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“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.” – Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light
Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies to increase exponentially in number and frequency with the result that people’s minds have become like 7-Eleven stores, open 24/7 for snack-crap “news.”
But once you become conscious that it’s lies night and day, it sets your head aswirl and plunges your soul into depths of despair. You are tempted to retreat from such knowledge and talk of trees and trivia. But you are ashamed of your country. It’s hard to laugh. You feel you are drowning. You flounder and gasp for air. You look around and wonder why most people are able to go their merry ways believing the lies and whistling in the dark. Junk news nation, indeed.
Yes, there are alternative voices who tell the truth, but their audiences and monetary support are very small or non-existent compared to the corporate mainstream media and those who shout and scream across the Internet as they take in a lot of money from naive followers.
The recent revelations about Alex Jones’s wealth probably don’t bother his diehard fans, but they should. Likewise, the funding sources for websites and writers of various persuasions are important to know, for they reveal possible biases in their work. Snake oil salesmen are commonplace, and there are many naive customers lining up for their wares.
Wealth and power are the main drivers of the media chicanery that has captured so many minds. Writers, of course, should be fairly paid for their work, but in this Internet age, most are not. As with the movies and book publishing, the income gap between the big names – the celebrity stars – and less well-known writers, even if their work is excellent, is huge.
Some sites and writers make a lot of money, but who they are is a guessing game. No one’s talking. Some regularly tell their readers that if they don’t receive enough contributions, they will be unable to continue to write or publish, even when the sites do not pay their contributors. Whether this is good marketing or income-by-threat is up for grabs. Whichever it is, it seems to work, as far as I can tell, for these writers and websites don’t disappear.
Money is the dirty secret of all news and commentary. To paraphrase someone: It is very difficult to get truth from writers whose income is dependent on pleasing those who fund them.
You may have noticed how many former military officers, CIA agents, mainstream journalists, pharmaceutical company executives, and sundry other government and corporate bigwigs appear in the mainstream and alternative media to support or oppose government policies. The mainstream ones doing the propaganda they always did, while the alternative ones appear as converts to the dissident faith. No one ever explains how and by whom these people are financed or how their lucrative pensions affect their consciences. “Former” is a funny word. Ha Ha Ha.
Confidence “men” come in all shapes and sizes with no one talking money.
So let me fess up. I received about $200 in support last year for edwardcurtin.com, my website. Nothing before that and not a cent over the last 5-6 years for many hundreds of articles that have appeared very widely across the Internet. Before the Internet, publications paid for work, mine and others. Not now, at least for me. How much money writers are receiving, and who is supporting their sites, is a taboo subject.
So I am thinking about selling mugs at my site with my name and mug shot on them and a line of supplements that will increase one’s testosterone and estrogen in equal measure to make sure no one takes offense in this era of delicate feelings. Ha Ha Ha. Yes, the joke is on us. I identify as a man since I am one. Don’t be offended.
Jokes aside, as Leonard Cohen sang:
“Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free”
If you are stubborn enough and have the good fortune to find inspiration from those brave dissidents who have gone before us and those who continue to lead us on, you realize silence is betrayal and that you must speak, even if all seems hopeless at times. Even when no one is paying you, or maybe more accurately, because no one is paying you. Even though it is hopeless, even though it isn’t. This is another secret. There are many.
It’s been twenty years since the U.S. brutally invaded Iraq. When George W. Bush, at a staged pseudo-event in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” no one laughed him out of the house. His claim was simply an evil joke that was reported as truth. It was all predictable, blatant deception. And the media played along with such an absurdity, which is their job and what they always do. I pointed it out at the time in a newspaper column, but who listened to a hick writer in a regional newspaper.
Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S. But the mainstream media, Senator Joe Biden, politicians galore, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey with her guest, the eventually disgraced Judith Miller of the New York Times, the despicable Tony Blair, et al., all supported Bush’s blatant lies. Soon Colin Powell, the “hero” of George H. W. Bush’s 1991 made-for-TV Gulf War of aggression against Iraq, would do his Pinocchio act at the United Nations and the U.S. military was off to get Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden’s evil twin, both the latest Hitlers until Vladimir Putin replaced them. I guess I skipped some others such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Al-Assad. New Hitlers proliferate so fast it’s hard to keep track of them. Ha Ha Ha. The joke is on us.
As everyone knows, or should, more than a million Iraqis died because of George W. Bush, but how many cared? How many cared when once Bush was gone, Barack Obama, aided and abetted by the cackling Hilary Clinton, destroyed Libya and ignited the war against Syria? You want examples? There are too many to name here. But let it be said these lies span all American administrations, whether it’s Bill Clinton continuously bombing Iraq and Serbia through Trump bombing Syria and Somalia, up to the present day with Biden attacking Russia via Ukraine, etc. All these presidents are liars, but their followers treat them otherwise. Biden says Jimmy Carter asked him to deliver his eulogy. What does that tell you? Shall we laugh? Sing?
On the clear understanding
That this kind of thing can happen
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh harder if I mention the Covid-19 propaganda and all those writers who have failed to even address it, as they have failed to question 9/11 and other obvious official lies? Is it not evident that if they did so, their money flows might dry up? Here and no further is a widespread rule, for they must adhere to the boundaries imposed by “responsible thought” and the “no go” zones with which they tie their own hands in order to keep their wallets full.
If you are lucky, as I was, when you are young you discover how fearful of free thought and how corrupt our institutional authorities are. You don’t spend decades feasting off the spoils of those institutions only to “wake up” once you have made your name and secured your fortune, which seems to be the way of so many wise luminaries of the Internet Age who are either trying to ease their consciences as they get ready to kick the bucket or are perhaps putting us on.
When I was twenty-four years-old, I accepted my first teaching job at a small Catholic college where I taught theology. I had been trained in the latest and best scholarly work of the most renown international theologians. Rather than indoctrinating my students with rote learning, I taught them to read widely and think deeply in the tradition of a liberal arts education. To seek out the best scholarship.
But doing so became quickly apparent to the college and Church authorities who were stuck in the inquisitorial age of obedience or else and no thinking allowed. Although my students loved my courses and felt freed up for the first time to think about their spiritual lives, I was hounded to correct my heretical teaching, which of course I refused to do.
At one point when I was at lunch in the cafeteria, a nun who was a professor, stole my brief case with my notes and left the cafeteria. One of my students saw her do this and chased her into the ladies’ room where the nun hid in a stall. The nun kept flushing the toilet to scare the student away, but the student wouldn’t let her out until she returned the briefcase. Ha Ha Ha. It sounds funny to recount but was an example of my experience at this college. Someone vandalized my office door and ripped down anti-war posters that were on it. I was gone from that college soon thereafter. It taught me a lot. Obey or else.
Heresy: The Latin word is from Greek hairesis, a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice.
At another teaching job a year or so later, I had a more chilling experience. I was known as an anti-war activist, a conscientious objector from the Marines, etc., and one day, a late Friday afternoon when few were around, an administrator asked to meet me on a deserted stairwell where he proceeded in hushed tones to try to convince me to join him in Army Intelligence to spy on others. He said I would be perfect for the job since I was known as an anti-war dissident. I told him to fuck off, but I was shocked by his double life and his request.
I have since learned that this guy the spy was not an anomaly, for government confidence men are widespread.
I’ve had many other such early experiences for which I am very grateful, even though when I was fired from jobs and lost income it was traumatic at the time. By my thirtieth year, I knew the system was corrupt to its core and subsequent experience has only ratified that conclusion. I got the joke.
I recount these incidents not because my experiences are singular and I’m special, for others have suffered the same youthful fate. But such good fortune can fortify you for life or break your spirit. If the former, you don’t wait to retire to push back against all the lies or regret your past. You find that it’s all good and life has set you on the heretic’s path of freedom and choice. You realize that what you went through is absolutely nothing compared to people around the world who have and continue to suffer at the hands of the U.S. military industrial complex. You realize your experiences are trivial in the larger scope of things and that your government’s conduct is beyond condemnation. It is an abomination. You feel ashamed to live in a land where killing is a game.
The sociologist Peter Berger puts it well in his little classic, Invitation to Sociology, when he discusses experiences that lead to seeing through the play-acting nature of social life:
Experiences such as these may lead to a sudden reversal in one’s view of society – from an awe-inspiring vision of an edifice made of massive granite to the picture of a toy-house precariously put together with papier mâché. While such metamorphosis may be disturbing to people who have hitherto had great confidence in the stability and rightness of society, it can also have a very liberating effect on those more inclined to look upon the latter as a giant sitting on top of them, and not necessarily a friendly giant at that. It is reassuring to discover that the giant is afflicted with a nervous tick.
Notice the giant George W. Bush’s clicking eyes as he delivers his “facing clear evidence of peril” lies for the invasion of Iraq. He and his presidential good friends are cardboard cartoon characters whose eyes reveal their evil intentions. “It’s a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be,” but it would all fall to pieces if it weren’t for you and me failing to see through all the bad actors, not just presidents but the whole cast of characters that populate the Spectacle of news and opinion.
The Russians are coming! Ha Ha Ha. Yes, Oliver, the joke’s on us.
But it’s not really funny, except in the most sardonic and dark way, for we now do really face clear evidence of peril as a result of Biden and his crazy predecessors who have run U.S. foreign policy for so long. They have brought us to the edge of nuclear war with Russia by surrounding Russia with NATO bases and nuclear weapons, while doing the same to China.
Bertolt Brecht was right in his poem “To Those Born After”:
Truly I live in dark times!
Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrible news.
What kind of times are these, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
When the man over there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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A TAROM Boeing 737-800, registration YR-BGK performing flight RO-7673 from Timisoara (Romania) to Hurghada (Egypt) with 184 passengers on board, was enroute at FL370 about 150nm south of Bucharest in Bulgarian Airspace when the first officer reported the captain had become incapacitated and they needed to turn around and divert to Bucharest. The aircraft landed safely on Bucharest’s runway 26R about 80 minutes after departure. (click here)
The aircraft remained on the ground for about 90 minutes, then departed again.
The airline reported the “medical emergency of one of the members of the command crew” prompted the crew to divert to Bucharest.
According to media reports in Bulgaria the captain (30 years of age) complained about chest pain and increased heart rate, then fell unconscious. The captain is on his way to recovery.
On Mar 27th 2023 Romania’s AIAS announced: “On 25.03.2023, around 17:21 local time, AIAS was notified about the occurrence of a civil aviation event at Henri Coandă Airport, Otopeni, in which the Boeing B738 aircraft, registered YR-BGK, was involved, which carried out an emergency landing. There are no victims. The event is being investigated by AIAS.”
Seventh pilot incident this month
March 25, 2023 – TAROM Flight RO-7673 TSR-HRG diverted to Bucharest as 30 yo pilot had chest pain, then collapsed
March 22, 2023 – Southwest Flight WN6013 LAS-CMH diverted as pilot collapsed shortly after take-off, replaced by non-Southwest pilot (click here)
March 18, 2023 – Air Transat Flight TS739 FDF-YUL first officer was incapacitated about 200NM south of Montreal (click here)
March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off (click here)
March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight UA2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains (click here)
March 11, 2023? – British Airways (CAI-LHR) pilot collapsed in Cairo hotel and died, was scheduled to fly Airbus A321 from Cairo to London (click here)
March, 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia Flight VA-717ADL-PER Adelaide to Perth flight was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure. (click here)
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
Featured image is licensed under GFDL 1.2
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.”
If mass psychosis entails a detachment from reality, then Westerners in particular are suffering from mass-psychosis on myriad issues. Now more than ever. In terms of government policies this manufactured illness is well-planned and deliberate. The media, in lockstep with the government, is owned and controlled by media cartels.
On episode 27 of the show we are joined by Vladimir Zakharov, a specialist in Chinese language and literature, diplomat and orientalist. For many years he worked at the embassy of the USSR, and then of the Russian Federation in Beijing. Former Deputy Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and senior lecturer of the Faculty of World Economy and World Politics, Higher School of Economics.
Massive anti-regime protests, unprecedented in their size and scope erupted on March 26- 27 in cities and towns across the state of Israel. The political crisis in Israel brought a surprising admission from the highest level of the U.S. government regarding its real relationship with the country.
Being the scapegoat of tribal lore cast out with the heavy weight of sins remains a popular political motif. Supposedly noble soldiers, by way of example, are punished for not adhering to the rules of war. In breaching the codes of killing and the protocols of acceptable murder, they are banished from a realm supposedly wrapped in law.
In an 8-1 vote, the Detroit City Council signed off on awarding two billionaires a tax incentive valued at $800 million despite broad independent opposition to the scheme. Known as “District Detroit”, the plan advanced by the owners of Illitch Holdings and Stephen Ross and Related Companies, would ostensibly result in the construction of and repurposing of several buildings near the downtown area.
The crisis of American national power has begun. America’s economy is tipping over, and Western financial markets are quietly panicking. Imperiled by rising interest rates, mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries are losing their value. The market’s proverbial “vibes”—feelings, emotions, beliefs, and psychological penchants—suggest a dark turn is underway inside the American economy.
On March 17th 2023, Member of Parliament (MP) Andrew Bridgen made an important speech in the U.K. Parliament asking ministers to critically consider the risks as well as the benefits for the Covid vaccines. Bridgen is one of the only MPs to highlight vaccine safety concerns and has been suspended from the Conservative Party on supposedly unconnected but obviously spurious grounds.
Contrasts? What do you mean? Simple. The astonishing divergence between what the carefully-controlled U.S. media depict as normal in Iran and the reality of the situation in the country. I know more than the average American journalist because, with some others, I’ve just returned from a week in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Diana is currently bleeding gastrointestinal and needing blood transfusions about every 2-3 weeks to sustain a normal level. She is unable to work and functions at a slow pace and is on a strict low sodium diet.
During the World Government Summit 2023, which was held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on February 13-15, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, proclaimed that whoever controls the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution will be the master of the world.
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Massive anti-regime protests, unprecedented in their size and scope erupted on March 26- 27 in cities and towns across the state of Israel. The political crisis in Israel brought a surprising admission from the highest level of the U.S. government regarding its real relationship with the country.
Demonstrations which had been taking place every Saturday night since mid-January exploded in numbers on Sunday, March 26, when huge protests followed the firing of the “Defense” Minister, Yoav Gallant earlier the same day. Gallant was dismissed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for speaking out against a plan for “judicial reform” that if adopted would constitute a legislative coup. The “reform” would be a crucial first step opening the door for a wide-ranging series of reactionary measures by the coalition of extreme religious fundamentalists and unabashed fascists who dominate the present government.
On March 26, hundreds of thousands took to the streets and much of the country was shut down by a general strike the following day. This came after thousands of military reservists announced that they would not report for duty in protest of the plan. On March 27, Netanyahu announced that a final vote would be postponed for three weeks, obviously hoping that the interlude would diminish opposition energy.
The glaring omission
The glaring omission in the demonstrations has been any mention of those who are the primary targets of the new regime – the Palestinian people. Even participation by Palestinians living inside the 1948 borders of Israel with the Palestinian flag has been discouraged or, in some cases, prevented. Instead, the protests have been seas of blue and white Israeli flags.
The fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Givr announced that anyone carrying a Palestinian flag in the Jerusalem protests would be arrested and jailed. He was saved the trouble of carrying out his threat by the protest organizers who made it clear that they didn’t want to “confuse” the message that this is a family dispute among Israel-loyal Zionists. Video of attacks on the tiny handful who dared to unfurl Palestinian flags by protest participants as well as security forces have been widely circulated.
In exchange for tolerating the pause in voting on the judicial reform, Ben-Givr was promised by Netanyahu that he would be able to set up a “national guard” under his direct command. Such a new military formation is expected to be composed of thousands of volunteers from the most fascistic elements of Israeli society and carry out horrible atrocities against Palestinians.
Leaders of the Israeli protests say that they are fighting for democracy. But it is not possible to speak of democracy in any real sense inside an apartheid system. Under the defunct South African apartheid system, whites could vote, go to court, print newspaper, etc. But no one could credibly call apartheid South Africa a “democracy,” and no one today can credibly claim that Israel does not have an apartheid. system. Apartheid is an international crime.
The day before taking office in late December 2022, Netanyahu issued a statement declaring that the new government’s top priority is to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev Desert, the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria [West Bank].” The Negev and Galilee are areas inside the 1948 borders of the Israeli state that have large Palestinian populations.
Netanyahu’s statement was nothing less than an announcement of his intention to carry out ethnic cleansing, the most extreme undemocratic policy imaginable. But this blatant threat is ignored – or condoned – by the opposition political leaders and protest organizers.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army and its fascist settler partners continue their rampage of terror across the occupied West Bank. There, especially in the northern West Bank cities and refugee camps, the occupiers are facing growing armed resistance.
The Israeli Supreme Court – Myth & Reality
The characterization by the present government and its supporters of Israel’s Supreme Court as a bastion of “leftism” and support for Palestinian human rights has no basis in reality. While the court has made rulings supporting democratic rights in Israel, it continues to validate nearly all attacks on Palestinian rights. It has upheld or ignored countless blatant violations of international law in regard to the occupation.
Among the most egregious violations upheld by the court are the massive building of settlements on occupied land, and the dual criminal justice systems for Palestinians and Israel settlers living in the West Bank. Palestinians endure life under military law and emergency decrees copied from the British colonizers’ regulations. The conviction rate for Palestinians is 99.4%. The settlers live under Israeli civilian rule.
In a February 14 opinion piece for the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Nathaniel Berman wrote of the court at times ruling that the government was not proceeding quickly enough in its illegal actions against Palestinians. Berman cited a recent ruling regarding the expulsion of hundreds of residents of the Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar in violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The decision was written by Justice Noam Sohlberg, himself a West Bank settler. Even on the few occasions where the court has ruled in favor of the Palestinians, the decisions have often been ignored by the military or the government.
The Khan Al-Ahmar ethnic cleansing case, like all violations of Palestinian rights, is not on the radar of the Israeli protest organizers.
Why, then, is the regime so determined to permanently weaken the court system? The answer is that Netanyahu and his coalition partners are driven by a determination to remove all obstacles to their expansionist and regressive vision of the future. At the same time, Netanyahu, facing long-standing corruption charges, would very much like to choose his own judge if ever forced back into court.
Out of crisis comes a surprising admission
Given the $3.8 billion in military aid and the invaluable diplomatic/political protection provided by the U.S. to Israel, Washington’s view is of the utmost importance to any Israeli government. The inclusion of undisguised fascists and other extraordinarily regressive ministers doesn’t comport well with the time-worn notion of Israel as ”the only democracy in the Middle East.”
For a while, U.S. leaders have tried to play down the crisis, with President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and others making repeated bland statements about “shared values,” etc.
But the firing of Gallant, an ally and a proven practitioner of war and occupation, sent a shock wave through the White House and the Pentagon as reflected in a statement from the U.S. National Security Council: “We are deeply concerned by the ongoing developments in Israel, including the potential impact on military readiness raised by Minister Gallant, which further underscores the urgent need for compromise.”
So, there it is. All the talk about “shared values” and “friendship” is just that, talk. The real concern in Washington is about Israel’s readiness to play its assigned military role in the U.S. empire, the role for which it is so lavishly rewarded.
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Being the scapegoat of tribal lore cast out with the heavy weight of sins remains a popular political motif. Supposedly noble soldiers, by way of example, are punished for not adhering to the rules of war. In breaching the codes of killing and the protocols of acceptable murder, they are banished from a realm supposedly wrapped in law. In doing so, commanding officers, policy makers and politicians are left, purified, their dirt shed.
In the context of war crimes, the subordinate and the minion often take centre stage, heaped upon with sins like a tribal scapegoat and sent out into the metaphorical, prison wild. For the moment, such a figure is Australian Special Air Service trooper Oliver Jordan Schulz. That he is the sole figure so far is not going to impress the fair minded, though there may be others to follow.
In a joint statement between the Office of the Special Investigator and the Australian Federal Police, Schulz is alleged to have murdered an Afghan man during the course of his deployment in Afghanistan with the Australian Defence Force. He is being charged with one count of War Crime, specifically murder under the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). The ABC reports that the victim was Dad Mohammad, slain in May 2012 in central Uruzgan province as he lay helpless in a wheat field.
Speaking in the Downing Centre local court on March 28, magistrate Jennifer Atkinson made a number of remarks. The executed man “was quiet and not resisting.” Schulz “turns towards the Afghan man and shoots towards him three times. The man appears to go limp after the first shot.”
Mohammad, according to the allegations against the defendant, “was not taking an active part in the hostilities”. The defendant “knew, or was reckless as to the factual circumstances establishing that the person was not taking an active part in the hostilities”.
The OSI was established to pursue the findings of the 2020 Brereton Report, also known by its lengthier title as the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force’s Afghanistan Inquiry Report. Sharing joint responsibility with the AFP, the office is charged with investigating “allegations of criminal offences under Australian law, arising from or related to any breaches of the Laws of Armed Conflict, by members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in Afghanistan from 2005 and 2016.”
The prosecution of Schulz is clearly designed to prevent the prying eyes from personnel based at the International Criminal Court. As a few legal authorities have written, “It seems certain that Australia would not want ICC scrutiny of its conduct in Afghanistan nor the embarrassment of the ICC stepping in to prosecute Australian military personnel.”
The prosecution is already attracting international attention. According to Human Rights Watch, it provides “an important opportunity for authorities to uphold the rule of law by ensuring respect for the fair trial rights of the accused, including the presumption of innocence of any individual charged with criminal offense, and ensuring accountability for war crimes.” It also sows the seeds of concern among the soldiers of other military forces deployed to Afghanistan during that same period.
The nagging worry here is that the military and political higher-ups are going to be given a convenient, well-oiled exoneration. Exonerated, the politicos and deskbound army wonks, who made critical decisions thousands of miles away, will be exempt, professing ignorance about the activities of a few bad apples in the Special Forces. Never mind why those apples were there in the first place.
The law will not necessarily be of much help here, beyond targeting the lower elements of foot soldiery. Doctrines of command responsibility require an adequate formulation of the “guilty mind”, otherwise known as mens rea. The pressing point in such a context is assessing what standard of knowledge is relevant: strict liability, constructive knowledge (that the commanders ought to have known about the crimes), or actual knowledge?
As Douglas Guilfoyle has observed, both the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and Australian law tend to exclude strict liability and actual knowledge, yet “contain different formulations of what falls between.” In a co-authored piece, Guilfoyle also notes that international law generally attaches “liability to commanders who, given the circumstances, should have known crimes were being or had been committed.”
The Brereton Report has done a remarkable disservice in shielding the chain of command in terms of operational awareness, and makes no mention of the political process that led to the deployment of such soldiers in Afghanistan in the first place. As the report improbably asserts, there was “no evidence that there was knowledge of, or reckless indifference to, the commission of war crimes, on the part of commanders at troop/platoon, squadron/company or Task Group Headquarters level, let alone at higher levels such as … Joint Operations Command, or Australian Defence Command.” Nor was “there any failure at any of those levels to take reasonable and practical steps that would have prevented or detected the commission of war crimes.”
The practice of frequently rotating commanders above the patrol level in the Afghanistan theatre, and the nature of how information was compartmentalised, have served to ignore culpability for practices in the field of battle.
This is not to say that a number of senior officers are not concerned by what Schulz’s trial promises. As The Australianreports, citing a military source, “Individuals who were commanding the soldier, right up the chain of command for as high as the defence team can justify, should reasonably expect to be called into court.” The defence team could then point to various “chain-of-command deficiencies”, among them the practice of repeatedly redeploying special service soldiers despite concerns about their state of mind.
Exposing such practices, and their source, would not only be fitting but just. We are otherwise faced with that convenient and all too regular spectacle: that of a soldier punished in isolation from the war machine that emboldened him to kill in the first place.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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***
In an 8-1 vote, the Detroit City Council signed off on awarding two billionaires a tax incentive valued at $800 million despite broad independent opposition to the scheme.
Known as “District Detroit”, the plan advanced by the owners of Illitch Holdings and Stephen Ross and Related Companies, would ostensibly result in the construction of and repurposing of several buildings near the downtown area.
What was so egregious about this proposal is that in 2014 a similar project was approved by the-then City Council. The District Detroit iteration of nearly a decade ago came during the concluding months of the contrived bankruptcy trial which further ensnared the majority African American municipality in an institutionalized subservience to the white-dominated financial institutions and corporations.
In 2014, the City Council gave away $400 million in tax incentives to the Illitch family. Just three years later, the cost overruns had doubled the expenses associated with this project which only resulted in the building of Little Caesars Arena (LCA). This venue houses the Detroit Pistons and Red Wings. There are periodic concerts where during the summer of 2022, a homecoming show featuring Anita Baker, tickets sold for as much as $1100. These prices are way above the affordability of most people living in the city. (See this)
However, as pointed out even by several corporate media outlets which dominate the narrative within the city limits and nationally, the Illitch Holdings firms did not fulfill their previous promises of building apartments, restaurants, bars and other businesses in the same area which was formerly known as the Cass Corridor. This raises the question as to why the City Council would approve yet another financial gift to those same corporations that have done nothing to curtail poverty, underdevelopment and economic injustice in the city? (See this)
Cass Corridor had become known as one of the most underdeveloped districts in Detroit where people had yearned for some type of economic investment that would improve their living standards. However, what came was the forced removal of thousands due to foreclosures, evictions under the guise of fostering “development”.
In an article published by the Detroit Metro Times in regard to the renewed tax giveaways: “Detroit City Council on Tuesday (March 28) approved more than $615 million in tax incentives for two white billionaire developers — the Ilitch family and Stephen Ross — to build new residential units, hotel rooms, and office space in areas that should have already been transformed. Following more than two hours of public comment, the council voted 8 to 1 in favor of the transformational brownfield tax incentives for the $1.5 billion District Detroit proposal. In all, the tax incentive package is worth nearly $800 million. The total cost of the project is roughly $1.5 billion.” (See this)
Development and Underdevelopment in Detroit
A concerted propaganda and psychological warfare campaign by the local ruling class interests framed the District Detroit project in the same fashion as it was articulated nearly a decade ago, that the awarding of tax-captured funds from city residents would provide thousands of jobs for the majority Black and growing Brown population groups. Millions are already taken from the tax coffers of the poor and working class in Detroit to provide funding for the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) and Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC). These funds taken through tax captures drain resources from public libraries, schools, transportation and other services.
Nonetheless, the city of Detroit remains the most underdeveloped and oppressed municipality in the United States. A poverty rate of 42% makes the city the poorest in the U.S.
Although the official rate of impoverishment is 42%, there are census tracts within the city where the rate of poverty exceeds 80%. These figures have not substantially improved since the imposition of the illegally imposed regime of emergency management and bankruptcy during 2013-2014. People have continued to leave the city while the incentives provided to corporations which are owned by whites have done nothing to enhance the overall status of African Americans and people of Latin American descent. (See this)
In 1950, Detroit had a population of 1.2 million people, the fourth largest in the U.S. Over the last 73 years, half of the people have either abandoned or been forced out of the city, leaving 610,00 residents. During the census period of 2000-2010, approximately 25% of the people left Detroit largely due to systematic disinvestment along with the targeting of its majority African American community in regard to predatory bank lending.
Tens of thousands of homes were foreclosed leaving entire neighborhoods desolate and underdeveloped. Jobs fled the state of Michigan in their millions while the state and municipal governments refused to impose moratoriums on plant closings, home foreclosures and evictions. This failure to confront the banks and corporations has rendered the governance structures administratively dysfunctional.
This dysfunctionality continues as the decades-long course of granting tax incentives to the wealthiest interests operating in the state has not resulted in the restoring of the levels of population, homeownership and household income.
Prior to the Great Recession beginning in 2007-2008, Detroit was a majority homeownership city, a fact which distinguished the majority African American and working class population from other municipalities such as New York City. Over the previous decade-and-a-half, the homeownership levels have been reversed making Detroit a majority renter city. Rents are increasing at an annual rate forcing African Americans, working class people and the impoverished out of the city as many have moved to other states seeking economic opportunities and social amenities.
Over the last decade there have been many development proposals advanced in the Downtown, Midtown and New Center areas of Detroit. Most of these announced projects have not materialized. The Hudson site location on Woodward downtown has been scaled back and remains uncompleted. The Hudson site is being led by billionaire Dan Gilbert who received millions in tax breaks as an incentive to initiate and complete the building.
Scores of longtime and start-up businesses and championed development projects in Detroit have collapsed. Hotels, restaurants, office spaces and other facilities are abandoned recreating blight which the corporate mayoral and city council functionaries have falsely claimed are a phenomenon of past decades.
In late 2022, the City Council, despite widespread opposition, authorized an additional $60 million in tax breaks for Dan Gilbert for the incomplete Hudson project. In addition to the tax incentives given to Gilbert, assessed municipal and state revenues generated by the employees of this incomplete deal would not go back to the public governing structures. The taxes would go right into the corporate coffers of the Gilbert corporations.
A Failed Urban Development Model Made Obsolete by the Burgeoning Financial Crisis
Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent economic impact has prompted major changes in the labor market. Hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses throughout the U.S. have been shuttered leaving millions displaced.
Since the declarations by the administration of President Joe Biden and the Supreme Court saying in essence that the pandemic is over, the economic development models in force prior to 2020, have been seriously destabilized. Many corporations are having their employees work from home curtailing the need for office space in municipal settings. This downsizing of physical office buildings will make many of the projects which purportedly served as the ideological basis for Tax Incremental Financing (TIF), such as capturing the revenue of the workers and poor to build skyscrapers and entertainment districts, will become even more unsustainable.
According to a report published in January 2023 related to the increasing loan default by commercial property owners:
“As borrowing expenses surge and downtown offices remain deserted, even major corporations are realizing their miscalculations. The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a ‘seismic shift’ in commercial real estate, enabled by technology, as millions of people were compelled to work remotely for the first time. Seven trophy buildings, including a San Francisco tower leased to Elon Musk’s Twitter, were subject to approximately $1.7 billion worth of mortgage defaults by Columbia Property Trust. However, this company was not the only one to default; Brookfield Corp., one of the world’s largest property owners, also defaulted on two Los Angeles skyscrapers, with one of them being named after accounting firm Deloitte. Recent loan defaults are part of a strategy to extend payment periods or negotiate improved loan terms. However, in some instances, building owners are surrendering their properties to lenders, indicating that they have given up on ownership.” (See this)
Therefore, these tax giveaways by the corporate-controlled municipal governance structures such as the Detroit City Council will only result in further economic distress where the working and impoverished are coerced into providing financial guarantees for the unprofitable so-called development projects of the ruling class. The dystopian illusions of the politicians are facilitated by the billionaires while the masses fall deeper into impoverishment.
This system of urban underdevelopment and displacement must be overthrown by the people through their organized efforts utilizing general strikes and insurrection. The working class and nationally oppressed can only win their rightful place within the cities by a political transition to socialism.
Under socialism the wealth generated by the workers will be shared equitably by people irrespective of national origin and class status. As the cities continue in their inevitable decline, the potential for revolutionary movements to arise aimed at defeating capitalism will provide the opportunities for genuine liberation and social emancipation of the majority.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Elena Herrada speaks to local media against $800 million tax giveaway to the rich controlling Detroit (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
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According to UNICEF Afghanistan’s Twitter account, this number means an average of two children every day.
“Last week, 8 children lost their lives due to unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan,” UNICEF Afghanistan said. “They lost their lives playing with unexploded ordnance and collecting metal scraps to sell.”
No details were provided in the tweets about the recent deaths.
The Directorate of Mine Action Coordination said that it has cleared more than 100,000 square meters of land in Afghanistan.
“We have more than 60 awareness teams in Afghanistan. The video clips about public awareness have been made and the teams are going to the rural areas and villages to increase people’s awareness,” said Qari Nooruddin Rustam Khail, head of the directorate.
Residents of Kabul expressed concerns, saying that children collect metals to sell because of poverty.
The residents said their lack of awareness about ordnance caused them harm.
“Due to poverty and unemployment, they (children) are forced to go to the mountains, collect sticks or coal for food. They are being martyred in these mines that are planted from the previous years,” said Rokai, a resident of Kabul.
“The unexploded mines are more in provinces than in cities. The awareness of the people is less in rural areas compared to the city,” said Shoib, a resident of Kabul.
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Although Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong initially backed the West’s position on Ukraine, even going against every other member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) by imposing US-led sanctions on Russia, he is retracting on his initial position now. He recently said: “We are not hostile to Russia, for us Russia is not an enemy.”
At the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, Singapore followed the US and announced the imposition of sanctions against Moscow.
Explaining his motives, Lee Hsien Loong said: “We go on principles rather than sides, so we have to follow the principle and be consistent and stand by it.” He even cited how Singapore took a similar stance when the US invaded Grenada, sidelining the fact that the two conflicts are completely unrelatable and incomparable.
More than a year has passed since the beginning of the special military operation and there have been many changes in the perception of Asian politicians about the conflict. Speaking recently at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore’s flagship public research and education think tank, Singapore’s Minister of Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam noted the behaviour of the US and Western countries.
“The West and NATO, in my view, were not uninvolved bystanders who had no role to play in the current situation,” he said. The minister added: “Whatever the case, Ukraine is the unfortunate victim, and its people are paying a terrible price.”
The minister also highlighted that the expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe was contrary to the promises made by Washington to Moscow during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that it poses a threat to Russia’s security. Shanmugan also recalled the hypocrisy of former European leaders, such as French President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It is recalled that the latter even admitted that the Minsk agreement was never with the intention of peacefully resolving the conflict but to instead to buy time for Ukraine to increase its military capabilities.
The truth is that ordinary citizens of Southeast Asia do not care much about what is going on in Europe. Singapore was the only exception in Southeast Asia, and in fact most of the non-Western world, in the sense that it took a clear position on the situation in Ukraine and imposed sanctions on Russia.
In a survey conducted in February, it was clear that the majority of Southeast Asian residents felt that “Ukraine’s problems are not our business and we will not interfere”. This accounted for 60% of Thai residents surveyed, 54% of Malaysian residents, 48% of Indonesian residents and 44% of Singaporean residents. In Laos, only 14% of respondents stated that they were concerned about the war in Ukraine.
Former Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo expressed this sentiment:
“No one in Southeast Asia wants to get involved in the war, it’s far away and not of strategic importance to us.”
Although Singapore has imposed sanctions on Russia, the island country has not completely terminated its cooperation with the Eurasian Giant. The sanctions concern sectors like the export of military-technical products to Russia and banking services.
As is the case with other countries, Singapore-Russia cooperation is flourishing in other sectors, such as petrochemicals. In 2022, the amount of Russian oil that Singaporean ports received was more than the previous year. According to local media data, this received oil is processed and then re-exported to other countries, such as Vietnam.
This is effectively in line with ASEAN’s policy towards Russia – business as usual. Some other ASEAN state leaders may have made damning statements, such as Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was quick to call Russia’s military operation an “act of aggression” and an “invasion.” However, during the recent ASEAN Summit hosted by Cambodia in November 2023, he offered to mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.
Even if Hun Sen was personally outraged by the special military operation, state-to-state relations continued as normal, as did economic relations. In fact, the Cambodian foreign affairs ministry said in a statement that it “categorically dismissed” Cambodia’s designation as a “military supporter of Ukraine” on a list that had been published by a Telegram channel, with Russia then offering to provide weapons to the country.
Although Singapore is unlikely to remove the sanctions anytime soon, there is a clear regret that it acted rashly and out of line with all of its neighbours. None-the-less, economic relations are continuing as normal with the exception of sanctioned sectors. As Loong said in a recent interview, and perhaps with greater clarity since 2022, Singapore is a “small” country and “does not play a role in determining the world’s political destiny,” which is why the country’s leadership seemingly regrets acting out of ASEAN norms.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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The crisis of American national power has begun. America’s economy is tipping over, and Western financial markets are quietly panicking. Imperiled by rising interest rates, mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries are losing their value. The market’s proverbial “vibes”—feelings, emotions, beliefs, and psychological penchants—suggest a dark turn is underway inside the American economy.
American national power is measured as much by American military capability as by economic potential and performance. The growing realization that American and European military-industrial capacity cannot keep up with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and equipment is an ominous signal to send during a proxy war that Washington insists its Ukrainian surrogate is winning.
Russian economy-of-force operations in southern Ukraine appear to have successfully ground down attacking Ukrainian forces with the minimal expenditure of Russian lives and resources. While Russia’s implementation of attrition warfare worked brilliantly, Russia mobilized its reserves of men and equipment to field a force that is several magnitudes larger and significantly more lethal than it was a year ago.
Russia’s massive arsenal of artillery systems including rockets, missiles, and drones linked to overhead surveillance platforms converted Ukrainian soldiers fighting to retain the northern edge of the Donbas into pop-up targets. How many Ukrainian soldiers have died is unknown, but one recent estimate wagers between 150,000-200,000 Ukrainians have been killed in action since the war began, while another estimates about 250,000.
Given the glaring weakness of NATO members’ ground, air, and air defense forces, an unwanted war with Russia could easily bring hundreds of thousands of Russian Troops to the Polish border, NATO’s Eastern Frontier. This is not an outcome Washington promised its European allies, but it’s now a real possibility.
In contrast to the Soviet Union’s hamfisted and ideologically driven foreign policymaking and execution, contemporary Russia has skillfully cultivated support for its cause in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The fact that the West’s economic sanctions damaged the U.S. and European economies while turning the Russian ruble into one of the international system’s strongest currencies has hardly enhanced Washington’s global standing.
Biden’s policy of forcibly pushing NATO to Russia’s borders forged a strong commonality of security and trade interests between Moscow and Beijing that is attracting strategic partners in South Asia like India, and partners like Brazil in Latin America. The global economic implications for the emerging Russo-Chinese axis and their planned industrial revolution for some 3.9 billion people in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are profound.
In sum, Washington’s military strategy to weaken, isolate, or even destroy Russia is a colossal failure and the failure puts Washington’s proxy war with Russia on a truly dangerous path. To press on, undeterred in the face of Ukraine’s descent into oblivion, ignores three metastasizing threats: 1. Persistently high inflation and rising interest rates that signal economic weakness. (The first American bank failure since 2020 is a reminder of U.S. financial fragility.) 2. The threat to stability and prosperity inside European societies already reeling from several waves of unwanted refugees/migrants. 3. The threat of a wider European war.
