential race. A key player in the delivery sector, United Parcel Services (UPS), is being threatened with a nationwide strike by workers represented by the Teamsters Union.

At some point it is inevitable that the proletariat in the U.S. will exercise its labor power against the corporate interests. African Americans and Latin Americans, who are mainstays of the Democratic Party electorate, are not content with the institutional and policy neglect of their constituencies by the Biden administration.

The peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean are the natural class allies of the working class and oppressed in the imperialist states. Propagandists for capitalism and imperialism have no solid arguments which support their positions related to the expansion of U.S. and NATO influence throughout the world.

Sudan and Libya are continuing to reveal the negative impact of neo-colonialism in the 21st century. As Nkrumah pointed out in his book “Class Struggle in Africa” published in 1970:

“The African Revolution, while still concentrating its main effort on the destruction of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, is aiming at the same time to bring about a radical transformation of society. It is no longer a question of whether African Independent States should pursue a capitalist or non-capitalist path of development. The choice has already been made by the workers and peasants of Africa. They have chosen liberation and unification; and this can only be achieved through armed struggle under socialist direction. For the political unification of Africa and socialism are synonymous. One cannot be achieved without the other.” (p. 84)

These same axioms enunciated in 1970 holds true for the African Diaspora as well. In the U.S. and Western Europe, the intensification of racist repression and super-exploitation serves to further institutionalize the national oppression of peoples of color. Mass demonstrations and urban rebellions which resurfaced in the aftermath of the police execution of George Floyd, three years ago on Africa Liberation Day 2020, illustrates the potential for revolutionary change in the citadel of world imperialism.

However, it will take the mass mobilization and organization of the most oppressed elements within capitalist society to reach the desired abolition of exploitation and oppression. Undoubtedly, based upon the history of African peoples over the previous six decades, they will play a pivotal role in the elimination of imperialism in the modern world.

***

Author’s Note

These remarks were prepared for and delivered in part at a webinar in honor of the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the African Union (AU) formed in 2002.

This virtual event was sponsored and organized by the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) on Thursday May 25, 2023. Other panelists were Dr. Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a Somali Kenyan and Kenyan citizen. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Horn of Africa Studies and a specialist in political science, conflict resolution, and rural development; Essam Elkorghli, an education specialist who has studied the impact of the United States and NATO destruction of Libya; and the moderator, Yolian Ogbu, a first-generation Eritrean American studying political science and communications. She has served as the youngest Student Government Association (SGA) president in the University of North Texas history on the first all-women of color ticket no less. An organizer at heart, Yolian was also on the National Women’s March 2019 Youth Empower Committee and works within her cohort to increase the wave of civic engagement in young women across the country. The live stream of the webinar can be viewed on Facebook

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.a

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“Having talked to people, having talked and participated in primarily economically-focused conferences, I would say that the Russian economy has been extraordinarily resilient. I mean, if you consider what Joe Biden wanted to do: reduce the Ruble to rubble and, you know, sanction the Russian economy back into the 19th Century. Well, none of this has happened.”

Radhika Desai (From this week’s interview)

“It is highly irresponsible for the leader of Ukraine to be, you know, inculcating in the population this delusional belief that this is a part of the, you know, the contested regions of the country that can be retaken by force. Because that – if they believe him, if they take him seriously, they’re going to continue to support a war which will ultimately end in Ukraine’s destruction. And that’s exactly where this is heading.”

 – Dimitri Lascaris (From this week’s interview)

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Since Global Research’s inception more than twenty-one and a half years ago, the website has been dedicating its efforts to delivering crucial information buried in the mainstream media narratives, documenting NATO imperialist ambitions, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the growing risk of a nuclear war. We uphold truth, peace and justice! [1]

In the case of the current Russo-Ukraine war, especially following the recent talks at the G7 meeting, NATO members are now announcing even more weapons going into Ukraine, and the U.S. granting its Western allies an allowance to supply advanced fighter jets, including America’s F-16s. And they refused even to commit to concrete resolutions to eliminate nuclear weapons or even the right to use them. The summit was ironically conducted in Hiroshima! [2]

But on a grander scale, it seems that Canada, given a history of emphasizing diplomatic tendrils toward other nations, either allies or enemies, is now increasingly abandoning the principle, quoted inappropriately to Winston Churchill as “jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” Canada was the lone G7 country to not engage in any dialogue with Russia over the build-up to the February 24th invasion. Even the top diplomat, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, had not accepted the open invitation to visit Russia. [3]