Inside presidential administrations, there are always competing factions urging the president to adopt a particular course of action. Observers on the outside seldom know with certainty which faction exerts the most influence, but there are figures in the Biden administration seeking an off-ramp from involvement in Ukraine. Even Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a rabid supporter of the proxy war with Moscow, recognizes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand that the West help him recapture Crimea is a red line for Putin that might lead to a dramatic escalation from Moscow.
Backing down from the Biden administration’s malignant and asinine demands for a humiliating Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine before peace talks can convene is a step Washington refuses to take. Yet it must be taken. The higher interest rates rise, and the more Washington spends at home and abroad to prosecute the war in Ukraine, the closer American society moves toward internal political and social turmoil. These are dangerous conditions for any republic.
From all the wreckage and confusion of the last two years, there emerges one undeniable truth. Most Americans are right to be distrustful of and dissatisfied with their government. President Biden comes across as a cardboard cut-out, a stand-in for ideological fanatics in his administration, people that see executive power as the means to silence political opposition and retain permanent control of the federal government.
Americans are not fools. They know that members of Congress flagrantly trade stocks based on inside information, creating conflicts of interest that would land most citizens in jail. They also know that since 1965 Washington led them into a series of failed military interventions that severely weakened American political, economic, and military power.
Far too many Americans believe they have had no real national leadership since January 21, 2021. It is high time the Biden administration found an off-ramp designed to extricate Washington, D.C., from its proxy Ukrainian war against Russia. It will not be easy. Liberal internationalism or, in its modern guise, “moralizing globalism,” makes prudent diplomacy arduous, but now is the time. In Eastern Europe, the spring rains present both Russian and Ukrainian ground forces with a sea of mud that severely impedes movement. But the Russian High Command is preparing to ensure that when the ground dries and Russian ground forces attack, the operations will achieve an unambiguous decision, making it clear that Washington and its supporters have no chance to rescue the dying regime in Kiev. From then on, negotiations will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
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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.
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***
(This report was orignally posted on December 23, 2023)
“I am greatly saddened to hear of Stephen’s passing, an extremely generous and courageous man. His valid criticisms of the vicious USA empire were unrelenting. He also took the time to ferociously defend others who came under attack, including me, in Ottawa, Canada. It was a pleasure to be interviewed on his radio show and to chat with him on occasion. I don’t believe he was afraid of anything. HE would call them what they are, in the clearest possible language, to their faces. He had a remarkable ability to distill truth down to essential elements.”
– Denis Rancourt [1]
“The only way to change the system, which I think is vital if humanity is going to survive, is we need to get rid of this predatory capitalist system!”
After an incredible number of articles on national and world issues starting back in the summer of 2005, his output suddenly came to an abrupt halt on April 30, 2023.
A few days later, the figure behind the gigantic output came in touch with the one force that could actually shut him down. [3]
Stephen Lendman after enduring health illness for years finally passed away on the 9th of May, 2023. [4]
Stephen Lendman, the print and radio show host, informed the public of where he stood on all the key issues of our time and did so with a strong emotional bond to the people he was talking about, and the readers and listeners in his audience.
Stephen Lendman put out more articles on Global Research than practically anyone.
Stephen Lendman, as a voice for independent public radio stood out on the airwaves. Even at a time when the internet is exploding with multiple practitioners getting involved in podcasts and radio, there is simply no host as distinct in voice, tone, and a sincere commitment to the issues at hand as this elderly individual who was already in his 70s when he started!
Stephen Lendman won honours and awards for his work and secured regular spots on multiple media networks, that is, those which typically highlight the exception to the mainstream media rule.
Stephen Lendman’s work encompasses dissident thinking on a number of subjects from 9/11 as an “inside job” to opposition to every major military act prosecuted by the U.S. in the last few decades, to challenging both sides of the Two Party paradigm within his own country, to lamenting the banking system and its ravaging of the economic system of America and the world to pillaging the Zionist principles annihilating the Palestinian people to benefit Israel, to directing venom toward American forces who overthrew the government in Ukraine and shifted the blame to Russia, to even questioning the narratives supporting the lockdowns around the COVID-19 “pandemic.”
Stephen Lendman was a pillar of support for Global Research. And he was also incidentally a fine guest whenever he appeared on the Global Research News Hour. He was also a good friend of this writer!
This week’s program is dedicated to his work and to everything he meant to us professionally and personally.
We will be playing him in multiple clips and hear testimonies from some of the people who knew him and worked closely with him. These voices include Ellen Brown, Peter Phillips, Rick Rozoff, Diana G. Collier, and Michel Chossudovsky
Listeners should also consult the vast works of Stephen Lendman’s writings consisting of more than 3000 articles
Stephen Lendman lived in Chicago. He was a Harvard Graduate and received an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Following a devoted career as a market research analyst for his family owned business, he started writing on major national and international issues in 2005 and soon started hosting the first incarnation of the Global Research News Hour in 2007.
Ellen Brown is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and a former civil litigation attorney. She has authored hundreds of articles and a dozen books, including the 2007 best-seller Web Of Debt and its 2013 sequel The Public Bank Solution, Ellen Brown lives in Los Angeles.
Prof. Peter Phillips is a Political Sociologist and Professor emeritus at Sonoma State University; author Giants: The Global Power Elite, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018); past director of Project Censored; co-author/editor of fourteen Censored yearbooks, 1997 to 2011; co-author of Impeach the President, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007); and winner of the Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications. Peter Phillips is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization
CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.
WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.
Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.
CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.
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On March 17th 2023, Member of Parliament (MP) Andrew Bridgen made an important speech in the U.K. Parliament asking ministers to critically consider the risks as well as the benefits for the Covid vaccines. Bridgen is one of the only MPs to highlight vaccine safety concerns and has been suspended from the Conservative Party on supposedly unconnected but obviously spurious grounds.
Unfortunately, there was almost nobody in the chamber to listen to his speech and it seems the Conservative Party or the Government ensured that not only the vast majority of Conservative but also Labour, Liberal, SNP and other MPs deserted the chamber as soon as he took the floor. Following protocol, the Government minister responsible for drug regulation, Will Quince MP, was present to respond; in this he stated (without challenging any of Bridgen’s detailed claims) the standard mantra that the vaccine was effective and safe and had saved “tens of thousands of lives” in the U.K.
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Inevitably, instead of focusing on the details of the speech – most of which was based on either official data from U.K. Government agencies or from 2020 vaccine clinical trial data – the on-narrative media universally criticised Bridgen as a “conspiracy theorist” (see here, here and here) or spreading “dangerous misinformation” (see here, here and here). YouTube even removed the video of the speech that Bridgen had put up on his channel (although it did eventually reinstate it, perhaps after realising that censoring a speech that had been made in Parliament and could be read on Hansard was pretty futile).
You can see excerpts of and commentary on Mr. Bridgen’s speech (here) and what appears to be collusion between opposing party members in the U.K. Parliament to ‘empty the house’ on Dr. John Campbell’s YouTube channel.
The attacks against Bridgen continued and on March 23rd the BBC dedicated an entire one-hour radio show AntiSocial hosted by Adam Fleming on Radio 4 to attacking his speech. His guests were:
David Grimes – who had already declared that Bridgen was “spreading fiction“.
Marianna Spring (the BBC’s “Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent”) who has spent the last three years self-promoting her adopted role as a ‘debunker’ of information from Covid sceptics, much of which was subsequently proven to be true, while simultaneously proclaiming her victimhood at the hands of what she calls ‘conspiracy theorists’.
Brendan O’Neill, present as the token free speech advocate and not there to defend what Bridgen said but rather his right to say it. Indeed, O’Neill said (without any attempt to be specific) that some of what Mr. Bridgen said was “strongly misinformation”.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, who has been a fierce defender of the ‘official’ Covid narrative and criticised the claims made by Bridgen; this formed the majority of the substantial content of the BBC radio show.
Appalling that @ABridgen spreads these fictions in the houses of parliament – COVID vaccines saved about 14.4 millions lives worldwide between 2020 and 2021 alone, and are safe and effective. Maybe have a public enquiry to try and locate Bridgen's sense of shame instead.. pic.twitter.com/DkmgZZJjl5
The one person who should have been present to defend himself, but was curiously denied the opportunity, was Andrew Bridgen himself, who tweeted: “I was contacted by BBC Radio 4’s AntiSocial for a programme going out right now. They declined my offer to come on, even though, or perhaps because, they were talking about me. I sent them this statement instead.”
Given most of the AntiSocial radio show focused on Prof. Spiegelhalter’s criticisms of Bridgen’s data, these deserve close analysis and rebuttal, for the simple reason that on hearing Spiegelhalter’s one-sided commentary members of the public may be left with the impression that the attacks on Bridgen were wholly warranted, when they were not.
First of all, although Spiegelhalter half-praised Bridgen for highlighting the need to look at the overall risk-benefit of the vaccines, he did not comment at all on any of the Government data (including the enormous economic costs of the vaccines) that Bridgen quoted in his speech. Similarly, and right from the start, the BBC and Spiegelhalter demonstrated bias by totally ignoring these and other important indisputable facts presented in Bridgen’s speech. Not only did the entire episode completely avoid any discussion of the Government’s own data, the existence of which appears to have been deliberately overlooked or censored across the entire mainstream media in spite of being of obvious interest to the public.
Despite a long monologue, Spiegelhalter presented very little explicit criticism of Bridgen’s data and with regard to the comments he did make, it is a simple matter to show that it is Spiegelhalter, not Bridgen, who was actually misleading the public.
One specific piece of data formed the thrust of Spiegelhalter’s challenge. This was Bridgen’s claim that there was one serious adverse event (SAE) for every 800 people vaccinated. Spiegelhalter said this figure was from a paper “that had been the subject of a lot of criticism” suggesting to the audience that the paper was flawed, without really stating what the flaws were.
In academia, every major paper is (quite properly) subject to criticism. That’s what peer review is for. However, Bridgen was quoting the 1 in 800 figure from Fraiman et al., a peer-reviewed paper whose senior author is BMJ Senior Editor Dr. Peter Doshi and was published in the prestigious journal Vaccine (which we can only surmise probably knows something about vaccines). The paper showed that the vaccinated participants reported more SAEs than the placebo participants – on average 12.5 SAEs more per 10,000 participants, equating to the 1 in 800 figure. So, the figure wasn’t dreamt up by some fly-by-night author or ‘dodgy’ journal spreading disinformation. And the data used in the paper were those from the Pfizer and Moderna placebo-controlled, Phase 3 randomised clinical trials.
We strongly suspect the ‘criticisms’ that Spiegelhalter refers to stem largely from one unreliable source, rather than the many separate sources suggested by his use of the phrase “lot of criticism”. This source is Dr. Susan Oliver, whose supposed take-down of Fraiman et al. we have previously refuted in detail here.
Spiegelhalter’s criticism of the 1 in 800 claim is extremely weak. He said the figure was misleading because it counted “the total number of events rather than the number of people experiencing at least one event”, with some people reporting multiple events. His criticism is unfounded because the authors had already accounted for this in the paper, wherein they describe (bold added):
Third, without individual participant data, we could only compare the number of individuals hospitalised for COVID-19 against the number of serious AESI events, not the number of participants experiencing any serious AESI. Some individuals experienced multiple SAEs whereas hospitalised COVID-19 participants were likely only hospitalised once, biassing the analysis towards exhibiting net harm. To gauge the extent of this bias, we considered that there were 20% (Pfizer) and 34% (Moderna) more SAEs than participants experiencing any SAE.
As we can see, Fraiman et al. had already factored in the possibility of some people reporting multiple events by assuming, for the Pfizer vaccine, that there were 20% more SAEs reported than people reporting, and they assumed 34% more for Moderna. So, Spiegelhalter’s first criticism doesn’t hold water.
There are other reasons to contest Spiegelhalter’s claim that the 1 in 800 figure is exaggerated. The Fraiman paper only examined data which covered the primary two doses of each vaccine. If there is a 1 in 800 chance that a person with two doses will suffer at least one SAE, then it is reasonable to conclude that there is approximately a 1 in 400 chance that a person who has had four doses will suffer at least one SAE. The risk increases with each additional dose. In fact, the Government’s own data show that the adverse event rates worsen with the boosters, making the situation potentially worse than simply multiplying by the number of doses. Bridgen’s speech was about the risk of additional boosters; many of the people targeted for these will have had four doses already. Spiegelhalter failed to consider this in his claim that the 1 in 800 figure was exaggerated.
It is also important to note that the data in the Fraiman paper is from the 2020 Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials which were conducted on a young and generally healthy population, not those actually at significant risk of severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 (the aged and infirm, having been judged ineligible to participate). It is generally accepted that the frequency and range of adverse drug events is always greater in the elderly and frail. So, given these high rates of SAE in the young and healthy then it is reasonable to infer that the SAE rate in the older and more infirm, who are eligible for boosters, will be significantly higher. So, again, this points to an even greater current risk than 1 in 800.
Spiegelhalter also sought to dismiss the number of reported SAEs in the vaccine arm of the Pfizer study as not being significantly different to the number reported in the placebo arm. This is because the total number of SAEs in the trial was quite small meaning that some of the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) had lower bounds less than one, as the authors clearly reported:
In the Pfizer trial, 52 serious AESI (27.7 per 10,000) were reported in the vaccine group and 33 (17.6 per 10,000) in the placebo group. This difference corresponds to a 57 % higher risk of serious AESI (RR 1.57 95% CI 0.98 to 2.54) and a risk difference of 10.1 serious AESI per 10,000 vaccinated participants (95% CI −0.4 to 20.6). In the Moderna trial, 87 serious AESI (57.3 per 10,000) were reported in the vaccine group and 64 (42.2 per 10,000) in the placebo group. This difference corresponds to a 36% higher risk of serious AESI (RR 1.36 95% CI 0.93 to 1.99) and a risk difference of 15.1 serious AESI per 10,000 vaccinated participants (95% CI −3.6 to 33.8). Combining the trials, there was a 43% higher risk of serious AESI (RR 1.43; 95% CI 1.07 to 1.92) and a risk difference of 12.5 serious AESI per 10,000 vaccinated participants (95% CI 2.1 to 22.9).
In our own (Bayesian) analysis of these data we showed that there was a 96% probability that the SAE rate for the combined Covid vaccines was higher than the SAE rate for those with the placebo and a 99.7% chance that serious adverse events of special interest were higher in the combined covid vaccines. There is a 90% probability the difference is greater than 1 in 2,500.
In summary, and contrary to what Spiegelhalter claims, the figure of 1 in 800 for the risk of serious adverse reaction to those people being targetted for the booster is, if anything, more than likely an underestimate.
Spiegelhalter’s concern about the 1 in 800 figure was also the basis for his criticism of the claim Bridgen made about the number needed to vaccinate (NNV). However, the NNV figures quoted by Bridgen were based entirely on the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) presentation to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on October 25th 2022, published January 25th 2023. For example, Bridgen stated:
The Government’s own data show that, in healthy adults aged 50 to 59, it was necessary to give 256,400 booster jabs to prevent just one severe hospitalisation… For healthy 40 to 49-year-olds, that number increases to 932,500 who needed to be boosted to keep one Covid patient out of an intensive therapy unit… And for healthy 30 to 39-year-olds, no one knows the answer to the number needed to be boosted to prevent a serious hospitalisation because the Government’s own data say that there has never been such a case of this age group being put into intensive care due to the current variant of COVID-19.
The host of the radio show, Adam Fleming, suggested to Spiegelhalter that Bridgen’s use of the NNV numbers was “a crime against statistics” without explaining the basis for this comment. Ignoring the Government NNV figures that Bridgen correctly stated, Spiegelhalter instead implied that this figure was flawed because Bridgen had also used the 1 in 800 SAE estimate from the Fraiman paper to compare the number of people who would be hospitalised from the vaccine to the number saved from hospitalisation by the vaccine. This is indeed what Bridgen did, but this was an appropriate, not flawed, approach. For example, he said (bold added):
The Government’s own data show that, in healthy adults aged 50 to 59, it was necessary to give 256,400 booster jabs to prevent just one severe hospitalisation, putting 321 people into hospital with a serious side-effect from the booster, which includes, obviously, risk of death.
The 256,400 is the Government’s own figure for the number of ‘not at risk’ 50-59 year-olds who would need to be vaccinated to prevent one severe hospitalisation. To obtain the figure of 321 all Bridgen has done is divide 256,400 by 800 (the severe adverse event rate)! An entirely rational calculation, since it is reasonable to equate a serious adverse reaction with a hospitalisation.
Given that we have already established the 1 in 800 figure was reasonable (or even an underestimate), Spiegelhalter’s criticism here is nothing more than an attempt to divert attention away from the Government’s own alarming NNV figure. It should also be noted that the figure 321 is so large that even if the severe adverse event rate was overstated 100-fold the risks would still far outweigh the purported benefits in this age group (and bear in mind we are ignoring unknown longer-term effects in this analysis).
It seems that Spiegelhalter was aware he was on shaky grounds here because he followed up with a different (but extremely weak) attempt to downplay the NNV figure. He claimed that they were only high because they were based on a time when Covid was no longer prevalent – implying that the reason for this is because the vaccines had already done their job. Hence the data were then simply confirming that the vaccines were no longer needed for those age groups. But if that is the case, it merely supports the view that boosters are simply unnecessary and more likely to be net harmful.
The only other substantive criticism Spiegelhalter made was of Bridgen’s claim that the 63,000 excess deaths could have been caused by the vaccine. Spiegelhalter simply said that this was “dangerous misinformation” and that “there was absolutely no evidence of any link to the vaccines”. But the only ‘evidence’ Spiegelhalter provided that the excess was not due to the vaccines was to state the (incorrect) mantra that: “we know that ‘all cause mortality’ when age-adjusted is ‘lower in the vaccinated’”.
This claim is based on the flawed ONS data that has been thoroughly exposed here.
Indeed, as was noted in our article, the Statistics Regulator agreed with us that the ONS data cannot be used to make comparisons between the mortality rate of the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. What makes it especially curious is that Spiegelhalter made this error, and spread misinformation, despite the fact that since 2020 he has been on the Board of the Statistics Authority!
His logic is difficult to understand. If the vaccines have done their job then that implies they have vastly reduced Covid mortality. But he also claims that all-cause mortality is lower in the vaccinated thus giving an immortality benefit. But given the very high vaccination rates in the elderly, who contribute nearly all deaths, how can this statement be true whilst all-cause mortality is in excess? Basically, nothing adds up.
Despite the presence of Brendan O’Neill, whose written views especially with respect of lockdowns would appear to be directly at odds to those of Prof. Sir David Spiegelhalter, at no point did any member of the panel present a dissenting view to the position that Mr. Bridgen’s speech was misinformation. The entire episode of AntiSocial was essentially the empanelment of a single mind or opinion.
During the show it was laughably notable that in response to a comment about a tweet by Greta Thunberg the host, Adam Fleming, cut off the conversation by saying it is inappropriate to opine about her tweets because she wasn’t present to explain her comments. It is therefore extremely ironic that Fleming set aside his entire one-hour program to proceed with one-sided dissection and discussion of the speech made by a sitting MP Andrew Bridgen whilst denying him the opportunity to be present to defend himself.
The absence of impartiality in Fleming’s radio show is obviously a clear breach of the BBC charter. Perhaps BBC licence-fee-payers will be so appalled at this that they might consider complaining against this latest abuse of their licence fee.
Stop Press: Some not unrelated eye-opening details of Prof Spiegelhalter’s background are presented in the Law, Health and Technology newsletter, which is worth a read.
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Until he retired in January, Norman Fenton was Professor in Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London.
Dr. Clare Craig is a diagnostic pathologist and Co-Chair of the HART group with Dr. Jonathan Engler.
Martin Neil is Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at Queen Mary University of London.
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.”
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Protests across Germany against weapons supplies to the Kiev regime reveal an important and strategically significant point that should not sidelined by those who continue to hold Russia solely responsible. Scenes of close to 13,000 anti-war protestors gathering at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin as well as across Germany also symbolize an acute understanding that exists in the German public that only dialogue and diplomacy, instead of camp politics and hegemony can resolve the Ukraine war. There is definitely a need to change course on Kiev.
These protests unfolded as the impasse in Ukraine is becoming unbearable. The war continues to fester in the absence of de-escalation calls and is further solidified as countries such as Germany sign off on € 8.9 million in arms exports in 2022, with a quarter of that amount heading straight to the Zelensky regime. The transnational nature of the conflict and various actors stepping in to prolong it, has resulted in the United States approving sales to countries such as Poland worth $10 Bn for interoperability. These hard facts continue to alarm pacifists and those vouching for negotiations with the Kremlin. Such state-sponsored war machineries remain unacceptable and the fact that this is coming from Berlin, which has historically adopted a nuanced foreign policy, is a cause for concern.
The protests are being spearheaded by figureheads such as Sahra Wagenknecht and veteran feminist campaigner, Alice Schwarzer, who are sending a clear signal that peace, amity, absence of hostilities and eschewing Cold War mentalities needs to take hold for a stable continent and world order. In a speech at the protest, Wagenknecht stated that a citizen’s initiative was the need of the hour as well as a new, strong and impactful peace movement across Germany. She also pointed out how demonstrators were united over grievances such as isolation and lack of representation by the Olaf Scholz administration. On the foreign policy front, the German public is also disillusioned by Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock’s doctrine of providing unfettered access to weapons.
The truth is that if Germany wants to ensure that its social contract with the people is not eroded, but kept intact, the flawed policy-making of its government cannot bypass public sentiment which is geared against confrontation and cooperation. One should note that the messaging from the protestors indicates that there is a clear aversion to the entire orientation towards Ukraine by German policymakers. Messages such as ‘Diplomats instead of Grenades’, ‘Stop the Killing’, ‘Not My War, Not My Government’, and ‘Helmets Today, Tanks Tomorrow, The Day After Tomorrow Your Sons’ reveal a clear disconnect between the official and societal stances to war. It is clear that taking sides in a conflict that has been the worst the world has seen since World War II is not the right strategy.
Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, the powers which are perpetuating this conflict have also been castigated by the German protestors. According to Nobert, a former soldier of the German Army, ‘the real enemy sits in the city of London and New York’ which is a direct reference to two global financial centers in the United States and the United Kingdom which have remained at the forefront of perpetuating the conflict. Nobert further states that, Germany had no right to participate in another conflict and that too, after the Second World War. Such castigation from public spearheads in Germany comes amid the promotion of figures such as John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi as symbols of peace.
The protests also underline public discontent over the possibility of a nuclear conflict in the post-Cold War/ World War II era. This becomes more likely with the Ukraine regime’s adamancy in accessing weapons ranging from HIMARS to Leopard Tanks from Germany and Poland which threatens to upend the nuclear threshold. Deterrence stability which has been the hallmark of Europe in the post-World War scenario now remains increasingly vulnerable where the decision by either side to seek battlefield advantages that could involve nuclear weapons could result in catastrophic consequences for both the globe and the entire continent. For a continent and a country that has already borne the brunt of fascism, providing arms to Ukraine lacks wisdom and hints at strategic implosion.
To offset the crisis, Wagenknecht further said that the solution lies in offering Russia table talks where a never-ending war of attrition with the latest weaponry offers nothing but prolonged humanitarian suffering. The German public’s commitment to the humanitarian cause is reflected in the publication of ‘Manifest for Peace’ by Wagenknecht and Schwarzer, which urges Chancellor Olaf Scholz to change course on Kiev and prevent an escalation in weapons deliveries. 650,000 Germans including intellectuals and political figures signed the publication which is another example of the public’s rejection of war. It also shows that Russia is a sovereign state should be considered a party to peace talks which goes against Kiev’s vitriolic propaganda against Moscow.
The protests in Germany are a reminder that the Scholz administration must work towards peace instead of resorting to confrontation. As a great power in Europe with significant clout in international affairs, translating domestic sentiment into foreign policy will work well for Germany and aid the peacemaking process. It is high time to shelve nefarious policies, strategies and tactics for good.
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Hamzah Rifaat is a broadcast journalist, analyst, and visiting fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C., 2016.
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Have you heard of the “International Rules Based Order?” Russia, according to Washington and NATO, is violating those rules (China too) and must be punished. We can’t have “rule breakers” mucking up global tranquility can we?
Since 1945, the United States has pursued its global interests by building and maintaining various alliances, economic institutions, security organizations, political and liberal norms, and other tools — often collectively referred to as the international order. . . .
Building an international order has been a formal program of U.S. foreign policy since at least the 1940s and an aspirational goal since the nation’s founding. According to its post–World War II architects, the international order protects U.S. values by maintaining an environment in which the ideals of a free and democratic society — like that of the United States — can flourish. The United States has used both power and idealistic notions of shared interests to underwrite the rules-based order. In this sense, it employed both hard and soft power to construct the order. See this.
Got it? The so-called international order basically is a system of rules that the United States sets and arbitrarily decides whether or not a foreign country is complying or disobeying. The bottom line? These “rules” are designed to promote U.S. interests at the expense of others.
Let’s take basketball (appropriate in light of March Madness currently underway in the United States) and look at how genuine rules are supposed to work in a competitive environment. There is a set amount of time for a college game — 40 minutes, two 20 minute halves. You, as a rules official, cannot arbitrarily give one team that you like more time to play in hopes that they score more points and finally prevail. Any player who makes a basket outside the 3 point line is awarded 3 points for his team. Any player who possesses the ball and takes more than two steps without dribbling is guilty of traveling and the ball is turned over to the other team.
When we look at the so-called international rules to promote global order a very different picture emerges. We are essentially talking about an international casino and the United States traditionally has behaved like a crooked dealer who makes sure that friends of the casino win. Here is one example. If protestors take to the streets and try to overthrow a government the United States likes, that is bad and those protestors must be punished. However, if the government has fallen out of favor with the United States then the protestors are sanctified beings carrying out God’s will and must be supported.
Iran is a case in point. Last October, Washington cheered on protests in Iran and punished Iranian authorities for trying to quell the activity:
The United States on Wednesday imposed a slew of new sanctions against Iranian officials involved in the ongoing crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran – the latest US response to Tehran’s efforts to quash outrage after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
“It has been 40 days since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s so-called ‘Morality Police,’ and we join her family and the Iranian people for a day of mourning and reflection,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
“The United States is committed to supporting the Iranian people and ensuring that those responsible for the brutal crackdown on the ongoing nationwide protests in Iran are held accountable,” Blinken said. “Today, we are announcing a joint action between the State and Treasury Departments designating 14 individuals and three entities using five different authorities, demonstrating our commitment to use all appropriate tools to hold all levels of the Iranian government to account.” See this.
Ditto for Georgia (the country not the state). When the legislature in Tbilisi passed a law intended to limit foreign interference in Georgia, protestors took to the streets and battled police in early March:
Police in the Georgian capital Tbilisi used tear gas, water cannon and stun grenades late on Wednesday as they moved to break up the second straight day of protests against a “foreign agents” law which critics say would limit press freedom and undercut the country’s efforts to become a candidate for EU membership. See this.
And Washington’s response to that “violent insurrection?”
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price voiced solidarity with the protestors.
“We urge the government of Georgia to respect the freedom of peaceful assembly and peaceful protests,” Price said. “We are standing with the people of Georgia and the aspirations that they have.”
If you watched any of the videos of the Georgia protests, they were not peaceful.
Quite a contrast to what took place in the United States on January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump supporters surrounded the U.S. Capitol.
The Trump supporters are condemned, prosecuted and imprisoned as insurrectionists bent on sedition.
The evidence from that day indicates that agents of the U.S. Government (as well as a few Ukrainian members of AZOV) were in the crowd trying to stir them to violence. Once those protestors entered the Capitol, very few participated in acts of violence. But, because they opposed Joe Biden, they are treated as despicable criminals.
Tucker punches back against the Biden Administration propaganda meme.
Iran, who was widely condemned in Europe for its response to protestors, is having great fun with French President Macron’s response to French citizens angry over raising the retirement age without a vote by the French legislature:
Iranian authorities commented on the mass protests and strikes in France. According to Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani, official Paris should listen to the French people and abandon the “barbaric methods of violence against people defending their democratic rights”. See this.
Rules about protests are small potatoes compared to the Big rule about not carrying out military activities in a foreign country unless you have been invited to send your forces to provide assistance or you have been attacked. The United States and NATO insist that Russia is a major violator of this rule and must be punished. Russia, for its part, argues that it is acting to protect Russian speaking Ukrainians who have been shelled relentlessly by the Government of Ukraine since 2014 and to oppose NATO’s expansion to its borders.
Neither Russia nor China give any credence to complaints and outrage from the West because of America’s own sordid record of military campaigns in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Panama, the former country of Yugoslavia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Here is the harsh truth about the Rules Based International Order. It is an anachronism created in the wake of World War II by the United States, it is unraveling and the Biden Administration continues to enact policies that will hasten its demise.
Keep your eye on Israel. It is being wracked with protests over a proposed law to strip its Supreme Court of power and consolidate that power with the Executive. The rifts within Israel are profound and widening by the day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired the Defense Minister today and Israel’s Consul General resigned in protest.
Why do I bring this up? Because there is no signal yet from the Biden Administration whether it will bless these protests as “following the international rules” or condemn Netanyahu as a violator of those rules.
Laments about the “International Based Rules of Order” exposes the fact that America no longer has the strength nor the ability to impose its will on others. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and South Africa, to mention a prominent few, are awake to this reality and are busy creating an alternative international order that will put the United States on the sidelines. I believe this is the most important consequence of the proxy war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine. The weak underbelly of America has been exposed and no amount of threats or sanctions from Washington will change that reality.
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Contrasts? What do you mean?
Simple. The astonishing divergence between what the carefully-controlled U.S. media depict as normal in Iran and the reality of the situation in the country. I know more than the average American journalist because, with some others, I’ve just returned from a week in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Let’s start with the concerted efforts to brainwash the American people without using soap. Several months ago, American television, radio, and newspapers were full of Iran’s mistreatment of women. They focused on problems experienced by a Kurd not wearing a hijab properly, i.e., a scarf covering all the hair. Arrested, she died in custody. Without evidence, the media asserted it was deliberately done by a brutal regime. Naturally, they omitted the close ties between the Kurds in the region, the CIA, and terrorist Israel’s external security service, the Mossad, as well as their efforts to effect another Iranian revolution, again returning a Western puppet to power. The American population got nothing in the way of news except that in Iran, women were not people, they could not hold gainful employment or obtain positions of power or trust. The “news” gleefully reported demonstrations, evidently stoked by the Foreign Hand, objecting to enforced head coverings that supposedly erupted all over the country.
Here’s an October 2022 excerpt from National Public Radio, which derives part of its budget from the U.S. government: “Protests in Iran following the killing of a young woman, Jina Amini, who also went by the first name of Mahsa, killed at the hands of the morality police last month. The protests center around the enforcement of the hijab…” About the same time, the New York Times, a paper close to the American government, opined “The protests since Ms. Amini’s death, led by women, have persisted for weeks and have brought Iranians in dozens of cities into the streets to reveal the depth of their anger. Iranians who are sick and tired of living under a tyrannical theocracy deserve the support of the United States and its allies…” Also in October, NBC News reported ““…The authorities are clearly nervous and shaken from the ongoing protests,” Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, a professor in global thought and comparative philosophies at SOAS University of London, told NBC News on Thursday via email…”
Hijab Styles
The Reality. First, it’s easy to say that the “journalists” can’t read. In 2005, Azadeh Moaveni published Lipstick Jihad, an account of growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran. In the book, she recounted how Iranian women cocked a snook at the hijab requirement by pushing their hijabs onto the backs of their heads.
Second, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, relaxed the rules on head coverings following the demonstrations. During my visit, I saw many women in their 20s and 30s without head coverings of any sort. They looked to me (and a contact confirmed this) more relaxed. Nearly all had cast aside the traditional black robe and head cloth, wearing instead more colorful jackets in light blue or medium green. One woman was clad in a bright pink sweater. Our interlocutor noted that he believed about 4 in 10 of younger women had cast aside the head covering–in contrast to large signs in English and Farsi (Iran’s native tongue) to “Adjust Your Hijab”.
Image: Woman Dress Designer & Musician at Tehran Trade Exhibition (Photo: J. Michael Springmann)
In Tehran, Shiraz, and Kerman in mid-February 2023, I saw no demonstrations or violence of any kind–other than that found in the usual traffic jams.
Moreover, Ensiyeh Khazali is Iran’s Vice President for Women’s and Family Affairs. Her predecessor was Masoumeh Ebtekar. About half the work force is female. In the hotel I stayed at, the Assistant Vice President was a woman. She’d held the post for four years and, prior to that, had been Marketing Manager for eight.
At Home. Family is very important and loving but wives are highly critical of their husbands who see and comment on other women’s makeup or hairstyle. One contact noted the recent difficulties he’d had with his wife. He had innocently commented that he had seen a neighbor woman with a new variety of eye shadow. And then asked what was for dinner. He said that his wife’s response was “go ask the woman with the eye shadow”.
Uncovered Women and Society. In talking further with contacts, I elicited the interesting comment, from a man, that he saw no difference in uncovered and covered women interacting with one another. They treated each other in simple conversation as if the clothing difference dd not exist. Moreover, he continued, saying that the uncovered exhibited no difference in piety from their completely covered sisters. They went to mosque when ordained, prayed when required, and comported themselves as if they were covered from head to foot in black.
Hijab Enforcement. One interlocutor, again a man, spoke out sharply against the concept of the religious police, mostly specially-uniformed women, enforcing the hijab requirement. In his view, the police were there to fight real crime, such as robbery or embezzlement, not to ensure that women’s heads were covered. He was grateful that the Supreme Leader had abolished such police.
To be sure, I attended part of the 44th Anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In the gigantic crowd (filling a six-lane street 13 kilometers/about eight miles long), I saw only one uncovered woman. But then, given the cold day, being covered from head to foot would have been a blessing.
Part of 44th Anniversary Celebration (Photo: J. Michael Springmann)
What People Do for Fun.I braced a married Iranian, conveying a question I had and that one of our group had posed. In a society that did not use alcohol or have night clubs, what did younger people do for enjoyment? How could they associate with the opposite sex? (Iran, unlike the U.S. and Western Europe, has only two genders.) His reply was simple and straightforward—private parties, just as set forth in Lipstick Jihad.
Public Displays of Affection. Several times I observed, in the hotel lobby, on the street, and in public buildings, members of the opposite sex holding hands or walking arm in arm. Surprised at this, given the conservative nature of Iranian society, I again began asking questions. (Like Rudyard Kipling’s “Elephant’s Child”, I am ‘satiably curious.) The answer was simple yet complicated. The people involved were not casually connected. They were serious about one another and the next step was likely a formal engagement to be married.
Noses. Flying from city to city, I noticed a number of young women with bandages on their noses at the various airports. Knowing that Iran was noted for re-working God’s nostril design, I, ever inquisitive, asked an Iranian man about the matter. I said that the people I had seen in the street or at the airport had beaks in proportion to their faces. There were no bulbous proboscises or hooked, cartoon-witch snouts. His response was that it was, essentially, vanity. Western media, with its image of perfect beauty, had found its way into the country. And women, seeing the perfect faces with the perfect noses in ads or in movies, wanted the same. No matter what. While the breathing apparatus was marginally improved, the concept and the process certainly put some rials into the plastic surgeon’s pockets.
Conclusion. The carefully-stoked tensions in Iran over the hijab and the morality police enforcing women’s dress did not have quite the effect the CIA, Israel, and hostile outsiders wanted. The country remained calm, women were still women and not wannabe men, as is regrettably common in the U.S. and Western Europe. Family is still intact, wives and husbands are devoted to but highly critical of one another, and the female of the species there wants to look as good as humanly possible—not unlike her sisters elsewhere in the world.
There appears to be some movement towards societal change, as happens in every country. However, the modifications are gradual and do not come with explosive force. Their precursors were apparent years ago. In 2018, on my earlier visit to the Islamic Republic, I noticed women in one of Tehran’s airports wearing almost nothing on their heads. One young, attractive female had a ponytail—bound with a large ribbon. This obviously sufficed as a kind of hijab. No one else noticed or said a word.
And, the changes I saw were not earthshaking nor turning society topsy-turvy. They were a logical continuation of accepted earlier alterations. Furthermore, Iran’s society might have picked up some Western influences but not to the extent that they will be permitted to poison the culture. Iran will continue to acquire good influences from abroad but reject the bad ones, a very wise view.
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J. Michael Springmann is an attorney, author, political commentator, and former diplomat, with postings to Germany, India, and Saudi Arabia. He previously authored, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World: An Insider’s View, recounting how the U.S. created and used Islamic Terrorism. Additionally, he penned Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb, an analysis of the alien wave sweeping the Continent. He currently practices law in the Washington D.C. Area. He is a frequent commentator on Arab and Russian news programs.
He is also on the Ukraine’s “Enemies List”, having questioned, inter alia, the country’s refusal to honor the Minsk Accords and for stating that it’s government is Nazified.
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The first batch of British-made Challenger 2 tanks arrived in Ukraine on Monday as reports said Berlin also delivered 18 of its Leopard tanks to the country.
The UK will send a total of 14 Challenger 2 tanks that will be armed with depleted uranium ammunition, a controversial munition that is radioactive and linked to cancer and birth defects in Iraq, where US forces commonly used the rounds.
Britain’s deputy defense minister confirmed last week that the Challenger 2s would be armed with depleted uranium despite Russian warnings. Over the weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putinsaid Russia would deploy nuclear weapons to Belarus, a move he said was a response to the UK arming Ukraine with depleted uranium.
Germany initially pledged to put together 60 Leopard tanks for Ukraine but has fallen far short of that goal. The US has sped up plans to get 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine by refurbishing older models instead of building new ones, but they will still take eight to 10 months to deliver.
The number of Challengers, Leopards, and Abrams still falls short of what Ukraine has been asking for. Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, told The Economist in December that he needed 300 tanks to beat Russia.
The US and its allies want Ukraine to launch a counteroffensive this spring and hope the new tanks can help. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that the offensive can’t begin until Western countries send even more weapons.
The provision of Western-made tanks to Ukraine marks a significant escalation in NATO’s role in the war. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz previously ruled out the idea of arming Ukraine with Leopards because he said he was trying to avoid a direct clash between NATO and Russia to prevent a nuclear war.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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March 2023 marks 20 years since the White House announced the beginning of a full scale invasion of Iraq – a decision which had broad reverberations not only across the Middle East but globally. While the invasion was for several reasons considered controversial at the time, primarily due to its lack of legal pretext, Western opinion on the assault against the oil rich Arab state grew considerably more negative in the aftermath, with a number of Western new outlets even apologising after the conflict for their blanket coverage and unequivocal support for plans to attack. To provide further insight into the American-led invasion, we at Military Watch sat down with prominent international security scholar A. B. Abrams to discuss in hindsight what the conflict signified regarding the direction of and trends in Western foreign policy.
Abrams has authored multiple books on international relations and defence, and 12 days ago published the highly rated study: ‘Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order.’ The book explores predominant trends in how false stories of atrocities and other misdeeds by Western adversaries have been widely propagated in the Western world not only to vilify them, but also as was the case in Iraq to provide pretexts for hostile policies ranging from economic warfare, to Western bombings of their territory, and even as in Iraq’s case full scale Western invasions. As noted by former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford, Abrams’ book “has provided a signal service by taking ‘fake news’ about alleged atrocities out of the current affairs arena in which it is mainly discussed and into a much broader, deeper and in fact even more disturbing context,” and “perceptively traces the evolution of the use of fabricated atrocity narratives back to the first days of Western warfare and colonial expansion through to eleven more recent case studies.” The book’s sixth chapter focuses on fabrication of false narratives leading up to the Iraq War, while the fourth focused on the Gulf War 12 years prior where the foundations of a vilifying metanarrative surrounding the country were largely laid. The transcript of our interview with Abrams is below:
Military Watch: Which false Western narratives were most instrumental in facilitating the American-led invasion of Iraq?
Abrams: As is consistent across all major Western atrocity fabrication campaigns, multiple reinforcing and complementary narratives were perpetuated to shape domestic and international opinion towards the country with various levels of effectiveness. An invasion could thus be presented not as a response to any particular action of the Iraqi state, but as a measure justified by a whole host of rationales. The narratives which had the most significant impacts varied between countries. In the United States the campaign to build support for invasion escalated in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which meant it was most effective to tie the rationale for an assault to a strongly implied link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. This was near unanimously acknowledged even in the U.S. itself to be totally ludicrous – but only after the invasion had begun and the narrative had served its purpose. In Britain claims that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction played a more central role in the justifying the war, in part because the public there had had no immediate experience of a terror attack. It was consistently implied that Iraq would, upon developing such weapons, almost immediately use them to attack Britain and its allies and thus that an invasion was needed to avert an imminent threat. The British campaign also focused heavily from an earlier stage on portraying extreme human rights abuses in Iraq. It thus depicted a Western assault to remove its government and install a westernised successor as something of a ‘civilising mission’ – a highly common theme in Western justifications for invasions of non Western countries over centuries.
Twin Towers on September 11, 2001
Although Iraq’s human rights situation since the rise of power of Saddam Hussein in 1979 was very far from exemplary, it was also far from outstanding worldwide and particularly by the standards of neighbouring countries – many of which were close Western allies. The claim that the West attacked Iraq for humanitarian reasons thus had little basis in reality. The history of humanitarian military intervention as a Western concept with a centuries long history, and how it has consistently been used to facilitate Western aggression and in many cases genocide and war crimes, is explored in detail in my recent book’s first chapter after the introduction. Non Western peoples could always be portrayed as having savage practices or conducts which in turn could be used to justify Western ‘civilising missions’ – from the European invasions of Americas and Australia to several cases such as Iraq’s in recent history. It is highly consistent with historical trends that the most extreme Western claims of Iraqi humanitarian abuses have consistently proven to be utterly false – from the story of ‘Saddam’s enemies’ being fed live into human shredders, to the claim 12 years prior that Iraqi soldiers were throwing premature babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on cold floors. Humanitarian and ideological justifications for the war played a growing role as it became clearer that narratives portraying Iraq as an international threat, such as claims of Al Qaeda ties or nuclear weapons programs, had no substance to them. The most extreme example was British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s claim that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners had been found buried in mass graves by Iraqi forces after the invasion – which was intended to retrospectively justify the aggression. It was later acknowledged that this had no basis in reality and was one of many totally fabricated stories.
British Headline Propagating Fabricated Claim of Iraqi ‘Human Shredder’ to Justify War
Military Watch: What Do You Think Are Some of the Most Common Misconceptions About the U.S.-Iraq War Today?
Abrams: Where to start? Most common notions about the war particularly in the Western world upon closer examination turn out to be false, for example portrayals of the Iraq War as a unique mistake or a product of the particularly poor leadership of the Bush administration. The invasion was in fact entirely consistent with U.S. and Western foreign policy trends. The country was one of many outside the Western sphere of influence to be targeted after the Cold War’s end when Soviet protection was lost – since the USSR had long shouldered the bulk of the burden of preventing the West from remaking the world in its image through force and asserting total dominance as it has before the Soviet rise in the 1930s. The U.S. would continue to lead assaults on countries which could no longer rely on Soviet protection, Syria and Libya being notable examples, after Iraqi was throughly neutralised as a potential source of resistance to Western hegemony.
U.S. Navy Cruise Missile Strikes on Iraq in 1996 (left) and 1998
Another common misconception was that the war marked the beginning of hostilities against Iraq. The country had in fact been under assault since 1990, first with major economic sanctions, then with very intensive Western bombardment of its industries and critical infrastructure from 1991 which left its population without basic services like electricity or clean water. The bombardment was seen to have set development back by well over half a century, and continued indefinite sanctions preventing postwar reconstruction were estimated by the mid 1990s to have killed an estimated half a million Iraqi children. Impositions of no fly zones by Western countries deep inside Iraqi airspace facilitated bombardment of infrastructure and air defence suppression efforts to ensure by 2003, after over a decade, the country was near defenceless and very throughly impoverished. These strikes were often conducted based on false claims that they were suppressing Iraqi forces which would otherwise be deployed to commit atrocities against minority groups domestically. Despite the ineptitude the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein in particular often showed, the U.S. would have had a much time launching a full scale invasion in 1990 had it not throughly worn the country down for over a decade beforehand.
Also key to paving the way to the Western assault was the promising of sanctions relief if Iraq provided international inspectors with deep access to its weapons facilities. These teams, it has since been confirmed, were deeply infiltrated by U.S. and British intelligence and used to unsuccessfully attempt to engineer the overthrow of the Iraqi government from within and the assassination of President Saddam Hussein. More significantly, they ensured Iraq had no military secrets and no retaliatory capability whatsoever when Western armies began to roll across the border – including no ballistic missiles or chemical weapons. This paired with a total arms embargo from 1990 were key to ensuring an increasingly favourable miltiary balance for the U.S. and its allies as they modernised their forces while Iraqi capabilities only diminished.
Artwork of Iraqi Scud Missile Launchers – A Key Asset For Chemical Weapons Delivery Iraq Was Stripped of Before the Invasion
Military Watch: Which Parties in Hindsight Do You Consider to Have Been the Leading Beneficiaries of the Invasion?
Abrams: Iraq was already throughly ravaged by the time the war began, although the fallout from the invasion and deep social and political remaking of the country in line with Western interests have effectively guaranteed that the country cannot rise again likely in the lifetime of anyone alive there today. This was a major boon to the interests of Western dominance over the Middle East. The Iraqi people did and continue to suffer immeasurably, with travel within the country until today remaining highly unsafe, living standards remaining poor where the country formerly prospered, while the atrocities committed by Western forces against them remain too numerous to even begin to elaborate on here. One of the most notable was the mass use of depleted uranium weapons against civilian population centres, such as Fallujah, which is expected to cause immense suffering for generations to come due to the millions of years for which it will continue to contaminate the area and the local gene pools. Another was the extreme brutalisation of Iraqis in American custody, many of whom including children were serially raped and tortured to death at facilities such as Abu Ghraib after the population was left under the power of the occupation forces. Many of the details have not been made public but, as noted by American journalist Seymour Hersh who had fuller access to the records from Abu Ghraib:
Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib. . . . The women were passing messages out saying, ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has.
Although successful in neutralising Iraq, likely permanently, as any kind of presence in the world, the war was overall highly detrimental to the interests of the Western led order. The focus of Western attentions and military resources on the country for the remainder of the decade allowed other countries remaining outside the Western sphere of influence to strengthen their positions considerably. The most notable examples were China, which saw its economic, high tech, and military positions improve immeasurably while gaining relatively little Western attention, and North Korea which drastically accelerated its development of nuclear weapons after the decision in Washington had been taken to invade Iraq. Iran, its close ally the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and Russia, all very significantly strengthened their strategic positions with time that was bought by the focusing of Western attentions on neutralising Iraq.
Military Watch: What Role Did Ideology, and Particularly the Predominant Trends in U.S. and British Political Thought, Play in the War?
Abrams: As previously mentioned the rationales drew on centuries old aspects of the Western worldview which have been central to its foreign policy for centuries, including the idea of a ‘civilising mission’ which had strong consistencies going back to the colonial era. Although there is little dispute that invading a sovereign country and UN member state remains illegal, with the UN Security Council and a majority of its members refusing to support the assault, claiming that military action was taken in the interests of ‘liberating’ a non Western people and westernising their much vilified system of governance has consistently been used highly successfully to justify aggression. Shortly before the war began, the ideal of ‘democratising’ and ‘freeing’ Iraq by imposing a Western system political system there gained growing prominence in American rhetoric – an idea with a very strong roots in how the West sees its place the world and its right to reshape countries in its image using military force. Indeed, British Prime Minister Tony Blair just earlier this month claimed on the invasion’s 20th anniversary that it was partly justified on the bases that “At least you could say we were removing a despot and trying to introduce democracy.” The idea of introducing the Western style of governance was consistently cited by Blair and others to divert criticism away from the war effort even after it became known that the death count resulting from U.S.-led military action exceeded 1 million Iraqis. This serves as one of many indicators of the importance which spreading this governance model carries in the Western mind. It is consistent with longstanding trends in Western thought since the colonial era towards mass killings in the non Western world being justified by the cause of spreading Western values – previously civilising and Christianising which killed tens of millions across five continents, and today democratising.
While before the war it was widely stated that an Iraq remade in the Western image politically would serve as a model for the region and wider world, and thereby further spread the Western governance model, the opposite has in fact occurred. The sharp contrast between pre and post war Iraq’s performances across all metrics, and the quality of life and future prospects for its people, has raised growing questions regarding the viability of the Western model. This has complemented the effects of relative Western decline and the rise of China since then. While the Cold War’s led led to proclamations of an ‘end of history’ in the West and universalisation of the Western model, the Iraq War closely followed by the 2007 financial crisis marked the beginning of a series of consecutive developments which would see this trend reversed.
Military Watch: How are the lessons from the Western campaign in the information space against Iraq most relevant today?
Abrams: The Iraq War is one of 11 case studies explored in my latest book exploring consistent trends in how the Western world uses atrocity fabrication to vilify those countries outside its control which it intends to target, and the campaign to justify an invasion thus remains highly relevant to understanding similar vilification of all major Western adversaries across the world today. We see similar often ludicrous and throughly debunked claims being spread by Western sources against China, North Korea, Syria and others both to provide pretexts for economic sanctions and to move world opinion to align behind Western campaigns against these countries. Iraq also provides an example of how the false atrocities invented in the West and attributed to its targets, even if they had been true, pale in comparison to the very real atrocities committed by the Western powers which the fabricated narratives facilitated. The numbers successful atrocity fabrication has facilitated towards the killing of by Western hands in the last century number in the high millions, and orders of magnitude more if going back to the colonial era. Had false crimes not been attributed to Iraq to allow the U.S. and its Western allies to see through the policies they had desired, 500,000 Iraqi children killed under sanctions in the 1990s, hundreds of thousands more Iraqis that decade, and 1 million Iraqis who died as a result of the 2003 invasion, would all have lived on. The Iraq War is far from unique in this regard, but it provides an example in relatively recent memory of why atrocity fabrication, and the free hand it can often give Western powers to target those outside their control, remains extremely dangerous.
Abrams’ bookAtrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order was published on March 15 and is available to purchase from the publisher here, as well as on Amazon here. A recent video review from Hong Kong media was published here.
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Israel collapsed into virtual chaos over the weekend, after Defence Minister Yoav Gallantmade a dramatic televised address to the nation, calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend his government’s extremist political plan.
The government’s proposals call for the elimination of the Supreme Court’s right of review of Knesset legislation; the appointment of court justices by the political echelon, rather than by an independent body; the ending of the attorney general’s right to determine if a prime minister was fit for office (Netanyahu would be ruled unfit if convicted on any of the corruption counts he faces, which he denies, at trial); and the permitting of the government to ignore a ruling by the attorney general determining that legislation violates Israel’s basic laws.
These proposals were drafted by an extremist libertarian think tank, the Kohelet Policy Forum. It not only wrote the bills presented to the Knesset, it drafted speeches and op-eds by ministers and MKs advocating them.
Kohelet is funded by American Jewish billionaires Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the latter one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party in the US.
In his TV address, Gallant urged Netanyahu to suspend the plans and enter negotiations with the opposition to arrange for a political compromise. Within 24 hours, Netanyahu had acceded to the most virulent of his ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who tweeted that he should fire Gallant. He did so within hours of the speech.
Furious public reaction
The public reaction was almost immediate and furious. In previous demonstrations, protesters congregated on major public streets and squares, with Tel Aviv providing the largest crowds. A small number would migrate to the nearby Ayalon Highway, a major roadway that cuts through the city, where they would block traffic. Police would attempt to prevent such blockades, confining activists to the city streets.
On Sunday night, the gloves came off. Over 100,000 Israelis marched directly to the highway. They were met by mounted police who charged them and beat them with long poles. Some protesters charged the police on horseback, driving them back. Others in the crowd screamed: “Shame! Shame!”
Thousands more converged on Netanyahu’s government residence on Balfour Street in Jerusalem, where they attempted to break down security barriers around the building. There were demonstrations at 150 locations throughout the country. Major highways outside of Tel Aviv were also blocked and protesters lit bonfires to express their rage. All universities announced they were on strike in protest.
One of the most damaging potential desertions was Netanyahu’s lawyer, representing him in one of the four corruption charges he faces, who warned that unless the legislation was stopped, he would stop representing him.
This hit the prime minister in one of his most vulnerable spots. The only thing he cares about is political survival. Losing his lawyer would put him in political jeopardy, since a conviction would almost certainly force him from office. Once he is no longer the country’s leader, he will be in no position to pass the legislation necessary to prevent his conviction. He must remain in power to protect himself from prison.
In a speech delivered to protesters, the leader of the country’s labour union, the Histadrut, warned that it was planning a nationwide general strike. “This is the country of the citizens, all its citizens. Not of the Kohelet Forum!,” chairman Arnon Bar-David declared in a dramatic speech.
“We will not allow the country’s descent into the abyss… If the legislation isn’t stopped, we are going from here to a general strike in Israel.”
Bowing to pressure
As a former general, and the current defence minister, Gallant knew the prevailing views of his officers. His own chief of staff told him that officers were in an almost open mutiny over the governing coalition’s agenda. Hundreds have signed public statements refusing reserve duty. Even active-duty officers have made such a commitment.
Gallant acted because he understood Israel must have a cohesive military. When there is dissension in the ranks, the country cannot protect its citizens – not to mention that the Israeli army is the most significant unifying institution in the country.
It defines Israeli identity and most citizens serve in it. For many Israelis, the army and the state are indistinguishable. For that reason, Gallant defined his allegiance to the state via the military. If the army is not with the government, then the latter cannot or should not function.
With his firing, the former minister has become a hero to the millions of Israelis opposing what they call the regime-change government. Netanyahu, normally a shrewd political tactician, not only created a rival, but offered him a huge platform and political visibility. Undoubtedly, Gallant will now become a key player in determining a way forward (if there is one).
The prime minister is known for being a cautious political player. He hardly ever tacks directly into the wind, preferring to zig and zag as he adjusts to the political currents. True to form, after firing Gallant, Netanyahu dropped another bombshell, with Haaretz reporting that he planned to announce a suspension of the far-right legislative programme on Monday.
After Gallant laid down the gauntlet, other senior Likud MKs expressed support. The former Israeli ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, perhaps the prime minister’s closest adviser and often called “Bibi’s Brain”, urged him to compromise.
In effect, he is bowing to the inevitable. With the nation in open rebellion, either his government falls or he has to fold and give in to the protesters’ demands.
Ironically, the government’s leading arsonist, Bezalel Smotrich, the settlements minister, urged Netanyahu to hold firm, warning that the nation would descend into “anarchy” and “violence”. Apparently, he’s not been watching television or walking the streets of any major Israeli city.
No time to celebrate
But it isn’t time yet for Israelis to celebrate. Netanyahu speaks glibly and promises with one hand and takes away with the other. It’s not yet clear precisely what is the nature of his strategic retreat.
Further, MK Yariv Levin, architect of the government’s legislative package, threatened to resign if it was jettisoned. The prime minister only has a four-seat majority. He cannot afford to lose a key figure like Levin, because others would likely support him and abandon the coalition.
The prime minister may have relented. But as a tactician, he knows that a strategic retreat could fool his opponents into believing that they have won a battle. By lulling them into a false sense of victory, Netanyahu retains the possibility of mounting a counter-attack.
While act one has ended, there will certainly be a lot more drama to follow before this story has concluded.
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Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times)
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced on Thursday that it will open an office in Ukraine, less than a week after issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over war crimes allegations.
“I firmly believe that the opening of the ICC country office in Ukraine marks the beginning of a new chapter in our close cooperation with the Court,” Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin, who signed the agreement on behalf of his country, said in a statement.
“This is just a start, a strong start, and I’m convinced that we will not stop until all perpetrators of international crimes committed in Ukraine are brought to justice, independently of their political or military position,” Kostin added.
The announcement comes after the court issued an arrest warrant last Friday for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, over the alleged deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
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Featured image is from Rick Bajornas/United Nations/Flickr
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In the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk was toxically masculine in the vein of John Wayne. He kicked alien ass and ate replicated steak and “got the girl in the end”.
Star Trek is an interesting and worthy case study of how art can be used to shape narratives in the national mythology.
The most effective propaganda, after all, is propaganda the viewer takes at face value.
Click image to view the video.
The show evolved in its sensibilities.
In the sequel, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kirk’s successor, the Frenchman Captain John-Luc Picard, is notably more sophisticated in his approach to space navigation – as is the diverse crew of the Star Trek Enterprise.
Click image to view the video.
Picard, a Frenchman, drinks tea, writes poetry, and waxes philosophical about the virtues of the Federation and its benevolent altruism within the universe.
And he spends way, way more time than his predecessor discussing the merits of the all-important Prime Directive, a non-interventionist doctrine that preaches a hands-off approach to managing other civilizations encountered in space (which serve as proxies for nation-states).
Click image to view the video.
“The [writing] approach expresses the ‘message’ basic to the series: we must learn to live together or most certainly we will soon all die together… unless [Star Trek] ‘said something’ and we challenged our viewers to react and think, then it wasn’t worth all we had put into the show.” -Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek creator
The Federation in Star Trek – the human-led interstellar space government – is noble because it is egalitarian and pacifistic. Its mission is explicitly anti-colonial and non-aggressive. It’s basically a celestial UN with spaceships. Its most prideful triumph is the introduction of the galactic version of human rights in the form of the Prime Directive.
“[The Prime Directive] embodies a kind of anti-colonialist ethos, a commitment to respecting a civilization’s own values, beliefs, and practices rather than imposing ‘better’ ones upon them.”
Whereas the adversaries of The Federation, like the Klingons and Romulans, are notoriously tribalistic, the Enterprise welcomes crew members from all backgrounds in a nod to diversity, all equal under the law and harmoniously unsegregated.
Everyone lives in harmony and health, with access to healthcare and even therapy under the care of the ship’s sexy counselor, Deanna Troi.
Most episodes present some sort of political or ethical (or both) message that challenges the moral judgments of the viewer, with the intended effect of reinforcing the classical liberal commitment to the God-given right of the individual to control one’s own destiny.
(Note: In the context of this article, “liberalism” is taken to mean the political science concept of the term: “a philosophy that starts from a premise that political authority and law must be justified.”)
For example, in Season 2 Episode 9, anthropomorphized android, Data, is put on trial to determine if his individual autonomy exists. More to the point, if it does, does his interest in staying alive outweigh the potential benefits to scientific advancement were he to be dismantled and reverse-engineered?
Click image to view the video.
Following some drama, the determination is made, in line with liberal dogma, that Data does enjoy such rights. He is permitted to continue living as he sees fit.
Season 1 Episode 8, “Justice” presents the case against the death penalty, as the young Wesley Crusher is condemned to death over an obscure law on a remote planet. The death penalty — sanctioned state violence — is anathema to the liberal ideals of every individual’s right to life and the importance of checking state power.
Click image to view the video.
The Star Trek protagonists even talk like liberals. Captain Picard, the ultra-paragon of liberal ideology who serves as the moral compass of the ongoing mission to seek out new life and new civilizations, frequently opines on the merits of interstellar liberalism:
“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
” With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.”
“We think we’ve come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, is all ancient history. Then, before you can blink an eye, suddenly, it threatens to start all over again.”
“A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor.”
Star Trek is the ultimate expression of liberal optimism, grounded in the secular belief that democratic rule of law and pluralistic tolerance is man’s salvation.
A similar example of liberal idealism may be seen in Star Wars, of course – set in a galaxy dominated by an oppressive, omnipotent empire in which the rebels on the side of “good” liberal values like democracy. The series, likewise, is an example of pop culture’s capacity to engineer the dominant political ideology.
The virtues espoused by these works of fiction, taken one by one, are not necessarily wrong in these works of fiction.
But because they are slyly presented in archetypal art, they have a way of being absorbed subconsciously without critical analysis. One reflexively – ask any millennial male – identifies with the rebels of Star Wars fighting the good fight against the enemies of human freedom.
Without critical analysis, then, it’s possible for the state to cloak its dangerous, anti-democratic, exploitative practices in the language of liberalism with none of the substance that justifies liberalism.
For instance, the justification of various corporate state products under the auspices of “defending democracy.”
One is forced to wonder: if and when China ascends to a position of global hegemony, and becomes a mass exporter of culture in the same way America has been since WWII, what values will it instill in its propaganda?
These, and others, are the pitfalls of art-as-propaganda, regardless of how well-intended any one creator may be.
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose, Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. Please support his independent operations however you can. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
If mass psychosis entails a detachment from reality, then Westerners in particular are suffering from mass-psychosis on myriad issues. Now more than ever.
In terms of government policies this manufactured illness is well-planned and deliberate. The media, in lockstep with the government, is owned and controlled by media cartels (1). Acceptable political dissent remains framed, for the most part, within the parameters of Big Lies, the most recent, expansive and criminal being the COVID Lies. (2)
If the COVID measures and jabs are a domestic manifestation of the government’s war on its own people, and the excess death rates suggest that they are (3), then imperialism would be an external manifestation of war on other peoples. Governments fabricate support for these “wars” through massive psychosis-generating lies and deceptions.
All of the post-911 wars in particular serve as a template for understanding the war in Ukraine. How? Because all of them were sold to incredulous Western populations through the medium of Big Lies. None of the wars were or are about humanitarian pursuits, democracy, freedom, or fighting terrorism. Quite the opposite.
The truth has seeped out for “past” wars to the extent that many Westerners now accept that Iraq did not have WMD, that Libya (4) before the Western invasion was a far better place (as was Iraq), and that far from being a brutal dictator, Syria’s elected government led by President Assad is infinitely superior to the Western-supported terrorists of al Qaeda, ISIS. (5)
So why the seemingly blanket acceptance of official Ukraine narratives? Have Western populations learned nothing from previous wars and the fabricated lies that launched and sustained them?
The war lies about Ukraine are consistent with war lies about the aforementioned countries.
The war is not about democracy, freedom, or humanitarianism, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a “brutal dictator”. This should not be a surprise. To be succinct, it is a proxy war meant to bleed Russia even if it means Ukrainians fighting to the “last person”. (6)In terms of bleeding Russia, the goal is unlikely to succeed since Russia is arguably stronger now than ever, despite (or perhaps because of ) the economic sanctions and the war.
In terms of fighting “to the last (Ukrainian) person“, as expressed by Senator Lindsay Graham, this bleak outcome may manifest itself as long as countries like Canada continue to support and send weapons to what is essentially a western-installed nazi regime.
George Eliason describes the deeds and foundational ideology of the resurrected Banderites of Kiev. He describes how the last thing holocaust victims saw were the blue and yellow armbands of the SS Totenkopf.
Video: George Eliason. Ukraine Greatest Lie
Yet westerners supporting the blue and yellow flags representative of the current Kiev Regime, product of an on-going Washington coup, seem blissfully unaware of what they are really supporting.
Western imperial warmongering complexes couldn’t be happier, even as this fabricated “psychosis” prolongs the war, the devastation, and the mass slaughter of Ukrainians. Imperialists do not want peace.
When if not now will the Western masses free themselves from their fabricated delusions? When if not now is it time for truth, peace, and justice?
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. He writes on his website where this article was originally published.
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“My 22 yr old daughter Diana was diagnosed with liver disease in March 2022 three weeks after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. She was a vibrant healthy young lady in the Army National Guard until she fell severely ill.” (click here)
She has been hospitalized numerous times in Fargo, Sioux Falls, Watertown and Rochester MN. The medical team at Mayo clinic said medication is not helping and she ultimately needs a liver transplant. During her hospitalization in Mayo they also found she has right heart failure which also needs to be addressed.
Diana is currently bleeding gastrointestinal and needing blood transfusions about every 2-3 weeks to sustain a normal level. She is unable to work and functions at a slow pace and is on a strict low sodium diet.
Appointments begin April 3rd where she will see the cardiologist, pulmonologist and hepatologist to start tests to get cleared to be put on the transplant list.
I will be taking a leave of absence from work to be with her thru all these appointments as we were told it will be weeks of testing. I am the sole provider for her and I drive her to all her appointments and I am known as her “support person” with all her doctors.”
A Case of Hepatotoxicity After Receiving a COVID-19 Vaccine
“A 14-year-old female, not known to have any chronic illnesses, presented to the emergency department with epigastric pain, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting for the past four days. Three days prior to her current presentation, the patient received the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.” (click here)
There have been three reports of patients having hepatic failure, with one case being acute, after receiving the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine in the United Kingdom between September 12, 2020 and September 4, 2021. Moreover, there have been 17 reported cases of liver injury
“the possible side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines on the liver are not limited to one type”
My Take…
I am doing a speaking tour right now with Dr.Paul Alexander, so I cannot comment extensively, but please read these stories carefully. These tragic stories are so important and brave parents must be supported when they come forward to tell us about their COVID-19 vaccine injured children.
Post COVID-19 vaccine autoimmune diseases are very common and they affect various organs including the liver, where the COVID-19 spike protein accumulates as well.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
Featured image is from the author
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.”
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Children watch pornography at school and then practice together, as part of “comprehensive sexuality education”, as instructed by the World Health Organization, and United Nations.
Below you find two screenshots from official documents published by the World Health Organization and United Nations. They instruct schools worldwide to teach toddlers masturbation and sexual techniques.
Below you see a poster sent to thousands of schools, as part of this “comprehensive sexuality education”. This is a Dutch poster from The Netherlands, which I translated in English for your convenience. It is published by Rutger, a government funded organization that is responsible for sexual education in schools. This poster literally tells children that boys should have sex with boys, and so should girls with girls.
This is full blown homosexuality being pushed into elementary schools, on unsuspecting kids.
Below you find photographs of children’s playgrounds. Just let it sink in that these were approved by the local governments, and schools…
I have received emails from parents testifying how their kids are indeed being molested at schools, in the USA. The stories are horrifying. Sexual abuse is happening under the guise of “comprehensive sexuality education”. One example of an email I received from a parent:
“Everything you are reporting happened to her. Using another girl to touch my daughter (masturbation), horrible bad words, pornography using her cellphone.”
Children’s books are distributed in schools, that teach little children how to lick each others genitals.
Another children’s book pushed into schools in Europe, contains the following quote:
“Examples of things you can do with sex are (tongue) kissing, caressing, petting (licking the vagina), piping (licking/sucking the penis), fingering, jerking off, dick-in-vagina sex (vaginal sex) and dick-in-anus sex (anal sex)”.
Sexuality classes are being organized where little children watch pornography, and engage into sexual activities with one another. The instructions of the teaching material reads:
“Make sure that nobody records or films this. We have to keep these classes safe”.
This doesn’t only happen in Europe, but worldwide, as part of the UN Agenda 2030 and the WHO directives for sexuality education.
As we can see this is promoted by UNICEF, WHO, and the United Nations. On page 71 this guide instructs schools worldwide to teach young children different sexual techniques, and masturbation.
The sexualization of children is even done on global corporate level, as we have seen with the mugs from MacDonalds, that – when turned properly – show children engaged in sexual acts.
Normalizing pedophilia
Why are children all over the world being sexualized? As we have revealed in our evidence report “Child abuse and murder by high level officials” pedophilia is widespread among government officials and the financial elites. Their agenda is to normalize their hidden practices of child abuse.
The publisher of school material for sexual education in The Netherlands, Europe, is Rutger, an organization that has been trying to get pedophilia legalized for many years. It is highly alarming that they are the ones who were selected by the government to create this material – an organization that is known to fight for the normalization of pedophilia.
The goal is clear: sexualize little children, so that pedophilia will become mainstream.
The horror this will unleash on humanity is unspeakable. Everyone who knows something, knows that this traumatizes children forever. Anyone who has personally experienced sexual abuse can confirm this.
Perverted sexuality devastates humanity
We all know that sexuality is a matter of love, intimacy, safety, and being faithful to one person, that you commit yourself to. Sexuality is a powerful force that can inflict unspeakable damage to humans when expressed wrongly. You don’t just engage in all kinds of sexual acts with just about anyone. Let alone teaching little children to do this with their friends and even in the classroom.
A perverted sexuality devastates humanity. People who are addicted to pornography for example, develop social, relational, emotional and spiritual problems.
Instead of love, respect, and intimacy… all they know is a selfish desire to satisfy their own lusts. Sexuality becomes totally disconnected from love, acceptance and intimacy. It leaves you with a deep sense of loneliness, as no love is involved whatsoever. It turns people into predators, as they develop an attitude of considering other people as lust objects, instead of valuable human beings that need to be cherished and protected.
Since the mass distribution of pornography domestic sexual child abuse has exploded, as adults have been terrorized with a perverse form of sexuality, that pushes them to satisfy their lusts by preying on their own children.
Fifty years ago pornography was considered evil, but in recent years it has gone mainstream. The same will happen with pedophilia if we don’t stand up against it.
Don’t fall for their magic tricks
The WHO and UN hire masterful word magicians who are able to make this horror sound like a wonderful thing. When you read their documents it all is explained in such a way that you get the feeling they are saints straight from heaven who mean so well, and want to help the world.
But it is extreme deception, as what is actually being said, and what is literally being done in the schools, is mass child abuse.
Please be sharp in your mind and learn to discern when reading the UN and WHO documents. Understand what these guidelines effectively imply. Remember these are the organizations who have unleashed the pandemic onto humanity, they are the ones who suppressed every working treatment for C0VID, they are the ones who censor millions of doctors and scientists worldwide, they are the ones who mandate the highly toxic injections that are killing millions, they are the ones who push for a one world government, and so on.
We are dealing with psychopaths of the worst kind, who have the skill to hide their most nefarious crimes under a layer of beautiful words that claim to help the world.
While aggressively destroying every and all human rights worldwide during pandemics, they claim to protect the “human right of teaching kids to masturbate at age 5”.
Normalizing pedophilia and child abuse is not part of “human rights”. Please see through their smokescreens and refined methods of hypnotizing humanity with magical word plays.
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Once again, American politicians are pushing for new escalations in the Ukrainian conflict. Now, lawmakers want the Biden government to supply cluster munitions to the Ukrainian armed forces. This type of measure would be seen as a serious provocation by Russia and would certainly have strong impacts on the battlefield and in the current diplomatic crisis.
Recently, some Republican senators formally asked the government to “not hesitate” to send cluster arms to Ukraine. James Risch and Roger Wickers, both from Mississippi, led the Congress campaign, and were also supported by Michael McCaul, from Texas, and Mike Rogers, from Alabama. According to them, Washington should ship such bombs as quickly as possible to Kiev, ignoring what they think to be “vague concerns about the reaction of allies and partners and unfounded fears of ‘escalation'”.
The pressure comes amid a context of “despair” on the part of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev and the more pro-war groups of American domestic politics. Faced with the Ukrainian military failure and the imminent Russian victory, despite the systematic sending of weapons by NATO, the only solution seems to be to resort to the use of “non-conventional” arms. In this sense, the use of cluster bombs would be one of the “alternatives”, which is why Ukrainian politicians have asked US congressmen to increase the pressure for the government to allow the export of such equipment.
Cluster bombs are banned in at least 110 countries by a 2008 UN-brokered treaty. These arms are notorious for their fragmentation power. Cluster munitions include countless small projectiles inside. When launched, these bombs explode ejecting projectiles that injure a much greater number of victims than conventional weapons. The most dangerous thing is that many of these small projectiles do not detonate immediately after being ejected, and can remain inactive for a long time, which is why civilians can be mutilated or killed by bomblets that explode long after a conflict ends.
In addition to the absolutely anti-humanitarian aspect of these arms, it is necessary to emphasize that American law prohibits their export in any situation. For the US government to authorize the shipment of cluster munitions to Ukraine, it would be necessary to change national legislation – or simply act illegally. Also, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had already made it clear that there was no possibility of sending these arms to Kiev, stating that “according to our own policy, we have concerns about the use of those kinds of munitions”.
However, for warmongers, no limits should be respected. Failing to convince the US government directly, the Ukrainians appealed to parliamentarians, who then used their power of political mobilization to form pro-war coalitions and encourage the violation of the country’s laws. Parliamentary pressure is one of the most frequently used mechanisms by Western powers to promote institutional changes in other countries. Now, the US government itself is under pressure from Congress, which echoes the interests of pro-war elites.
On the part of Ukrainians, there is no interest in respecting any humanitarian limits. There are already several reports stating that the Ukrainian armed forces used Soviet-era cluster weapons in civilian residential areas in Donbass since 2014. In March last year, for example, a Tochka-U missile containing cluster munitions killed more than 20 people and injured dozens of civilians in Donetsk. Faced with the collapse of the Ukrainian arsenals, what interests the neo-Nazi regime now is to obtain cluster arms from American stockpiles.
It is important to emphasize that the pressure in Washington comes in parallel with the British decision to send depleted uranium radioactive weapons to Kiev. This reinforces that Western pro-war elites are interested in raising the level of aid to Kiev, openly promoting the shipment of illegal weapons banned by international treaties. The practical result of this will obviously be an unprecedented escalation.
Commenting on the case at a recent press conference, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Ryabkov, said that American lawmakers do not seem aware of the tragic consequences that sending such armaments would generate. According to him, the very security of NATO countries would be threatened if such a measure were taken – since international tensions would escalate to a point of no return. Ryabkov also warned that this would block any possibility of normalization of relations between Moscow and Washington.
Obviously, Moscow will not remain inert while citizens in the special military operation zone are exposed to attacks with illegal weapons with high destructive power. In order to defend the inhabitants of territories reintegrated into the Russian Federation, extraordinary military measures will certainly be taken, which will have high impacts on the battlefield.
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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
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***
Abuse and weaponization of the United Nations system by the United States and its vassal governments to both mislead and intimidate the rest of the world have been a feature of international relations since the very founding of the United Nations and the time of the Korean War. In recent years, that reality has deteriorated to a point where aggressive demented false beliefs promoted by the US and its allies have made the UN system complicit in outright terrorism. Various UN institutions have been abused in this way.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has produced false reports masking the complicity of the US and its allies in extremist terrorism against Syria’s government and people. The International Atomic Energy Agency has covered up the Ukrainian army’s shelling of the Zaporozhe nuclear power station. Practically the entire UN human rights system is consistently abused to supply pretexts for economic and even military aggression against one country after another.
That system depends substantially on reporting by partisan Western government and corporate funded nongovernmental organizations, abusing their nonprofit status so as to serve as political opposition to their respective governments, often in support of opposition violence and terrorism. That has been the case in countries from Serbia to Haiti, from Venezuela to Thailand, from Bolivia to Iran and even of great powers like the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. This too is the context and pattern of the violent 2018 coup attempt aimed at overthrowing Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
Now, five years on, the UN Council for Human Rights has facilitated what is being designated as an expert group report, whitewashing the terrorist opposition campaign between April 18th and July 17th 2018 to overthrow Nicaragua’s elected government. The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition has produced a systematic rebuttal of the UN report which exposes the bad faith methodology and incompetent research of the expert group and its secretariat. The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition document explains that the UN report was produced by an anonymous secretariat of nine individuals, raising serious doubts about the integrity of the claim by the report’s ostensible authors to offer an expert account of the events they purport to cover.
The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition rebuttal argues that the expert group failed to comply with its mandate to investigate exhaustively all human rights violations in Nicaragua after April 2018. For example, testimony was excluded from the innumerable victims of opposition terrorism and intimidation, and thus the group failed to gather and analyse essential information to be able to offer a true and fair view of what happened. Thus, the expert group’s claim is nonsense that their investigation used a victim centered approach.
Similarly, the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition material notes how the expert group deny that the opposition protests sought to overthrow the government, despite Nicaragua’s opposition leaders themselves stating this as their aim from the earliest days of the failed coup attempt. The report offers many readily refuted claims and assertions, in particular the plainly false claim that the 2018 protests in Nicaragua were overwhelmingly peaceful. The expert group also exceeds its ostensible mandate by calling in their report’s conclusion for more coercive measures against Nicaragua’s government.