There are however many Canadians who are advocating intensively for peace talks and a ceasefire negotiations. The peace crusader Tamara Lorincz made a trip to Moscow in defiance of Canadian government sanctions and travel advisories in the name of meeting with the people there. The need to broker a dialogue now by grass roots citizens is necessary if government officials won’t do it.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, like the rest of Global Research, we are endeavoring to see the conflict through the eyes of Russians and others not drowning in a sea of media propaganda about finding a way to peace, rather than “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

Appearing on the show is Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski who studied much of the data around the Maidan Massacre in February of 2014, and reveals the role of fascist elements of the Maidan and their higher level contacts abroad in a coup d’etat! He then talks about the implications at the heart of the war and the prospects that the conflict can possibly reach a peaceful conclusion. This is followed by two other “Canadian ambassadors to Russia” – Dimitri Lascaris and Professor Radhika Desai – about their own journeys recently to “Putin-land,” and what they learned most prominently about what the people on the ground, in official fora and in the streets had to tell them.

Ivan Katchanovski is a Canadian Political Scientist originally born in Lutsk Ukraine. He teaches at the school of political studies at the University of Ottawa and specializes in research in democratization, comparative politics, political communication, and conflicts, in particular, in Ukraine, and especially the origins of Russo-Ukrainian War.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, a journalist and an activist. From 2004 to 2016 he was a member of Canada’s leading class action law firm Siskinds LLP. He now works pro-bono legal cases. In 2020, he ran for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada and placed second with  45.5% of the membership.

Radhika Desai is  Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba in Canada; she edits newcoldwar.org, a project associated with GERG, and is the Convener of the International Manifesto Group.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 393)

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Transcript of Dimitri Lascaris and Radhika Desai, May 23, 2023

Part One

Global Research: Thanks to both of you for joining us. Maybe you can each give us a sketch of the economic situation in Russia. I mean, Radhika, you’ve been to Russia before. Now that sanctions have been levelled against the giant power – the West’s attempt to punish them for their behaviour – what have you noticed about the situation in the centres you visited? I mean, how impoverished are the people? Are their businesses shutting down? Or is there any other major changes from the last time you were there?

Radhika Desai: Sure. I mean, so obviously, there are some big brand name shops which were indeed boarded up, but they were actually few and far between. What I was surprised by is the number of Western firms that are still operating there. Like we saw shops, you know, of Subway and United Colours of Benetton, and then we also saw Citibank branch. So, it’s amazing how many Western businesses are still operating there. So, that’s just on the completely, you know, subjective observational point of view.

But more generally, you know, having talked to people, having talked and participated in primarily economically-focused conferences, I would say that the Russian economy has been extraordinarily resilient. I mean, if you consider what Joe Biden wanted to do: reduce the Ruble to rubble and, you know, sanction the Russian economy back into the 19th Century. Well, none of this has happened. Yes, the Russian economy took a bit of a – back in 2021 – you know, I think it went down a couple of percentage points. But nevertheless, it has proved extremely resilient.

It’s defence production, of course, has been far better than Western countries and it has been brought under planning. And if you ask me, one of the criticisms I heard of the government there, was that it could do a lot more to mobilize the economy on a war footing. And had Putin done that, it wouldn’t even have had a two percent drop, it would have actually boomed. And so, this is the sort of broad picture I’m looking at.

GR: Okay. Dimitri, could you add anything to Radhika’s analysis? I mean, did you see anything that surprised you or impressed you in any way about the state of the economy post-sanctions?

Dimitri Lascaris: Well, I saw no evidence of economy crisis or stress. You know, the shops were full, the shelves were full, the grocery stores were full. The prices, by Canadian standards, I thought were quite reasonable. Also, by European standards, even more reasonable. I completely concur with what Radhika said about the continued presence of, you know, major Western corporations.

I think that my overall impression of the economic situation in Russia is that the country has done remarkably well in adapting to the, you know, a set of sanctions which were quite plainly designed to destroy the economy. And in fact – and I think James Galbraith, an eminent US economist, progressive economist commented recently – what these sanctions have done is actually forced, obliged the Russian government to adopt structural reforms which in the long run are going to make Russia’s economy stronger, more self-sufficient. And if anything – and this is something that The Guardian of all newspapers, it’s intensely pro-Ukraine – acknowledged through its principle economics columnist – his name escapes me for the moment – in an article this week, you know, the sanctions are a failure. And the fact that they’re tightening the sanctions is in fact a sign of how much they have failed.