The report shares with other institutions in the UN system, like the OPCW and the IAEA, what in effect amounts to a cancel culture regarding any information that contradicts their prejudices and presuppositions. By excluding sources which contradict them and expose their assumptions as incorrect, they lock their research and investigation into the kind of infinite disinformation loop sometimes referred to as false collateral. This renders the expert group’s report on Nicaragua not just categorically specious, but also irredeemably anti-democratic, denying world opinion readily available as well as highly relevant facts.
For example, as the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition material demonstrates, the UN report completely excludes the following local news sources despite the fact that they all published a large amount of highly relevant material and reports on specific incidents during the period in question: Juventud Presidente, Nueva Radio Ya, Canal TN8 news, Canal 6 news, Canal 2 news, Canal 13 Viva Nicaragua, Informe Pastrán, Radio La Primerísima and Tortilla con Sal. Likewise, the report makes no mention of the horrifying and very well documented cases of violence and abuse by Nicaragua’s opposition which indicate the scale and intensity of the Nicaraguan opposition’s overall terror offensive against the country’s population and authorities.
In particular, the Coalition rebuttal points out, there is no reporting of the following cases:
The expert group report does acknowledge opposition violence against police officers (22 killed and over 400 wounded by gunfire) but offers the wholly implausible explanation that this scale of violence was in self-defense. The report suppresses documented evidence of the extensive opposition damage to government infrastructure, vehicles and equipment. The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition also notes that the expert group excludes hundreds of other relevant reports on the events it does cover, as well as documents readily available on-line. These include Nicaragua 2018 – Dismissing the Truth, Nicaragua 2018 – Uncensoring the Truth, and this “Open Letter to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.”
The UN expert group argue they were unable to visit Nicaragua and thus could not engage with the Nicaraguan government authorities. But the expert group themselves in their report dismiss as unreliable material from the Nicaraguan authorities, such as police press releases. Furthermore, as the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition explains, since April 2018 the Nicaraguan government has repeatedly submitted material to both the Organization of American States and to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which presumably was available to the UN expert group.
The UN report on Nicaragua is irremediably vitiated by this distinctly anti-government bias and repeats this pattern of bad faith reporting throughout. Its egregious prejudice is self-evident, given the complete exclusion of abundant documental and audiovisual material confirming the systematic opposition terrorist violence in 2018 and exposing the opposition leaders’ clear and stated objective of overthrowing Nicaragua’s elected government.
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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.
Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
A trillion dollars is a lot of money. If you stacked a billion dollar bills on top of one another, the pile would be 67.9 miles high, but if you stacked a trillion dollar bills on top of one another the pile would be 67,866 miles high. And if you lined up a trillion dollar bills end to end, the line of dollar bills would be a staggering 96,906,656 miles long. That is longer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
On March 18th, 2023, an Air Transat Airbus A321 was flying from Fort-de-France to Montreal when the aircraft’s first officer became incapacitated. The incident occurred as the aircraft was flying over the United States, 200NM south of Montreal. (click here)
The Washington Consensus in liaison with Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have imposed an IMF style neoliberal agenda (routinely imposed on Third World Countries) on all member states of the European Union. This process has been geared towards destroying the “European Project” as well eliminating the Welfare State.
Watching the Serbian TV evening programme on 24 March 2023, I was at first deeply shocked, although 24 years had already passed since the first war on European soil by the “North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation” (NATO) against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ). A short time later, a question came to me, the answer to which I already knew.
On March 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will start deploying its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Construction of designated storage facilities for the weapons is planned to be completed by July 1.
Carlson is correct that Nixon was an enemy of the Deep State, but the plot against Nixon originated prior to Nixon’s meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms.Nixon was removed because he was normalizing US relations with the Soviet Union and China.This was seen as taking away the needed enemies for the military/security complex’s budget and power.This was also the main reason the CIA murdered President Kennedy.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an ideological divide that has gripped the world, with one side (led by the G7) condemning the invasion and seeking to punish Russia economically, and the other (led by BRICS) taking a more nuanced stance by neither supporting the Russian action nor joining in on the sanctions. This has created a intellectual vacuum when it comes to assessing the true state of play in global economic affairs.
We all know that 95 percent of elite Pakistani politics is mentally challenged fairytales and gossip replete with murmurings that can be cooked up for a good story to sell to the public. The intrigues and power plays of Pakistan’s rulers seem to just drag the country further and further to the abyss.
Here are all the updated key facts and sources concerning the alleged “pandemic”, to help you get a grasp on what has happened to the world since January 2020, and assist in the enlightenment of any of your friends who might be still trapped in the New Normal fog.
If you are not confused, you should be, because creating confusion is a hallmark of every successful operation to control the masses, and the perfect biopsychosocial operation will create confusion in spades. It’s not a matter of covering tracks to make an investigation into the origins or other parts of an operation impossible – it’s a matter of deliberately creating many tracks, tracks that run in various directions and lead to questionable conclusions.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: You Will be Shocked by How Much Money Is Being Pulled Out of U.S. Banks, and Now the Biggest Bank in Germany Is in Trouble
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Einleitung
Als ich mir am 24. März 2023 das serbische TV-Abendprogramm ansah, war ich zunächst tief erschüttert, obwohl seit dem ersten Krieg auf europäischen Boden der „Nord-Atlantischen-Terror-Organisation“ (NATO) gegen die Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien (SRJ) bereits 24 Jahre vergangen sind.
Kurze Zeit später drängte sich mir eine Frage auf, deren Antwort ich bereits kannte.
Erschüttert war ich zunächst über die Hass-Reden krimineller westlicher Politiker gegen den damaligen jugoslawischen Staatspräsidenten und das serbische Volk. Erschüttert auch über die gnadenlosen Bombardements serbischer Infrastruktur sowie serbischer Zivilisten. Doch vor allem erschüttert über den Einsatz hochgiftiger, radioaktiver Uran-Geschosse.
Das Ausmaß dieses NATO-Kriegsverbrechens in Serbien wurde erst nach 1999 deutlich: Aggressive Krebserkrankungen unter Jung und Alt nahmen ein epidemisches Ausmaß an – jeden Tag erkrankte ein Kind an Krebs und das ganz Land ist verseucht worden. Durch die Schädigung des Erbgutes (DNA) kommen Generation um Generation missgebildete Kinder zur Welt. Ein Krieg, der nicht zu Ende geht (1).
Wissentlich und willentlich ist ein Völkermord (Genozid) begangen worden, der als „Verbrechen der Verbrechen“ („crime of crimes“) oder als „schlimmstes Verbrechen des Völkerstrafrechts“ bezeichnet wird (2).
Nach der ersten Erschütterung fragte ich mich: Wieso haben wir Bürger in der Welt diese politischen Verbrechen weitgehend widerspruchslos hingenommen und lassen sie wieder geschehen? Radioaktive Uran-Munition soll demnächst im Ukraine-Krieg von ukrainischen Soldaten eingesetzt werden – und die Welt schreit nicht auf. Haben wir in den letzten Jahrzehnten nichts hinzugelernt?
Die Antwort auf diese Frage kenne ich seit langem: Was auch immer mit den Menschen in der nächsten Umgebung oder weitab in irgendeinem Teil der Welt geschieht – es geht mich nichts an.
„Ja das geht mich nichts an“
In einem Fortbildungskurs für Jugendliche erzählte mein ehemaliger Psychologie-Lehrer aus einer psychotherapeutischen Berufsberatung folgendes:
„Ein 20jährer junger Mann kommt in die Berufsberatung und wird genau aufgeklärt: wie es ihm geht, welchem Beruf er sich widmen kann, wie es ihm in der Sexualität geht?
Herr Müller, haben Sie Schutzmittel, wenn Sie mit einem Mädchen verkehren?
Ja, die, die ich kenne, da habe ich Präservative.
Ja wie meinen Sie das: die Sie kennen?
Ja wenn ich mit einer Sexualität habe, die ich nicht kenne, dann verwende ich das Präservativ nicht.
Ja warum nicht?
Ja das geht mich nichts an.
Ja sagen Sie, Herr Müller, wenn das arme Kind, das Mädchen schwanger wird, das ist doch schrecklich, denken Sie!
Ja das geht mich nichts an.
Es nützt kein Reden. Der junge Mann wird noch einmal in die Praxis bestellt, aber es geht nicht. Er ist ein guter Christ, er gehört einer Kirche an und hat das Beten gelernt, und so weiter (…).
Das ist die Erziehung, so hat es der Mensch erlebt. Heute sprechen wir zum Beispiel vom Politiker, der den Krieg anzettelt und von demjenigen, der ihn nicht anzettelt. Und vom Pfarrer und der Kirche, die die Waffen des Krieges segnen, die die anderen jenseits der Grenze erschlagen, die auch Christen sind, Menschen wie wir. So schaut die Welt aus.
Wir werden versuchen, uns dem Problem „Mensch“ zu widmen. Wie er wird und was für Unterschiede wir machen sollen zwischen dem Pfarrer, den Theologen, dem Kriegsführer, dem Politiker und dem Burschen, der marschiert, wenn er gerufen wird.
Und wir, wie stehen wir da? Was machen wir?
Wir reden vom Krieg – von den vergangenen Kriegen. Was ist mit den kommenden Kriegen? (…). Noch nie wurden so viele Waffen geschmiedet wie heute, aber für andere Zwecke wie für Schulen, für den Unterricht, für kulturelle Zwecke haben wir kein Geld (…).“ (3)
Der Jugend eine lebenswerte Zukunft ermöglichen
Liebe Leser, ich hoffe, wir verstehen uns!
Sollten wir erwachsenen Bürger nicht darüber nachdenken, wie wir unseren Kindern und Kindeskindern – nach einem meist erfüllten persönlichen Leben – ebenfalls eine lebenswerte Zukunft ermöglichen können?
Wenn wir davon überzeugt sind, dass auch wir Bürgerinnen und Bürger die derzeitige Weltsituation bewusst oder unbewusst mitgeprägt haben, weil wir sehr ungünstige – und zum Teil absehbare – politische Entwicklungen im eigenen Land und in der Welt geschehen ließen und dabei „unsere Hände in Unschuld wuschen“, dann werden wir die richtigen Lehren aus unseren Versäumnissen ziehen.
Es sind eben nicht nur die anderen, die unsichtbaren „Herrscher der Finsternis“ und die ihnen hörigen Politiker, die für das irdische Elend verantwortlich sind. Wir Bürger haben uns durch die salbungsvollen, verlogenen Stellungnahmen vieler Politiker – meist im Namen irgendeiner Demokratie – beruhigen lassen und damit unser Nichtstun gerechtfertigt. Die uns über Jahre oder Monate über die Regierungsmedien eingehämmerten Feindbilder haben ihre Wirkung nicht verfehlt.
Als deutscher Bürger, der seit Jahren in Frieden und Freundschaft in diesem „verpönten“ Land Serbien lebt, bin ich der Meinung, dass es sich bei der versuchten Zerstörung und „Ermordung“ Serbiens um einen verborgenen politischen Plan, einen Auftrag von „ganz oben“ gehandelt hat und nicht um einen „missliebigen“ Präsidenten oder um ein Volk, das wegen seiner sozialistischen Gesinnung und Loyalität unbedingt bestrafen werden müsse.
Mit Serbinnen und Serben kann man wunderbar zusammenleben! Das trifft auch auf alle anderen Staaten und deren Bevölkerung zu, die von der US-NATO mit mörderischen Kriegen überzogen worden sind. Deshalb sollten wir Bürger im Westen alles daransetzen, unser Bewusstsein von individuellen und kollektiven Vorurteilen zu reinigen und uns von gewissen Politikern und ihren Regierungs-Medien nicht beeindrucken lassen.
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Schul-Rektor, Erziehungswissenschaftler (Dr. paed.) und Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych.). Nach seinen Universitätsstudien wurde er wissenschaftlicher Lehrer (Professor) in der Erwachsenenbildung: unter anderem Leiter eines freien Schul-Modell-Versuchs und Fortbildner bayerischer Beratungslehrkräfte und Schulpsychologen. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. Bei einer Öffentlichen Anhörung zur Jugendkriminalität im Europa-Parlament war er Berichterstatter für Deutschland. In seinen Büchern und Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung sowie eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Für seine Verdienste um Serbien bekam er 2021 von den Universitäten Belgrad und Novi Sad den Republik-Preis „Kapitän Misa Anastasijevic“ verliehen.
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Three large banks failed in a single week in March 2023, and the ripple effect could easily take down the entire banking system. The cascading bank failures began March 8 with the shut down and liquidation of the crypto bank Silvergate Capital. It had invested deposits in Treasury bonds, which lost value as interest rates were hiked to stem inflation.
March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed. It too was invested in government bonds, which again became a problem when customers began making large fear-based withdrawals. This was the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, and the largest since the financial crisis in 2008.
Spooked by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank customers withdrew more than $10 billion in the days that followed, resulting in the shutdown of Signature Bank on March 12.
Government regulators have promised to make customers of the two banks “whole” by insuring all funds, not just the first $250,000. Only select “too big to fail” banks will be eligible for this kind of special treatment. Small local banks will not be eligible.
The most likely outcome of this bailout system is a consolidation of banks until we’re left with just a small number of mega-banks. This consolidation, in turn, will facilitate the rollout of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), as the banking industry will be a tight-knit monopoly.
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Three large banks failed in a single week in March 2023, and the ripple effect could easily take down the entire banking system, although government officials insist the banking sector “remains strong” and that the problems faced by these banks “do not appear to be widespread.”1
Cascading Domino of Bank Failures
The cascading bank failures began March 8 with the shut down and liquidation of the crypto bank Silvergate Capital.2 As reported by Government Executive:3
“During 2022, Silvergate’s deposit base grew dramatically, almost doubling its assets to $210 billion. But the bank did not have either the administrative capacity or market demand to lend out all of the money, as banks normally do.
So, it invested the excess deposits in Treasury bonds and mortgage investment products. But the bond purchases became a problem as the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates to address inflation.”
Two days later, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) — the 16th largest bank in the U.S.4 — failed. It too was invested in government bonds, which again became a problem when customers began making large fear-based withdrawals. This was the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, and the largest since the financial crisis in 2008.
Allegedly “spooked” by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank customers then withdrew more than $10 billion, resulting in the shutdown of Signature Bank on March 12, making it the third-largest bank failure in history.5,6
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) took control of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature, and government regulators have promised to make all customers “whole” by insuring all funds, not just the first $250,000. In other words, government is bailing out the banking system yet again, on the taxpayers’ dime.
Within a week, Signature was bought up by Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp (one of the largest banks in the U.S.).7 According to the FDIC, anyone who had deposits at Signature Bank will automatically become a client of Flagstar Bank, except for crypto banking clients, as Signature’s digital banking business was not included in Flagstar’s bid.8
The FDIC is also left holding $11 billion-worth of “toxic waste debt” in the form of commercial real estate loans for rent-regulated buildings, as this debt portfolio was also rejected by Flagstar.9 The FDIC is still looking for a buyer for Silicon Valley Bank.
Is the US Banking System Really Sound?
President Joe Biden’s comments shortly after the three bank failures was that “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe” and that “Your deposits will be there when you need them.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also insists the U.S. banking system “remains sound.”10
Should we believe them? Probably not. Within days of those statements, the contagion had already spread to Credit Suisse, the largest bank in Switzerland. After government initially stepped in to cover some of the losses, the Swiss banking giant was sold to the UBS Group.11 The acquisition was announced March 19.
It’s hard to believe the ripple effects of bank failures of this magnitude can really be stopped. The question is, should we even try? As reported by Government Executive,12 government has no obligation to step in and bail these banks out under current banking regulations.
What’s more, the biased bailout system now being put into place will virtually guarantee further bank consolidations and the widespread rollout of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). As reported by Newsweek March 16, 2023:13
“During a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Yellen was grilled by Oklahoma GOP Senator James Lankford over the Biden administration’s handling of the banking crisis, which saw the federal government offer a multibillion-dollar bailout to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) after a bank run left it without enough cash to back up hundreds of millions of dollars of its clients’ deposits. Most of those deposits were not insured.
To address the crisis, U.S. bank regulators announced a plan last weekend to fully insure all deposits at SVB as well as the crypto-friendly Signature Bank.
This would cover all deposits above the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s insured limit of $250,000. Federal officials said the plan would be paid for by a special fee levied on all FDIC institutions.
While all banks would be required to pay for the plan, Yellen said under questioning Thursday that it would not apply to every bank. She said the federal government would extend the privilege only to troubled banks whose failure would have a profound impact on the U.S. financial system.
Uninsured deposits, Yellen said, would be covered only if a ‘failure to protect uninsured depositors would create systemic risk and significant economic and financial consequences,’ which would be decided by a supermajority of the FDIC’s board members, Yellen, and the President …
In further questioning, Lankford asked Yellen whether that policy’s implication would be that small banks would become less appealing to depositors with accounts exceeding the FDIC’s $250,000 insurance threshold …
Amid the sharp increase in bank mergers over the past decade, Lankford expressed concern that the trend could only accelerate under current policy, causing the U.S. banking system to become less resilient.
“I’m concerned you’re … encouraging anyone who has a large deposit at a community bank to [hear], ‘We’re not going to make you whole, but if you go to one of our preferred banks, we will make you whole,'” Lankford told Yellen. Yellen replied, ‘That’s certainly not something that we’re encouraging.'”
And yet that’s exactly what this policy will be encouraging. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case, the outcome of this policy is quite clear, regardless of what Yellen is saying.
To recap, the FDIC will only insure deposits up to $250,000 if your money is in a small bank, but if your money is in a big bank, uninsured deposits over that amount will be covered as well, should the bank fail.
Why Bank Crashes Will Facilitate CBDC Rollout
Adding insult to injury, while the system is clearly biased and won’t protect everyone, all banks (and hence account holders) will be forced to pay this “special fee” to the FDIC that will, supposedly, insure all these uninsured deposits at preferred banks.
The most likely outcome of this bailout system is a consolidation of banks until we’re left with just a small number of mega-banks. We’re already starting to see the early phases of this, with “the big three” — Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — reporting14 a deposit spike in the wake of the SVB collapse and Yellen’s announcement that only certain preferred banks will be covered above FDIC insurance limits.
This consolidation, in turn, will facilitate the rollout of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), as the banking industry will be a very tight-knit monopoly. Let’s say there are only half a dozen banks in all of America. All they have to do is make the switch to CBDC as a group, and anyone with a bank account in America will be automatically trapped in the new system. As reported by News Punch:15
“What we are seeing is a push towards Global Government that is being camouflaged and cloaked in humanitarianism, multiculturalism, as well as manufactured threats such as global warming and pandemics in order to condition the population into accepting globalization and a One World Government.
In order for this to occur the elite are planning to create a global financial crisis the likes of which the world has never seen. Out of the ashes of this financial crisis will rise the phoenix of is a New International Economic Order. The public will be told that the new order is the only way to stabilize the world economy and save what little remains of their wealth …
People often ask why the globalist elite would collapse the world economy. Wouldn’t that mean they destroy their own wealth in the process? The answer is no. The elite have been consolidating their wealth in order to protect it for centuries … When the world financial system finally crashes the elite will be positioned to buy what’s left for pennies on the dollar.
Where does this leave the rest of the world financially? The answer is in bondage to a Techno-Communist World Governmental System led by the World Economic Forum in Davos and the hidden hands that control the public face of that cabal. If you pay attention now you can see that everything around you is being engineered towards this one goal …
The globalist elite are also forcing their vassal states to move towards centralizing currency in the form of a … CBDC, which by the way, is not currency at all – it is software designed as a tool of total social control … If they can cancel out your bank balance with a single keystroke, then you have no freedom, no autonomy. You are a slave …”
UCC Code Update Is Stealth Attempt to Steal Our Freedom
The fact that CBDCs are intended as financial shackles to control you within what amounts to an open-air prison is also noted by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem16 in the Fox News interview above.
She highlights a proposed Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) update that seeks to redefine “currency” to exclude decentralized crypto currencies, effectively putting the government on the path to a CBDC monopoly. Noem vetoed the bill and is urging other states to reject it as well.
The UCC Code is a set of laws that govern commercial transactions in the U.S. While not a federal law, it’s a set of laws that states agree to adopt in a uniform fashion to facilitate interstate business. So, it appears they intend to begin the financial takeover by rolling out the CBDC on the state level first, and legislators who believe in freedom must denounce all such plans.
Government Bonds Are Now the ‘Toxic Asset’
According to News Punch,17 the destruction of Silicon Valley Bank was intentional. While I cannot vouch for that, it’s interesting to note that SVB was in relatively good shape before it went kaput overnight.
As explained by the Sovereign Research and Advisory Group in an article titled “If SVB Is Insolvent, So Is Everyone Else,”18 the 2008 banking crash occurred because Lehman Brothers and other banks had used depositors’ money to buy extremely risky no-money-down mortgage bonds.
While the economy was good, banks earned hefty profits from these toxic assets, but as soon as the economy downshifted, these toxic securities plunged in value and wiped them out.
This time, however, the toxic asset is not mortgages obtained by people with no job, income or history of paying their bills. No, this time, it’s U.S. government bonds that are sinking banks, and these bonds are supposed to be the safest investment there is. Sovereign Research and Advisory Group writes:19
“Silicon Valley Bank was no Lehman Brothers. Whereas Lehman bet almost ALL of its balance sheet on those risky mortgage bonds, SVB actually had a surprisingly conservative balance sheet.
According to the bank’s annual financial statements from December 31 of last year, SVB had $173 billion in customer deposits, yet “only” $74 billion in loans. I know this sounds ridiculous, but banks typically loan out MOST of their depositors’ money.
Wells Fargo, for example, recently reported $1.38 trillion in deposits. $955 billion of that is loaned out. That means Wells Fargo has made loans with nearly 70% of its customer’s money, while SVB had a more conservative ‘loan-to-deposit ratio’ of roughly 42%.
Point is, SVB did not fail because they were making a bunch of high-risk NINJA loans. Far from it. SVB failed because they parked the majority of their depositors’ money ($119.9 billion) in US GOVERNMENT BONDS. This is the really extraordinary part of this drama.
US government bonds are supposed to be the safest, most ‘risk free’ asset in the world. But that’s totally untrue, because even government bonds can lose value. And that’s exactly what happened.
Most of SVB’s portfolio was in long-term government bonds, like 10-year Treasury notes. And these have been extremely volatile. In March 2020, for example, interest rates were so low that the Treasury Department sold some 10-year Treasury notes at yields as low as 0.08%.
But interest rates have increased so much since then; last week the 10-year Treasury yield was more than 4%. And this is an enormous difference.
If you’re not terribly familiar with the bond market, one of the most important things to understand is that bonds lose value as interest rates rise. And this is what happened to Silicon Valley Bank.
SVB loaded up on long-term government bonds when interest rates were much lower; the average weighted yield in their bond portfolio, in fact, was just 1.78%. But interest rates have been rising rapidly. The same bonds that SVB bought 2-3 years ago at 1.78% now yield between 3.5% and 5%, meaning that SVB was sitting on steep losses.”
All Banks, Including the Fed, Are Likely Insolvent
According to the SVB’s 2022 annual report published January 19, 2023, they had $16 billion in capital and $15 billion in unrealized losses on their government bonds. So, they were ripe for a wipeout.20
The problem is, if SVB, with its conservative loan-to-deposit ratio ended up insolvent due to government bonds tanking, then that likely means that everyone else is insolvent as well, including state and local governments, large corporations of all kinds, and the Federal Reserve. Anyone holding government bonds is sitting on huge losses as interest rates rise.
According to FDIC estimates, the unrealized losses of U.S. banks is approximately $650 billion and rising. Meanwhile, the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund (DIF), the fund that’s supposed to cover insured deposits (accounts up to $250,000), has a balance of just $128 billion.21 See the problem? What’s worse, the DIF money doesn’t just sit there. It too is invested — in U.S. government bonds! As noted by the Sovereign Research and Advisory Group:22
“So even the FDIC is suffering unrealized losses in its insurance fund, which is supposed to bail out banks that fail from their unrealized losses. You can’t make this stuff up, it’s ridiculous!”
And it’s only going to get worse if the Federal Reserve continues to increase interest rates. The problem is, interest rates need to be raised to curtail runaway inflation, but if they go up, more banks will sink due to their holdings in government bonds.23,24 There’s just no way out.
Add to this insurmountable problem the fact that President Biden’s 2024 budget will raise the federal debt to $50.7 trillion by the end of 2033. It’s currently $31.459 trillion.25 That’s a staggering amount of debt.
From a household perspective, you have no choice but to file for bankruptcy once your income cannot even cover the interest payment on your debt, and that’s basically where we are on a national level. As noted by The Balance:26
“Most creditors don’t worry about a nation’s debt, also known as ‘sovereign debt,’ until it’s more than 77% of gross domestic product (GDP). That’s the point at which added debt cuts into annual economic growth, according to the World Bank. At the end of the second quarter of 2021, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio was 125%. That’s much higher than the tipping point …”
Are You Prepared?
All of this is why it’s so important to prepare and become as independent as possible. The things we’ve taken for granted our entire lives may soon vanish, and what’s coming to replace them are not in your best interest unless you’re part of the globalist cabal that will exempt themselves from the slave system.
Becoming more resilient in the face of these changes could include moving cash into things that have a greater chance of withstanding inflation, such as precious metals (the actual metals, not the paper) and land, for example, and/or tradeable items. Shelf-stable foods may also be a wise investment, as could securing a private well or building a rain catchment system.
Also remember that artificial intelligence is the “beast” that drives the coming slave system. A formula created by the World Economic Forum’s philosophical guru, Yuval Noah Harari, describes the technocrats’ ever-growing ability to hack humans: B x C x D = AHH.27
B stands for biological knowledge, C is computing power, D is data and AHH is the level of ability to hack a human being. AI needs massive amounts of up-to-the-minute data for the control system to work, so “starving the beast” also needs to be on your list.
That means eliminating apps and devices that collect your personal data, Google and Facebook being two of the biggest data miners. It also means rejecting CBDCs, as it’s not really a currency but a tool for population control, and digital identity, which will track everything you do, both online and in the real world, and will strip you of basic rights and freedoms based on your social credit score.
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On March 18th, 2023, an Air Transat Airbus A321 was flying from Fort-de-France to Montreal when the aircraft’s first officer became incapacitated. The incident occurred as the aircraft was flying over the United States, 200NM south of Montreal. (click here)
According to The Aviation Herald, the March 18th incident took place aboard Air Transat flight TS739, an Airbus A321-200 service from Fort-de-France, capital of the French territory of Martinique to Montreal, Canada.
At FL360, about 200NM south of Montreal, the first officer reportedly became incapacitated. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board reported that a second officer was available onboard and was thus able to replace the incapacitated first officer. Unfortunately, no additional details on the first officer’s condition were made available.
Sixth pilot incident this month
March 22, 2023 – Southwest 613 LAS-CMH diverted as pilot collapsed shortly after take-off (click here)
March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off (click here)
March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight 2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains (click here)
March 11, 2023? – British Airways (CAI-LHR) pilot collapsed in Cairo hotel and died, was scheduled to fly Airbus A321 from Cairo to London (click here)
March, 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia VA-717ADL-PER Adelaide to Perth flight was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure. (click here)
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
All images in this article are from the author
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
Comments Off on Air Transat Flight TS739 FDF-YUL Service from Fort-de-France to Montreal, Airbus A321-200: Pilot Incapacitated In-flight on March 18th, 2023, Sixth Incident This Month
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The American Library Association (ALA) today released new data documenting[1] 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago. The unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubles the 729 challenges reported in 2021.
A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.
Of the reported book challenges, 58% targeted books and materials in school libraries, classroom libraries or school curricula; 41% of book challenges targeted materials in public libraries.
The prevalent use of lists of books compiled by organized censorship groups contributed significantly to the skyrocketing number of challenges and the frequency with which each title was challenged. Of the overall number of books challenged, 90% were part of attempts to censor multiple titles. Of the books challenged, 40% were in cases involving 100 or more books
Prior to 2021, the vast majority of challenges to library resources only sought to remove or restrict access to a single book.
“A book challenge is a demand to remove a book from a library’s collection so that no one else can read it. Overwhelmingly, we’re seeing these challenges come from organized censorship groups that target local library board meetings to demand removal of a long list of books they share on social media,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Their aim is to suppress the voices of those traditionally excluded from our nation’s conversations, such as people in the LGBTQIA+ community or people of color.
“Each attempt to ban a book by one of these groups represents a direct attack on every person’s constitutionally protected right to freely choose what books to read and what ideas to explore,” said Caldwell-Stone. “The choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police.”
ALA will unveil its highly anticipated list of the top 10 most challenged books in the U.S. on Monday, April 24 during National Library Week, along with its full State of America’s Libraries Report. The theme of National Library Week 2023, There’s More to the Story, focuses on the essential services and programming that libraries offer through and beyond books.
ALA President Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said, “Every day professional librarians sit down with parents to thoughtfully determine what reading material is best suited for their child’s needs. Now, many library workers face threats to their employment, their personal safety, and in some cases, threats of prosecution for providing books to youth they and their parents want to read.
“ALA began documenting the book challenges reported to us over two decades ago because we want to shine a light on the threat of censorship facing readers and entire communities. Book challenges distract from the core mission of libraries: to provide access to information. That includes access to information and services for learners of all ages, homeschooling parents, job seekers, new computer users, budding readers, entrepreneurs, veterans, tax filers and amateur genealogists – just to name a few.
“While a vocal minority stokes the flames of controversy around books, the vast majority of people across the nation are using life-changing services that public and school libraries offer. Our nation cannot afford to lose the library workers who lift up their communities and safeguard our First Amendment freedom to read.”
Polling conducted by bipartisan research firms in 2022 showed that voters across the political spectrum oppose efforts to remove books from libraries and have confidence in libraries to make good decisions about their collections. To galvanize support for libraries and respond to the surge in book challenges and other efforts to suppress access to information, in 2022 ALA launched Unite Against Book Bans, a national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship. The coalition will mark its first anniversary during National Library Week.
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Note
[1] ALA compiles data on book challenges from reports filed with its Office for Intellectual Freedom by library professionals in the field and from news stories published throughout the United States. Because many book challenges are not reported to the ALA or covered by the press, the 2022 data compiled by ALA represents only a snapshot of book censorship throughout the year. A challenge to a book may be resolved in favor of retaining the book in the collection, or it can result in a book being restricted or withdrawn from the library.
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The March 13 Biden-Albanese-Sunak summit in San Diego to demonstrate alliance solidarity and to sign the multi-billion AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, US) nuclear submarine deal accelerated the pace of the U.S. and China sleepwalking toward catastrophic war. Compounding the dangers that came with the creation of the alliance in 2021 as part of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific military buildup, the new deal also adds to the mountain of obstacles blocking the way to the U.S.-Chinese cooperation that is essential if the climate emergency is to be reversed, the world’s nuclear arms races stanched, and if the planet’s two most technologically advanced nations collaborating to prevent pandemics and discover cancer cures.
The San Diego deal was designed to seal the southern flank of what Chinese President Xi Jinping describes as the West’s “all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression” of China. Initially, the U.S. is to sell Australia three and possibly more nuclear powered and nuclear-capable Virginia class submarines in the 2030s. A decade later the U.S. subs will be augmented with nuclear-powered submarines built by Britain and Australia with advanced U.S. technologies. In addition to deepening dangerous military tensions and provocations across the Indo-Pacific where an accident or miscalculation could trigger World War III. At an estimated cost of $268 to $368 billion, the submarine deal is a massive windfall for the three powers’ military-industrial complexes at the cost of spending for climate resilience and essential human needs. And even before Australia takes command of the most advanced U.S. and British nuclear submarines, Australian harbors will host U.S. and U.K. nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines as that land down under becomes a forward-based repair and maintenance hub for the United States’ seventh fleet.
To be clear, Beijing is not innocent in this. The new cold war era is defined by a classic Thucydides Trap, the inevitable tensions between rising and declining powers that in most cases—see most recently World War I and World War II—have climaxed with catastrophic conflicts. In this case, with its imperial claims to more than 80% of the resource-rich and strategically vital South China Sea, its occupation of Spratly and Parcel Islands claimed by six other nations, and its military modernization including its nuclear arsenal, China is behaving like most rising great powers.
Despite its calls for “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security” and for others to honor the United Nations, it is not adverse to seizing others’ maritime territories or violating international law to create a buffer zone or to revise, if not revolutionize, the rules of the road. But Xi had a point in decrying U.S. encirclement and containment. Building on the Obama-era U.S. Pivot to Asia, the Biden administration has deepened and expanded its alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia; expanded its military bases in Guam; and deepened military cooperation with India via the QUAD (U.S., Japan, Australia and India) collaboration.
My friend, the Australian peace and anti-bases movement leader Hannah Middleton, was unsparing in her opposition to AUKUS deal, writing that “Prime Minister Albanese and Defence Minister Marles, like their predecessors Morrison and Dutton, are now exposed as traitors and agents of a foreign power. They are willing to sacrifice Australia’s economy, to risk massive military and civilian casualties for the United States to retain dominance, economically and militarily in the Indo-Pacific. They are prepared to risk WW3 and the possibility of it going nuclear with devastating worldwide consequences?”
Looking back at history, it is worth recalling that with its 1898 conquests of the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa and the annexation of Hawaii, the United States launched its Asia-Pacific empire. Unlike the war to defeat Nazi Germany, the Pacific theater of World War II was an imperial competition between Japan, the U.S., and Britain. Japan lost. Britannia no longer ruled the waves. And the Pacific Ocean became an “American Lake,” patrolled by the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and reinforced by hundreds of U.S. military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and other U.S. protectorates. This guaranteed U.S. access to East Asian markets and labor along with the implicit threat that U.S. naval and air power could enforce blockades and strangle rival economies, especially China’s.
Beginning with the sacrifice of 60,000 Australian lives in the futility of WWI, the dispatch of troops to fight in the Korean War, and its brutal complicity in Washington’s Indochina War, the Australian government has long served as Anglo-America’s poodle. Its hosting of the Pine Gap intelligence base has given Australia a role in U.S. preparations for fighting a nuclear war. And the expansion of Holt Naval base in Perth and the permanent deployment of thousands of U.S. marines in Darwin (both in northern Australia) reinforce U.S. control of the strategically vital Malacca Strait, with their presence also challenging Chinese ambitions in the Indian Ocean.
Now comes AUKUS to reinforce U.S. Indo-Pacific hegemony. In addition to augmenting U.S. and Japanese military plans to bottle up the Chinese Navy within the first island chain, AUKUS begins to harness Australia into the first stage of a possible and certainly catastrophic war for Taiwan. In anticipation of a possible Chinese blockade of what Beijing perceives as its renegade province, U.S. war planners anticipate that the PLA will establish a naval blockade around Taiwan in the tradition of siege warfare. The Pentagon’s answer? Breaking the blockade with its and its allies’ submarine supremacy. (To calm Chinese fears the Australian government denies that it has yet to commit to defend Taiwan in case of war.)
AUKUS is the latest iteration of U.S. campaigning to maintain military supremacy to reinforce its declining Indo-Pacific hegemony. In response to the 1996 Taiwan crisis, when President Clinton dispatched two U.S. aircraft carrier fleets through the Taiwan Strait (and terrifying Chinese leadership as a result), Beijing has invested heavily in building a 21st military and laid its unjust claim to more than 80% of the South China/West Philippine Sea thus challenging U.S. Pacific hegemony, and built a Navy as it competes for control of the Inner Island Chain. The U.S. response has been a redoubled campaign to “contain” China, augmenting U.S. fire and economic power with expanded and deepened alliances.
First came Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” the commitment to deploy 60% of U.S. naval and air power in what is now called the Indo-Pacific region, then Trump’s China-bashing, provocative assaults on the (Taiwan-related) One China Policy and “Freedom of Navigation” forays in territorially disputed waters. Now the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy is targeted primarily against China.
There are also questions and a debate about the nuclear implications of the deal. The three allies insist that while the submarines will be nuclear-powered, they will not be nuclear-armed, and Australia’s foreign minister claims that the navies of a “number of other countries” have nuclear-powered submarines. Missing from that claim is that the number is five, and that those five nations are the P-5 nuclear weapons states.
Beijing is not having it, claiming that the deal violates the “object and purpose” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and that it violates the NPT’s requirement that exchange of nuclear equipment be only “for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.” There are also fears that the AUKUS submarine precedent will inspire other nations to field nuclear-powered submarines, thereby increasing the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. And, as the renowned physicist Frank Von Hipple report reminds us, nuclear-powered submarines are designed for one purpose: attack.
However, as the Quincy Institute reports, in 1972 a “submarine loophole” was inserted into the NPT. The deployment of these extraordinarily deadly and dangerous war machines may not violate international law. But they do severely undermine the chances that we can escape what Australian Ambassador Kevin Rudd describes as “the avoidable war.”
As Hannah Middleton’s writing indicates, the AUKUS submarine deal has not been unanimously welcomed in Australia. Citing the monumental cost of the deal, former Australian Prime Minister Keating has termed the agreement “the worst deal in all history.”
The Australian peace movement is mobilizing to block implementation of the deal, focusing on the dangers of ratcheting up tensions with China, the submarines’ staggering costs, and the need to pursue common security diplomacy across the Asia Pacific. We in the U.S. are also called to oppose AUKUS and the submarine deal, to begin finding ways to act in solidarity with our Australian partners. And, rather than sleepwalk into World War III, we would do well to at least test China’s commitments to common security by prioritizing diplomacy instead of thoughtlessly and dogmatically pursuing the chimera of military domination.
From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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Joseph Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, Co-founder of the Committee for a SANE U.S. China Policy and Vice President of the International Peace Bureau. His books include Empire and the Bomb, and With Hiroshima Eyes.
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International law died 24 years ago, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on Friday at the main ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the start of the 1999 NATO aggression on Serbia, noting that, at the time, big powers had tried to break the Serbian spirit but had not broken it, and never would.
Contemporary international law finally died 24 years ago – that sounds like an insignificant bureaucratic sentence, but it is much more than that, he said.
“Since then, nothing that is going on in the world can be worse than what they did to a small country whose only fault was that it wanted to be independent on its own soil, free and freedom-loving and, as such, it was not liked by those who created a new order in 1989 and 1990, in which only they decided about everything, while the disobedient were to be punished,” Vucic said in Sombor, northwestern Serbia.
They succeeded in destroying the Soviet Union and proceeded to Yugoslavia, and then it was the turn of “disobedient Serbia, which did not want to accept diktat,” he said.
Serbia wants no conflicts, Vucic also said.
“My message is that we want peace and that we want no conflicts with NATO or anyone else, but we are telling everyone clearly: We will protect our country. And when we tell you what our red lines are, do not play with that and do not pressure us any further, because you will then get the answer of a proud, dignified and heroic Serbia,” Vucic said.
“Our answer is: We are not giving Serbia away, and we will never give it away to anyone,” he said.
We will not give our children away to anyone, and we will never forget all those killed in the NATO bombing, Vucic said.
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Introductory Note by Michel Chossudovsky
This interview with James Corbett on the history of the European Union was first published almost 7 years ago on July 16, 2016.
The Washington Consensus in liaison with Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have imposed an IMF style neoliberal agenda (routinely imposed on Third World Countries) on all member states of the European Union. This process has been geared towards destroying the “European Project” as well eliminating the Welfare State.
In turn, America’s hegemonic project has been to integrate the E.U. political structures and bureaucracy based in Brussels into those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). With some exceptions, most EU member states are now members of NATO.
This de facto merger of the EU with NATO has been instrumental to the imposition of an “Economic Iron Curtain”, which essentially prevents the EU from establishing a framework of economic of cooperation with the Russian Federation.
“Strong economic medicine” has been imposed on the member nation states of the EU via the European Central Bank (ECB) (in liaison with Wall Street) coupled more recently with measures affecting the prices of energy and food staples which have led to bankruptcies, coupled with the impoverishment of more than 400 million Europeans.
The U.S. act of sabotage (26-27 September 2022) of the Nord Stream Pipeline ordered by President Joe Biden is tantamount of an Act of War against the European Union.
I remain indebted to James Corbett for his incisive and carefully research video productions.
Michel Chossudovsky, March 28, 2023
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Professor Michel Chossudovsky exposes the EU as the imperial project that it always was, and the growing movement against EU domination as an anti-imperial movement of world historical importance.
The EU is a Cold War Construct, a US imperial project formulated by the Washington Consensus. The growing movement against EU domination is an anti-imperial initiative of Worldwide significance. It is also a movement against neoliberalism.
GRTV Feature Interview with Michel Chossudovsky, produced by James Corbett
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During the past several years, a plethora of articles, blog commentaries and books have warned about the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset agenda to reimagine the international community as techno-hierarchy controlled by a stakeholder elite. The Forum’s president Klaus Schwab is the exemplary archetype of what Samuel Huntington in 2004 defined as the “Davos Man” and ”gold-collared workers.”
These “dead souls,” Huntington states, have been denationalized. Writing for Harpers in 1994, Christopher Lasch remarked that this elite “cancelled their allegiance to America.” They regard the planet as their financial playground and have no national allegiance to any border or flag. CNBC later defined the stereotypical Davos Man as rich and powerful, perhaps out of touch, but most of all representative of the global elite.
Technically, we have been charging blindly into the Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Globalization 4.0, for over three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the near silencing of anti-globalization protests after 911. When this new revolution began is relatively unimportant. However, two events at the close of the first Bush administration seem to have inadvertently catapulted its onset. First was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which decimated the older geopolitical landscape dividing the world between two military superpowers. With US military supremacy escalating towards global hegemony, the era of neoliberal globalization entered hyper-drive as the Clinton administration’s new generation of neocons seemed determined to keep Cold War mythologies alive through NATO. Second was the aftermath of the first Gulf War. In 1993, the World Wide Web went public, effectively launching the digital age and the era of big tech and social media.
There is an amateurish assumption that the Great Reset is the brainchild of Schwab. There is nothing theoretically new about many of the Great Reset’s underlying principles. Technologies such as 5G telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence, data collection and surveillance, block chain applications, biotechnology and genetic engineering and transhumanist visions were already forging ahead and becoming exponentially more complex and sophisticated.
A dozen years ago, a popular urban theorist Richard Florida published his book The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. Well, before Schwab’s blathering about the great opportunity before us to reset human civilization as the Covid-19 pandemic overturned “life as normal,” Florida’s Reset already promised a better life free of “ownership of real estate, appliances, cars and all manner of material goods.”
Several of his predictions are coming to pass, notably the shift away from home ownership to a renter economy. Florida believes this is particularly crucial for larger urban cities because of populations migrating away from rural areas. This in turn was outlined in the United Nation’s Agenda 20, which has much in common with the WEF’s futurist strategies. In 2014, Dutch economist Willem Middelkoop proposed The Big Reset in his book with the same title.
Surprisingly since its inception in 1971 the WEF has achieved little as an international institution. Despite the enormity of its global public face, by itself the Forum is a lot of smoke and mirrors, a climax of human hubris and self-deception.
Left to itself, it is a rather lame institution. Schwab himself has stated that his organization’s sole purpose is to initiate “dialogue between stakeholders” and doesn’t engage in negotiations for treaties and policy decisions. “Elites have always existed,” Schwab once stated, “We bring together people of influence, and we hope they use their influence in a positive way.” Speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, when asked whether the WEF could replace the multilateral institutional international structure Schwab replied it was not the Forum’s goal; instead the WEF’s strategy is to initiate reform from within the existing institutions.
The Forum is largely a huge clearing house that internalizes enormous amounts of analytical reports, public and private symposia, geopolitical analyses and scenario exercises from a wide network of governmental, multilateral organizations, transnational corporations and financial firms, banks, think tanks, NGOs and no doubt intelligence entities and elitist institutions such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc.
It has never truly succeeded in anything monumental or earthy shattering other than serving as the premier incubator for the Davos Folk, corporate multinational and financial elite and their well funded think tanks and NGOs, to network behind closed doors and conjure new ways to preserve and advance a post-capitalist technological agenda without overly disrupting the parasitical neoliberal agenda upon which these entities depend. Yet it is also in the WEF’s DNA to advance a template for socio-economic progress defined by a technologically driven regime that will not trigger earthquakes throughout the ruling elite class.
More worrisome is the younger generation who willingly and eagerly become incentivized by the market value of infinite technological innovations and progress despite their egregious applications for surveillance, social restructuring and behavior modification. Corporate techno-nerds pursue means to artificially mechanize human biology and dream of transhumanist futures when human cyborgs yearn for terrestrial immortality. They believe the miracles of CRISPR engineering to easily manipulate any species’ genome offers the technological future infinite Promethean possibilities.
At our peril, the WEF’s harshest public critics may be placing too much weight on Schwab as the mastermind for a unipolar world ruled by elite stakeholders. Schwab is simply a useful idiot, a comic decoy for the real movers and shakers who spearhead the globalist agenda. Remove Schwab, WEF and the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will proceed unscathed.
However, one elite mover and shaker who barely goes noticed is the French economist and social theorist Jacques Attali. Attali was a senior consultant to French presidents Mitterrand, Sarkozy and it is claimed he opened doors for Emmanuel Macron’s election. He founded the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1989 with a mission to rebuild the former Eastern European Soviet republics into functioning capitalist democracies, which he was later accused for having grossly mismanaged. Nevertheless, the prestigious journal Foreign Policy lists him as among the world’s top global thinkers.
Professor Valentin Katasonov, Chairman of the Russian Economic Society, has noted that many of Schwab’s strategic plans and goals outlined in his Great Reset coincide with Attali’s ideas. Attali’s Positive Planet Initiative is also part of the WEF’s network. A few voices have called Attali the actual “mastermind behind the Great Reset.”
In his 2009 bookThe Crisis and After, Attali predicted an “uncontrolled pandemic” and has supported Bill Gates’ pandemic strategies. During a 2021 TED talk, which was removed shortly after being posted, Attali is fully onboard with a technological readjustment of the human organism through vaccination. “We are very capable of creating vaccines,” Attali stated, “that will protect this code [the human genetic code], improve it and defend it against viruses, and that is how it should be.” Embracing the doctrine of radical scientific materialism, Attali believes all human activity – politics, agriculture, transportation, technology, economics, human behavior [from selfishness to empathy], health and medicine, are nothing more than codes. All such codes in Attali’s dystopian future, which govern “sets of rules,” need to be overhauled and rewritten so a “living being “ becomes “an object” and “an artifact.”
A decade ago, Attali praised the possibility of radio-identification chip strategies to be implanted “voluntarily or without it,” to reach “universal traceability.” “The luxury of tomorrow,” he conceded, will be to escape this electronic surveillance prison—hence offering the elite and get out of prison pass. Earlier he indicated that modern medical practice is ideally suited to be the platform for a future surveillance system when “the policeman and the priest fade away behind the doctor.” During the same 1981 interview published in L’Avenir de la Vie, Attali rejected the idea that his technological utopia was Orwellian; rather he believes “in implicit totalitarianism with an invisible and decentralized Big Brother. These machines for monitoring our health,” he continued, “which we could have for our own good, will enslave us for our own good. In a way, we will be subjected to gentle and permanent conditioning.” The Chinese Communist Party’s control is a vague analogy, and during a recent appearance on China’s state media, Schwab proclaimed the Xi regime is one of his role models for a global transformation. In later lectures and interviews Attali recommends a drastic reduction in agriculture, most forms of transportation, mechanical and chemical engineering and widespread decarbonization – all points clearly outlined in Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Throughout Attali’s work we repeatedly discover technological innovation as the final solution for all of humanity’s struggles and failures. True to the ideology of scientific determnism and metaphysical realism, his language characteristically frames humans as broken and imperfect machines. But it is the inherent authoritarian capacity of technology itself — through the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s social networks, data collection, algorithmic surveillance and censorship, and human engineering — that will ultimately give rise to a post-capitalist regime.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and the West in general believed a new neo-capitalist era was being born. Fukuyama’s The End of History would have us believe that history was being wiped out by an epoch of neoliberalism engineered by the US and its economic allies.
However, perhaps the events leading to this ahistorical era also marked signs pointing to the end of capitalism altogether. During the 2008 financial collapse the loss of money’s hard value accelerated. The only thing required was a printing press to create value and purchasing power out of nothing.
Neoliberal capitalism could be replaced by a stakeholder surveillance state with technology, and the multinational corporations who develop and control it may emerge as the new sovereign state. Nation states would be reduced to levels of subservience. Rather than technology and many of its wonderful advancements serving humanity and democratic ideals, the human race becomes increasingly enslaved. Humans are then meant to serve technology itself.
Writing shortly before the WHO’s declaration of Covid-19 pandemic, David Baker, a historian at Macquarie University, lists the “big picture” predictions that have been made as the century progresses: “stagnant real wages, altering standard of living for the lower and middle classes, worsening health inequality, more riots and uprisings, ongoing political polarization, more elites competing for limited position of power, and elites co-opting radical movements.” We have been witnessing each of these crises unfolding in spades.
The Great Reset agenda could transform neoliberalist capitalism into a counterrevolutionary movement led by a global elite to destroy capitalism itself in order to usher in a post-capitalist era.
Warnings of such a revolution were described by Christopher Lasch in his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elite and the Betrayal of Democracy.
Lasch viewed the elites’ intention to destroy the middle class as a revolt to “unleash a war of all against all.”
Post-capitalism has nothing to do with a new Marxism, an ignorant trope that sadly infects red pill country and many WEF critics. Many call it Marxist, communist, socialist and fascist in a single breath. Yet none of these socio-political constructs accurately encapsulate or describe the Great Reset’s larger vision. Attali, Schwab, and those most closely aligned with the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s techno-economic ideology, invert true Marxism.
It should be self-evident that the WEF counterrevolution is not about genuine class struggle nor does it in any way favor the proletariat worker’ struggle against an extremely powerful global bourgeoisie ascending to opaque political positions of socio-economic governance as stakeholders. The owners of wealth, instead of average citizens, orchestrate the Reset revolution. Consequently this would be an utterly new creature, an oppressive regime to further the destruction of the middle and upper working classes.
As real estate is gobbled up by banks and large investment firms like Blackrock, tens of millions of homeowners and owners of small and medium sized businesses are going bankrupt and having their property seized.
The Dutch government seizing farmers’ land is another recent example. The long-term goal is to eventually establish a depopulated caste system that favors a liberated elitist class and its privileged constituents. Beneath them resides a socially engineered caste that comprises the masses of useful and expendable “useless” eaters.
In 2018, attendees at the Santa Fe invitation-only conference by the National Security Agency (NSA) voted on their preference and/or likelihood of four future scenarios for humanity to constructively face the global crises ahead.
The first and most optimal scenario portrayed our civilization’s capacity to meet and solve every obstacle and crisis;
the second scenario required a major technological breakthrough in order for modern civilization to successfully confront its most foreboding challenges. The attendees voted against both of these scenarios because of the Western political leadership’s low intelligence level, and, second, that the most law-abiding citizens [i.e., middle and upper working classes] are incapable of taking the responsibility necessary to meet those challenges.
The third scenario received the greatest approval and involves orchestrated and controlled chaos. As an admirer of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” theory propelling innovation as a revolutionizing force, this third scenario is aligned with Schwab’s preferred trajectory.
The second most popular scenario was named “anthropological transition” and refers to the movement towards a new social order with the distinguishing gap between the top and bottom being that which separates two different biological species. This latter scenario is the new caste system, which can be found intrinsically couched within the Great Reset as a kind of Plan B.
However, none of this is really new; we have heard much of this before. In their special report Crisis of Democracy, commissioned by the Trilateral Commission under the directorship of Zbigniew Brzezinski and published in 1975, authors Samuel Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki suggest the US needs to move towards less rather than more democracy. A functioning democracy requires moderation; to reach this goal a large portion of the population must become apathetic and disengaged from civil action. Therefore diminishing civil society’s public influence is essential. Perhaps better would be the destruction of the middle class altogether.
We may not feel inclined to lend much importance to a report written almost half a century ago. However, in the Trilateral Commission’s Summer 2019 report, entitled “Democracies Under Stress,” the 1975 report was resurrected. The 2019 report states, “The Commission will return to its roots and seek to produce content as seminal and lasting [our italics] as Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki’s Crisis of Democracy.”
The globalists’ adrenaline rush during the past years of the pandemic has been an effort to shatter the public’s self-awareness, to squash individuality and dumb down critical thought. Viewed from this perspective, social movements such as the New Woke, environmentalism as an ideology created by the elites’ New Green Deal agenda, and gender insanity were likely very predictable distractors now that we have seen them being co-opted by the same engineers of the Great Rese. The Critical Race Theory movement’s identity politics has replaced a direly needed authentic class struggle. They are synonymous with a system that needs to shatter the public’s conscious self-awareness and replace democracy with idiocracy for mass consumption. This includes abolishing public control over social media networks, as witnessed by the US Democrat and EU governments’ backlash against Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
After Obama’s 8-year term in office, the elite class fully expected Hillary Clinton to rule for the following two terms. Over the course of this aniticipated 16-year reign by hardened corporate Democrats, the politicos of globalist ideology, the neoliberal project for implementing the unipolar regime outlined in the Great Reset had a greater chance of success. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley, the exemplar of a technological autocracy, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
But then there was a “black swan” event. There was the surprising election of Donald Trump. Far from truly representing the average person, Trump represents a different maverick class of elites. As a nationalist, he believes in the country’s sovereignty. However he also stood in opposition to international institutional infrastructures, such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, World Health Organization and their various offspring that impose their will upon nations’ sovereignty. Trump’s presidential predecessors were simply high-ranking clerks.
Trump, on the other hand, stood on the margins. Hyperactive globalists, such as George Soros, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, prefer the demolition of the state and national boundaries. For the global elites, Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism would usher large multinational banks, corporations and cherry-picked NGOs into the ranks of governance over domestic and foreign affairs. Trump’s buffoonery, the uncertainty about what he would do from one day to the next, may be regarded as a surreal blessing to interrupt the globalist agenda and perhaps saved a middle class – or at least lend it a bit more survival time. Trump’s fool’s errand nevertheless brought to public light the underbelly of the globalist class and its ties to the deep state apparatus. Trump would certainly be an inappropriate architect and general for a constructive counterattack against a new global order built upon the Great Reset’s designs.
However, it serves us to pay heed to how his presidency’s burlesque upset the new faux left’s tyrannical forces and the powers of wealth that support it.
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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer for the Progressive Radio Network in Manhattan and an independent journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Introduction
Watching the Serbian TV evening programme on 24 March 2023, I was at first deeply shocked, although 24 years had already passed since the first war on European soil by the “North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation” (NATO) against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ).
A short time later, a question came to me, the answer to which I already knew.
First of all, I was shocked by the hate speeches of criminal Western politicians against the then Yugoslav President and the Serbian people. I was also shocked by the merciless bombardments of Serbian infrastructure and Serbian civilians. But above all, shocked by the use of highly toxic, radioactive uranium shells.
The extent of this NATO war crime in Serbia only became clear after 1999: Aggressive cancer among young and old took on epidemic proportions – every day a child fell ill with cancer and the whole country was contaminated. Due to the damage to the genetic material (DNA), generation after generation of malformed children are born. A war that will not end (1).
Knowingly and willingly, a genocide has been committed, which is called the “crime of crimes” or the “worst crime of international criminal law” (2).
After the initial shock, I asked myself: why have we citizens of the world accepted these political crimes largely without objection and let them happen again? Radioactive uranium munitions are soon to be used by Ukrainian soldiers in the Ukraine war – and the world does not cry out. Have we learned nothing in the last decades?
I have known the answer to this question for a long time: Whatever happens to the people in the immediate vicinity or far away in any part of the world – it’s none of my business.
“Yes it’s none of my business.”
In a further education course for young people, my former psychology teacher from a psychotherapeutic career counselling service told the following:
“A 20-year-old young man comes to the vocational counselling and is told exactly: how he is doing, what profession he can devote himself to, how he is doing in sexuality?
Mr. Müller, do you have means of protection when you have relations with a girl?
Yes, the ones I know, I have condoms.
Yes what do you mean: the ones you know?
Yes, when I have sexual intercourse with someone I don’t know, I don’t use the condom.
Yes, why not?
Yes, it’s none of my business.
Yes you say, Mr. Müller, if the poor child, the girl gets pregnant, that’s terrible, you think!
Yes, it’s none of my business.
It’s no use talking. The young man is called to the surgery again, but it’s none of my business. He is a good Christian, he belongs to a church and has learned to pray, and so on (…).
That is the upbringing, that is how man has experienced it. Today we speak, for example, of the politician who instigates war and the one who does not. And of the priest and the church who bless the weapons of war, who slay the others on the other side of the border, who are also Christians, people like us. This is the world.
We will try to address the problem of “man”. How he becomes and what differences we should make between the pastor, the theologians, the war leader, the politician and the lad who marches when he is called.
And we, how do we stand? What do we do?
We talk about war – about the past wars. What about the wars to come? (…). Never before have so many weapons been forged as today, but for other purposes like for schools, for teaching, for cultural purposes, we have no money (…).” (3)
Enabling the youth to have a future worth living
Dear readers, I hope we understand each other!
Shouldn’t we adult citizens think about how we can also enable a future worth living for our children and children’s children – after a mostly fulfilled personal life?
If we are convinced that we citizens have also consciously or unconsciously helped to shape the current world situation because we have allowed very unfavourable – and in some cases foreseeable – political developments to happen in our own country and in the world, while “washing our hands of it”, then we will learn the right lessons from our failures.
It is not only the others, the invisible “rulers of darkness” and the politicians in bondage to them, who are responsible for earthly misery. We citizens have allowed ourselves to be reassured by the unctuous, mendacious statements of many politicians – mostly in the name of some democracy – and thus justified our inaction. The enemy images hammered into us over years or months via the government media have not failed to have an effect.
As a German citizen who has lived for years in peace and friendship in this “frowned upon” country of Serbia, I am of the opinion that the attempted destruction and “murder” of Serbia was a hidden political plan, an order from “high up” and not from a “disliked” president or a people who absolutely had to be punished because of their socialist sentiments and loyalty.
It is wonderful to live together with Serbs! This is also true of all other states and their people that have been overrun by the US-NATO with murderous wars. Therefore, we citizens in the West should do our utmost to cleanse our consciousness of individual and collective prejudices and not be impressed by certain politicians and their government media.
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a school rector, educational scientist and qualified psychologist. After his university studies he became an academic teacher in adult education. As a retiree he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and professional articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education in values as well as an education for public spirit and peace. In 2021, he was awarded the Republic Prize “Captain Misa Anastasijevic” by the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad for services to Serbia.
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On March 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will start deploying its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Construction of designated storage facilities for the weapons is planned to be completed by July 1.
The decision to transfer nuclear weapons to Belarus was made after Minsk [allegedly] issued a formal request, essentially mirroring Washington DC’s nuclear sharing agreements with several NATO member states. And while the decision was officially made after the United Kingdom announced it would supply depleted uranium munitions to the Kiev regime, the actual reasoning might have to do with much more sinister plans by the United States.
Namely, Warsaw and Washington DC have been floating the idea of transferring some of the US nuclear weapons stockpiled in Europe to Poland. The move has been mentioned several times in recent years, including in early October last year, when Polish President Andrzej Duda mentioned it in an interview with Gazeta Polska. The US has nuclear sharing agreements with the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey, with approximately 100 (mainly air-launched) tactical nuclear weapons deployed in all five countries. Greece also took part in the program, but discontinued its participation in 2001, although it’s widely believed Athens still keeps the necessary storage facilities functional.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko advised against UK plans to deliver depleted uranium munitions to the Kiev regime and warned that Russia would soon supply Belarus with “munitions with real uranium”. However, Putin himself stated that “even outside the context of these events”, Belarus still has legitimate security concerns and that “Alexander Grigoryevich [Lukashenko] has long raised the question of deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus”. This clearly implies that threats to Minsk transcend the immediate danger of depleted uranium munitions deliveries to the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev.
“There is nothing unusual in such a decision, as the United States has been doing this for decades. They have long placed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territories of their allies, NATO countries, and in Europe. In six states – the Federal Republic of Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Greece – well, not in Greece now, but there is still a storage facility,” Putin stressed, further adding: “[Russia and Belarus] will do the same, without violating our international obligations on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons”.
He added that Russia is indeed mirroring the United States in this regard and that it’s not transferring the ownership of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, but that it’s simply deploying them to the country and training the Belarussian military to operate and use them in the case of a wider escalation by the US and NATO. The Russian military has already provided Belarus with the necessary upgrades to be able to deliver tactical nuclear warheads. At least 10 (presumably Belarussian Air Force) jets have been assigned and equipped to carry such weapons, although neither side specified what type of aircraft received the said upgrades.
Belarus operates several types of nuclear-capable fighter jets, including the recently acquired Su-30SM and the Soviet-era MiG-29. In addition to air-launched nuclear weapons, Russia already deploys ground-based assets in Belarus, including the “Iskander” systems capable of launching nuclear-tipped hypersonic and regular cruise missiles. Minsk also operates its own “Iskander” units, meaning that those too could be equipped with tactical nuclear warheads, further bolstering the country’s deterrence capabilities. This is particularly important as Belarus has also been targeted by US/NATO covert/black operations in recent years, including an attempted Maidan-style color revolution in 2020.
“We have handed over to Belarus our well-known and very effective ‘Iskander’ system that can carry [nuclear weapons],” Putin stated, adding: “On April 3, we will start training the crews and on July 1 we will complete the construction of a special storage [facility] for tactical nuclear weapons on the Belarussian territory.”
In addition to the “Iskander”, Belarus still maintains a number of Soviet-era nuclear-capable assets, including a substantial arsenal of “Tochka-U” tactical ballistic missiles. These could serve as a secondary delivery option given their shorter range and inferior accuracy when compared to the “Iskander” which boasts a 500 km range, high precision, extreme maneuverability at every stage of flight, as well as a hypersonic speed estimated to be at least Mach 5.9, although military sources indicate that it can go up to Mach 8.7. This makes the “Iskander” virtually impossible to intercept, as evidenced by its performance during the SMO (special military operation). The system also provides a significant advantage over NATO forces in Eastern Europe.
President Lukashenko strongly indicated that Minsk could host Russian nuclear weapons as soon as NATO implied it could deploy US B61 nuclear bombs to Poland, highlighting that his country’s Soviet-era infrastructure for such weapons remains intact despite US pressure to destroy it during the 1990s.
Belarus is home to a growing arsenal of state-of-the-art Russian military units and equipment, including strategic assets such as the S-400 SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems, as well as the advanced Su-35S air superiority fighter jets and MiG-31 interceptors, including the K/I variants capable of deploying the already legendary “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles, which are also nuclear-capable.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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First published on September 9, 2022
In recent developments “Green King Charles” has endorsed legislation allowing for the genetic manipulation of plants and animals.
Did you know that Prince Charles, now King Charles, was the first to announce the Global Reset?
Boy was that prophetic.
Farmers in the Netherlands are being persecuted more than ever to stop providing food to the masses.
What is this all about? We break it down.
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Oil prices may be trading in a sweet spot for buyers, but it will take years to replenish the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.
When the Biden Administration sold off 221 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR last year, the idea was to buy oil to replace what was withdrawn. In October of last year, the Administration announced that it would repurchase crude oil for the reserve when prices were at or below about $67-$72 per barrel. The move would be dual purpose in that not only would it replenish the nation’s depleted reserves, but it would boost demand when prices were low instead of sending them into orbit at a time or regular prices.
In December, the Administration said that it had plans to make the first of these repurchases. The Administration issued a solicitation for 3 million barrels of sour crude oil, with bids due by December 28. Contracts were to be awarded by January 13. At the time, WTI was trading around $74 per barrel. It later declined the finalize its own buyback plan, saying that it did not get offers that met its terms for price or quality.
Today, WTI is trading at just over $71 per barrel—a price that many forecasters don’t think will stick around for long. But according to Granholm, refilling the SPR at $70 per barrel will be difficult this year. In fact, according to Granholm, it will take a few years to replenish.
The SPR currently holds 372 million barrels of crude oil, down from 638 million at the beginning of 2021. It is the lowest level since December 1983. Oil was first delivered into the U.S. SPR in 1977.
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Julianne Geiger is a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group.
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The biggest global news story in 2021, 2022, and now in 2023 is that people around the world are dying in ever great numbers as the pandemic winds down. This is just the opposite of what was expected since COVID-19 mortality was largely in the elderly and those with many medical problems, the viral illness should have had a “culling” effect leaving 2022 and now 2023 to have decreased mortality.
Multiple sources of data suggest the swell in mortality occurring is not just among the elderly. Edward Dowd’s book “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 numerous sources of insurance data are cited suggesting death claims among working age persons are skyrocketing.
Aarstad et al have published an ecological analysis demonstrating that deaths tracked with increased COVID-19 vaccination rates. But as the authors point out, these observations are not conclusive that the vaccines independently are responsible for the alarming trend.
Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints 2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.
Public health agencies should immediately merge the vaccine administration and all cause death data to analyze temporal association. In other words, to produce a frequency histogram of deaths occurring on days 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. after the shot. From a regulatory perspective, any death within 30 days of an injection should be attributed to COVID-19 vaccination since all vaccines have conclusively caused death(s) as published in the peer-reviewed literature. Given the long-acting nature of mRNA and Spike protein, one could argue any death within a year is reasonable to consider as a vaccine death.
In conclusion, governments hold all the data on vaccination and death and it will be public health agencies or independent researchers who acquire the data that will deliver these important answers. Death cannot remain “cause unknown” forever.
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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.”
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The circumstances surrounding the flare-up in Syria between the US occupation forces and pro-Iranian militia groups remain murky. President Biden claims that the US is reacting, but there are signs that it is likely being proactive to create new facts on the ground.
The US Central Command claims that following a drone attack on March 23 afternoon on an American base near Hasakah, at the direction of President Biden, retaliatory air strikes were undertaken later that night against “facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.”
However, this version has been disputed by the spokesman of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council who accused Washington of “creating artificial crises and lying.” The Iranian official has alleged that
“Over the past two days, American helicopters have carried out several sorties with the aim of increasing instability in Syria and transferred Daesh (Islamic State) terrorists in the territory of this country.”
He said Washington must be held accountable for such activities. The official warned that Tehran will give a prompt response to any US attack on whatever false pretext against Iranian bases that exist on Syrian soil at the request of Damascus for fighting terrorism.
Is the US deliberately ratcheting up tensions in Syria even as the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement is radically changing the security scenario in the West Asian region in a positive direction?
There is optimism that Syria stands to gain out of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. Already, the Saudi Foreign Ministry revealed on Thursday that talks are going on with Syria for resuming consular services between the two countries, which will pave the way for the resumption of diplomatic relations and in turn make it possible to reinstate Syria’s membership of the Arab League.
Saudi Arabia has established an air bridge with Syria to send reef supplies for those affected by the devastating earthquake in February.
The backdrop is that the normalisation of relations between Syria and its estranged Arab neighbours has accelerated. It must be particularly galling for Washington that these regional states used to be active participants in the US-led regime change project to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The Saudi-Iranian rapprochement badly isolates the US and Israel.
From such a perspective, it stands to reason that the US is once again stirring up the Syrian cauldron. Lately, Russian aircraft have been reported as frequently flying over the US’s military base At Tanf on the Syrian-Iraqi border where training camps for militant groups are known to exist.
Israel too is a stakeholder in keeping Syria unstable and weak. In the Israeli narrative, Iran-backed militia groups are increasing their capability in Syria in the last two years and continued US occupation of Syria is vital for balancing these groups. Israel is paranoid that a strong government in Damascus will inevitably start challenging its illegal occupation of Golan Heights.
A key factor in this matrix is the nascent process of Russian mediation between Turkiye and Syria. With an eye on the forthcoming presidential and parliamentary election in Turkiye in May, President Recep Erdogan is keen to achieve some visible progress in improving the ties with Syria.
Erdogan senses that the Turkish public opinion strongly favours normalisation with Syria. Polls in December showed that 59 percent of Turks would like an early repatriation of Syrian refugees who are a burden on Turkish economy, which has an inflation rate of 90 percent.
Evidently, Turkiye is ending up as a straggler when the West Asian countries on the whole are coasting ahead to normalise their relations with Damascus. But the catch is, Assad is demanding the vacation of Turkish occupation of Syrian territory first for resuming ties with Ankara.
Now, there are growing signs that Erdogan may be willing to bite the bullet. The consummate pragmatist in him estimates that he must act in sync with the public mood. Besides, the main opposition party CHP always maintained that an end to the Syrian conflict needs to be anchored firmly on the principles of Syria’s unity and territorial integrity.
The influential Beirut newspaper Al-Akhbar has reported citing sources close to Damascus that Erdogan is weighing options that would meet Assad’s demand with a view to restore relations. The daily reported that one possibility is that Turkiye may propose a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops in Syria.
Significantly, Erdogan telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday and the Kremlin readout mentioned that amongst “topics concerning Russian-Turkish partnership in various fields,” during the conversation, “the Syrian issue was touched upon, and the importance of continuing the normalisation of Turkish-Syrian relations was underlined. In this regard the President of Türkiye highlighted the constructive mediatory role Russia has played in this process.”
Earlier, on Wednesday, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar held telephone talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu to discuss developments in Syria where he underscored that the “sole purpose” of its deployment in northern Syria is to secure its borders and fight terrorism.
It is entirely conceivable that Erdogan has sought Putin’s help and intervention to reach a modus vivendi with Assad quickly. Of course, this is a spectacular success story for Russian diplomacy — and for Putin personally — that the Kremlin is called upon to broker the Turkish-Syrian normalisation.
The China-brokered Saudi-Iranian normalisation hit Washington where it hurts. But if Putin now brokers peace between two other rival West Asian states, Biden will be exposed as hopelessly incompetent.
And, if Turkiye ends its military presence in Syria, the limelight will fall on the US’ illegal occupation of one-third of Syrian territory and the massive smuggling of oil and other resources from Syria in American military convoys.
Furthermore, the Syrian government forces are sure to return to the territories vacated by Turkish forces in the northern border regions, which would have consequences for the Kurdish groups operating in the border region who are aligned with the Pentagon.
In sum, continued US occupation of Syria may become untenable. To be sure, Russia, Turkiye, Iran and Syria are on the same page in seeking the vacation of US occupation of Syria.
Thus, an alibi is needed for the US to justify that although dialogue and reconciliation is in ascendance in West Asian politics, Syria is an exception as a battleground against “terrorism.” The US is vastly experienced in using extremist groups as geopolitical tools.
The US’ real intention could be to confront Iran on Syrian soil — something that Israel has been espousing — taking advantage of Russia’s preoccupations in Ukraine. The Russian-Iranian axis annoys Washington profoundly.
The spectre that is haunting Washington is that the stabilisation of Syria following Assad’s normalisation with the Arab countries and with Turkiye will inexorably coalesce into a Syrian settlement that completely marginalises the “collective West.”
In retrospect, the unannounced visit by General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to northern Syria in early March falls into perspective. Milley told reporters traveling with him that the nearly eight-year-old US deployment to Syria is still worth the risk!
The time may have come for the militants, including ex-Islamic State fighters, who were trained in the US’s remote At Tanf military base to return to the killing fields for “active duty.”
Tass reported that on Friday, the terrorist group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham tried to break into the Aleppo region which has been under Syrian government control and relatively stable in the recent years.
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Featured image: US Joint Chiefs Chair, General Mark Milley (L) paid an unannounced visit to a US military base in Northeast Syria, March 3, 2023 (Source: IP)
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
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A trillion dollars is a lot of money. If you stacked a billion dollar bills on top of one another, the pile would be 67.9 miles high, but if you stacked a trillion dollar bills on top of one another the pile would be 67,866 miles high. And if you lined up a trillion dollar bills end to end, the line of dollar bills would be a staggering 96,906,656 miles long. That is longer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
A trillion dollars is such a vast amount of money that it is truly difficult to comprehend, but as you will see below, that much money has already been pulled out of “vulnerable” U.S. banks over the past year. Hordes of small and mid-size banks are now in trouble, and that is really bad news because those institutions issue most of the mortgages, auto loans and credit cards that our economy runs on.
The other day, I asked my readers to “imagine what our country will look like if the banking system implodes and the economy plunges into a depression”, because if our banks continue to collapse that is precisely where we are headed.
Unfortunately, the recent banking panic has greatly accelerated matters. In fact, a whopping 98.4 billion dollars was pulled out of U.S. banks during the week ending March 15th…
The readout, released shortly after the market closed Friday, came around the same time as new Fed data showed that bank customers collectively pulled $98.4 billion from accounts for the week ended March 15.
That would have covered the period when the sudden failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank rocked the industry.
Just think about that.
Nearly 100 billion dollars in deposits evaporated in just one week.
And it turns out that small banks were being hit the hardest. Unsurprisingly, big banks actually saw enormous inflows…
Data show that the bulk of the money came from small banks. Large institutions saw deposits increase by $67 billion, while smaller banks saw outflows of $120 billion.
That article didn’t give numbers for mid-size banks, but it appears likely that they experienced large outflows as well.
JPMorgan Chase & Co analysts estimate that the “most vulnerable” U.S. banks are likely to have lost a total of about $1 trillion in deposits since last year, with half of the outflows occurring in March following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
This really is a “banking meltdown”, and it has been going on for quite some time.
And as Bill Ackman has aptly noted, if something is not done our small and mid-size banks are headed for disaster.
There are more than 4,000 banks in the United States right now, and the vast majority of them are rapidly losing deposits.
Banks have been flocking to emergency lending facilities set up after the failures of SVB and Signature. Data released Thursday showed that institutions took a daily average of $116.1 billion of loans from the central bank’s discount window, the highest since the financial crisis, and have taken out $53.7 billion from the Bank Term Funding Program.
Meanwhile, the banking crisis in Europe has taken another very alarming turn.
On Friday, shares of Deutsche Bank plunged due to renewed concern about the stability of Germany’s biggest bank…
Deutsche Bank shares fell on Friday following a spike in credit default swaps Thursday night, as concerns about the stability of European banks persisted.
The Frankfurt-listed stock was down 14% at one point during the session but trimmed losses to close 8.6% lower on Friday afternoon.
The German lender’s Frankfurt-listed shares retreated for a third consecutive day and have now lost more than a fifth of their value so far this month.
It will be interesting to see if Credit Suisse or Deutsche Bank ends up going under first.
Of course the politicians continue to tell us that everything is just fine.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Friday that there was “no reason to be concerned” about Deutsche Bank.
“It’s a very profitable bank,” he told reporters in Brussels, where EU leaders issued a joint statement describing the European banking system as “resilient, with strong capital and liquidity positions.”
Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
Once upon a time we were told that Lehman Brothers would be just fine.
And earlier this month we were told that Silicon Valley Bank would be just fine.
As Robin Williams once observed, these banks love to make excuses.
The word collapse is a great word, and the other word that comes with collapse is calamity. With the collapse and calamity under way, people think, well, as long as it doesn’t touch me, I’ll be okay or I’ll be dead, and my kids will have to deal with it. What a selfish way to deal with the Biblical times we live in. I think we are in big trouble with this banking situation that will really kick into high gear in April.
You may not have much sympathy for the banks, and I understand that.
But what is going to happen to our economy when the flow of mortgages, auto loans and credit cards is greatly restricted?
So what is going to happen when we do fall into a very deep economic depression?
These are such perilous times, and they are only going to get more difficult in the months ahead.
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Now Tucker CarlsonExplains:“The Deep State Removed Nixon, The Most Popular President Ever, to Cover Up CIA’s Murder of JFK.”
Carlson is correct that Nixon was an enemy of the Deep State, but the plot against Nixon originated prior to Nixon’s meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms.Nixon was removed because he was normalizing US relations with the Soviet Union and China.This was seen as taking away the needed enemies for the military/security complex’s budget and power.This was also the main reason the CIA murdered President Kennedy.
Kennedy, having come face to face with nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, was working with Khrushchev to normalize US-Soviet relations.
President Trump’s intention was to normalize
Note that Biden has learned the lesson and does everything possible to raise tensions with Russia.
After the CIA’s removal of three US presidents, what future president will dare to move against the CIA?