GR: Now I know that there’s an economic forum, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, it launches next month actually. But it will host not only the BRICS states, but 81 other nations. Yeah, so much for a nation abandoned by the international community, but… The de- dollarization seems to be under discussion which would be devastating under the current circumstances for America, I believe. You know, given with the bank failings or the major banks that are going under. You know, is the – is that economic forum on Russian mines the way, say, the G7 meetings of last week are the talk of the town out here. And is, in particular, is de-dollarization in particular more of a talking point than it is here? Radhika Desai, I know this is right up your alley, you talk about it on your regular show regularly. What do you think?

RD: Well, first of all let me say that the person that Dimitri was thinking of is Larry Elliot. And indeed, for Larry Elliot to come out and say that sanctions are not working is a pretty big deal, particularly considering that as Jimmy Galbraith also said, there is a certain kind of, you know, mutually reinforcing consensus that everybody just sings the same tune in the West, and so, everybody believes the lies that are being put forward.

So, that’s one thing. And secondly, I just wanted to say, these are the sanctions that – you know, there is a very interesting column if you look for Nicolai Petro and sanctions against Russia I’m sure you’d find it. He basically says that the sanctions have not worked, they are not working, but more and more of them keep being slammed on. Why? And he says, they – it’s just like a shaman, you know? That they think that they are going to have an effect. But the effect of these is – there is no effect. But they have no other tricks up their sleeve, so they keep imposing more sanctions. So, you have to understand what a psychological bin d we are – the West is in, you know? They are not working.

Anyway, on SPEC , yes, I would say that it’s a pretty big event and for the Russians, I would say that I’m sure they will be keeping a keen eye on which countries are coming. There is definitely a sense in which the Russians feel that the Western nations have abandoned them. So, they are working double-hard to try to get more allies and more support in the rest of the world. Indeed, one of the other things that happened in one of the conferences I was attending is that the Russians have coined a new term. It’s called the “world majority.” Because the Russians are trying to define what is the grouping they are joining. They are very aware that Russia is not a third world country. Russia is, you know, has a much better, higher standard of living than the overwhelming majority of peoples – of countries that are called “third world.” They have a huge technological sophistication, a very, very highly trained workforce, et cetera. So, they have decided to dub this grouping that they are now joining the “world majority,” which I think is a rather good way of putting it.

And so, I think they will definitely be looking to see who attends, and so on. And I think that, you know, there will be, you know – I think more and more the West is beginning to have to admit, as Larry Elliot’s column shows that, sanctions are not working. And I think the West will have to open up a lot more. There will probably be more Western presence there than we imagine.

On de-dollarization, Russian interest in de-dollarization is not new. I have been there many times, and every – almost every time I ask to speak on a subject that somehow relates to de-dollarization or write on the subject of de-dollarization itself. It’s very important for Russians and I think for the whole world. Because the dollar system – I mean, I have argued in my book Geopolitical Economy that the dollar system never worked. But somehow, this ramshackle machine kept going for a while, but it is actually about to come apart. It’s about to come apart for two reasons: number one, its internal contradictions are mounting.

One of my points I’ve made in various places about the debt ceiling negotiations is it doesn’t matter if they come up with an agreement on the debt ceiling. The fact of the matter is that the market for US Treasuries, which is the foundation of the dollar system, is already deeply troubled. And as the United States – the political dysfunction, economic decline continue, it can only get worse. And I should also add to that, financial mismanagement continues. And financial mismanagement continues because everything has been staked on a low interest rate regime, and now, the financial sector is facing increasing interest rates and that is already leading to bank collapses, bottom following out of various asset markets, and so on. And this is already going to mean that the rest of the world is not going to put its dollars in the dollar system anymore, in the US dollar denominated financial system. And the less that – and this has been going on, by the way, since 2008. The more this accelerates, the closer we come to the end of the dollar system.

One final point – sorry to go on for so long, but one quick final point: the dollar system will not be replaced by another currency taking its place, it is not possible. The dollar system itself was without foundation because it was already not possible when the dollar system was attempted to – it was imposed on the world. And somehow, through various contrivances, it has continued so far. But it is not going to be replaced by any other currency, but by a series of arrangements, inevitably regional, because the US will not take part in them. They will inevitably be regional, but they will be a serious of different arrangements which eventually will, I think, acquire political gains.