TUCKER CARLSON: Joe Biden alone is responsible for this crime. He alone took home classified documents. He didn’t have help in doing that, but allowing the country to be invaded, that’s not something you can do by yourself. So, if Biden were to be taken down for opening the southern border, a lot of other people would go with them. He had a lot of accomplices. Permanent Washington doesn’t want that and ultimately and here’s the point: Permanent Washington is in charge. It’s not the democracy you imagined. We’re seeing that now.
So, if you want to understand, if you really want to understand how the American government actually works at the highest levels, and if you want to know why they don’t teach history anymore, one thing you should know is that the most popular president in American history was Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon. Yet somehow, without a single vote being cast by a single American voter, Richard Nixon was kicked out of office and replaced by the only unelected president in American history. So, we went for the most popular president to a president nobody voted for. Wait a minute, you may ask, why didn’t I know that? Wasn’t Richard Nixon a criminal?
Wasn’t he despised by all decent people? No, he wasn’t. In fact, if any president could claim to be the people’s choice, it was Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1972 by the largest margin of the popular vote ever recorded before or since. Nixon got 17 million more votes than his opponent. Less than two years later, he was gone. He was forced to resign and in his place, an obedient servant of the federal agencies called Gerald Ford took over the White House.
How did that happen? Well, it’s a long story, but here are the highlights and they tell you a lot. Richard Nixon believes that elements in the federal bureaucracy were working to undermine the American system of government and had been doing that for a long time. He often said that. He was absolutely right. On June 23, 1972, Nixon met with the then–CIA director, Richard Helms, at the White House. During the conversation, which thankfully was tape-recorded, Nixon suggested he knew “who shot John,” meaning President John F. Kennedy. Nixon further implied that the CIA was directly involved in Kennedy’s assassination, which we now know it was. Helms’s telling response? Total silence, but for Nixon, it didn’t matter because it was already over. Four days before, on June 19, The Washington Post had published the first of many stories about a break-in at the Watergate office building.
Unbeknownst to Nixon and unreported by The Washington Post, four of the five burglars worked for the CIA. The first of many dishonest Watergate stories was written by a 29-year-old metro reporter called Bob Woodward. Who exactly was Bob Woodward? Well, he wasn’t a journalist. Bob Woodward had no background whatsoever in the news business. Instead, Bob Woodward came directly from the classified areas of the federal government. Shortly before Watergate, Woodward was a naval officer at the Pentagon.
He had a top-secret clearance. He worked regularly with the intel agencies. At times, Woodward was even detailed to the Nixon White House, where he interacted with Richard Nixon’s top aides. Soon after leaving the Navy, for reasons that have never been clear, Woodward was hired by the most powerful news outlet in Washington and assigned the biggest story in the country. Just to make it crystal clear what was actually happening, Woodward’s main source for his Watergate series was the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt, and Mark Felt ran — and we’re not making this up — the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which was designed to secretly discredit political actors, the federal agencies wanted to destroy — people like Richard Nixon. And at the same time, those same agencies were also working to take down Nixon’s elected vice president, Spiro Agnew. In the fall of 1973, Agnew was indicted for tax evasion and forced to resign. His replacement was a colorless congressman from Grand Rapids called Gerald Ford.
What was Ford’s qualification for the job? Well, he had served on the Warren Commission, which absolved the CIA of responsibility for President Kennedy’s murder. Nixon was strong-armed into accepting Gerald Ford by Democrats in Congress. “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford,” Speaker of the House Carl Albert later boasted. Eight months later, Gerald Ford of the Warren Commission was the president of the United States. See how that works? So those are the facts, not speculation. All of that actually happened. None of it’s secret. Most of it actually is on Wikipedia, but no mainstream news organization has ever told that story. It’s so obvious, yet it’s intentionally ignored and as a result, permanent Washington remains in charge of our political system.
Unelected lifers in the federal agencies make the biggest decisions in American government and crush anyone who tries to rein them in and in the process, our democracy becomes a joke. Now, you may have noticed that the very first person in the Trump administration the agencies went after was Gen. Michael Flynn. Why Flynn? Because Mike Flynn was a career Army intel officer who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency. In other words, Mike Flynn knew exactly how the system worked, and as a result, he was capable of fighting back. Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI lured Mike Flynn into a meeting without his lawyer, concocted a series of fake crimes and forced him to resign.
So, that’s how things actually work in Washington. Let’s stop lying about it. Joe Biden, meanwhile, whooped like a hyena when the Justice Department destroyed Mike Flynn. So, there is, we have to say, a certain perverse justice in watching something very similar happen to Joe Biden himself six years later. Joe Biden does not deserve our sympathy. He’s being shafted, but don’t weep for him, and yet, the rest of us do deserve a better system, an actual democracy. When people nobody voted for run everything, you are not living in a free country.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is asking Congress for a $3.5 billion plus-up over the president’s budget request as it seeks to bolster its presence in the region to deter China.
The command’s wish list is the largest request on the unfunded priorities lists of six combatant commands obtained by Defense News.
Africa Command came in a distant second at $397.8 million for its unfunded priorities list, which is largely devoted to developing a “persistent presence” in Somalia.
The $376.7 million Northern Command wish list asks for several key upgrades to the air defense architecture of North American Aerospace Defense Command. A significant portion of the $278.3 million list for Southern Command, which oversees U.S. forces in Latin America, is also allocated for air defenses.
European Command’s $159.5 million list also includes more cash to upgrade its bases against missile threats, while Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Greater Middle East, cites the threat of Iranian drones in its $280 million unfunded priorities list.
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Featured image: An MH-60S Seajawk helicopter flies past the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer Sterett. (MC1 Daniel Barker/U.S. Navy)
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A sculpture of the coat of arms of the British royal family, created with the blood of four Afghans, is to be “projected” onto the walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London by Russian artist Andrei Molodkin to protest Prince Harry’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
The prince’s recent memoir “Spare” caused significant controversy after he said in it that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters while serving as an attack helicopter pilot.
He added that the figure was “not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me,” and that he had thought of the fatalities as akin to taking “chess pieces.”
At the time, the claims prompted a backlash from many inside and outside Afghanistan, with the Taliban saying he should be put on trial.
Prince Harry later said the idea that he had boasted about killing Afghans was “a dangerous lie.”
Molodkin told Sky News that four Afghans currently based in the French city of Calais had voluntarily given their blood for the artwork, that five others living in the UK would donate more blood for it at a later stage, and that they, like him, were “very, very angry” about what the prince had written.
“They read they are just ‘chess figures’ … for some prince hunting by helicopter,” Molodkin said. “It looked like a safari situation. How he told it, for him it’s like a computer game.”
Molodkin added that the aim was to “drench St. Paul’s Cathedral in the blood of Afghani people,” and that video footage of the prince would also be displayed.
Explaining how the art worked, he said: “Blood will go in the royal coat of arms, it will circulate in there. It will be projected … on to the cathedral — so all the cathedral will be in the blood of Afghani people.”
Molodkin said he would also try to bring blood into the cathedral, adding: “It’s a cathedral — it’s for everyone. Everyone can come there and pray. Donating blood, it’s kind of a way of praying.” He has not sought the cathedral’s permission.
He said he has worked with human blood as a creative medium for 15 years, adding that it symbolizes power. “Then, the people who are abused by this power, I ask them to donate blood for this,” he said.
Molodkin’s solidarity with the Afghan people stems from his time in the Soviet Union, where he served as a soldier during his country’s occupation of Afghanistan.
“Even in the army, you’re scared to participate in the shooting of others … you’re very stressed,” he said of his experiences. “But (Harry) thinks it’s a video game.”
Molodkin lives in southern France after creating an art installation involving blood donated by Ukrainian soldiers depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I can’t go back to Russia,” he told Sky News.
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Featured image: Harry in New South Wales, May 2015 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
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***
Only two weeks after Saudi Arabia announced an effort to establish diplomatic ties to Iran in a deal mediated by China, more news surfaced that Saudi Arabia was also planning to reopen its embassy in Syria for the first time in over a decade. Rumors are swirling that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria are on the verge of geopolitical and economic agreements that sidestep the US. It is perhaps not surprising that just as these deals are being announced, there has been a sudden resurgence of fighting between US forces in Syria and Iran supported insurgent groups in the eastern region of the country.
Joe Biden addressed the issue in a short statement, asserting that his administration is ‘not seeking conflict with Iran’, but that the US government would act to protect its personnel deployed in Syria. The comments were a response to an apparent drone strike on a US military instillation in Syria which killed at least one American contractor and injured several others. Biden has authorized airstrikes against Iran backed forces in Syria as retaliation, though, it should be noted that no evidence has yet been presented of Iranian involvement.
The eruption of direct conflict has the potential to escalate tensions with the Syrian government and Iran, and the timing of the event is highly suspicious.
In January of this year at the annual Davos conference run by the WEF, Saudi Arabia announced it was now open to trading oil for Chinese Yuan instead of US dollars (long valued as the global petro-currency). The economic shift, if Saudi Arabia follows through, could change the very fabric of the global economic landscape as the dollar loses petro-status and even world reserve status.
China has been aggressively pursuing stronger economic ties to oil producing nations and the CCP announced its intention to turn the Yuan into a global petro-currency in December of 2022. Another important factor is Russia’s alliance with Syria’s government under Bashar al-Assad and their naval base in Tartus, which they have been expanding since 2021.
Why is the US military still in Syria? It’s hard to say. No US president since Barack Obama has offered a rational explanation. Syria continues to act as a remnant of establishment war-hawk policies from the Bush era, with Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton using the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a jumping-off point for their covert Arab Spring operations, including the Pentagon funding and training of groups that would later become ISIS terrorist factions.
In theory, Syria stands as a possible powder keg for wider regional wars that certainly serves the interests of establishment globalists if their goal is geopolitical chaos. The confluence of eastern interests is bound to clash with the US military occupation eventually. Furthermore, the growing threat of international economic warfare and even a currency war over smaller conflagrations like Ukraine is not being addressed.
Did Iran-backed militants really attack US forces in Syria? Or, is the flare up in tensions with Iran merely designed to throw a monkey wrench into diplomatic negotiations between Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and China? Or, is Biden leading America towards an economic conflict that will eventually destroy the dollar?
If the third scenario is the case, who ultimately benefits?
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***
Last summer, the Group of 7 (G7), a self-anointed forum of nations that view themselves as the most influential economies in the world, gathered at Schloss Elmau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to hold their annual meeting. Their focus was punishing Russia through additional sanctions, further arming of Ukraine and the containment of China.
At the same time, China hosted, through video conference, a gathering of the BRICS economic forum. Comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, this collection of nations relegated to the status of so-called developing economies focused on strengthening economic bonds, international economic development and how to address what they collectively deemed the counter-productive policies of the G7.
In early 2020, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had predicted that, based upon purchasing power parity, or PPP, calculations projected by the International Monetary Fund, BRICS would overtake the G7 sometime later that year in terms of percentage of the global total.
(A nation’s gross domestic product at purchasing power parity, or PPP, exchange rates is the sum value of all goods and services produced in the country valued at prices prevailing in the United States and is a more accurate reflection of comparative economic strength than simple GDP calculations.)
Then the pandemic hit and the global economic reset that followed made the IMF projections moot. The world became singularly focused on recovering from the pandemic and, later, managing the fallout from the West’s massive sanctioning of Russia following that nation’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The G7 failed to heed the economic challenge from BRICS, and instead focused on solidifying its defense of the “rules based international order” that had become the mantra of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.
Miscalculation
U.S. President Joe Biden in virtual call with G7 leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Feb. 24. (White House/Adam Schultz)
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an ideological divide that has gripped the world, with one side (led by the G7) condemning the invasion and seeking to punish Russia economically, and the other (led by BRICS) taking a more nuanced stance by neither supporting the Russian action nor joining in on the sanctions. This has created a intellectual vacuum when it comes to assessing the true state of play in global economic affairs.
It is now widely accepted that the U.S. and its G7 partners miscalculated both the impact sanctions would have on the Russian economy, as well as the blowback that would hit the West.
Angus King, the Independent senator from Maine, recently observed that he remembers
“when this started a year ago, all the talk was the sanctions are going to cripple Russia. They’re going to be just out of business and riots in the street absolutely hasn’t worked …[w]ere they the wrong sanctions? Were they not applied well? Did we underestimate the Russian capacity to circumvent them? Why have the sanctions regime not played a bigger part in this conflict?”
It should be noted that the IMF calculated that the Russian economy, as a result of these sanctions, would contract by at least 8 percent. The real number was 2 percent and the Russian economy — despite sanctions — is expected to grow in 2023 and beyond.
This kind of miscalculation has permeated Western thinking about the global economy and the respective roles played by the G7 and BRICS. In October 2022, the IMF published its annual World Economic Outlook (WEO), with a focus on traditional GDP calculations. Mainstream economic analysts, accordingly, were comforted that — despite the political challenge put forward by BRICS in the summer of 2022 — the IMF was calculating that the G7 still held strong as the leading global economic bloc.
In January 2023 the IMF published an update to the October 2022 WEO, reinforcing the strong position of the G7. According to Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s chief economist, the “balance of risks to the outlook remains tilted to the downside but is less skewed toward adverse outcomes than in the October WEO.”
This positive hint prevented mainstream Western economic analysts from digging deeper into the data contained in the update. I can personally attest to the reluctance of conservative editors trying to draw current relevance from “old data.”
Fortunately, there are other economic analysts, such as Richard Dias of Acorn Macro Consulting, a self-described “boutique macroeconomic research firm employing a top-down approach to the analysis of the global economy and financial markets.” Rather than accept the IMF’s rosy outlook as gospel, Dias did what analysts are supposed to do — dig through the data and extract relevant conclusions.
After rooting through the IMF’s World Economic Outlook Data Base, Dias conducted a comparative analysis of the percentage of global GDP adjusted for PPP between the G7 and BRICS, and made a surprising discovery: BRICS had surpassed the G7.
This was not a projection, but rather a statement of accomplished fact: BRICS was responsible for 31.5 percent of the PPP-adjusted global GDP, while the G7 provided 30.7 percent. Making matters worse for the G7, the trends projected showed that the gap between the two economic blocs would only widen going forward.
The reasons for this accelerated accumulation of global economic clout on the part of BRICS can be linked to three primary factors:
residual fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic,
blowback from the sanctioning of Russia by the G7 nations in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a growing resentment among the developing economies of the world to G7 economic policies and
priorities which are perceived as being rooted more in post-colonial arrogance than a genuine desire to assist in helping nations grow their own economic potential.
Growth Disparities
It is true that BRICS and G7 economic clout is heavily influenced by the economies of China and the U.S., respectively. But one cannot discount the relative economic trajectories of the other member states of these economic forums. While the economic outlook for most of the BRICS countries points to strong growth in the coming years, the G7 nations, in a large part because of the self-inflicted wound that is the current sanctioning of Russia, are seeing slow growth or, in the case of the U.K., negative growth, with little prospect of reversing this trend.
Moreover, while G7 membership remains static, BRICS is growing, with Argentina and Iran having submitted applications, and other major regional economic powers, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, expressing an interest in joining. Making this potential expansion even more explosive is the recent Chinese diplomatic achievement in normalizing relations between Iran and Saudia Arabia.
Diminishing prospects for the continued global domination by the U.S. dollar, combined with the economic potential of the trans-Eurasian economic union being promoted by Russia and China, put the G7 and BRICS on opposing trajectories. BRICS should overtake the G7 in terms of actual GDP, and not just PPP, in the coming years.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for mainstream economic analysts to reach this conclusion. Thankfully, there are outliers such as Richard Dias and Acorn Macro Consulting who seek to find new meaning from old data.
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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
Featured image: G7 leaders meeting on June 28, 2022, at Schloss Elmau in Krün, Germany. (White House/Adam Schultz)
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***
Iraq and Libya were both targeted by the U.S. in the month of March. The anniversaries of these war crimes must be commemorated, and the nature of the US/EU/NATO war machine must be understood.
“The International Criminal Court should uphold an objective and impartial stance, respect the jurisdictional immunity enjoyed by the head of state in accordance with international law, exercise its functions and powers prudently by the law, interpret and apply international law in good faith, and avoid politicization and double standards.” (Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin)
This commentary really should be part two from the piece I wrote last week in the run-up to the anti-war mobilization that took place March 18th which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In that article I made a similar argument about why the U.S. should be seen as the greatest threat to the survival of collective humanity on our planet.
That point, however, needs to be reinforced because in typical arrogance, on the eve of that mobilization and the official March 20th date of the U.S. invasion, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Russia President Vladimir Putin while Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Barack Obama, responsible for horrific crimes against humanity and literally millions of deaths combined in Serbia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria, walk around as free individuals.
It would be comical if it was not so deadly serious and absurd. Just a couple of years ago when the ICC signaled under the leadership of theChief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda wanted to conduct an investigation into possible crimes in Afghanistan by the U.S. state, the Trump Administration told the court in no uncertain terms that the Court would be subjected to the full wrath of the U.S. government and the Court quietly demurred in favor of a national probe that everyone knew was a sham.
This is just part of the infuriating double standards that Chinese spokesperson Wang Wenbin refers to. For many in the global South, the “neutral” international mechanisms and structures created to uphold international law have lost significant credibility outside of the West.
The politicization of the ICC on the Ukrainian war and the unprincipled participation of the United Nations that provided political cover for the invasion and occupation of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010 are just two examples of how international structures ostensibly committed to upholding international law and the UN Charter are now seen as corrupt instruments of a dying U.S. and Western colonial empire.
How did we get here?
It is not a mere historical coincidence that the world became a much more dangerous place with the escalation of conflicts that threatened international peace in the 1990s. Without the countervailing force of the Soviet Union, the delusional white supremacists making U.S. policy believed that the next century was going to be a century of unrestrained U.S. domination.
And who would be dominated? Largely the nations of the global South but also Europe with an accelerated integration plan in 1993 that the U.S. supported because it was seen as a more efficient mechanism for deploying U.S. capital and further solidifying trade relations with the huge and lucrative European Market.
Central to the assertion of U.S. global power, however, was the judicious use of military force. “Full Spectrum Dominance” was the strategic objective that would ensure the realization of the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC ). There was just one challenge that had to be overcome. The U.S. population still suffered from the affliction labeled the “Vietnam syndrome .” Traumatized by the defeat in Vietnam the population was still reticent about giving its full support to foreign engagements that could develop into a possible military confrontation.
How was this challenge overcome? Human rights.
“Humanitarian interventionism,” with its corollary the “responsibility to protect” would emerge in the late 90s as one of the most innovative propaganda tools ever created. Produced by Western human rights community and championed by psychopaths like Samantha Power, the humanitarianism of the benevolent empire became the ideological instrument that allowed the U.S. to fully commit itself to military options to advance the interests of U.S. corporate and financial interests globally while being fully supported by the U.S. population.
With this new ideological tool, the Clinton Administration bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 without any legal basis but with the moral imperative of the “responsibility to protect.” By the early 2000s it was obvious that the U.S. was not going to be bound by international law. Operating through NATO and with the formulation of a “rules based order” in which the U.S. and its Western European allies would make the rules and enforce the order, the world has been plunged into unending wars, illegal sanctions, political subversion and the corruption of international structures that were supposed to instrumentalize the legal, liberal international order.
But white supremacist colonial hubris resulted in the empire overextending itself.
Twenty years after the illegal and immoral attack on Iraq where it is estimated that over a million people perished and twelve years after the racist attack on Libya where NATO dropped over 26,000 bombs and murdered up to 50,000 people, the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is in irreversible decline but the U.S. hegemon, like a wounded wild beast is still dangerous and is proving to be even more reckless then just a few years ago.
The disastrous decision to provoke what the U.S. thought would be a limited proxy war with Russia that would allow it to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation will be recorded in history, along with the invasion of Iraq, as the two pivotal decisions that greatly precipitated the decline of the U.S. empire.
However, with over eight hundred U.S. bases globally, a military budget close to a trillion dollars and a doctrine that prioritizes a “military-first strategy,” the coming defeat in Ukraine might translate into even more irresponsible and counterproductive moves against the Chinese over Taiwan in the Pacific and more aggressive actions to maintain U.S. hegemony in the Americas through SOUTHCOM and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The commemoration of the attacks on the peoples of Iraq and Libya is an act of solidarity not only with the peoples of those nations, but with the peoples and nations suffering from the malign policies of this dying empire today. It is a time of rededication to peace and to justice, two elements that are inextricable. In the Black Alliance for Peace, we say that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
This understanding is the foundation for why we are launching with our partners, an effort to revive the call to make the Americas a Zone of Peace on April the 4th, the day the state murdered Dr. King and the date that the Black Alliance for Peace was launched in 2017.
For Africans and other colonized peoples, the task is clear. The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination embodies the anti-life structures of colonial/capitalist oppression and must be seen as the primary contradiction facing global humanity. We recognize that other contradictions exist. We are not naive. But for the exploited and colonized peoples of this planet, until there is a shift in the international balance of forces away from the maniacs in the “collective West,” the future of our planet and collective humanity remains imperiled.
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Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Featured image: Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org
Comments Off on Commemorations of the Attack on Iraq March 20th and Libya March 19th Reaffirm that the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination Remains the Greatest Threat to International Peace on Our Planet
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***
We all know that 95 percent of elite Pakistani politics is mentally challenged fairytales and gossip replete with murmurings that can be cooked up for a good story to sell to the public. The intrigues and power plays of Pakistan’s rulers seem to just drag the country further and further to the abyss.
After virtually a year now of the troika of the country’s entire traditional crooked and corrupt political class, dominant sections of the upper echelons of the military, and of course Washington (no wretched troika worth its salt could be without the third!) trying to eliminate former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the massive popular support behind him, things seem to have backfired so badly that the ‘Deeper’ state in Washington is actually feeling nervous.
This is the backdrop to all of the bluster coming from Khan’s enemies, i.e. he is now becoming ‘friendly to the Americans.’ The phrase itself is indicative of the buffoonery of Pakistan’s politicians and elite liberal intelligentsia.
Indeed, Khan would have no problem being a friend to the Americans, Indians, and Israelis if they immediately ceased their warmongering, occupations, and brutality.
Khan has, on average, done about fifteen interviews just with CNN every year since 9/11. And for those twenty years of the ‘War on Terror,’ there was a very simple proposition that Khan made: America’s military solution will not only take a huge human toll (as all wars do) but will also be counterproductive since it will fuel more militancy.
One of the reasons the American national security state, humiliated in Afghanistan by the Taliban, was hellbent on the regime change against Khan was because they never forgave him for being…absolutely right. Yet, this was always called some genetic ‘anti-Americanism’ and earned the leader the poetic title of ‘Taliban Khan.’
But this is nothing new. As Noam Chomsky noted once, “anti-Americanism” is a term of propaganda intended to stifle and shut down debate on any meaningful issues related to US foreign policy. If your views are seen unacceptable in what they’re advocating, you immediately become ‘anti-American’ and your views are removed from the ‘free market of ideas.’ No one knows this better than Chomsky.
In Khan’s case, the American national security state knew that it had trillions to lose (largely for its defense contractors like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman) if no war(s) and ‘shock and awe’ campaigns were unleashed incessantly after 9/11 against multiple Muslim-majority countries. Hence, Khan’s view was unthinkable and therefore axiomatically made him and the view itself ‘anti-American.’ This is what is meant when Pakistan’s class of political punditry, not known for its sophistication or nuance, constantly regurgitates the trope that Khan is ‘using the Anti-American card.’
For much of Pakistan, there’s no ‘card’ to be used. Opposing American drone strikes and US support for Pakistan’s ruthless military and civilian leaders is simply sensible and necessary critique, and that’s what Khan’s been offering since 2001.
Nevertheless, the tightly state-controlled media is peddling the narrative that because of some tweets by the old American pragmatic neocon, Zalmay Khalilzad, Khan is secretly now being supported by Washington. How inane these claims become have no bounds.
For the past few weeks, it has become clear that there is some real confusion now within Washington planners about the situation in Pakistan. They certainly did not see the massive outpouring of support for Khan coming after the regime change last April, but they thought it could be fixed quick with the only plan that could kill this phenomenon: assassinate Khan.
Unfortunately for the troika of tyranny, it was a botched assassination attempt and Khan survived. His popularity doubled after that.
Next have come a series of deeply repressive and pathetic attempts by Washington’s clowns in Islamabad to try to arrest Khan on bogus charges – none succeeded since tens of thousands of ordinary people are always guarding and protecting Khan from any such state malfeasance targeted towards Khan. The political mafias – and the military establishment sometimes – that keep sending these security forces to arrest Khan have now…tripled his support.
Thus, one does not need to be a master geo-strategist to figure out why Washington may be incredibly anxious about the political scene in Pakistan right now. Washington planners may be many things, but they perhaps are not so boorish to observe that even if miraculously Khan is eliminated somehow now, that the ‘Pakistani street’ is going to sit back quietly and let the much-despised traditional political dynasties and sections of the top brass of the military simply roll out the red carpet for Washington to do as it pleases in Pakistan (re-establishing a military base, surveillance on China, etc.) And in the minds of all ordinary Pakistanis will be that it was Washington in the first place that set the process in motion that led to the ouster and potential elimination of Khan.
In such a situation, even a warmongering and insatiable empire like the United states has to think twice before believing in its own ability to accomplish its stated aims. And it is precisely in that context that the old neocon pragmatist Khalilzad articulated one gradually emerging position in Washington right now. That is, the jokers that we put in power when ousting Khan have fumbled up things so royally that we might have to take a step back or two in order regain some influence in Pakistan and the larger region itself. This is what crucially explains why Washington is dragging its feet before releasing yet another IMF bailout for the brainless quislings ruling Pakistan right now.
On the other hand, the Pakistani liberati and punditry are too quick to parrot the asinine accusations for which their paymasters pay them. Even a cursory geopolitical assessment indicates that Washington grossly miscalculated on two fronts this time, how deeply popular Khan was throughout the country, and how detested was the rest of the entire traditional political feudal dynasties and their cohorts were. Perhaps the one factor Washington cannot be blamed for was predicting the one unprecedented and perhaps the most important facet of this political equation: for the first time in the nation’s history, there are serious divisions within the military, with the majority of middle and junior rank officers, not to mention nearly one hundred percent of the soldiers, on the side of Khan, not their boss, the always all-powerful Chief of Army Staff (COAS).
Thus, even though the US national security state regularly seems to display signs of insanity these days, it still has retained a little sense that some special cases like Pakistan may need some recalibration of policy after the abominable tyrants Washington has subject Pakistan to over the past year, an abomination Pakistanis will not forgive or forget lightly.
As for Khan, his message remains the same that it was more than twenty years ago now: we (the US and Pakistan) can be friends in peace and on the basis of an equitable relationship – but only on the conditions of those terms.
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Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion and Global Politics, and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
We first published our hugely popular cribsheet in September of 2021 in response to dozens – even hundreds – of reader requests for sources and data. It was intended as a resource and link dump as much as an article, and intentionally free of interpretation, editorialising or opinion.
The response was incredible, within weeks it became our most-viewed article of all time, and it has maintained steady traffic ever since.
But time moves on, and as new data was published and new facts came to light, it became clear we needed to update the piece – not just in terms of facts, but in terms of approach.
So, here are all the updated key facts and sources concerning the alleged “pandemic”, to help you get a grasp on what has happened to the world since January 2020, and assist in the enlightenment of any of your friends who might be still trapped in the New Normal fog.
Part I: Symptoms
NEW!1. “Covid19” and the flu have IDENTICAL symptoms.There are no symptoms or collections of symptoms unique or specific to “Covid” and only “Covid”. All “Covid” symptoms are common to many other diseases and conditions, including the collection of common respiratory infections colloquially known as “the flu”.
This is readily admitted by mainstream sources and “experts”, who routinely describe “Covid” symptoms as “flu like”.
The symptoms [of Covid] are very similar to symptoms of other illnesses, such as colds and flu.
While all mainstream sources couch the admission in soft language – “some of the same symptoms”, “very similar” – the truth is the symptoms are identical. The only points of difference ever observed are equivocations on severity and onset time.
This article from Health Partners highlights that “Covid” can be both more severe OR milder than the flu, noting that “Covid” can sometimes “feel more like a cold”
While according to the Mayo Clinic, in their article on “Covid” vs the flu, the only difference in symptoms is that they “appear at different times”.
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2. “Ground glass opacities” are NOT unique to “Covid”. Early in the pandemic, it was reported that medical imaging revealed what they call “ground glass opacity” in the lungs of suspected “Covid” cases and that this was being used to diagnose patients, but ground glass anomalies are not unique to “Covid”.
Ground glass opacity (GGO) is defined as diffuse pulmonary infiltration [which can be caused by] edema, airspace and interstitial pneumonia. non-infectious pneumonitis as well as tumor manifestations. Physiological processes, such as poor ventilation of dependent lung areas and effects of expiration can also present as ground glass opacity.
Ground-glass opacities (GCOs) aren’t specific to COVID-19 […] they can show up due to other conditions and infections
In short, GGOs are a common presentation of pulmonary illness or injury, and are associated with pneumonia, pneumonitis, tuberculosis, and many other conditions.
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3. A loss of smell and taste is NOT unique to “covid”. As with GGOs, it has been widely reported that a loss of the sense of taste and sense of smell is the telltale sign of “Covid”, but that is a known symptom of many upper respiratory infections.
In adults, the two most common causes of smell problems that we see at our Clinic are: (1) Smell loss due to an ongoing process in the nose and/or sinuses such as nasal allergies and (2) smell loss due to injury of the specialized nerve tissue at the top of the nose (or possibly the higher smell pathways in the brain) from a previous viral upper respiratory infection.
Many common medical conditions are known to cause both acute and chronic damage to the sense of smell and taste, according to the UK’s NHS:
Changes in sense of smell are most often caused by a cold or flu, sinusitis (sinus infection) [or] allergies (like hay fever)
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Part II: Diagnosis and PCR Tests
4. It is not possible to clinically diagnose “Covid19”.Clinical diagnosis is the practice of diagnosing a disease based on a unique symptom or collection of symptoms. Wiktionary defines it as:
The estimated identification of the disease underlying a patient’s complaints based merely on signs, symptoms and medical history of the patient rather than on laboratory examination or medical imaging.
Since “Covid19” has no unique symptomatic profile[1], and since ALL major symptoms of “Covid” can potentially apply to literally every common respiratory infection, it is impossible to diagnose “Covid19” based on symptoms.
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5. Lateral flow tests are unreliable. Throughout the “pandemic” the most frequently used “self-test” for “Covid” were Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs). These tests are highly unreliable, and known to return positive test results from household liquids such as fruit juice and soda.
Children in the UK frequently “broke” their LFTs using vinegar or coca-cola in order to create false-positive tests and get a few days off school.
In February 2022, an “expert” told The Guardian that LFTs could create false positives based on the diet of the person being tested, or through “cross-reacting” with a different virus.
In February 2022, it was also reported by a team of “experts” from Imperial College that LFTs can “miss” infectious people. In other words, the official position is that LFTs produce false negative results AND false positive results.
Further, it is acknowledged – and the subject of explainer articles – that LFT and PCR results will often contradict one another. Meaning you can test positive on one, but not the other.
In short, lateral flow tests are of almost no diagnostic value whatsoever.
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6. PCR tests were not designed to diagnose illness. The Reverse-Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test is described in the media as the “gold standard” for “Covid” diagnosis.
But Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the process, never intended it to be used as a diagnostic tool and said so publicly:
PCR is just a process that allows you to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.”
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7. PCR Tests have a history of being inaccurate and unreliable. The “gold standard” PCR tests for “Covid” are known to produce a lot of false-positive results, by reacting to DNA material that is not specific to Sars-Cov-2.
As early as February of 2020 experts were admitting the test was unreliable. Dr Wang Cheng, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences told Chinese state television “The accuracy of the tests is only 30-50%”. The Australian government’s own website claimed“There is limited evidence available to assess the accuracy and clinical utility of available COVID-19 tests.” And a Portuguese court ruled that PCR tests were “unreliable” and should not be used for diagnosis.
You can read detailed breakdowns of the failings of PCR tests here, here and here.
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8. The CT values of the PCR tests are too high. PCR tests are run in cycles, the number of cycles you use to get your result is known as your “cycle threshold” or CT value. Kary Mullis said: “If you have to go more than 40 cycles[…]there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”
The MIQE PCR guidelines agree, stating: “[CT] values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported”.
Dr Juliet Morrison, virologist at the University of California, Riverside, told the New York Times: Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive…I’m shocked that people would think that 40 [cycles] could represent a positive…A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35″.
In the same article Dr Michael Mina, of the Harvard School of Public Health, said the limit should be 30, and the author goes on to point out that reducing the CT from 40 to 30 would have reduced “covid cases” in some states by as much as 90%.
Based on what we know about the CT values, the majority of PCR test results are at best questionable.
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9. The World Health Organization (Twice) Admitted PCR tests produced false positives. In December 2020 WHO put out abriefing memo on the PCR process instructing labs to be wary of high CT values causing false positive results:
when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain.
Then, in January 2021, the WHO released another memo, this time warning that “asymptomatic” positive PCR tests should be re-tested because they might be false positives:
Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
These announcements coincided with the initial launch of the “covid vaccines”.
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10. The scientific basis for ALL “Covid” tests is questionable.The genome of the Sars-Cov-2 virus was supposedly sequenced by Chinese scientists in December 2019, then published on January 10th 2020. Less than two weeks later, German virologists (Christian Drosten et al.) had allegedly used the genome to create assays for PCR tests.
They wrote a paper, Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR, which was submitted for publication on January 21st 2020, and then accepted on January 22nd. Meaning the paper was allegedly “peer-reviewed” in less than 24 hours. A process that typically takes weeks.
Since then, a consortium of over forty life scientists has petitioned for the withdrawal of the paper, writing a lengthy report detailing 10 major errors in the paper’s methodology.
They have also requested the release of the journal’s peer-review report, to prove the paper really did pass through the peer-review process. The journal has yet to comply.
The Corman-Drosten assays are the root of every “Covid” PCR test in the world. If the paper is questionable, every PCR test is also questionable.
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Part III: “Cases” and “Deaths”
11. Huge numbers of “Covid cases” are “asymptomatic”.Early in the “pandemic” it was reported that the majority of “Covid cases” never exhibited any symptoms. In March 2020, studies done in Italy were suggesting 50-75% of positive Covid tests had no symptoms. Another UK study from August 2020 found as much as 86% of “Covid patients”experienced no viral symptoms at all.
In short, the vast majority of “cases” during the first year of the “pandemic” were people who never got sick at all.
Following a WHO directive to re-test asymptomatic cases [9] in January 2021 – just as the “vaccines” were first rolled out – the percentage of “asymptomatic cases” has been reportedly lower, approximately 40%.
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12. “Covid case” numbers are inherently meaningless.From the onset of the “pandemic”, a “Covid case” has been defined in terms guaranteed to artificially inflate statistics.
The World Health Organization’s definition of a “confirmed case” is anyone who gets a positive PCR result, regardless of symptoms or personal history. Further, it is known that many health agencies around the world – including the US CDC – include “probable cases” in their statistics.
The WHO defines a “probable case” as anyone who meets the “clinical criteria” (ie has flu-like symptoms) and has been in contact either a “confirmed case” OR another “probable case”:
Probable Case: A patient who meets clinical criteria AND is a contact of a probable or confirmed case, or linked to a COVID-19 cluster.”
As established above, PCR tests do not work and produce false positives. Lateral flow tests also produce false positives. It is known these tests may even give contradictory results for the same person at the same time. “Covid19” also lacks a unique symptom profile, ruling out clinical diagnosis.
If you cannot reliably test for the disease in a lab, and cannot identify it via a unique symptom profile, and many “cases” are recognised as “asymptomatic”, then “Covid19” becomes a label with no meaning.
Absent any kind of reliable diagnostic method, case statistics for any disease are inherently meaningless.
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13. “Covid deaths” were created by statistical manipulation.Since “Covid” case statistics are inflated [12] it naturally follows that “Covid” death statistics would be likewise unreliable. In fact it was noted from the very beginning of the “pandemic” that “Covid death” counts were being artificially inflated.
A COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 disease (eg. trauma).
Throughout the “pandemic” many countries around the globe went even further and defined a “Covid death” as a “death by any cause within 28/30/60 days of a positive test”.
Removing any distinction between dying of “Covid”, and dying of something else after testing positive for Covid will naturally lead to completely meaningless numbers of “Covid deaths”.
Considering the huge percentage of “asymptomatic Covid infections” [11], the well-known prevalence of serious comorbidities [30] and the fact all “Covid tests” are entirely unreliable [II], this renders the “Covid” death numbers a completely meaningless statistic.
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Part IV: Lockdowns
14. Lockdowns do not prevent the spread of disease. There is little to no evidence lockdowns have any impact on limiting “Covid deaths”. If you compare regions that locked down to regions that did not, you can see no pattern at all.
“Covid deaths” in Florida (no lockdown) vs California (lockdown)
“Covid deaths” in Sweden (no lockdown) vs UK (lockdown)
15. Lockdowns kill people. There is strong evidence that lockdowns – through social, economic and other public health damage – are deadlier than the alleged “virus”.
Dr David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for Covid-19 described lockdowns as a “global catastrophe” in October 2020:
We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of the virus[…] it seems we may have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition […] This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe.”
Unemployment, poverty, suicide, alcoholism, drug use and other social/mental health crises are spiking all over the world. While missed and delayed surgeries and screenings have already seen increased mortality from heart disease, cancer and other conditions in many countries around the world.
A World Bank report from June 2021 estimated close to 100 million people had been plunged extreme poverty by so-called “anti-Covid measures”.
As of January 2023, healthcare services the world over are still experiencing chaotic backlogs in treatment and diagnosis. The knock-on effects of lockdown will likely hurt public health for years.
The impact of lockdown could account for any observed increases in excess mortality.[33]
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16. Babies born during lockdown have lower IQs. A study done at Brown University found that children born after March 2020 had, on average, IQs 21 points lower than previous generations, concluding:
questions remain regarding the impact of the work-from-home, shelter-in-place, and other public health policies that have limited social interaction and typical childhood experiences on early child neurodevelopment.