GR: Well, for sure. Certainly it was the fact that the dollar was such a powerful force for the United States for so long and it looks like that era is coming to a close. Dimitri, I believe you and Radhika and Al had actually met there for a time. It was concerning the dollarization. I don’t know if you have anything to add, but I wanted to also get you on the question of Crimea. I mean, Zelensky himself had said that his forces would liberate Crimea from Russia and return the people back to Ukraine, but… Talking to the Crimean people there, did you get a sense from anyone that you visited as to the attractiveness of that suggestion?

DL: Not a single person. You know, I don’t want to qualify my answer, but I say that of course, I didn’t conduct any kind of a scientific poll while I was there. I spoke to a few dozen people. Some of them just, you know, ordinary citizens going about their daily jobs —

GR: Were you just in certain areas or did you go pretty much all across the region?

DL: I was all over Crimea. I went to Yalta, I was in Simferopol which is the capital of Crimea. I was in Sevastopol which is, of course, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, the Russian Black Sea Fleet. I went up to the north, the border of Crimea and Kherson region and spoke there with people who were volunteers in a refugee transitional centre, you know, from all over Russia: from Siberia, from St. Petersburg, from Moscow. And I did not encounter a single person who expressed a desire to see Crimea returned to the rule of Kyiv. And in fact, everybody was intensely hostile to that idea.

But at the same time, and this is something that I thought was most impressive, was that I didn’t encounter a single person who expressed hostility towards the people of Ukraine. Their revulsion was directed entirely to the government of Ukraine, and one word that I heard over and over again to describe Zelensky was “comedian.” Nobody takes him seriously, people think that he’s a buffoon. And this notion that the Ukrainian military is going to retake Crimea by force is not one that I think – certainly not one that anybody I met – took seriously.

And I’ll tell you, you know, Michael, based on what I saw, I’m not a military expert. I think the idea that Ukraine is going to take – the military of Ukraine is going to retake Crimea by force is delusional. You know, they’re – the peninsula of Ukraine is attached to the mainland, you might call it, of Ukraine, the peninsula of Crimea is attached to the mainland of Ukraine by two narrow channels of land, each of which is heavily fortified. There are multiple lines of trench works and tank obstacles. They’re flat, they’re wide open, there’s no tree cover. There are no mountainous areas. Each of them is flanked by large bodies of water. And if, you know, the Ukrainian military tried to insert large numbers of forces into those, one or both, of those two narrow bits of land, I imagine that they would be massacred. They would get bogged down and they would be met with ferocious artillery assaults and it would be a pure bloodbath and it would be completely irresponsible for any military political leader of Ukraine to attempt that.

The only other way to retake Crimea would be by an amphibious landing. The problem with that, of course, is that Ukraine has no navy to speak of, whereas Russia has a very powerful naval force, the Black Sea Fleet, circling the waters around Crimea. So, I think that that also would be equally suicidal.

So, you know, you don’t have to take my word for it, you can listen even to, you know, prognostications of people like Antony Blinken and Mark Milley and other pro-Ukraine Western military experts who have, in the last several months, expressed, you know, considerable skepticism about Ukraine being able to take Crimea by force. And I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: it is highly irresponsible for the leader of Ukraine to be, you know, inculcating in the population this delusional belief that this is a part of the, you know, the contested regions of the country that can be retaken by force. Because that – if they believe him, if they take him seriously, they’re going to continue to support a war which will ultimately end in Ukraine’s destruction. And that’s exactly where this is heading.

GR: Hm.

DL: It cannot be said enough: this war is going to end in the destruction of Ukraine. And the harder Ukraine tries, that its military and its government tries to retake territories that are practically beyond their ability to re-conquer, the more Ukrainian people are going to suffer.

-Intermission-

Part Two

GR: Could you talk a little bit about the media? Because I know polls suggest that Putin is way more popular today among Russians than either the Canadian prime minister among Canadians or the American preside nt among Americans. One of the reasons cited by sources is that – the Western sources is that the Putin – Putin’s misinformation is going out on its networks, so the Russian people are not as informed about the war in Ukraine as we in the West, I guess. Based on media you were exposed to while in the country, did you get that sense of patterns of misinformation on the airwaves or any false information appearing or shady facts or anything like that? Radhika Desai?

RD: Well, no. I would say that in Russia, there is a – there is no doubt that there is a section of the population that is not comfortable with the war. There may be certain, shall we say, members of the globalized classes that are, you know, chiefly concerned about their image in the rest of the world and their inability to travel and things like that. But on the whole, I would say that the overwhelming majority of Russians are not against the war. If there is any feeling that there is something wrong, it is that they think ‘Why is this taking as long as it is? Why don’t we simply win it sooner?’

And I completely agree with Dimitri. I – and I think this is a fact worth emphasizing: there is no nationalist, chauvinistic feeling in Russia. What they realize is that had this not – had this war not taken place Russia’s security would have been in danger. And so, they are – they support what has happened, not happily, but reluctantly as something that had to be done.

And I would say that also, I have noticed this for a long time, I hardly know any Russians who don’t have some personal connections, often kinship connections, with Ukraine. And there is a great feeling of sadness that what was once a very close relationship, there is a historical, long-standing relationship between Russia and Ukraine going back hundreds of years, a thousand years probably, and that this is being broken in such a way is a source of great sadness.

And I should also add one final thing: in the West, Putin’s speech in which he referred to this historic closeness of the two nations was interpreted as questioning Ukraine’s right to exist. But this is complete nonsense. If you look at what Russia – how hard Russia tried to keep the border, the post-2014 borders of Ukraine intact – and I can go back into that, if you want. But if you think about how hard they were going to Minsk One Agreement, Minsk Two Agreement, simply to keep that country together, provided that there was some autonomy given to the Russian-speaking minority, you would understand what the Russian position is. It is not to question Ukraine’s right to exist.

If any country has questioned Ukraine’s right to exist, or any part of the world, it is the West. Because again, I’d like to reinforce something Dimitri said: everybody who is talking about supporting Ukraine and giving it all the arms and supporting it as long as it takes, is not supporting Ukraine. It is supporting the destruction of Ukraine.

GR: Hm. Okay, well, I don’t know. Dimitri, I mean, did you see any instances of, say, counter-viewpoints to the government line available in the mainstream – in the press?

DL: I certainly didn’t hear any vigorous criticisms of the Russian government from the left. I heard a fair bit of criticism from – about the Russian government. Not particularly intense criticism, but some modest criticism about the Russian government from what might – one might consider ‘the Right.’ And what I mean by that is that, I heard from a number of people that they felt that the Russian government was being too restrained in how it was dealing with, you know, what they regarded as a far-right Russophobic, militaristic and very threatening regime in Kyiv.

And I should add that, you know, everybody I spoke to did not view this as being a war between Russia and Ukraine. They viewed this as being a war between Russia and NATO, or sometimes they referred to it as the “collective West,” and the Ukrainian government was a corrupt proxy of NATO and the collective West. Some people, a number of people, expressed to me the view that the Russian government should have been more forceful. They also expressed the view that the Russian government should have intervened much earlier before NATO built up the Ukrainian military to the point that it became a difficult adversary, and it has evolved into that.

And by the way, one should – you know, we need to be cognizant of the fact that NATO has pumped into Ukraine – putting aside all the weapons they’ve sent there before the invasion began in February of last year – since then, in the last 15 months or so, the dollar value of the weaponry they’ve put into Ukraine is approximately equivalent to the annual military budget of Russia.

So, it’s not surprising that the Russian people, many of them, feel that they are actually at war with NATO and not Ukraine. And they feel that the government needs to be more forceful about this, some of them do. And that it should have intervened more quickly.

Now, having said all of that, you know, it is a difficult environment and I don’t think this is particularly surprising for a country that is at war with the world’s largest and most aggressive military alliance. And that is, you know, genuinely existentially threatened as Russia is, that it’s difficult to criticize in that environment Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. I think that that is something that one ought to take into account.

But at the same time, you know, polls have shown consistently – and I’ll refer people to the Levada Polling Agency which is widely regarded as a reputable polling agency and one that’s very critical of the Russian government – has shown consistently that the level of support long before the military intervention in Ukraine last year, the support for Vladimir Putin was, you know, never lower, I think in his entire tenure as the president of Russia, than 60 percent. And it’s currently hovering around 80 percent, which obviously is much higher than the, you know, the kinds of approval ratings we see amongst Western leaders. And if you compare the circumstances, the conditions in which Russians lived in the ‘90’s under the drunken buffoon and Clinton-vassal Boris Yeltsin to the living conditions in Russia today, it shouldn’t surprise anybody, frankly, why so many Russians feel a level of appreciation for the president. And not just the president, but the people who surround him, who formed an important part of that government over the past 20 years.

Living conditions in Russia is something that’s not talked about in the West at all – not at all – have improved dramatically during the time that Vladimir Putin has been the president of the country. That’s just a fact. You can consult the World Bank statistics yourself and that will bear it out very clearly. So, we in the West need to start having an honest conversation about why the Russian people support this government and whether it actually is democratic for us to be trying to overthrow it.