This mirrors reports in older children (aged 4-5) of stunted development of social skills and inability to read facial cues.
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17. Hospitals were never unusually overburdened. The main argument used to defend lockdowns is that “flattening the curve” would prevent a rapid influx of cases and protect healthcare systems from collapse. But most healthcare systems were never close to collapse at all.
As part of their Covid policy, the NHS announced in Spring of 2020that they would be “re-organizing hospital capacity in new ways to treat Covid and non-Covid patients separately” and that “as a result hospitals will experience capacity pressures at lower overall occupancy rates than would previously have been the case.”
This means they removed thousands of beds.
Yes, during an alleged deadly pandemic, they actually reduced the maximum occupancy of hospitals.
Despite this, the NHS never felt pressure beyond your typical flu season, and at times actually had 4x more empty beds than normal.
An article in Health Policy in November 2021 found that, in all of Western Europe, the “surge capacity” of ICU beds was exceeded for only one day – in Lombardy on April 3rd 2020.
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18. There was a massive increase in the use of “unlawful” DNRs. Watchdogs and government agencies reported huge increases in the use of Do Not Resuscitate Orders (DNRs) in the years 2020-2021.
As early as March 2020, when the “pandemic” was still in its early stages, there were already papers appearing in mainstream journals predicting “unilateral” DNR usage, something which had “rarely had a role prior to Covid”:
clinicians in some health care settings may unilaterally decide to write a DNR order. This latter approach is not uniformly accepted and, prior to COVID-19, it rarely had a role. During this pandemic, however, in extreme situations such as a patient with severe underlying chronic illness and acute cardiopulmonary failure who is getting worse despite maximal therapy, there may be a role for a unilateral DNR to reduce the risk of medically futile CPR to patients, families, and health care workers.
In the UK there was an “unprecedented” rise in “illegal” DNRs for disabled people, GP surgeries sent out letters to non-terminal patients recommending they sign DNR orders, whilst other doctors signed “blanket DNRs” for entire nursing homes.
A study done by Sheffield University found over one-third of all “suspected” Covid patients had a DNR attached to their file within 24 hours of hospital admission.
Some countries were forced to adopt a unilateral DNR policy for certain patient groups […] In the current difficult situation…difficult decisions are to be made. Societal rather than individual benefits might prevail.
Blanket use of coerced or illegal DNR orders could account for any increases in mortality in 2020/21.[33]
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Part V: Ventilators
19. Ventilation is NOT a treatment for respiratory infections. Mechanical ventilation is not, and never has been, recommended treatment for respiratory infection of any kind. In the early days of the pandemic, many doctors came forward questioning the use of ventilators to treat “Covid”.
Writing in The Spectator, Dr Matt Strauss stated:
Ventilators do not cure any disease. They can fill your lungs with air when you find yourself unable to do so yourself. They are associated with lung diseases in the public’s consciousness, but this is not in fact their most common or most appropriate application.
German Pulmonologist Dr Thomas Voshaar, chairman of the Association of Pneumatological Clinics said:
When we read the first studies and reports from China and Italy, we immediately asked ourselves why intubation was so common there. This contradicted our clinical experience with viral pneumonia.
Despite this, the WHO, CDC, ECDC and NHS all “recommended” Covid patients be ventilated instead of using non-invasive methods.
This was not a medical policy designed to best treat the patients, but rather to reduce the hypothetical spread of Covid by preventing patients from exhaling aerosol droplets, this was made clear in officially published guidelines.
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20. Ventilators kill people. Putting someone on a ventilator who is suffering from influenza, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or any other condition which restricts breathing or affects the lungs, will not alleviate any of those symptoms. In fact, it will almost certainly make it worse, and will kill many of them.
Mechanical ventilation is also damaging to the physical structure of the lungs, resulting in “ventilator-induced lung injury”, which can dramatically impact quality of life, and even result in death.
According to the “undercover nurse”, ventilators were being used so improperly in New York, they were destroying patients’ lungs:
This policy was negligence at best and potentially deliberate murder at worst. This misuse of ventilators could account for any increase in mortality in 2020/21 [33]
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Part VI: Masks
21. Masks don’t work. At least a dozen scientific studies have shown that masks do nothing to stop the spread of respiratory viruses.
One meta-analysis published by the CDC in May 2020 found “no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks”.
A Canadian review from July 2020 found “limited evidence that the use of masks might reduce the risk of viral respiratory infections”.
Another study with over 8000 subjects found masks “did not seem to be effective against laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections nor against clinical respiratory infection.”
There are literally too many to quote them all, but you can read them: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] Or read a summary by SPR here.
The WHO commissioned its own meta-analysis in the Lancet, but that study looked only at N95 masks and only in hospitals. [For a full rundown on the bad data in this study click here.]
Aside from scientific evidence, there’s plenty of real-world evidence that masks do nothing to halt the spread of disease.
For example, North Dakota and South Dakota had near-identical “case” figures, despite one having a mask mandate and the other not:
Not only do masks not work, but it was widely known they did not work before 2020.
A 2016 literature review published in the Journal of Oral Health found:
there are no convincing scientific data that support the effectiveness of masks for respiratory protection.
(This study was quietly removed from the journal’s website in June 2020, because it was “no longer relevant in the current climate”.)
Another study, published in 2020 but carried out in 2019, found:
no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
In his 2020 review, “Masks Don’t Work”, Dr Denis Rancourt cites studies from 2009, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017 and 2019…none of which found any significant benefit at all from wearing a mask.
there is no evidence that [masks are] effective in reducing transmission
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22. Masks are bad for your health. Wearing a mask for long periods, wearing the same mask more than once, and other aspects of cloth masks can be bad for your health. A long study on the detrimental effects of mask-wearing was recently published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Dr. James Meehan reported in August 2020 he was seeing increases in bacterial pneumonia, fungal infections, and facial rashes.
Masks are also known to contain plastic microfibers, which damage the lungs when inhaled and may be potentially carcinogenic.
Moreover, masks may actually increase the likelihood of respiratory disease, a trial of cloth masks from 2015 found that:
Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in an increased risk of infection.
While a new study published in July 2022 found that masks, especially those worn more than once, were breeding grounds for both bacteria and fungal microbes.
While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks […] was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.
The report goes on to warn these masks (and other medical waste) will clog sewage and irrigation systems, which will have knock-on effects on public health, irrigation and agriculture.
A study from the University of Swansea found “heavy metals and plastic fibres were released when throw-away masks were submerged in water.” These materials are toxic to both people and wildlife.
Whereas the theory behind traditional vaccines is that exposing the body to a weakened strain of a microorganism will trigger an immune response, many of these new Covid “vaccines” are mRNA vaccines.
mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccines theoretically work by injecting viral mRNA into the body, where it replicates inside your cells and encourages your body to recognise, and make antigens for, the “spike proteins” of the virus.
mRNA vaccines have been the subject of research since the 1990s, but before 2020 no mRNA vaccine was ever approved for use on humans.
Yet, following the advent of Covid, two different companies made two supposedly “safe and effective” mRNA vaccines within weeks of each other.
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25. “Covid vaccines” do not confer immunity or prevent transmission. It is readily admitted that Covid “vaccines” do not confer immunity from infection and do not prevent you from passing the disease onto others. Indeed, an article in the British Medical Journal highlighted that the vaccine trials were not designed to even try and assess if the “vaccines” limited transmission.
The vaccine manufacturers themselves, upon releasing the untested mRNA gene therapies, were quite clear their product’s “efficacy” was based on “reducing the severity of symptoms”.
In October 2022 Pfizer executive Janine Small, testifying in front of the EU parliament, admitted that Pfizer never even tested if their vaccine prevented transmission of “Covid” prior to its release to the public.
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26. The vaccines were rushed and have unknown long-term effects. Vaccine development is a slow, laborious process. Usually, from development through testing and finally being approved for public use takes many years. The various vaccines for Covid were all developed and approved in less than a year.
Moderna’s own website admits“it normally takes 10-15 years to develop a vaccine”, but boasts of producing their SpikeVax“within 2 months”
Obviously, there can be no long-term safety data on chemicals that are less than a year old.
Pfizer even admits this is true in the leaked supply contract between the pharmaceutical giant, and the government of Albania:
the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known
27. Vaccine manufacturers have been granted legal indemnity should they cause harm. The USA’s Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) grants immunity until at least 2024.
The UK went even further, granting permanent legal indemnity to the government, and any employees thereof, for any harm done when a patient is being treated for Covid19 or “suspected Covid19”.
Again, the leaked Albanian contract suggests that Pfizer, at least, made this indemnity a standard demand of supplying Covid vaccines:
Purchaser hereby agrees to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Pfizer […] from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, settlements, penalties, fines, costs and expenses
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28. Covid “vaccines” carry a significant risk of adverse side effects. The experimental Covid vaccines have potentially caused dozens of severe conditions in millions of people. These include myocarditis (especially in young boys), blood clots, allergic reactions, skin conditions, Bell’s Palsy, menstrual irregularities and more. [For a detailed breakdown of these conditions, click here]
29. The survival rate of “Covid” is over 99%. Government medical experts went out of their way to underline, from the beginning of the pandemic, that the vast majority of the population are not in any danger from Covid.
A new global review of Covid data, published in October 2022 by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis (et al) found a median fatality rate of just 0.07% in people younger than 70 years old.
Almost all antibody studies on the infection-fatality ratio (IFR) of Covid have returned results between 0.04% and 0.5%. Meaning, assuming for a moment that “covid” ever existed as a discrete disease at all, its survival rate was at least 99.5%.
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30. The vast majority of “covid deaths” have serious comorbidities. In March 2020, the Italian government published statistics showing 99.2% of their “Covid deaths” had at least one serious comorbidity.
These included cancer, heart disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s, kidney failure and diabetes (among others). Over 50% of them had three or more serious pre-existing conditions.
In summary, the vast majority of “Covid deaths” were very frail people.
This was interpreted by the press as old age or infirmity being “risk factors” for “Covid”. However, it could be more accurately said that the number one risk factor for “dying of covid” was already dying of something else.
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31. Average age of “Covid death” is greater than the average life expectancy. The average age of a “Covid death” in the UK is 82.5 years. In Italy, it’s 86. Germany, 83. Switzerland, 86. Canada, 86. The US, 78, Australia, 82.
Research from March 2021 found that, across the eight studied countries, more than 64% of all “Covid deaths” occurred in people over the national life expectancy.
As such, for most of the world, the “pandemic” had little-to-no impact on life expectancy. Contrast this with the Spanish flu, which saw a 28% drop in life expectancy in the US in just over a year. [source]
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32. Covid mortality exactly mirrors the natural mortality curve.Statistical studies from the UK and India have shown that the curve for “Covid death” follows the curve for expected mortality almost exactly:
The small increase for some of the older age groups can be accounted for by other factors.[15][18][20][28]
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33. There has been NO unusual excess mortality. The global death toll of “Covid”, even with exaggerated statistics [13], was never high enough to justify the draconian responses we saw from most world governments.
In three years of “covid”, there have been roughly 6.8 million “Covid deaths”, or 2.3 million per year. That’s 0.03% of the global population. For comparison’s sake, the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed 25-100 million people in two years, or between 0.7 and 2.8% of the global population per year.
The press has called 2020 the UK’s “deadliest year since world war two”, but this is misleading because it ignores the massive increase in the population since that time. A more reasonable statistical measure of mortality is Age-Standardised Mortality Rate (ASMR):
By this measure, 2020 isn’t even the worst year for mortality since 2000.In fact, since 1943 only 9 years have been better than 2020.
Similarly, in the US the ASMR for 2020 is only at 2004 levels:
Sweden, which famously did not lockdown, saw their all-cause mortality hit levels previously seen in 2012:
The World Bank’s mortality dataset estimates that 2020 saw the crude global death rate increase from ~7.6 to 8, or a return to the level seen from 2006-2011.
From May of 2021, the World Health Organization began to discuss the “true cost of the pandemic”, promoting efforts to further inflate the pandemic’s death toll by attributing all excess deaths since 2020 to Covid. However, since any increases in mortality could be attributable to non-Covid causes [facts 15, 18, 20 & 28] that is either irrational or intentional deception.
Further, there is strong evidence any excess deaths had nothing to do with “Covid”, since excess deaths have continued to increase even as Covid cases reportedly decline. As reported in the Spectator in November 2022:
Why are excess deaths higher now than during Covid?
It’s not just the UK either, as Toby Green and Thomas Fazi wrote for Unherd on January 30th:
…despite relatively low Covid death rates, overall excess deaths in all age groups in Europe in 2022 were as high as in 2020 and higher than 2021 — even in the oldest cohorts. Beyond Europe, the situation is much the same…
That excess deaths have continued to increase despite the “pandemic” allegedly slowing down is evidence that any excess mortality may never have been caused by “Covid”, but was in fact due to other factors (eg. the economic and social fallout of lockdown policies and potentially the distribution of untested and unnecessary “vaccines”).
Part IX: Planning and Deception
34. The EU was preparing “vaccine passports” at least a YEAR before the pandemic began. Proposed COVID countermeasures, presented to the public as improvised emergency measures, have existed since before the emergence of the disease.
These documents were combined into the 2019 “Vaccination Roadmap”, which (among other things) established a “feasibility study” on vaccine passports to begin in 2019 and finish in 2021:
This report’s final conclusions were released to the public in September 2019, just a month before Event 201 (below).
In fact, vaccination and immunisation programs have been recognised as “an entry point for digital identity” since at least 2018.
Immunization poses a huge opportunity to scale digital identity
ID2020 was founded jointly by Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation and GAVI the Vaccine Alliance. Its “partners” include Facebook, and the UN.
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35. A “training exercise” predicted the pandemic just weeks before it started. In October 2019 the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University held Event 201. This was a training exercise based on a zoonotic coronavirus starting a worldwide pandemic. The exercise was sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and GAVI the vaccine alliance.
The exercise published its findings and recommendations in November 2019 as a “call to action”. One month later, China recorded their first case of “Covid”.
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36. Covid-sceptic world leaders “died suddenly”.Multiple political leaders who opposed the World Health Organization’s Covid policies died unexpectedly, only to see their anti-WHO covid policies reversed immediately by their successors.
On May 14th 2020 Nkurunzia formally expelled the WHO representatives from Burundi. Less than a month later, he died “of a sudden illness”. His successor labelled Covid “our biggest enemy”, and invited the WHO back.
In March 2021, Magufuli disappeared from public view for weeks. Again, the Council on Foreign Relations published an article calling for his removal, and again it was reported he had died suddenly.
His successor reversed course on Covid immediately, enforcing quarantines, social distancing and mask-wearing, as well as signing Tanzania up to the WHO’s vaccine program and jabbing 10 million of her citizens.
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37. During the “Covid “pandemic”, the Flu almost completely “disappeared”. In the United States, since February 2020, influenza cases have allegedly dropped by over 98%.
It’s not just the US either, in September 2020 the US CDC reported thatflu activity was markedly decreased in the US, Australia, South Africa and Chile.
The explanation given is that anti-Covid measures – eg. masks and lockdowns – stopped flu spreading. But we have established that masks and lockdowns do not halt the spread of respiratory illnesses[14][21].
In short, globally, the flu almost completely disappeared throughout 2020 and 2021, and that cannot be explained by anti-Covid measures.
Meanwhile, a new disease called “Covid”, which has identical symptoms [1] and a similar mortality rate [29] to influenza, was apparently affecting all the people normally affected by the flu.
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Part X: Profit and Motive
38. The Covid pandemic advanced a pre-existing political agenda. From its earliest days, Covid was used as an excuse to push through reforms of food, identity and monetary systems, as well as advance “green” agendas that centralise both global and national power.
The pandemic also saw an increase in censorship and surveillance powers, both in China and the West.
In September 2018, the important role of “digital identity” in the future “social contract” was a major talking point at Davos. By December 2020, The Economist reported that“Covid-19 spurs national plans to give citizens digital identities”.
In January 2019, it was reported the Bank of International Settlements and 70 central banks around the world were involved in research on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In July 2021 FinTech times reported that the pandemic had “accelerated the development of Central Bank Digital Currencies by up to five years”,
The Grantham Institute of Imperial College, London published an article claiming Covid had allowed expert opinion “a foot in the door” so they could “strongly advocate for a ‘net-zero emissions’ recovery and a resilient future.”
Finally, the pandemic opened the door for sweeping globalist changes to public health policies in the form of the proposed “Pandemic Treaty”.
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39. Corporations saw MASSIVE profits due to Covid.Companies in multiple sectors saw huge profits due to the “pandemic”, most of which arose from increases in government spending putting public money in private hands.
The global market for facemasks, for example, expanded by over 15000%, from $1.4 billion in 2019 to $225 billion in 2020. And that’s just facemasks, not other forms of personal protective equipment (PPE) which all saw massive increases in both personal and government spending.
Rubber gloves and hand sanitzers also saw huge upticks in their market thanks to government spending. A lot of this money was completely wasted as products expired.
However, the biggest profits were seen in the vaccine sector. Since the vaccine rollout, pharmaceutical companies have made roughly $1000 a second.
In late 2019, Pfizer’s revenues were the lowest they had been since 2010, two years later they had increased by 150%, and were the highest they had ever been.
40. The elite have made fortunes during the pandemic.It is not just pharmaceutical companies that have profited from Covid, since the beginning of lockdown the wealthiest people have become significantly wealthier.
By April 2021 Forbes was reporting that 40 new billionaires have been created “fighting the coronavirus”.
That process has only accelerated.
As of May 2022, the number of new billionaires created by the pandemic stood at 543. Or roughly one every 30 hours for the previous two years. That includes 40 new billionaires in the pharmaceutical sector alone.
Meanwhile, the share of the world’s wealth held by billionaires has increased from 10% in 2019 to 14% in 2022, a greater increase than the previous 16 years combined.
Altogether, the richest people in the world increased their collective wealth by over five trillion dollars in the past three years, all thanks to Covid.
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Conclusion
I made a point of saying, in the introduction of this piece, that it was being updated not just in terms of facts but in terms of approach. Now I will clarify.
When the first edition of this list was published, “Covid” was still a live fire exercise. A sprawling propaganda war, where facts were ammunition and supply lines were strained. It needed to be what it was – short, to the point and easily accessible.
These days the pandemic front is a quieter place. A muddy ruin of a battlefield, dotted with bodies and limp banners on broken staves. Left to the scavengers, as both sides prepare for the next big push.
“Covid” is being gently dialled down in preference for talk of Ukraine, climate change, and even “the next pandemic”.
Our world has not returned to “normal” – and likely never will – but while the transformation remains in place, the agent of that initial change is slowly being pushed aside by new fronts in the Great Reset’s war for control of the world.
Now we find there is space – and time – to survey the “Covid” narrative in full, and tell the real story of the “pandemic” that turned the world upside down, in order to better empty its pockets.
The previous edition of this list was left intentionally free of any interpretation on the part of the author. That the facts were left to speak for themselves, and that they did. Indeed, they still do.
But nevertheless, as a closing statement to the worldwide jury, I want to summarize the story these facts narrate to us.
Through 2017, ’18 and ’19, various international and global bodies put plans in place – or discussed the possibility of – worldwide vaccination drives, including how they could be used to facilitate the introduction of digital passports linked to medical records.
In late 2019, an international exercise was held focused on a hypothetical zoonotic coronavirus causing a worldwide pandemic and planning a possible response.
Just two months later, it was claimed that an allegedly real zoonotic coronavirus had begun infecting people. The “new disease” had typical flu-like symptoms and very similar death rate to seasonal flu-like diseases. Coincidentally, in this period cases of flu reportedly dropped to almost zero.
Tests for this “new virus” were rushed out, skipping the usual peer review process.
Mass testing of asymptomatic people was used to create “covid cases”, while mass testing of those already dying in hospital was used to create “covid deaths”.
As a “response” to the “pandemic”, lockdowns were introduced, crippling the economy and causing massive increases in poverty, malnutrition, drug and alcohol abuse and mental health problems. Whilst also ensuring people suffering real health problems would avoid hospitals out of fear.
Meanwhile, in hospitals, “covid guidelines” resulted in murderous abuse of DNR orders and mechanical ventilation.
These measures killed people, helping to create the increases in excess mortality which could be officially blamed on “Covid”, but which have not declined despite “Covid cases” reducing in number.
Masks, and social distancing were enforced on the public – despite their own research showing they are ineffective – in order to increase public fear and acted as literally the only visual evidence anything was happening at all.
Under the guise of this fake “pandemic”, the greatest single exchange of public money into private hands of all time took place.
The “pandemic” also allowed for a massive centralisation of power – both on the national and global level. Leaders of almost every nation on Earth seized more power for themselves by playing along, and those who refused were killed.
Finally, and most importantly, “Covid” allowed for a rapid acceleration of a political agenda which aspires to reshape the world into a dystopian horror show. Digital surveillance, mandated medical procedures, curfews, police brutality and censorship all became further normalised under the guise of “protecting public health”. While programs such as digital currency, “food reform” and “green new deal” policies all saw marked increases in the speed of their development.
These are the vital facts of the pandemic, and they tell only one story. “Covid” was a design. A fake disease, created to sell a very real agenda. This is the only rational explanation of all the evidence we have.
The “official story” doesn’t hold water. If Covid were a real disease and a real pandemic it would not require corrupt testing practices and statistical sleight-of-hand to spread. If it was really deadly, they would not need to rely on statistical manipulation to create “Covid deaths”. If the powers-that-be were being honest they would never have introduced “public health” measures that their own research says don’t work.
The idea it was all a snowball of mistakes – a perfect storm of public panic, governmental incompetence and corporate greed – likewise falls short of an all-encompassing explanation, as it fails to account for the many acts of prolific and deliberate dishonesty, and again asks us to believe that Event 201 was merely a coincidence.
The “lab leak” or “bio weapon” theory – that “Covid” is a real disease either accidentally or deliberately released on the public – does not fit either, neither factually or logically. Factually, as with the official version, a real virus would not require fake statistics to spread. While logically, there is the problem of control.
the effect of a released novel pathogen couldn’t be predicted accurately. It might burn out rapidly. Or it might turn out to be quite a lot more lethal than they’d expected, demolishing advanced civilisations.
No, the only story which holds together is that “covid” was a psychological operation on a global scale. The biggest and broadest propaganda campaign of all time, with the singular aim of breaking the world apart, and remaking it in a new globalist image.
In fact, they kept telling us this was the case. A “great reset” in order to “build back better” towards a “new normal”. They made no secret of their intention:
“Covid” was – and is – a deceptive means to a malignant end. We need to see that, understand it, and remember it. Because unless we properly disect and comprehend the scale and methodology of this propaganda, we will be similarly vulnerable to the same methods the next time they are deployed.
While the means may be retired, the end will always remain.
Their new world exists now, all around us. But it is only half-built, and the distinct and final aim of everything they do and say moving forward will be working to its completion.
That’s the silver lining of “Covid”, if you want to find one. For want of a better analogy, the mask has slipped. We caught a glimpse of Zappa’s brick wall. Now we know what they really want.
They want control – over everything and everyone. They want to reduce us – reduce our intellects, our means, our health and our rights. They want to accelerate our slow crawl to tyranny and build a global work camp surrounded by imaginary evils that hypnotise the inmates into thinking the barbed wire is for their own good…because it keeps the monsters out.
Simply put, they want to finish what “Covid” started. But as long we see them, and understand them, they will never be able to.
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First published on February 17, 2023
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Billionaire Elon Musk and World Economic Forum (WEF) Chairman Klaus Schwab faced off this week, presenting competing visions for the future at this year’s World Government Summit (WGS).
Convened from Feb. 13-15 in Dubai under the slogan “Shaping Future Governments,” the WGS brought together prominent figures in politics, business and global governance in a format akin to that of the recent WEF annual meeting.
The WGS bills itself as “a global knowledge exchange platform dedicated to shaping the future of government worldwide.”
Participants comprised over 300 speakers and 10,000 attendees, including 250 government ministers and representatives from 80 international, regional and governmental organizations, including the U.N., WEF, World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Musk, Schwab and other leaders debated conflicting hopes and concerns for the future. The WGS itself also predicted what the world will look like by 2071, released as part of the WGS’ “Government in 2071” initiative.
These projections foresee a dystopian future of catastrophic climate change, mass migration, mass layoffs due to automation, ensuing social unrest and the merging of humans and technology as the “best-case scenario” for 2071.
Musk: AI, one-world government pose threats to humanity
“One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI,” Musk told WGS attendees. “But AI is both positive or negative — it has great promise, great capability but also, with that comes great danger.”
He commented on ChatGPT, the increasingly popular AI tool developed by OpenAI. Musk co-founded OpenAI with former PayPal partner Peter Thiel, but has since left its board of directors, the New York Post reported.
“ChatGPT, I think, has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become. AI has been advanced for a while; it just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people,” said Musk.
“What ChatGPT has done is just put an accessible user interface on AI technology that has been present for a few years,” he added.
Musk called upon governments to develop safety regulations for AI, comparing its rise to the development of nuclear technology.
“You look at, say, the discovery of nuclear physics. You had nuclear power generation but also nuclear bombs,” said Musk, adding:
“I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly. Think of any technology which is potentially a risk to people, like if it’s aircraft or cars or medicine, we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public safety of cars and planes and medicine.
“I think we should have a similar set of regulatory oversight for artificial intelligence, because I think it is actually a bigger risk to society.”
This is not the first time Musk has made such remarks about AI. In March 2022, Musk said that “artificial intelligence going wrong” is one of the three biggest threats facing humanity, along with falling birth rates and the rise of “religious extremism.”
Others have expressed concerns about AI “going wrong” — alleging that bias is baked into the technology. The New York Post reported, for instance, that ChatGPT refused to write an article about Hunter Biden in the newspaper’s critical style, but it was willing to write the article from the perspective of CNN.
Business Insider argues that AI tools like ChatGPT must be “woke” in order to attract major investors.
Major investments are pouring into such AI technologies. Microsoft announced last month it is investing $10 billion in OpenAI, while Google is working on a competitor to ChatGPT known as “Bard.”
“I know this is called the World Government Summit, but I think we should be maybe a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government,” he said. “We want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having, frankly — this may sound a little odd — too much cooperation between governments.”
Instead, Musk called for the maintenance of “civilizational diversity.” He said:
“I think we want to be a little bit cautious about being too much of a single civilization, because if we are too much of a single civilization, then the whole thing may collapse.
“Obviously not suggesting war or anything like that, but I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much. It sounds a little odd, but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity, such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, that the whole thing doesn’t collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.”
Musk also had some advice for political leaders and other prominent figures: speak in your own voice.
“I think people should speak in their own voice,” he said. “I would encourage CEOs, legislators, to speak authentically. Do the tweets yourself and convey your message directly.”
Musk tweeted that he chose to make these remarks at the WGS because it “seemed like the right venue.”
He also hinted at his plans for Twitter, indicating he expects to find a CEO to succeed him “probably toward the end of this year.”
“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place,” he said. “I’m guessing probably toward the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.”
Schwab: Technology can help the elite ‘be the master of the world’
Perhaps confirming Musk’s fears, in his keynote speech to the WGS, Schwab said mastering technologies such as AI can help global elite “be the master of the world.”
“We are at the beginning,” he said. “When you look at technology transformation, it usually takes place in the terms of an S-curve. And we are just now where we move into the exponential phase.”
This phase, Schwab said, “requires us to strengthen cooperation and enhance coordination at the level of governments, countries and institutions to maintain the frameworks of international cooperation, which in turn is reflected in the paths of development comprehensively.”
Schwab referred to the recently concluded WEF annual meeting to contextualize his remarks, stating, “we discussed our ability to adapt to these global challenges, in light of various crises that require new mechanisms and innovative methods to help us reach a better future and serve the aspirations of humanity.”
Schwab said the coming decades will witness major “structural transformations” related to climate change. He argued for achieving the Paris Climate Agreement goals and reaching “zero carbon emissions.”
New technologies, said Schwab, will continue to play a vital role in these transformations.
“A few years ago, we considered some technologies a science fiction that was difficult to implement,” said Schwab. “But today, it has become a reality that we live through artificial intelligence, new space technology, and industrial biology, which heralds a major change coming during the next 10 years, and requires governments to be ambitious in their decisions.”
“Artificial intelligence, but not only artificial intelligence, but also the metaverse, neospace technologies, and I could go on and on … synthetic biology. Our life in ten years from now will be completely different, very much affected. And who masters those technologies, in some way, will be the master of the world.”
Like Musk he expressed some concerns, but his “deep concern” was that new technologies such as AI might “escape” the control of the global elite.
“My deep concern is that [regarding] #4IR technologies, if we don’t work together on a global scale, if we do not formulate, shape together the necessary policies, they will escape our power to master those technologies,” he said.
These same elites must therefore “shape the necessary policies to make sure that those technologies serve humankind.”
That’s how, Schwab said, they can show the public, which will “feel overwhelmed by change” because it can’t “understand really what’s going on,” why “those technologies can serve for the good.”
Schwab’s remarks at the WGS about how new technologies can help the global elite “be the master of the world” closely mirrored his statements at this year’s WEF meeting, where he opined what it means “to master the future.”
“Conflict is raging, poverty and hunger are rising, divisions are deepening, and the climate emergency keeps worsening,” he said. “We have a duty to act. We must forge a path towards greater cooperation, rooted in solidarity.”
To do so, he said:
“We must avoid short-term policymaking that delays taking on the big tests we face — and ultimately makes those challenges even more intractable. We must strengthen global governance and reinvigorate multilateralism for the 21st century. And we must act at the speed and scale that our fast-moving times demand.
“This applies to every challenge we face — from tackling the climate catastrophe and advancing sustainable development, to achieving peace and safeguarding human rights, including the rights of future generations. … Government action is critical, but not enough.”
“We need everyone — across the private sector, civil society, and beyond — to work together for the common good,” Guterres added. “This is our common agenda.”
And Arturo Bris of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, also speaking at the WGS, said that a “shock” is needed to spur the “transition” to a new “world order.”
Aside from speeches by key figures, the WGS meeting encompassed several forums, including “SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] in Action,” “Future by Design Global Forum,” “Future of Work Forum,” “Future of Education Forum,” “Food System Transformation Forum” and “Gathering of the Greatest Minds.”
WGS proceedings were also accompanied by several reports that were published to complement this year’s meeting. PWC wrote one such report, suggesting that “policymakers and regulators will have to learn from non-traditional, non-government actors who have already built a foothold in the metaverse.”
Roberto Azevêdo, executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer of PepsiCo and former director general of the World Trade Organization, wrote a report that stressed “the need for government and businesses to work as partners, while both must better engage the will of the people.”
“This partnership must seek structural changes that aim at long-term solutions, free from the logics of electoral cycles,” Azevêdo argued.
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the International Parliamentary Conference Russia – Africa in a Multipolar World held in Moscow under the auspices of the State Duma of the Russian Federal Assembly March 20. The partnership between Russia and African countries has gained additional momentum and is reaching a whole new level, he noted in his speech, and along the line added that additional opportunities are opening up by the process of establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which began in 2021, which in the future will become a continental market which favors developing ties both through the Eurasian Economic Union and bilaterally.
“Mutual trade is growing every year, which reached almost $18 billion last year. It is unlikely that such a figure can fully suit us, but we know that this is far from the limit. The development of counter commodity exchanges will undoubtedly be facilitated by a more energetic transition in financial settlements to national currencies and the establishment of new transport and logistics chains,” he added.
During the African leaders summit at the Black Sea city of Sochi in 2019, Putin rolled out a comprehensive roadmap, particularly questions relating to the development and consolidation of beneficial partnership with Africa, and that Russia would strengthen overall ties in line with the 2063 concept (agenda) developed by the African Union.
Putin based his arguments on the fact that Africa is increasingly becoming a continent of opportunities. It possesses vast resources and potential economic attractiveness, Putin further noted that interest in developing relations with African countries is currently visible not only on the part of Western Europe, the United States and the People’s Republic of China, but also on the part of India, Turkey, the Gulf states, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Israel, and Brazil.
With a view to expanding trade and cooperation, a memorandum of understanding has been signed between the Eurasian Economic Commission and the African Union Commission at the Sochi Summit. In 2018, Putin’s assessment was that Russia’s trade with African countries grew more than 17 percent and exceeded $20 billion. Putin would like to bring it (the trade figure) to, at least, $40 billion over the next few years.
Admittedly Russia’s trade is consistently straddling since 2019 after Sochi, a position which officials seem to accept. “Despite illegal sanctions imposed by Washington, Russia and African states are developing trade and economic cooperation. The trade turnover is increasing: at the end of 2022, it reached $17.9 billion,” according to Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, addressing African parliamentarians at the plenary session Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World.
Russia, of course, has its own approach towards Africa. It pressurizes no foreign countries neither it has to compete with them, as it has its own pace for working with Africa. With the same optimism towards taking emerging challenges and opportunities in Africa, Russia still has to show, in practical terms, commitment especially with its policy initiatives.
On 29 April 2021, Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), Russian NGO that focuses on foreign policy, held an online conference with participation of experts on Africa. Chairing the online discussion, Professor Igor Ivanov, former Foreign Affairs Minister and now RIAC President, made an opening speech, pointed out that Russia’s task in Africa is to present a strategy and define priorities with the countries of the continent, build on the decisions of the first Russia-Africa Summit.
“Russia’s task is to prevent a rollback in relations with African countries. It is necessary for Russia to define explicitly its priorities: why are we returning to Africa? Some general statements of a fundamental nature were made at the first Summit, now it is necessary to move from general statements to specificity,” he suggested.
During his address at the opening of the special panel session on Africa at the St. Petersburg International Forum held June 2021, Rwandan Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente has called upon Russians to consider increasing investment in Africa. That Africa has great opportunities that investors from Russia can take advantage of, among these, are the continent’s young population and workforce, the fast rate at which urbanization is taking place, and the huge potential that has been demonstrated in technological progress in areas like telecommunications and digitization of the society.
“Therefore, advancing our common prosperity agenda would imply translating the existing business opportunities into reality. And this calls for important flows of investments in priority areas,” he said.
In addition, Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente pointed at the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and regional integrations of economic communities as another priority to advance quickly Africa’s growth agenda and position the continent as an investment destination.
“This could be an opportunity for Russian businesses to invest in infrastructures such as roads, railways, ports, hydropower plants, and internet connectivity that facilitate trade on the continent of 1.3 billion consumers. The investment required is estimated at $130 billion to $170 billion per year,” explained Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente.
South African business tycoon, Sello Rasethaba, questioned how Russia was going to establish a thriving trade relationship with Africa for the benefit of all. In reality and effective practical terms, how does Russia want to reposition itself in relation with Africa? With business relationships, Russia has to consider practical strategies in consultation with African countries. The fact that the middle class is growing in leaps and bounds in Africa makes this market even more attractive and opens more opportunities for Russian businesses.
“The current investment and business engagement by foreign players with Africa is on the increase. There are so many unknowns up there in Russia; it’s crucial that Russia has a clear vision of the relationship it wants with Africa. Russia together with African countries must setup sovereign wealth funds using the resources power of those countries,” he said.
In an interview with Steven Gruzd, Head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), explained that Africa is a busy geopolitical arena, with many players, both old and new, operating. Apart from EU countries, China and the US. There are players such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, the UAE, Japan and others. Russia has to compete against them, and distinctively remain focused its efforts with strategies.
On the other side, Russia uses the rhetoric of anti-colonialism in its engagement with Africa, and that it is fighting neo-colonialism from the West, especially in relations with their former colonies. It sees France as a threat to its interests especially in Francophone West Africa, the Maghreb and the Sahel. It, therefore, focuses on anti-western slogans as its main trading commodity across Africa. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could be the strongest dimension of Russia’s dealings in Africa.
Many other factors including the geo-political changes are influencing the United States, European and Asian investors to intensify exploring several opportunities in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), a policy signed by African countries to make the continent a single market. As monitored, foreigners are looking at market for new partnerships. The AfCFTA has unlocked value chains for – especially US investors – in key sectors such as pharmaceuticals, automobiles, agro-processing, and financial technology.
Unlike Russian ministries, institutions and organizations, the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), for instance, shares insights on critical issues and policies influencing the US-Africa economic partnership. It is facilitating trade and investment issues for potential investors interested in pursuing public-private partnerships that support the United States and African businesses, including women-owned and led Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises. The U.S. Agency for International Development is working close with African institutions and organizations. According to documents, there are an estimated 1,200 U.S. companies operating in Africa.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made resonating announcement that the foundation will spend $7 billion, over the next four years, [allegedly] to improve health, gender equality and agriculture across Africa. Strengthening and supporting these sectors have become necessary due to increasing complaints about lack of funds and worse, due to the negative impact of geopolitical changes. It will further continue to invest in researchers, entrepreneurs, innovators and healthcare workers who are working to unlock the tremendous human potential that exists across the continent.
In another related development, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has signed a memorandum of understanding with African Continental Free Trade Area aims at exploring work on the next phases of the U.S.-African trade relationship. United States sees enormous opportunities to improve the longstanding African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) system of trade preferences, which is due to expire in 2025.
“The world that we’re living in today certainly has been transformed by significant events that we have experienced since 2015, the last time the program was reauthorized,” Tai noted during a meeting of trade ministers from Sub-Saharan Africa to discuss AGOA as part of a U.S.-Africa summit in Washington. “We’ve consistently seen that there are opportunities for the program to be better, there could be much better uptake and utilization of the program.”
In fact, AGOA offers an irreversible solid ground as a “stepping stone to address regional and global challenges,” especially with Africa’s young and entrepreneurial population, she said, before concluding that “the future is Africa, and engaging with this continent is the key to prosperity for all of us.”
Similarly, at least, after its historic UK-Africa Investment Summit held in January 2020, UK has increased its support for business on the continent, a step that aims at strengthening aspects of the planned economic cooperation with Africa. Our random research after the summit, we have noticed different priorities – all of which are supporting and strengthening economic partnerships in a number of countries on the continent. The significance of these is to help unlock opportunity, spread prosperity and thus transform lives in Africa.
The Department for International Trade said in a media release that it would cut import taxes on hundreds more products from some of the world’s developing countries to boost trade links. It explained further that the measure was part of a wider push by the UK to use trade to “drive prosperity and help eradicate poverty” as well as reduce dependency on aid. The scheme covers developing countries and will affect around 99% of goods imported from Africa.
South Africa and Nigeria, the continent’s two largest economies, make up 60% of the entire UK-Africa trade relationship. Only eight nations from sub-Saharan Africa mostly former colonies count the UK in their top 10 export destinations, including Rwanda, Mauritius, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya and South Africa.
Our monitoring shows that American, Asian, European Union members particularly British investors are strategically leveraging unto trade platforms, working to support the creation of an African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) because trade integration is such a powerful tool to accelerate economic growth, create employment and alleviate or reduce poverty.
The AfCFTA provides a unique and valuable platform for businesses to access an integrated African market of over 1.3 billion people. The growing middle class, among other factors, constitutes a huge market potential in Africa. Quite challenging though, but there are new legislations that stipulate localizing production and distribution inside Africa.
Under the current circumstances, what has Russia done to help Africa? It only contributes to deepening social dissatisfaction, increases the fear of vulnerable groups among the population to rising prices of commodities and consumables throughout Africa. Nevertheless, it is so common reiterating that Russia has always been on Africa’s side in the fight against colonialism. The frequency of reminding again and again about Soviet assistance, that was offered more than 60 years ago, will definitely not facilitate the expected beneficial trade and investment ties under these new conditions.
Afreximbank President and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Dr. Benedict Okey Oramah, says Russian officials “keep reminding us about Soviet era” but the emotional link has simply not been used in transforming relations. Oramah said one of Russia’s major advantages was the goodwill. He remarked that even young people in Africa knew how Russia helped African people fight for independence. “So an emotional link is there,” he told Inter-Tass News Agency.
The biggest thing that happened in Africa was the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). That is a huge game-changer, and steps have been made lately in the African countries for creating better conditions for business development and shaping attractive investment climate.
“Sometimes, it is difficult to understand why the Russians are not taking advantage of it? We have the Chinese, we have the Americans, we have the Germans who are operating projects…That is a very, very promising area,” Oramah said in his interview 2021.
Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, has several times highlighted the underlying fact of developing intra-African trade, and even with external players that “the next wave of investment in African markets must focus on productive sectors of Africa’s economy in order to drive the continent’s industrial development in the decades to come. For foreign investors and traders, it is necessary to support local entrepreneurs to build scale, and therefore improve productivity.”
For example, the total United States (US) two-way trade in Africa has actually fallen in recent years, to about $60 billion, far eclipsed by the European Union (EU) with over $200 billion, and China more than $200 billion, as stated by the Brookings Institution in the Africa in Focus post. According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), Africa’s economies are growing faster than those of any other regions. Nearly half of Africa’s countries are now classified as middle-income countries – the number of Africans living below the poverty line fell to 39 per cent as compared to 51 percent in 2021, and around 350 million of Africa’s one billion people are now earning good incomes – rising consumerism – that makes trade profitable.
As the official Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website indicated – it is evident that the significant potential of the economic cooperation is far from being exhausted, much remains to be done in creating conditions necessary for interaction between Russia and Africa. At a meeting of the Ministry’s Collegium, Lavrov unreservedly suggested taking a chapter on the approach and methods adopted by China in Africa.
Lavrov said:
“It is in the interests of our peoples to work together to preserve and expand mutually beneficial trade and investment ties under these new conditions. It is important to facilitate the mutual access of Russian and African economic operators to each other’s markets and encourage their participation in large-scale infrastructure projects. The signed agreements and the results will be consolidated at the forthcoming second Russia-Africa summit.”
After the first Russia-Africa summit held 2019, expectations are high as it offers the impetus to substantially increase investment in the economy, industry, transport, telecommunications and tourist infrastructures, as well as in high technology, healthcare, urban development, and other fields that are vital to the quality of life. On the contrary, Russians are consistently trading anti-Western slogans and engaged in geo-political rhetoric, instead of investment and business.
Is Russian torn between the challenges of its own assumptions and understandings about forging trade cooperation with Africa? Are pragmatic measures not necessary for promoting trade between the two regions? Is Russia only paying lip-service to the summit promise of doubling trade with Africa?
Now at the crossroad, it could be meandering and longer than expected to make the mark. Russia’s return journey could take another generation to reach destination Africa. With the current changing geopolitical world, Russia has been stripped of as a member of many international organizations. As a direct result of Russia’s “special military operation” aims at “demilitarization and denazification” since late February 2022, Russia has come under a raft of stringent sanctions imposed by the United States and Canada, European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and a host of other countries.
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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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In Belgrade on March 24, Serbian minister Nikola Selakovic and Russian Ambassador to Serbia Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, laid a wreath at a memorial to children killed in the illegal 1999 NATO terror bombing of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The ceremony and the anniversary of the attack went predictably unmentioned in America.
On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic bloc, without UN's authorization, started bombing Yugoslavia in gross violation of the fundamental principles of international lawand UN Charter. The US and NATO bombed Yugoslavian cities , including civilian infrastructure for 78 days. pic.twitter.com/T7IsAuTT1I
The remarks of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic were also ignored in the West. “24 years ago, the modern international law finally died,” Vucic said during a commemorative event in Sombor, the first city to be bombed by NATO and President Bill Clinton.
“Nothing worse could happen in the world than what was done here, to a small country, which was guilty only of seeking to make its own decisions, and to be free. As such it didn’t appeal to those powers which destroyed the old international order in 1989/90 and created a new one in which only they have the final say in everything.”
that the NATO forces deliberately attacked civilian infrastructure targets (and that such attacks were unlawful), deliberately or recklessly attacked the civilian population, and deliberately or recklessly caused excessive civilian casualties in disregard of the rule of proportionality by trying to fight a “zero casualty” war for their own side.
On this day in 1999 #US-led #NATO started illegal bombing of #Yugoslavia It lasted 78 days 1700+ civilians killed, incl 400 children 10,000 people seriously injured Infrastructure, bridges, hospitals, schools, cultural monuments were destroyed or damaged Still no #ICC prosecution pic.twitter.com/PyEVS8nG2h
A decade after the terror bombing, Stephen Zunes wrote,
The 11-week bombing campaign resulted in the widespread destruction of Yugoslavia’s civilian infrastructure, the killing of many hundreds of civilians, and—as a result of bombing chemical factories, the use of depleted uranium ammunition and more—caused serious environmental damage. Almost as many Yugoslav civilians died from NATO bombing than did Kosovar Albanian civilians from Serb forces prior to the onset of the bombing. A number of human rights groups that condemned Serbian actions in Kosovo also criticized NATO attacks that, in addition to the more immediate civilian casualties, endangered the health and safety of millions of people by disrupting water supplies, sewage treatment, and medical services.
Instead of holding NATO and the USG responsible for the murder of innocent civilians, the United Nations went after Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian president. Milošević stood accused of a laundry list of crimes, including genocide and unlawful deportation of Albanians in Kosovo. He died in prison (some believe he was poisoned) before a verdict was reached.
“In the days following the death of Slobodan Milosevic, every newspaper made sure to find him guilty of charges that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) could not prove in court,” writes Louis Proyect. The demonization campaign required “a false dichotomy” to portray Milošević as
the mastermind of a genocidal plot rather than simply one actor among many in a nasty civil war. Throughout the 1990s, self-described radicals like Mark Danner or State Department liberals like Michael Ignatieff were consumed with the need to vilify Milosevic as some kind of awful combination of Hitler and Stalin.
Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Kim Jung-un, Osama bin Laden, Moammar Gaddafi, and now Vladimir Putin, all are routinely compared to Hitler. “We repeatedly have seen how ‘rogue nations’ are designated and demonized,” notes historian Michael Parenti. “What they really had in common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development or somehow was not complying with the dictates of the global free market and the U.S. national security state.”
As Parenti notes, the destruction of Yugoslavia and its dismemberment had nothing to do with humanitarianism, as the Clinton administration and the corporate media in the West insisted. In fact, in 1999, there were a number of humanitarian disasters unfolding. The West (the USG and Europe) did not bother to intervene, and instead, as noted below, in many cases instigated or exacerbated crises and supported the perpetrators.
While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda—not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching “humanitarian bombings” against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the Guatemalan military’s systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators—who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.
Parenti’s remark about making “the world safe for the Fortune 500” underscores the relentless objectives of neoliberalism—domination of markets, capture (and, as in Syria, outright theft) of natural resources, subversion of economic independence, total control of societies, culture, information, and determining the collective fate of more than eight billion people.
The destruction of the former Yugoslavia, and nations since—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Somalia—demonstrate the USG and the ruling elite, the globalist oligarchs of an interlocking corporate directorate, will use all the tools at their disposal now that Russia and China are at the forefront of an emerging multipolar world.
The destruction and brutal reformulation of Iraq and Libya—the latter, formerly the wealthiest nation in Africa, now an open slave market—has sent an unmistakeable message to countries around the world: the USG military and its proxies will be deployed if the leaders and people of nations (with exploitable resources) refuse to play by the “rules-based” international corporate-fascist playbook.
On March 22, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said his balkanized country has no desire to join NATO.
“I believe that Serbia must not join NATO. Serbia is a free country and a militarily neutral country. Serbia will be defending its land and its sky on its own, but let me tell you something: our duty is to forgive and our duty is not to forget,” Vucic said.
“He was addressing a large crowd of people who gathered at the St. George Square in Sombor, waving Serbian flags and lighting candles for the victims of the bombings, which most of them see as an act of injustice,” Countercurrents reported.
Serbia will forget about NATO aggression in 1999 only when all Serbs disappear – Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, speaking at mourning events dedicated to the 24th anniversary of NATO aggression against Yugoslavia pic.twitter.com/vHwmtPrZbh
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Should they be taking them? Ukraine is desperate for any bit of warring materiel its armed forces can lay their hands on, but depleted uranium shells would surely not be a model example of use. And yet, in an act of killing with kindness, the UK is happy to fork them out to aid the cause against the Russians, despite the scandals, the alleged illnesses, and environmental harms.
An outline of the measure was provided by Minister of state for defence Baroness Annabel Goldie’s written answer to a question posed by Lord Hylton:
“Alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armour piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium. Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armoured vehicles.”
The response from the Kremlin was swift. “If all this happens,” warned Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Russia will have to respond accordingly, given that the West collectively is already beginning to use weapons with a nuclear component.” Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu also foresaw “nuclear collision”.
The statement from Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian lower house, shifted the focus from potential nuclear catastrophe to the field of medical consequences, reminding his fellow members that the use of such ammunition by the US in former Yugoslavia and Iraq had led to “radioactive contamination and a sharp rise in oncological cases.”
News networks were left trying to convey a picture to the public, much of it skimpy on the perilous consequences arising from using such munitions. The BBC’s characteristic language of understatement notes that such uranium, stripped of much of its radioactive content, “makes weapons more powerful, but it is feared those weapons could be a threat to people in areas where they are used.”
Sky News had its own benign interpretation of the dangers, suggesting that DU, in emitting alpha particles, did not “have enough energy to go through skin, so exposure to the outside of the body is not considered a serious hazard.” An admission as to the dangers had to follow. “It can be a serious health hazard, however, if it is swallowed or inhaled.”
The US Department of Veterans Affairs outlines a few points on the matter in greater detail. “When a projectile made with DU penetrates a vehicle, small particles of DU can be formed and breathed in or swallowed by service members in the struck vehicle. Small DU fragments can also scatter and become embedded in muscle and soft tissue.”
Since their use in the Gulf War (1991), the Kosovo War (1999), the Iraq War (2003) and Afghanistan, the curriculum vitae of such weapons has become increasingly blotchy. The use of such shells has been contentious to the point of being criminal, said to be carcinogenic and a cause of birth defects. A study examining a civilian population sample from Eastern Afghanistan, published in 2005, revealed that “contamination in Afghanistan with a source consistent with natural uranium has resulted in total concentrations up to 100 times higher than the normal range for various geographic and environmental areas throughout the world.”
Subsequent field research, notably in Iraq, has found instances of serious birth defects, including congenital heart disease, paralysis, missing limbs and neurological problems. While some of these outcomes can be attributable to other activities of the US military and its allies, the role of DU looms large.
The nature of such weaponry is also indiscriminate. As a law firm representing US war veterans acknowledges, those involved in campaigns, notably in Iraq, “may have been exposed to depleted uranium as a result of being in a vehicle that was hit by a projectile, being exposed to burning depleted uranium, or salvaging the wreckage of a vehicle that was hit by a depleted uranium projectile.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs has also admitted that DU is a “potential health hazard if it enters the body, such as through embedded fragments, contaminated wounds, and inhalation or ingestion.” It prefers, however, to treat each claim for disability that might have been the result of DU poisoning “on a case-by-case basis.”
The claimed lack of unequivocal evidence linking such projectiles to adverse effects on the environment and humans has been a consistent theme in investigations – and a boon for militaries using them. A committee of review established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that covered, among other things, the use of these shells by NATO forces in the Kosovo campaign, proved less than satisfactory.
In recommending that no investigation be commenced regarding the bombing campaign – hardly a surprise – the members had to concede that NATO’s responses to any queries were “couched in general terms and failed to address specific incidents.” The Committee also found no consensus on whether the “use of such projectiles violate general principles of the law applicable to use of weapons in armed conflict.”
The UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights proved more forthright on the issue, claiming in a resolution that DU are weapons with indiscriminate effects and should therefore be prohibited under international humanitarian law. The UN General Assembly’s latest resolution on the matter, however, suggested a distinct lack of backbone, noting that “studies conducted so far by relevant international organizations have not provided a detailed enough account of the magnitude of the potential long-term effects on human beings and the environment of the use of armaments and ammunitions containing depleted uranium.”
Little wonder, given such a muddled frame of mind, that the use of DU projectiles has persisted with some relish, despite an avalanche of studies warning of their dangers. Nature abhors a vacuum and fills it accordingly with the mean and ghastly. In November 2015, 5000 rounds of DU ammunition were used in an air raid on oil trucks used by Islamic State forces despite assurances from the US military that it had stopped using such weapons. As to whether it will supply Kyiv with this hazardous product remains unclear – the Pentagon is proving reticent on the subject.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has attacked the UK’s decision. Its General Secretary, Kate Hudson, outlined her concerns in a statement: “CND has repeatedly called for the UK government to place an immediate moratorium on the use of depleted uranium weapons and to fund long-term studies into their health and environmental impacts.”
Short of a clear treaty on the subject, preferably one with teeth, this is much wishful thinking. The Ukrainian forces, however, should give the whole matter a second thought: the effects of such weapons will not distinguish between the users, the targets, and the civilians. In the long run, it will also prove unsparing to the environment, which promises to be richly contaminated by the toxicity of such lingering munitions.
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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]
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich on International Crimes Investigative Committee talks about the World Health Organization’s attempt to take over national sovereignties with James Roguski, an outspoken activist; Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, professor emeritus of Economics; and Matthew Ehret, journalist and writer.
24 years ago, on March 24, 1999, NATO aggression against Serbia, that is, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, started. The order for the attack was issued by Javier Solana, the Secretary General of NATO at the time, to the then commander of the allied forces, US General Wesley Clark, although there was no UN Security Council approval. It was an obvious precedent.
During the armed conflict in Ukraine in 2022, Kiev lost, and Moscow gained, a significant part of the south of the country. The largest oblast in this region of Ukraine is Zaporizhzhia. Today Russia controls about 80% of the region’s territory, including more than 90% of the agricultural land.
Twenty-four years ago, marks the beginning of NATO’s aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia (March 24, 1999- June 10, 1999). The bombings which lasted for almost three months, were followed by the military invasion (under a bogus UN mandate) and illegal occupation of the province of Kosovo.
From Friday, March 24, Romanian Senator Diana Iovanovici Sosoaca found herself “targeted” on the pages of the infamous Ukrainian portal “Mirotvorets”. On this Ukrainian “open source death list” the names of people appear, some of whom perish under “unclear circumstances” The last one killed was Darya Dugin!
While only rarely do we see politicians who are brave enough to speak out about the dangers of mRNA COVID-19 injections, there are a few who refuse to be silenced. Take Andrew Bridgen, for example, a Member of Parliament from the UK who, a few days ago, stood up to give a speech in a debate on mRNA COVID-19 booster vaccinations.
On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was put into receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC announced that deposits over the $250,000 insurance limit would get an advance dividend within the next week, and would receive a receivership certificate for the rest of the funds.
Many mainstream media outlets have commemorated the actions of two decades ago and its aftermath, noting that the war was, in fact, a disaster both for the millions of people in Iraq, and for the thousands of U.S. soldiers laid to rest. There has been plenty of talk about the difficulties facing Iraqis despite the execution of Saddam Hussein and the presence of elections. The war effort led to the decline in popularity of the hawkish leaders with the reigning whips in their hands.
The Credit Suisse (CS) takeover by UBS, the largest Swiss bank, has taken place over the weekend, 18/19 March, when people are distracted and don’t focus on actions behind dark curtains. The merger was untransparent like in a dark room. See this on the build-up to the fusion to the UBS – CS fusion.
You can say what you want about China, it is true that the one-party system has many problems internally like many other countries, but when it comes to establishing peace among nations, China so far has been successful. The normalization of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a big deal, but anti-China hawks from both sides of the aisle in Washington and the Mainstream Media especially Fox News has downplayed the developments.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: Video: Towards WHO Totalitarianism? Dr. Reiner Fuellmich with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, James Roguski and Matthew Ehret
March 27th, 2023 by Center For Biological Diversity
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The annual count of migratory monarchs that spend the winter in Mexico is once again dismal for the iconic orange-and-black butterflies. This year’s count showed a 22% decline from 2022, leaving the butterfly highly vulnerable to extinction.
The count found only 2.21 hectares of occupied forest. The total number of monarchs is 64% below the minimum threshold scientists say is necessary for the migrating pollinators to not be at risk of extinction in North America. Monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains have declined by around 90% since the mid-1990s.
“Despite heroic efforts to save monarchs by planting milkweed, we could still lose these extraordinary butterflies by not taking bolder action,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Monarchs were once incredibly common. Now they’re the face of the extinction crisis as U.S. populations crash amid habitat loss and the climate meltdown.”
Monarchs are currently on the candidate waiting list for Endangered Species Act protection. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a 2024 deadline to make a final listing determination.
At the end of summer, eastern monarchs migrate from the northern United States and southern Canada to high-elevation fir forests in central Mexico. Scientists estimate the population size by measuring the area of trees turned orange by the clustering butterflies. The annual count is conducted by Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas and World Wildlife Fund Mexico. The eastern population has been perilously low since 2008.
“We petitioned for protection for monarchs nine years ago, but they still face an onslaught of pesticides and habitat loss,” said George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety. “This year’s count shows once again that they continue to urgently need Endangered Species Act protection. The Fish and Wildlife Service has already agreed to make a final decision; now they only need make the correct one, the one conservation, science and the law requires: protect monarchs.”
Monarchs are threatened by pesticides, climate change, loss of U.S. grasslands and illegal logging of the forests where they migrate for the winter. They are also threatened during their migrations by mortality from roadkill and habitat fragmentation.
Scientists led by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the butterfly under the Endangered Species Act in 2014.
Monarchs have lost an estimated 165 million acres of breeding habitat in the United States to herbicide spraying and development in recent decades. The caterpillars only eat milkweed, but the plant has been devastated by increased herbicide spraying in conjunction with corn and soybean crops that have been genetically engineered to tolerate direct spraying. The butterflies are also threatened by neonicotinoid insecticides, fungicides and other chemicals that are toxic to young caterpillars.
Most monarch butterflies west of the Rocky Mountains overwinter on the central coast of California. Their numbers rebounded this year to more than 330,000 butterflies during Thanksgiving counts. But deadly storms led to a 58% drop, with only 117,000 butterflies surviving into January. Overall the western population is down more than 95% since the 1980s.
In Canada monarchs are slated for listing as endangered under the Species At Risk Act. In Mexico they are considered a species of special concern.
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Featured image: Monarch butterfly photo by Lori Ann Burd, Center for Biological Diversity.
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The scale of environmental destruction caused by British soldiers exercising at a nature conservancy in Kenya has been revealed for the first time.
A cooking accident by UK troops two years ago today set fire to Lolldaiga Hills, a safari resort home to elephants and lions near Mount Kenya.
The smoke plume was so large that ash particles reached Lake Victoria on the Tanzanian border, some 200 miles away.
Now a new report by Howard Humphreys has calculated Lolldaiga’s burnt landscape will take until 2060 to recover, if climate change does not prevent it from doing so.
More than a quarter of a million seedlings need to be planted to replace torched trees, the consultancy firm said.
One of the main tree species at Lolldaiga, the African Pencil Cedar – a threatened conifer protected by Kenyan presidential decree – was virtually wiped out.
So much biomass was burnt during the incident that 178,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide were emitted.
That figure is equivalent to 7% of the UK military’s total greenhouse gas emissions for 2020-21, which officially stood at 2,527,000 tonnes and did not count fumes from the fire.
A Ministry of Defence spokesperson told Declassified:
“Emissions relating to this incident in Kenya aren’t included in the figures for 2020/21, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while an investigation is ongoing.”
Many of the MoD’s declared emissions came from British fighter jets, tanks and battleships that together consumed more than 500 million litres of fuel.
So for an accidental forest fire at a wildlife reserve to emit almost a tenth as much will undermine the army’s attempts to appear environmentally responsible.
It would take nearly half a million average Kenyans a year to emit the same amount of CO2.
Dr Stuart Parkinson, a scientific expert who analysed the report for Declassified, said: “This fire shows the importance of the MoD counting its whole carbon footprint.
“If just one accidental fire in a training area can destroy a forest leading to an extra 7% of the organisation’s carbon emissions, then what might the impacts of its worldwide military operations be causing?”
Smoke inhalation
The 175-page Howard Humphreys report was commissioned by Lolldaiga Hills Limited, the company that owns the ranch.
It is likely to feature prominently in a compensation case brought against the British army by more than 5,500 local Kenyans who claim to have suffered damage from the fire.
While the report highlights some major environmental impacts, it takes a conservative view of the fire’s significance beyond the perimeter of the ranch – where the majority of those seeking compensation reside.
They include Maasai herders who say tens of thousands of their cattle died from a smoke-related illness soon after the fire. There are also many complaints of chronic breathing problems and even blindness.
Declassified met one claimant, Samuel Lokure, who said: “I’ve been really affected. My eyes, my nose, my whole breathing system. Before I was able to see. But for now I don’t really see well. My eyes are itching every day. I’m totally disabled.”
Yet the report said the smoke only caused “minor” damage to air or water quality, and “no widespread impact on human health [is] likely to have arisen due to dispersal of [the smoke] plume.”
Flaws
Several shortcomings in the scientific study are acknowledged by Howard Humphreys, most notably that it took place a year after the fire and “the directive of the client to sample within the Ranch is a limitation to assessment.”
At one point, the Howard Humphreys team appears to downplay the significance of forest fires, calling them a “common occurrence in Kenya”. They omit the fact the British army sparked five smaller fires in the month before the Lolldaiga blaze.
The report also wrongly asserts British military training at Lolldaiga only began in 2009. The ranch was in fact used much earlier, not least in 2007 when a man working for the British army was killed in an explosion.
It does however reveal that solar panels and two residential camps housing ranch workers were destroyed by the fire, together with their personal belongings.
Even then, the death of conservancy worker Linus Murangiri, who was crushed by a lorry while fighting the fire, is only mentioned as a “second order impact” without naming him.
Selective study
By focusing only on the damage inside the ranch, the report sheds little light on the wider impact to neighbouring communities who have applied for compensation.
We learn “wildlife escaped from the Ranch during the fire incident and fled to the community living on the southern part of the Ranch, [where] the wildlife destroyed some farm crops”.
It goes on to say “however, wildlife fence breeches are a regular occurrence in the area” and “the study was not able to verify/quantify the extent of crop damage.”
There is no mention of the fact local farmers asked to participate in the Howard Humphreys study so their losses could be calculated.
Nor does it reflect that fence breaches are a historic grievance that neighbouring farmers have raised with Lolldaiga’s owners for more than 20 years.
When the local community attempted to crowdfund for its own scientific study of the environmental damage, five of the lead petitioners were arrested for ‘extortion’.
The charges were dropped after the elderly group spent an uncomfortable night in police custody.
Delays
Howard Humphrey’s environmental impact report was shared with petitioners last week by the body adjudicating their claims, the Inter-Governmental Liaison Committee (IGLC).
It had previously been denied to the media and freedom of information requesters.
The IGLC is an obscure UK-Kenyan body, co-chaired by a British army brigadier. As well as providing the report, it published its own rules for the first time.
The body said it reserves the right “at its sole discretion, [to] extend any time-frame” and indicated the compensation claims might not be settled until May 2024 – more than three years after the fire.
Robert Wells – who owned Lolldaiga at the time of the fire – has since sold the ranch, which his family acquired during British imperial rule.
Other descendents of European settlers continue to own vast farms in Kenya. They are often marketed as wildlife conservancies while also hosting military exercises for the former colonial power.
Carbon offsets
British troops are not the only ones facing scrutiny over their ecological impact in Kenya.
Survival International has published a new report criticising a carbon offset scheme north of Lolldaiga.
The area, which is mostly inhabited by nomads, is being marketed as a vast carbon sink by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), a controversial conservation group.
NRT claims that by encouraging nomadic herders to adopt new grazing practices they can restore grasslands, which will absorb 50 million tonnes of CO2.
The NRT’s chief, former big game hunter Ian Craig, received a conservation award in December from Prince William, who used to date his daughter.
Survival International believes the NRT scheme is “fundamentally flawed” and questions whether nomadic communities have consented.
Campaigner Fiore Longo said: “This project is not just dangerous greenwashing, it’s blood carbon: NRT is making money by destroying the way of life of those least responsible for climate change.”
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Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo
Featured image: Fire burns Lolldaiga Hills in March 2021. (Photo: Justice for Lolldaiga)
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China’s mediation to normalise Saudi-Iranian diplomatic ties has been widely welcomed internationally, especially in the West Asian region. A clutch of unhappy states that do not want to see China stealing a march on any front, even if it advances the cause of world peace, mutely watched.
The US led this pack of dead souls. But the US is also on the horns of a dilemma. Can it afford to be a spoiler? Saudi Arabia is not only the fountainhead of petrodollar recycling — and, therefore, a pillar of the western banking system — but also America’s number one market for arms exports. Europe is facing energy crisis and the stability of the oil market is an overriding concern.
Saudi Arabia has shown remarkable maturity to maintain that its “Look East” policy and the strategic partnership with China do not mean it is dumping the Americans. Saudis are treading softly.
After all, Jamal Khashoggi was a strategic asset of the US security establishment; the US is a stakeholder in the Saudi succession and it has a consistent record of sponsoring regime changes to create pliable regimes.
Yet, the fact remains that the Saudi-Iranian deal drives a knife into the heart of the US’ West Asian strategy. The deal leaves the US and Israel badly isolated. The Jewish lobby may show its unhappiness during President Biden’s bid for another term. China has stolen a march on the US with far-reaching consequences, which signifies a foreign policy disaster for Biden.
Washington has not spoken the last word and may be plotting to push back the peace process from becoming mainstream politics of the West Asian region. The American commentators are visualising that the Saudi-Iranian normalisation will be a long haul and the odds are heavily stacked against it.
However, the regional protagonists are already creating firewalls locally to preserve and foster the new spirit of recnciliation. Of course, China (and Russia) too lend a helping hand.China has mooted the idea of a regional summit between Iran and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council by the end of this year.
An unnamed Saudi official told the establishment daily Asharq Al-Awsat that Chinese President Xi Jinping approached Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister, last year about Beijing serving as a ‘bridge’ between the Kingdom and Iran and the latter welcomed it, as Riyadh sees Beijing being in a ‘unique’ position to wield unmatched ‘leverage’ in the Gulf.
“For Iran in particular, China is either No 1 or No 2 in terms of its international partners. And so the leverage is important in that regard, and you cannot have an alternative that is equal in importance,” the Saudi official added.
The Saudi official said China’s role makes it more likely that the terms of the deal will hold. “It (China) is a major stakeholder in the security and stability of the Gulf,” he noted. The official also revealed that the talks in Beijing involved “five very extensive” sessions on thorny issues. The most difficult topics were related to Yemen, the media, and China’s role, the official said.
Meanwhile, there are positive tidings in the air too — the likelihood ofa foreign minister level meeting between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the near future and, more importantly, the reported letter of invitation from King Salman of Saudi Arabia to Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi to visit Riyadh. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian remarked on Sunday with reference to the Yemeni crisis that
“We [Iran] are working with Saudi Arabia on ensuring the stability of the region. We will not accept any threat against us from neighbouring countries.”
To be sure, the regional environment is improving. Signs of an overall easing of tensions have appeared. For the first visit of its kind in over a decade, the Turkish Foreign Minister was in Cairo and the Egyptian FM has been to Turkey and Syria. Last week, on return from Beijing, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council headed for the UAE where President Sheikh Mohammed received him.
“Syria has been absent from its brothers for too long, and the time has come for it to return to them and to its Arab surroundings,” Sheikh Mohamed told Assad during their historic meeting at the presidential palace.
In an interview with NourNews, Shamkhani described his 5 days’ talks in Beijing leading to the deal with Saudi Arabia as “frank, transparent, comprehensive and constructive.” He said,
“Clearing misunderstandings and looking to the future in Tehran-Riyadh relations will definitely lead to the development of regional stability and security and the increase of cooperation between the countries of the Persian Gulf and the Islamic world to manage the existing challenges.”
Evidently, the regional states are tapping the “feel-good” generated by the Saudi-Iranian understanding. Contrary to the western propaganda of an estrangement lately between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed is identifying closely with the positive trends in the regional environment.
This is where China’s overarching role fostering dialogue and amity becomes decisive. The regional countries regard China as a benign interlocutor and the concerted attempts by the US and its junior partners to run down China make no impact on the regional states.
China has immense economic interests in the region — especially, expansion of the Silk Road in West Asia. The region’s political stability and security, therefore, is of vital interest to Beijing and prompts it to become the sponsor and guarantor of the Saudi-Iranian agreement. Clearly, the durability of the Saudi-Iranian deal should not be underestimated. The Saudi-Iranian agreement will remain West Asia’s most important development for a long time.
Fundamentally, both Saudi Arabia and Iran have compulsions to shift the locus of their national strategies to development and economic growth. This has received scant attention. The Western media has deliberately ignored this and instead demonised the Saudi Crown Prince and created a doomsday scenario for Iran’s Islamic regime.
That said, the known unknown is the tension building up over Iran’s nuclear programme. The issue is among the most prominent points of contention between Tehran and the Kingdom. Also, Israeli threats of attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities are escalating. Significantly, Iran’s FM Amirabdollahian is expected to visit Moscow this week.
A Russian-Chinese coordinated effort is needed to forestall the US from raking up the nuclear issue in tandem with Israel and ratchet up tensions, including military tensions, in such a way that a pretext becomes available to destabilise the region and marginalise the Saudi-Iran agreement as the leitmotif of regional politics.
All parties understand only too well that “If the Beijing agreement materialises, the violent and fanatical right-wing Israeli government will be the first to lose out, as respecting the agreement would give rise to a stable and prosperous regional system that sets the course for further normalisations and all the achievements that ensue from them,” as a Lebanese columnist wrote today in Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.
On balance, the regional states are acting on free will, increasingly and eschewing their determinism that was wedded to decisions and actions that were thought to be causally inevitable. The realisation has dawned now that it is within the capacity of sovereign states to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe.
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Featured image: UAE President Sheikh Mohammed (R) received Syria’s President Assad on official visit at Abu Dhabi airport, March 19, 2023 (Source: Indian Punchline)
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At the end of his recent video about the Chinese-Saudi-Iranian diplomatic deal on 10 March, the astute foreign policy expert Muqtedar Khan asks whether this breakthrough may lead to the “de-Americanisation of Saudi Arabia” itself.
It is an interesting question that reflects current realities pertaining not only to Saudi Arabia but also to the entire Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.
For the kingdom, one could conclude that it has already reached a point of no return. This, of course, does not mean that the Saudis are willing to end their close alliance with the US as such a move would be most detrimental to Saudi interests.
Let’s, however, consider this sequence from the past year: first, US President Joe Bidenvociferously, publicly, and repeatedly promised to make Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a global “pariah” over the assassination of journalistJamal Khashoggi. But he did nothing of the sort when he went to visit him – all smiles, reverence, and courtesy – and had his infamous fist-bumping moment caught on tape by all the cameras of the world.
During last July’s visit, Biden essentially begged Bin Salman to increase oil production to try to fight US and worldwide inflation caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not only did the crown prince refuse, but he did the exact opposite: Bin Salman actually decreased oil production by two percent. That was despite the threats that Biden had levelled against him should the Saudis do that.
Once again, Biden did nothing but return home feeling and looking sorry, silly, powerless, and way out of his league. A heated exchange then took place between Biden and Bin Salman in October with threats of a Nopec bill by US members of Congress (lifting sovereign immunity from the oil cartel member states) and Biden warning the Saudis of “consequences” if Opec+ were to cut oil production.
To make this double-slap-in-the-face worse, since Russia is part of Opec+, MBS actually objectively helped Putin get more oil revenue to finance his “special military operation” and mitigate the effects of US sanctions, at a time when the US is engaged in a war against him.
Then to the repeated and increasingly bitter threats of Biden, Saudi Arabia responded with very firm and forceful (though not hostile) press releases from their embassy that they would always put their national interests first, and that no amount of pressure and threats from the US or anyone else could make them deviate from that.
A humiliating defeat
Again, Biden had to swallow his pride. And now, this: the 10 March tripartite deal between Riyadh and Tehran announced in Beijing. It has not been emphasised enough how severe and humiliating a defeat this represents for the US.
First, apparently Washington was left out of these diplomatic negotiations and had nothing to do with it.
Second, as Khan says in his podcast, not only may it end Iran’s isolation and further break the embargo the US has been working so hard to maintain since the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis of 1979, but the two powers who broke it are: a) China, the main US adversary in the world now, America’s public enemy number one as they themselves claim in their rhetoric, as has become obvious in their inept and reckless foreign policy; b) Saudi Arabia, their top ally (after Israel) in the Middle East.
That must hurt.
Third, it is not just its top strategic adversary that is replacing the US as a major peace broker (though we are not there yet, but it’s at a minimum an excellent first step towards possible further rapprochement) but Beijing is doing so in what had always been the US’s own backyard, the Middle East.
Fourth, the fact that this deal was announced in Beijing seems to symbolise the shift eastwards of Middle Eastern foreign policy and alliances, in a series of “Asian pivots” and “Look to the East” (as Iran calls it) strategic realignments.
Fifth, and finally, from a public relations, global image, and beyond that, actual soft-power viewpoint, this is absolutely disastrous for the US.
The diplomatic breakthrough and success of China make even more obvious and cruel by comparison the never-ending slew of major foreign policy failures, defeats, and debacles of the US for decades. Its new aura as a major, and totally unexpected peace broker only highlights further the loss of influence and ineptitude of the US itself.
China as peacemaker
Worse, China is coming out of this as a state power interested in and able to bring about peace, detente, normalisation, and de-escalation. It has proven itself capable of pulling stunning diplomatic coups like this one with finesse, persistence, intelligence, and agility, while in sharp contrast, the best the US could do is flood entire nations with weapons to keep the Ukraine war going “as long as it takes”, and drag the world in another forever war of choice, now as American as apple pie.
China now looks like a brilliant peacemaker while the US looks just like the warmonger it actually always was, if one just looks at its history since its very bloody beginnings in the genocide of First Nations populations all the way to Vietnam and Iraq.
Xi is presented in official American discourse as a problem, something the world should be afraid of. Yet, after this recent breakthrough, one wonders who looks like the real problem in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Xi’s recent speeches and China’s strategic documents have made it clear this diplomatic operation is only the beginning of an ongoing effort to turn China into a major international broker.
It started in the Global South – Africa included – and is now possibly expanding into Europe and the Russia-Ukraine war, with the Chinese president’s recent three-day visit to meet Vladimir Putin. Xi commented pointedly to the Russian president: “There are changes going on now that haven’t happened for 100 years. And we are moving these changes together.”
China is in this for the long term, and Xi has made it clear he is eager to extend his services to anybody to help solve other conflicts.
Escaping US control
The question of whether Saudi Arabia can undergo a “de-Americanisation” of its country can be extended to the entire Mena region. Like the rest of the world, with the exception of the EU, these states are finally extracting themselves from US control and domination even if it means striking tactical partnerships with authoritarian regimes like China.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 8 December 2022 (Saudi Press Agency/Handout via Reuters)
The Middle East has actually already entered a largely de-Americanised era – the era of fluctuating, realist, pragmatic, fluid, radically open, and quite unpredictable hybrid alliances in order to give itself more space to manoeuvre, and more options for the sake of sovereignty.
The next moves in that direction are already being planned and are on the horizon. For example, both Saudi Arabia and Iran want to join the BRICS group, while Saudi Arabia has applied for membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation where Iran is already an observer state.
But the answer to the “de-Americanisation” question will be provided, maybe soon, by one ultimate test: whether Saudi Arabia and other oil producers after it will trade in a currency other than the dollar. Only then would there be a true revolution, and what observers have called “the nuclear option” (against the US).
And not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia, pushed by China itself and many others who would love to see that happen, is actually considering this.
Given that dollarisation of the global energy market has always been the lynchpin of the US domination of the world economy itself, this would indeed be a nuclear blast.
And it may now just be a matter of time, possibly a mere few years.
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Dr Alain Gabon is Associate Professor of French Studies and chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, USA. He has written and lectured widely in the US, Europe and beyond on contemporary French culture, politics, literature and the arts and more recently on Islam and Muslims. His works have been published in several countries in academic journals, think tanks, and mainstream and specialized media such as Saphirnews, Milestones. Commentaries on the Islamic World, and Les Cahiers de l’Islam. His recent essay entitled “The Twin Myths of the Western ‘Jihadist Threat’ and ‘Islamic Radicalisation ‘” is available in French and English on the site of the UK Cordoba Foundation.
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