GR: Okay. I just have one last question, because I know you’ve got to go in a minute. But I just wanted to know: were you asked a lot of questions about what Canadians are thinking and how did you respond to that? Go Radhika first, and then…

RD: Well, I think that, you know, I feel that obviously, if you look at our mainstream media, whether it is the Globe and Mail or the CBC, there is an unrelenting barrage of anti-Russian propaganda which, at the same time, is exceedingly flimsy. Because there is often never any fact, it’s always ‘Kyiv says this,’ and you know, it is believed that, and sources say this, and so on. So, I would say that, on the one hand, there is this barrage and undoubtedly for a lot of people who may not be thinking, they just end up believing this.

But I have also no doubt that there is a very large section of the Canadian population that does not take the government and dominant media version of things for granted. And indeed, that is why we have seen that there is a lot of interest in alternative news media websites, such as for example, Michael your own, and many others. Because, you know, the fact of the matter is that we’ve been interested in alternative media going back to the 1990’s because already then it was clear, there’s more and more people around the world that are – certainly the Western world – that the dominant media is not giving us the truth. And with this war in Ukraine, the level of smoke and mirrors, the disinformation, the systematic fake news produced by the dominant media has taken on a new level of reality and I think that people realize that.

GR: Okay. And Dimitri, quickly.

DL: On the one hand, I was treated very respectfully when I told people that I’m a Canadian. No one expressed hostility to me because of the fact that I’m Canadian. But I frankly didn’t have the impression that people in Russia are particularly concerned about what Canadians think. And they were very candid about this because they think, and with considerable justification, that the Canadian government, at the end of the day, is just going to do what Washington does. And so, they think the real decision makers in the collective West are in Washington. And it’s not just about Canada, it’s also about, you know, European states, that they are going to follow the lead of the Biden administration. And that’s the real interlocutor and the real opponent of Russia today, the Biden administration.


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Notes:

  1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/twenty-one-years-ago-global-research-embarked-its-mission-spread-truth/5792805
  2. https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2023/05/21/nobel-peace-prize-winner-denounces-g7-failure-to-deliver-on-nuclear-disarmament-in-hiroshima/
  3. Allan Woods (February 25, 2022), ‘Canada supports Ukraine, but why aren’t we talking to Russia?’, The Toronto Star;  https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/02/19/canada-supports-ukraine-but-why-arent-we-talking-to-russia.html

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Background

The governor of the Central Bank of Pakistan, as the former chairman, handed over the presidency to the governor of the Iranian central bank, Mohammad Reza Farzin. Jameel Ahmad said the union can come up with new ideas for alternative currencies that would bring more benefits. Farzin, for his part, expressed hope for more cooperation between the ACU members (ACU = Asian Clearing Union).

The Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has underlined the need for the member states of the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) to trade in their national currencies and other not commonly used currencies.

The CBI governor said that the ACU was established in 1974 with the aim of de-dollarization and using local currencies and fostering barter trade among the nine member countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.

The Vice president of Iran and top banking officials of the member states have attended the meeting. The Asian Clearing Union, that has 9 members, was established in 1974 with the aim of reducing dependence on global currencies, especially the US-dollar. The main objective of the union is to facilitate payments among member countries for eligible transactions.

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PressTV: Could you please comment on dedollarization, Iran’s capability of evading US sanctions?

Peter KoenigAlthough in existence since 1974, the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) has hardly been on the radar of the west in at least almost 50 years. Of course, it is not convenient for the west to show the world that an alternative to the western-controlled SWIFT international transfer system is possible.

Definitely – a strengthened and even enlarged ACU would help Iran and all adhering members to dedollarize.

Dedollarization has already made enormous headways. At present international reserves consist only of a mere 45% of US dollar denominated assets.

Some 20 years ago, 90% or more of all reserves were designated in US dollars. Likewise with trading. Once upon a time, still 10-15 years ago, the US dollar was the main trading currency in the world. No more.

There has been a gradual shift away from trading in US dollars, and instead countries adopted trading in their local currencies, or in a currency of common use by the trading partners, for example the Chinese Yuan.

Latin America – especially Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela – are consistently using local currencies or the Chinese Yuan to avoid the dollar.

Avoiding the dollar is foremost for own protection from US sanctions. Increasingly more country will use this new mode of trading – equitable and peaceful.

PressTV: What about the New World Order?

PK: The New World Order as foreseen by the Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030 is a pipe dream of the west.

It will not happen – as too many countries see through the game and will object, and start creating new alliances as we see already emerging in the east, in the form of the enlarged BRICS+ (Iran), as well as in monetary / exchange terms with the Asian Clearing Union.

These may evolve into parallel economies – eventually leaving the west behind.

Let us not forget, the Global South is part of the Eastern Alliance – and most of the natural resources left on the planet are in the East – Russia is a good example – and in Africa and Latin America.

The west will starve without the resources of the Global South.

Important question but we cannot prove it: Are man-made climate change – ENMOD technologies (Environmental Modification) — causing extreme crop and infrastructure damage, by floods and droughts, cold and heat waves, even causing earthquakes?  It all goes under the indoctrinated narrative of “climate change”.

Most people on planet earth have no clue about the truth. They have been brainwashed with a criminal lie for the last at least 30 years. It is now difficult to convince them of the truth.

Eastern Alliances – and a coordination mechanism, or union, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – will make the East, eastern or alternative economies independent.

After all the East and Global South comprise more than two-thirds of the world population and already now, in its limited form, close to 40% of the world’s GDP.

PressTV: Can you, please, comment on the capacity of Iran’s economy in the region and the world?

PK: Under the new premises of an enhanced ACU, the Iranian economy may expand exponentially – even more so, if the member countries expand and create a common trading / reserve currency like an Asian SDR = ASDR. In this case they would be way ahead of the west.

PressTV: What do you mean by an Asian SDR (Special Drawing Right)?

PK: As mentioned earlier, until recently little was known to the rest of the world about the 1974 created Asian Clearing Union. It is now the moment to activate ACU, expand it, making it a reliable platform for trade and monetary transfers, a force to outmaneuver SWIFT – for eastern alliances, for trading.

In short, ACU should become a fully non-SWIFT trading / money-transfer platform for further dedollarization, as well as for lending eastern economies stability – independence from the western dollar-dominated, sanction-prone SWIFT system.

If possible, more countries may join with “stronger” currencies – China, Russia, and why not ALL BRICS — perhaps ACU may also partner with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to build up strength.

If I may, let me advance an idea – the currencies of participating ACU countries could be grouped into some kind of Asian SDR  where each currency within the Asian SDR – ASDR – would be weighed according to its own economy, and the ASDR could act as a trading currency – as well as a reserve currency for participating as well as non-participating countries.

This concept, at one point, was behind the IMF established Special Drawing Right (SDR) which today consists of the world’s five major currencies – US-dollar, Chinese Yuan, Euro, British Pound and Japanese Yen. They figure within the IMF-SDR with their weighted average according to their country’s economic strength.

However, the SDR has major flaws. The IMF being dominated by the US, the Chinese Yuan is considerably undervalued. Every discussion and argument China wants to engage in with the IMF / US for adjusting the Yuan’s weight within the SDR is being “avoided”.

Therefore, an Asian SDR (ASDR) – could be named differently, applying the principles of the IMF SDR — would be a tremendous step towards dedollarization, towards independence from the western currencies.

ASDRs might not only be used for trading but also as a reserve currency. The more countries join the ACU / ASDR system, the stronger the ASDR, the more pressure to dedollarize the world.

It would allow escaping the “sanctions regime” of the US and Europe and lead into a new more balanced monetary system.

As this new exchange-trade progresses, more countries – even from the so-called west — may join.

A more balanced monetary / economic system – a better equilibrium of the world economy  — is a natural precursor for PEACE.

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Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Brasil – Asfixiar al gobierno de Lula

May 26th, 2023 by Jeferson Miola

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First published on May 15, 2023

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This is an URGENT message from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Team about the World Health Organization’s (WHO) impending Power Grab. If we do not intervene and stop it NOW, WHO will take over power and dominion on all matters of health over and above the sovereignty of WHO member states, and over our right to decide over our own body.

Please sign the petition below.

The World Health Assembly (WSHA) in the week of 21 May 2023 is scheduled to voting on a new set of International Health Regulations (IHR), including an intimately related Pandemic Treaty. If these criminal rules were to be approved; they would abolish some of our basic Human Rights.

These made-to-order rules, would be called “laws”, for which there is no legal basis whatsoever. They would allow WHO to impose their health rules over and above every sovereign country, of over their 194 members.

The mega-monsters behind this planned tyranny have the corrupt UN system on their side. WHO and the UN follow the WEF’s Great Reset Agenda, alias UN Agenda 2030 which pursues identical goals – massive population reduction, the introduction of chipped humans to make them transhumans, also called “cyborgs” and full control of the world and its surviving “cyborgs” under a One World Order (OWO).

A cyborg is a human being whose body has been taken over in whole or in part by electromechanical devices.

On population reduction, read and see this (below) which follows the blueprint of the 1972 written “Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome – which has nothing to do with Rome, and was initiated by Rockefeller — a renown eugenist.

The Club of Rome was created in 1968, by David Rockefeller, Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King, and Co- Presidents: Sandrine Dixson-Declève and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele. The Club of Rome is registered as a tax-free NGO with headquarters in Winterthur, Switzerland.

This article contains a short video by one of the authors of “Limits to Growth”, Dennis Meadows. In this 2017 10-min video, Meadows propagates an inevitable genocide of 86% of the world population, hoping it could be accomplished peacefully under a “benevolent” dictatorship. See video embedded in the article below.

Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” Author Promotes Genocide of 86% of the World’s Population
Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, is a member of the World Economic Forum. (4 May 2023)

Please sign the petition highlighted in the CHD message below. Please circulate this memorandum widely. There is no time to lose.

We, the People, must stand up NOW.

In case this Power Grab, the new revised International Health Regulation (IHR) and related “Pandemic Treaty” are accepted within the coming two to three weeks – it needs a two thirds majority of the voting WHA members to be ratified – to save our human rights and to save our rights over our bodies, We, the People, and, We, Representatives of our Nations, have no choice but to EXIT WHO; to EXIT the entire compromised, bought UN system.


From Children’s Health Defense

In the last three years, we’ve witnessed the obliteration of our rights under the guise of safety and public health measures.

During the pandemic, countries around the world utilized governing bodies to impose mandates, enact executive orders and coerce compliance with untested, unsafe experimental mRNA shots. The people were ultimately stripped from their fundamental rights, restricting our ability to travel, seek proper healthcare, or choose alternative methods to maintain health.

Sign the Health Freedom Bill of Rights.

All of these tyrannical efforts were orchestrated by the government in concert with Big Tech and Big Pharma and propagated by mainstream media. Now the powers that be want this tyranny to continue — so they’re outsourcing it to a group of unelected bureaucrats to usher in a one-world global government.

Despite catastrophic public health failures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) is preparing amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). These amendments would transfer the management of future pandemics to the WHO Director-General, who can deem a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) at will.

The U.N. is preparing a similar “Emergency Platform” at this very moment to be a part of this power grab.

The proposed changes to the legally binding IHR would give WHO unprecedented power over national governments to dictate how we live our lives and the choices we will be allowed to make for our health, freedom, and families. We must oppose this coup d’etat against our constitutional republic and preserve our national sovereignty and fundamental rights.

The Great Reset vs. The Great Freeset. Which side of history will you stand on? Will you allow the ushering in of a one-world government to undermine the powers of sovereign nations and our individual rights, or will you defend your rights and choose freedom?

Here are three things you can do to take part in #TheGreatFreeset

1. Sign the Health Freedom Bill of Rights to let the WHO and the U.N. know that we are paying attention and will not comply with this consolidation of power at the hands of unelected global leaders.

2. Help us send a simultaneous global message! Share this video on all your social media channels tonight, Friday, May 5, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

3. Even though, the date may have past, it is never too late to share this important message. Becoming aware of its contents and standing up against it in unison, may indeed make a difference between life and death.

4. Stay tuned for action alerts and share our campaign to help spread mass awareness of this threat of tyranny that will usher in a one-world government. There is strength in numbers. Please share this campaign far and wide!

It is critical that we act now to protect our nations from these global power grabs. Join us in finding a new way forward!

In solidarity,

The Team at Children’s Health Defense

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Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Bayer Head Admits COVID-19 Vaccine Is Gene Therapy

May 26th, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

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First published on September 23, 2022

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Stefan Oelrich, head of Bayer’s pharmaceuticals department, admitted at the World Health Summit that the COVID-19 vaccine is gene therapy. He smugly stated that the drug companies knew people would reject the vaccine if they knew it was in fact a gene-altering injectable. They lied to us for profits as the vaccine certainly did not prevent anyone from contracting or transmitting the virus.

“If we had surveyed two years ago if people were willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate,” Oelrich admits while forgetting many took the “gene therapy” through force.

Twitter has already flagged retweets of this video as “misleading.” The conspiracy theorists who were told they had no place in society were right as Big Pharma and governments worldwide used the public as guinea pigs for the largest gene therapy study in history. We still do not know the long-term health implications but have seen a variety of health issues and lingering side effects in the short-term. Revolutions have occurred over much less.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense