Suing Meta-Facebook in Kenya High Court

December 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Africa has been a continent exploited since the European scramble carved it out in lines of a draughtsman’s crude design.  Its resources have been pilfered; its peoples enslaved for reasons of trade and profit; its political conditions manipulated to favour predatory companies.

A similar pattern is detectable in the digital world.  The slavers have replaced their human product with data and information. The ubiquitous sharing of information on social media platforms has brought with it a fair share of dangerous ills. A $2 billion lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, which was filed in Kenya’s High Court this month, is a case in point.

The petitioners, Kenyan rights group Katiba Institute, and Ethiopian researchers Fisseha Tekle and Abrham Meareg, argue that Meta failed to employ sufficient safety measures on the Facebook platform which would have prevented the incitement of lethal conflict.  Most notable were the deaths of Ethiopians arising from the Tigray War, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and seen the displacement of 2.1 million Ethiopians.

Abrham Meareg’s case is particularly harrowing.  His father, chemistry Professor Meareg Amare Abrha and an ethnic Tigrayan, was singled out and harassed in a number of violent and racially inflammatory Facebook posts.  Two posts screeching with slander (complicity in massacres; aiding military raids, corruption and theft) and death threats found their way onto a page named “BDU STAFF”, which sported over 50,000 followers at the time.

The posts also included the professor’s picture and home locality. Complaints to the platform by his son received no response.  The posts remained up for four weeks.  Meareg Amare was subsequently assassinated after leaving his work at Bahir Dar University.  According to his son, the killing “was orchestrated by both state and non-state actors.”

Rosa Curling, Director of the non-profit campaign outfit Foxglove, an organisation supporting the petitioners, is convinced that the professor would still be alive had the posts been removed.  She also makes a salient point.  “Sadly, ‘engaging’ posts are often violent or shocking, because people react to them, share them, comment on them.  All those reactions mean the Facebook algorithm promotes the post more, and can make hate posts and violence go viral, and spread even further.”

Meta, in response, has trotted out the standard, disingenuous deflection, giving us an insight into a parallel universe of compliance.  “We have strict rules about what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram,” declared Meta spokesperson Mike DelMoro.  “Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our security and integrity work in Ethiopia.”

Meta’s content moderation hub for Eastern and Southern Africa is located in Nairobi.  But questions have been raised about how adequate its staffing and resourcing arrangements are.  DelMoro claims there is nothing of interest on that score.  “We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise, and continue to develop our skills to detect harmful content in the country’s most commonly spoken languages, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya.”

The treatment of staff at Meta’s main subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, Sama, is also the subject of another lawsuit.  That action alleges the use of forced labour and human trafficking, unequal labour relations, attacks on unions and a failure to provide sufficient mental health and psychosocial support to hired moderators.

Abrham Meareg and his fellow petitioners are demanding, along with Facebook’s halting of viral hate and demoting of content inciting violence, the employment of greater numbers of content moderators versed in a range of languages.  The legal filing also demands that Meta issue an apology for the professor’s death and establish a restitution fund for victims of hate speech or misinformation posted on the company’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Such actions are becoming regular fare.  All tend to follow a similar blueprint.  In December last year, a class action complaint was lodged with the northern district court in San Francisco claiming that Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.”  The language proved instructive: a company, operating much in the traditional mercantilist mould, a plunderer of resources, its gold the product of surveillance capitalism.

Lawyers representing the petitioners also submitted a letter to Facebook’s UK office stating that their clients had been subjected to acts of “serious violence, murder and/or other grave human rights abuses” as part of a genocidal campaign waged by the military regime and aligned extremists in Myanmar.

As with the case lodged in Kenyan High Court, the grounds against Facebook were that its algorithms amplified hate speech against the Rohingya populace; it failed to adequately invest in local moderators and diligent fact-checkers; it failed to remove posts inciting violence against the Rohingya; and it did not shut down or delete specific accounts, groups and pages that encouraged ethnic violence.

Despite such actions, there is nothing in the way Meta operates to suggest a change in approach.  As far long as the wallets stretch, platforms such as Facebook will continue to use devilish algorithms to boost bad behaviour.  In the scheme of things, such behaviour, however hateful or misinformed, sells.  The dragon of surveillance capitalism continues to thrive with fire breathing menace.

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

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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The political history of a country has been the fight between the “have yes” and ” have no”, between the strong and the weak and between the elite group and the ordinary people.

Humanity has tried to solve this fight through peaceful relations with little success. More frequent solution has been massive uprisings, bloodless civil wars and bloody revolutions.

The political history of South Korea has been the fight between the elite pro-Japan conservative force (PJCF) (Chin-il-pa 普守親日派) and the progressive liberal nationalist force (PLNF) (jin-bo-ae-guk-se-ryok (进步愛國派).

The PJCF-PLNF fight has been continuing since 1945, the year of Korea’s “liberation” from Japanese colonialism. Up to now, the fight has had cyclical variations and neither force has received fatal blow.

However, since the PJCF took over the power this year (May 9, 2022), the fight has become more aggressive and its outcome may have serous impacts not only on the survival of South Korea as a genuinely democratic country but also on the dynamics of regional economy and security.

This paper intends to examine the evolution of current PJCF-PLNF battle, the nature of the fight and its possible impacts.

Evolution of PJCF-PLNF Fight

The Western media treats South Korea as one country, but in reality, there are two South Koreas, one for the PJCF and, the other, the PLNF. Each has different way of looking at Korea and different role it has to play in Korean collective life.

Of course, there are those who are neutral and take side depending upon the policies of the two organized forces. At present, the political distribution of the South Korean population is as follows: the PJCF (30%), the PLNF (40%) and the neutral (30%).

The PJCF-PLNF fight has had the following periods of evolution: 1910-1945, 1948-1987, 1987-1998, 1998-2008 2008-2017 and 2017-2022, 2022-present.

1910-1945: Period of Japanese occupation in Korea and the formation of PJCF and PLNF

The Japanese brutal and illegal occupation of Korea had the tragic footprint of dividing Koreans between the pro-Japan force and the anti-Japan force.

Many Koreans had to work to survive under the Japanese colonial government. But, there were those who more than worked for the Japanese; they actively participated with the Japanese masters in the terrible crimes of oppressing and exploiting Koreans. These Koreans were regarded by other Koreans as “traitors”.

The traitors participated in the theft of lands, houses and other assets belonging to Koreans.

They participated in capturing more than 250,000 teenage Korean girls to be sent to the horrible military Comfort Women camps to be raped more than 20 times a day by Japanese soldiers during the entire duration.

They also collaborated in mobilizing 800,000 Korean workers to work as slaves in Japanese mines and factories under less than sub-human living conditions.

They helped for the conscription of a huge number of Korean youth to be sent to the frontline to kill Korean patriots.

Even worse, these traitors actively helped in killing Korean identity.

Koreans were forced to throw away Korean names and adopt a Japanese name. My family had a Japanese name. At schools, it was forbidden to speak Korean language. Koreans were forced to go to Shinto shrines every day. At schools, the history of Korea was forbidden to teach. The whole process of uprooting the Korean identity was to enslave Koreans. Even the Korean native trees were to be replaced by Japanese trees.

Under these conditions, the Korean population was sharply divided between the pro-Japan group which became later the PJCF and the anti-Japan group which became later the PLNF. This was the beginning of a century-old fight between these two political forces in South Korea.

1948-1987: Period of PJCF governments of Rhee Syngman (1948-1960), Park Chung-hee (1962-1979) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1987)

This period was the darkest Korean post-war history of brutal police dictatorship and military dictatorship under which South Koreans had to go through violent human right violation and suffering from fear and insecurity.

In 1945, Korea was liberated from the Japanese yoke. People filled the streets, singing, dancing and shouting “Long Live Korea!”

The priority in the mind of Koreans was the punishment of the traitors. But, to the dismay of Koreans, the traitors were welcomed by the US military government (1945-1948) and, in fact, they ruled Korea for the American interests.

In 1948, Rhee Syngman established the first civilian government after the departure of the American military government. He was elected after the assassination of Kim Gu, the president of the Korean Provisional Government along with other nationalists.

In 1962, General Park Chung-hee took power after a coup-d’état and ruled South Korea until 1979. Then, in 1980, General Chun-Doo-hwan snatched the power through another coup d’état.

These three presidents had several things in common.

First, they took power by force or by rigged election: Rhee Syngman by rigged election and, both Generals Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan by coup d’état.

Second, they ruled force and violence: Rhee Syngman by police dictatorship and the two generals by military dictatorship. This is explained by the lack of legitimacy of their government which made it impossible for them to take power in legitimate way.

Third, being denied by the Koreans, they felt insecure and, to protect themselves, they formed a tight knit community. Now, to maintain the community, they decided to cumulate money and assets by all means including immoral and illegal ways. This has led to the creation of corruption community and corruption culture.

Fourth, to expand and strengthen the corruption community, they intensified the violation of citizens’ freedom and their right to decent living. They imposed unfair wage and oppressed labour union. They embezzled public funds; they gave illegal grants to the members of the corruption community; the bribe money was a lucrative source of their income.

Fifth, these three presidents were devoted pro-Japan leaders. There were logical reasons for this. Rhee Syngman survived as president for 12 years owing to the supporters who had collaborated with Japan (traitors).

General Park Chung-hee was a Japanese army officer who wrote allegiance to the emperor of Japan with his own blood so that he could be admitted to the Japanese military academy in Manchuria. He killed Korean patriots for Japan.

He established the pro-Japan Republican Party with $66 million given in 1965 by Kishi Nobuske who was the worst racist and the most brutal oppressor of Chinese and Koreans in Manchuria. He was known as “Showa demon”.

General Chun Doo-hwan was a faithful subordinate to his boss, General Park. After the assassination of his boss in 1979, he stole the power by coup d’état in 1980. Chun was the most brutal dictator and he was ready to do anything as long as he can stay in power.

In fact, he killed thousands of innocent Gwangjoo citizens in order to prevent the opposition from challenging his power. He tried to become eternal president as his boss had wanted, but failed.

The three presidents of the PJCF ruled Korea with brutal police and military force. In order to keep power, they massacred hundreds of thousands of citizens who were suspected to be against the regime. They arrested, incarcerated, tortured and killed tens of thousands of college students to prevent anti-regime demonstrations.

But the PLNF was organized and fought against the dictators. The core of the PLNF was filled by students. The students organized huge street demonstrations four times during this period:

  • The Student Revolution of April 19 1960,
  • The BUMA Protest on October 16 1979,
  • The Kwangju Democratic Movement on May 18, 1980,
  • The Democratic Movement of June 1987.

The PLNF had important victory through these uprisings. The three presidents ended their presidency in a tragic way.

Rhee Syngman was chased by the students and fled Korea, in 1960, on an American CIA plane.

General Park Chung-hee failed to become permanent president, because he was assassinated in 1979 by his CIA director.

General Chun Doo-hwan was sentenced to death in 1996 for his crime of killing Kwangju citizens. He was also the most corrupted leader and the worst abuser of power.

To be sure, this was a significant victory of the PLNF over the PJCF. But, the corruption culture of the PJCF remained in tact.

1987-1993: Period of PJCF government of Rho-Tae-woo (1987-1993)

This was the period of the birth of a new constitution allowing the regime of direct election of the president made possible by the huge June Democratic Uprising in 1987.

The president was General Rho Tae-woo who was relatively peaceful compared to his violent friend, General Chun Doo-hwan. Rho Tae-woo avoided confrontation with PLNF, but he was accused for corruption.

As far as the PJCF-PLNF fight was concerned, no major change took place under Rho Tae-woo.

1993-1998: Period of the coalition government of PJCF-PLNF under Kim Yong-sam (1993-1998)

Despite the coalition between the two political forces, this period brought a major victory of PLNF. President Kim Yong-sam of PLNF was successful in bringing General Chun Doo-hwan and General Rho Tae-woo to the court. General Chun was given death penalty for his crime of Kwangju massacre. General Rho got the prison term for corruption.

1998-2008: Period of PLNF government under Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Rho Moo-hyun (2003-2008)

This period was one of the major victories of PLNF over PJCF. In fact, during this period, there was major change in economic policy more in favour of the ordinary people and new basis for the North-South dialogue.

In 1998, the foreign reserve crisis hit Korea hard. Countless small and medium businesses had to close; several Chaebols went bankrupt and an army of jobless went hungry. Millions of poor Koreans gave their gold wedding rings, necklaces and golden properties to pay the debt to IMF.

But, above all, President Kim Dae-jung who took over power in 1998 imposed bold reform of Chaebols, which weakened considerably the strength of the corruption culture of PJCF.

Moreover, he undertook several reforms designed to make the income distribution more equal such as the regime of minimum income, the promotion of labour union, increase of corporate taxes, the incentives given to SMEs and measures.

President Rho Moo-hyun gave another big blow to PJCF. To begin with, he made substantial social and industrial reforms leading to a more equal distribution of income. Another major reform undertaken by President Rho was the de-bureaucratization of the Korean rigid and unproductive bureaucracy leading to the weakening of the corruption culture developed by the PJCF.

The measures taken by the two presidents of the PLNF could have slowed down the flow of public money toward the PJCF.

There was another event which took place in this period, namely, the “Sunshine policy” which could have damaged the PJCF’s interests.

The North-South tensions had been a useful tool of winning major election of the PJCF and promoting the close ties between the PJCF and Japan. The sunshine policy has surely hurt such tie.

Thus, the two presidents of the PLNF were relatively successful in improving income distribution and reducing the North-South tension resulting in a meaningful victory of the PLNF over the PJCF.

2008-20017: Period of PJCF government by Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013-2017)

This period was marked by a strong comeback of the PJCF. Under presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, the PJCF became successful in three fields of battle.

First, the distribution of income and assets was made more unequal through lower corporate taxes, more grants to PJCF-friendly institutions and individuals and, above all, the cutting of spending for the ordinary people’s wellbeing.

The notorious case of embezzling public funds was the 4-River Development Project involving billions of US dollars and so-called the Natural Resource Diplomacy. Nobody knows how much money went to the pockets of the PJCF members.

Second, the North-South tension was made to increase by stopping all North-South relations including the closing of the Gaesung Industrial Complex and the denial of the access to Gum-gwang-san tourist resort facilities.

Third, the PJCF was successful in taking out from history textbooks the story of the crime against comfort women. In addition, they put in history textbooks the Japanese claim that Japanese occupation of Korea was for the good of Korea.

This was indeed a big victory for the PJCF. But, in order to protect this victory, the PJCF deployed the following methods of discouraging dissidence.

First, the PJCF media justified the wrongdoings of the PJCF and criticized the normal doings of the dissidents.

Second, the police, the prosecutors and court judges overlooked the wrongdoings of the PJCF and accused the dissidents for fabricated crimes.

Third, they produced a blacklist of 10,000 artists, cinema people, intellectuals and possible dissidents and reduced or stopped official subsidies.

Fourth, they even eliminated in 2014 a legally-constituted political party of liberal ideology, the Unified Progressive Party.

Fifth, prominent leaders of the PLNF were victims of illegal incarceration or, worse, they were victims of frame up of sexual misconduct so that they cannot continue their political leadership.

These measures did not involve guns and tortures, but they were quite effective in discouraging dissidence.

But, the PLNF were not idle. They stood up and bravely fought back. For eight months from august 2016 to April 2017, not less than 17,000,000 people of all walks of the society and of all ages went down to the streets and shouted the impeachment of Park Geun-hye who stepped down as president and went to prison for corruption, abuse of power and incapability to run the government.

In short, during the 9-year period, the government of the PJCF put almost everything they had to destroy the PLNF but they did not foresee the impact of the Candlelight Revolution.

Candlelight Protest around Sejong Center at Gwanghwamun (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

2017-2022: Period of PLNF government of Moon Jae-in (2017-2022)

During this period, the PLNF government of Moon Jae-in hit hard the core of the PJCF making them to feel threatened to lose their wealth and privileges.

This period was marked by the brilliant success of the Moon Jae-in government’s national policies and desperate counter attack of the PJCF through two strategies to destroy the PLNF government of Moon.

Being threatened by Moon’s anti-corruption culture of PJCF and their friends, they fought back.

Having lost the election, they used the tactic they had been using all these years. These are the conspiracies of the prosecutors supported by the corrupted media.

The prosecutors gave themselves two tactics:

First, they eliminated potential PLNF leaders to succeed Moon Je-in in the future through the fabricated evidences of sexual abuse or bribes. Several potential leaders of PLNF were put in prison by the prosecutors and some others killed themselves due to the pressure punt on their families by the PJCF media and prosecutors.

Second, the PJCF media was given two functions. To begin with, they supported prosecutors’ criminal operation of accusing the PLNF for fabricated evidence of crime and the media’s job was to print whatever the prosecutors tell them. In other words, the PJCF media performed the kangaroo court to condemn the innocent before the court judgment.

Moreover, the mission of the PJCF media was to discredit whatever the Moon government did. They never printed or broadcasted Moon’s success as a national leader or international leader.

Moon’s visit to various countries for the promotion of Korea’s interests were seldom published or aired on TV. On the other hand, if Moon’s government makes a slight mistake, it becomes a federal case and they dramatize it as if it would bring the end of Korea.

Despite the violent anti-Moon tactics of PJCF, the government of Moon was able to accomplish major reforms for the benefit of all Koreans not just for the elite group of the PJCF.

President Moon Jae-in challenged the PJCF in four areas of dispute which were vital for the survival of the PJCF: unequal income distribution, the corruption culture, North-South tension and Japanese neo-colonialism.

Unequal Income Distribution: The measures adopted by Moon Jae-in in order to assure more equal income distribution included the following: reduction of grants and subsidies to Chaebols, increase of corporate tax, creation of more jobs through the development of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), the increase of minimum wage, more income transfer to the poor and the increase of the supply of public goods such as free lunch for school kids, more coverage of medical care insurance.

Corruption Culture: The measures designed to destroy the corruption culture consisted of the following:

First, the cabinet ministers, advisors and other key positions in the government were corruption-free.

Second, the family members and relatives of the president were excluded from government jobs.

Third, the government stopped receiving bribes from Chaebols.

Fourth, President Moon has reformed the National Information Service so that it can no longer gather citizens’ information for political purpose.

Fifth, President Moon has established special bureau of criminal investigation of high ranking civil servants, the Bureau of Corruption Investigation for Officials of High Ranking (gong-soo-tcho).

Sixth, PLNF government of Moon Jae-in sent President Lee Myung-bak to prison for corruption and abuse of power.

The North-South tension: The North-south tension has been a gift for the PJCF for two reasons. It makes the Koreas’ reunification more difficult on the one hand, and on the other it facilitates PJCF’s victory at major elections allowing it to keep power.

The North-South tension has given the opportunity for the PJCF to create a climate of fear which allowed the PJCF to boost its militarism providing electoral comparative advantage.

The PJCF fear the reunification because, under a unified Korea, they will become a marginal political force and possible target of revenge for their collaboration for Japanese oppression of Koreans.

But to the disappointment of the PJCF, President Moon has been able to alleviate the North-South tensions.

Remember, in 2017, President Donald Trump was ready to attack North Korea, most likely encouraged by South Korea’s PJCF and Japan.

But, owing to North Korea’s trust in President Moon Jae-in and the brilliant diplomacy of Kim Yo-Jung, sister of Kim Jung-un, North Korea came to the Pyeong-Chang Winter Olympics of 2018 leading to the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore in June 2018, their Hanoi-Summit of 2019 and their Panmunjom summit of 2021.

Kim Yo-jong (far right, upper row), South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence at the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony (Licensed under KOGL Type 1)

True, the North-South peace process hit the wall in Hanoi that was too high to go over. But, the North-South peace process allowed the Korean peninsula to enjoy three-year peace and a hope for reunification.

The Kim-Trump summits and peace on the peninsula were a huge disappointment for the PJCF. It became impossible to demonize North Korea, because the diplomacy of North Korea revealed that Kim Jung-un was a “normal leader” and North Korea was not a hell. The demonization of North Korea no longer became an alibi for PJCFs election victories.

Japanese neo-colonialism: It is true that Japan left Korea in 1945. But the Japanese colonialism has never left Korea. In other words, the Japanese neo-colonialism has replaced its old colonialism. By neo-colonialism, I mean the colonialism in which the coloniser is absent physically in the colonized country.

The execution of the neo-colonialism is conducted by an agent. In Korea, the PJCF has been the agent ever since 1948.

Since 1948, South Korea has been the target of Japanese neo-colonialism in three areas: economic development, the denial of Japanese war crimes against the Koreans and the fear of Koreas’ reunification.

So, South Korea has been the target of Japanese economic neo-colonialism, security neo-colonialism and political neo-colonialism.

Economic neo-colonialism: The Han River miracle was partly attributable to the Japanese neo-colonialism in which Japan provided high value-added intermediary goods and services, while South Korea assembled these intermediary good to produce finished goods.

The value-added of the intermediary goods and services, in the case of smartphones, accounts for as much as 95% of the sale price leaving merely 5 % of the sale price to the job of assembling the intermediary goods and services to produce the smartphone.

Under such situation, South Korea has had to live with trade deficit with Japan until the Japan trade war in 2019. After this trade war, Korea’s dependence on Japan for key intermediary goods and services has declined.

Security Neo-colonialism: The peace process was not welcomed by Japan for it will lead to the reunification of Koreas which will be a threat to Japan. Hence, the continuation of the North-South tension was Japan’s interest in Korea. Japan has surely asked the PJCF to maintain the North-South tension for Japan. This is the security neo-colonialism.

To the disappointment of Japan, the government of Moon Jae-in was successful in reducing the North-South tension through the peace process. Thus, President was good in weakening PJCF’s role for Japanese neo-liberalism.

Political Neo-colonialism: One of the most important issues for Japan has been the denial of its war crimes, especially the crime of collective raping of 250,000 Korean young girls for the whole duration of the Pacific War.

This crime is impossible to accept for the Japanese Neo-Meiji Restoration Group (NMRG) who is suspected to dream for Holy War 2.0. For this, the NMRG needs the active participation of the Japanese people on the one hand and, on the other, they need to convince the Koreans that Japanese colonialism is beneficial to Korea.

Japan has asked the PJCF to take out from history textbooks the story of comfort women. In fact under the PJCF government of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, it was done. Thus, the PJCF did a good job to please their Japanese master.

But PLNF put the history of Japanese war crimes including the crime against the comfort women back into history textbooks.

Thus, President Moon Jae-in has caused significant damage to the interests of the PJCF. As a matter of fact, the PJCF seems to have felt threat of their survival and might have decided to revenge.

The revenge battle begun with the election of Yoon Suk-yeol as president in May 2022.

2022-Now: period of PJCF government of Yoon Suk-yeol

On 9 May, 2022, there was the presidential election. The candidate of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) representing the PLNF was Lee Jae-myung, while that of the People Power Party (PPP) representing the PJCF was Yoon Suk-yeol.

Lee Jae-myung was a lawyer who has spent his whole career for the poor and the weak. As a mayor of Sung-nam city, he has implemented several public policy measures including the system of “basic income”, which can be spent in his city and corruption-free management of the city budget.

On the other hand, Yoon Suk-yeol has spent his career in arresting people as prosecutor and in 2021, he was appointed by President Moon as prosecutor general.

The presidential election took place on May 9, 2022. To the great surprise of all, Yoon Suk-yeol won, albeit a very small margin of 0.73%. Yon got 48.56% of votes, while Lee got 47.83% of votes.

Yoon was elected despite a long list of reasons against his victory. He had many sins and defects. Nevertheless, he won. But, why? The most important reason for voting Yoon was the wish of the PJCF people to revenge Moon Jae-in government and recover the wealth, the income and the privileges which they think they have lost due to Moon’s government. They thought that Yoon Suk-yeol, the merciless prosecutor was the right man who could do the revenge for them.

Yoon Suk-yeol made his name by destroying Professor Cho-guk, his wife and his children on the basis of controversial and fabricated evidence for the simple reason that the professor as Minister of Justice wanted to reduce the power of the prosecutors.

This seems to have pleased the PJCF and voted for Yoon Suk-yeol for the simple reason that he could arrest and put all the PLNF leaders in jail and restore South Korea where the corrupted PJCF could dominate again. In fact, it is what Yoon has been doing for last 6 months since he became president.

Impact of PJCF’s Victory

As mentioned above, the government of Moon Jae-in has surely destroyed the lucrative source of bribe money and other types of illegal and immoral money, power and privileges of PJCF. The PJCF and those who received some benefits from the PJCF voted for Yoon Suk-yeol to recover what was taken away by Moon government.

However, a good part of those who voted for Yoon realize now that they made a mistake of choosing a wrong man.

What is important is what the Yoon government wants and how he intends to get what it wants. What it wants is not the promotion of national interests; what it wants is the promotion of the collective interests of the corrupted community of the PJCF. To be more precise, what it wants is the advancement of the interest of Yoon’s family and his devoted friends.

To attain such objective, Yoon needs a regime of dictatorship, to be more precise, the dictatorship of prosecutors. In fact, most of the positions of power within the government and government-funded institutions are filled by prosecutors and personal friends of Mrs. Yoon, Kim Gun-hee.

As a result, policies designed to advance the wellbeing of the population are absent. This is reflected in major national policies, namely, economic policy, social policy, security policy and foreign policy.

Yoon’s economic policy is simply the neo-liberal policy of th 1970s and 1980s. The first thing his government did was to cut the corporate tax, increase subsidies to Chaebols, allow the Chaebols to exploit SMEs and weaken the negotiation power of labour unions. This is the usual way of getting bribe money for the PJCF.

This Chaebol-first policy is bound to make it difficult to prepare for   coming digital-based 4th technological revolution.

The trade policy is a part of economic policy. Since Yoon government joint the Japan-US policy of China containment, the exports to China radically fell and the trade deficit with China has been increasing.

Yoon’s social policy is extremely harmful not only to the welfare of the people but also to economic growth. Yoon cut down most of all the funds allocated to the elderly, the jobless, the handicapped and other minority groups. Moreover, Yoon is planning to cut the minimum wage.

There is another negative impact of such anti-welfare policy. It is the inevitable worsening income distribution in favour of the well-to-do at the expense of the majority of the consumers. This leads to the weakening of consumer demand and provoke stagnation of the economy.

Yoon’s foreign policy is simply a disaster. He spent all his life in the office of prosecutor and only thing he knows well is to catch those liberal and democratic minded people and put them in jail on the basis of fabricated evidence of wrongdoings.

Yoon is totally ignorant about foreign policy. The tragic thing is that he does not know the fact that he is ignorant. He has with him experienced experts in foreign relations. But, it is reported that he never listens the experts’ advice.

The world was surely scandalized to see clearly that Yoon does not know the ABC of politics as pointed out by the Economist (August 25, 2022). He does not know the ABC of diplomacy either.

The world saw strange behaviours of Yoon and his wife at the NATO meeting (June 28), the funeral ceremony late Queen Elisabeth II (September 19), the UN General Assembly (September 28), the ASEAN meeting (November 11) and the G20 meeting (November 16).

These behaviours have made South Koreans ashamed of Yoon and his wife. What Yoon has obtained through these international meetings was the fall of Korea’s credibility as a reliable country. Moreover, these behaviours have led to the critical damage of Korea’s trade and security.

Yoon’s participation at the NATO meeting, the ASEAN meeting and the G20 meeting have put ROK to join the camp of China bashing and China containment strategy. This has seriously hampered the previous governments’ effort to maintain friendly relations both with the U.S. and China on the one hand, and, on the other, to increase trade surplus with China.

Yoon’ speech at the UN General Assembly did not include ROK’s DPRK policy letting Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida to handle the North Korean issues. This naive gesture of Yoon was intended to discredit the peace process of the previous government of Moon Jae-in.

His declaration of pre-emptive attack against North Korea during his presidential campaign and persistent belligerent anti-DPRK words and behaviour have worsened the North-South tension and increased the Korea risk, hurting foreign investment.

Yoon’s courting for Japan-ROK summit and his official support for Japan’s Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIP) prepared the ground for Japan-ROK military alliance, which will eventually force the ROK armed forced to join the Sino-US war along with Japanese forces.

What makes South Koreans the most worried about the possible Japan-ROK military alliances is the reunification of Korea by the allied armed forces of ROK, Japan and the U.S. which may lead to the presence of Japanese military, something which Koreans hate to see, except the Yoon’s pro-Japan conservative force in South Korea.

All in all, Yoon’s internal as well as his external policies is total fiasco. Moreover, the Itaewon disaster (the 10.29 Disaster) is likely to be the coup de grâce to his political career.

The persistent refusal of admitting the responsibility of the tragedy and the apparent involvement of “shaman” Cheon-dong stir up even the controversies surrounding the relation between the shaman and Yoon Suk-yeol and his controversial wife.

Yoon Suk-yeol having failed completely as president, he is speeding up the creation of prosecutor dictatorship and this will expand and intensify popular uprising.

Already on October 9, no less than 400,000 people went to the street and shouted “Down Yoon Suk-yeol and “Special probe for Kim Gun-hee!”

It is possible that the ongoing battle between the two political forces is the end of century-old fight between the pro-Japan conservative force and the progressive liberal nationalist force.

If the PJCF wins, South Korea will go back what it was 50 ago. On the other hand, if the PLNF wins, the policy of Moon Jae-in will come back and South Korea will march toward a better society where justice, equality, freedom and prosperity will prevail far all.

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Dr Joseph H. Chung is professor of Economics at Quebec University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and member of the Research Center in Integration and Globalization (CEIM-UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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First published on January 20, 2022

***

The roll out of the new C-Band 5G service by AT&T and Verizon scheduled for January 19, has raised alarms for major airline executives who have warned that it will create “catastrophic” interference with flight navigation systems and pilot safety during take off and landing.  The risks will be greater during bad weather. Among the warnings are major disruptions in commerce and supply chain, the overriding of aircrafts’ electronic safety systems and radio altimeters, and the grounding of flights that will leave “tens of thousands of Americans grounded.”

According to CNN, the airlines estimate that upwards to 1,000 flights will be disrupted daily. The 5G threat is particularly heightened in low-visibility conditions. Chief executives from American Airlines, United, Delta, Southwest and Jet Blue have demanded that 5G be blocked within a two-mile radius of major US airports. FedEx and UPS have also joined the airlines’ complaints. Foreign airlines such as Dubai’s Emirates, Air India, Japan Air, Lufthansa and British Airways have already changed or canceled flights to the US. Two of the world’s largest plane manufacturers, Airbus and Boeing, have also issued warnings.

This has become an ongoing battle between the Federal Aviation Administration and the private telecomm industry and its Washington lobbyists. The FAA has been warning about 5G interruption of planes’ navigation systems for quite some time.  The telecomm industry’s unwillingness to budge is most disturbing because the Biden administration has already permitted 90 percent of wireless tower deployment to roll out as scheduled.  It is only in the vicinity of major airports where the FAA and airlines demand restrictions due to safety concerns. However, as we have reported for the past several years, the telecomm giants, notably AT&T and Verizon, and its leading media spokespersons at CNN and the New York Times, have undermined and denied 5G’s risks, especially to human health and the environment, ever since wireless technologies were first commercialized.

5G is destined to be a permanent fixture across the nation. There is barely a chance to prevent it. The thousands of medical and environmental studies confirming high EMF’s dangers and the petitions signed by thousands of international scientists to halt its deployment are unequivocally ignored or worse ostracized and canceled.

It is estimated that there are over 10,000 peer-reviewed clinical studies mentioning serious molecular biological injury and defects to organs, neurons, cells and cellular function, and DNA damage to plants, animals and humans alike.  Between August 2016 and September 2018 alone, over 400 new studies on electromagnetic radiation risks were compiled by public health Professor Joel Moskowitz at the University of California at Berkeley.

Despite the pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing have not hindered 5G’s progress to connect every American into its spider’s web.  In December 2019, T-Mobile reached its goal of nationwide 5G coverage of over 1.3 million square miles (34 percent of the US) and AT&T reached its milestone to reach 179 million people. The 5G roll out is also crucial for international globalists to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The World Economic Forum’s presentation, “Why is 5G Important for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” outlines the multi-trillion dollar impact advanced connectivity will have on manufacturing, wholesale and resale, smart cities and homes, public services, transportation, real time banking, finance and insurance, agriculture and forestry, micro chip surveillance, real estate, education, mining, health and medicine.

We must not hold any false hopes that the Biden administration will ultimately side with the airlines’ safety concerns. During the 2020 election, the Biden campaign received $97 million from the Communications/Tech sector versus Trump’s $18 million.  Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, AT&T and Comcast overwhelmingly contributed to Biden’s war chest.

The American public is being bamboozled with blatant falsehoods to embrace 5G as a necessary and innovative technology that will benefit and improve our lives. But the real truth is the exact opposite.

The following information has been abbreviated from scientific literature that is fully validated and has been stated by international experts such as Drs. Devra Davis and Martin Pall about EMF’s adverse effects to government leaders and national legislators repeatedly. This outline was presented by Dr. Martin Pall, a Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Medical Sciences at Washington State University to the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pall is recognized worldwide as an expert in EMF and 5G’s detrimental effects on biological systems and the diseases associated with wireless technologies.

  • Lower Fertility: Alters the structure of the testes and ovaries, lowers sperm count and the number of egg follicles, increases spontaneous abortion and lowers the levels of three sex hormones.
  • Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Effects: There has been a dramatic increase in the following conditions since the advent of mobile phones, the internet, and wireless technologies:  insomnia, fatigue, depression, headaches and cognitive dysfunction, anxiety, and loss of memory. Animal studies have shown that EMFs produce major changes in brain structure, which is likely happening to everyone who has extensive daily exposure to EMFs
  • Cellular DNA Damage: There are three types of DNA damage observed in EMF exposure:  single and double DNA breaks and oxidized DNA bases.  These can cause cancer and mutations in the sexual germ lines.
  • Apoptosis: EMFs contribute to programmed cell death that in turn leads to reproductive and neurodegenerative disorders.
  • Oxidative Stress: Free radical damage that has been associated with numerous health conditions including cancer, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, myocardial infarction, stroke, chronic inflammation, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, cellular death and aging
  • Endocrine Effects: According Dr. Pall, every hormonal system in the body is adversely affected by EMF exposure.
  • Excessive Intracellular Calcium: Ca2+ is critical for cellular activity
  • Cancer: There are 35 separate scientific reviews of the body of peer-reviewed literature providing evidence that EMFs increase carcinogenesis, promote and progress tumor development and contribute to metastasis.

There are also other medical conditions that have been shown to be associated likely with EMF exposure:

  • Cardiac Effects. EMFs interfere with the electrical control of the heart that can produce tachycardia, bradycadia, arrhythmia and abnormal heart palpitations.
  • Early Onset of Alzheimer’s and Dementia: In recent years and in parallel with increased EMF exposure, signs of symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s are being observed in people age 30 and younger. Dr. Pall has called this “digital dementias.”
  • ADHD and Autism: The epidemic in ADHD and autism witnessed in each younger generation may be caused by late prenatal and early post-natal EMF exposure. Each of these neurological conditions is associated with the increase of calcium over-penetrating cell linings due to EMF pulsations and disrupting synapse formations.

Everyone will be affected by 5G’s radiation. But it will not require three decades to observe its injurious effects. Unlike cigarettes, nobody has a choice whether you wish to be exposed to 5G or not. 5G’s EMF radiation is all-pervasive.

The mainstream media, in particular the New York Times, which has a collaborative agreement with the leading 5G provider Verizon, have no intention to warn the public about any of the scientific findings mentioned above. There is a growing consensus in the scientific and medical community that 5G will usher an epidemic of disease never before witnessed in human history. It is too difficult to make forecasts. Nevertheless, if the past and current research on EMF’s adverse effects on health and the environment during the past 50 years are any indication, we are entering a new epoch of disease and neurological disorders that humanity is completely unprepared to handle.

This is a consequence of what happens when an entire nation is trapped into carelessly trusting elected presidents and legislators whose campaigns are bankrolled by the Telecomm giants and Silicon Valley, and a media empire ruled by serial liars and masters of disinformation campaigns for private corporate interests. This is vulture capitalism at is worse.

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

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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Binyamin Netanyahu today heads the most extreme right-wing government in the history of this modern 74-year-old state, and it will not go unnoticed that there is a criminal element at its centre. That indicates a current threat to world peace – an unpredictable, extremist government controlling the only undeclared nuclear weaponised state in the world, with enough nuclear and other WMD to destroy the whole Middle East including the Gulf.

That indicates a potential existential threat to global peace and brings the likelihood of WW3 ever closer. Which is why NATO must stop the shockingly misplaced support for this neo-colonial, nuclear armed entity that wishes to expel five million indigenous people from their hereditary lands.  For well over 1000 years the Palestinian Arab had been the dominant demographic of Palestine until the political power grab of 1948 that dispossessed him.  That position must now be reversed. There must be a two-state solution and until such time, all NATO bilateral trade with the now extremist Israel should cease.

Furthermore, the American taxpayer should stop the US Congress from sending billions of dollars every year to prop-up the new government of allegedly corrupt Netanyahu. Failing to do so, brings war ever closer to Europe and the entire world. This is the factual situation that pertains today. Not alarmist, but realistic. Unless there is a global, paradigm shift in the current arming and supporting of this violent occupier of Palestinian land, then global peace can turn into global war, overnight.

To put this into context, the fact that the nuclear-weaponised state of Israel comprises just 1/1000th of the global population means that the members of the extremist Netanyahu government, are today the most powerful, nuclear-armed politicians anywhere in the entire world, on any continent – with Netanyahu, currently on trial for bribery and corruption, as prime minister. Let that terrifying truth sink in as both Britain and America continue to supply him with billions of dollars-worth of arms and funding to finance his violent, unlawful annexation programs in the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.

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Featured image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech on Iran’s nuclear programme at the defence ministry in Tel Aviv on 30 April 2018 (Source: Middle East Eye)

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Dr. Kerryn Phelps, a medical practitioner and former member of Australia’s Federal Parliament, said she and her wife suffered “devastating” vaccine injuries from their COVID-19 vaccines.

In a submission to an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into long COVID, Phelps, a former president of the Australian Medical Association, also accused government health regulators of censoring discussion about vaccine side effects.

Phelps described her and her wife’s adverse reactions to the vaccine in detail and called for research into vaccine injury beyond myocarditis and pericarditis.

She testified that her wife, Jackie Stricker-Phelps “suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes,” and continues to suffer ongoing neurological symptoms, musculoskeletal inflammation and fatigue.

Phelps also was diagnosed with vaccine injuries, including intermittent fevers and cardiovascular issues, following her second Pfizer dose in July 2021.

Dr. Kerryn Phelps, a medical practitioner and former member of Australia’s Federal Parliament, said she and her wife suffered “devastating” vaccine injuries from their COVID-19 vaccines.

In a submission to an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into long COVID, Phelps, a former president of the Australian Medical Association, also accused government health regulators of censoring discussion about vaccine side effects.

Phelps described her and her wife’s adverse reactions to the vaccine in detail and called for research into vaccine injury beyond myocarditis and pericarditis.

She testified that her wife, Jackie Stricker-Phelps “suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes,” and continues to suffer ongoing neurological symptoms, musculoskeletal inflammation and fatigue.

Phelps also was diagnosed with vaccine injuries, including intermittent fevers and cardiovascular issues, following her second Pfizer dose in July 2021.

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Featured image is from CHD


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

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

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

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

Got MilQ? Fake Milk to Replace Dairy and Breast Milk

December 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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The globalist technocrats are intent on monopolizing the entire food supply. They already have a monopoly on grains and have made headway in genetically engineered (GE) seafood. The next targets include lab-grown meats and dairy substitutes

Biomilq, made from cultured breast tissue, will be marketed as a breast milk substitute

The company Helaina is working on creating glycoproteins “identical to those found in breast milk.” Those proteins can then be added to a variety of infant formulas, seniors’ nutrition and, eventually, all sorts of foods

The justification for creating synthetic milk substitutes is, of course, preventing and reversing “climate change.” That’s the justification used to sell virtually all fake foods. In reality, however, they will perpetuate and worsen adverse effects on the environment

Lab-created foods are ultraprocessed and therefore qualify as junk food. Fake meat and dairy cannot replace the complex mix of nutrients found in grass fed beef and dairy, and it’s likely that consuming ultraprocessed meat and milk alternatives may lead to many of the same health issues that are caused by a processed food diet

The starting ingredients in fermented synthetic biology products are cheap sugars derived from GE corn and soy. All GE crops are grown in environmentally destructive monocultures, and use loads of herbicides such as glyphosate, pesticides like neonicotinoids and synthetic fertilizers. As a result, they’re loaded with chemical residues that end up in the final product

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The globalist technocrats are intent on monopolizing the entire food supply. They already have a monopoly on genetically engineered (GE) grains and have made headway in GE seafood. The next targets are lab-grown meats and dairy substitutes. There’s even a lab-made breast milk alternative on the way called Biomilq, which is made from cultured breast tissue.1

Another company, Helaina, aims to create glycoproteins “identical to those found in breast milk,”which can then be added to a variety of infant formulas. They may also be used in seniors’ nutrition and eventually, all sorts of foods.

Many familiar globalists are invested in these faux dairy ventures. Biomilq investors, for example, include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Masayoshi Son, Jack Ma, Michael Bloomberg and Marc Benioff.3

The first Biomilq product is expected to be ready for the market within the next three to five years.Other animal-free milk products are expected to hit the shelves sometime between 2023 and 2024.5,6 That includes ice cream made with lab-grown diary, which will go into Ben & Jerry’s product line.7

In the Environmental Health Symposium video above, Alan Lewis reviews what goes into the making of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology goes by many names, including “gene edited fermentation” and “precision fermentation products.”

While that sounds fairly innocuous, synthetic biology manufacturers rarely ever discuss what goes into the feed they use to grow the target organism, or what happens to the waste at the end of the fermentation process. That’s understandable, as both raise a number of serious questions.

What Are the Base Ingredients?

As explained by Lewis, the starting ingredients in fermented synthetic biology products are cheap sugars derived from GE corn and soy. All GE crops are grown in environmentally destructive monocultures with taxpayer subsidies, and use loads of herbicides such as glyphosate, pesticides like neonicotinoids and synthetic fertilizers. As a result, they’re loaded with chemical residues that end up in the final product.

In addition to a base of sugars, hundreds of other ingredients may be added to the ferment in order to produce the desired end product, such as a certain protein, color, flavor or scent.

As explained by Lewis, the most-often used microorganism in the fermentation process is E.coli. The E.coli is gene-edited to produce the desired compound through its digestive process. It also needs to be antibiotic-resistant, since it needs to survive the antibiotics used to kill off other undesirable organisms in the vat.

Aside from the desired target metabolite, these gene-edited organisms may also be spitting out any number of non-target metabolites that have completely unknown environmental consequences and health effects.

How Are Synthetic Biology Ferments Created?

As explained by Lewis, the various “feed” ingredients are placed in a fermentation bioreactor set at 87 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit for anywhere from 24 to hundreds of hours to grow the target microorganism. The target organisms in the ferment consume the nutrients they need, and what’s left over after those organisms are extracted is hazardous biowaste.

Importantly, while traditional fermentation processes, such as the making of beer, produces waste products that are edible by animals, compostable and pose no biohazard, the same cannot be said for these GMO synthetic biology ferments. The biowaste must first be deactivated, and then it must be securely disposed of. It cannot go into a landfill.

It’s important to realize that they are creating GMO organisms that have never existed on earth before, and these organisms and their waste are neither edible nor compostable, and there are unknown risks involved with unintentional or intentional release of these organisms into the environment.

They may also result in novel foodborne illnesses. And, since antibiotics are used to prevent the growth of undesirable organisms in the ferment, antibiotic-resistant organisms are automatically integrated into the final product. The types of foodborne illness that might be caused by gene-edited E.coli and its metabolites are anyone’s guess at this point. Nobody knows what such illness might look like.

The Fake Justification for Fake Foods

The justification for creating synthetic biology for food, including milk substitutes, is to prevent and reverse “climate change.” As reported by CNBC in June 2020:8

“Biomilq co-founder and CEO Michelle Egger … and her co-founder, CSO Leila Strickland, hope that the breast milk produced by Biomilq from culturing mammary epithelial cells will help reduce the carbon footprint from the global infant formula market …

‘Right now, by the estimations we have been able to make, at least 10% of the dairy market globally ends up in infant formula,’ Eggers said. ‘That means per-infant-fed formula in the U.S., 5,700 metric tons of CO2 are produced, and 4,300 gallons of freshwater are consumed each year to feed a child. Parents want to do what’s best for their kids but shouldn’t have to decide between feeding their children and protecting the planet.'”

While the push for synthetic biology is built on the idea that it will somehow save the environment from the ravages of factory farming, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and monocultures, it’s incredibly misleading, because it doesn’t address the fact that there are environmentally beneficial ways to farm, and we really should switch to those instead of transitioning into factory laboratories where everything that comes out of it is a biohazard.

Fake Food Manufacturing Creates Toxic Waste Products

In February 2021, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry, released a techno-economic analysis of cultivated meat, which was prepared by consulting firm CE Delft.9 In it, they developed a model to reduce the current costs of cultured meat production down to a point that would make it economically feasible in full-scale plants by 2030, a model they said is “feasible.”

In attempting to create cultured meat on the scale that would be necessary to feed the world, logistical problems are numerous and, possibly, insurmountable. There are waste products — catabolites — to deal with, as even cultured cells excrete waste that is toxic.

Oxygen and nutrients must also be adequately distributed to all the cells, something that’s difficult in a large reactor. Stirring the cells faster or adding more oxygen may help, but this can cause fatal stress to the cells.10

The environmental “benefits” are also on shaky ground when you factor in soy production as well as the use of conventional energy sources. When this is factored in, GFI’s life-cycle analysis found that cultured meat may actually be worse for the environment than conventionally produced chicken and pork.11,12

Repeat of a Failed System

Yet, the push for the creation of synthetic biology continues. In the foreword to Navdanya International’s report “False Solutions That Endanger Our Health and Damage the Planet,” Vandana Shiva details how lab-grown foods are catastrophic for human health and the environment, as they are repeating the mistakes already made with industrial agriculture:13

“In response to the crises in our food system, we are witnessing the rise of technological solutions that aim to replace animal products and other food staples with lab-grown alternatives. Artificial food advocates are reiterating the old and failed rhetoric that industrial agriculture is essential to feed the world.

Real, nutrient-rich food is gradually disappearing, while the dominant industrial agricultural model is causing an increase in chronic diseases and exacerbating climate change.

The notion that high-tech, ‘farm free’ lab food is a viable solution to the food crisis is simply a continuation of the same mechanistic mindset which has brought us to where we are today — the idea that we are separate from and outside of nature.

Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to ‘stuff’ that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process, both the planet’s health and our health have been nearly destroyed.”

Lab-Made Foods Are Junk Foods

It’s important to realize that all lab-created “foods” are ultraprocessed, and will likely impart the same kind of ill health effects as other ultraprocessed foods. In 2018, Friends of the Earth (FOE), a grassroots environmental group, released a report that posed critical questions about the trend toward synthetic biology. In it, they stressed the highly-processed nature of these products:14

“Various ‘processing aids’ are employed to make some of these products, including organisms (like genetically engineered bacteria, yeast and algae) that produce proteins, and chemicals to extract proteins.

For example, chemicals like hexane are used to extract components of a food, like proteins (from peas, soy, corn etc.) or compounds (from genetically engineered bacteria) to make xanthan gum … disclosure of these ingredients is not required.

Other processing aids (e.g. bacteria, yeast, algae), including those that are genetically engineered to produce proteins, are also not currently required to be disclosed on package labeling. The lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess the inputs and impact of their use.”

Basically, what the globalist cabal is attempting to do is to eliminate conventional farming methods like raising cattle for beef and dairy products, and replace them with synthetic, patented reproductions. In short, they’re taking whole foods and turning them into ultraprocessed junk foods, all while trying to convince you the junk food is healthier for you.

Synthetic Biology Is Part of a Control Scheme

Aside from the potential health hazards, lab-grown foods rely on monocultured crops that destroy the soil, resulting in carbon release. So, right there, the climate change justification falls apart. Since synthetic biology relies on GMO monoculture, it creates the very things they claim to counteract: environmental degradation that results in climate change.

As noted by Lewis, synthetic biology, which is the latest addition to the patented, genetically modified organism (GMO) food system, also results in a “massive shift in ownership and concentration of wealth … and control over our food supply.”

In short, synthetic biology creates reliance on industry that can then be used to manipulate and control the population in any number of ways. In the long term, people will eventually lose the know-how of producing their own food using traditional methods, and this may well be part of the plan.

The globalist cabal intends to create a one world government, and what better control tool than having everyone completely dependent on the state for all of its food?

Protect Your Health by Avoiding Frankenfoods

The drive for plant-based alternatives to real animal food, be it meat or dairy, isn’t due to health, or even to support vegan or vegetarian diets. Those truly interested in eating a plant-based diet can do so by eating real plants, after all, and in so doing can enjoy the many health benefits that eating plant foods provides. No, it’s about creating a system of control through food. It’s also a way to control people’s health.

It’s already known that the consumption of ultraprocessed food contributes to disease,15 but manufactured fake meat and dairy may also pose additional unknown risks.16 The benefactor of ill health, of course, is Big Pharma.

The processed food industry has spent many decades driving chronic illness that is then treated with drugs rather than a better diet. Synthetic foods will likely be an even bigger driver or chronic ill health and early death.

The fact is, fake meat and dairy cannot replace the complex mix of nutrients found in grass fed beef and dairy, and it’s likely that consuming ultraprocessed meat and milk alternatives may lead to many of the same health issues that are caused by a processed food diet. So, if you want to really protect your health and the environment, skip pseudofoods that require patents and stick to those found in nature instead.

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Notes

1, 4 Alarabiya.net May 3, 2022

2 Food Navigator December 12, 2022

3, 8 CNBC June 16, 2020

5 Startup Daily July 27, 2021

6 Sydney Spring Herald September 13, 2022

7 ZME Science December 9, 2022

9 Techno-Economic Analysis for the production of cultivated meat February 2021

10, 12 The Counter September 22, 2021

11 LCA of cultivated meat – February 2021, Page 3

13 Children’s Health Defense April 5, 2022

14 Friends of the Earth, From Lab to Fork, June 2018 (PDF)

15 BMJ 2018; 360:k322

16 Consumer Reports, August 29, 2019, Impossible Burger, What is it?

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The 15th session of the Conference of Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) concluded in the early hours on Monday, December 19th with the adoption of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), known as the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework.  The UNCBD is a multilateral treaty with three core goals, “the conservation of biological diversity; the sustainable use of its components; and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.” Additionally, the post-2020 GBF defines targets for biodiversity conservation for the next decade, and with nearly 200 Parties and an estimated 15,000 attendees present for the biodiversity summit, there were various obstacles and points of tension that Parties did not agree on. 

Although the framework includes 20 references to Indigenous Peoples, and some references to our rights including the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), human rights, and the rights of Mother Earth, COP15 prioritized the expansion of false solutions, harmful instruments, and the financialization of Mother Earth over the true protection of biodiversity. In section C, Considerations for the implementation of the framework, made reference to rights of nature and the rights of Mother Earth as being an integral part of its successful implementation. While rights of Mother Earth are aligned with Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews and part of our own stewardship practices, these references are nothing more than recommendations for Parties and there remains a gap in implementation.

Of the 23 Targets in the framework, seven targets included references to Indigenous Peoples. Traditional [Indigenous] Knowledge was also referenced ten times and Free, Prior and Informed Consent was referenced twice. However, the concerns for implementation despite these references are apparent in Target 21, where the text states, “…traditional knowledge, innovations, practices, and technologies of Indigenous Peoples and local communities should only be accessed with their free, prior and informed consent [FPIC], in accordance with national legislation.” Ultimately, this means that FPIC is contingent on whether that Party recognizes the rights of Indigenous Peoples and that it is subject to national legislation first and foremost.

Prominent on COP15’s agenda also included new financial instruments tied to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and foregin debt, the expansion of nature-based solutions (NBS), including biodiversity offsets through the framework, as well as digital sequencing information (DSI) and the expansion of geoengineering technologies. The final text of COP15, the post-2020 GBF, includes a range of false solutions that cater to private finance. These false solutions include NBS, the financialization and commodification of nature, geoengineering, and offsetting schemes as well as genetic engineering in the forms of synthetic biology and gene drives. By continuing to promote and proliferate these false solutions, the framework subordinates the sacredness of Mother Earth, her web of life, to the chains of the markets, capitalism and the growth of the corporate dominated systems. The passage of this framework does not question the viability of a global economy whose jurisprudence places property rights above all, and a system that prioritizes private interests over Indigenous and human rights.

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Finance was another major theme at COP15, including discussions on banking, insurance, and hosting the first ever ‘Finance and Biodiversity Day’ at the global biodiversity summit. Private interests pushed to establish a uniform system of standards and metrics for measuring ‘natural capital’, which includes biodiversity, as well as to create a new type of ‘biodiversity credits’ to be harmonized with other carbon markets in the future. Not only are these efforts pushing for the more swift and aggressive commodification of Mother Earth, but are also paving the way for debt-for-nature swaps, in which countries in debt, mostly in the Global South, would pay off debt by handing over their biodiversity to banks.

Debt for nature is a dangerous concept that threatens the sovereignty and tenure of Indigenous Peoples, and prevents developing nations from attaining economic power. The inclusion of private and financial sectors has culminated so far into profit-driven frameworks that are antithetical to natural law. Biodiversity is not a metric, nor translates into shareholder gains and financial market reporting. To attach ownership and price tags on the natural resources that maintain the balance of earth’s systems that sustain all life further commodifies Mother Earth and does not address the true threats to biodiversity loss, rather is an expansion of false solutions.

Moreover, Target 3 in the post-2020 GBF sets out a 30×30 goal, to conserve 30 percent of the world’s lands and 30 percent of the world’s waters for biodiversity conservation. While Parties and private interests acknowledge that Indigenous Peoples have a unique and crucial role in preserving biodiversity, there remains a gap for ensuring the protection of Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty over their lands on Target 3, that goes beyond just mere recognition and respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples over their territories. In achieving Target 3, there has been an aggressive push to include market-based approaches and in terms of implementation, there is a real risk and threat to ensuring Indigenous Peoples’ rights over their lands, waters, and territories are upheld, which includes the implementation of their Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) to engage on this conservation target.

IEN’s Carbon Policy Educator, Thomas Joseph, shares his concerns regarding Target 3 in the framework, “The ratification of Target 3, which focuses on the implementation of  the global 30×30 initiative, is nothing more than manifest destiny in the 21st century. This will lead to the largest land and resource grab of Indigenous Peoples’ territories since westward expansion. The Kunming-Montreal Global biodiversity framework guarantees a continuation of the commodification of our Mother Earth using market based mechanisms like nature-based solutions and carbon trading. Our relationship with our Mother Earth must change and we cannot use market approaches or colonial tactics to preserve the remaining biodiversity.”

Another key vehicle in achieving targets outlined in the GBF are nature-based solutions (NBS). However, the discussions at COP15 fixated on how to financialize nature and co-opt Traditional Indigenous Knowledge. While Parties might highlight the role of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the implementation of NBS projects, they perpetually disregard and downplay the risks of human rights violations, land and resource grabs, and the unintended negative impacts of associated climate and biodiversity projects led by the private sector.

Furthermore, digital sequencing information (DSI) was another focal point at COP15. This included interventions related to the access to information derived from genetic resources and the altering of genes in the name of preserving biodiversity. At COP15, technical and policy information around DSI was intentionally hidden and obscured from Indigenous Peoples. DSI is not only dangerous because of its potentially destructive and irreversible ecological impacts, but particularly for Indigenous Peoples because it is a way for governments and private industry to extract, commodify, and monetize Traditional Indigenous Knowledge. Likewise, DSI poses the risk of restricting Indigenous Peoples’ benefits or use of their own genetic resources. Indigenous Peoples’ communities and lands have already become testing sites for new, risky technologies without their Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

IEN’s Executive Director, Tom BK Goldtooth shares his reflections on this year’s global biodiversity summit, “The outcome of the UNCBD COP15 leaves Mother Earth open to be bought and sold by the private sector and through carbon trading. Violating Traditional Indigenous Knowledge, the agreement embraces the risky and dangerous gene drive extinction technology. Indigenous Peoples are not safe from this new agreement. Rather, we stand at more of a risk of being forced into a capitalist system that demands the expansion of the destruction of Mother Earth in order to continue its continuous growth. We are at a point of no return to stop biodiversity loss and climate change, and it is clear that the UNCBD and UNFCCC are not the platforms to deliver the frameworks that will prevent a global catastrophe.”

All in all, COP15 prioritized the continued commodification and exploitation of Mother Earth over finalizing a global framework that upholds Indigenous and human rights. Private interests paired with developed countries pushed for false solutions that put profit over biodiversity protection, yet again let those who are driving immense biodiversity loss off the hook, leaving those on the frontlines without adequate resources or protection to continue to protect the remaining biodiversity on Mother Earth. Stay tuned for Indigenous Environmental Network’s full analysis of the outcomes of COP15 in early 2023.

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This paper examines labor abuses during the war in Afghanistan, focusing on how the U.S. is denying legally-required compensation to foreign workers in war zones. The U.S. government leaned heavily on contractors to do its essential work during the war in Afghanistan. In 2020, approximately 65% of wartime contractors were citizens of Afghanistan or a third-party country, such as Nepal. This paper focuses on how the U.S. military and Department of Labor have done little to enforce the U.S. Defense Base Act (DBA), which calls for the provision of compensation to all workers, regardless of their nationality, injured under U.S. contracts, and for the provision of financial compensation to their kin in case of death.

Through FOIA requests and interviews with over 200 third-country nationals, many of them Nepali, the authors found that:

  • Over twelve years between 2009 and 2021, the Department of Labor fined contracting companies performing work in Afghanistan only six times for failing to report Defense Base Act claims for their employees. The total amount of these fines amounted to just $3,250.
  • The Army Contracting Command-Afghanistan was able to show that it terminated just four contracts in Afghanistan due to contractor failure to purchase DBA insurance between 2009 and 2020.
  • Of the Nepali contractors the authors interviewed, they found 12 cases of contractors who were injured or killed while working under U.S. government subcontracts in Afghanistan, which were not properly compensated. In two additional cases, they interviewed Nepalis who received DBA compensation for injuries in Iraq only after filing legal challenges with the help of American lawyers.

SIGAR has estimated that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alone paid companies $58.5 million between 2005-2011 that was supposed to go towards insurance premiums for their workers, but which was instead pocketed. Even though the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan, U.S. Central Command reports that it still relies on more than 21,000 contractors in its area of responsibility — more than 9,000 of whom are third-country nationals.

This report notes there is reason to believe the exploitative practices that lead to these violations may become even more egregious in the future, since they will be difficult to monitor in conflict zones where wars are smaller and there is less international media attention.

Click here to read the full paper.

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Featured image: Kathy Kelly and Maya Evans walk with children at the Chamin-E-Babrak refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan, January 2014. (Abdulhai Darya)

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As U.S. military forces continue to kill and wound civilians in multiple countries during the ongoing 21-year War on Terror while chronically undercounting such casualties, a pair of Democratic lawmakers on Monday asked the Pentagon to explain discrepancies in noncombatant casualty reporting and detail steps being taken to address the issue.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—who have both led calls to hold the military accountable for harming noncombatants—said they are “troubled” that the Pentagon’s annual civilian casualty report, which was released in September as required by an amendment Warren attached to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), again undercounts noncombatants killed by U.S. forces.

“In this year’s report, the department reported that approximately 12 civilians were killed and five were injured in Afghanistan and Somalia as a result of U.S. military operations during 2021,” the lawmakers wrote. “However, the report did not admit to any civilian deaths in Syria, despite credible civilian casualty monitors documenting at least 15 civilian deaths and 17 civilian injuries in Syria in 2021.”

The U.K.-based monitor group Airwars counted between 12 and 25 civilians likely killed by U.S. forces, sometimes operating with coalition allies, in Syria alone last year, with another two to four people killed in Somalia and one to four killed in Yemen.

Airwars does not track civilians killed or wounded in Afghanistan, where all of last year’s casualties acknowledged by the Department of Defense (DOD) occurred. These incidents include an errant August 29 drone strike that killed 10 people—most of them members of one family—including seven children.

“The report also appeared to undercount additional civilian casualties from Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) that occurred prior to 2021,” the lawmakers’ letter continues, referring to the anti-Islamic State campaign launched during the Obama administration and ramped up under then-President Donald Trump—who infamously vowed to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS militants and “take out their families.”

“For example, the report… only disclosed four civilians killed and 15 civilians injured as a result of the March 18, 2019 strike in Baghuz, Syria,” the lawmakers noted. “But The New York Times investigated this strike in 2021, finding evidence that the military concealed the extent of the civilian casualties, and according to Airwars, local sources alleged that the strike resulted in at least 160 civilian deaths, including up to 45 children.”

“This vast difference between independent reporting and the DOD investigation raises concerns and undermines DOD credibility on civilian casualty reporting,” Warren and Jacobs stressed.

“One reason for this underreporting appears to be that DOD is not giving appropriate weight to outside sources when investigating casualty reports,” the letter contends. “The significant discrepancies between DOD and outside reporting suggests outside sources are still not being sufficiently incorporated into DOD assessments.”

The congresswomen also expressed concern that “this year’s report revealed that DOD made only one total ex gratia payment in 2021, despite an annual $3 million authorization from Congress,” a reference to the compensation sometimes paid by the U.S. military to relatives of civilians its forces kill.

“It is a continued betrayal of our values to continually undercount and refuse to acknowledge or take proper steps to address the civilian casualties that result from U.S. military action,” Warren and Jacobs wrote.

Declaring that “the protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative,” the Pentagon in August published its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP), which lays out a series of policy steps aimed at preventing and responding to the death and injury of noncombatants.

These steps include establishing a civilian protection center of excellence, improving commanders’ understanding of civilian environments, developing standardized incident reporting and data management processes, and improving the military’s ability to assess and respond when noncombatants are harmed by U.S. attacks.

Almost immediately after publication of the CHMR-AP, Jacobs, along with Reps. Jason Crow (D-Col.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), and Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) formed a new congressional caucus to “conduct oversight and advance policies to prevent, reduce, and respond to civilian harm.”

Spearheaded by Jacobs, the caucus worked to include $25 million in funding for CHMR-AP implementation in the $858 billion 2023 NDAA.

“Every time Congress is briefed about an instance of civilian harm, we are almost always told that the service member followed the proper protocol and processes,” Jacobs told Politico earlier this month. “So I think it’s clear that it’s an institutional not an individual problem.”

While it is notoriously difficult to track how many civilians have been killed by a military that, in the words of Gen. Tommy Franks, doesn’t “do body counts,” researchers at the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimate that combatants on all sides of the U.S.-led War on Terror have killed as many as 387,000 civilians as of late last year.

Airwars, meanwhile, said last September that U.S. airstrikes alone have killed as many as 48,000 civilians in nearly 100,000 bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen since 2001.

The killing continues. Since November, Airwars has posted credible reports of civilians killed by U.S. airstrikes in Syria (two incidents) and Yemen, where two children and a woman reportedly died when a U.S. drone bombed their home in the Al-Hadba area of Al-Wadi while targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants on November 30.

Meanwhile, Airwars reports that hundreds of al-Shabaab fighters have been killed in numerous U.S. air and drone strikes in Somalia in recent weeks.

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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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9879389-0-9
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

Price: $9.40

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Washington’s Dubious Syria Intervention Continues

December 22nd, 2022 by Ted Galen Carpenter

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With the world’s attention focused on the Russia‐​Ukraine War and growing tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan, other worrisome U.S. ventures tend to fly under the radar. A prominent, potentially very dangerous example is the continuing U.S. military presence in Syria. That intervention should be objectionable on constitutional, moral, and strategic grounds, yet it retains widespread bipartisan support in Congress and the foreign policy establishment.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify that mission on any basis. Positioning U.S. occupation forces in northeastern Syria, the one region of the country with significant oil reserves, hardly seemed coincidental and has raised understandable suspicions about Washington’s motives. Moreover, the principal U.S. client in that region, the Kurdish‐​dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), is something less than a paragon of democracy. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have repeatedly come under attack, usually by pro‐​Iranian militias based across the border in Iraq.

As if those problems weren’t enough to cast a pall over the mission, the presence of U.S. troops is causing growing difficulties with NATO ally Turkey. Ankara launched a new round of airstrikes against Kurdish targets in northern Syria in November 2022. One attack came within 300 meters of a U.S. military base, leading to complaints from the Pentagon that such tactics were needlessly endangering the lives of U.S. personnel.

Mounting frictions with Turkey with respect to Syria are not a small problem, since the Biden administration badly needs greater cooperation from Ankara to implement NATO’s policy of isolating Russia in response to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus far, Turkey’s stance on policy toward Russia has been ambivalent, and a new quarrel with Washington now has arisen over Ankara’s growing flirtation with Tehran—a move that is helping to cushion Iran from the effects of U.S.-led sanctions. The last thing the Biden administration needs is a new round of tensions with Turkey regarding Syria.

Washington’s unwise Syria policy has been unraveling for some time, but that process seems to be accelerating. The misadventure in that country began when Barack Obama’s administration launched an effort in collaboration with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other leading Sunni powers to unseat Syrian president Bashar al‐​Assad. The underlying reason for that campaign was Assad’s close ties with Iran; indeed, Syria was Tehran’s principal ally in the Middle East. The Assad family also was a longtime Russian client. Therefore, as far as U.S. officials were concerned, Assad’s regime was guilty of not one, but two unforgivable sins.

Syria’s Middle East adversaries fomented a Sunni‐​dominated revolt against Assad’s government, which garnered most of its support from religious minorities in Syria, especially Christians, Druze, and Assad’s own Alawites (a Shia offshoot). Washington increased its support for the Sunni campaign and highlighted the Syrian regime’s human rights abuses while ignoring equally egregious offenses by rebel forces and their autocratic foreign sponsors. The Obama administration tried to portray a brass‐​knuckles power struggle as a morality play featuring Assad as a monstrous villain and his adversaries as noble freedom fighters. U.S. policymakers persisted in that approach even as evidence mounted that many of those “freedom fighters” were Islamic jihadists—some of whom were even affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Russia’s 2015 military intervention to support Assad doomed Washington and its Sunni partners’ hopes of a rebel victory. Nevertheless, the Obama administration refused to abandon its ill‐​starred crusade. Indeed, it already was busy in 2014 and 2015 escalating America’s involvement by deploying U.S. troops over the strenuous opposition of the Syrian government. Such behavior made a mockery of Washington’s lectures about the need for nations to respect a “rules‐​based international order.” Syria was a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations, yet the United States brazenly deployed its forces in that country without the consent of the recognized government.

The intervention has persisted even in the face of growing tensions with Ankara. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan originally was one of the biggest foreign sponsors of the anti‐​Assad insurgency. However, his enthusiasm has faded dramatically as it became clear that one of the consequences of the rebellion was to create opportunities for Kurdish separatists in northern Syria along that country’s border with Turkey. In response, Erdogan warned President Donald Trump to relocate U.S. forces that were deployed in Kurdish territory. Trump finally did so on the eve of Ankara’s military intervention in October 2019 to clear the border area. Despite that redeployment, U.S. troops came under fire from Turkish artillery during the offensive.

The response in the U.S. political and foreign policy establishment to Trump’s prudent move to at least get American military personnel out of the line of fire highlighted the extent of its zealous support for continuing the ill‐​advised mission in Syria. Congress had never authorized the Syria intervention, yet a bipartisan hawkish coalition, led by neoconservative Rep. Liz Cheney (R‑WY), pushed through a resolution denouncing Trump for even considering a withdrawal of the illegal U.S. occupation force. Despite official accounts insisting that a mere 500 American troops were stationed in Syria, evidence indicated that the actual number had ballooned to between 2,000 and 4,000.

Matters have not become either more constitutional or coherent under President Joe Biden. The Syria mission just seems to drift on, as though it were on autopilot. However, the circumstances are becoming increasingly dangerous. In October 2022, Syrian Kurdish leaders pressed for even greater military support from the United States. The SDF’s commander specifically called on the president to prevent a full‐​scale Turkish invasion to end Kurdish control of Syrian territory along the border. The Pentagon is expanding its ground patrols, creating the risk of a direct clash with Turkish forces.

Another quagmire is beckoning. Unfortunately, the usual suspects in the U.S. foreign policy blob may succeed in their efforts to deepen Washington’s involvement in Syria’s complex civil strife. The Biden administration’s reckless meddling in the Russia‐​Ukraine War assuredly is more dangerous, since it involves the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear‐​armed power possessing delivery systems capable of striking targets anywhere in the United States. Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the growing, multiple perils in Washington’s Syria intervention.

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**Voices from Syria**

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Cuba: When Is the Monroe Doctrine Going to Die?

December 22nd, 2022 by Ibis Frade

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Although Humanity has evolved a lot up to date, contemporary U.S. administrations continue to use in their relations with Latin America a policy whose beginnings date back to 1823.

Time and again, they use it as a basis for justifying their actions: the much-used Monroe Doctrine, but it’s better known as “America for the Americans”, sought in its beginnings to ensure Washington’s dominion over lands that were colonies of European metropolises, such as Spain.

Almost two centuries after this idea was first put forward, in the 21st century, the then U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, in a speech before the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2013, declared the Monroe Doctrine dead when he assured that its era was over.

Five years later, in September 2018, speaking at a high-level debate in the UN General Assembly, then U.S. President Donald Trump “revived” it.

Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the intrusion of foreign powers, he said in reference to the support that China and Russia were giving to several Latin American nations.

According to Trump at the time, formal U.S. policy since President James Monroe (1817-1825) dictates that “we reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs”.

With the stroke of a pen, the words of Kerry, who was part of Barack Obama’s cabinet (2009-2017), were erased, while Joe Biden was at that time the Vice President of the United States.

In January 2021, Biden assumed the presidency of the North American nation and many questions arose as to what his position would be towards Latin America and the Caribbean during the next four years. After all he had campaigned to improve relations with Cuba which Trump had buried under 243 additional sanctions.

Would he re-bury the Monroe Doctrine, and what policies would guide his relations with the region? The questions are many, as are the expectations.

America vs Western Hemisphere

First, we should go back to the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (in power from 1801 to 1809), who formulated the idea of the “Western Hemisphere” to refer to the American continent.

In short, he postulated that the populations of the American hemisphere, from north to south, have a special inherent, unique and natural relationship among themselves, well-differentiated qualitatively and separated from their links with the extra continental world, explained Cuban researcher Raúl Rodríguez.

But in reality, this doctrine is based on the phrase:

“The American continents, because of the free and independent condition they have assumed and maintain, should no longer be considered as susceptible to future colonization by any of the European powers”.

Reworkings  and Adjustments

The Monroe Doctrine is one of the many means by which the United States has been expanding its hegemonic eagerness over the Latin American and Caribbean region since the early stages of its existence as a nation, Rodriguez pointed out. Over the years, he added, this policy has been reworked and adjusted.

Such is the case of Pan-Americanism, highly questioned by Cuban National Hero José Martí, since it was constituted as a way of institutionalizing imperialist domination over Latin American peoples at the beginning of the last decade of the 19th century.

This is maintained in the context of the transition to the imperialist stage in the United States and continues to the present day, including the creation of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, in 1947, and the OAS, in 1948, the expert explained.

Both are pillars of the system currently comprising the Inter-American Development Bank and a multitude of other entities.

More recently, said Rodriguez, the idea of the Western Hemisphere has formed the conceptual basis for other regional summits and periodic meetings of heads of state and government that have been held regularly since the Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994.

Currently, the fundamental feature of the validity of the Monroe Doctrine is the strengthening of the inter-American system, with emphasis on its economic, political, institutional and military components.

All this in order to consolidate a bloc to counteract the economic and technological ascendancy of China and the political, diplomatic and scientific challenge represented by Russia, said the Cehseu director.

In addition, the aim is to unify and extend the model of representative democracy and market fundamentalism, that is, the U.S. capitalist model as a formula for the entire continent, he stressed.

“Remember that the region of the world that inspired the first doctrinal formulation of foreign policy in the United States – Monroism – was, precisely, Latin America.”

“Therein lies the old pretext that the powerful neighbor to the North protected the interests of our countries against the appetites of the old European colonial powers.”

But now they revive it in a new form to argue objections to the Chinese and Russian presence in the continent and, as it is clear, what is really at stake is will the U.S. hegemonic grip prevail in the geopolitical dispute taking place in Latin America, said Rodriguez.

Old Policies that Refuse to Go Away

Also almost 200 years ago, U.S. President James Polk concurrently decided in 1846 that his country’s “manifest destiny” was to expand, and he waged war against Mexico.

Mexico lost more than half of its territory to the Americans, who took over the lands that now make up California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Then, in 1898, U.S. President William McKinley invaded Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico (the latter territory remains to this day).

And lets not forget that Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala… are on the long list of countries that were invaded and occupied by Washington.

Meanwhile, the US Central Intelligence Agency has backed military coups in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and more recently in Venezuela and Bolivia, as revealed by its own analysts.

When Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine in 2018 by name, experts in the area warned that the mere mention of that policy awakened the historical memory of the repression from numerous military and economic interventions promoted by Washington in Latin America.

Historically, it is just a given that the leaders of the North American nation perceive Latin America as a sort of extension of their territory, the so-called “backyard”.

Given their geographic location, the countries of the area are the closest source of raw materials and natural resources, and also in geopolitical terms, they are considered important for the national security of the United States, according to Jorge Hernandez, a CEHSEU specialist.

U.S. interests in the region are based on a geopolitical conception and the need to build a sphere of influence, that has been the perspective once the U.S. nation reached the imperialist stage, he said.

Invasions, interventions, the establishment of military bases, the plundering of natural resources, interference in the internal affairs of other countries, subversion plans, sanctions and blockades… are elements of Washington’s strategy, which is repeated, with one variant or another, throughout history, both distant and recent.

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We Are Still Locked Down

December 22nd, 2022 by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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Consider just how fortunate we are to have the Twitter Files. Every few days, we are seeing dumps of documents from the operations of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. This weekend’s release was especially shocking. It revealed a close and symbiotic relationship between the company’s management and the FBI, which employs 80 people to police social networks and flag posts. They aren’t looking for crime. They were focused on wrongthink on matters of politics. 

In other words, all our worst suspicions have been confirmed. We still await the Covid files but let there be no doubt about what they will show in grim detail. Twitter worked with government to throttle the reach and searchability of accounts that took issue with the main messaging of the CDC/HHS from early in lockdowns to the present. We already knew that Facebook had deleted 7 million posts in the second quarter of 2020. Twitter pulled some 10,000 accounts down.

Twitter is now mostly open, for now. The rest of the venues remain wholly controlled. Brownstone has posts tagged, throttled, and sometimes deleted from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and it is a constant struggle to avoid Google’s own push against our content. Even ridiculous sites with no credibility or reach appear high in search engines when our content is searched. This is not an algorithm at work.

On this basis alone, it is fair to say that we are still in lockdown nearly three years later. The point of such top-down censorship is not only to control the public mind. It is also to keep all of us from finding each other. It truly did work for a very long time. It took nearly a year for the group that we now know as the anti-lockdown movement to form. Even when Brownstone was founded, I had not known about Justin Hart’s Rational Ground. Now of course we work closely together.

The impact of all this work to keep us apart has been huge. It’s why those of us who resisted from the very beginning felt so very alone, and we could not understand why. Were we going crazy? What is wrong with people that they seem not to be objecting to having their schools and churches closed? Why was the media demonizing people for wanting to get haircuts? Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights and why does no one seem even to be complaining about what was happening?

Let us pause to explore the meaning of lockdown. We often hear now that the US never did lock down, as ridiculous as that sounds. Epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya grew so tired of hearing this claim that he formulated a definition: any government policy that seeks to keep people physically separate under the excuse that doing so mitigates against some crisis. This would include claims, for example, that other people are biohazards, and would include fear-mongering propaganda, and much else.

Think back to March 16, 2020 in the White House press conference when Deborah Birx summed up the whole theme of the day. “We really want people to be separated at this time, to be able to address this virus,” she said. If you think about it, that is surely among the most draconian demands ever made by any government against its people. It means the abolition of freedom and society too. It’s utterly astonishing, and yet the media gathered there just nodded heads as if this were completely normal.

Part of the mandatory separation – part of the lockdown – was information control to keep people who opposed what was happening from finding each other. This trick truly did work because all our usual methods for digital socializing came to be nationalized overnight. We did not know this because there was no real announcement but it was nonetheless real. We had come to rely on social media to give us a sense of the public mind but that came to an end during the most shocking policies ever imposed on so many Americans. And the policy happened all over the world except for one state and about 5 nations.

The lockdown included information control and that was crucial. As for the possibility of hearing the opinions of others, we also faced egregious stay-at-home orders and limits on the numbers of people who could even enter our own homes. I’ve not seen a complete study on what happened but in Western Massachusetts where I was at the time, no more than 10 people were allowed to meet in one setting. Thus no weddings, funerals, or large house parties. Private citizens became so zealous in their enforcement of this that they would fly drones over communities to look for cars bunched up and rat out the address to the local media. This truly did happen.

Only now do we see the larger point. It was to prohibit an opposition from forming and to gaslight the whole population into thinking that everyone was going along with this, since this was nothing but “common sense public health measures.” Anthony Fauci told us this many times. This might also have contributed to the huge decline in the health of the population. People lost a sense of hope and turned to substance abuse and overeating. Gyms were closed and so were all in-person AA meetings. The lockdowns contributed as much as 40 percent to the overall excess deaths in that year alone.

Eventually of course many things opened up but unvaccinated visitors from other countries are still not allowed in, which is an outrage. I have a conductor friend from the UK who has constant invitations to conduct in the US but he is simply not allowed into the country. For three years now!

Question: have we really ever left lockdowns? We are far less free today and far more censored. Twitter is an aberration among the major tech platforms. Media is controlled too. But for Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and few others, plus the mighty Epoch Times, where would we even get our news? And thank goodness for Substack, which has allowed so many writers and researchers to have an outlet. The point is that these are all lights peeking through a darkness that is still being imposed from above. Which is to say: the emergency for human liberty is still with us.

They wanted to keep us separate, and the excuse was a virus. The rule of separation (and the stickers are still everywhere in this country) was truly to keep us apart. One of the most powerful books to come out of our era is Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others. The core theory was that separating humans from other humans was the whole point: to take away our social connection and the possibility of living a dignified life of our own choosing. The only beneficiaries to the policy were tech, media, and government. Her book is a classic for the ages.

Part of this separation included the attack on small business and traditional commerce. The word commerce comes from commercium in Latin, a word that figured prominently in a composed verse from medieval Christianity that became a much-loved motet: O Admirabile Commercium. The point is to draw attention to the exchange between time and eternity as instantiated in the incarnation that Christmas celebrates.

Commerce has long been the meeting place for humans to form social order. Trade means mutual benefit, finding value in each other. That it came under such severe attack makes sense from the point of view of a ruling class that was attacking human association at its root.

Even today, we are having difficulty finding each other and are relieved when we do so. I was struck by this during the Brownstone holiday party a few days ago. There we were all together, the room filled with incredibly energy, everyone toasting friendship and connection, smiles everywhere, a profound sense of gratitude for the physical space that allowed us to meet and eat, all of us knowing full well that we went months and even a year and longer when we could not do this by order of government edict. Just discovering each other, and sharing tales and ideas, amounts to an act of defiance.

Two Christmases came and went when we were told that meeting and celebrating the season was a biohazard and not recommended. In some places, it was forbidden. It’s hard to imagine a more grim policy and it still shocks us to think back and realize that it was all deliberate. One means to reverse this horror is simple: find friends, celebrate together, share stories and ideals, promote peace and love, and work to rebuild what we have lost.

*

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Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Featured image is from Shutterstock


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

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

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

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

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***

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, over-the-top, hysterical fearmongering has been an intricate component of the Public Health™ messaging.

Scared slaves are compliant slaves.

The New York acting health commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, for instance, last year admitted that a health advisory released by the state intentionally exaggerated the risk of COVID to children to “motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination” – “motivate” being a euphemism for “manipulate”.

Here’s her defense of the state’s propaganda, in which she admits the strategy:

“The numbers that we gave on pediatric admissions weren’t intended to make it seem that children were having an epidemic of infection, these were small numbers. That was based on 50 hospitalizations, and I’ve now given you some larger numbers, but they’re still small numbers. It really was to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination.”

Not content with merely inflating hospital admissions numbers and dancing on the graves of unvaccinated public figures who died allegedly due to COVID while ignoring vaxxed deaths, the Public Health™ technocrats also engage in semantical engineering.

Via NBC:

“Referred to as the “nightmare” variant in some reports, XBB is the combination of two omicron subvariants – BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.10.75 – and is said to have a “significant growth advantage,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease specialist and the technical lead for COVID-19 response at the World Health Organization.”

The unelected Public Health™ overlords decided that the endless litany of new variants with nerdy names like Beta 543 or whatever fail to produce sufficient panic in the population to entice them to scurry to Walgreens™ for their twelfth Booster™.

Sober risk-reward assessments don’t move pharmaceutical products.

Before COVID, scientists and medical doctors were still permitted to say in public that most viruses evolve to become more infectious and less pathogenic without fear of losing their license to practice and having their careers sabotaged.

This makes logical sense, as SARS-CoV-2’s prime directive, like any living organism’s (or semi-living organism in the case of a virus), is to survive and replicate. If it can figure out how to evade immune reaction and not kill its host, it’s likelier to thrive.

At the tail-end of the above-cited NBC article, nestled far below the headline, you’ll find the caveat, lonely and totally out of step with the panicked tenor of every preceding paragraph:

“There have been no signs of increased severity in the XBB, BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 variants.”

Reason and logic, alas, went out the window almost three years ago. So each new mutation of the virus elicits ever-greater levels of pearl-clutching by the corporate media increasingly desperate to retain the attention of an audience that – except for the most fringe sects of the Branch COVIDians like the Zero COVID cult – is ready to move on.

*

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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Daily Bell


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

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

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

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

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

Some of America’s most advanced military aircraft conducted drills in South Korea on Tuesday as a show of force against North Korea. Pyongyang recently announced that it had made advancements toward deploying a surveillance satellite. 

US B-52s and F-22s took part in a new round of war games in the skies over the Korean Peninsula, joined by South Korean F-35s and F-16s. The B-52 is capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and has long served as one of Washington’s primary strategic bombers.

The joint military exercises came soon after the DPRK carried out a test of a newly developed spy satellite, which is among a range of military tech Pyongyang has vowed to produce to better counter the United States.

Throughout 2022, Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang have engaged in a series of escalatory actions. North Korea has conducted a record number of missile tests – including multiple intercontinental ballistic missile launches – and fired projectiles over Japanese territory. US officials, among them Vice President Kamala Harris, have repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against the DPRK and increased deployments of strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula. Seoul and Washington regularly carry out large-scale, live-fire war games, including the largest aerial military drills ever held between the two countries.

Additionally, the US and South Korea have entered into a trilateral defense agreement with Japan, largely looking toward Pyongyang and Beijing. The North has denounced the security pact, suggesting the United States intends to create a NATO-like alliance in the Pacific.

The heightened military tensions in 2022 are a break from the previous four years. Starting in the second half of the Donald Trump administration, Washington and Seoul scaled back their military activity and opened up a dialog with Pyongyang, ultimately netting a drastic reduction in war games and weapons tests on all sides. However, the Joe Biden White House has broken with the policy of engagement, almost entirely favoring military action over diplomacy.

*

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Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute.

Will Porter is the assistant news editor of the Libertarian Institute and a staff writer and editor at RT.

Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter host Conflicts of Interest along with Connor Freeman.

Featured image: US B-52H, F-22, and C-17 aircraft fly together during a joint air exercise with South Korea, December 20, 2022. (Credit: Republic of Korea Defense Ministry)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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***

The man in green, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, has arrived in the US to demand more money be shoveled into the bottomless pit that is Ukraine.

Earlier this week, I saw a young woman standing on the corner of an intersection as I drove home from the grocery store. She had a cardboard sign and it read: NEED $TO PAY RENT. PLEASE HELP. GOD BLESS.

Since the pandemic, every busy intersection in this city has at least one or two homeless people begging for money and asking for help. In the past, the street corner beggars were mostly male drug addicts and alcoholics, but now they are young men and women. I occasionally see mentally ill people pacing up and down sidewalks—shoeless, dazed, and ignored. The street is where you go when there are no other options.

More than half of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and the situation for the middle class grows more perilous with each passing day. Meanwhile, the rich get richer (making a fortune during the pandemic), thanks in large part to the bankster cartel, the Federal Reserve.

In a somewhat more perfect world, the government would reform monetary policy, audit the federal reserve, and preferably get rid of it altogether. But that’s not going to happen. The staggering debt will not be addressed, nor will it be forgiven. Generations to come will be forced to pay off a stratospheric debt accumulated by spendthrifts, psychopaths, and warmongers. It is part of a long-term plan to reduce millions of people to poverty and dependence on the state.

However, the way things are going, I’m not sure if there will be future generations. Sorry to be a bummer, but I see very little if any light at the end of the tunnel. If the trajectory we are following continues, we will end up with nuclear winter and dystopia.

Short of “draining the swamp,” torching K Street, and salting the ashes, the current monetary and military insanity will continue until the bottom falls out. The lesson of Trump is that any political outlier not a member of the uniparty political class—not taking orders from the elite and the national security state—will be attacked, threatened, investigated, slandered by the corporate media, de-platformed, and have his or her life destroyed.

Zelenskyy’s pathetic entreat for endless money will not fall on deaf ears. Both factions of the uniparty are gung-ho on gifting the ultranationalist whack jobs in Ukraine with tons of cash and weapons, much of the latter ending up in Africa, specifically in the Lake Chad Basin, and into the hands of Boko Haram and ISIS. In addition, USG-supplied weapons arrive in Finland “where ‘three of the world’s largest motorcycle gangs’ now operate, including Bandidos MC, which ‘has a branch in every major city in Ukraine.’”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov said back in April that USG weapons are now filtering into West Asia. “The diplomat went on to say that it is obvious that Kiev, which has no control over the militants’ actions, will be unable to ensure the safe storage and non-proliferation of these weapons, which may then end up in the shadow markets of other countries.”

Short of nuclear war, nuclear winter, and species extinction, the ruling elite, and its embedded neocons, will continue the long-term effort to destroy the middle class.

During my research following the events of 9/11, I read up on Leo Strauss and his disciples. Strauss believed a deceitful and amoral ruling class, based on Plato’s Republic model, should rule, and the lower classes, locked in poverty and ignorance, should throw themselves headlong into perpetual war.

For the original neocon philosophers (notably, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, and Carl Schmitt), it was imperative the lower classes, the engineered poor kept in blinkered ignorance, understand

that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and “creature comforts.”

I am convinced we are on the cusp of that horrid future now—that is if the psychopaths, brimming with hubris and malignant narcissism, do not blow up the world in their deluded conviction the “exceptional nation” can do no wrong and cannot be defeated.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

America’s War Against the People of Korea: The Historical Record of US War Crimes

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 22, 2022

The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first major military operation  undertaken by the US in the wake of  World War II,  launched at the very outset of  what was euphemistically called “The Cold War”. In many respects it was a continuation of World War II, whereby Korean lands under Japanese colonial occupation were, from one day to the next, handed over to a new colonial power, the United States of America.

Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable. America’s Post 9/11 Nuclear Doctrine

By William M Arkin and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 22, 2022

The geopolitics of America’s nuclear doctrine (NPR 2001) are outlined: Russia and the “Axis of Evil”, China and the status of Taiwan, Israel, Iran and the Middle East, North Korea. The modalities consist in integrating a new category of nuclear weapons (allegedly safe for the surrounding civilian population) into the conventional war arsenal.

The Hidden History of the Korean War

By Dr. T. P. Wilkinson, December 21, 2022

The only war in the official history of the United State that was lost, was also the first war in which Jim Crow, the apartheid regime created in the US after the Civil War and Reconstruction, was not the policy of the US military. How African-Americans came again to challenge the imperialist war machine in the 1960s cannot be understood without uncovering the decades of silence and deception that have covered the first war the US regime truly lost—although it has never officially ended.

World War I, “An Un-Christian Like Patriotic Fervor”: The 108th Anniversary of the Christmas Truce of 1914

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, December 21, 2022

108 years ago this Christmas Eve something happened in the early months of the “War to End All Wars” that put a tiny little blip of hope in the historical timeline of the organized mass slaughter that is war. The event was regarded by the professional military officer class to be so profound and so important (and so disturbing) that strategies were immediately put in place that would ensure that such an event could never happen again.

New Breakthrough in Australia-China Relations

By Prof. Michelle Grattan, December 20, 2022

Australia’s relations with China will take another major step forward this week with Foreign Minister Penny Wong travelling to Beijing for the resumption of the bilateral Foreign and Strategic Dialogue, which has been on hold since 2018.

Modi Ignores West’s Sanctions on Russia

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, December 20, 2022

For India, the reorientation of Russian economic diplomacy toward the Asian region presents huge business opportunities. Who would have thought nine months ago that Russia was going to be the largest supplier of oil to India, leapfrogging Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the US?

The Inflation Hoax

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, December 16, 2022

The Fed thinks that the inflation is the result of the trillions of dollars of Covid payments that were dumped into the economy.  To the extent that this money was simply replacing the lost wages, salaries, and business earnings from the lockdowns, there would be no net addition of money, just a replacement.  I don’t have the data on the lost earnings from the lockdowns, but it is obvious that there was a large supply disruption.

Putin Attempting to Prevent a Repeat of the Clinton-Yeltsin Destruction of Russia

By Kurt Nimmo, December 16, 2022

In a speech delivered in 2007, well before the current crisis, Vladimir Putin “reserved his bitterest complaints… for the US drive to expand Nato into former Soviet eastern Europe and for the plans to deploy parts of the missile shield in central Europe. ‘Why do you need to move your military infrastructure to our borders?’” he asked.

How Blackrock Investment Fund Triggered the Global Energy Crisis

By F. William Engdahl, December 21, 2022

The energy crisis is a long-planned strategy of western corporate and political circles to dismantle industrial economies in the name of a dystopian Green Agenda. That has its roots in the period years well before February 2022, when Russia launched its military action in Ukraine.

The War Moves Forward as Outlined by the RAND Corporation on Behalf of the Pentagon. “NATO Is Not Part to the Conflict”

By Manlio Dinucci, December 18, 2022

The United States, the European Union, and other countries have so far “donated” about 100 billion euros of military supply to Ukraine. It is money directly or indirectly coming out of our pockets. This figure is constantly increasing. The European Union will train 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers in two camps in Poland and in another member state.

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***

Introductory Note 

This incisive article by William Arkin summarizes the key elements of America’s nuclear doctrine, formulated both before and in the immediate wake of September 11, 2001. 

The article was originally published by the Los Angeles Times on March 10, 2002, a few months prior to the official release of the infamous 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).

The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) of the Cold War era has been indefinitely scrapped.

The NPR 2001 confirms America’s foreign policy stance:

the pre-emptive use of nukes as a means of “self-defense” against both nuclear and non-nuclear states.  

Nuclear weapons are also slated to be used in the conventional war theater. 

Post Cold War Nuclear Doctrine. NPR 2001 (Drafted 21 Years Ago) Sets The Stage

Let us be under no illusions. 

Today, nuclear war is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.

The 2001 NPR (full document) released (officially) in July 2002 is of utmost significance. It determines America’s nuclear doctrine. It has a direct bearing on our understanding of the war in Ukraine, and the danger of a World War III scenario. For details, see  also NPR 2001 (excerpts by FAS).    

The geopolitics of America’s nuclear doctrine (NPR 2001) are outlined: Russia and the “Axis of Evil”, China and the status of Taiwan, Israel, Iran and the Middle East, North Korea.

The modalities consist in integrating a new category of nuclear weapons (allegedly safe for the surrounding civilian population) into the conventional war arsenal.

Minimizing Collateral Damage while “Blowing up the Planet” 

Here are some of the highlights outlined in William Arkin’s article, most of which are being implemented: 

  • “...the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries … naming not only Russia and the “axis of evil”–Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–but also China, Libya and Syria.”
  • “nuclear weapons may be required in some future Arab-Israeli crisis.”
  • “…using nuclear weapons to retaliate against chemical or biological attacks”
  • the NPR lists a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan as one of the scenarios that could lead Washington to use nuclear weapons.”
  • “nuclear strategy …viewed through the prism of Sept. 11.  faith in old-fashioned deterrence is gone”
  • developing such things as nuclear bunker-busters and surgical “warheads that reduce collateral damage,”
  •  “cyber-warfare and other nonnuclear military capabilities would be integrated into nuclear-strike forces”
  • “the integration of “new nonnuclear strategic capabilities” into nuclear-war plans.
  • expand the breadth and flexibility of U.S. nuclear capabilities.
  •  “what has evolved since last year’s [September 11, 2001] terror attacks is an integrated, significantly expanded planning doctrine for nuclear wars.”

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 10, 2022, December 22, 2022

***

Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable

The Bush administration, in a secret policy review completed early this year, has ordered the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, naming not only Russia and the “axis of evil”–Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–but also China, Libya and Syria.

In addition, the U.S. Defense Department has been told to prepare for the possibility that nuclear weapons may be required in some future Arab-Israeli crisis. And, it is to develop plans for using nuclear weapons to retaliate against chemical or biological attacks, as well as “surprising military developments” of an unspecified nature.

These and a host of other directives, including calls for developing bunker-busting mini-nukes and nuclear weapons that reduce collateral damage, are contained in a still-classified document called the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was delivered to Congress on Jan. 8.

Like all such documents since the dawning of the Atomic Age more than a half-century ago, this NPR offers a chilling glimpse into the world of nuclear-war planners: With a Strangelovian genius, they cover every conceivable circumstance in which a president might wish to use nuclear weapons–planning in great detail for a war they hope never to wage.

In this top-secret domain, there has always been an inconsistency between America’s diplomatic objectives of reducing nuclear arsenals and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, on the one hand, and the military imperative to prepare for the unthinkable, on the other.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration plan reverses an almost two-decade-long trend of relegating nuclear weapons to the category of weapons of last resort. It also redefines nuclear requirements in hurried post-Sept. 11 terms.

In these and other ways, the still-secret document offers insights into the evolving views of nuclear strategists in Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.

While downgrading the threat from Russia and publicly emphasizing their commitment to reducing the number of long-range nuclear weapons, Defense Department strategists promote tactical and so-called “adaptive” nuclear capabilities to deal with contingencies where large nuclear arsenals are not demanded.

They seek a host of new weapons and support systems, including conventional military and cyber warfare capabilities integrated with nuclear warfare. The end product is a now-familiar post-Afghanistan model–with nuclear capability added. It combines precision weapons, long-range strikes, and special and covert operations.

But the NPR’s call for development of new nuclear weapons that reduce “collateral damage” myopically ignores the political, moral and military implications–short-term and long–of crossing the nuclear threshold.

Under what circumstances might nuclear weapons be used under the new posture? The NPR says they “could be employed against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack,” or in retaliation for the use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, or “in the event of surprising military developments.”

Planning nuclear-strike capabilities, it says, involves the recognition of “immediate, potential or unexpected” contingencies. Show me why. “All have long-standing hostility towards the United States and its security partners. All sponsor or harbor terrorists, and have active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and missile programs.”

China, because of its nuclear forces and “developing strategic objectives,” is listed as “a country that could be involved in an immediate or potential contingency.” Specifically, the NPR lists a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan as one of the scenarios that could lead Washington to use nuclear weapons.

Other listed scenarios for nuclear conflict are a North Korean attack on South Korea and an Iraqi assault on Israel or its neighbors.

The second important insight the NPR offers into Pentagon thinking about nuclear policy is the extent to which the Bush administration’s strategic planners were shaken by last September’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though Congress directed the new administration “to conduct a comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear forces” before the events of Sept. 11, the final study is striking for its single-minded reaction to those tragedies.

Heretofore, nuclear strategy tended to exist as something apart from the ordinary challenges of foreign policy and military affairs. Nuclear weapons were not just the option of last resort, they were the option reserved for times when national survival hung in the balance–a doomsday confrontation with the Soviet Union, for instance.

Now, nuclear strategy seems to be viewed through the prism of Sept. 11. For one thing, the Bush administration’s faith in old-fashioned deterrence is gone. It no longer takes a superpower to pose a dire threat to Americans.

“The terrorists who struck us on Sept. 11th were clearly not deterred by doing so from the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal,” Rumsfeld told an audience at the National Defense University in late January.

Similarly, U.S. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton said in a recent interview, “We would do whatever is necessary to defend America’s innocent civilian population …. The idea that fine theories of deterrence work against everybody … has just been disproven by Sept. 11.”

Moreover, while insisting they would go nuclear only if other options seemed inadequate, officials are looking for nuclear weapons that could play a role in the kinds of challenges the United States faces with Al Qaeda.

Accordingly, the NPR calls for new emphasis on developing such things as nuclear bunker-busters and surgical “warheads that reduce collateral damage,” as well as weapons that could be used against smaller, more circumscribed targets–“possible modifications to existing weapons to provide additional yield flexibility,” in the jargon-rich language of the review.

It also proposes to train U.S. Special Forces operators to play the same intelligence gathering and targeting roles for nuclear weapons that they now play for conventional weapons strikes in Afghanistan. And cyber-warfare and other nonnuclear military capabilities would be integrated into nuclear-strike forces to make them more all-encompassing.

As for Russia, once the primary reason for having a U.S. nuclear strategy, the review says that while Moscow’s nuclear programs remain cause for concern, “ideological sources of conflict” have been eliminated, rendering a nuclear contingency involving Russia “plausible” but “not expected.”

“In the event that U.S. relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future,” the review says, “the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture.”

When completion of the NPR was publicly announced in January, Pentagon briefers deflected questions about most of the specifics, saying the information was classified. Officials did stress that, consistent with a Bush campaign pledge, the plan called for reducing the current 6,000 long-range nuclear weapons to one-third that number over the next decade. Rumsfeld, who approved the review late last year, said the administration was seeking “a new approach to strategic deterrence,” to include missile defenses and improvements in nonnuclear capabilities.

Also, Russia would no longer be officially defined as “an enemy.”

Beyond that, almost no details were revealed.

The classified text, however, is shot through with a worldview transformed by Sept. 11. The NPR coins the phrase “New Triad,” which it describes as comprising the “offensive strike leg,” (our nuclear and conventional forces) plus “active and passive defenses,”(our anti-missile systems and other defenses) and “a responsive defense infrastructure” (our ability to develop and produce nuclear weapons and resume nuclear testing). Previously, the nuclear “triad” was the bombers, long-range land-based missiles and submarine-launched missiles that formed the three legs of America’s strategic arsenal.

The review emphasizes the integration of “new nonnuclear strategic capabilities” into nuclear-war plans. “New capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply-buried targets (HDBT), to find and attack mobile and re-locatable targets, to defeat chemical and biological agents, and to improve accuracy and limit collateral damage,” the review says.

It calls for “a new strike system” using four converted Trident submarines, an unmanned combat air vehicle and a new air-launched cruise missile as potential new weapons.

Beyond new nuclear weapons, the review proposes establishing what it calls an “agent defeat” program, which defense officials say includes a “boutique” approach to finding new ways of destroying deadly chemical or biological warfare agents, as well as penetrating enemy facilities that are otherwise difficult to attack. This includes, according to the document, “thermal, chemical or radiological neutralization of chemical/biological materials in production or storage facilities.”

Bush administration officials stress that the development and integration of nonnuclear capabilities into the nuclear force is what permits reductions in traditional long-range weaponry. But the blueprint laid down in the review would expand the breadth and flexibility of U.S. nuclear capabilities.

In addition to the new weapons systems, the review calls for incorporation of “nuclear capability” into many of the conventional systems now under development. An extended-range conventional cruise missile in the works for the U.S. Air Force “would have to be modified to carry nuclear warheads if necessary.” Similarly, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter should be modified to carry nuclear weapons “at an affordable price.”

The review calls for research to begin next month on fitting an existing nuclear warhead into a new 5,000-pound “earth penetrating” munition.

Given the advances in electronics and information technologies in the past decade, it is not surprising that the NPR also stresses improved satellites and intelligence, communications, and more robust high-bandwidth decision-making systems.

Particularly noticeable is the directive to improve U.S. capabilities in the field of “information operations,” or cyber-warfare.

The intelligence community “lacks adequate data on most adversary computer local area networks and other command and control systems,” the review observes. It calls for improvements in the ability to “exploit” enemy computer networks, and the integration of cyber-warfare into the overall nuclear war database “to enable more effective targeting, weaponeering, and combat assessment essential to the New Triad.”

In recent months, when Bush administration officials talked about the implications of Sept. 11 for long-term military policy, they have often focused on “homeland defense” and the need for an anti-missile shield. In truth, what has evolved since last year’s terror attacks is an integrated, significantly expanded planning doctrine for nuclear wars.

***

Our thanks to William Arkin and the Los Angeles Times. Copyright Los Angeles Times

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Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

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

Reviews

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

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

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

We Should Learn From the Christmas Truce of 1914

December 21st, 2022 by Global Research News

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“Putin Has Misread the West (And) if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us”

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and Mike Whitney, December 20, 2022

With a history such as mine, I was surprised when I took an objective position on Russian President Putin’s disavowal of US hegemony, and found myself labeled a “Russian dupe/agent” on a website, “PropOrNot,” which may have been financed by the US Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the CIA itself, still harboring old resentments against me for helping President Reagan end the Cold War, which had the potential of reducing the CIA’s budget and power.

NATO Decides to Attack Russia in Ukraine

By Kurt Nimmo, December 21, 2022

But NATO has always been very clear: Ukraine CANNOT LOSE. For Washington, the only solution would therefore be for NATO forces to enter Ukraine, hoping that this will end the Russian offensive. The calculation is that Vladimir Putin will not want to directly face NATO with the possible (nuclear) consequences, and will therefore then retreat.

Video: Panama Commemorates Those Who Died in the 1989 Illegal US Invasion, Noriega Was a CIA Asset

By Don Hank, December 21, 2022

Today is an official day of mourning in Panama. It is a bank holiday and most businesses are closed. Americans like to think they did Panama a favor by invading and ridding the country of the dictator. If you go to the official web site, you will see cited a very LOW number of deaths due to Bush Senior’s 1989 invasion, which in fact killed thousands of Panamanian citizens.  

Australia’s Wieambilla Killings: The Sense Behind Senseless Murder

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, December 21, 2022

The contradiction behind the messages is clear.  This was a “sophisticated” operation involving surveillance.  It was planned. Those unfortunate police officers were lured to an isolated Queensland property where they were “executed”.

Jordan Vows Crack Down on Protestors “Tied to Terrorism”

By Steven Sahiounie, December 21, 2022

Yesterday, three more policemen were killed in the same area that saw the murder of the deputy police chief on Thursday and the wounding of two others. The unrest and murders occurred in the southern area near Maan.  The area has supported the Radical Islamic ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS.

Bill Gates Plans for New Catastrophic Contagion

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, December 21, 2022

Over time, it’s become clear that the globalist cabal seeking to implement a one world government repeatedly tell us what they’re about to do. They hold dress rehearsals in the form of tabletop exercises, and they’ve revealed their plans in various reports and white papers through the years.

Peru Coup: CIA Agent Turned US Ambassador Met with Defense Minister Day Before President Overthrown

By Ben Norton, December 20, 2022

The US ambassador in Peru, Lisa Kenna, worked for the CIA for 9 years, as well as the Pentagon. One day before the coup against elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo, Kenna met with Peru’s defense minister, who then ordered the military to turn against Castillo.

Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War with Russia

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, December 20, 2022

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”

Insider Tells Tucker Carlson That CIA Was Directly Involved in JFK Assassination

By Catherine Salgado, December 20, 2022

Speculation about the circumstances and motivations behind the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, rife at the time the tragedy occurred, has never stopped. While Kennedy’s murderer was declared soon after the assassination to have worked alone, one insider claimed to Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was directly involved with JFK’s assassination.

What “Victory” and “Defeat” Would Mean in Ukraine’s War. “Regime Change in Russia”

By Eric Zuesse, December 21, 2022

In order to be able accurately to define “victory” in the war in Ukraine, the pre-requisite is to define whom the two sides are that wage this war. For example: when America fought in WW II, it was waging war in foreign battlefields and with its own troops and weapons, and even if America were to win in any of those battlefields, it still could have been defeated in WW II simply by Hitler’s winning WW II.

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Abstract

All-cause mortality by week in Australia shows that there was no detectable excess mortality 13 months into the declared pandemic, followed by a step-wise increase in mortality in mid-April 2021, synchronous with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine prioritizing elderly, disabled and aboriginal residents.

The excess mortality in the vaccination period (mid-April 2021 through August 2022; 14 % larger all-cause mortality than in recent pre-vaccination periods of same time duration;

62 million administered vaccine doses) was 31±1 thousand deaths, which is more than twice the deaths registered as from or with COVID‑19.

In addition, a sharp peak in all-cause mortality (mid-January to mid-February 2022; 2,600 deaths) is synchronous with the rapid rollout of the booster (9.4 million booster doses, same time period), and is not due to a climatic heatwave.

We give thirteen numbered arguments as to why we conclude that the excess mortality in Australia is causally associated with the COVID-19 vaccine.

The corresponding vaccine injection fatality ratio (vIFR) is approximately 0.05 %, which we compare to estimated vIFR values from the USA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and from all-cause mortality data for India, Southern states of the USA, Michigan (USA) and Ontario (Canada).

*

Australia experienced a significant and sustained increase in all-cause mortality, starting with its COVID-19 vaccine rollout aimed at high-risk residents in mid-April 2021, whereas it saw no detectable excess all-cause mortality up to that point during 13 months of a pandemic that was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020.

Starting in mid-April 2021, the all-cause mortality per week in Australia shows a sustained increase of >10 %, during which it never returns to its seasonal low value (of approximately 3,000 deaths/week) and attains highs of >4,000 deaths/week in June-July-August 2022. The step-wise increase in all-cause mortality remains large up to the final date of presently consolidated official government statistics (week-34 of 2022, week ending 28 August 2022) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022a).

Over the measured period of the step-wise increase in all-cause mortality (mid‑April 2021 through August 2022; 14 % larger all-cause mortality than in recent pre-vaccination periods of same time duration; 62 million administered vaccine doses) there are 31±1 thousand excess deaths of all causes in Australia, whereas no excess deaths are detected in the prior 13-month period since a pandemic was declared (mid-March 2020 through mid-April 2021).

The excess all‑cause mortality following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout (31,000 deaths, mid‑April 2021 through August 2022) is more than twice the total number of deaths registered as being from or with COVID-19 (14,014 deaths, 1 January 2020 through 29 August 2022; WHO, consulted 20 December 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/au).

The above points are corroborated and illustrated in the following figures.

Figure 1A: All-cause mortality in Australia, all ages, from week-1 2015 (week ending 4 January 2015) through week-34 2022 (week ending 28 August 2022). Light-blue: All-cause mortality by week, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Integrated all-cause mortality over successive and non-overlapping 72-week periods (week-15 2021 through week-34 2022, for most recent period), right y-scale. Each point is positioned on the x-axis at the 1st week of its 72-week integration period. (Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022a.)

Figure 1B: All-cause mortality in Australia, ages 85+ years, from week-1 2015 (week ending 4 January 2015) through week-34 2022 (week ending 28 August 2022). Light-blue: All-cause mortality by week, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Integrated all-cause mortality over successive and non-overlapping 72-week periods (week-15 2021 through week-34 2022, for most recent period), right y-scale. Each point is positioned on the x-axis at the 1st week of its 72-week integration period. (Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022a.)

Figure 1C: All-cause mortality in Australia, ages 75-84 years, from week-1 2015 (week ending 4 January 2015) through week-34 2022 (week ending 28 August 2022). Light-blue: All-cause mortality by week, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Integrated all-cause mortality over successive and non-overlapping 72-week periods (week-15 2021 through week-34 2022, for most recent period), right y-scale. Each point is positioned on the x-axis at the 1st week of its 72-week integration period. (Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022a.)

Figure 1D: All-cause mortality in Australia, ages 65-74 years, from week-1 2015 (week ending 4 January 2015) through week-34 2022 (week ending 28 August 2022). Light-blue: All-cause mortality by week, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Integrated all-cause mortality over successive and non-overlapping 72-week periods (week-15 2021 through week-34 2022, for most recent period), right y-scale. Each point is positioned on the x-axis at the 1st week of its 72-week integration period. (Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022a.)

Figure 2: All-cause mortality in Australia, all ages, from week-1 2015 (week ending 4 January 2015) through week-34 2022 (week ending 28 August 2022), compared to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Light-blue: All-cause mortality by week, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Cumulative 1st doses of the vaccine. Orange: Cumulative 2nd doses of the vaccine. (Data sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022a); and https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, consulted on 14 December 2022.)

The vaccine rollout is shown in more detail as follows.

Figure 3A: Cumulative COVID-19 vaccine doses administered (all dose types) by time (24 February 2021 through 22 August 2022) by state in Australia (as indicated, in the sequence NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, WA, TAS, NT, ACT). (Source: https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, accessed 20 December 2022.)

Figure 3B: Daily and 7-day average daily reported COVID-19 vaccine doses (all dose types) administered by time (1 March 2021 through 22 August 2022) in Australia. (Source: https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, accessed 20 December 2022.)

Mortality and vaccination data specifically for the state of Victoria (VIC), Australia, is shown, for example, as follows.

Figure 4A: All-cause mortality in the state of Victoria (VIC), Australia, all ages, from week‑1 2015 (week ending 4 January 2015) through week-34 2022 (week ending 28 August 2022). Light-blue: All-cause mortality by week, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Integrated all-cause mortality over successive and non-overlapping 72-week periods (week-15 2021 through week-34 2022, for most recent period), right y-scale. Each point is positioned on the x-axis at the 1st week of its 72-week integration period. (Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022a.)

Figure 4B: Daily and 7-day average daily reported COVID-19 vaccine doses (all dose types) administered by time (28 February 2021 through 22 August 2022) in the state of Victoria (VIC), Australia. (Source: https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, accessed 20 December 2022.)

The step-wise increase in mortality is evident in Figure 1 (A through C), and it is synchronous with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout (Figures 2, 3 and 4).

The step-wise transition to a regime of larger all-cause mortality is also seen in the different states of Australia. The example of Victoria is shown in Figure 4. The same phenomenon occurs in the all-cause mortality of all the eight states of Australia, although not clearly in NT (Northern Territory) (Appendix 1).

In addition to the above-described step-wise change in regime of all-cause mortality, there is a prominent peak in all-cause mortality, having a full duration of seven weeks, from mid-January to mid-February 2022. It is not consistent with a seasonal feature and it is synchronous with a large burst in COVID-19 vaccine dose delivery (Figures 1, 3B and 4), which was the rollout of the booster (3rd doses) in Australia. The said 7-week-duration peak in all-cause mortality is prominent in the states NSW, QLD and VIC, but is essentially not present in the other states (Appendix 1). The booster rollout is shown in the following Figures 5 and 6.

Figure 5: Daily and cumulative booster (3rd doses) rollout in Australia. The time axis is from 10 November 2021 through 22 August 2022. (Source: https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, accessed 20 December 2022.)

Direct comparisons between all-cause mortality by week for the mid-January to mid‑February 2022 peak and booster delivery by week are shown below, for Australia and for the states NSW, VIC and QLD (Figures 6A through 6D).

Figure 6A: Highlight of the mid-January to mid-February 2022 mortality peak, in relation to booster (3rd doses) delivery, in Australia. All-cause mortality by week (light-blue) and booster doses delivered by week (black) from 2021 to 2022. (Data sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022a); and https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, consulted on 14 December 2022.)

Figure 6B: Highlight of the mid-January to mid-February 2022 mortality peak, in relation to booster (3rd doses) delivery, in NSW (Australia). All-cause mortality by week (light-blue) and booster doses delivered by week (black) from 2021 to 2022. Both mortality and booster delivery are for NSW. (Data sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022a); and https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, consulted on 14 December 2022.)

Figure 6C: Highlight of the mid-January to mid-February 2022 mortality peak, in relation to booster (3rd doses) delivery, in VIC (Australia). All-cause mortality by week (light-blue) and booster doses delivered by week (black) from 2021 to 2022. Both mortality and booster delivery are for VIC. (Data sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022a); and https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, consulted on 14 December 2022.)

Figure 6D: Highlight of the mid-January to mid-February 2022 mortality peak, in relation to booster (3rd doses) delivery, in QLD (Australia). All-cause mortality by week (light-blue) and booster doses delivered by week (black) from 2021 to 2022. Both mortality and booster delivery are for QLD. (Data sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022a); and https://www.covid19data.com.au/vaccines, consulted on 14 December 2022.)

The integrated excess mortality in the 7-week-duration peak, relative to its baseline, is approximately 2,600 deaths, compared to approximately 9.4 million booster doses delivered over the duration of the mortality peak. This corresponds to a vaccine injection fatality ratio (vIFR) of approximately 0.03 %, which in turn is not too different from the vIFR of 0.008 % for 65+ year old USA subjects injected with the Janssen vaccine, calculated from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data by Hickey and Rancourt (2022) (their Table 1).

An alternative hypothesis for the 7-week-duration mortality peak would be that it was caused by an Australian summer heatwave affecting Eastern Australia. This hypothesis is not tenable with the climatic and mortality data, which we demonstrate in Appendix 2.

For the following reasons (presented as numbered points), taken together, we conclude that the 16-month (mid-April 2021 through August 2022) sustained regime of large excess all-cause mortality in Australia may largely or predominantly be caused by its vaccine rollout, including the booster (3rd doses).

1 – There is a clear temporal association between the new regime of heightened all‑cause mortality and the vaccine rollout, whereas Australia did not have detectable excess mortality up to the start of the rollout, during 13 months of a pandemic that was declared by the WHO on 11 March 2020. (Figures 1, 2, 4 and 6; and Appendix 1)

2 – The excess mortality in the vaccination period (mid-April 2021 through August 2022) for Australia (all ages) is 31,000 (±1,000) deaths (Figure 1A), which is more than twice the total number of deaths registered as being from or with COVID-19 (14,014 deaths, 1 January 2020 through week ending 29 August 2022; WHO, consulted 15 December 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/au).

Note that the percentage of total COVID-19-assigned deaths that are “with COVID-19” (rather than “from COVID-19”) varies between approximately 10 % and 30 %, in the period January 2022 through August 2022 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022b; their figure entitled “Proportion of deaths from and with COVID-19 during the Omicron wave”, and see “Proportion of deaths from and with COVID-19 during the Omicron wave by state of registration”). Here, death “from COVID-19” means that COVID-19 is assigned as “the underlying cause of death as the disease or condition that initiated the train of morbid events leading to death”, whereas other diseases and conditions reported as contributing to death are “referred to as associated causes” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022c). In fact, 95.4 % of deaths “from COVID-19” in Australian death certificates had non-COVID-19 “causal sequences of events” and/or “pre-existing chronic conditions” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022c; their table entitled “Number of deaths due to COVID-19 that has associated conditions”).

The question is unavoidable: Why would Australians suddenly (at the start of the vaccine rollout) start dying in excess of something mostly if not entirely other than COVID-19, after 13 months of a declared pandemic during which there was no detectable excess all-cause mortality?

3 – The mean vIFR in the vaccination period (mid-April 2021 through August 2022) for Australia, therefore, would be:

31 K deaths  /  62 M vaccine doses[1]  =  0.05 %

which is larger than the vIFR of 0.008 % for 65+ year old USA subjects injected with the Janssen vaccine, calculated from the VAERS data (Hickey and Rancourt, 2022; their Table 1), and smaller than the estimated 1 % calculated for the excess mortality event in India (Rancourt, 2022), and for excess mortality peaks for several Southern states of the USA (Rancourt et al., 2022). As such, the 0.05 % estimated mean vIFR for Australia is within an expected range for real‑world circumstances.

4 – In addition to the above-described vaccination-period regime of all-cause mortality (mid-April 2021 through August 2022), there is a prominent peak in all-cause mortality from mid-January to mid-February 2022, having a full duration of seven weeks, which is synchronous with a large burst in COVID-19 vaccine dose delivery (Figures 1, 3B, 4 and 6). The said large burst in vaccine dose delivery was the rollout of the booster (3rd doses) in Australia (Figures 5 and 6).

We stress that Figure 6, showing a high degree of synchronicity (in both position and width) between the mid‑January to mid-February 2022 all-cause mortality peak and the booster (3rd doses) delivery pattern, with the booster delivery surge generally leading the mortality surge by approximately 1 week, represents strong evidence for a causal relation; the strongest we have seen in all-cause mortality data.

5 – The said prominent peak in all-cause mortality from mid-January to mid-February 2022 has an integrated excess mortality in its 7-week duration, relative to its baseline, of approximately 2,600 deaths, compared to approximately 9.4 million booster doses delivered over the duration of the mortality peak. This corresponds to a calculated vIFR for the specific mortality peak:

2.6 K deaths  /  9.4 M vaccine doses[2]  =  0.03 %

which is comparable in value to that obtained (0.05 %) for the mean vIFR in the vaccination period (mid-April 2021 through August 2022) for Australia.

6 – The impact of the rollout would be sudden, as observed (Figures 1, 2, 4A and 6; and Appendix 1), because Australia prioritized elderly, disabled and aboriginal residents (Australian Government – Department of Health and Aged Care, 2021).

7 – The step-wise increase in all-cause mortality, into the regime of excess all-cause mortality (mid‑April 2021 through August 2022) occurs simultaneously in mid‑April 2021 across all of Australia, in the eight states (see Appendix 1), rather than showing any distribution of starting times, which would be compatible with a spreading infectious disease seeding different regions at different times and spreading at different rates depending on regional differences of social and health conditions.

In this regard, theoretical models of spreading and emerging pandemics show high sensitivity of dynamic outcomes to seeding, societal population size, and inferred social and health conditions (Parham and Michael, 2011; Hasegawa and Nemoto, 2016; Ma et al., 2022).

8 – The VAERS data of the USA unambiguously shows excess all-cause deaths immediately following injections with each of the three types of COVID-19 vaccines used in the USA, with a prominent peak within 5 days of injection and an exponentially decaying excess mortality extending 2 months following injection (Hickey and Rancourt, 2022; see their Figs. S3 through S5). The integrated mortality by number of injections following injection (injection toxicity or vIFR) increases exponentially with age, as does the batch to batch variability of toxic effect (Hickey and Rancourt, 2022; see their Fig. S6). The latter observations of exponential increases with age mean that the injections represent fatal challenges in proportion to frailty of the subject.

9 – Detailed histopathological and immunohistochemical autopsy studies have demonstrated that the COVID-19 vaccines are causes of death, both in otherwise healthy subjects and in elderly subjects with comorbidities (Choi et al., 2021; Schneider et al., 2021; Sessa et al., 2021; Gill et al., 2022; Mörz, 2022; Schwab et al., 2022; Yoshimura et al., 2022).

10 – The Australian Government interprets both test results (cases) and the mortality as occurring in four “waves”, which it describes by time period as follows (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022b):

  • “Wave 1: as occurring between March and May 2020. The predominant variant during Wave 1 was the original virus strain.
  • Wave 2: as occurring between June and November 2020. Wave 2 predominantly occurred in Victoria. The variant during Wave 2 was the original virus strain.
  • Delta wave: as occurring between July and December 2021.
  • Omicron wave: as occurring during 2022 (until the end of September 2022). Due to the length of this wave and the higher number of deaths […].”

We have not found any study establishing a scientific basis for the Australian Government’s assignation of these waves. Furthermore, the said Government’s assignation is irreconcilable with:

  1. the absence of detected excess mortality in March-May 2020 (Figure 1; and Appendix 1),
  2. the absence of detected excess mortality in Australia (Figure 1A) and in Victoria (Figure 4A) in the period June-November 2020 (and see Appendix 1),
  • a Delta-variant wave (July-December 2021) that would have missed both the mid-April 2021 step-wise surge in excess all-cause mortality and the 7-week-duration mid-January to mid-February 2022 peak in excess all-cause mortality, and
  1. an Omicron-variant wave (2022) that would have caused two distinct and prominent features in excess all-cause mortality, namely the mid-January to mid‑February 2022 7-week-duration peak and the large surge that followed starting in May 2022 (Figure 1A).

The official interpretive situation is similar, although less sophisticated, to that employed by Dhar et al. (2021) who postulated that the April-July 2021 “second wave” event in Delhi (the capital city of India) was due to the Delta variant, which would have quickly swept Delhi to become predominant because it would have higher transmissibility and larger immune escape than concomitantly circulating variants. However, Dhar et al. estimate the needed characteristics of Delta by fitting a model to the epidemiological data and to the variant predominance estimated by genomic measurements from small non-randomized cohorts. Leaving aside the large known and unknown uncertainties throughout their exercise, basically, the inferred characteristics of Delta are obtained by fitting to the data, rather than being independently measured in a controlled clinical trial. Under such circumstances, the mortality event creates an illusion of the needed Delta for Delhi, but an actual Delta cannot be concluded to have caused the mortality event.

Likewise, the Australian Government’s assignation of COVID-19 waves for Australia is merely a naming exercise of reported test results (case statistics), coupled to sparse and unreliable genomic measurements (Australian Government – Department of Health and Aged Care, 2022). The Australian Government’s assignation is contradicted by hard data of all-cause mortality by time.

11 – A similar synchronicity between vaccine dose delivery and excess all-cause mortality is observed in connection with the so-called “vaccine equity” campaigns in the USA. An anomalous fall-2021 peak was interpreted as being caused by the vaccines, and is prominent in the 25-64 years age group in 21 states of the USA, most notably including Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana (Rancourt et al., 2022). The data for Mississippi is shown below (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Rancourt et al. (2022), their Fig. 11B. All-cause mortality by week (light-blue), cumulated number of people with at least one dose of vaccine (dark-blue), cumulated number of fully vaccinated people (orange) and cumulated number of people with a booster dose (yellow) by week from 2019 to 2022, for 25-64 years age group in Mississippi. Data are displayed from week-1 of 2019 to week-5 of 2022.

In the study by Rancourt et al. (2022), it was concluded that significant (detectable by all-cause mortality) vaccine-induced mortality occurred primarily among fragile groups, characterized by high degrees of poverty, disability, obesity, diabetes, and high medication rates. The vaccine injection was seen as an additional challenge, often accelerating and causing death in residents with comorbidities.

12 – Another example of probably causal synchronicity between a rapid COVID-19 vaccine rollout prioritizing elderly, frail and disabled residents and large excess all‑cause mortality is that of India (Rancourt, 2022). In that case, the early rollout of the vaccine in April-July 2021 was devastating, causing the deaths of approximately 3.7 million residents, on administering approximately 350 million doses of the vaccine (in a population of 1.39 billion). This corresponds to an effective vIFR (per-dose toxicity) of approximately 1 %. It is also approximately the same vIFR (1 %) as is consistent with the anomalous fall-2021 peak in excess all-cause mortality occurring in high‑poverty states of the USA, which was interpreted as being caused by the vaccine (Rancourt et al., 2022; and see the data for Mississippi shown in Figure 7).

Clearly, frail residents are susceptible to being fatally harmed by the injection and should be protected against state-run injection campaigns implemented without stringent individual clinical risk assessment. It appears that the population-wide COVID-19 vIFR can be as large as 1 % (India, Southern USA states), and is approximately 0.05 % in Australia.

Both India and Australia had virtually no detectable excess all-cause mortality after a pandemic was declared by the WHO, until their respective COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, which makes the synchronicity association relatively easy to assign.

13 – Two more examples of synchronicity between a rapid COVID-19 vaccine rollout prioritizing elderly and vulnerable residents and large excess all‑cause mortality occur for Michigan, USA (Rancourt et al., 2022) and Ontario, Canada.

Key figures for Michigan, USA are as follows (Figure 8). The COVID-19 vIFR in the main rollout of the vaccine in Michigan is comparable in value to that for the vaccination period for Australia (0.05 %).

Figure 8: All-cause mortality by week (light-blue), cumulative number of people with at least one dose of vaccine (dark-blue), cumulative number of fully vaccinated people (orange) and cumulative number of people with a booster dose (yellow) by week from 2019 to 2022, and by age group for Michigan, USA. Data are displayed from week-1 of 2019 to week-5 of 2022. Upper panel: (Rancourt et al., 2022; their Figure 11G) Michigan, 25-64 years age group. For the 25-64 years age group, the vaccination data is for the 18-64 years age group. Lower panel: (Rancourt et al., 2022; their Figure 11H) Michigan, 65+ years age group. The discontinuous breaks in cumulative number of vaccinated individuals are artifacts.

A key figure for Ontario, Canada is as follows (Figure 9).

Figure 9: All-cause mortality by week (light-blue), cumulative number of people with at least one dose of vaccine (dark-blue), cumulative number of fully vaccinated people (orange) and cumulative number of people with a booster dose (purple) by week from 2010 to 2022 (upper panel), and from 2019 to 2022 (lower panel), in the province of Ontario, Canada. Both mortality and vaccination are for the age group 65-84 years. (Rancourt et al., manuscript in preparation)

A clear non-seasonal peak is seen in this age group (65-84 years) in Ontario, which is synchronous with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to this age group (Figure 9); and a particularly large and sharp mortality peak is synchronous with the booster rollout to this age group the following winter season (Figure 9). Here, again, the corresponding COVID-19 vIFRs are comparable in value to that for the vaccination period for Australia (0.05 %).

As further discussion, we make the following observations and comments.

As outlined above, less than and approximately half of the excess deaths of all causes in the vaccination period are deaths registered as COVID-19 deaths. The COVID-19-registered deaths have the following properties (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022c):

  1. Attribution of death “from COVID-19” versus “with COVID-19” is based on a qualitative evaluation susceptible to bias
  2. 4 % of deaths “from COVID-19” in Australian death certificates had non-COVID-19 “causal sequences of events” and/or “pre-existing chronic conditions”
  • The deaths statistics by age and sex are typical of all-cause old-age deaths statistics in Western societies
  1. The three “most commonly certified acute disease outcomes of COVID-19” were: pneumonia (61.4 %), respiratory failure (15 %), and other infections (11.2 %)
  2. The three most common pre-existing conditions in certified “with COVID-19” deaths were: chronic cardiac conditions (39.0 %), dementia (30.5 %), and chronic respiratory conditions (17.8 %)

Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that the vaccine injections caused death by providing an additional and significant challenge to already chronically frail or vulnerable subjects, and that COVID-19 itself may not have provided a significant contribution, as we already demonstrated for the Southern states of the USA (Rancourt et al., 2022), and as is apparent for India (Rancourt, 2022).

In this context, and given the “most commonly certified acute disease outcomes of COVID-19”, it is important to note that Australia, like virtually all Western jurisdictions, dramatically reduced its antibiotic prescriptions after a pandemic was declared by the WHO (Gillies et al., 2021; Rancourt et al., 2022). This would mean that, not only were chronically frail residents challenged with the toxic injections, but they may also not have been provided the normal treatments against respiratory bacterial infections.

Finally, we note that there is starting to be some acknowledgement in the mainstream media suggesting that vaccine harm in Australia may be much larger than generally admitted by the medical establishment. The recent public testimony and submission to Parliament of former federal MP and former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Dr. Kerryn Phelps stands out in this regard (Chung, 2022).

In conclusion, the declared pandemic would have had to entirely spare Australia any detectable deaths for more than a year, while it raged in many other places around the world, before it showed any virulence, suddenly in mid-April 2021, when vaccines coincidentally were being rolled out to the elderly and most vulnerable. In addition, a sharp peak in all-cause mortality (mid-January to mid-February 2022) would be synchronous with the rapid deployment of the vaccine booster (3rd doses) purely by coincidence, without any explanation (plausible or not) being provided.

On the contrary, our analysis leads us to conclude that the excess mortality in the vaccination period (31±1 thousand deaths, mid-April 2021 through August 2022; 14 % larger all-cause mortality than in recent pre-vaccination periods of same time duration; 62 million administered vaccine doses), which is more than twice the deaths registered as from or with COVID‑19, and the sharp peak in all-cause mortality (mid-January to mid-February 2022; 2,600 deaths), which is synchronous with the rapid rollout of the booster (9.4 million booster doses, same time period) are causally associated with the COVID-19 vaccine. We give thirteen numbered arguments as to why we make this conclusion.

The corresponding vaccine injection fatality ratio (vIFR) is approximately 0.05 %, which is intermediate between the value from VAERS for ages 65+ years with the Janssen vaccine in the USA (0.008 %) and the value for India’s vaccine rollout and for Southern states of the USA subjected to “vaccine equity” campaigns (1 %).

Of course, this is diametrically opposite to the proposal that the COVID-19 vaccine would have saved any lives; a proposal that is not substantiated by extensive study of all-cause mortality data (Rancourt et al., 2022).

*

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Dhar et al. (2021): Dhar MS, Marwal R, Vs R, Ponnusamy K, Jolly B, Bhoyar RC, Sardana V, Naushin S, Rophina M, Mellan TA, Mishra S, Whittaker C, Fatihi S, Datta M, Singh P, Sharma U, Ujjainiya R, Bhatheja N, Divakar MK, Singh MK, Imran M, Senthivel V, Maurya R, Jha N, Mehta P, A V, Sharma P, Vr A, Chaudhary U, Soni N, Thukral L, Flaxman S, Bhatt S, Pandey R, Dash D, Faruq M, Lall H, Gogia H, Madan P, Kulkarni S, Chauhan H, Sengupta S, Kabra S; Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG)‡, Gupta RK, Singh SK, Agrawal A, Rakshit P, Nandicoori V, Tallapaka KB, Sowpati DT, Thangaraj K, Bashyam MD, Dalal A, Sivasubbu S, Scaria V, Parida A, Raghav SK, Prasad P, Sarin A, Mayor S, Ramakrishnan U, Palakodeti D, Seshasayee ASN, Bhat M, Shouche Y, Pillai A, Dikid T, Das S, Maitra A, Chinnaswamy S, Biswas NK, Desai AS, Pattabiraman C, Manjunatha MV, Mani RS, Arunachal Udupi G, Abraham P, Atul PV, Cherian SS. /// Genomic characterization and epidemiology of an emerging SARS-CoV-2 variant in Delhi, India. /// Science. 2021 Nov 19;374(6570):995-999. doi: 10.1126/science.abj9932. Epub 2021 Oct 14. PMID: 34648303; PMCID: PMC7612010. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj9932

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Mörz (2022): Mörz, M. A /// Case Report: Multifocal Necrotizing Encephalitis and Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccination against COVID-19. /// Vaccines 2022, 10, 1651. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10101651

Parham and Michael (2011): Paul E. Parham, Edwin Michael /// Outbreak properties of epidemic models: The roles of temporal forcing and stochasticity on pathogen invasion dynamics /// Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 271, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 1-9, ISSN 0022-5193, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.11.015 .

Rancourt (2022): Rancourt, DG /// Probable causal association between India’s extraordinary April-July 2021 excess-mortality event and the vaccine rollout /// Correlation Research in the Public Interest, 5 December 2022 /// https://correlation-canada.org/report-probable-causal-association-between-indias-extraordinary-april-july-2021-excess-mortality-event-and-the-vaccine-rollout/

Rancourt et al. (2022): Rancourt, D.G., Baudin, M. and Mercier, J. /// COVID-Period Mass Vaccination Campaign and Public Health Disaster in the USA: From age/state-resolved all-cause mortality by time, age-resolved vaccine delivery by time, and socio-geo-economic data /// Research Gate (2 August 2022) /// https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362427136_COVID-Period_Mass_Vaccination_Campaign_and_Public_Health_Disaster_in_the_USA_From_agestate-resolved_all-cause_mortality_by_time_age-resolved_vaccine_delivery_by_time_and_socio-geo-economic_data /// Also available at: https://vixra.org/abs/2208.0023

Schneider et al. (2021): Schneider, J., Sottmann, L., Greinacher, A. et al. /// Postmortem investigation of fatalities following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines. /// Int J Legal Med 135, 2335–2345 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-021-02706-9

Schwab et al. (2022): Schwab, C., Domke, L.M., Hartmann, L. et al. /// Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination. /// Clin Res Cardiol (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00392-022-02129-5

Sessa et al. (2021): Sessa, F.; Salerno, M.; Esposito, M.; Di Nunno, N.; Zamboni, P.; Pomara, C. /// Autopsy Findings and Causality Relationship between Death and COVID‑19 Vaccination: A Systematic Review. /// J. Clin. Med. 2021, 10, 5876. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm10245876

United Nations (2022): United Nations data /// “Deaths by month of death” /// UN (11 August 2022), accessed 2 December 2022, https://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=POP&f=tableCode%3A65

Yoshimura et al. (2022): Yukihiro Yoshimura, Hiroaki Sasaki, Nobuyuki Miyata, Kazuhito Miyazaki, Koji Okudela, Yoko Tateishi, Hiroyuki Hayashi, Ai Kawana-Tachikawa, Hiromichi Iwashita, Kazuho Maeda, Yoko Ihama, Yasuyoshi Hatayama, Akihide Ryo, Natsuo Tachikawa  /// An autopsy case of COVID-19-like acute respiratory distress syndrome after mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 vaccination  /// International Journal of Infectious Diseases 121 (2022) 98–101, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2022.04.057

Notes

[1] Cumulative COVID-19 vaccine doses administered: All doses, including boosters, are counted individually; administered 14 April 2021 through 25 August 2022, 63.01M – 1.36M = 62M. Our World in Data, accessed 16 December 2022: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~AUS&Metric=Vaccine+doses

[2] Estimated using cumulative COVID-19 vaccine doses administered: All doses, including boosters, are counted individually; administered 8 January 2022 through 21 February 2022, 53.4M – 44.0M = 9.4M. Our World in Data, accessed 16 December 2022: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~AUS&Metric=Vaccine+doses

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense


Appendix 1: Step-wise increase in all-cause mortality occurs in mid-April 2021 in all the states in Australia

Here, we show the all-cause mortality data for Australia and for each state of Australia (as labelled in the panels of Figure A1-F1), and including the 72-week vaccination period integrations, described in the present article.

We also provide the following table of corresponding vaccine-period excess mortalities.

Table A1-T1: Integrated all-cause mortality (72 weeks), differences and ratios

*The baseline-period 72-week-integrated mortality was estimated from an inspection of the values on the graphs (Figure A1-F1) for periods prior to the vaccination period, in such a way as to be representative of the value that would be predicted in the absence of the vaccination campaign and its effects.

Figure A1-F1 (containing 9 panels) follows.

APPENDIX 2: Mid-January to mid-February 2022 mortality peak not caused by a heatwave

This appendix is concerned with the question of whether the mid-January to mid‑February 2022 prominent peak in all-cause mortality in Australia (occurring in NSW, VIC and QLD; see Appendix 1) can be due to a climatic heatwave.

It is important to address this question because sharp all-cause mortality peaks are often associated with exceptional summer heatwaves in mid-latitude countries (e.g. Rancourt et al., 2022, cited in the present article).

The most important heatwave to affect Eastern Australia over more than the last three decades was in 2009. The government report [Australian Government – Bureau of Meteorology, Special Climate Statement 17: The exceptional January-February 2009 heatwave in south-eastern Australia (issued 4 February 2009, updated 12 February 2009), http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs17d.pdf , accessed 18 December 2022] describes it this way:

“An exceptional heatwave affected south-eastern Australia during late January and early February 2009. The most extreme conditions occurred in northern and eastern Tasmania, most of Victoria and adjacent border areas of New South Wales, and southern South Australia, with many records set both for high day and night time temperatures as well as for the duration of extreme heat.

There were two major episodes of exceptional high temperatures, from 28-31 January and 6-8 February, with slightly lower but still very high temperatures persisting in many inland areas through the period in between.”

This exceptional 2009 heatwave did not cause any significant peak in all-cause mortality, as shown in Figure A2-F1, below. In fact, heatwaves essentially do not cause peaks in all-cause mortality in Australia, presumably because it’s always hot in the summers. Figure A2-F1 does not show any peaks, 1980-2022, which could be interpreted as summer heatwave peaks.

Also, there are no Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology, Special Climate Statements (SCSs) 2006-2022, which can be interpreted to be associated with or similarly associated to the mid-January to mid‑February 2022 prominent peak in all‑cause mortality occurring in Eastern Australia (NSW, VIC, QLD) (see Appendix 1). See the list of SCSs here: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/ . Archived on 18 December 2022 here: https://archive.vn/WDlPA

And the Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology, “Monthly Weather Review, Australia, January 2022” report [Product code IDCKGC1AR1. Prepared on 27 April 2022. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/mwr/aus/mwr-aus-202201.pdf ] makes no mention of any climate or weather event that could be associated with the mid-January to mid‑February 2022 prominent peak in all-cause mortality occurring in Eastern Australia (NSW, VIC, QLD).

That the 2022 all-cause mortality peak of concern is not due to a heatwave is again corroborated by the fourteen maximum daily temperature maps for Australia shown below, for the years and dates as indicated on the maps.

[Source: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ . Specifically: http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/temp/rmse_archive.jsp?map=maxave&period=daily&year=2022&month=1&day=12 ]

The mid-January to mid‑February 2022 prominent peak in all-cause mortality occurring in Eastern Australia (NSW, VIC, QLD) (see Appendix 1) — seen in Figure A2-F1 and in Figures 1, 2, 4A and 6 of the present article — is not due to any climate, weather or temperature event or anomaly.

Figure A2-F1: All-cause mortality in Australia, all ages, from January 1980 through August 2022. Light-blue: All-cause mortality by month, left y-scale. Dark-blue: Integrated all-cause mortality over successive and non-overlapping 16-month periods (May 2021 through August 2022, for most recent period), right y-scale. Each point is positioned on the x-axis at the 1st month of its 16-month integration period. The labelled vertical line shows January 2009, which had a record-breaking heatwave and virtually no associated increase in mortality. February has lower mortality because it generally has only 28 days. (Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022a) for 2015-2022; United Nations (2022) for 1980-2014.)


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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NATO Decides to Attack Russia in Ukraine

December 21st, 2022 by Kurt Nimmo

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If Olga Lebedeva and Pravda.ru can be believed, NATO is on the verge of entering the war in Ukraine.

“Such announcements were heard from officials of the Polish Ministry of Defence, the General Staff of the NATO alliance, officers of the French army and (of course) the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence,” according to Lebedeva.

“The main reason would be the very next Russian general offensive that NATO is planning and which according to it would decimate the Ukrainian army not only in the Donbass but also on the Kiev side (many Russian units are in combat situation in Belarus at the borders with Ukraine),” explains Rusreinfo.ru, a Russian website.

But NATO has always been very clear: Ukraine CANNOT LOSE. For Washington, the only solution would therefore be for NATO forces to enter Ukraine, hoping that this will end the Russian offensive. The calculation is that Vladimir Putin will not want to directly face NATO with the possible (nuclear) consequences, and will therefore then retreat.

The idea here is that the entrance of NATO into the conflict will strike fear into Russia and Putin and his generals and they will rethink the SMO and retreat with tails tucked.

Not going to happen.

In any case, this is a very bad calculation since it is clear that Russia will go to the end of the mission assigned by Vladimir Putin. Counting that our forces will retreat in the face of a few NATO regiments whose arms problems Russia is experiencing is a ridiculous calculation… and which will very quickly prove to be extremely deadly.

Is it possible the USG and NATO believe their own lies about Ukraine?

The war propaganda corporate media insists Ukraine is winning. “Russia is losing the war it started against Ukraine thanks to military support from the West. Now, NATO should provide the Ukrainian Armed Forces with the offensive firepower and air defense Ukraine needs to end it,” writes a USG propagandist working for the 1945 website, a site churning out pro-war commentary for the propaganda media.

Fatigue has set in as the USG and its “partners” in Europe have emptied their arsenals. “Despite Washington’s assurance of supporting Kyiv for ‘as long as it takes,’… the fact is the U.S. will not be able to maintain the supply of high-end ammunition to Ukraine indefinitely,” reports the International Business Times, despite death merchants cranking out new bombs and missiles.

The USG is determined to follow through on its delusional policy of victory in Ukraine and the project to destroy Russia. Rusreinfo.ru notes

the European and American governments have an agenda to follow, made urgent by the announced dollar crash on the one hand and by the current economic debacle that will only increase in Western countries. A state of war would trigger martial law and global control of the population as it has been developed in recent years under the pretext of “covid”. They may also think that a state of war would reunite the citizens behind them.

Another delusion. Indeed, the American people are opposed to Russia’s SMO and support Ukraine, while at the same time, thanks to USG propaganda and omission, are ignorant of what Ukraine’s ultranationalists have done to ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. In essence, the American people are supporting the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk. They are unwittingly facilitating atrocities reminiscent of those committed by Hitler and the Nazis (the Nazi Reichskommissariat Ukraine tested genocide in Eastern Europe under a Führer Decree).

Unlike Biden, and his neocon and humanitarian interventionist “advisers,” the American people want a peace deal and an end to the war. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs conducted a poll last month.

A just-completed November 18-20 Chicago Council survey finds that large majorities of Americans continue to support US assistance to Ukraine, both economically and with military equipment. But as the fighting drags into winter, the overall US public is now divided on whether the United States should support Ukraine as long as it takes or if it should urge Kyiv to settle for peace as soon as possible. (Emphasis added.)

Not that the political class, the uniparty, taking orders from a global elite, will be bothered with the wishes of the American people, who only matter every two years during elections of handpicked selected candidates.

“U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley held a joint news conference on Wednesday after a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group,” Reuters reported, around the same time the results of the above poll were released.

Austin and Milley both said the United States would support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

Milley, the top U.S. general, cautioned that Russia still had significant combat power inside of Ukraine despite suffering military setbacks in its invasion.

“The probability of a Ukrainian military victory — defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they claim as Crimea — the probability of that happening anytime soon is not high, militarily,” Milley told the news conference.

“Politically, there may be a political solution where, politically, the Russians withdraw. That’s possible,” he added, saying Russia “right now is on its back.”

Milley and Austin are pushing the USG “take down Russia” narrative, never mind this will not happen and Putin has warned existential threats levied against Russia will result in a thermonuclear response.

Russia will not exit Ukraine short of accomplishing its objectives—making certain NATO is not on its border, disarming a Russophobic post-coup ultranationalist government, and making sure Ukronazis are unable to terrorize and bomb ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (and now Russia proper in Kursk, Briansk, Shebekino, Belgorod, and Klintsy).

Earlier this month, the Pentagon urged Ukraine to strike inside Russia. Now there is talk of a direct NATO intervention in Ukraine.

The USG realizes the Ukrainians are unable to defeat Russia, thus the only option is for direct NATO involvement above and beyond the current proxy war. On December 12, Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian secretary general of NATO, admitted the alliance will soon enter the fray directly.

Adam Kinzinger, a House Republican, proposed a new Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) allowing USG troops to enter Ukraine to restore “the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event Russia uses WMDs. According to The Libertarian Institute,

Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kinzinger has repeatedly pushed to escalate a situation that his policy helped to create. On March 3, 2022, he publicly called for a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine to “prevent Russian air attacks.” If enforced, a no-fly zone in Ukraine would see U.S. forces shooting down Russian planes and even attacking targets in Russia.

Keep in mind the Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives in January.  It is reported they will attempt to audit the weapons going to Ukraine. However, this does not mean they oppose USG involvement in the war. In March, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Putin a “ruthless thug” who, according to USA Today, “invaded a sovereign country and is responsible for the killing of innocent people.” Biden, Pelosi, and McConnell are on the same page, thus underscoring the unanimity of the uniparty in regard to killing Russians.

No mention of the millions of people killed by the USG war machine since the end of WW2. A “carefully researched article by James A. Lucas documents the more than 20 million lives lost resulting from US led wars, military coups and intelligence ops carried out in the wake of WWII, in what is euphemistically called the ‘post-war era’ (1945- ),” writes Michel Chossudovsky.

Lucas writes the USG and its satraps are responsible for mass deaths in Angola, Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominican Republic, East Timor, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hungry, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israeli-Palestinian War, Korea, Laos, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Sudan, Vietnam, Yugoslavia (and Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, not mentioned).

Most Americans are unaware the USG is the world’s most prolific mass killer since the end of WWII.

This instilled ignorance, and the basic intellectual incuriosity of the average American, will allow the USG to dive further into the bloody Ukraine war, and without large antiwar demonstrations of the sort that came to an end during the USG invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many leaders and members of former antiwar movements and organizations were subsumed into the uniparty, on the “Democrat” side under Barack Obama, the man responsible for 30,000 deaths in Libya and the importation of jihadi cutthroats into Syria’s “civil war,” actually a covert campaign by the USG and Israel to reduce Syria to the failed state status suffered by Iraq after two brutal invasions and a medieval sanctions regime (resulting in a million Iraqis killed).

So long as the war propaganda media can divert attention away from the violent policies and behavior of the USG and its neoliberal predatory agenda, and the people remain ignorant of reality and mindlessly offer consensus for mass murder in the name of a perverse reformulation of democracy, there will be no stopping psychopaths from dragging the country into a war that very well may spell extinction for humanity and a majority of all living creatures.

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from KNG

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Today is an official day of mourning in Panama. It is a bank holiday and most businesses are closed.  

Americans like to think they did Panama a favor by invading and ridding the country of the dictator. If you go to the official web site, you will see cited a very LOW number of deaths due to Bush Senior’s 1989 invasion, which in fact killed thousands of Panamanian citizens.  

There was no mention in the US press that Noriega was a CIA asset, but declassified documents revealed that he was.  

He was trained at the notorious School of the Americas in torture methods. He was groomed for the position of president, and then after the mysterious plane crash that killed strongman Omar Torrijos, the extremely popular leader responsible for the handover of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians under Carter, the reins of government were turned over to the vicious dictator Manuel Noriega, all with Washington’s blessings.  

When Noriega started bad mouthing the US, Bush went after him, first organizing a coup, which succeeded, but the US betrayed the coup plotters, who were then punished by Noriega. The US then went after the army group that had tried to cooperate with the US to oust Noriega, illegally sending troops to areas outside the Canal Zone. The purpose of this betrayal was to take complete control of the military power in Panama, and this led to the bloody invasion that we are commemorating today.  

There was indiscriminate shooting of civilians, as described in the documentary linked below. The Panamanians I have spoken with all agree that the US invaders in 1989 were vicious killers, very different from the US service people in the Canal Zone, who had been very friendly with the locals, giving them well-paid jobs, which disappeared after the signing of the Carter-Torrijos treaty.  

In this web site you will see president Cortizo taking credit for making this a national Day of Mourning. In fact, I was here on Dec 20 during one of the years of the Martinelli presidency and I remember that president commemorating the Panamanians who died in the invasion.  

But lying is what politicians do, and their henchmen are journalists.  

This documentary is the closest you will get to a true picture of what actually happened, click the image below to watch the video.

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Featured image: Elements of 1st Bn, 508th Infantry parachuting into a drop zone, during training, outside of Panama City. (Licensed under the Public Domain)

 

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The contradiction behind the messages is clear.  This was a “sophisticated” operation involving surveillance.  It was planned. Those unfortunate police officers were lured to an isolated Queensland property where they were “executed”.  The details were initially sketchy, but that did not prevent the general sentiment from simmering away: this was, in the words of a statement by the Queensland Police Union, a “senseless murder of colleagues”.  That account has been trotted out with unanimity.

It began as an inquiry about a missing person, involving four officers from Tara sent to a Wieambilla property in the Western Downs region, some 270km west of the Queensland capital, Brisbane.  According to Ian Leavers, President of the Queensland Police Union, two officers, constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, were shot on arrival around 4.45pm in “a ruthless, calculated and targeted execution of our colleagues”. Of the two remaining officers, one was wounded, while the other escaped.  A neighbour, Alan Dare, going in to assist, was also killed.

The three individuals accused of perpetrating the shootings were brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train, and Gareth’s wife Stacey Train.  They were subsequently killed by specialist police forces at the site.

Murder, in many instances, is filled with sense and planning.  As disturbing it may well be, an intention to kill can conform to a set of presumptions that make sense within a particular world view.  That view is often alloyed by a number of disturbing influences, the contaminant that sets the fuse.

To that end, it would be appropriate to investigate what the motivations of these figures are.  But efforts to do so have been uneven.  Media outlets have not held back in portraying the individuals as members of the mad, the deranged, the delusional.  These cloddish efforts do little to illuminate and much to obfuscate.

The quest to not understand has been aided by the conspiracy label attached to the three individuals.  Gareth Train, for one, believed that the 1996 Port Arthur massacre had been a false-flag operation; tactical police had set out to target “conspiracy talkers” and “truthers”.  He also had a YouTube channel, since deleted, replete with posts covering conspiracies on COVID, anti-vaccination and the sovereign citizen movement.  That same channel featured footage from Gareth and Stacey Train showing the prelude to the attack, including coverage of the shootings.

An ABC investigative report into the background of the trio noted, among other things, the conduct of Gareth and Tracey on their move in 2011 to the small town of Camooweal, about 13km from the Northern Territory border in far west Queensland.  “We were invited to tea at their house,” noted a resident, who noticed “their pig dogs inside the house in cages” and Gareth’s “big collection of hunting knives and he then told us he was a social worker.”

Gareth, the accounts note, had a certain lusting for blood.  “Sometimes we would see Gareth with his knives running around with dogs chasing the pigs,” another resident stated.  Given the ecstasy shown by many an Australian in massacring “feral” invasive species, not to mention the occasional native one, this crude behaviour is hardly eyebrow raising.  But this is Gareth, the cop killer, so all must be exceptional and unusual in his universe.

A closer reading of such accounts suggests that what the Trains did was less a case of being remarkable than the fact it was done so openly.  Slaughtering animals is all good, but do not do it in front of children.  Paul (not his real name) recalled how Gareth would “butcher” the pigs and hang the carcasses facing the local school.  “There would be a smell of offal and blood running onto the footy field.”

Using the analytical template for the standard nutter and the unhinged lunatic, interest focused on Gareth Train’s views expressed on fora dedicated to conspiracies and survivalism.  “I currently live on my rural property in western Queensland were [sic] I have been building an ‘ark’[,] homesteading for the last five years preparing to survive tomorrow. I am not interested in indoctrinating or convincing anyone of anything.”

The last line is worth recalling but has gotten lost in the speculative literature warning about rampaging conspiracy theorists willing to tear their way through the security and law enforcement establishment.  It’s easy to forget that the survivalist, conspiracy tribe seeking arks and sanctuaries from impending cataclysm is a large one.  It includes a good number of terrified billionaires, among them the libertarian Peter Thiel, who hopes to set up shop in New Zealand when calamity strikes.

Nicholas Evans, an academic in policing and emergency management, illustrates  the fear of his colleagues: “[t]he killings are the clearest example of what security, policing researchers, and law enforcement have warned of – conspiracy beliefs can be motivators for actual or attempted violence against specific people, places and organisations.”

In the saturation of grief, the police have been less than forthcoming about why they sent junior officers to this particular property in the first place.  Queensland Police Service commissioner Katarina Carroll conceded she did not have the “full extent of information” about the Trains.

The Queensland Police have resolutely refused to answer questions about whether officers had made a prior visit to the property, or the extent of knowledge about the shooters.

The now deleted YouTube channel features videos suggesting a history with authorities, expressed through paranoid language.  And as with much in the way of paranoia, kernels of veracity might be picked.  “You attempt to abduct us using contractors,” goes one caption.  “You attempt to intimidate and target us with your Raytheon Learjets and planes.  You sent ‘covert’ assets out here to my place in the bush.  So what is your play here?  To have me and my wife murdered during a state police ‘welfare check’?  You already tried that one.”

Gareth’s brother Nathaniel was also one who came across the police radar, having driven a 4WD packed with loaded guns and military knives through a New South Wales border gate into Queensland last December.  This was in breach of COVID-19 regulations.  Nathaniel was subsequently found disposing of some of the items in a creek near the Queensland town of Talwood, an incident reported to police.  The fact that these included three loaded firearms might have struck law enforcement as odd.

On Radio National on December 21, the Queensland Police Union again reiterated the view that there was no credence to claims that police had made a previous visit to the property.  Instead of discussing such details, Leavers has something else in mind: purchasing the property of the shooters in Wieambilla, rendering the profane sacred.

This macabre object has a broader purpose: “The last thing we want to see is the anti-vaxxers, pro-gun, conspiracy theorists to get this land and use it for their own warped and dangerous views.”  Comprehending or even seeking to understand such individuals was simply intolerable.  “They are absolutely un-Australian and I don’t want it to be used for them to promote themselves.”  Let ignorance reign so that others may live happily.

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

Featured image is from Queensland Police News

Jordan Vows Crack Down on Protestors “Tied to Terrorism”

December 21st, 2022 by Steven Sahiounie

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Yesterday, three more policemen were killed in the same area that saw the murder of the deputy police chief on Thursday and the wounding of two others. The unrest and murders occurred in the southern area near Maan.  The area has supported the Radical Islamic ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS.  Large amounts of guns and ammunition were seized by the police. Experts are wondering if this might be the beginning of an uprising in Jordan. Using the cover of fuel price increases as the catalyst of a deadly uprising, recalling the 2011 staged uprising in Deraa, Syria which was engineered by the Muslim Brotherhood on the heels of a similar US-NATO attack on Libya.

Funeral of the Jordanian police officer that was killed by the Muslim Brotherhood

Dozens of people have been arrested by Jordanian security forces, accused of involvement in recent protests and violence sparked by the rise in fuel prices.

Colonel Abdul Razzaq Dalabeh, the deputy police chief of Maan province, was killed after being shot in the head on December 15 in Al-Husseiniya after he confronted protesters.  Two additional policemen were shot and wounded in the same area.  Reinforcements were called up to crack down on the protests and to find the killer of Dalabeh.

Fuel prices have almost doubled in Jordan in the last year. The diesel used by trucks and buses has caused major transport cost increases. Jordan depends on imports from neighboring countries by land.  Home heating oil costs have made people choose between eating and heating in a country that is bitterly cold in winter and may be blanketed with snow in places.

More than a week ago, cab and truck drivers began strike actions. Bus drivers and merchants joined them with shops shuttered in protest on December 14.  Protests then escalated to blocking roads with burning tires and confrontations with security forces.

Previous fuel increases and protests

In 1999, Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein took the throne as King of Jordan.  The following year Bashar al-Assad was elected President of Syria.

In 2012, Jordan increased gasoline prices by 10% which resulted in protests. That was the year after the Syrian conflict began.

Jordan has no oil or gas resources

Jordan is located in the Middle East and surrounded by some oil-rich nations like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but Jordan has no oil or gas resources, is dependent on imports, and is affected by the increasing prices of energy caused in part by the Ukrainian conflict.

The IMF loan

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is headquartered in Washington, DC. approved a $2 billion loan in 2012, and called for Jordan to increase their fuel prices to the consumers, which resulted in protests.  Jordan’s economy was under extreme pressure as thousands of Syrian refugees poured over the border into the Zaatari camp.

Jordan participated in the attack on Syria

The King of Jordan played a pivotal role in the US-NATO attack on Syria orchestrated by President Obama.  The King can’t say no to the US because Jordan receives a great deal of its annual budget from the US government. Many of the weapons and fighters in Syria came through the Jordanian border at Deraa, which was the staging place of the “uprising”.  The US government sent the weapons they had confiscated in Libya, while overthrowing the government there, to be transported to Syria via the Jordanian border at Deraa.  The Al Omari Mosque in Deraa in March 2011 became the arsenal for the terrorists following the Muslim Brotherhood ideology. Jordan has always had Muslim Brotherhood followers in the country and has suffered violent attacks by them in the past. The Muslim Brotherhood is an internationally recognized terrorist group following Radical Islam, but the US has never banned it.

Part of the US plan for regime change in Syria was the establishment of refugee camps, such as in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. The refugees living in camps perpetuate an image that Syria is not safe enough to live in, and this promotes the regime change goal.  In reality, Syrian refugees have returned from Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Lebanese government is in the process of sending refugees back home, especially those that were in the Arsal camp which was populated by Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and their wives and children. In the upcoming Turkish Presidential elections in six months, all the parties vying for the office have pledged to forcefully return all the refugees to Syria.

Jordan is facing violence carried out by domestic terrorists. President Assad had said that if you feed a monster, it may turn to bite you.  The monster is Radical Islam. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the US Congress and admitted, “we created them”, which referred to Al Qaeda and how the CIA had created the terrorist group to fight for US interests in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.  Al Qaeda, the US-sponsored Free Syrian Army, Jibhat al-Nusra, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and finally ISIS all have the same ideology, which is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Jordan participated in the US-NATO attack on Syria, and after 12 years is facing the same terrorist ideology, but this time directed at the Amman government, instead of Damascus. The monster has turned to bite the hand that fed it.

Israeli occupation

More than half of the 6.3 million population of Jordan is Palestinian.  They are the survivors and descendants of the founding of Israel in 1948 and were made refugees after their homes, farms, and businesses were taken by Israeli settlers.  The UN has registered over 2 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan.

In April, the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the UAE met together in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The leaders called on Israel to stop all actions that undermine the two-state solution and to return to negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict under UN resolutions.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi received Jordan’s King Abdullah and Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed at Cairo Airport, and they stressed “the importance of sustaining efforts to restore calm in Jerusalem, and the need to respect the legal and historical status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

On December 17, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority called King Abdullah II of Jordan and said, “the State of Palestine and its people are keen on the security and stability of Jordan”, and that “the security and prosperity of Jordan are part of the security and prosperity of Palestine”.

Abbas thanked the King for his unending support of the Palestinian cause, which is tied to the Jordanian custodianship over Islamic and Christian holy places in Jerusalem.

The King is the custodian of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and is a 41st-generation direct descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.  The king of Jordan, its mainly Palestinian population, and his Palestinian wife, Queen Rania, are all tied to the past, present, and future of Palestine.

On December 18, Israeli occupation forces blocked the main entrance to the town of Azzun, east of Qalqilia city in the northern West Bank. Israeli forces shut down the main entrance to the town with a metal gate, blocking the movement of Palestinian traffic through the entrance.

Human rights groups have said,

“Restricting movement is one of the main tools Israel employs to enforce its regime of occupation. Israel imposes restrictions on the movement of Palestinians within the West Bank, and travel between it and the Gaza Strip, into East Jerusalem, Israel, and abroad.”

The violence now brewing in Jordan may be tied to the King’s resistance to the occupation of Palestine.

Massive Protests in Jordan against the rise of fuel prices

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

All images in this article are from MD; featured image: King of Jordan giving his condolences to the family of the police officer that was killed

The Hidden History of the Korean War

December 21st, 2022 by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

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First published on Global Research in 2014.

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali (born Cassius M. Clay) is probably the most famous draft resister in US history. When refusing to accept the draft in 1967, during the American war against Vietnam he told the Press:

“No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end… Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville[1] are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights.”

The only war in the official history of the United State that was lost, was also the first war in which Jim Crow, the apartheid regime created in the US after the Civil War and Reconstruction, was not the policy of the US military. How African-Americans came again to challenge the imperialist war machine in the 1960s cannot be understood without uncovering the decades of silence and deception that have covered the first war the US regime truly lost—although it has never officially ended.

Bruce Cumings, certainly the most authoritative if not the sole US expert on this mysterious conflict, wrote,

Americans know the Korean War as a “forgotten war”, which is another way of saying that generally they do not know it. A war that killed upwards of four million people, 35,000 of them Americans, is remembered mainly as an odd conflict sandwiched between the good war (World War II) and the bad war (Vietnam).”

This reflects what might be called an especially American form of Manichaeism—for Americans there is only the “good” and the “bad”. The ability to judge either their own individual behaviour or that of their government is limited by this narrow dualism, a recurrent pattern in the way they perceive both domestic and foreign affairs. It is what made Jim Crow a most stringent and insidious form of social engineering: white and black, good and bad, sin and salvation, communism (without understanding it) and democracy (without having it). Bipolar disorder predates the pharmaceutical and confessional waves of the last two decades. In fact this disorder, going back to the country’s founding myth, has been a fundamental obstacle to comprehending the vicious invasion of a fiercely independent Asian country, under the pretext of preserving these supposedly clear moral categories. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, staunch Presbyterian and corporate mercenary, declared the necessity of a “Christian war” in Asia.[2]

I.F. Stone, a unique American journalist, tried to breach the insipid and seemingly impenetrable barrier in the consciousness of Americans when he first published his Hidden History of the Korean War in 1952—in the midst of brutal fighting in Korea and political purging in his own land. Stone wrote:

“Writing in an atmosphere much like that of full war, I realised that I could be persuasive only if I utilised material which could not be challenged by those who accept the official government point of view. I have relied exclusively, therefore, on United States and United Nations documents, and respected American and British newspaper sources.”[3]

Stone’s history is damning although he deliberately used only published sources and not the disclosure of classified documents. His hidden history is a case study in how the control of the narrative—to use a modern term—successfully prevented and prevents obvious criminal conduct by the government and military from being recognised for what it is.

Hence Professor Cumings asserted that Stone’s non-conformist history “is a textbook on how to read… People with a built-in indifference to history are ill accustomed to retrospective digging, to lifting up rugs, to searching for subterranean forces and tendencies. Exploring the labyrinth of history is alien to the American soul, perhaps because an optimistic people find knowledge of the past too burdensome in the present”[4]

But just maybe even more problematic are the basic lies upon which the US founding myth was based and had to be enforced upon every new wave of cheap immigrant labour imported to dilute the poison of Negro slavery and Native American annihilation from which the hypocritical optimism was born. The US war against Korea was only possible because the US regime had emerged from the “good war” with the only industrial economy intact and capable of fulfilling its founder’s “manifest destiny” to replace the empires of their European forebears. This manifest destiny replaced Britain’s “white man’s burden” with the war against communism and nationalism. This optimism, born from decimation of a continent filled with virtually defenceless indigenous, driven by uprooted and exploited labour, was only possible with a culture of forgetting, forgetting the mass murder, the slavery, the poverty and oppression to which immigrants had been subjected in Europe before they came to North America. Two world wars had taught Germans and Japanese their tenuous place in this white man’s republic, racially divisible under god.

I.F. Stone explains the way the war was fabricated by a man William Manchester called an “American Caesar”.[5] He shows that this nominally United Nations war was a process of transforming the continental warrior state into a full-fledged global war machine for whom the very scent of peace was deemed revolting, esp. for dividends. Repeatedly Stone refers to the threat of “peace”. Chapter 15 is called, “Peace alarms”. Chapter 28 is called “Anti-peace offensive”. Chapter 33, “Hiding the Lull” describes how MacArthur’s headquarters worked to conceal the actual decline in combat activity—except US bombing. Chapter 41 is called “Postponing Peace Again”. In fact Stone shows on numerous occasions that the worst fear of those US warlords in Asia and Washington was that “peace might break out”.[6] Even MacArthur’s field commanders lied beyond the distortions for which William Westmoreland would be grated years later. Stone writes:

“Eighth Army Headquarters claimed to have killed or wounded 69,500 of the enemy from January 25 to midnight February 9, an average of about 4,600—or as Headquarters put it, “almost” a “full division” a day. Comparisons with the peak battles of World Wars I and II will indicate what a feat this was… If the figures given out that day at Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway’s Headquarters were correct, then the push through the no man’s land south of Seoul must rank with the Battle of Stalingrad, the climax of World War II…”[7]

This was somehow plausible—and even acceptable– to Americans since they were repeatedly told how their clean-cut American soldiers were confronting endless “hordes” of Asians. Even the British press could not swallow the official reporting. The Daily Mirror published a story headlined: “Fairy Tales from Korea”.[8]

Aside from the exhaustion of the belligerents during the US Civil War—from 1860 – 1865—after the horrific violence waged by the industrialised armies of the mercantile North against the feudal armies of the Southern latifundista, there has been little serious bloodshed in the history of US conquest—at least as far as whites have been concerned. Hence the optimism that prevails among the warmongering classes seems to have arisen from the exceedingly modest waste of white lives in the two hundred years of the republic’s continental and colonial expansion.

Stone repeatedly demonstrates that Douglas MacArthur always lived up to the reputation he enjoyed among his fellow general officers—as a man who knew how to stage a show. MacArthur’s wilful deceit and manipulation of the US media assigned to his headquarters in Tokyo was every bit as contrived as the embedded reporting and isolated journalist pools of the Grenada invasion (1983) and the endless Gulf Wars starting in 1991. It should be no surprise however that a third generation colonial slaughterer should follow his return to the Philippines (where his father had also been military governor) to pursue the conquest of the rest of Asia, absorbing on the way the colonies and dependencies of Europe’s bankrupt empires.

However Stone rightly distinguishes between MacArthur’s limitless egotism and the genteel ambitions of the Northeastern establishment personified in Dean Acheson, whom the British antecedents thought “was their picture of what a foreign secretary should be: cultivated, personable and superbly tailored.”[9] Where Stone becomes problematic is precisely in this aspect of his analysis. If MacArthur and the rest of the military establishment in Washington were bent on presenting the war in terms of the controlling narrative: good v. bad, communist v. democracy, Christianity v. atheism, and ultimately whites v. non-whites, who were the real targets of the propaganda—the psychological operations at the core of the war against Korea. What made the war against Korea, essentially a civil war to reunify a peninsula that had been colonised by Japan with US brokerage and then partitioned against both Allied promises and the will of the Korean inhabitants, necessary?[10]

It could not have been the general population, including the Black Americans still targets of Jim Crow and white terrorism at home. It could not have been the socialists who emerged in the US as a potent force in the labour movement, abetted by the grudging US alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II. Nor could it have been the average working class man or woman whose claims to a peace dividend were to be foiled by America’s corporate elite. Stone was not privy to NSC 68—promulgated just before 1950 and only declassified in the 1970s. Nonetheless Stone was well aware of the corporate forces prepared to fight against social expenditure but perfectly willing to adopt military Keynesianism if it meant windfall weapons profits.[11]

Stone’s Hidden History leaves us with the facts of war: the total destruction of Korea, esp. north of the 38th parallel. He documents endlessly, from reports in the New York Times and other newspapers of record, that despite the lack of an enemy in the field that had no interest in demolishing its homeland, the Supreme Commander exercised carte blanche (pun intended) to saturate the entire peninsula with high explosives and napalm. The logical conclusion of Stone’s story is that the US regime destroyed non-white Korea—like so many Vietnamese villages thereafter—to save it. But for whom? Stone only hints at the answer.

Today the territory of the Palestinian nation has been virtually obliterated by a US client state. However the debate in the US persists in the same way it did between 1950 and 1953. Perhaps what Stone missed—or was simply unable to say in public—is that same issue which conceals the war against Palestine: Namely the entrenched power of an elite US ruling class.

This imperial consensus however is not uniform in its particular objectives or interests. It only coalesces when there is active warfare. It has only recently been acceptable in albeit limited public venues to discuss the “Israel lobby”. In 1950, it was impossible for anyone to discuss the “China lobby”. Stone tells us that powerful factions in the US elite could not agree whether the dictates of empire meant that US power should be focussed on Europe and the threat posed by the Soviet Union to the expansion of US corporations into European markets or—as the faction to which John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen in CIA belonged felt—directed toward the endless wealth to be plundered in Asia. The evacuation of Britain, France and the Netherlands from their plantation and mining possessions—not least of which the CIA-favoured opium trade, controlled from Shanghai until 1949—promised huge opportunities.

MacArthur’s role ought to be seen in this light. The decision to attempt “rollback” in Asia, rather than “containment” was made possible by the US atomic arsenal. This fearsomely obscene weapon had already been deployed against “non-white hordes” in Japan and appeared no doubt the weapon of choice for US re-conquest of China. Sheer numbers would have made an invasion and occupation of China impossible. The victory of Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party resulted in the expulsion of the last of China’s great warlord drug dealers from the mainland. Not only Chiang Kai-Shek but also his banking and pirate backers in the US, Japan and Britain would have profited immensely from a restoration of the status quo ante.[12] To pursue this goal MacArthur cut the Korean War out of whole cloth and deliberately created conditions which would replicate the rationale used to defend the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The mystery with which Stone left his readers in 1952 was why did the US regime ultimately stop its campaign to conquer China? Was it the repeated refusal of the Chinese and Russians to intervene far enough to provide objective justification for MacArthur’s fake war against communism? Was it the realisation in Washington that having destroyed all of Korea they could not have fought a two front, perhaps even nuclear war? Perhaps it was precisely the outbreak of a precursor to what has been erroneously called “Vietnam syndrome”, the puncturing of pride within the ruling elite and the choice in Washington and New York to make more money at home and in Europe?

According to Gerald Horne, the Korean War was a major catalyst for Truman’s half-hearted attempts to abolish the US apartheid system of Jim Crow.[13] While the war in Korea served well to establish the post-war military-industrial complex, against which Eisenhower belatedly warned, it did not produce the desired domestic harmony. The Korean War was waged at home against every dissident group that had survived the New Deal and the US victory over the Axis. However, by attacking a fiercely nationalist, non-white country while attempting to preserve all the vestiges of centuries of white privilege at home, the elite was forced for a brief moment to choose. Could it crush nationalism (anti-colonialism) abroad and equality at home? Could it win an absolute ideological victory in Europe while terrorising Blacks in America? Could it arm and train segregated military units and construct the national police force which today keeps the largest prison population in the world under lock and key?

Stone does not ask any of those questions. But then these issues were not yet part of the official and respected narrative.

In 1954, the US regime was compelled to use federal authority to suppress the most atrocious practices of its racist system. It could be confronted with this domestic crime all the way through to the finish of its only “bad war”. Mohammed Ali was only born in 1942, less than ten years before the war against Korea started. However he was only the most famous of those Blacks who refused to join in the annihilation of non-whites throughout the world to support liberties never respected at home. Refusing to go to Vietnam—where both the death squads and saturation bombing deployed by the US Armed Forces in Korea were enhanced and modernised–Ali put it quite bluntly. “My enemy is the white people not the Vietcong.” Sometimes the US ruling elite is forced to recognise the potential hazard of such honesty in the face of their own egregious deceit.

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Notes

[1] Louisville, Kentucky, where Mohammed Ali was born.

[2] Stone, p. 25, “He helped draft a manifesto by the Federal Council of Churches that year (1947) calling for a world-wide ‘moral offensive’ by the United States to spread the doctrine of freedom as opposed to Soviet doctrine…” As Stone put it, “the man who in 1943 had been pleading for a ‘Christian peace’ with the Axis no seemed to be advocating a “Christian war” against the USSR.”

[3] Author’s preface

[4] Bruce Cumings, Preface to the 1988 edition.

[5] William Manchester, American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964

[6] Stone, p. 153.

[7] Stone, p. 245.

[8] Stone, p. 242.

[9] Stone, p. 203

[10] Stone, p. 302, Not only the Yalta agreement was violated but the Cairo agreement to restore Korean sovereignty. See here esp. Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War.

[11] Stone, p. 106

[12] Stone, p. 122.

[13] see Gerald Horne, Race to Revolution, New York, 2014. Although Truman issued Executive Order 9981 to end racial discrimination in the US military, it was only in 1952 that the armed forces began forming integrated units—although the allocation of command positions remained race-based well into the early 60s.

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In order to be able accurately to define “victory” in the war in Ukraine, the pre-requisite is to define whom the two sides are that wage this war.

For example: when America fought in WW II, it was waging war in foreign battlefields and with its own troops and weapons, and even if America were to win in any of those battlefields, it still could have been defeated in WW II simply by Hitler’s winning WW II.

Any given battlefield was only a part of the war itself; and that war, WW II, was not defined by any one of its many battlefields. There is a difference between a battlefield in which a war is being waged, versus the war that is being waged.

However: when America fought and still fights in Syria, it wages war on that battlefield against Syria, for regime-change in that nation; and ONLY by replacing Syria’s Government with one that the U.S. Government supports would America (and its allies in that war) “win” that war, in that battlefield (Syria), which is that war’s ONLY battlefield.

In that instance, then, winning that battlefield is the same as winning the war there, by America and its allies, against that nation.

America (unlike in WW II) does not wage this war against Syria by using its own troops and weapons but instead by hiring proxy armies — mainly separatist Kurds and Al Qaeda-led jihadists — in order to achieve there a regime-change that the U.S. Government approves of.

Unless and until that is done, America will have lost the war that it is fighting in Syria. (Perhaps this is a reason why U.S. troops are not fully withdrawn from there though Syria’s Government has repeatedly ordered them to leave: America doesn’t want to lose in Syria, as it did lose in Afghanistan and in Vietnam.) However: the war in Syria is not between Syria’s Government and America’s proxy-armies there; it is instead a war between America and Syria, which is being waged by America in that battlefield, using foreign troops, to defeat Syria.

Similarly, the war in Ukraine is not a war between Ukraine versus Russia, but, in Ukraine’s case, Ukraine is only a proxy battlefield and proxy army on America’s side.

The war in Ukraine is a war that America initiated against Ukraine in February 2014 by America’s coup there that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected and neutralist Government and replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian and pro-American one on Russia’s border in order ultimately to become able to place just 317 miles away from the Kremlin U.S. missiles which would be only a five-minute flight-time away from nuking Russia’s central command — far too little time in order for Russia’s central command to be able to verify that launch and then to launch its own retaliatory missiles.

For America to win that war, by Ukrainians, in the battlefield of Ukraine (i.e., by that proxy army, in that proxy battlefield against Russia) would be to checkmate Russia and so to transform Russia into another U.S. vassal-nation, regardless of what Russians might want — and this is what the U.S. regime demands: “regime-change in Russia.” That is America’s (and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations’) goal there.

For Russia to win that war in the battlefields of Ukraine would be for Russia to defeat the U.S.-imposed government there and to establish in Ukraine not the neutralist Government that had been there before America’s take-over of Ukraine in 2014 but instead a Russian-imposed Government that will order all U.S.-and-allied troops and advisors — including from all of America’s vassal-nations and especially from NATO — out of the country, and close the door, seal Ukraine’s borders against all U.S. vassal-nations.

That would mean telling all Ukrainians who want to leave for “The West” to go and never come back into Ukraine. At that time, Russia would invite the U.S. and its vassal-nations (or ‘allies’) to provide to any such Ukrainian any assistance, financial or otherwise, that the person might need in order to relocate into the U.S. empire. However, even if the U.S.-and-allied side refuse to provide any such assistance, the person must relocate and never come back — even if the person would then be stateless. Anyone who wishes to remain in Ukraine would be required to sign an oath of loyalty to the new, pro-Russian, Ukrainian Government. That would automatically entail the right to vote in the new Ukraine’s future elections.

The only alternative to there being a clear win of this war by either side would be for America to agree to Russia’s demand that America recognize the legitimacy of the then-existing line of separation between the two sides, and for Russia to relocate its own capital away from Moscow, to Novosibirsk (1,900 miles away from Ukraine) or some other city that would be far enough away from NATO so that America would not within the forseeable future any longer be able, at all realistically, to aspire to checkmate against, and grab control over, Russia. That would entail concessions by both sides, no win for either side. (Moving the capital to Novosibirsk would also place the capital near the center of Russia and within its Asian part — better suited for the future, nearer to China, Beijing being 1,865 miles away.) America would continue to be the world’s biggest threat to peace; the only way to stop that would be for Russia to win in Ukraine against America.

America is attempting to carry out the plan that Cecil Rhodes came up with in 1877, and that Harry Truman committed America to on 25 July 1945, and that GHW Bush, starting on 24 February 1990, committed America and its allies to continue at least until Russia becomes conquered. Barack Obama merely started the present phase of this “Rhodesist plan”, a phase that could produce a nuclear WW III and end everything, if Russia fails to achieve a clear win against the U.S. empire.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from commons.com.ua/

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“…and the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame; And on each end of the rifle we’re the same” — John McCutcheon

108 years ago this Christmas Eve something happened in the early months of the “War to End All Wars” that put a tiny little blip of hope in the historical timeline of the organized mass slaughter that is war.

The event was regarded by the professional military officer class to be so profound and so important (and so disturbing) that strategies were immediately put in place that would ensure that such an event could never happen again.

“Christian” Europe was in the fifth month of the war of 1914 – 1918, the so-called Great War that finally ground to a mutually suicidal halt after four years of exhausting trench warfare, with all of the original participants financially, spiritually and morally bankrupted.

British, Scottish, French, Belgian, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbian and Russian clergymen from church pulpits in those Christian nations were doing their part in fomenting a decidedly un-Christ-like patriotic fervor that would result in a holocaust that destroyed four empires, killed upwards of 20 million soldiers and civilians, physically wounded hundreds of millions more and caused the psychological and spiritual decimation of an entire generation of young men whose spiritual care was supposed to be the responsibility of those clergymen.

Christianity, it should be remembered, began as a highly ethical pacifist religion based on the teachings and actions of the nonviolent Jesus of Nazareth (and his pacifist apostles and followers). Christianity survived and thrived despite persecutions until it became the largest religion in the Roman Empire by the time Constantine the Great became emperor and usurped the religion into becoming OK with homicidal violence. Since then, the nations that profess Christianity as their state religion have never allowed the mainline churches to truly exercise the radical peacemaking of the original form of Christianity as Jesus had taught.

So, contrary to the ethical teachings of Jesus, most modern Christian churches have not been active resisters to its particular nation’s imperial aspirations, its nation’s aggressive wars, its nation’s war-makers or its nation’s war profiteers. Instead, the church has, by and large, become a bloody instrument of the satanic in support of whatever sociopathic warmongers and sociopathic corporations are in power.

So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see that the religious leaders on both sides of World War I were convinced that God was on their particular side and therefore not on the side of those professed followers of Jesus that were fingered as enemies on the other side. The incongruity (believing that the same god was blessing the lethal weapons and protecting the doomed sons on both sides of No-Man’s Land) failed to register with the vast majority of combatants and their spiritual counselors.

So, early in the war, pulpits and pews all over Europe reverberated with flag-waving fervor, sending clear messages to the millions of doomed warrior-sons that it was their Christian duty to march off to kill the equally doomed Christian soldiers on the other side of the line. And for the civilians back home, it was their Christian duty to “support the troops” who were destined to return home dead or wounded, psychologically and spiritually broken, disillusioned – and faithless.

A mere five months into this frustrating war (featuring trench warfare, artillery barrages, withering machine gun fire, and, soon to come, unstoppable armored tanks, aerial bombardment and poison gas), the first Christmas of the war on the Western Front offered a respite to the exhausted, freezing and demoralized troops.

Christmas was the holiest of Christian holidays and every soldier in the frozen trenches was slowly coming to the abrupt realization that war was NOT glorious (as they had been led to believe). The new experiences of death, dying, hunger, frostbite, sleep deprivation, shell shock, traumatic brain injuries and homesickness, the traditional hopefulness of the spirit of Christmas had a special meaning for the troops.

Christmas reminded the soldiers of the good food, warm homes and beloved families that they had left behind and which – they now suspected – they might never see again. The soldiers in the trenches desperately sought some respite from the misery of the rat and lice-infested, corpse-infested and increasingly frozen trenches.

They did not yet realize that even if they survived physically, they might not survive psychically or spiritually.

Trench Warfare in 1914

In the excitement leading up to the war, most frontline soldiers had been convinced that God was on their side, that their nation was pre-destined to be victorious and that they would be “home before Christmas” where they would be celebrated as conquering heroes.

Instead, each frontline soldier was at the end of his emotional rope because of the unrelenting artillery barrages against which they were defenseless. If they weren’t killed or physically maimed by the artillery shells and bombs, they would eventually be emotionally destroyed by “shell-shock” (now known as combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder – PTSD).

The soldier-victims of battlefield cruelty often suffered depression, suicidality, hyper-alertness and horrifying nightmares and flashbacks (which was usually misdiagnosed as a “hallucination of unknown cause”, a reality that would condemn millions of future soldiers to be mistakenly diagnosed with schizophrenia and thus mistakenly treated with addictive, brain-altering psych drugs).

Many World War I soldiers suffered any number of traumatic mental and/or neurological abnormalities, including traumatic brain injury, which only became a diagnosable affliction several wars later.

Among the other common war-induced “killers of the soul” were the starvation, the malnutrition, the dehydration, the infections (such as typhus and dysentery), the louse infestations, the trench foot, the frostbite and the gangrenous toes and fingers. If any of the tormented survivors got back home in one piece, they would not really appreciate being treated as military heroes in memorial day parades staged in their honor. They knew – if they were being totally honest with themselves – that they not heroes, but rather they were victims of a sick, delusional, militarized culture that glorified war and killing and then abandoned the wounded survivors, whom they wouldn’t or couldn’t understand.

Poison gas attacks from both sides, albeit begun by the scientifically-superior Germans, began early in 2015, and Allied tank warfare – which was a humiliating disaster for the British innovators of that new technology – wouldn’t be operational until the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

One of the most stressful and lethal realities for the frontline soldiers was the suicidal, misbegotten, “over the top” infantry assaults against the opposition’s machine gun nests. Such assaults were complicated by the presence of shell holes and the rows of coiled barbed wire that often made them sitting ducks. Artillery barrages from both sides commonly resulted in tens of thousands of casualties in a single day.

The “over the top” infantry assaults sacrificed hundreds of thousands of obedient soldiers in the futile efforts to gain ground. Those assaults were stupidly and repeatedly ordered by senior officers such as Sir John French and his replacement as British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig. Most of the old-timer generals of a century ago had trouble admitting that their outdated horse and sabre cavalry charges across the muck of No-Man’s Land were both hopeless and suicidal.

The general staff planners of their disastrous attempts to end the war quickly (or at least end the stalemate) were safely out of the range of enemy artillery barrages. The national war-planners were safely back in Parliament or in their castles, and their aristocratic generals were comfortably back at their warm and dry headquarters far away from the battles, eating well, being dressed by their orderlies, and drinking their tea and claret – none of them at any risk of suffering the lethality of war.

Psychologically distressing screams of pain often came from the wounded soldiers who were helplessly hanging on the barbed wire or trapped and perhaps bleeding to death in the bomb craters between the trenches. Often the dying of the wounded would linger for days, and the effect on the troops in the trenches, who had to listen to the desperate, unanswerable cries for help was always psychologically devastating. By the time Christmas came and winter hit, troop morale on both sides of No Man’s Land had hit rock bottom.

Christmas in the Trenches

So on December 24, 1914, the exhausted troops settled down to their meager Christmas with, for the lucky ones, gifts from home, special food, special liquor, special chocolate bars and the hope for peace, if even for one night.

On the German side, a magnanimous (and deluded) Kaiser Wilhelm ordered that 100,000 Christmas trees with millions of ornamental candles be sent to the front, expecting that such an act would boost German troop morale. Using the precious supply lines for such militarily unnecessary items was ridiculed by the most hardened officers, and nobody suspected that the Kaiser’s Christmas tree idea would backfire – instead becoming a catalyst for an unplanned-for and unauthorized cease-fire, orchestrated by non-officers and unheard of in the history of warfare. It was to become censored out of mainstream history books for most of the next century.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a spontaneous, unauthorized event that happened at a number of locations all along the 600 miles of triple trenches that stretched across Belgium and France, and it was an event that would never again be duplicated.

”Joyeux Noel”

Ten years ago, “Joyeux Noel” (French for “Merry Christmas”) received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for best foreign film of 2005. It tells the moving tale that was adapted from the many surviving stories that had been told in letters from soldiers who had participated in the truce. It was almost a miracle that the truth of that remarkable event survived the powerful censorship.

 

Courageous German soldier Singing in No Man’s Land – Christmas Eve 1914

As told in the movie, in the darkened battlefield, some German soldier started singing the beloved Christmas hymn “Stille Nacht”. Soon the British, French and Scots on the other side of No Man’s Land joined in with their versions of “Silent Night”. Other Christmas songs were sung, often as duets in two tongues. Before long, the spirit of peace and “goodwill towards men” prevailed over the demonic spirit of war, and the troops on both sides began to sense their common humanity. The natural human aversion to killing other humans broke through to consciousness and overcame the fear, patriotic fervor and pro-war brain-washing to which they had all been subjected.

Soldiers on both sides courageously dropped their weapons, came “over the top” in peace to meet their former foes face-to-face. To get to the neutral zone, they had to climb over barbed wire, walk around shell holes and over frozen corpses (which were later to be given respectful burials during an extension of the truce, with soldiers from both sides helping one another with the gruesome task of burying their comrades).

 

Graves in No Man’s Land – Christmas Day 1914

Treasonous French, German and Scottish Lieutenants – Christmas Day, 1914

The spirit of retaliation had been replaced by a spirit of reconciliation and the desire for real peace on earth. New friends shared chocolate bars, cigarettes, wine, schnapps, soccer games and pictures from home. Addresses were exchanged, photos were taken and every soldier who genuinely experienced the emotional drama was forever changed, having an aversion to kill men who were not demons but rather exactly the same as they were.

And the generals and the politicians back home were appalled.

Fostering Peace on Earth in Times of War is an Act of Treason

Fraternization with the enemy (as well as refusing to obey orders in time of war) is universally regarded by military commanders as an act of treason and a serious crime deserving of severe punishment. In most wars throughout history, such “crimes” were often dealt with by severe beatings and often firing squad. In the case of the Christmas Truce of 1914, most commanding officers feared mutiny if severe punishments were carried out so, instead, not wanting to draw public attention to an incident that was potentially contagious and could stop the war, they  censored letters home and tried to ignore the episode.

War correspondents were forbidden to report the incident to their papers. Some commanding officers threatened courts martial if fraternization persisted. They understood that getting to know and befriend a supposed enemy was bad for the killing spirit of war.

There were punishments that were carried out against some of the most conscientious soldiers who refused to fire their rifles. The French Catholic and British Protestant Allied troops naturally began questioning the moral legitimacy of the war and so they were re-assigned to different – and less desirable – regiments.

German troops were either Lutheran or Catholic, and the consciences of many of them had been revived by the truce. Refusing to obey their orders to kill, many of them were sent to the Eastern Front where there were much harsher conditions. Separated from their comrades who had also experienced the spirit of Christmas, they had no choice but to fight and die in the equally suicidal battles against their Russian Orthodox Christian co-religionists. Very few Allied or German soldiers who experienced the Christmas Truce of 1914 survived the war.

If humanity is truly concerned with the barbaric nature of militarism, and if our modern-era false flag-generated wars of empire are to be effectively derailed, the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 needs to be retold over and over again.

The satanic nature of war became obvious to the ones who experienced the Christmas Truce in 1914, but war profiteers have been trying –with great success – to cover it up ever since. Flag-waving patriotism and telling fake or exaggerated stories of universal military heroism have worked well to glorify what is blatantly inglorious.

The satanic nature of war has existed ever since greed took over natural humane values and somebody found out that he could dominate somebody else (or steal his possessions) with the threat of bodily harm. The satanic nature of homicidal violence, whether state-sponsored or simply a solitary act, was recognized as evil by the nonviolent Jesus and his earliest followers 2000 years ago.

Both ancient and modern wars have been unjustifiably glorified in history textbooks and, if civilization is to survive, they need to be exposed as satanic.  Violence begets violence and wars are contagious. Wars are universally futile, seem to be contagious, never truly end and their extremely high costs makes them a very poor return on investment.

Modern American wars are now being fought by vulnerable, thoroughly indoctrinated, post-adolescent, Call of Duty first person shooter gamers who liked the adrenalin high of killing virtual “bad guys”. Sadly, unbeknownst to them, they are at high risk of having their emotional and spiritual lives negatively and permanently altered by the physical, mental and spiritual damage that always comes from participating in actual homicidal violence.

Combat war can easily doom its participants to a life overwhelmed by the wounds of war (PTSD, sociopathic personality disorder, suicidality, homicidality, loss of religious faith, traumatic brain injury, malnutrition from the highly processed military food, autoimmunie disorders because of the military’s over-vaccination programs with neurotoxic vaccines, and addictive drug use [either legal or illegal]). What is most important to realize is that all those lethal effects are totally preventable.

Society has an Ethical Duty to Warn

It seems to me that it would be helpful if moral leadership in America, especially its Christian leaders, would discharge their duty to warn their children and adolescents about all of the serious consequences that being in the killing professions can have on their souls and psyches.

Without such countervailing truths being told by a nation’s moral leadership, war planners have an easy time keeping potential  soldiers from recognizing the humanity of those that are fingered as enemies, whether they are Syrians, Iranians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Russians, Vietnamese, Chinese or North Koreans. I have been repeatedly told by military veterans that military chaplains, who are supposed to be nurturers of the souls of the soldiers that are in their “care”, never bring up, in their counseling sessions, the Golden Rule, Jesus’ clear “love your enemies” commands, his many ethical teachings in the Sermon on the Mount or the biblical commandments that say “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil”.

Military chaplains (as is true with military psychiatrists as well) are just well-paid cogs in the apparatus of making war maximally efficient for their military, economic, political and corporate overlords. In fairness, I suppose, military chaplains have probably never been schooled – beginning with their Sunday School upbringings – in the profoundly important gospel truths about humility, mercy, non-violence, non-domination, non-retaliation, unconditional love and the rejection of enmity. Is it too late to start asking them to do what Jesus would have them do?

Theological Blind Spots of War

One theological blind spot about war was nicely illustrated near the end of “Joyeux Noel” in a powerful scene depicting a confrontation between the Christ-like, altruistic, antiwar Scottish chaplain and his pro-war Calvinist bishop. As the humble chaplain was mercifully administering the “last rites” to a dying soldier, he was approached by the bishop, who had come to chastise the chaplain for fraternizing with the enemy during the Christmas Truce. The bishop summarily relieved the simple pastor of his chaplaincy duties because of his “treasonous and shameful” Christ-like behavior on the battlefield.

The authoritarian bishop refused to listen to the chaplain’s story about his having performed “the most important mass of my life” (with enemy troops participating in the celebration) or the fact that he wished to stay with the soldiers that needed him because they were losing their faith in God. The bishop angrily denied the chaplain’s request to remain with his men.

Christmas Eve Mass, France, Dec 24, 1914

The bishop then delivered a rousing pro-war, jingoistic sermon (which was taken word-for-word from a homily that had actually been delivered by an Anglican bishop later in the war). The sermon was addressed to the fresh troops that had to be brought in to replace the veteran soldiers who had suddenly become averse to killing, and were refusing to fire on the “enemy”.

The image of the dramatic but subtle response of the chaplain to his sacking should be a clarion call to the Christian church leadership – both clergy and lay – of every militarized, so-called “Christian” nation. This chaplain, after listening to the bishops sermon, simply hung up his cross and walked out of the door of the field hospital.

“Joyeux Noel” is an important film that deserves to be annual holiday viewing. It has ethical lessons far more powerful than the traditional fare of “It’s A Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol”.

One of the lessons of the story is summarized in the concluding verse of John McCutcheon’s famous song about the event: “Christmas in the Trenches”:

“My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell.

Each Christmas come since World War One, I’ve learned its lessons well:
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same.”

Check out the video of McCutcheon singing his song at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJi41RWaTCs

A critical scene from the movie is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPk9-AD7h3M

Additional scenes from the movie, with the narration of a letter from one of the soldiers involved can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehFjkS7UBUU

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. In the decade prior to his retirement, he practiced what could best be described as “holistic (non-drug) and preventive mental health care”. Since his retirement, he has written a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American imperialism, friendly fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, and the dangers of Big Pharma, psychiatric drugging, the over-vaccinating of children and other movements that threaten American democracy, civility, health and longevity and the future of the planet. Many of his columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn, http://www.globalresearch.ca/authors?query=Gary+Kohls+articles&by=&p=&page_id= or at https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

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Green New Deal and Vegan Bullying

December 21st, 2022 by Julian Rose

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First published on December 16, 2022

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Perhaps some vegans would agree with the World Economic Forum’s attempt to sell the idea that only a dictatorship can ensure that methane emitting cows, real food supporters and mixed farmers will not disrupt the path of global salvation set out by the proponents of a ‘Green New Deal’.

Whatever opinions may be held, the interpretation of what constitutes a ‘Green’ diet is not being decided by common sense oriented consumers of pro-ecological foods.

Amongst the fake foods being pushed forward as ‘world saving’, synthetic beef is already in production in Israel, Holland, Indonesia and the USA.

The motivation to create such a product centres around the story that cows give off methane thereby contributing to global warming.

This piece of so called ‘science’ has given a boost to the vegan argument that mankind should adopt a purely vegetable, grain, fruit and nut diet – and that farm animals should be phased-out of agricultural practices altogether.

The more thoughtful ones rightly point-out that some 70% of all agricultural grains are used to feed livestock instead of to feed human beings direct, thus producing a huge imbalance in global food availability and efforts to eradicate poverty and starvation.

This argument, widely adopted by the vegan lobby – should be recognised as valid – provided it is seen in the context of a long, gradual evolutionary transformation of farming systems and human dietary trends. But not as reason to force veganism on a generally omnivorous global human family, overnight.

Veganism has already advanced quite rapidly in the ‘health conscious’ segment of modern Western society; but it is riven with confusions and extremism.

Most of the younger generation know absolutely nothing about food and farming, plant processing or modern food production methods.

They can’t make an informed distinction between ‘grass-fed’ (no grains), low stocking density, free ranging well cared for livestock – and cereal fed, highly intensive, high stocking rate ‘coral’ based animal concentration camps.

Starting from here, the vegan goes only by what he/she is informed is a ‘healthy meat free diet’, via the heavily slanted projections of corporate advertising.

But is it healthy?

Unfortunately not. Unless organically grown (a tiny minority), the vegetables, fruits, nuts and grains  that form the typical vegan diet are all the product of intense agrichemical farming methods that use synthetic nitrogen, carcinogenic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and monocultural (non rotational) soil depleting field management methods.

Such foods are also grown by ‘hydroponic’ methods. Here vegetables are grown in large vertical greenhouses using no soil at all, just water drip fed with chemicals. The mechanics of this system are largely robotic.

The majority of vegans have no idea about any of this. They judge all by the words of the propaganda machine which pumps out glossy photos of perfect looking veggies being eaten by perfect looking people in perfect looking homes and perfect looking restaurants.

The sales pitch for vegan is as brutal as any other corporate backed global market promotion.  It is hugely misleading, deeply divisive and increasingly political. It conveys the sense of ‘purity’ on one hand and ‘degenerate’ attitudes on the other; when of course the reality is neither.

There is a clear moral statement behind vegan and vegetarian, but it only becomes a broader force for the good when it involves eating such foods grown caringly, organically and locally.

The rest is simply about supporting the centralisation, globalisation and ‘devitaminisation’ of the food chain. The hypermarket/supermarket New World Order.

This takes us straight back to the deeply deceptive WEF Green New Deal agenda for a fascistic, corporate ‘Zero CO2’ food and farming future ‘To save the world from global warming’.

If we want to be on the right side of the laws of nature – then we must feed ourselves via human scale, ecological and time honoured methods of environmentally friendly farming.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher.  He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and Co-founder of the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology HARE. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is strongly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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Mike WhitneyYou think that Putin should have acted more forcefully from the beginning in order to end the war quickly. Is that an accurate assessment of your view on the war? And—if it is—then what do you think is the downside of allowing the conflict to drag on with no end in sight?

Paul Craig Roberts: Yes, you have correctly stated my position. But as my position can seem “unAmerican” to the indoctrinated and brainwashed many, those who watch CNN, listen to NPR, and read the New York Times, I am going to provide some of my background before going on with my answer.

I was involved in the 20th century Cold War in many ways: As a Wall Street Journal editor; as an appointee to an endowed chair in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, part of Georgetown University at the time of my appointment, where my colleagues were Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, and James Schlesinger, a Secretary of Defense and CIA director who was one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Virginia; as a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger; and as a member of a secret presidential committee with power to investigate the CIA’s opposition to President Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War.

With a history such as mine, I was surprised when I took an objective position on Russian President Putin’s disavowal of US hegemony, and found myself labeled a “Russian dupe/agent” on a website, “PropOrNot,” which may have been financed by the US Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the CIA itself, still harboring old resentments against me for helping President Reagan end the Cold War, which had the potential of reducing the CIA’s budget and power. I still wonder what the CIA might do to me, despite the agency inviting me to address the agency, which I did, and explain why they went wrong in their reasoning.

I will also say that in my articles I am defending truth, not Putin, although Putin is, in my considered opinion, the most honest player, and perhaps the most naive, in the current game that could end in nuclear Armageddon. My purpose is to prevent nuclear Armageddon, not to take sides. I remember well President Reagan’s hatred of “those godawful nuclear weapons” and his directive that the purpose was not to win the Cold War but to end it.

Now to Mike’s question, which is to the point. Perhaps to understand Putin we need to remember life, or how it was presented by the West to the Soviet Union and the American broadcasts into the Soviet Union of the freedom of life in the West where streets were paved with gold and food markets had every conceivable delicacy.

Possibly this created in the minds of many Soviets, not all, that life in the Western world was heavenly compared to the hell in which Russians existed. I still remember being on a bus in Uzbekistan in 1961 when a meat delivery truck appeared on the street. All traffic followed the truck to the delivery store where a several block long line already waited. When you compare this life with a visit to an American supermarket, Western superiority stands out. Russian hankerings toward the West have little doubt constrained Putin, but Putin himself has been affected by the differences in life between the US in those times and the Soviet Union.

Putin is a good leader, a human person, perhaps too human for the evil he faces. One way to look at my position that Putin does too little instead of too much is to remember the World War II era when British Prime Minister Chamberlin was accused of encouraging Hitler by accepting provocation after provocation. My own view of this history is that it is false, but it remains widely believed. Putin accepts provocations despite having declared red lines that he does not enforce. Consequently, his red lines are not believed. Here is one report:

RT reported on December 10 that “The US has quietly given Ukraine the go-ahead to launch long-range strikes against targets inside Russian territory, the Times reported on Friday, citing sources. The Pentagon has apparently changed its stance on the matter as it has become less concerned that such attacks could escalate the conflict.”

In other words, by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia, attack on the Crimea bridge, destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, torture of Russian POWs, attacks on Russian parts of Ukraine reincorporated into the Russian Federation, and attacks on internal Russia.

At some point there will be a provocation that is too much. That’s when the SHTF.

Putin’s goal has been to avoid war. Thus, his limited military objective in Ukraine to throw the Ukrainian forces out of Donbass meant a limited operation that left Ukrainian war infrastructure intact, able to receive and deploy advanced weapons from the West, and to force Russian withdrawals to lines more defensible with the very limited forces Putin committed to the conflict. The Ukrainian offensives convinced the West that Russia could be defeated, thus making the war a primary way of undermining Russia as an obstacle to Washington’s hegemony. The British press proclaimed that the Ukrainian Army would be in Crimea by Christmas.

What Putin needed was a quick victory that made it completely clear that Russia had enforceable red lines that Ukraine had violated. A show of Russian military force would have stopped all provocations. The decadent West would have learned that it must leave the bear alone. Instead the Kremlin, misreading the West, wasted eight years on the Minsk Agreement that former German Chancellor Merket said was a deception to keep Russia from acting when Russia could have easily succeeded. Putin now agrees with me that it was his mistake not to have intervened in Donbass before the US created a Ukrainian army.

My last word to Mike’s question is that Putin has misread the West. He still thinks the West has in its “leadership” reasonable people, who no doubt act the role for Putin’s benefit, with whom he can have negotiations. Putin should go read the Wolfowitz Doctrine. If Putin doesn’t soon wake up, Armageddon is upon us, unless Russia surrenders.

MW: I agree with much of what you say here, particularly this: “Putin’s inaction has convinced Washington… that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations.”

You’re right, this is a problem. But I’m not sure what Putin can do about it. Take, for example, the drone attacks on airfields on Russian territory. Should Putin have responded tit-for-tat by bombing supplylines in Poland? That seems like a fair response but it also risks NATO retaliation and a broader war which is definitely not in Russia’s interests.

Now, perhaps, Putin would not have faced these flashpoints had he deployed 500,000 combat troops to begin and leveled a number of cities on his way to Kiev, but keep in mind, Russian public opinion about the war was mixed at the beginning, and only grew more supportive as it became apparent that Washington was determined to defeat Russia, topple its government, and weaken it to the point where it could not project power beyond its borders. The vast majority of the Russian people now understand what the US is up-to which explains why Putin’s public approval ratings are presently at 79.4% while support for the war is nearly universal. In my opinion, Putin needs this level of support to sustain the war effort; so, postponing the mobilization of additional troops has actually worked to his benefit.

More importantly, Putin must be perceived to be the rational player in this conflict. This is absolutely essential. He must be seen as a cautious and reasonable actor who operates with restraint and within the confines of international law. This is the only way he will be able to win the continued support of China, India etc. We must not forget that the effort to build a multipolar world order requires coalition building which is undermined by impulsive, violent behavior. In short, I think Putin’s “go-slow” approach (your words) is actually the correct course of action. I think if he had run roughshod across Ukraine like Sherman on his way to the sea, he would have lost critical allies that will help him establish the institutions and economic infrastructure he needs to create a new order.

So, my question to you is this: What does a Russian victory look like? Is it just a matter of pushing the Ukrainian army out of the Donbas or should Russian forces clear the entire region east of the Dnieper River? And what about the west of Ukraine? What if the western region is reduced to rubble but the US and NATO continue to use it as a launching pad for their war against Russia?

I can imagine many scenarios in which the fighting continues for years to come, but hardly any that end in either a diplomatic settlement or an armistice. Your thoughts?

Paul Craig Roberts: I think, Mike, that you have identified the reasoning that explains Putin’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine. But I think Putin is losing confidence in his approach. Caution about approaching war is imperative. But when war begins it must be won quickly, especially if the enemy has prospects of gaining allies and their support. Putin’s caution delayed Russia’s rescue of Donbass for eight years, during which Washington created and equipped an Ukrainian army that turned what would have been an easy rescue in 2014 like Crimea into the current war approaching a year in duration. Putin’s caution in waging the war has given Washington and the Western media plenty of time to create and control the narrative, which is unfavorable to Putin, and to widen the war with US and NATO direct participation, now admitted by Foreign Minister Lavrov. The war has widened into direct attacks on Russia herself.

These attacks on Russia might bring the pro-Western Russian liberals into alignment with Putin, but the ability of a corrupt third world US puppet state to attack Russia is anathema to Russian patriots. The Russians who will do the fighting see in the ability of Ukraine to attack Mother Russia the failure of the Putin government.

As for China and India, the two countries with the largest populations, they have witnessed Washington’s indiscriminate use of force without domestic or international consequence to Washington. They don’t want to ally with a week-kneed Russia.

I will also say that as Washington and NATO were not constrained by public opinion in their two decades of wars in the Middle East and North Africa, based entirely on lies and secret agendas, what reason does Putin have to fear a lack of Russian public support for rescuing Donbass, formerly a part of Russia, from neo-Nazi persecution? If Putin must fear this, it shows his mistake in tolerating US-financed NGOs at work in Russia brainwashing Russians.

No, Putin should not engage in tit-for-tat. There is no need for him to send missiles into Poland, Germany, the UK, or the US. All Putin needs to do is to close down Ukrainian infrastructure so that Ukraine, despite Western help, cannot carry on the war. Putin is starting to do this, but not on a total basis.

The fact of the matter is that Putin never needed to send any troops to the rescue of Donbass. All he needed to do was to send the American puppet, Zelensky, a one hour ultimatum and if surrender was not forthcoming shut down with conventional precision missiles, and air attacks if necessary, the entirety of the power, water, and transportation infrastructure of Ukraine, and send special forces into Kiev to make a public hanging of Zelensky and the US puppet government.

The effect on the degenerate Woke West, which teaches in its own universities and public schools hatred of itself, would have been electric. The cost of messing with Russia would have been clear to all the morons who talk about Ukraine being in Crimea by Christmas. NATO would have dissolved. Washington would have removed all sanctions and shut up the stupid, war-crazy neoconservatives. The world would be at peace.

The question you have asked is, after all of Putin’s mistakes, what does a Russian victory look like? First of all, we don’t know if there is going to be a Russian victory. The cautious way that Putin reasons and acts, as you explained, is likely to deny Russia a victory. Instead, there could be a negotiated demilitarized zone and the conflict will be set on simmer, like the unresolved conflict in Korea.

On the other hand, if Putin is waiting the full deployment of Russia’s hypersonic nuclear missiles that no defense system can intercept and, following Washington, moves to first use of nuclear weapons, Putin will have the power to put the West on notice and be able to use the power of Russian military force to instantly end the conflict.

MW: You make some very good points, but I still think that Putin’s slower approach has helped to build public support at home and abroad. But, of course, I could be wrong. I do disagree strongly with your assertion that China and India “don’t want to ally with weak-kneed Russia”. In my opinion, both leaders see Putin as a bright and reliable statesman who is perhaps the greatest defender of sovereign rights in the last century. Both India and China are all-too-familiar with Washington’s coercive diplomacy and I’m sure they appreciate the efforts of a leader who has become the world’s biggest proponent of self-determination and independence. I’m sure the last thing they want, is to become cowering houseboys like the leaders in Europe who are, apparently, unable to decide anything without a ‘nod’ from Washington. (Note: Earlier today Putin said that EU leaders were allowing themselves to be treated like a doormat. Putin: “Today, the EU’s main partner, the US, is pursuing policies leading directly to the de-industrialization of Europe. They even try to complain about that to their American overlord. Sometimes even with resentment they ask ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ I want to ask: ‘What did you expect?’ What else happens to those who allow feet to be wiped on them?”)

Paul Craig Roberts: Mike, I agree that Russia for the reasons you provide is the choice partner of China and India. What I meant is that China and India want to see a powerful Russia that shields them from Washington’s interference. China and India are not reassured by what at times seems to be Putin’s irresolution and hesitancy. The rules that Putin plays by are no longer respected in the West.

Putin is correct that all European, and the Canadian, Australian, Japanese, and New Zealand governments, are doormats for Washington. What escapes Putin is that Washington’s puppets are comfortable in this role. Therefore, how much chance does he have in scolding them for their subservience and promising them independence? A reader recently reminded me about the Asch experiment in the 1950s, which found that people tended to conform to the prevalent narratives, and of the use to which Edward Bernays analysis of propaganda is put. And there is the information given me in the 1970s by a high government official that European governments do what we want because we “give the leaders bags of money. We own them. They report to us.”

In other words, our puppets live in a comfort zone. Putin will have a hard time breaking into this with merely exemplary behavior.

MW: For my final question, I’d like to tap into your broader knowledge of the US economy and how economic weakness might be a factor in Washington’s decision to provoke Russia. Over the last 10 months, we’ve heard numerous pundits say that NATO’s expansion to Ukraine creates an “existential crisis” for Russia. I just wonder if the same could be said about the United States? It seems like everyone from Jamie Diamond to Nouriel Roubini has been predicting a bigger financial cataclysm than the full-system meltdown of 2008. In your opinion, is this the reason why the media and virtually the entire political establishment are pushing so hard for a confrontation with Russia? Do they see war as the only way the US can preserve its exalted position in the global order?

Paul Craig Roberts: The idea that governments turn to war to focus attention away from a failing economy is popular, but my answer to your question is that the operating motive is US hegemony. The Wolfowitz Doctrine states it clearly. The doctrine says the principal goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that could serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. At the 2007 Munich security conference Putin made it clear that Russia will not subordinate its interest to the interest of the US.

There are some crazed neoconservatives in Washington who believe nuclear war can be won and who have shaped US nuclear weapons policy into a pre-emptive attack mode focused on reducing the ability of the recipient of a first strike to retaliate. The US is not seeking a war with Russia, but might blunder into one. The operative neoconservative policy is to cause problems for Russia that can cause internal problems, distract the Kremlin from Washington’s power moves, isolate Russia with propaganda, and even possibly pull off a color revolution inside Russia or in a former Russian province, such as Belarus, as was done in Georgia and Ukraine. People have forgot the US-instigated invasion of South Ossetia by the Georgian army that Putin sent in Russian forces to stop, and they have forgot the recent disturbances in Kazakhstan that were calmed by the arrival of Russian troops. The plan is to keep picking away at the Kremlin. Even if Washington doesn’t meet in every case with the success enjoyed in the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, the incidents succeed as distractions that use up Kremlin time and energy, result in dissenting opinions within the government, and that require military contingency planning. As Washington controls the narratives, the incidents also serve to blacken Russia as an aggressor and portray Putin as “the new Hitler.” The propaganda successes are considerable–the exclusion of Russian athletes from competitions, refusals of orchestras to play music of Russian composers, exclusion of Russian literature, and a general refusal to cooperate with Russia in any way. This has a humiliating effect on Russians and might be corrosive of public support for the government. It has to be highly frustrating for Russian athletes, ice skaters, entertainers, and their fans.

Nevertheless, the conflict in Ukraine can turn into a general war intended or not. This is my concern and is the reason I think the Kremlin’s limited go-slow operation is a mistake. It offers too many opportunities for Washington’s provocations to go too far.

There is an economic element. Washington is determined to prevent its European empire from being drawn into closer relations with Russia from energy dependence and business relationships. Indeed, some explain the economic sanctions as de-industrializing Europe in behalf of Washington’s economic and financial hegemony. See this.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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. 

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace. 

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

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New Breakthrough in Australia-China Relations

December 20th, 2022 by Prof. Michelle Grattan

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In a recent CHD.TV episode of “Good Morning CHD,” three Canadian doctors — Drs. Charles Hoffe and Stephen Malthouse and Chris Shaw, Ph.D. — discussed Canada’s disturbing normalization since 2016 of “medical assistance in dying” (“MAID”) and their government’s possibly imminent endorsement of the practice for “mature minors” who request death without parental knowledge or consent.

“Physician-assisted suicide,” “assisted suicide,” “assisted dying” and euthanasia — each with slightly different legal connotations — all refer to medical interventions to expedite death, with the main distinction being “who performs the final, fatal act.”

Last year, 3.3% of deaths in Canada occurred under MAID, representing “a growth rate of 32.4% over 2020,” and “steady year over year growth” in all provinces, including in the 18- to 45-year age group.

Among the first 100 patients to avail themselves of MAID in the province of Ontario, more than 5% were younger adults ages 35-54.

In the Netherlands and Belgium, other countries that allow euthanasia, those under age 60 account for 12.5% and 15% of those euthanized, respectively.

What the Canadian doctors were discussing on “Good Morning CHD” was a consequential 2021 modification to Canada’s original MAID law, eliminating the criterion that previously had made it a requirement for a candidate’s death to be “reasonably foreseeable” — and making decisions about eligibility far more subjective.

Even for those with “reasonably foreseeable” deaths, the bill eliminated a formerly mandated 10-day “reflection period” and downgraded the requirement for independent witnesses from two to one.

The three doctors and other critics of the more expansive policy warn that it will “nurture the country’s growing culture of death” and open the door to even more widespread implementation of a practice that is already ethically contentious, particularly since the Canadian government has pledged to consider eligibility for minors as young as 12 if deemed “capable of making decisions with respect to their health.”

Extending MAID eligibility to youth — which could be on the horizon as soon as 2023 — would mean that “before children in Canada can drive vehicles, they may be allowed to consent to physicians taking their lives.”

As Hoffe wryly commented to his two colleagues, “It is amazing the lengths that the government seems to be going to — to reduce the population.”

A growing trend, including in the youngest

Legalization of euthanasia and/or physician-assisted suicide is a growing trend worldwide, exhibiting a “momentum” that “appears unstoppable.”

Not only are more and more nations endorsing a practice that was “prohibited and morally condemned” throughout much of human history, but every country or jurisdiction that allows it is experiencing the same year-over-year growth as Canada.

And when it comes to hastening death for young people, in particular, Canada is not entirely an outlier.

Belgium, in 2014, became the first country to legalize lethal injection for children of all ages, having laid the groundwork 12 years earlier with legal euthanasia — explicitly defined as “medical treatment” — for adults and emancipated minors.

In 2016 and 2017, according to the Daily Mail, Belgium’s “radical laws” enabled the putting to death of three children and 19 young adults under age 30. Belgium reported another child euthanasia death in 2019, a year in which the country euthanized a “record number” of people overall.

Also in the vanguard of kiddie euthanasia is the Netherlands, where a 2002 law not only established the practice for adults — with the range of eligible conditions expanded in 2007 — but allowed euthanasia for children ages 12 and up. Parental consent is not required for those 16 or 17 years old.

In the first decade, there were five assisted deaths in Dutch adolescents, including one 12-year-old.

Under a “devil’s bargain between medical professionals and prosecutors,” Dutch doctors also can kill certain babies in their first year without fear of prosecution, as long as they follow a designated protocol.

In late 2022, a member of the Quebec College of Physicians proposed something similar to the Canadian parliament, suggesting that babies with “severe deformations or very grave and severe syndromes” be candidates for assisted suicide.

Objecting, a horrified bioethicist and physician noted that this would leave too “much room for parental, physician, personal, social and economic bias.”

Given the unwarranted fear-mongering about pediatric COVID-19 — used to justify misleading and ultimately genocidal vaccine mandates for kids — it is noteworthy that during the pandemic years, the Netherlands joined Canada in pointedly escalating its kid-focused euthanasia legislation.

In late 2020, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, began taking steps to extend “active termination of life” to children ages 1-12, first stacking the deck with a favorable commissioned report from the Dutch Society of Pediatrics.

Dutch Health Minister Ernst Kuipers renewed the case for under-12 euthanasia in a June 2022 briefing to members of parliament.

Meanwhile, in May 2022, Colombia became the first Latin American country to endorse medically assisted suicide, having made euthanasia legal in 1997. The laws apply to children as young as 6.

Switzerland, where assisted suicide (but not euthanasia) has been legal for seven decades, has played an influential role in normalizing the practice for all ages, even attracting lucrative “suicide tourism” in slick designer-furnished clinics due to its willingness to provide death to foreigners.

As long as “patients commit the act themselves and helpers have no vested interest in their death,” there is no specified age limit, prompting The Guardian to observe in 2014, “technically even a healthy young person could use such services.”

According to studies of that time period, 1 in 5 assisted suicides in Switzerland involved adults under age 65, including individuals as young as 18.

A year ago, Switzerland legalized a fancy new way for people to kill themselves that is likely to appeal to young people — a space-age “coffin-like capsule with windows” designed so that the decedent-to-be can push a button, flood the interior with nitrogen and die within 10 minutes.

Why die? Let me count the ways

In 2017, Kees van der Staaij, the leader of the Netherlands’ Christian SGP party, communicated his concerns — in the Wall Street Journal, no less — about his country’s “euthanasia culture,” and other prominent figures agreed the situation might be “getting out of hand.”

That year, Dutch politicians discussed the option of legalizing euthanasia for “perfectly healthy” people, allowing “any person age 75 or over who decides their life is ‘complete’ to receive euthanasia.”

In 2015, Belgian doctors agreed to euthanize a healthy 24-year-old woman who convinced herself of a lifelong “death wish” despite growing up “with a quiet, stable family.”

Canada’s 2021 relaxation of its criteria for hastening death suggests that concerns about an out-of-hand process are legitimate — 219 individuals “whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable” immediately opted that year for assisted death, with nearly half of that group (46%) citing “neurological” problems as a reason to die.

Between 2011 and 2014 in the Netherlands, doctors euthanized 110 individuals solely for mental disorders, including a man in his 30s “whose only diagnosis was autism.”

In a study published in 2020, European researchers cautioned that granting euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (EAS) “based on a perception of the patient’s illness as being untreatable with no prospect of improvement, could … in many cases fail to meet the due care criteria listed in EAS laws.”

They added, “This practice neglects the individual’s potential for having a life worth living.”

In Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere, some suggest that the ranks of assisted suicide candidates increasingly are likely to include not just youth and the mentally ill but also other marginalized groups, such as the homeless, the poor, the disabled, those with chronic pain — and “even dissenters who the government feels are not fit for society.”

Critics posit that instead of preserving human dignity, medically assisted death “seems to be a way to kill the vulnerable,” with the availability of assisted suicide “inducing hopelessness … and removing pressure for an improvement in psychiatric and social services.”

In fact, cost-benefit analyses have been creeping into the assisted death calculus for some time, with research and reports issued in advance of Canada’s 2021 amendments describing how doctor-assisted death could “save millions.”

Observers also note “the pressure on aging, low-birthrate societies to cut their health care costs” and describe doctors “allegedly suggesting [assisted suicide] to … sick people seeking a quietus for reasons linked to financial stress.”

Even euthanasia’s most ardent supporters are concerned that the “financial gutting of the healthcare sector” will encourage desperate people to resort to assisted death.

Overt … and covert

In the U.S., physician-assisted suicide is legal for adults in 10 states plus the nation’s capital, with half having legalized it just in the last five years: Oregon (law passed in 1994 and implemented in 1997), Washington (2009), Montana (2009), Vermont (2013), California (2015), Colorado (2016), the District of Columbia (2017), Hawaii (2018), Maine (2019), New Jersey (2019) and New Mexico(2021).

Reflecting the pandemic-spurred trend toward remote healthcare, Vermont’s governor signed a law this year to permit telemedicine as a route for “aid in dying.” The bill makes it possible for patients to waive the “two in-person consults and … 48-hour waiting period” ordinarily required to get a prescription, and also grants healthcare providers and pharmacists full legal immunity.

The enthusiasm that these jurisdictions display for the “freedom” to die — employing loft rhetoric about “dignity” and “humane” policies — contrasts sharply with their abysmal and malevolent performance during the pandemic, when all (with the exception of Montana) stood out in their willingness to destroy people’s livelihoods and use authoritarian measures to suppress constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

The contrast was also evident in Spain, which chose — coincidentally or not — to legalize adult euthanasia in 2021. The same prime minister who vigorously enforced pandemic lockdowns and restrictions unironically declared that the euthanasia decision made his country “more humane, fairer and freer.”

As the pandemic disturbingly revealed, however, it is not just overt euthanasia that is on the rise — governments also appear increasingly willing to put their citizens to death without admitting to it.

In the U.K., which nominally promises a jail sentence of up to 14 years for those who help others to die, credible on-the-ground reports described the use of covert euthanasia as a “medical protocol,” with damning evidence including the health secretary’s unprecedented acquisition of a two-year supply of the execution drug midazolam in March 2020.

Citizens refer to the death of more than 136,000 elderly residents of U.K. care homes since April 2020 as the “Midazolam Murders,” but they also point out that “the UK Government and its institutions have been acting as if euthanasia is perfectly legal” for far longer, since at least 2008.

The ventilator- and remdesivir-only COVID-19 protocols inflexibly adhered to by U.S. hospitals immune from liability and salivating over hefty financial incentives — were another form of covert murder, as was the withholding around the world of safe and inexpensive treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

And of course, the aggressive imposition of mandates for known-to-be-dangerous COVID-19 shots took government-instigated death and disability to even more shocking levels.

Describing how medically assisted suicide has become a cherished “progressive” and “liberal” value, one writer asks, “What if a society remains liberal but ceases to be civilized?”

As the cultural conditioning favoring euthanasia ramps up, citizens everywhere urgently need to query their governments’ uncivilized motives for both silently and openly celebrating death, rather than life.

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To the onlooker, Israel is visibly changing. The shift is most conspicuous from the outside: the world sees a western liberal democracy moving with alarming speed towards ultra-nationalism, fundamentalism, racism, fascism and the breakdown of democratic structures as a result of the recent election

While correct, this view is also distorted. It assumes that until now, Israel was indeed a western democracy, and that it is now visibly becoming something else. The truth, however, is less about Israel fundamentally changing, and more about it shedding its masks and disguises.

What is changing is the appearance. The cracks appearing in Israel’s image bear little relation to the underlying essence. From this standpoint – and this standpoint only – the new government can be viewed as a harbinger of a positive message: the truth about Israel will come to light, albeit at a heavy cost in terms of the oppression of Palestinians and the rupture of fragile democratic structures that hitherto served Israel’s Jews.

The new government will be the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israel’s history. The truth, at least in terms of the ideology of most of its ministers, is that it will also be the most extremist government anywhere in the West today. The extreme right in Israel is much more extremist than the right in Europe, and perhaps even than in the US.

It will now rule Israel and control the most senior positions. A government in which Benjamin Netanyahu is the standard-bearer for the secular and liberal is a very extremist government indeed.

Threats lie in wait from all sides: destruction of the justice system, harm to minorities, a shameless ramping-up of Jewish supremacy, the heavy hand of religion in everyday life, and an occupation ever more cruel to its Palestinian subjects. It is difficult at such an early stage to know which of these will actually come to pass.

Israel has already had right-wing governments and extremist parties whose ascension to power had a moderating effect on their plans, for all kinds of reasons. “Things look different from here than they did from there” is the usually-accepted explanation. But it is certainly within the realm of possibility that Netanyahu’s new partners are made of sterner stuff and will carry out the looming threat of regime change in several areas of crucial significance for Israel.

Hitting the panic button

Faced with a potential actualisation of this extreme scenario, the Israeli left and centre have hit the panic button, notably by embarking on a campaign of attempted intimidation. Not a day passes without another prophecy of doom – and some, if not all, of these predictions will surely be borne out.

Nevertheless, one cannot help but ask: is the threatened change really such a radical one? Was Israel truly such a lone outpost of democratic norms, equality under the law, protection of human rights and sanctity of judicial systems that this new government could enter stage right and destroy it all?

Was that Israel of the “good old days” – the one before the new government – a country so far removed from fascism, ultra-nationalism and apartheid that the new government can come to power and change everything, so that Israel turns into that kind of country now?

Obviously not. Without downplaying the dangers posed by the new government and its chosen path, one cannot help but notice that the alarmist campaigns in response to its declarations seem to have a covert subtext about how good it was here when the Zionist left and centre were in power; how all of that will come to an end now, and how bad it will all be. That picture, however, is far from accurate.

Consider the 166 Palestinians, including at least 39 children, who died by acts of the Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the beginning of this year. An additional 49 Palestinians, including 17 children, who were killed in Gaza during Israel’s three-day onslaught in August on the besieged strip.

Were they killed under the terrifying new government featuring Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, or under the so-called “government of change” featuring the liberal promises of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, whose tenure is now ending?

The difference between regimes will most likely be, first and foremost, one of rhetoric: the centre-left tries to gloss over the facts, whereas the extreme right will hide nothing. In some ways, this may prove advantageous.

The new government, by word and deed, may force Israel’s allies, along with the almost non-existent leftist camp in Israel, to look honestly at Israel and acknowledge the reality. With a government like the one that’s coming, no longer will there be an option to ignore, avert the gaze and obfuscate, attempting to make do with weak condemnations and clinging to a fictitious “peace process” or a two-state solution that has long been unrealistic.

MEE

The new government will force the West to look at Israel and admit, at least to itself: this is an apartheid state. Continuing the masquerade ball with Israel will become untenable. The new government may even compel Israel’s allies to move one step forward and, for the first time in Israel’s history, take practical actions against it.

Reason for hope

Not all of this may happen. Israel may not radicalise to the extent that some would have us fear; or, despite its radicalisation, the West – especially the US – may go on insisting that rhinestones are diamonds, claiming that Israel is the West’s frontline outpost in the Middle East and insisting that criticism of the state is forbidden because of the Holocaust.

But there is also another possibility. When Israel legislates appalling ultra-nationalist laws; when house demolitions and expulsions in the occupied West Bank soar; when Israel’s Supreme Court is stripped of all power; when the army kills unimaginable numbers of Palestinians and the annexation of the occupied territories becomes a fact no longer deniable – perhaps then, the West will have no other option than to turn its back on its beloved Israel, world champion of impunity, for whom almost everything is permissible.

Perhaps then, the West’s position will have to change. Maybe the West will finally understand that there is no legal or moral difference between the occupation in Ukraine and the occupation in Palestine, and that the measures it took immediately against the Russian occupation can finally be considered against the Israeli occupation, after 55 years that only postponed the ultimate outcome?

It is true that the new government, and especially some of its ministers, may take irreversible steps that could further amplify inequality, oppression, deprivation, discrimination and Jewish supremacy in all areas of life. Also true is that the first to pay the price for all this will be Palestinians in the occupied territories and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Their lives could certainly change, but let us bear in mind that their situation has already been intolerable for decades.

A handful of human rights activists in Israel may also pay a price, along with freedom of expression, which is already facing significant attempts at curtailment.

In addition, the expected damage to governmental checks and balances could endanger the entire state structure, from a planned “override clause” undermining the power of the Supreme Court in a country without a constitution, to proposed legislation designed to allow convicted criminals to serve in government. Many opinion pieces have already been written to warn against these dangers, which should not be taken lightly.

Meanwhile, the time has come for Israel to undergo a fundamental shakeup, including in the attitude of its friends in the West. For more than five decades, Israel has claimed that the occupation of 1967 was temporary, and the world bought into that bluff.

The new government will put an end to that. The occupation will be permanent, not temporary, and there will clearly be no intention to ever grant national rights to half the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

This demands an international response; it is not an internal Israeli matter. Anyone who thinks that Israel will ever change course willingly, of its own accord, does not know Israel very well. Israel has no reason and no incentive to do so. The world has thus far accepted Israel with its apartheid and its oppression, while Israel ignores the international community, its institutions and its decisions.

No other country can thumb its nose at international law as Israel does and not pay a price. But apparently, there is a point at which a critical mass of insolence, arrogance and over-confidence could leave the world no choice but to take action. The hope is that this new government will bring Israel closer to precisely that point – apart from which, few hopes are evident in the vicinity.

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Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.

Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

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***

The US ambassador in Peru, Lisa Kenna, worked for the CIA for 9 years, as well as the Pentagon. One day before the coup against elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo, Kenna met with Peru’s defense minister, who then ordered the military to turn against Castillo.

The US ambassador in Peru, a veteran CIA agent named Lisa Kenna, met with the country’s defense minister just one day before democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo was overthrown in a coup d’etat and imprisoned without trial.

Peru’s defense minister, a retired brigadier general, ordered the military to turn against Castillo.

The coup set off mass protests all across Peru. The unelected regime has unleashed brutal violence, and police have killed numerous demonstrators.

Meanwhile, the US government has staunchly supported Peru’s unelected coup regime, which declared a nation-wide “state of emergency” and deployed the military to the streets in an attempt to crush the protests.

Most governments in Latin America have criticized or even refused to recognize Peru’s unelected coup regime, including Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, and various Caribbean nations.

The CIA has organized many coups against democratically elected left-wing leaders in Latin America, from Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to Chile’s President Salvador Allende in 1973.

When the Donald Trump administration nominated Lisa Kenna to be ambassador to Peru in 2020, the State Department released a “certificate of competency” that revealed that, “Before joining the Foreign Service, she served for nine years as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.”

This important fact is curiously absent from most of Kenna’s bios, including her page on the US embassy’s official website.

Lisa Kenna US ambassador Peru CIA

Under Trump, Kenna also served as executive secretary of the State Department and was “senior aide” to Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who previously headed the CIA.

In regard to his work for the notorious spy agency, Pompeo admitted in 2019, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.”

At a Congressional nomination hearing in 2020, Kenna admitted that, as executive secretary, she saw “nearly all” of the memos that were sent to Pompeo, adding, “I am aware of the vast majority of” calls made to and by him.

Kenna also previously worked for the Defense Department and served State Department roles in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Swaziland, and Pakistan.

When President Joe Biden entered in January 2021, he kept Kenna as ambassador in Peru.

On December 6, 2022, Kenna met with Gustavo Bobbio Rosas, a retired brigadier general from the Peruvian military who had officially been appointed as defense minister the day before. (A local media outlet reported that the meeting was on December 5, but that appears to have been an error.)

Peru’s Ministry of Defense published a photo of their friendly chat.

At the time of this meeting, it was known in Peru that the notoriously corrupt, oligarch-controlled congress was preparing for a new vote to overthrow democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo.

Article 113 of Peru’s constitution allows the unicameral congress to remove presidents simply by voting to declare that they have a “moral incapacity,” in a process known as “vacancy.”

Peru’s congress is well known for its extreme corruption. In the infamous “Mamanivideos” scandal, congress members from the far-right Fuerza Popular party were filmed bribing other congress members to vote against impeaching previous right-wing President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

Fuerza Popular is run by the family members of Alberto Fujimori, the far-right dictator who ruled Peru with an iron fist from 1990 until 2000. With the support of the US government, Fujimori committed genocide, sterilizing approximately 300,000 Indigenous people, while killing, torturing, and disappearing large numbers of leftist dissidents.

The Mamanivideos scandal showed that it is quite easy for Peru’s rich oligarchs to buy votes in congress to overthrow democratically elected presidents.

And as soon as Castillo entered office on July 28, 2021, the congress tried to do exactly this.

Just one day after the US ambassador met with Peru’s defense minister, on December 7, 2022, the right-wing-dominated congress launched a parliamentary coup against Castillo, using article 113.

This was the third coup attempt in just over a year by Peru’s congress, which in September 2022 had a mere 7% approval rating.

Hoping to stop the coup, Castillo responded by trying to dissolve the congress. This is allowed in cases of obstructionism by article 134 of Peru’s constitution.

Defense Minister Bobbio immediately denounced the president’s actions. He published a video resigning from his position (that he had only held for three days).

In the video, Bobbio told Peru’s armed forces not to support President Castillo and to oppose his attempt to dissolve the coup-plotting congress.

Bobbio claimed Castillo was launching a “coup attempt,” but in reality Bobbio was instructing the Peruvian military to support a coup against the democratically elected president, on behalf of a notoriously corrupt oligarch-controlled congress that had almost no support from the population.

While Bobbio ordered the military to rebel against the president, the US government promptly attacked Castillo.

Former CIA agent and current Ambassador Kenna tweeted, “The United States categorically rejects any extra-constitutional act by President Castillo to prevent the congress from fulfilling its mandate.”

Kenna failed to mention article 134 of Peru’s constitution, which states:

The President of the Republic is authorized the dissolve the Congress if it has censured or denied its confidence to two Councils of Ministers [the official name of Peru’s cabinet]. The dissolution decree contains the call for elections for a new Congress.

When Castillo moved to dissolve the congress, he cited article 134 and he made it clear that it was only going to be a “temporary” closure. The president said new congressional elections would be held as soon as possible.

Kenna ignored all of this context. Instead, the ambassador declared, “The United States emphatically urges President Castillo to reverse his attempt to close the congress and allow the democratic institutions of Peru to function according to the constitution.”

By this, the CIA veteran meant that Castillo should simply allow the anti-democratic, oligarch-controlled congress to launch a coup against him.

The US embassy in Peru subsequently published an official statement echoing exactly what Kenna had said.

This was Washington’s green light for Peru’s corrupt, right-wing-dominated congress to overthrow President Castillo, and for the state security services to arrest him, without trial.

Mere hours after Castillo was imprisoned, the oligarch-controlled congress appointed his vice president, Dina Boluarte, as leader of the country.

Boluarte promised on the floor of the congress that she would create “a political truce to install a government of national unity” – that is, a pact with the right wing.

Boluarte had been expelled in January 2022 from the leftist Perú Libre party that Castillo had campaigned with. She proudly declared that she “had never embraced the ideology” of the socialist political party.

The day after the coup, on December 8, the State Department gave its rubber stamp to Boluarte’s unelected regime.

“The United States welcomes President Boluarte and hopes to work with her administration to achieve a more democratic, prosperous, and secure region,” stated Brian A. Nichols, the US assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs.

“We support her call for a government of national unity and we applaud Peruvians while they unite in their support of democracy,” the top State Department official added.

In the mean time, the Peruvian people were filling the streets, condemning the coup against their elected president.

Peru’s police responded with violence, harshly cracking down, killing several protesters.

On December 14, the coup regime imposed a national “state of emergency” for 30 days, and said it might also declare a curfew.

At the same time, the coup regime also said it plans to sentence Castillo to 18 months in “preventative prison,” without a proper trial that resembles anything remotely like due process.

Just one day before the coup regime made these authoritarian announcements, former CIA agent and current US Ambassador met with Peru’s unelected leader, Dina Boluarte, and reiterated Washington’s wholehearted support.

Kenna praised the right-wing “unity government” that Boluarte pledged to form, adding, “We hope to strengthen our bilateral relationship.”

Brian Nichols, the top State Department official on Latin America, added with a touch of deep irony, “We support the Peruvian people and their constitutional democracy.” He urged protesters to “reject violence.”

On the same day, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, and Colombia released a joint diplomatic statement with a completely contrary message, supporting elected President Castillo, saying he was the victim of “anti-democratic harassment.”

In a press briefing on December 13, the State department was asked about the protests in Peru.

State Department spokesman Ned Price – who, like Lisa Kenna, was also a CIA agent – emphasized Washington’s steadfast support for Peru’s coup regime.

“We do commend Peruvian institutions and civil authorities for safeguarding democratic stability,” he said, as Peru’s repressive police killed protesters.

Instead of condemning the rampant police brutality, the US State Department blamed the protesters themselves. Price stated,

“we are troubled by scattered reports of violent demonstrations and by reports of attacks on the press and private property, including businesses.”

“When it comes to Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, we of course do recognize her as such. We will continue to work with Peru’s democratic institutions, and we look forward to working closely with President Boluarte and all branches of the government in Peru,” the former CIA agent stressed.

In addition to serving as a CIA agent for nine years and current US ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna worked as a:

  • political adviser to the secretary of defense
  • director of the Iraq office on the National Security Council at the White House
  • deputy director of the Iraq political office at the Department of State
  • chief of the political section at the US embassy in Jordan
  • political/military officer at the US embassy in Egypt
  • staff member at the US embassy in Swaziland
  • staff member at the US consulate general in Peshawar, Pakistan

At a Congressional nomination hearing on July 23, 2020, Kenna boasted of her US-supremacist worldview, stating,

“The longer I have been in public service, the more I am convinced that America is the world’s most exceptional nation.”

She also vowed,

“I will maintain the United States’ vital relationship with Peru which has long been one of our closest partners in the region. Recently, Mission Peru has performed heroically to sustain our strong partnership and serve our fellow Americans in these challenging times.”

At the time of the hearing, Peru had a right-wing government, led by President Martín Vizcarra.

Kenna praised Peru’s conservative government, “as founder of the Lima Group,” for backing the United States in its right-wing coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro, claiming, “The U.S. and Peru are also growing our shared support for a peaceful return to democracy in Venezuela.”

She also pledged in the hearing that, as US ambassador to Peru: “I commit to meet with democratically oriented opposition figures”; “We also commit to meet with independent, local press in Peru”; and “I am committed to meeting with human rights, civil society, and other non governmental organizations in the United States and in Peru.”

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Featured image: Ex CIA agent and US ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna, meets with its defense minister two days before a coup against its elected left-wing President Castillo (Source: Multipolarista)

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***

The UN Officer of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has issued a press release detailing the views of its experts on the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians during the past year, which they say has seen the worst death rate among the Occupied population since the organization began systematically tracking fatalities in 2005.

The experts rebuked Israel for the excessive use of force deployed by Israeli forces against Palestinians and the unbridled violence of Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank, which have left 150 Palestinians dead this year in the Occupied West Bank, including 33 children. In addition, militant, armed Israeli squatters have killed two or possibly three Palestinians this year.

Palestinian violence was responsible for the deaths of four security personnel, one guard for a squatter settlement, and five squatters on stolen Palestinian land.

The experts issued a joint statement, saying

“We remind Israel that pending the dismantlement of its unlawful occupation, Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory must be treated as protected persons, not enemies or terrorists.”

Quite the opposite — they pointed out that Israeli officials have the responsibility under international law to attend to the security and welfare of the Occupied population.

Fanatical Israeli squatters who have built on land owned by Palestinian families and walk around armed are a particular concern for the UN human rights experts. They say that:

“Armed and masked Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in their homes, attacking children on their way to school, destroying property and burning olive groves, and terrorising entire communities with complete impunity.”

Worse, there are credible reports of Israeli troops actually helping the squatters commit mayhem on Palestinians. The experts observed, “Disturbing evidence of Israeli forces frequently facilitating, supporting and participating in settler attacks, makes it difficult to discern between Israeli settler and State violence.” They added, “The impunity of one is reinforced by the impunity of the other.”

Each year has seen more Israeli squatter attacks than the year before since 2016. Ironically, it was in 2016 that the UN Security Council had passed a resolution demanding an end to such Israeli squatting.

There is something horribly wrong with Israeli military rules of engagement, which are producing this high death toll among the Palestinians. The experts point out that Occupation troops can only deploy firearms against persons from the Occupied population when the latter pose an imminent threat to life. That is, you can’t just shoot down unarmed people, and you can’t shoot someone in the head who has been taken down and immobilized, regardless of what he had been doing up to that point. The experts warn that these cavalier approaches to taking human life “may amount to extrajudicial execution – a violation of the right to life – and wilful killing prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention and Rome Statute.”

Ultimately, the experts say, it is the Israeli determination to colonize the Palestinian West Bank that is driving this drumbeat of violence against the indigenous population:

“Illegal settlement poses a corrosive threat to Israeli society as a whole, and unless Israeli forces abandon this dominant settler mindset and rightfully treat Palestinians in the occupied territory as protected persons, Israel’s deplorable record in the occupied West Bank will likely deteriorate further in 2023. No peaceful settlement can be pursued under Israel’s repressive occupation: a reality that should be a wake-up call for all decision-makers.”

Their expectation that the lives of Palestinians are about to get harder, though they did not say so, is justified by the formation of the most far right wing, extremist government in the country’s history, with cabinet members who are themselves illegal squatters on stolen Palestinian land and who champion more such theft.

The experts issuing this statement are Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, Morris Tiball-Binz, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,and Clément Voule, Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association.

Ms. Albanese has a law degree from the University of Pisa and a Master of Law in Human Rights from London University’s SOAS. She is finishing a Ph.D. in International Refugee Law at Amsterdam University’s Law School. An Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, Albanese is the author of Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford U.P., 2020). Her highly knowledgeable critique of Israeli Occupation policies toward the Palestinians has led to a smear campaign against her, predictably and pitifully attempting to depict her concern for the rights of Palestinians as a form of bigotry toward Jews.

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

Featured image: Shireen Abu Akleh was an icon in Palestine and throughout much of the Arabic speaking world for her reporting from the occupied territories (Illustration/MEE)

Modi Ignores West’s Sanctions on Russia

December 20th, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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***

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday marks a new stage in the bilateral relationship between the two time-tested friends, both contextually and from a long-term perspective.

The media may find it alluring to link Modi’s call to Ukraine developments despite the Indian and Russian readouts (here and here) making it clear that Russian-Indian bilateral relations dominated the conversation. 

Nonetheless, it is very significant that Modi was not deterred by the fact that although this is not era for wars, the Ukraine conflict in all probability will only escalate, and there is a greater likelihood than ever before that Russia may be compelled to seek a total military victory, as the US is leaving it with no option by doggedly blocking all avenues for a realistic settlement and is furtively climbing the escalation ladder. 

Without doubt, the Biden Administration’s reported decision to deploy Patriot missile in Ukraine is a major escalation. Moscow has warned of “consequences.” Again, Moscow has confirmed that the US planned, masterminded and equipped Ukraine with the military capability to attack deep inside Russian territory — hundreds of kilometres, in fact — including against base at Engels where Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers are stationed. The two superpowers never before targeted each other’s nuclear assets. 

So, there is no question that Modi’s initiative at this point in time to discuss “the high level of bilateral cooperation that has been developing on the basis of the Russian-Indian privileged strategic partnership,” including in key areas of energy, trade and investments, defence & security cooperation, conveys a huge message in itself.

It quietly underscores a medium and long term perspective on the Russian-Indian relationship that goes far beyond the vicissitudes of the Ukraine conflict. Put differently, India will not allow its long-standing ties with Russia to be held hostage to Western sanctions. 

For India, the reorientation of Russian economic diplomacy toward the Asian region presents huge business opportunities. Who would have thought nine months ago that Russia was going to be the largest supplier of oil to India, leapfrogging Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the US? According to Reuters, India purchased about 40% of all export volumes of Russian Urals grade oil transported by sea in November, when European countries accounted for 25%, Turkey 15% and China 5%.

The figures speak for themselves: in November, while Russia supplied 909,000.4 barrels of crude oil to India per day, the corresponding figures were for Iraq (861,000.4), Saudi Arabia (570,000.9), and the US (405,000.5) Suffice it to say that when Modi upfront listed energy as his talking point with Putin, it reconfirms that India is giving a wide berth to the G7’s hare-brained scheme to impose a price cap on Russian oil exports. 

But all good things have a flip side to it. As the volume of India-Russia trade shoots up — with Russia emerging as India’s seventh largest trading partner, rising from 25th place — the imbalance in the bilateral trade is also widening, as Moscow prioritises India (and China) as preferred trading partners. 

EAM Jaishankar’s recent Moscow visit focused on a list of 500 items that Russia would be keen to source from India. Importantly, this is also about a supply chain for Russian industry / economy. Jaishankar reportedly gave an interim reply of India’s readiness to start supplying spare parts necessary for airplanes, cars and trains.

Some Russian experts have talked about India as a potentially significant “trans-shipment” state for Russia’s “parallel imports” — that is, Russia can buy not only Indian goods from India but also products from third countries.

Meanwhile, turning away from the European market, Russia also seeks business opportunities for its export basket that includes mineral products, precious metals and products made from them, aluminium and other non-ferrous metals, electric machines, vehicles, pharmaceutical, chemical, rubber products, etc. 

Clearly, there are systemic issues to be addressed such as transportation logistics; payment mechanism, collateral sanctions. However, for the near term, all eyes are on the Russian oil exports to India in the time of the G7 price cap. 

The Russian government daily Rossyiskaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday, “It is expected that Russia, in response to the price ceiling, will adopt an official ban on selling oil under contracts where the “ceiling” will be mentioned or the marginal price for our oil will be indicated.” That is, Moscow will insist on an embargo on supplies basically restricted to the G7 and Australia. 

China and India are  not affected, as they haven’t joined the price cap. The following excerpts from the Moscow daily outlines the state of play:

“There are no real mechanisms that could enforce these [G7] restrictions… already, about a third of Russian oil exports leave Russian ports without indicating the final destination. That is, a so-called “grey trade zone” is growing before our eyes, which allows traders to purchase Russian raw materials without the risk of falling under secondary sanctions… discount [ie., fair prices] allows the Asia-Pacific countries, primarily China and India, to increase purchases of Russian raw materials.” 

The fascinating part is that not only is the so-called “grey zone” expanding steadily but alongside, other suppliers have begun to adjust to the prices of Russian oil in the Asia-Pacific region — that is, to the real equilibrium prices or discounted prices. Curiously, even Western countries are in a position to receive relatively inexpensive Russian oil through third parties.

The bottom line is that the Biden administration’s goal was not to limit the volume of Russian oil exports but focused on the revenues of the Russian budget from oil production and the world oil market. Rissyiskaya Gazeta concludes: “In fact, so far what is happening does not contradict either our aspirations or the desires of the United States.” [See my article Race for Russian oil begins, The Tribune, Nov. 28, 2022]

This new-found pragmatism in the US calculus about the limits to sanctions took a curious turn in Thursday when the US blacklisted the Russian billionaire-oligarch Vladimir Potanin but exempted two of his biggest assets from the purview of sanctions — MMC Norilsk Nickel and Tinkoff Bank — on the specious ground that his holdings are less than 50% in these two companies [but are only 35%!]   

Why so? Because, MMC’s share in the world market of high-grade nickel is 17%, palladium 38%, platinum 10%, rhodium 7%, copper and cobalt 2% each; and, sanctioning the Russian company could sharply aggravate the world market for non-ferrous metals and can hurt US manufacturers. 

Clearly, the law of diminishing returns is at work in the continued weaponisation of sanctions against Russia. Indian business and industry should pay close attention to Modi’s far-sighted initiative on Friday.

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Featured image: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar (L) met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Moscow, November 8, 2022 (Source: Indian Punchline)

L’Iran com’è (e non come ce lo fa vedere il mainstream)

December 20th, 2022 by Manlio Dinucci

In questa puntata realizzata con la collaborazione del giornalista Max Civili, Grandangolo (nel format Dentro la Notizia) mostra la realtà iraniana attraverso un autorevole testimone che la vive dall’interno: il prof.  Raffaele Mauriello, professore alla Facoltà di Letteratura Persiana e Lingue Straniere dell’Università di Teheran.

La puntata si apre con una sintetica scheda sugli eventi storici che hanno portato all’attuale situazione, a iniziare dal colpo di stato del 1953, orchestrato dal servizio segreto britannico ed eseguito dalla CIA statunitense per rovesciare Mohammad Mossadeq, il primo ministro iraniano democraticamente eletto nel 1951, che aveva nazionalizzato l’industria petrolifera sottraendola al controllo britannico. Ciò è all’origine dei successivi passaggi storici: il regime dello Scià legato agli Stati Uniti che controllano con la Gran Bretagna l’industria petrolifera iraniana,  la conseguente occidentalizzazione forzata dell’Iran, la rivoluzione popolare che porta al potere l’Ayatollah Khomeini e alla nazionalizzazione dell’industria petrolifera iraniana, la guerra dell’Iraq contro l’Iran fomentata e sostenuta dagli USA negli anni Ottanta. Seguono le ulteriori trasformazioni fino all’Iran odierno, sempre nel mirino dell’Occidente che lo attacca dall’esterno e dall’interno. Emblematico l’assassinio del generale iraniano Soleimani con un drone USA nel gennaio 2020, mentre arrivava all’aeroporto di Baghdad in visita ufficiale in Iraq. Nell’attuale situazione geopolitica, l’Iran è oggi ancora più importante quale snodo della Nuova Via della Seta, promossa dalla Cina, e del Corridoio Internazionale di Trasporto Nord-Sud che collega la Russia all’Asia Meridionale.  

Su questo sfondo si colloca la campagna di demonizzazione dell’Iran, condotta soprattutto da Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna. Quale sia la reale situazione del paese lo documenta il prof. Mauriello con precisi e documentati fatti, che demoliscono il quadro propagandistico del mainstream. 

Manlio Dinucci

STASERA ALLE 20:30 

SUL CANALE TV 262 BYOBLU

GRANDANGOLO

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On Nov. 3, a spine-chilling assassination attempt was mounted on Pakistan’s most charismatic and popular political leader, Imran Khan, while he was addressing a political rally in Wazirabad, a small town near the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Lahore.

As corroborated by eye witness accounts, there were two shooters. One of them was an amateur religious zealot armed with a pistol and meant as a diversion who was caught by the supporters of PTI, Imran Khan’s political party. The other was a professionally trained sniper who shot a burst of bullets at Imran Khan’s container with a sub-machine gun and escaped the crime scene unharmed.

It’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t an assassination attempt but a shot across the bow meant to send a loud and clear warning to the leadership of Imran Khan’s PTI. The sharp shooter aimed the gun at Imran Khan’s legs and emptied an entire magazine of the sub-machine gun, and hit the bull’s eye.

Clearly, the assassin had explicit instructions only to target lower limbs of victims and avoid hitting vital organs in upper body that could’ve caused deaths and needless public furor. Injuries suffered by the rest of PTI leadership, mainly in the legs, and bystanders was collateral damage. One bystander, named Moazzam, was killed on the spot, but circumstantial evidence points that he was likely shot dead from the bullets shot by the guards protecting the container who mistakenly assumed that he was the shooter.

Multiple bullets and fragments of lead from two to three feet high metal plate around the container pierced Imran Khan’s both legs. After taking a close look at Imran Khan’s x-rays, as shown by his personal physician, Dr. Faisal, one bullet fractured Imran Khan’s right shin bone. A tiny piece of shrapnel landed near patella on the knee-cap. Another lead fragment almost pierced femoral artery that could’ve caused profuse bleeding and even death if left untreated for long.

The amateur zealot, identified as Naveed s/o Bashir, was armed with a locally made pistol he had bought for Rs.20,000 ($100). Most pistols found in Pakistan are semi-automatic and are utterly unreliable. They seldom fire an entire magazine without misfiring a couple of bullets. That’s what happened with the shooter, too. A bullet got stuck in the chamber and a valiant PTI supporter, Ibtisam Hassan, leapt on him and snatched the pistol from his hands.

Russian-made Kalashnikovs, on the other hand, are weapons of choice for sharp shooters. And since the times of Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties, Kalashnikovs are so easily available in Pakistan that one could conveniently get an AK-47 from any arms dealer. In all likelihood, the sniper was armed with an AK-47, as the classic rattling sound of Kalashnikov burst could be clearly heard in the video of the incident, and he likely escaped the crime scene in the narrow alleys of the town on a motor-bike with an accomplice.

The confessional statement of Naveed s/o Bashir was an eyewash, as he was a decoy. The whole assassination attempt appeared astutely choreographed. The purported assassin was not only caught red-handed but was also filmed shooting bullets in the air with a pistol while the actual hitman who professionally executed the assassination attempt remains as elusive as the masterminds of the cowardly plot.

Subsequently, Imran Khan implicated incumbent Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and DG-C of ISI Major Gen. Faisal Naseer in the plot to assassinate him. But the police refused to register the first information report due to fear of repercussions from the deep state for naming a serving military officer in the police report.

In any case, the director of intelligence couldn’t have ordered mounting an assassination attempt on a popular political leader and the country’s former prime minister all by himself without a nod of approval from Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, then the army chief of Pakistan’s military, who retired from service on Nov. 29, weeks following the assassination plot on Nov. 3.

In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception.

Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in the sixties was regarded as a liberal establishment. Then, the General Zia-led administration during the eighties was manifestly a religious conservative establishment. And lastly, the General Musharraf-led administration from 1999 to 2008 was once again deemed a liberal establishment.

The deep state does not judge on the basis of ideology, it simply looks for weakness. If a liberal political party is unassailable in a political system, it will join forces with conservatives; and if conservatives cannot be beaten in a system, it will form an alliance with liberals to perpetuate the stranglehold of “the deep state” on policymaking organs of state.

The biggest threat to nascent democracies all over the world does not come from external enemies but from their internal enemies, the national security establishments, because military generals always have a chauvinistic mindset and an undemocratic temperament. An additional aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of military coups in developing democracies is that they lack firm traditions of democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism which act as bars against martial laws.

All political parties in Pakistan at some point in time in history were groomed by the security establishment. The founder of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was groomed by General Ayub’s establishment as a counterweight to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League, the founder of Bangladesh, during the sixties.

Nawaz Sharif was nurtured by General Zia’s administration during the eighties to offset the influence of Bhutto’s People’s Party. But he was cast aside after he capitulated to the pressure of the Clinton administration during the Kargil conflict of 1999 in disputed Kashmir region and ceded Pakistan’s military positions to arch-rival India, leading to Gen. Musharraf’s coup against Nawaz Sharif’s government in Oct. 1999.

Imran Khan’s PTI draws popular support from Pakistani masses, particularly from younger generations and women that are full of political enthusiasm. PTI won the general elections of 2018 and formed a coalition government, and Imran Khan was elected prime minister. But a rift emerged between Imran Khan’s elected government and the top brass of Pakistan’s military in Nov. 2021 over the appointment of the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service.

Eventually, Imran Khan succumbed to pressure and appointed the spymaster nominated by the top brass. But by then, the military had decided that Imran Khan had become too powerful a political leader and was encroaching on the military’s traditional domains, defense and national security policy. Therefore, deploying the astute divide-and-conquer strategy, the deep state lent its weight behind the opposition political alliance. Imran Khan’s political allies abandoned the PTI government and the coalition government fell apart in April.

Due to the British imperial legacy and subsequent close working relationship between the security agencies of Pakistan and the US during the Soviet-Afghan war of the eighties, Pakistan’s security establishment works hand in glove with the deep state of the United States, like the Turkish security establishment which is a NATO member.

Before his ouster as prime minister in a no-trust motion in the parliament on April 10, Imran Khan claimed that Pakistan’s Ambassador to US, Asad Majeed, was warned by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu that Khan’s continuation in office would have repercussions for bilateral ties between the two nations.

Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani politician who served as the Federal Minister for Human Rights under the Imran Khan government, quoted Donald Lu as saying:

“If Prime Minister Imran Khan remained in office, then Pakistan will be isolated from the United States and we will take the issue head on; but if the vote of no-confidence succeeds, all will be forgiven.”

Imran Khan fell from the grace of the Biden administration, whose record-breaking popularity ratings plummeted after the precipitous fall of Kabul in August 2021, reminiscent of the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport, and Washington accused Pakistan for the debacle.

After the United States “nation-building project” failed in Afghanistan during its two-decade occupation of the embattled country from Oct. 2001 to August 2021, it accused regional powers of lending covert support to Afghan insurgents battling the occupation forces.

The occupation and Washington’s customary blame game accusing “malign regional forces” of insidiously destabilizing Afghanistan and undermining US-led “benevolent imperialism” instead of accepting responsibility for its botched invasion and occupation of Afghanistan brought Pakistan and Russia closer against a common adversary in their backyard, and the two countries even managed to forge defense ties, particularly during the three and a half years of Imran Khan’s government from July 2018 to April 2022.

Since the announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban by the Trump administration in Feb. 2020, regional powers, China and Russia in particular, hosted international conferences and invited the representatives of the US-backed Afghanistan government and the Taliban for peace negotiations.

After the departure of US forces from “the graveyard of the empires,” although Washington is trying to starve the hapless Afghan masses to death in retribution for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the global hegemon by imposing economic sanctions on the Taliban government and browbeating international community to desist from lending formal diplomatic recognition or having trade relations with Afghanistan, China and Russia have provided generous humanitarian and developmental assistance to Afghanistan.

Image: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Licensed under the Public Domain)

Z A Bhutto (President of Pakistan).jpg

Imran Khan’s ouster from power for daring to stand up to the United States harks back to the toppling and subsequent assassination of Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in April 1979 by the martial law regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

The United States not only turned a blind eye but tacitly approved the elimination of Bhutto from Pakistan’s political scene because, being a socialist, Bhutto not only nurtured cordial ties with communist China but was also courting Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union played the role of a mediator at the signing of the Tashkent Agreement for the cessation of hostilities following the 1965 India-Pakistan War over the disputed Kashmir region, in which Bhutto represented Pakistan as the foreign minister of the Gen. Ayub Khan-led government.

Like Imran Khan, the United States “deep state” regarded Bhutto as a political liability and an obstacle in the way of mounting the Operation Cyclone to provoke the former Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and the subsequent waging of a decade-long war of attrition, using Afghan jihadists as cannon fodder who were generously funded, trained and armed by the CIA and Pakistan’s security agencies in the Af-Pak border regions, in order to “bleed the Soviet forces” and destabilize and weaken the rival global power.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA and State Department in January 2019, as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December that year.

The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department documents, in the 1998 interview to The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf Arab States to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan joined the American-led, anticommunist SEATO and CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s client state since its inception in 1947. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan.

Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security agencies were alarmed by his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that although the Bhutto government did provide political and diplomatic support on a limited scale to Islamists in their struggle for power against Pashtun nationalists in Afghanistan, being a secular and progressive politician, he would never have permitted opening the floodgates for flushing the Af-Pak region with weapons, petrodollars and radical jihadist ideology as his successor, Zia-ul-Haq, an Islamist military general, did by becoming a willing tool of religious extremism and militarism in the hands of neocolonial powers.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

It is no longer enough to put it in a vacuum to protect nature

December 20th, 2022 by Prof. Jacques Prescott

As COP 15 prepares to adopt the objective of dedicating 30% of the planet to the creation of protected areas, there is reason to wonder whether this solution is the best in a context where the rapid evolution of the climate jeopardizes the resilience of protected areas. Consider the case of forests. In recent months, in Quebec, while the Premier had declared that a balance between the economic and environmental aspects remains essential, the public hearings on the survival of the woodland caribou highlighted a major split between the point of view of the supporters of the strict protection of nature and those advocating the rational use of resources. Is a happy medium possible?

Some are asking for strict protection of forest areas sheltering caribou, others want to continue their forest management activities. Without denying its impact, forestry is not the only cause of the decline in caribou populations. Other factors demonstrated by science come into play: habitat degradation and fragmentation by forest fires and insect epidemics, disturbance caused by resort and eco-tourism activities, hunting and poaching, wolf and bear predation, food availability, parasites, diseases and biting insects, climate change and extreme weather events. Caribou are therefore affected simultaneously by a combination of factors such that it is difficult to assess their relative effects separately. Forest management alone cannot be responsible for the decline of woodland caribou populations and is in fact only one of the many causes.

What if the forest itself was threatened? According to the Canadian Department of Forests, Canadian forests have become net emitters of CO2 over the past twenty years due to their poor management in the face of the vagaries of the climate. Due to a lack of resources, vast tracts of forest left on their own are systematically destroyed by invasive species and fires that return the phenomenal amounts of carbon sequestered by these trees to the atmosphere. Is integral protection without adequate human intervention enough to protect ecosystems?

Another dilemma arises. By removing thousands of square kilometers of forests from forest management, we are depriving ourselves of a renewable energy source and a building material that sequesters carbon for a long time. Is it possible to develop the forest without destroying its biodiversity and endangering its occupants?

The path of middle ground and balance suggested by the concept of sustainable development offers a solution to this dilemma. In Quebec, the current forest policy inspired by the Sustainable Development Act advocates forest management that recognizes and encourages the various functions of the forest, protects biodiversity and takes into account the expectations of all users in the face of the vagaries of climate change.

To do this, we need sustainable forestry that takes advantage of science and the most advanced technologies (remote sensing, modelling, local interventions) and makes it possible to identify both priority intervention areas (infection hotspots, fire risk areas) and protection areas. By targeted harvesting of forest resources in properly managed areas, it is possible both to increase the resilience of the forest and to market a source of renewable energy and a carbon-neutral building material.

Such work is costly and cannot be applied over vast territories without the adoption of a new economic model. By creating forest areas for sustainable use centered on carbon sequestration and the protection of biodiversity (the equivalent of what IUCN experts call category 6 protected areas), would it not be possible to finance forest management and biodiversity protection work by selling offset credits on the carbon market?

No, it is no longer enough to put nature in a vacuum to protect it. The impacts of climate change force us to rely on active conservation of natural environments based on scientific knowledge and to promote their various functions in a renewed economic model. This is a future-focused approach to sustainable conservation able to meet today’s challenges.

 

Jacques Prescott, M.Sc. biology, Associate Professor , Chair in eco-advising, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi

Gaston Déry, Forest Engineer, M.Sc., OC, C.Q., Strategic Advisor Sustainable Development

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***

The 2024 United States presidential race would become much more interesting if Children’s Health Defense Founder and Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has tenaciously challenged the tyranny and propaganda pursued in the name of countering coronavirus, runs for president with legal scholar and former New Jersey Judge Andrew Napolitano as his running mate on a third-party ticket. That is the presidential ticket possibility suggested by political commentator and trends forecaster Gerald Celente in a Friday interview with host David Knight at the David Knight Show.

Twenty-five minutes into the interview, Celente broached the idea of a Kennedy-Napolitano ticket. Many Americans’ reaction to such a ticket may be similar to Knight’s initial response upon hearing its suggestion. Knight stated, “I would support something like that, even if I didn’t agree with them on all the issues, because I think they tell people what they really believe.” You can watch the interview here.

Celente further suggested that Kennedy and Napolitano could seek the Libertarian Party nomination.

Celente mentioned in the interview his having spoken along with Kennedy and Napolitano at the September 4, 2021 Ron Paul Institute (RPI) conference in Virginia near Washington, DC. Regarding what a Kennedy-Napolitano campaign would look like, Kennedy and Napolitano’s speeches at that RPI event provide a promising preview.

Watch Kennedy’s speech here:

Watch the speech by Napolitano, who is an RPI Advisory Board member, here:

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***

In key respects, although in dramatically different contexts, “gun control” activism falls prey to the same logical blind spot as the government’s Orwellian war on “misinformation” as well as global denuclearization efforts. 

No one, save for hardened nihilists, likes misinformation — a manufactured media term that essentially amounts to lies disseminated at scale – any more than anyone wants more gun deaths or nuclear war.

However, the notion that censorship could ever eliminate misinformation is epically misguided – ironically, a lie invented by those who hold power. In addition to running afoul of every decent Western tradition that values individual liberty, censorship campaigns invariably serve the interests of those who assume the role of censors. The inevitable result is that elites disseminate their own favored lies while suppressing competing lies as well as the objective truth.

Genuine unfiltered truth rarely, if ever, comes from a government politburo or state-sanctioned media. That’s now how reality works. Neither does stable peace result from state monopoly on force.

However, even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, the counterfactual premise that combatting misinformation through censorship works, the US government would literally be the least deserving institution in world history to be entrusted with the task.

Back in 2003, when telling the truth would have mattered, no corporate media outlet – not the neoliberal New York Times or the neo-conservative Fox News – seriously investigated or challenged Powell’s false claims that Saddam Hussein was developing WMDs. They served the same military-industrial complex Deep State interests then as the neocons in the Bush administration.

If Colin Powell’s UN act had happened in 2022 instead of 2003, Twitter would have undoubtedly suspended anyone who questioned his account as “misinformation” at the behest of the US government, just as it does not to fight COVID “misinformation”(much of which has since been proven true).

Then just as now with “anti-vaxxers” (a catch-all term to demonize anyone who questions lockdowns), any public figure who spoke out about the Iraq WMD lies risked becoming a social pariah in the halls of power.

Guns, nukes, and misinformation already exist. They have proliferated and are possessed by numerous actors – and in greatest abundance by states. Getting rid of them is an impossibility.

The only real answer offered — through nuclear non-proliferation or gun control or censorship regimes – is to limit the average person’s capacity to possess them as a means to concentrate capability in a centralized authority.

But the reason the United States didn’t nuke the USSR – and vice versa – during the Cold War was because each had launch-ready nukes in spades pointed at each other in mountainsides, in submarines, everywhere. Firing on the enemy would have assured the other’s destruction (a concept called mutually assured destruction, or MAD).

In the context of combatting domestic totalitarianism, the Second Amendment to the Constitution serves the same function as MAD does in the context of international nuclear deterrence – namely, as a check on abuse of power.

To allow the government to confiscate the arms of the citizenry while maintaining its own arsenal would be absurd on its face – a unilateral surrender of the only real means for a free people to keep the state in check.

The Department of Homeland Security – the largest domestic law enforcement body in all the land — buys bullets by the billions. And it recently declared a jihad on flyover country in a “war on domestic terror” – a “domestic terrorist” being anyone who claims election fraud or opposes COVID lockdowns.

Why would anyone concerned with his personal liberty agree to surrender his guns to an entity that has stated ill intentions against him?

By the same token, why would a nation-state agree to unilaterally abandon a nuclear project at the behest of its adversary that already has nukes and implicitly threatens it with them?

Similarly, why would a free person allow the government – itself the biggest purveyor of “misinformation” – to police and control the public discourse?

Misinformation is obviously a potential social poison. Maybe the world would be better off without guns. It certainly would be better off without nukes. But all three are here now, and they’re here to stay. The only way to maintain the balance of force is to decentralize their distribution throughout the population.

The unavoidable effect of censorship, denuclearization, or gun control is to monopolize the means of force and information dissemination in the state, to be weaponized against a defanged, defenseless population as necessary to maintain its power.

This always ends poorly for the disarmed sitting ducks. One might ask the Cambodian peasants slaughtered by Pol Pot or the Chinese slaves killed by Mao for some perspective on the matter, but that’s not possible because they’re all dead.

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This article was originally published on Armageddon Prose.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

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***

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”

These comments echoed those of Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, who came to power in snap elections after the 2014 coup d’état. Regarding his signing of the Minsk Accord, Poroshenko repeated in a Deutsche Welle interview last June his previous admission:

“Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”

Meaning that Ukraine had no real intention of following the accords, but wanted to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications and developed a military strong enough to wage a war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which had demanded autonomy from the Ukrainian government installed in the February 2014 coup.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) became a target for regime change when he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and instead drew his country closer to Russia.

When protesters backed by the U.S. did not have enough signatures for Yanukovych’s impeachment, they overthrew his government by force and hunted down Yanukovych’s supporters. The new Ukrainian government further tried to impose draconian language laws and attacked the people of eastern Ukraine after they voted for their autonomy after the coup—an attack that began right after then-CIA director John Brennan visited Ukraine.[1]

Signed originally on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia, rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by leaders in France and Germany, the Minsk agreement had followed a twelve-point protocol advocating for a cease-fire in the fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and to decentralize power, giving those Republics autonomy which they had voted for in popular referenda.

October 17, 2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, in talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (foreground) and French President Francois Hollande (center back). [Source: consortiumnews.com]

Additional provisions included the withdrawal of illegal armed groups and mercenaries from Ukraine, the release of hostages and illegally detained persons, the establishment of security zones and independent monitoring of the conflict zones, prosecution and punishment of war criminals, and continuance of inclusive national dialogue.

Unfortunately, the Minsk protocol was never followed, and conflict in eastern Ukraine persisted, leading to the signing of the Minsk II protocol in February 2015.

This protocol reaffirmed many aspects of the first Minsk agreement, including the promotion of decentralization and autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, which was to be enshrined in a new Ukrainian constitution that was to recognize the diversity of religions, languages and cultures within Ukraine.[2]

The Ukrainian right sector, however, vowed not to follow Minsk II, claiming that it was unconstitutional and the U.S. State Department accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of violating the protocol by deploying Russian Armed Forces around the contested city of Debaltseve to assist the Donetsk Army. (Putin’s spokesman denied this and said that Russia could not assist in the implementation of Minsk II because it was not involved in the conflict.)

When a law was passed in the Ukrainian parliament granting Donetsk and Luhansk partial autonomy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “law was a sharp departure from the Minsk agreements because it demanded local elections under Ukrainian jurisdiction.”

The leaders of Belarus, Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine at the February 11-12, 2015, summit in MinskBelarus. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Angela Merkel’s comments on December 7 were nothing short of the testimony of a person who openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict.”

Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal in turn that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.”

Loss of Trust

Russian President Vladimir Putin for his part told journalists at a Eurasian Union Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on December 10[3] that he had thought the leader of the Federal Republic of Germany, even though Germany was on Ukraine’s side, had been sincere in negotiating the Minsk agreements, but now it was apparent that

“they were deceiving us. The only purpose was to pump arms into Ukraine and get it ready for hostilities. We are seeing this, yes. Apparently, we got our bearings too late, frankly. Perhaps we should have started all this sooner, but we still simply hoped to come to terms under these Minsk peace agreements.”

For Putin, Merkel’s admission shows that

“we did everything right by starting the special military operation. Why? Because it transpired that nobody was going to fulfill these Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leaders also mentioned this, in the words of former President Poroshenko, who said he signed the agreements but was not going to fulfill them.”

According to Putin, now the issue of “trust is at stake. Trust as such is already close to zero, but after such statements, the issue of trust is coming to the fore. How can we negotiate anything? What can we agree upon? Is it possible to come to terms with anyone, and where are the guarantees? This is, of course, a problem. But eventually we will have to come to terms all the same. I have already said many times that we are ready for these agreements, we are open. But, naturally, all this makes us wonder with whom we are dealing.”

Fitting a Larger Pattern of Deception

Western treachery over the Minsk agreements is far from a historical anomaly.

Following the end of the Cold War, the George H. W. Bush administration promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded one inch eastward in exchange for Russia accepting the reunification of Germany and removing troops it had stationed in East Germany.

But in 1998, the Clinton administration certified NATO expansion into Romania, Poland and Hungary, triggering a new Cold War.

Decades earlier, the United States had deceived the Soviets by failing to abide by the Yalta agreements when it covertly armed neo-Nazis to try to foment counter-revolutions in pro-communist governments that were being established in Eastern Europe.

When the U.S. invaded Russia with six other countries in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson deceived his own commanding General, William S. Graves, who was told that he was going to Russia to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and a Czech military delegation when his real purpose was to support Czarist military officers intent on re-establishing the old order in Russia.[4]

How the West Brought War to Ukraine

Benjamin Abelow’s new book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), demonstrates that the official U.S. narrative about the war in Ukraine is not only wrong but “the opposite of truth.”

A lecturer in medicine at Yale University with a degree in European history who lobbied Congress on nuclear weapons policy, Abelow writes that “the underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”[5]

The key U.S./Western provocations detailed by Abelow are:

  1. The expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a hostile anti-Russian military alliance, over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.
  2. Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the placing of anti-ballistic launch systems that could accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles at Russia, from newly joined NATO countries.
  3. The Obama administration’s laying the groundwork for and possibly directly instigating an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine, which replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one that had four high-ranking members who could be labeled neo-fascist.
  4. The conducting of countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border, including ones with live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.
  5. The assertion that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
  6. Withdrawal by the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, increasing Russia’s vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.
  7. The U.S.’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and holding of regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine.
  8. Leading the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia.[6]

Source: gordonhahn.com

Abelow makes clear that, if the situation were reversed and Russia or China carried out equivalent steps near U.S. territory, the U.S. would surely respond with a preemptive military attack on the aggressors that would be justified as a ‘matter of self-defense.’

So why should Russia be maligned when it is acting as any country would under similar circumstances? And why is it so hard for Americans to stand against their government’s reckless, deceitful and criminal policies that have greatly heightened the risk of nuclear war?

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

  1. Kees van der Pijl, Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 103. 

  2. Russian expert Nicolai Petro noted at the time that there was one major omission to Minsk II—an end to anti-terrorist operations against the East, which would not have passed the Kyiv parliament. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, 146. 
  3. At this summit, Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko presented proposals to strengthen the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, including by promoting development of modern industries and subsidizing interest rates on loans for industrial projects. Lukashenko stated: “We need to improve, at all costs, the blood circulatory system of our union…. It is already clear to everyone that the era of dollar dominance is coming to an end. The future belongs to trade blocs, which will be made in national currencies. Belarus and Russia are no longer using the U.S. dollar in their main settlements. It is important that other partners actively join this process.” 
  4. Years after Graves came back to the U.S., he wrote a scathing memoir, America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishers Inc., 1931) and was accused in turn of being a communist sympathizer. 
  5. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), 7. 
  6. Abelow should add that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is to trap Russia into a quagmire and bankrupt the country by ratcheting up sanctions, resulting in the growth of civil unrest and overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who is hated because he restored Russia’s economic sovereignty following the misrule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and tightened Russian economic integration with Germany, threatening to undermine Anglo-American dominance in Central and Eastern Europe. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Repeating ’70s Strategy of Grand Chess-Master Brzezinski: Biden Appears to Have Induced Russian Invasion of Ukraine to Bankrupt Russia’s Economy and Advance Regime Change,” CovertAction Magazine, March 1, 2022, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/03/01/repeating-70s-strategy-of-grand-chess-master-zbigniew-brzezinski-biden-administration-appears-to-have-induced-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-to-bankrupt-russias-economy-and-advance-regime-cha/; Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War, 3.

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Speculation about the circumstances and motivations behind the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, rife at the time the tragedy occurred, has never stopped. While Kennedy’s murderer was declared soon after the assassination to have worked alone, one insider claimed to Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was directly involved with JFK’s assassination.

Carlson noted that questions about the Kennedy assassination have been circulating since it happened, simply because there were a lot of details that didn’t add up or seemed too coincidental. The CIA refused to release its documentation on the killing.

President Lyndon B. Johnson released a report the year after JFK’s untimely death declaring that both Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, were acting alone. About 50 years later, the CIA admitted it had withheld evidence—but the reason why is still publicly unknown. Carlson said that the term “conspiracy theory” was first brought into the everyday American lexicon by the media following JFK’s assassination due to the many rumors and suspicions flying about. The phrase then—as now, of course—was used to label anything and everything contrary to a government pronouncement, both plausible questions and far-out kookiness, as pure nonsense.

Carlson cited one potentially suspicious circumstance, noting that psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West declared in April 1964 that Jack Ruby was insane after visiting him in jail. West wrote that Ruby was in need of psychiatric hospitalization, even though no one encountering Ruby before had diagnosed him as insane. West was a contract psychiatrist and mind-control expert working for the CIA at the time. He was involved in the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, which gave powerful psychiatric drugs to some Americans without telling them about it. U.S. media has never investigated why a CIA psychiatrist who specialized in uninformed mind control was diagnosing Ruby. The reasons behind West’s selection remain lost to history.

In 1976, the U.S. House of Representatives reopened an investigation into the Kennedy assassination with a special bipartisan committee and concluded that JFK was “almost certainly murdered as the result of a conspiracy.” What was not decided: whose conspiracy? Carlson boldly called the CIA an “obvious suspect.” He explained his reasoning: “Why else would the agency withhold critical evidence from the investigators?” There was a 1992 congressional law mandating that all JFK assassination-related documentation be released by 2017, which ultimately did not happen. Former CIA director Mike Pompeo convinced then-President Donald Trump not to release all the documents, even though all the people involved are dead. The reason is unknown, and Pompeo declined to appear on Carlson’s show.

Today, the Biden administration released thousands of secret government documents regarding the JFK assassination. It is unclear how many remain secret.

Carlson believes he knows why the JFK files were not released in 2017, however. He said he talked with someone who has access to and familiarity with the still-secret Kennedy documentation, and asked, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of [President] John F. Kennedy?” According to Carlson, the insider replied, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” Carlson admitted that the response was “jarring,” but insisted the unnamed source is no “conspiracy theorist… this is someone with direct knowledge of the information.”

Carlson invited viewers, regardless of their feelings about the JFK assassination and his own new report, to consider the ramifications of his source’s statement. Based on what Carlson’s source stated, there are forces inside the U.S. government entirely beyond the control of the electorate (which, in fact, is true, simply because America has so many unelected bureaucrats). Carlson explained his understanding of the situation: “These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want. They constitute a government within a government.” Which is a pretty explosive accusation. Carlson noted that Americans no longer trust their government, but added that the government may be even less trustworthy than is publicly apparent.

The situation Carlson described is truly terrifying. Unfortunately, until all the CIA documentation on Kennedy’s assassination is released, the American public cannot judge whether the insider on Carlson’s show was telling the truth.

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Catherine Salgado is a contributor for PJ Media. She also writes for The Rogue Review, Media Research Center, and her Substack Pro Deo et Libertate. She received the Andrew Breitbart MVP award for August 2021 from The Rogue Review for her journalism.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

Pyotr Kropotkin, 180 Years Later

December 20th, 2022 by Prof. Sam Ben-Meir

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“Anarchism is an aspect of socialism (among many others) that those of us wishing socialism, or some comparable form of resistance, to survive will have to think about again, this time without a prearranged sneer.” T J Clark, Farewell to an Idea

This December 9th marked 180 years since the birth of Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), the great Russian anarchist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, economist, and philosopher. Now, of all times, we should be remembering, revitalizing, and creatively reconstructing his legacy.

One might assume that a 19th century Russian anarchist would have nothing to say that could possibly have real bearing on the world today, that his political philosophy, whatever relevance it might have once held, had been long surpassed. I would dare to venture another point of view: not only are we unable to justify confining Kropotkin to the history (or worse, the dustbin) of ideas – rather, this is a thinker that remains still ahead of us, a thinker whose vision has yet to be truly realized. We have not yet caught up with Kropotkin, but there are indications that conditions more favorable to receiving his thought are on the horizon, and that perhaps there is a day approaching when we may even begin to see his ideas implemented on a scale that could radically transform our communities and, most especially, our workplaces.

Kropotkin’s importance for us has only grown because the material conditions, the post-scarcity, the technological advances, have made it possible, no doubt for the first time in history, to truly realize his vision of unfettered human creativity. There is one chapter in The Conquest of Bread (1892) that I want to focus on because it may surprise those who are new to anarcho-communist political philosophy. The chapter is entitled ‘The Need for Luxury,’ and his thesis is quite a simple one: “After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.” The anarchist commune – or what is sometimes referred to today as “luxury communism” – recognizes “that while it produces all that is necessary to material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind.”

We can agree with Aaron Bastani, who argues in Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2020) that, “There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions. In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.” Bastani is talking about using the levels of post-scarcity and automation that we’ve attained to finally usher in a society free of drudgery, toil, and where the full range of tastes can be satisfied.

Given the multiple crises we are facing, the general name for which is global capitalism, how should we answer the question famously posed by Lenin, “What is to be done?”

There are at least three basic principles which can be derived from the work of Kropotkin, and that can and should strategically guide us as we move forward.

The first is ending the tyranny of private property which has produced greater economic inequality today than we have ever seen in the history of the world. The concentration of capital has produced a condition in which a handful of individuals possess wealth exceeding that of the combined wealth of the billions of people who share this planet. So, as the great French philosopher Alain Badiou has also reiterated, our first principle must be that of collectivism in opposition to the dictatorship of capital: “It is not a necessity for social organization to reside in private property and monstrous inequalities.”

The second principle involve democratizing our workplaces, through worker self-management, or more precisely through what the economist Richard Wolff calls ‘worker self-directed enterprises – in a word, economic democracy. Experiments with non-traditional, non-hierarchical firms, have largely met with success. Perhaps the greatest example is Spain’s Mondrian Corporation, but there are many others. So that we are well past the stage of asking ourselves whether such non-capitalist forms of organization can succeed and be competitive. It has been amply proven that they indeed can.

The non-capitalist reorganization of our workplaces would undoubtedly improve the condition of workers, which is under assault around the world.

In countries around the world, union leaders are routinely threatened with violence or murdered. Indeed, the International Trade Union Confederation reports that 2019 saw “the use of extreme violence against the defenders of workplace rights, large-scale arrests and detentions.”  The number of countries which do not allow workers to establish or join a trade union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019. In 2018, 53 trade union members were murdered — and in 52 counties workers were subjected to physical violence. In 72 percent of countries workers have only restricted access to justice, or none at all.  As Noam Chomsky observed, “Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the unions fight for workers’ rights, but they also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous.”

And third, it is time we recognize, as Badiou put it two weeks after the election of Trump, “that there is no necessity for a state in the form of a separated and armed power.” The principle of free association as opposed to the state is one that anarchism has long advocated. But we need to be clear here: anarchism is usually taken to mean, if anything, opposition to all government or to government as such. In fact, this is a mistakenly one-sided view of anarchism, and it certainly does not represent a nuanced understanding of Kropotkin, who made a clear and sharp distinction between government and the state.

Anarcho-communism is opposed to the state inasmuch as it represents centralized power in the hands of a few, hierarchical relationships and class domination. But Kropotkin was not necessarily opposed to a condition of society in which certain elements of decentralized community government remain. Martin Buber underscored this point: Kropotkin’s “‘anarchy’ like Proudhon’s, is in reality ‘anocracy’; not absence of government, but absence of domination.” The distinctive feature of anarchist programs is not that governments are excluded from the process and without any meaningful contribution to make. The essential characteristics are voluntarism, antiauthoritarianism, the decentralization of political authority, worker self-management (economic democracy), and in general a tendency to address social problems from the bottom up, rather than by imposing solutions from the top down.

Kropotkin was one of Russia’s finest minds, and one that was among the most dedicated to the ideals of which we are in danger of completely losing sight. There is no better time than now to salvage the very best of Russian thought, to reaffirm its universality, its inherently critical posture towards authoritarianism, and the self-destructive pursuit of power through violence.

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Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Peter Kropotkin circa 1900 (Licensed under the Public Domain)

Billions of Euros Paid by Us. They Feed War and Corruption in Ukraine

By Manlio Dinucci, December 19, 2022

EU foreign ministers have allocated another 2 billion euros for military support to Ukraine. The “European Peace Fund”, which has been used to arm and train Kyiv’s army since 2021, is set to increase on an annual basis from the initial 400 million to over one billion euros. This adds more funds to the 30 billion euros that the EU spent from January to October to arm Ukraine.

Over 900 Faith Leaders in the US Demand Christmas Truce in Ukraine

By Peoples Dispatch, December 20, 2022

Ahead of the end-of-year holidays, nearly 1,000 faith leaders in the United States of major traditions are calling for a truce in Ukraine. With 14 million people displaced and over 6,700 confirmed deaths (although the true death toll is estimated to be greater), the war in Ukraine has resulted in enormous violence.

COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects: “I Can’t Hear You”

By Dr. Peter McCullough, December 20, 2022

Loss of hearing in the elderly is common affecting both the patient and the people around them trying to communicate. I have noticed many of my vaccinated elderly patients developing progressive hearing loss. Nieminen et al have conducted an extensive hearing assessment of patients in Finland after COVID-19 vaccination and compared them to the unvaccinated.

Yes, Jesus Would Have Been Branded a Domestic Extremist Today

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, December 20, 2022

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire?

“Inside the COVID-19 Global Coup d’état”. COVID-19 Was a Global Coup by Private Finance, IT, and Intelligence Complexes

By Emanuel Pastreich and Hrvoje Morić, December 20, 2022

A lot of people talk about the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, techno-fascism, global technocracy. I like the term “algorithm ghetto,” because it’s putting us in a ghetto. They want to create this global government, or global totalitarian system, wherein all nations are run like this. And if you don’t think the way the system wants you to think it’ll just shut you off, you can’t go to work. Your permission to travel will be shut off locally, or internationally.

Russia: From Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, December 19, 2022

After the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) emerged many new problems in the international arena of global politics as the circumstances concerning international relations drastically have been changed. One of the many problematic issues that have been facing both the USA and Europe (in fact, NATO and the EU) after 1989 was to find a new way of their relations with a new post-communist Russia – a country in a historical political and economic transition.

The Bivalent Booster Disaster

By Rav Arora, December 19, 2022

Over the past four months, the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have vigorously pushed the new bivalent vaccine on all eligible Americans. In his final White House briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated, “Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community.”

Media Reporting, Justice and “Induced Political Dementia”

By Stephen Sefton, December 19, 2022

People who have had to care for elderly loved ones who suffer from the terrible disease of dementia commonly find during this experience that our loved ones can hold grammatically correct but completely meaningless conversations. These may be with imaginary people, about non-existent situations, or recalling events that never happened. The conversation sounds normal, but is in fact completely absurd.

On Western Support for Nazism

By Mark Taliano, December 19, 2022

It would be obvious and widely accepted that we in the West are responsible for the rebirth and growth of Nazism, if the truth was a staple in our cultural diets. Beneath veils of distractions and obfuscations, for example, the Canadian government has a long history of quietly supporting nazism.

500,000 Internally Displaced Palestinian Citizens of Israel Prevented from Returning to Their Villages

By Khaled Mouammar, December 19, 2022

Palestinian woman tells the story of her connection to the village of Ma’alul (which I visited on July 28, 2022) which was one of 520 villages destroyed by Israel in 1948, and how she and the half million internally displaced Palestinian citizens of Israel are determined to exercise their return to their villages and land despite racist Israeli laws that deny them their right to do so.

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Winter’s arrival in the northern hemisphere brings increased concern about the war in Ukraine – now in its 10th month. Concern about the suffering of civilians under siege and the fate of millions of refugees, concern about the energy crisis and militarization in Europe, concern about war-related food shortages in Africa, and concern about the possibility of a civilization-ending nuclear war. In the face of these compounding disasters, the world’s people are confronted by the apparent readiness of Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and NATO to dig in for a long war in which there will be no winners.

Veterans For Peace shares these concerns. As far back as 2015, we called for the withdrawal of all NATO forces from Ukraine’s borders with Russia. Like many observers, we saw this unnecessary and totally avoidable war coming. On February 24, 2022, the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, we issued an urgent call for Diplomacy Not War. Veterans For Peace is part of the Peace In Ukraine Coalition, which is calling for a ceasefire and diplomacy to end the war before it is too late.

Now, with the holiday season almost upon us, we join in the calls by religious leaders and others for a temporary truce in Ukraine, hearkening back to the storied “Christmas Truce” in 1914 during World War I, when German and British soldiers came out of their trenches to celebrate together.

As veterans who have experienced the carnage of war, we feel great empathy for the young soldiers on both sides of this bloody war who are being killed and injured in the tens of thousands. We know all too well that the survivors will be traumatized and scarred for life. We say Enough is Enough – War is Not the Answer.

We want urgent, good-faith diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, not more U.S. weapons, advisors and endless war. And certainly not a nuclear war. We want to see those billions of dollars going for climate, jobs, healthcare and housing, not for weapons manufacturers and war profiteers.

As soldiers who have resisted wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, we support war resisters on all sides, including conscientious objectors, draft resisters, deserters and all who refuse to participate in killing. We especially encourage U.S. military personnel to refuse to participate in training, arming, advising or otherwise engaging in this and other wars of empire. We furthermore call on the U.S. government to end all its wars and withdraw our troops from multiple countries around the world.

It is time to reverse course now. Drop the weapons. Embrace diplomacy and peace. For the sake of Ukraine. For the sake of Russia, Europe and the United States. For the sake of the all the peoples of the world. A holiday truce could be the first step toward peace.

Enough Is Enough – War Is Not the Answer!

Ceasefire Now – Negotiate, Don’t Escalate!

Support Soldiers Who Refuse to Kill!

Signed,

Enya Anderson, VFP National Board

Ellen Barfield, Past Vice President, VFP National Board; Co-founder, Baltimore VFP

Medea Benjamin, VFP Advisory Board, CODEPINK Women for Peace

Leah Bolger, Past President, VFP National Board

Marjorie Cohn, VFP Advisory Board; Past President, National  Lawyer’s Guild

Gerry Condon, Past President, VFP National Board

Paul Cox, VFP National Board

Michael Dempsey, VFP National Board; President, Monterey, CA, VFP

Jim Driscoll, VFP Climate Crisis and Militarism Project

Mike Ferner, Past President, VFP National Board

Mark Foreman, Past Treasurer, VFP National Board

Gerald Hassett, Vice President, New York City VFP

Matthew Hoh, VFP Advisory Board

Helen Jaccard, Manager, VFP Golden Rule Project

Eric Johansson, Past President, San Francisco VFP

Tarak Kauff, Past Member, VFP National Board

Bob Keilbach, Secretary, New York City VFP

Kathy Kelly, VFP Advisory Board; Board President, World Beyond War

Jeremiah Knowles, Vice President, VFP National Board

Barry Ladendorf, Past President, VFP National Board

Gene Marx, Past Secretary, VFP National Board

Ray McGovern, VFP Advisory Board; co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Maj. (ret’d) Ken Mayers, USMCR; VFP National Board

Nick Mottern, VFP National Board; Co-coordinator, BanKillerDrones

William D. (Pete) Peterson, Vice President, VFP Tucson

Barry Riesch, Past President, VFP National Board

Doug Rawlings, Co-founder, VFP; Past Vice President, VFP National Board

Denny Riley, USAF, Our war in Vietnam

Susan Schnall, President, VFP National Board

Chuck Searcy, President, Vietnam VFP

Joshua Shurley, Secretary, VFP National Board

Alice Slater, VFP Nuclear Abolition Working Group

Rick Staggenborg, President, Mid-Valley Oregon VFP

David Swanson, VFP Advisory Board, World Beyond War

Mike Tork, Treasurer, VFP National Board

Michael Wong, Vice President, San Francisco VFP

Col. (Ret) Ann Wright, VFP Advisory Board; Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

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Ahead of the end-of-year holidays, nearly 1,000 faith leaders in the United States of major traditions are calling for a truce in Ukraine. With 14 million people displaced and over 6,700 confirmed deaths (although the true death toll is estimated to be greater), the war in Ukraine has resulted in enormous violence. Faith leaders are invoking the legacy of the 1914 Christmas Truce during WWI in calling for peace and negotiations in Ukraine. Led from the ground up by soldiers on both the British and German sides, during the 1914 truce troops defied their officers and ceased hostilities during Christmas all along the Western Front.

Almost 1,000 faith leaders have signed onto a statement that reads in part, “In the spirit of the truce that occurred in 1914 during the First World War, we urge our government to take a leadership role in bringing the war in Ukraine to an end through supporting calls for a ceasefire and negotiated settlement, before the conflict results in a nuclear war that could devastate the world’s ecosystems and annihilate all of God’s creation.”

The statement was put together by US peace organizations CODEPINK, National Council of Elders, and Fellowship of Reconciliation–USA (FOR).

The recent escalations in Ukraine, especially on the part of the US, have raised worldwide concerns about the potential of a nuclear confrontation. Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released on October 27, abandons Biden’s 2020 campaign promise of supporting a “no first use” of nuclear weapons policy. It calls for a rebuilding of the US nuclear arsenal, citing threats from Russia and China, despite the fact that US intelligence has admitted that there is no sign that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons. The US has also sped up storage of upgraded nuclear warheads in Europe as the war rages on in the continent. As the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a blog post, “the Biden NPR doubles down on nuclear deterrence and the status quo approach to security that says we all must be prepared to die in less than an hour. That is not a world any of us should want to live in.”

While the US escalates, peace organizations call instead for negotiations. “Negotiation is not a euphemism for capitulation, nor is it a rationalization of Putin’s aggression,” says Medea Benjamin, cofounder CODEPINK. “It is simply a recognition that the end of this war cannot be achieved by more war. Any prospect for a pause in hostilities should be acted on.”

On November 19, peace organizations such as CODEPINK collaborated on an anti-war event hosted by the Peoples Forum and the ANSWER Coalition, also calling for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Speaking to the condemnation of progressive voices for peace in the United States, ANSWER Coalition direct Brian Becker said at the event, “Whenever people have organized and fought for and mobilized for peace, they draw the wrath of the warmakers…It doesn’t matter if their slogans are soft or mild, whether they talk about negotiations or overturning capitalism, just mobilizing the people against war is a great danger to the warmakers, because if the people finally say NO to war, the wars end. The ruling class can’t do the wars without the people.”

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The White House believes Ukraine’s military could retake the Crimean Peninsula from Russia. However, officials say the offensive may cross Moscow’s “red lines” and prompt a nuclear strike.

The Biden administration has radically changed its view of Kiev’s military since Russia invaded nearly ten months ago. The Ukrainians “continue to shock the world with how well they’re performing on the battlefield,” an unnamed official said.

The White House now assesses that the Ukrainian armed forces are capable of retaking Crimea, with NBC News reporting that statements to that effect were made to lawmakers during a Congressional hearing last month. The administration official was attempting to explain to Congress why Kiev still needs American support.

The Crimean Peninsula was a region of Ukraine before it was annexed by Russia in 2014. While a referendum of Crimean citizens backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision, Kiev and Washington assert the peninsula still belongs to Ukraine.

Sources reached by NBC News said the White House believes Putin will respond sharply to a successful Ukrainian offensive in Crimea. “Putin may react more strongly to Crimea,” one official said, while a former administration staffer added “That’s the red line.”

The White House does not believe Ukrainian military operations in Crimea to be imminent. “A lot would have to happen militarily first” before Ukraine could begin a real offensive to retake Crimea, an official stated.

However, the Biden administration has been surprised by some of Ukraine’s most advanced military operations. Two US officials and an American defense staffer said the White House was caught off guard and frustrated after Kiev launched a series of three drone attacks strikes deep inside Russian territory.

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Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.

America’s Roving Goals for Ukraine

December 20th, 2022 by Ted Snider

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In a joint statement with French President Emmanuel Macron on December 1, President Joe Biden reiterated his vow of “continued support for Ukraine’s defense of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the provision of political, security, humanitarian, and economic assistance to Ukraine for as long as it takes.” A week later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken restated the American mantra of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

But U.S. goals have shown signs of shifting. There have been three shifts, gradually growing, with the most significant almost imperceptibly whispered on December 7, when Secretary of State Blinken suggested for the first time that the “territorial integrity” part of Biden’s vow may be flexibly open to interpretation.

The Biden administration has long “ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table.” But then in early November, after talks with Moscow, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan showed up in Kiev for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. At those talks, Sullivan “raised the need for a diplomatic resolution to the war” and privately pushed Zelensky to “signal an openness to negotiate with Russia and drop their public refusal to engage in peace talks unless President Vladimir Putin is removed from power.”

That was the first shift. The Biden administration went from ruling out nudging Ukraine to negotiate to pushing Ukraine to negotiate.

The second shift came only days later. Zelensky yielded to the U.S. nudge, urging the international community to “force Russia into real peace talks.” But he established preconditions for talks, including “restoration of [Ukraine’s] territorial integrity…compensation for all war damage, punishment for every war criminal and guarantees that it will not happen again,” which effectively negated the offer to negotiate.

Publicly, the U.S. continued to insist that everything was up to Ukraine: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. But, privately, U.S. officials began to say that “they believe that Zelensky would probably endorse negotiations and eventually accept concessions, as he suggested he would early in the war.”

And that was the second shift. Western officials began suggesting that Zelensky compromise.

The reference to Zelensky “early in the war” seems to have been a reference to Zelensky’s previous willingness to negotiate the status of the disputed eastern territories. Even before the war, in December 2021, Zelensky said he was willing to negotiate to avert conflict: “I do not rule out a referendum on Donbass in general. It might be about Donbass, it might be about Crimea.” He was still open to “compromises in Crimea” by March 8, after the war had begun. At that point Zelensky was still “ready to hold a dialogue with Russia on security guarantees, on the future of the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions [and] Crimea.” Although he said that “We cannot recognize that Crimea is the territory of Russia,” he also said, “But we can discuss with Russia the future of Crimea and Donbas.” He added that “Ukraine is ready to hold a dialogue with Russia on…the future of the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.” Three weeks later, Zelensky was still defining his goal as Russia withdrawing to positions they held before the invasion.

After pressure from the U.S. and U.K., all that changed. As Zelensky’s November preconditions for talks indicate, he began insisting on the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. That includes the Donbas and Crimea. In his address to the G20 on November 15, Zelensky again insisted that Russia must withdraw “all Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine” and that there must be full “restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.”

In the second shift, U.S. officials begun suggesting a return to the very openness to compromise that they had consistently discouraged. TheWall Street Journal reports that “Two European diplomats briefed on the discussions said Mr. Sullivan recommended that Mr. Zelensky’s team start thinking about its realistic demands and priorities for negotiations, including a reconsideration of its stated aim for Ukraine to regain Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.” A Western European official said, “We are saying to the Ukrainians that it is up to them to decide when to do it,” but then added, “But it might be a good idea to do it sooner.”

And that U.S. recommendation that Zelensky think about “realistic demands and priorities for negotiations” set off the tremors that led to the third, and most surprising, shift.

The U.S. and its NATO allies have long insisted that the goal is to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity and to punish and weaken Russia. Blinken has appealed to the international principle that “The borders and territorial integrity of a state cannot be changed by force” and affirmed “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters.”

But, on December 7, Blinken subtly modified that message. Blinken suggested for the first time, in a whisper that was barely heard, that the “territorial integrity” part of Biden’s vow may be flexibly open to interpretation.

Blinken hinted that, while leaving the choice of maintaining their wider goals up to Ukraine, the U.S. was narrowing its goals. Blinken told the Wall Street Journal that

Our focus is on continuing to do what we’ve been doing, which is to make sure that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself, what it needs to push back against the Russian aggression, to take back territory that’s been seized from it since February 24th, to make sure as well that it has the support economically and on a humanitarian basis to withstand what’s happening in the country every single day.

The surprising line Blinken slipped in after “to take back territory that’s been seized from it” was the addition of the words “since February 24th.” That three-word addition seems to imply that, when negotiations finally start, the U.S. could settle for Russia maintaining sovereignty over Crimea and even parts of the Donbas. Anything beyond that is up to Ukraine. A senior State Department official told the Post that “how far Ukraine pushes south and east is a future decision for Kyiv.”

And the U.S. is not alone. Its Western allies repeated Blinken’s new formulation. The Post reports that “Some Western officials said Tuesday that the status of Crimea and the Donbas should be up for negotiation in eventual talks between Moscow and Kyiv.” One Western official said that “The longstanding issues of Crimea and the status of the Donbas might be something which are spoken about thereafter.”

British officials expressed “the absolute minimum needed for Russia to demonstrate it is serious about negotiating” as their willingness to “withdraw to positions that it occupied on Feb. 23, before the reinvasion.”

Germany said they will support whatever red lines Ukraine draws but added that “they believe it is unrealistic to expect that Russian troops will be fully expelled from all the occupied territories, and they think that an attack on Crimea would be potentially an escalation that could prompt the Kremlin to use weapons of mass destruction.”

Sullivan’s prior suggestion that Zelensky start thinking about realistic demands and priorities, including Crimea, and several Western allies repeating the new formulation, suggests that Blinken’s three-word addition was not a slip of the tongue. If that is so, it suggests the possibility that the U.S. and its NATO allies are shifting to a position of openness to the possibility of a ceasefire, one where Russia remains in Crimea and the area of the Donbas that it controlled prior to the war, with the final status of those territories negotiated at some later date.

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Ted Snider is a columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft as well as other outlets.

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***

The invitation said the quiet part out loud.

The Ukrainian Embassy hosted a reception last week in honor of the 31st anniversary of the country’s armed services. Events like this are part of the social calendar of Washington’s smart set, with hobnobbing diplomats, think tankers, journalists, and US officials. Guests took photos with the Ukrainian ambassador. Even Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley showed up.

But there was something so overt it led some observers to laugh out loud at the gathering’s invitation.

The logos of military contractors Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney, and Lockheed Martin were emblazoned on the invitation as the event’s sponsors, below the official Ukrainian emblems and elegant blue script that said the Ukrainian ambassador and defense attaché “request the pleasure of your company.”

“It’s really bizarre to me that they would put that on an invitation,” one think tank expert told me. “The fact that they don’t feel sheepish about it, that’s interesting,” explained an academic. (Both spoke on the condition of anonymity and regularly attend embassy events in Washington.)

The invitation to the 31st anniversary of the Ukraine’s armed services, held at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, DC.

A copy of the invitation obtained by Vox.

That Ukraine and those US military contractors have a strong relationship isn’t surprising. America’s allies and partners around the world bought some $50 billion in US weapons last year. These four companies produce some of the most high-profile missile defense systems and anti-tank missiles that President Joe Biden has sent to Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded in February. Neither is it surprising that Ukraine’s government, which says its country has already suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, might not want to deplete its coffers.

But the explicit sponsorship indicates how intimate major military contractors have become with Ukraine, and how much they stand to gain from the war.

The invitation is a clear expression of how the war in Ukraine has been good for business. As Ukraine fights a defensive war against Russia’s brutal invasion, Ukrainians in Washington have been pushing for the US to send Ukraine more weapons. So far, President Joe Biden’s administration has committed a substantial $19.3 billion of military assistance since February.

That aid has been integral to Ukraine’s success on the battlefield; their armed forces first repelled Russia’s advances and then launched counteroffensives that have retaken much of the territory Russia initially claimed.

No one wanted to talk about the party invite, however. A senior official from the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington confirmed that the companies’ logos appeared on the invitation but declined to speak on the record. They directed me to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which did not immediately respond. Lockheed declined to officially comment and deferred to Ukraine House, an embassy-linked entity that was also listed on the invitation. Raytheon also declined to comment. Emails to Northrop Grumman and Pratt & Whitney were not returned.

Even some US supporters of Ukraine say the overt sponsorship is a bad look. “Sustaining American popular support is absolutely essential for Ukraine’s continued defense,” Matt Duss, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow who previously advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me. “So Ukrainian diplomats should probably think harder about how it looks for them to be throwing parties with the defense contractors who are making bank off of this horrible war.”

$19.3 billion of US security assistance to Ukraine, briefly explained

The Biden administration has ramped up military aid to Ukraine to an unprecedented degree. It’s had an undeniable effect on the battlefield.

It’s also been good business for US defense contractors. Among the biggest winners are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Each of their stocks has climbed since Russia’s invasion, with Lockheed up about 38 percent this year.

Contractors have accelerated production to backfill the weapons the US has been sending to Ukraine. The Javelin missile, for example, has become a meme in Ukraine. It’s so in-demand that Lockheed said it will go from manufacturing 2,100 a year to 4,000. The Biden administration has been using what’s called a presidential drawdown authority to quickly source high-end weapons from American stocks and get them into Ukraine, and then use congressional funding to replenish those.

“You’re making it possible for the Ukrainian people to defend themselves without us having to risk getting in a third world war by sending in American soldiers fighting Russian soldiers,” Biden told employees at Lockheed’s Troy, Alabama, factory in May. “And every worker in this facility and every American taxpayer is directly contributing to the case for freedom.”

Lockheed also produces the high-tech defensive systems that protect Ukrainian cities under Russian’s aerial bombardment. In appeals to Washington, Ukraine has sought Lockheed’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). The US has sent Ukraine 20 of the missile defense systems and is working to produce another 18, which will cost about $1.1 billion, according to Defense News. Lockheed also makes another precision missile system that has been sent to Ukraine; last month, the US Army awarded Lockheed $521 million of contracts to refill its own supplies, which had been sent to Ukraine.

“We are confident in long-term growth as domestic and international demand for a wide range of our products and services remain strong,” CEO James Taiclet said on the company’s October earnings call.

Raytheon, for its part, just won a $1.2 billion contract for six surface-to-air-missile systems. The company co-produces Javelin missiles and also makes Stinger missiles, which the US awarded a $624 million contract for in May — the first in two decades, according to the Financial Times. “Over the first 10 months of the war, Ukraine has consumed as many Stinger anti-air missiles as Raytheon makes in 13 years,” the trade publication Breaking Defense noted. Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace company whose logo also appeared on the embassy invitation, is one of Raytheon’s subsidiaries.

In its most recent earnings call, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes described a “significant global demand for advanced air defense systems, especially in Eastern Europe, as the Russians and Ukraine conflict, unfortunately, continues.”

The entire military industrial base has been facing supply chain issues resulting from the Covid pandemic and microchip shortages. But Northrop Grumman, a leading producer of ammunition, could stand to gain long-term from the ongoing war in Ukraine. “One is the growth that we’re seeing in munitions and particularly that demand which we expect to grow even more with the conflict in Ukraine,” CEO Kathy Warden said on an earnings call.

Arming Ukraine is a good narrative for these companies, especially after coming under intensive criticism for selling bombs to countries like Saudi Arabia, which have reportedly been used to kill civilians in Yemen. And an embassy event for Ukraine is an opportunity for military contractors to show that they support the so-called arsenal of democracy.

Military contractors support many research institutions and nonprofits in Washington, but that sponsorship tends to be more subtle. Their names appear in donor rolls or on the final page of a report — not on an invite below an ambassador’s name.

“I’ve never quite seen this kind of public embrace of a country and the weapons contractors as is happening with Ukraine,” Bill Hartung, a researcher at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “I can’t imagine another situation where the contractors would sponsor an event for a country that they’re arming in the middle of a war.”

“It’s one thing to support Ukraine to defend itself, which I think is certainly legitimate,” he added. “But I think the companies want to go beyond that. They want to cash in on this reputationally.”

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COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects: “I Can’t Hear You”

December 20th, 2022 by Dr. Peter McCullough

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Loss of hearing in the elderly is common affecting both the patient and the people around them trying to communicate. I have noticed many of my vaccinated elderly patients developing progressive hearing loss. Nieminen et al have conducted an extensive hearing assessment of patients in Finland after COVID-19 vaccination and compared them to the unvaccinated. The data suggested each successive shot increased risk for hearing loss. However, the most important results are in the supplemental tables which demonstrate the elderly and those with risk factors for hearing loss are pushed over the edge by COVID-19 vaccination.

Nieminen TA, Kivekäs I, Artama M, Nohynek H, Kujansivu J, Hovi P. Sudden Hearing Loss Following Vaccination Against COVID-19. JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. Published online December 15, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamaoto.2022.4154

Their risk for sudden and substantial loss of hearing is more than double those who wisely deferred on the vaccines. The Spike protein produced by the vaccines is a neurotoxin damaging nerves throughout the body and likely having more of an impact in nervous tissue which is already degenerated such as the auditory nerve. It is also possible the Spike protein incites inflammation leading to fibrosis in the tissue holding the stapes or stirrup which is a bone bone in the middle ear, the annular ligament, or the oval window all involved in the conduction of sound vibrations to the inner ear. If you have an elderly person in your circle who has been vaccinated, check on their hearing and do not fall behind on progressive hearing loss which if unchecked, can lead to social withdrawal and insidious depression.

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Source

Nieminen TA, Kivekäs I, Artama M, Nohynek H, Kujansivu J, Hovi P. Sudden Hearing Loss Following Vaccination Against COVID-19. JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. Published online December 15, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamaoto.2022.4154

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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.”

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

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Yes, Jesus Would Have Been Branded a Domestic Extremist Today

December 20th, 2022 by John W. Whitehead

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***

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later.

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do.

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our  modern age.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state.

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.

We must do no less.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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***

Read Part I:

“Inside the COVID-19 Global Coup d’état”

By Emanuel Pastreich and Hrvoje Morić, December 12, 2022


Geopolitics & Empire: Just to go to a step further, where do they want to take us? I feel like we’re still in the eye of the storm, operation COVID-19 is not yet finished, by any means. You write,

“As a result global institutions like Bretton Woods, UN, IT corporations, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle are being militarized as we speak. What they have been authorized to do to Russians today, they will do to you tomorrow. And there will be no appeal precisely because the policies were formulated and implemented in secret. Your bank account, your automobile, your every action can be shut down by these hidden forces. The oppression of citizens in Canada, New Zealand and Austria was the frontline of this war against the citizens of the earth. Now something far worse is slouching towards Kiev to be born or shadow government lurks behind the titles, US government, German government, NATO, World Bank or UN. And they will be able to seize everything you possess and put you in jail without any due process.”

 

Putting Us in a Ghetto

A lot of people talk about the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, techno-fascism, global technocracy. I like the term “algorithm ghetto,” because it’s putting us in a ghetto. They want to create this global government, or global totalitarian system, wherein all nations are run like this. And if you don’t think the way the system wants you to think it’ll just shut you off, you can’t go to work. Your permission to travel will be shut off locally, or internationally.

Where I used to work, all the teachers had to get injected or they lost their job. I know people who were fired because they refused to be injected with what I call Pentagon Juice because it was the Pentagon ‘s DARPA in 2012 which created that mRNA tech.

Your further thoughts on their end game,

what they’re trying to achieve.

And in all countries, we see countries like Russia, you touch on this again, that it’s the struggles in nations like you see in Russia they’re implementing some of this stuff, China, every nation to different degrees.

So what’s their end game?

defang the population

Emanuel Pastreich: Right. Well, I think their end game first is to defang the population. I think that’s number one priority. They may not have a complete consensus among the global elite on what the end game is. This is my speculation; some elites want to reduce the World population by 95%. Others are more open to having a large slave population. And so it’s not clear whether their goal is that the population should be three billion or 500 million, or whatever. And these different goals are related to the confusion about what climate change is, and how catastrophic it is.

If you embrace the view popular among many globalists that climate change really is catastrophic and we’re not going to be able to live on this planet for a variety of reasons, then obviously you have to bring a population down to about 400 million because the planet will not support more people in the future.

If you don’t believe that scenario, if you think Earth’s ecosystem is more or less stable, then obviously you can tolerate more people. It’s not clear, what will happen, even for the elites.

But the basic assumptions are the same: we will create a false sense of democratic process and liberalism, then confuse citizens with a false multicultural, gender, good feeling rainbow flag show as a way to fool people for the period until we get them to the next stage.

And when we get to the next stage, when citizens are confined to their homes, and at any moment the so-called “government” can shut off their credit cards, or if you go outside, a drone or tracker might target you. At that point the super-rich will not have to care about what you think any more, right?

When we’ve gotten to the next stage, then at that point, all the feel good, “multi- culty” stuff can go in the garbage because then we have essentially implemented the final stage.

And at that point we will be looking at the real third world war, which will be quite brutal. I also want to note that I think that Israeli high tech companies among others may be playing a major role in this process.

Control Systems

But if we look at the know-how for QR codes and geo-fencing and all these systems of control, that Israel was the pioneer in this field and that many of the programs that are being used in the United States, in Oklahoma and Louisiana, are based on Israeli models for social control. The Israelis have expertise that they built up in the occupied territories. On the one hand, there’s the DARPA studies, the RAND studies in the background, but the Israelis were expert on how to control people and monitor them 24/7.

The cutting edge was in Israel, and now they found a global market for it in this COVID-19 operation. It has brought enormous profits for these specialized private Israeli firms all over, including places, probably everywhere. It’s been documented in the case of the United States, but my guess is in places like China, or even in Russia, that there’s substantial amount of outsourcing of these control systems, IT systems.

Probably we have a symbiotic relationship between big tech, Amazon, Cisco, Google, Facebook, the big players, and then the specialized firms, say like Black Cube, these Israeli IT intelligence firms, that do the initial work, and some of the dirty work.

Geopolitics & Empire: Just to get a little geopolitical, get your thoughts on, you mentioned World War III, there’s Ukraine and China now. Basically the big three powers, the US, NATO, Brussels, EU West, and then the pull of Russia and China in the Taiwan issue, and Ukraine. And as you said, all governments seem to have been penetrated by these IT private intelligence-

Emanuel Pastreich: For sure.

Geopolitics & Empire: These are transnational elite networks. But at the same time we see rivalry between US, China, Russia. How do you explain this apparent contradiction? What’s Putin’s vision as you see it, or Xi Jinping’s vision, and where might things go?

Emanuel Pastreich: Right. Well, one of the major problems we have in politics and in journalism is that our intellectual capacity has been so degraded. People don’t read books; they don’t understand philosophy. If you go back in 1960s or back to the 1940s, a lot of people who were engaged in journalism or in discussions on politics in universities. They knew, they read Kant and Hegel. They knew about Aristotle or for that matter, about Confucius, and they had an understanding of the epistemological and ontological problematics that lie behind politics. All that has all been cleared out.

So we’re stuck with the politics of bad guys and country-to-country confrontations. And because our minds have been so simplified, because the schemata we use are so crude, it’s hard for us to think three-dimensionally about how you can have conflicts between nation states and at the same time have cooperation between multinational corporations, et cetera.

I would say they’re basically four axes.

One is the nation state; it hasn’t disappeared, probably won’t. It has an enduring quality no matter how outdated it is. It appeals to part of the human brain by saying, I have a country and I belong to it.

The second is the multinational corporations which follow their own rules. They fight with each other, and sometimes they hate each other, but they’re not following the trajectory of the nation state. And we see this increasingly to be the case because of the IT revolution, if you will.

The third is the ethnic group, the sense of being whether it’s Caucasian or Chinese or Indian. We have these transnational ethnic groups which span the world. And increasingly we have populations of Indians in the United States or in South Africa, or wherever, who work together in their own way.

Ethnic groups do not necessarily correspond with the reach of the multinational corporation, but they are significant.

And the final axis is class.

Class, as we know, has been intentionally I think stamped as being a Marxist communist concept that is forbidden. In fact, the idea of class is an essential issue in politics in society, John Stuart Mills talked about it. It was not a Marxist concept.

I think it’s really important for us to take that association with Marxism out, to say we can talk about class and class interests without embracing a Marxist perspective, and that class should be front and center of our analysis.

It’s very hard to understand the what’s going on without getting those four different players right. And what we’re seeing is essentially an interference pattern between these different factors.

So to answer your question, I’m sorry it took so long. I think someone like Putin or Xi Jinping is not so free in his decision making process.

In some ways, I think the compromise they make is they get to be on TV and make it look like they make decisions, but, in fact, they basically have to play to the needs of these multinational corporations and billionaires, wealthy individuals in their country and around the world who are pulling their strings. And that that’s increasingly the case.

I wouldn’t say the nation state has disappeared, and there are bureaucratic entities which are focused on the particular nation like Russia or United States, but I would say increasingly transnational forces are quite significant.

And finally, this phenomenon is not totally new. The first world war followed the same trajectory basically.

We had the contradictions of these jointly- held petrochemical, steel weapons manufacturers, places where British, French, Russian, German owned stakes in weapons manufacturing in each of these countries in 1914, making profits off of wars. That was essentially how the first World War unfolded.

Of course, that war changed in nature once you had millions of people dead and you could no longer pull that game off. But the initial start of the first world war was basically another,

I don’t know if false flag’s the right word for it, but basically the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was not a totally clean thing and it certainly didn’t need to end up in a world war.

It became a world war because of the financial interests baying for war and was these extremely wealthy families who had bought into arms manufacturing who drove the process. That’s what led to the Russian and the German Revolution in 1918, 1919.

Geopolitics & Empire: Just on the issue of Marx, I’ve been classified as a “commie,” when I am nothing of the sort. I feel just like you. It’s a very useful to employ Marxist analysis. I’ve had many leftists and Marxists on the show to have them break things down, and to use analysis of class as well.

Obviously, I’ve met people in the US, Americans who were upper class, rich, who would refuse to talk to me because I was local. Literally we’d be sitting at the table and they don’t talk to me, but then someone else comes along who’s from their class and they can’t shut up.

The two of them go talking, but they won’t talk to me because I’m a lower class. Obviously this is a reality.

There was one point I think where I agree with most of what you’re saying, the wasn’t one point I didn’t agree on, but I know I’m not here to debate.

Emanuel Pastreich: Well, I’m curious-

Geopolitics & Empire: It’s in your book where you talk about the climate security threat, and I think you were talking about ending the use of petroleum and coal, the war economy.

Emanuel Pastreich: Do you think I went too far?

Geopolitics & Empire: No more cars and fewer airplanes. I think the issue that we see people like the Klaus Schwab and globalists saying that as well. What’s your take on the climate security issue?

Emanuel Pastreich: I really appreciate you bringing that topic up. And it has been an issue previously for me because things that I wrote a while ago regarding the response to climate change and to the petroleum based economy are now read in an entirely different way. Sadly, that legitimate agenda has been taken over by people with a totally different intention than myself.

My intention was, at multiple levels. First, energy independence, I.e. produce your own energy and reduce your use of energy. And second was that to eliminate the role of petrochemical corporations and those banks related to them, to end their political influence.

That would allow us to make policy, whether it’s how we run our communities without being force-fed automobiles and freeways and other things which we didn’t have before and that we don’t need. They’re very destructive.

My approach was multifaceted, it’s not simply to say that climate change is going to kill us all, but also say that automobiles are dangerous, that petrochemicals are bad for you and for the environment. And that forcing us to use petroleum is basically a hidden tax for the benefit of multinational corporations.

Every time you have to use plastics, you have to use automobiles, to live because of the way corrupt politicians have designed your city, then you’re being forced to support this totalitarian system.

But to come back to the issue of climate change, what I discussed with Josh the other day. I started out by saying, I don’t know, my knowledge is limited, but I have read now quite a lot on the subject, and I’ve taught a class on climate change. And I think there is sufficient evidence to say that is a general phenomenon, that we’re seeing a major alteration of the climate. However, to say that it’s because we have too many petroleum driven cars is not the case. The climate change is a complex phenomenon. It involves the misuse of land, misuse of water, spread of deserts as a result, the destruction of the oceans by micro-plastics, a variety of factors.

And then there is the collapse of biodiversity, which many scientists say is a much more serious threat than the alteration of the climate. There are multiple factors involved, and unfortunately the discourse in academics and in the media has been simplified and reduced to a cartoonish way.

So on the one hand you have Greta Thunberg and Al Gore and other people who the corporate media feeds to us, people who give this incredibly simplistic vision of what needs to be done.

Their solutions do not address class, do not ask who owns Exxon and how do they use the corporations to make money, how their profits are related to foreign wars. None of the real politics or economics is mentioned by these climate messiahs.  The assumption in their words is that politicians are insensitive and they don’t listen to the people, and they don’t know what’s really happening. That is definitely not the case. Politicians know exactly what’s happening, but they have their masters to serve.

And so the analysis that is offered to us by most of the environmental climate change NGOs is a base blatant fraud.

But regarding the concern that we will face a catastrophic alteration of our climate, of our biosphere, that might lead eventually to human extinction, that concern I would not dismiss. I would only say that it appears that the exaggerated scenarios in which people claimed that we’ll all be dead in 10 years or 20 years, 30 years, that those scenarios appear to have been wrong.

But it doesn’t mean we won’t all be dead in 1,000 years or in 500 years. I think that’s not acceptable either.

On the other hand, we have Donald Trump and others who say that all discussion of climate change is a fraud. They say that it is fine to use fossil fuels, that we are being misled by this fake IMF, World Economic Forum agenda to believe things which are totally false.

I don’t buy that at all. I think that that argument against climate change as a threat is also funded by corporate interests, and most notably that when they criticize those drawing who are drawing attention to the threat, to the environment, to the climate, they attack those cardboard figures like Greta or Al Gore. They don’t go after books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” or these rather complex, carefully written research that describes a complex dangerous phenomenon in the climate.

And so the reason why people are skeptical of climate change is that climate change has become like “scientism” or for that matter “COVID-19.” Climate change is being defined for us by a tiny group of self-interested people who are backed by global finance. And their purpose is not to end climate change, but to use climate change, again, as a trauma, a deep psychological mass trauma, that will allow us to move people to somewhere politically that they would never go naturally.

And that is to a system in which money is controlled by multinational banks through their fronts, their NGO fronts or their so-called “global governance.”

Geopolitics & Empire: We’ve covered the main points. One of my last questions for you would be what should be our response to all of these things, the plans of the crazy global elites.

My purpose is twofold, trying to resist, just as you suggested, to fight back politically, to speak the truth, and to organize. But also the second part is preparing for worst-case scenarios. If my banks account is shut down and I can’t use money anymore and I’m going to starve to death, well, then I have to start preparing.

There are a lot of people fleeing down here to Mexico where I am. There are people leaving urban areas for rural areas. They’re creating their plan Bs, getting a plot of land with water and food, creating networks, decentralizing, using technology as well.

And so, what do we need to do? What’s your advice? How do we move forward now?

Emanuel Pastreich: Right. Well, the first point I would stress is that the current system in the United States, and globally, is so corrupt, so infected, that it cannot be reformed internally.

I think we all have to recognize this fact. You’re not going to elect somebody, whether it’s in Mexico or in the United States, who’s going to be a savior. President Lopez Obrador in Mexico is one of the better politicians out there in the world, but what he could do was quite limited by the system in which he’s working.

And by the way I should mention that only two commercial publishers that were willing to publish my book “Fear No Evil” and they were in Mexico and South Korea. I’m very grateful actually to the Mexican people for supporting me back then, two and a half years ago.

So that means we have to create our own system. I‘ve written about this now at length. We need to admit that a lot of us are in serious trouble, but we need to come together and to support each other, and to create our own communities which will then be institutionalized.

So you, me, and a couple other people should say we form our own government. We have our own constitution, we’re committed to each other, and we will create our own economy wherein we produce our own food, we create our own utensils and instruments, and we are essentially independent.

Now, of course, the powers that be want to shut this down and they’ll use extreme methods. But if we get to a critical mass in our country, in our region, in our country, and globally, they will not be able to do that. That doesn’t mean they won’t be able to kill some of us, but I think they will not be able to shut down such a movement.

But I think what’s most difficult about this is process is that it means giving up hope in all these false promises that have been made to us. We thought that the UN, the United States, or European Union, or other organizations, could play some positive role if reformed.

But we have to build from the bottom up, start from you, me, and our neighbors; come together and say, we’ll help each other, we’ll grow food or build things, make our clothes, whatever it is. And that although it seems incredibly backwards and inefficient and counterproductive to go down to that level, control the basic means of production, that in fact, in the long term, that action will form the solid foundation for something which is independent.

And that by contrast, we have so many thoughtful people, progressives, whoever, who are trapped in the system, to some degree that was so true of me.

They’re dependent on the money given to them by progressive thinking, rich people, and they’re unable to address real issues. So if you had to choose, you’re better off being independent.

I’m not just an independent candidate for president, but when I was in Korea, essentially unable to work in the US, the last year I lived in Yeosu in the south of Korea, we had a tiny apartment. I lived minimally with my friend who’s on the second floor, and we cooked together, we cooperated in everything. Our costs were very low, and we were able to sustain ourselves and to be politically active.

It doesn’t require money to be politically active. In fact, most political action does not require money. But we’re fed this line that somehow, unless you have millions of dollars flowing in like Bernie Sanders did, or whatever, that you can’t be politically active. It’s a fiction.

In fact, I think the real revolution will come when people snap out of this narcissistic view of success for me, and finally realize that cooperation and mutual support are the foundation of political action and then start to create their own truly independent communities, which will be the building blocks on which we create something new.

I don’t want to say it will be a totally new system because it will be based on moral philosophy, ideas about governance that go back thousands of years.

In that respect I’m not a Marxist, right? I don’t say, throw away everything and we’re going to engage in some radical modernism. I think that if anything, we need to go back to governance as it existed before. And in the United States, the native peoples like the Iroquois people had tremendously sophisticated ideas about governance that were based on long-term sustainable development, for that matter we find such wisdom in China as well.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there were ideas about economics in which you looked at where you’re going to be in 200 years, not next month’s returns on your stock.

And that sort of revolutionary change at the conceptual level, must be goes together with the establishment of an independent community. The independent community changes the economic means of production and support. And the intellectual philosophical revolution says clearly that growth and consumption are bad, that frugality is a virtue, and that intellectual depth, spiritual depth, is far superior to consumption, going to movies, traveling, whatever. You can sit in your own room, in little space, and have profoundly deep, philosophical, spiritual experience from reading books, talking to people, creating art. It doesn’t take money.

In fact, that brings me to my final point. I think we have to end the money economy, to recognize that we humans have lived on the earth for millions of years with minimal use of money. And that even until the 1930s, most people supported themselves at the local level through mutual support, not money. You got butter from your neighbor, carrots from another neighbor, you gave your potatoes in barter, that sort of exchange. Some of it included money, but much of it did not.

You produced energy from a windmill or from a water mill or from your horse, or your cow, or your own manual labor. And you were basically economically independent. You needed some money on the weekends if you go to the market to buy some specialized products.

But I think it’s entirely possible, and preferable, to pull ourselves out of this digitalized monetary system, which is the primary tool used by the global elite to pin us down and to slowly ease us into slavery.

Geopolitics & Empire: They want to put us on their digital farm and get us off of our farm. And you echo a lot of sentiments from past guests I’ve had, who talk about basically what you’re saying, in different ways with variations like a parallel society, a parallel structure, a parallel economy and that sort of thing. Where would be the best place for people to go to find out more?  I’ll include all of the links in the descriptions, but if you want, tell us where’s the best place for people to go to find out more.

Emanuel Pastreich: Well, the best way, the best starting point, is to be able to sit down with your own family and have a serious discussion about what’s happening in the United States. It trumps everything else. Because so many families are not able to speak honestly about what’s happening, or even to address the challenges that we face. We have to overcome this taboo, the forbidden truths, and have real discussions with family members, friends and neighbors. For my part, my little contribution, I hope, is to be a catalyst to get people to say: that’s the way to go. And, obviously, I’m here to support you. If you want to contact me, I’ll do everything I can to be helpful to you.

In terms of websites, I have my own blog, circlesandsquares.asia. I do a lot of writing in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and I have stuff in Spanish and other languages as well, which might be interesting to some. My field is Asia. I was a Chinese major. I studied Japanese for many years, and Korean as well.

And then I have a site for my presidential candidacy emanuelprez.com that has my speeches, my book in 14 languages, and then the prefaces in another 20 languages.

And then I have the US provisional government site, usprovgov.asia, where I present some of the basic concepts for what a provisional government based on the Constitution of the United States would be. And purpose of that site is to say, obviously, that I can’t do it myself, but I can set forth a vision for what is possible that will inspire other people to do it.

The underlying assumption there is that we must at the least have a strategy behind our actions. We must say to ourselves, “These people control everything now. how do you overthrow that?”

I think there are some basic principles in politics about how you do it.

The first is to say that they have no legitimacy, that the United States is based upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that those documents define the United States. Other organizations which defy that basic understanding and agreement of those two documents which define our government, those organizations are not government, at all, but they’re criminal syndicates.

And so we need to identify among a larger population –the process has already started—of ordinary working people, and intellectuals, the sense that this is our position: “We are the government.” Why are we the government? Because we follow the Constitution, we follow the rule of law, and we follow the scientific method.

Those people say that they’re the government, but if we look at them, they’re set up by Google and Facebook, and Israeli private intelligence firms, etc. They’re not government in any sense. The same holds for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. There’s not a word in the Constitution about the role of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. So if they are making policy, then that process is profoundly unconstitutional.

They have seized control of the process of making law and enforcing law, both because of the privatization of the police and military, and also because of the process of making policy within political parties.

Our position, should be, I think, to pull back and say, “I’m not going to engage. Well, I’m going to talk, I’d love to be on the show, but I’m not interested in compromising with these people.”

I’m going to say that me, you, couple of my friends, we are the United States because we follow the Constitution.

These people are running a criminal syndicate that is posing as the United States, but they have no legitimacy.

Now, this declaration in itself does not change things. It’s not magic. It’s sort of, you might say, a speech act as defined in literary theory.  It’s like getting married, right?

The priest says, “I declare you man and wife,” right? Now, this doesn’t mean anything, right? Just words. But because of its ritual power and the way that the words are set up, it is transformative. It suddenly makes people committed to a lifetime together. And so something like that, to say, we declare that we are independent, that we follow the Constitution, that we are the government, that we are going to form a more perfect union amongst ourselves. That will be transformative.

At the beginning, maybe people won’t take it seriously. But over time they will. And that new consensus we will build from the ground up. But the underlying implication is that most of these institutions, including universities and government offices, and all sorts of organizations, used to serve their function, and they could serve their function again, but now they’re essentially criminal syndicates.

They do not have legitimacy in my eyes. And anybody who looks at the situation objectively, and gets beyond this trauma, will see quite clearly what we’re talking about.

Geopolitics & Empire: As Tommy Jay said, and so did Thomas Jefferson in the poster behind me, “Liberty begins with you.”

Emanuel Pastreich: Very true.

Geopolitics & Empire: There’s a lot to digest there, Emanuel. I’d like to thank you again for being on Geopolitics & Empire.

Emanuel Pastreich: Much appreciated. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak. I had a lot of trouble coming back to the United States. I just back in the US so I’m readjusting.

To be honest, for a while there, I thought I’d never get back to the US. I think that there is hope, and that there are people who are really trying. Starting with you, we can really change things.

*

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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Russia: From Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin

December 19th, 2022 by Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović

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After the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) emerged many new problems in the international arena of global politics as the circumstances concerning international relations drastically have been changed. One of the many problematic issues that have been facing both the USA and Europe (in fact, NATO and the EU) after 1989 was to find a new way of their relations with a new post-communist Russia – a country in a historical political and economic transition. Russia after the Cold War 1.0 faced many stresses as it started to experiment with its position in the new world and new international relations which have been dictated by the American hyperpower position.

At that time, Europe was more divided than united over the fundamental constitutional provisions which would finally lead the EU toward a European super-state. Europe as well was facing several critical challenges of economic, political, and cultural nature. The leaders of Europe, but especially of the EU, not only have been confronted by older issues that they could not solve like Turkish membership of the EU, integration of European citizens of Islamic origin (some 13 million in 1991), or rising economic competition with both USA and especially China.

The Europeans were aware of where they were coming from (of their historical roots), but on other hand, they did not have a clear vision of their way to the future, losing the plot of navigation. Only in 2003, the EU started to produce a more clear vision of its future through the adoption of the European Security Strategy which became at the same time the first serious effort in thinking about its international role under the new conditions of globalization and unipolar international relations.

In the 1990s, during an especially painful decade, Russia of Boris Yeltsin moved from being what it had once been after WWII under the cover of the USSR−a military superpower that could effectively challenge the US and its allies−to a declining power with diminishing both political and economic assets. As a direct result of its speedy adoption of Western-style (wild and brutal) privatization, Yeltsin’s Russia experienced consequences close to a 1930s-style Great Economic Depression. The focal negative outcomes have been the decline of industrial production, falling in living standards, and that whole regions previously devoted to military production during the Cold War now experienced an economic depression.

From the very global perspective, the foreign policy of Russia at the time of Boris Yeltsin was catastrophic as Russia lost even the position of great power in international relations. It was quite visible during the time of the destruction of the former Yugoslavia and especially during the Kosovo War in 1998−1999. Russian MFA did little to reassure many Russians who indeed understood Yeltsin’s decision to get close to Russia’s old historic Western enemies as he was selling out Russia to the West.

However, outside Russia, the such policy made Yeltsin a hero−a “useful idiot” or “drunk clown”. Nevertheless, to the majority of Russians, he, like M. Gorbachev, was conceding everything but getting very little in return from the West. Two groups of Russian citizens were especially unsatisfied with Yeltsin’s administration and particularly with his foreign policy: nationalists and old communists, of whom there was still a significant number.

Many anti-Yeltsin Russians argued that he and his administration of Westernphile liberals, had not only given away Russia’s benefits at knock-down prices to a new class of oligarchs (tycoons), but he was as well turned Russia into a Western political, economic, and financial, and even ideological dependency. In one word, Yeltsin did not at all protect Russia’s national interest and even turned Russia into a Western colony.

However, when Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin (a victor over Chechen separatists) took over the presidency, he had more or less a clear vision for Russia’s future. In order to realize his project of reviving Russia and making her independent from the Western hands, he started to stake out very different positions. Particularly, these included:

  • A greater level of Russian patriotism at home.
  • A clear recognition that the interests of Russia and the West would not going always smoothly.
  • A persistent drive to bring the Russian economy−and Russia’s immense natural resources, especially in Siberia−back under state control from the private tycoons.

In practice, it meant that Western governments could no longer consider Russia, as it was at the Yeltsin time, as a “strategic partner”, which meant the Western economic colony, indeed. In order words, the West understood that Putin’s Russia is going not to be in a state of irreversible decline as Yeltsin’s Russia, in fact, was. Further, with practically unlimited supplies of oil and natural gas in its possession, followed by the political leadership in Kremlin that determined to defend Russia’s national interests, Russia, actually, no longer was looked like the “sick man of Europe” (this term was originally applied by West Europe to the Ottoman Empire after 1699).

It was originally a common opinion in Western societies that the West had less fear than it was during the Cold War 1.0. It was believed that reborn Putin’s Russia had nothing like the same resources as the former Soviet Union. At least up to 2022 when Russia started the special anti-Nazi military operation in historical Russia Minor (today East Ukraine). The focal Western mistake with Putin’s Russia was that Western governments thought that regardless of economic reforms by Moscow, Russia still was dependent on the West. However, in reality, several Western countries, particularly Germany, have been and still are heavily dependent on energy from Russia.

The official ideology of Moscow, at least up to 2022, did not challenge Western institutions or values. Surely, the world had changed since 1990, and Russia for the first decade after the Cold War 1.0 as a power was not what it was during the USSR. On one hand, Moscow since 1990, in fact, did not want to prevent former Soviet republics to become independent, but on other hand was unable to prevent three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) from both to sign up former (politically and ideologically) enemy institutions of the USSR and moving much more openly into the Western camp (the EU and NATO). Therefore, as the consequence, up to 2007, Russia became overwhelmingly encircled by the three Baltic republics to the north-west, an increasingly pro-Western and Russophobic Ukraine (since 2014 a Nazi Ukraine) to the south-west, and finally by Georgia in the Caucasus.

Nevertheless, first Russia’s success in opposing Western historical imperialism against its own state territory was in Chechnya in 1999 (the Second Chechen War) which certainly was enough to spoil West-Russia relations and compel many in the West to conclude that while Russia changed in many pro-Western ways it still remained a historical enemy which was fighting against Western imperialistic policy (ideologically wrapped into the protection of human rights and political democracy). The second Russian success in fighting Western imperialistic Russophobia was in 2008 during the short war against US client state Georgia followed by the Russian military intervention in Syria and in 2022 by the direct Russian preventive military intervention against NATO on the territory of historic Russia Minor. A coming future may have beckoned, but the heavy hand of the past (Russophobic Western imperialism) will continue to influence Russian relations with the West (the EU and NATO).

The key points of the article can be summarized into three facts:

  • The first President of Russia, a Westernphile B. Yeltsin, sought a new partnership with the West but under the conditions of not defending the Russian national interest.
  • His successor, Vladimir Putin, is pursuing much more patriotic policies at home and abroad and, at the same time, bringing Russia’s economic resources back under state control.
  • Regardless of the opinion that a new Cold War (2.0) was unable after 1990/1991 because of extremely important political, social, and economic changes that have happened in Russia since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it gradually occurred after the 2014 state putsch in Kiev.

*

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Bivalent Booster Disaster

December 19th, 2022 by Rav Arora

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***

Over the past four months, the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have vigorously pushed the new bivalent vaccine on all eligible Americans. In his final White House briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated, “Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community.”

Yet, only 12 percent of Americans 5 and older have received the updated booster. Meanwhile, just over 30 percent of senior citizens — the most have gotten the bivalent dose. In attempts to increase vaccine uptake, the Biden administration has announced a six-week campaign budgeting more than $475 million to expand mRNA vaccine outreach. $350 million will go into community health centers to promote booster awareness while another $125 million will be devoted “to national organizations that serve people with disabilities and older adults to support community vaccination programs and efforts.”

Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to persuade Americans to get a fourth shot they likely don’t need, the authorities ought to take a step back and examine why no one is getting the new booster.

Low bivalent vaccine uptake may, at least in part, stem from the disastrous public launch in September when the new shots were approved on the basis of testing on eight mice. No human data existed at the time, yet the new shots were authorized under the much-abused “emergency use authorization” mechanism. This time, even the media’s most trusted public health experts were expressing concern and skepticism. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, FDA vaccine advisory member Dr. Paul Offit stated, “I’m uncomfortable that we would move forward—that we would give millions or tens of millions of doses to people—based on mouse data.”

On the concern of safety, it was the CDC and FDA’s responsibility to assure the public that the updated booster didn’t carry significant risks like the primary series. Knowing the alarming prevalence of vaccine myocarditis, convincing tens of millions of healthy men to get the new shot was already a hard sell. As the most robust research (Kaiser Permanente) on vaccine-induced myocarditis shows, roughly 1 in 1,800 young men are injured after the second dose. Long-term effects are unknown, but current studies show over half of vaccine myocarditis patients had an abnormal cardiac MRI and a third were not fully recovered at the three-month check-up.

What reassurance have CDC officials given to those concerned with the most common serious adverse event caused by mRNA vaccination? According to CDC official Dr. Sara Oliver, “We know that the myocarditis risk is unknown but anticipate a similar risk to that seen after the monovalent vaccines.”

A similar risk? About 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 for men under 40? For a disease with an infection fatality rate of less than 0.035% that only harms obese, severely ill, and immunocompromised people?

Are they serious?

The novel COVID-19 vaccines have already injured an untold number of young, healthy men and women, and the pitch from public health authorities for a secondbooster shot is “we don’t really know what the risks are.”

If safety concerns remain, perhaps the first round of human data on the bivalent vaccine would show promise. Yet all the latest studies are highly confounded, ambiguous, or otherwise flawed.

Late in September, Moderna published a disappointing study looking at the immune response to an earlier version (BA.1) of the latest shot. While they did find a rise in antibody titers, the bivalent vaccine cohort had a higher number of COVID infections than the original booster cohort. The study sample was so small that definitive conclusions were virtually impossible to make. A few weeks ago, Moderna released newer data in 500 participants showing their bivalent BA.5 booster produced five to six times higher antibody levels than the original strain booster.

Pfizer also released their antibody data for the updated bivalent vaccine, reassuring the public that the mass administration of the bivalent vaccine is a necessary next step in combating COVID-19. As stated in the press release, the “Omicron BA.4/BA.5 neutralizing antibody titers were approximately 4-fold higher for the bivalent vaccine compared to the companies’ original COVID-19 vaccine in individuals over 55 years of age.”

As promising as all this data may have seemed, these findings were far from persuasive. A mere “increase” in antibody titers doesn’t necessarily translate to any sustained protection against infection or severe disease. This is widely agreed upon among mainstream virologists and immunologists. Moreover, Pfizer has concededthere’s “no established correlate of protection” between antibody levels and immunity.

To draw more concrete conclusions, clinical data in the real-world is needed — and the CDC released the first study on bivalent vaccine effectiveness on Nov. 22. Unlike nebulous antibody statistics, this study examined vaccine effectiveness in adults 18 and older. While adults 18 to 49 who had gotten bivalent boosters were 43 percent less likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts, older cohorts were far less protected. Those ages 65 and older were only 22 percent less likely to get sick with COVID-19 than unvaccinated individuals of the same age.

As tangled as these results are, they must be taken with a grain of salt. The authors of the study rightly note the findings should be “interpreted with caution because unvaccinated persons might have different behaviors or a fundamentally different risk for acquiring COVID-19 compared with vaccinated persons.”

“The findings in this study are subject to at least six limitations,” they added.

To make matters worse for the public image of the bivalent vaccine, CDC head Rochelle Walensky has shown in real time how ineffective the latest shot is. Walensky twice tested positive for COVID-19 a month after receiving her bivalent booster shot (the window which should have the “greatest protective effect” according to Dr. Vinay Prasad). She tested negative a few days after her first positive result (October 22), but her symptoms appeared to have strangely rebounded on Oct. 30. In light of the new CDC study, Walensky’s re-infection makes perfect sense: Observed bivalent vaccine effectiveness is less than 30 percent in her age cohort—far from the “90 percent effective” health agencies promised with initial doses of the vaccine.

It is a grim sort of irony to witness the bivalent booster shot utterly fail to provide any long-lasting protection in the head of the public health agency most zealously promoting it.

Putting aside the only remaining, arguable rationale for further boosting (those at higher risk), the FDA and CDC have greenlit the new Omicron booster for kids under 12. Moderna’s booster has been authorized for children 6+ and the Pfizer booster for 5 and older.

As USA Today notes: “The companies have not yet completed clinical trials of the booster in younger children. The FDA decided the change to a bivalent vaccine is not likely to have a different effect or risk profile than the earlier shots.”

For this with any knowledge of the inner-workings of the FDA, this is hardly surprising. The FDA is an incredibly corrupt agency with many conflicts of interest. To illustrate, 4,500 FDA-approved medications are recalled a year, on average. 139 for deadly side effects. Based on these figures, a dozen medications will be recalled this month because they kill people. So why are they FDA-approved?

Perhaps in part because 75% of their drug review funding comes from the biopharmaceutical industry, which allows drug companies to get swiftly expedited reviews and approvals. In fact, 68% of pharmaceutical drugs on the market are approved by the FDA through expedited reviews.

As one can infer, quick approvals means less rigorous testing of safety and efficacy.

The totality of evidence for the bivalent booster shot has failed in persuading the American public to get jabbed again. The updated vaccine should never have been approved on the basis of mouse testing. The studies published after approval (that order should have been in reverse) were hardly reassuring. The only study on vaccine effectiveness shows highly limited protection in the most vulnerable groups.

In response to Joe Biden’s tweet urging Americans to get the updated vaccine ahead of the holidays, Jordan Peterson responded,

“Why is the president of the United States shilling for the pharmaceutical industry? Because that’s exactly what this is…”

The answer is quite simple. The Biden administration has ambitiously purchased 170 million bivalent vaccine doses and over 120 million remain unused. Americans have roundly rejected it and moved on from Covid.

The administration may spend millions of tax-payer money promoting the new shot, but until vaccine standards are improved, “emergency” powers are left alone for real public health crises, and the White House COVID response team comes clean on the real dangers and uncertainties surrounding mRNA vaccines, institutional trust may never recover.

The evangelical, evidence-free promotion of highly experimental vaccines — and their new “bivalent” updated iterations — with known safety concerns has destroyed the reputation and credibility of the Biden administration’s COVID response team. I find myself agreeing with (pro-vaccine and mainstream) epidemiologist Dr. Vinay Prasad’s bold assertion:

[The White House] need to fire all their advisors and start new. That’s the only way to fix the situation.

*

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Rav Arora is a 21-year-old, independent journalist formerly writing for top publications such as The Globe and Mail and New York Post before critically covering vaccines and government mandates. 

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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.”

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

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

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***

People who have had to care for elderly loved ones who suffer from the terrible disease of dementia commonly find during this experience that our loved ones can hold grammatically correct but completely meaningless conversations. These may be with imaginary people, about non-existent situations, or recalling events that never happened. The conversation sounds normal, but is in fact completely absurd.

This same experience occurs when reading or listening to Western sources reporting on international affairs. It is worth remembering that last December 15th at the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the United States and its NATO allied countries voted against a resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. It is not that the North American and European representatives abstained. No. They opposed the resolution, that is, in fact they support Nazism, a position which contradicts all the claims members of the Western political classes make to their populations about supporting democracy and human rights.

Faced with this contradiction, the very few genuinely anti-imperialist Western media outlets often analyze how Western populations can be deceived to the extreme of accepting the genocidal policies of their fascist governments and their masters in the North American and European corporate elites. For example, a common term used in those North American media outlets which criticize the imperialism of their countries is “gaslighting” derived from the famous movie “Gaslight” released in 1944. In this film the heroine is subjected to sinister, systematic manipulation by her husband, who seeks to have her declared insane in order to seize the inheritance of her aunt, whom he had previously murdered.

So now the term “gaslighting” is applied to the Western countries’  mass media psychological warfare offensive against their own populations.  By means of this psychological warfare, insane false beliefs are induced in order to convince the North American and European populations that their governments’ criminal foreign policy promotes and defends democracy and human rights. Tto achieve the imposition of this mass induced dementia, the fundamental strategy is the incessant repetition of big lies combined with the elimination of sources of information contradicting those lies.

For this reason, the Western ruling classes implement censorship policies on social networks and eliminate information sources such as Russia’s RT or Iran’s Press TV, as took place recently through decrees of the European Union and its member countries. RT and Press TV use traditional reporting criteria in the sense of seeking to report reality. However, for Western sources of disinformation, reality is precisely what they strive to eliminate in order to be able to induce collective dementia among their populations. Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, has commented on the recent censorship measures against RT noting that: “They are further proof of the European Union’s desire to severely censor information flows to the point of banning undesirable media, contrary to the principles of freedom of expression and media for which it condemns other countries. The current decision further violates the right of EU residents to access information.”

Precisely, because the reporting criteria of the Western media are formulated to induce false beliefs. For example, they promote the belief that NATO is a defensive organization, that Iran and not Israel is a nuclear threat or that Iran is a country where women are not respected, that the United States is fighting terrorism. Or they allege that China is incapable of ensuring the public health of its population, or that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are dictatorships that destabilize the region.

Of course, the reality is the opposite. Unquestionably, the revolutionary democracies of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela contribute greatly to regional stability. NATO is an aggressive military organization that attacked the civilian population of Serbia with massive bombings and supports Ukraine’s genocidal assault on the Russian-speaking population in Donbass. The United States is the most important promoter of terrorism in the world. China is one of the world’s most successful countries in defending the public health of its huge population.

It is important to understand that this is not just about the dishonest, false output of the Western media or the repressive control exercised by giant communications corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. The vast Western psychological warfare apparatus also incorporates the non-governmental industrial complex and seeks to control the academic industry, since intellectual production, especially in social sciences, is of special importance in being able to induce false beliefs. Of utmost relevance in this regard too is the aggressive action of the Western powers, especially the United States, trying to impose their control of the apparatus of international law.

These include, for example, the UN Human Rights Council or the International Criminal Court and the various special tribunals established in recent years to deal with specific issues, such as Rwanda, Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia, among others. These tribunals. of dubious legitimacy, very clearly carried out their investigations in support of the foreign policy objectives of the collective West against its enemies. But their tendentious conclusions go down in history as definitive. with the effect of freezing in the form of false memories the biased premises with which their original establishment was justified.

Apart from seeking control of important instances that affect the development of international jurisprudence, the United States has managed to impose its national jurisdiction over other countries. For six decades, the United States has illegally applied the genocidal Helms-Burton Act to the people of Cuba, which in effect elevates the national laws of the United States as unchallenged international standards to the detriment of the Cuban people. Another example is how Argentina, under the government of Crsitina Fernández, was the victim of intimidation and intervention by a minor judge of a district court in New York who acted aggressively in favor of US vulture funds that rejected the legitimate restructuring of Argentina’s debt agreed with all the country’s other creditors.

Last June, the United States also imposed its jurisdiction in the case of the Venezuelan plane hijacked in Argentina at which time the authorities acted with procedures in complete violation of Argentine law cased on requests from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. These examples of unjustifiable, bad faith application of the law are based on the deployment of sinister artifices, completely disconnected from reality and truth. In these cases, the evidence presented is invariably grossly biased, clearly fabricated or as often as not simply non-existent.

Among the most notorious cases of this type have been the persecution and torture of Julian Assange for having revealed the crimes of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, of Vice President Jorge Glas in Ecuador, the judicial persecution of Lula da Silva and the illegal judicial kidnapping of Alex Saab. The most recent has been the infamous conviction at the beginning of this month against Cristina Fernández after more than a decade of interminable arbitrary legal attacks  against her. These abuses of national justice formalize bad faith legal processes that have the intention and often the actual effect of destroying their victims. At an international level, such processes serve to pressure, harass and condemn entire countries trying to defend their national dignity and sovereignty.

Nicaragua reflected this reality in its message this month in response to yet another false report in the United Nations Human Rights Council: “The legitimate Government of Reconciliation and National Unity of Nicaragua, will not tire of repeating with dignity, loudly and irrefutably, our total rejection of this type of mechanisms, which “update their Human Rights reports”, unilaterally and in a biased manner; acting as an “instrument of pressure and interference”, by using arguments far from out nation’s reality, with the sole purpose of keeping us underdeveloped and perverting our achievements, to have us submitted to the jurisdiction of foreign powers.”

Also relevant in this context is the message to the Iranian people last November from the Leader of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, in which he observed in relation to the failed coup attempt by the Western powers in his country, “One of their weak points is your lucidity. When you are lucid, they suffer setbacks… What the enemy wants is to gain control of  people’s minds. Controlling these is for them much more valuable than taking control of territory.”

*

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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).

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On Western Support for Nazism

December 19th, 2022 by Mark Taliano

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***

It would be obvious and widely accepted that we in the West are responsible for the rebirth and growth of Nazism, if the truth was a staple in our cultural diets.

Beneath veils of distactions and obfuscations, for example, the Canadian government has a long history of quietly supporting nazism. (1)

Drawing false equivalencies between the USSR and Nazi Germany furthers the support for nazism, which, through such operations, is being whitewashed. Canada voted against a UN initiative condemning the glorification of nazism.

Russia is combating the cancer of nazism and NATO expansionism in Ukraine, whereas the West seeks to fight “to the last Ukrainian” as it uses Ukrainians, and nazism, as proxies against Russia.

Largely censored and forgotten, Washington is behind the nazi-infested coup that overturned the elected Ukrainian government in 2014. This was followed by about eight years of genocide in which nazi battalions bombed Eastern Ukrainian (Russian-speaking) civilians and civilian infrastructure. (2)

Former Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel and former Ukraine President Pyotr Poroshenko even admitted to using the Minsk Peace accords as a stalling mechanism to build up the Ukrainian military. They were never negotiating in good faith. They never wanted Peace. (3)

Western support for nazism goes back to WW2 with Western corporate support (Rockfeller’s Standard Oil) of Operation Barbarossa and the nazi rampage across the USSR.

Prof. Chossudovsky notes that,

“(w)ithout US support to Nazi Germany, the Third Reich would not have been able to wage war on the Soviet Union. Germany’s oil production was insufficient to wage a major military campaign. Throughout the war, the Third Reich relied on regular shipments of crude oil  from US Standard Oil owned by the Rockefeller family.” (4)

Furthermore, writes Chossudovsky,

“Wall Street creditors are the main actors.  They were firmly behind Nazi Germany. They financed Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Rockefellers funded Hitler’s election campaign.

Wall Street also “appointed” the head  of Germany’s Central Bank (Reichsbank).” (5)

WW2 didn’t need to happen, and the current war in Ukraine didn’t need to happen either.

The complex web of Western war propaganda which obfuscates these facts enables the permanent warfare state and its war against us all.

*

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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.

Notes

(1) Aidan Jonah, “Long history of Ukrainian-Canadian groups glorifying Nazi collaborators exposed by defacing of Oakville memorial.” The Canada Files, 20 July 2020. (Long history of Ukrainian-Canadian groups glorifying Nazi collaborators exposed by defacing of Oakville memorial — The Canada Files_ Accessed 16 December, 2022.

(2)  Christelle Néant and Dr. Leon Tressell, ” ‘The First Casualty of War is the Truth’. What is Really Happening in Donbass/ A Conversation with Christelle Neant of Donbass Insider on the War in Ukraine.” Global Research, 21 June, 2022 (“The First Casualty of War is the Truth”. What is Really Happening in Donbass – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization) Accessed 16 December, 2022.

(3) Mark Taliano, “The West Seeks War, Not Peace.” Global Research, 30 November, 2022. (The West Seeks War, Not Peace – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization) Accessed 16 December, 2022.

(4) Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, ” Sleeping With The Third Reich: America’s Unspoken “Alliance” with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union/Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.” Global Research, 04 December, 2022, (Sleeping With The Third Reich: America’s Unspoken “Alliance” with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization) Accessed 16 December, 2022.

(5) Yuri Rubtsov, “History: Hitler was Financed by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England/US Investments in Nazi Germany. Rockefeller Financed Adolf Hitler’s Election Campaign.” Global Research, 03 December, 2022. (History: Hitler was Financed by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization) Accessed 16 December, 2022.

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***

This U.S. Government support for Ukraine to retake Crimea is part of a plan by U.S. President Barack Obama, in which he sidelined his Secretary of State John Kerry and backed Kerry’s subordinate Victoria Nuland when she promised the then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that he would continue to enjoy U.S. backing if he expanded his civil war against the breakaway (formerly Ukrainian) region of Donbass so as to invade also Crimea, which had broken away from Ukraine earlier — less than a month after the U.S. coup in Kiev occurred in February 2014. So, the U.S. Government’s now teasing Ukraine’s Government to invade Crimea can’t be understood without knowing its history:

On 16 March 2014, Crimeans went to the polls in a plebiscite on whether Crimea should be restored to Russia, of which it was a part during 1783-1954 (Khrushchev arbitrarily switched it to Ukraine in 1954, which outraged most Crimeans), and the vote (in that 83.1%-turnout March 2014 Referendum) was 96.77% voting to “join the Russian Federation,” which then was promptly done.

The U.S. Government, in its extensive planning for the February 2014 coup that overthrew the democratically elected neutralist President of Ukraine and selected the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk to replace him and to install a rabidly anti-Russian junta to ethnically cleanse the areas of Ukraine that had voted more than 70% for the elected Ukrainian President that Obama had just overthrown in February, so as to enable a ‘democratic’ election in Ukraine to retain the rabidly anti-Russian U.S.-installed regime to continue to remain in power ‘democratically’ without those voters still being able any longer to vote in Ukraine, had commissioned Gallup to poll Crimeans in 2013 in order to find out how receptive Crimeans would be to the coup which was then being planned and which would entail replacing Russia’s naval base in Crimea (since 1783) by a U.S. naval base there.

This 2013 Gallup poll (which was reported to U.S. Government agencies but not to the public) had found that whereas only 15% considered themselves to be “Ukrainian,” 40% considered themselves to be “Russian”; and 24% said instead that they preferred as their self-identity “Crimean,” which meant favoring an independent nation of Crimea, a breakaway from Ukraine that wouldn’t necessarily be part of Russia.

Asked to choose between Crimea being part of the U.S.-allied EU or part of the Russia-allied EurAsian Customs Union, 53% chose the latter, 17% chose the EU. Whereas 68% said that their feelings for Russia were “Warm,” and 5% said “Cold”; 6% said that their feelings for USA were “Warm,” and 24% said “Cold.” (The poll also asked many questions that were designed in order for the U.S. Government to plan a PR program targeted especially at the roughly 10% of Crimeans who self-identified as being “Tatars” in order to enable the U.S. operation to make them hate Russia and Russians — including pro-Russian Crimeans.)

The U.S. Government again Gallup-polled Crimeans in April 2014, just weeks after the 96.77% plebiscite-vote to rejoin Russia, in order to obtain any evidence that might become the basis for a U.S. accusation the plebiscite had been rigged by Russia — not genuinely democratic. This poll of 500 Crimeans was simultaneous with Gallup’s polling of also 1,400 (non-Crimean) Ukrainians in order to help the newly U.S.-installed Ukrainian regime to control the media and public opinion more effectively.

The question,

“Please tell me if you agree or disagree: No government outside of Ukraine has a right to be involved in decisions about the country’s future. [Asked of nonCrimeans only]” produced around 80% of (non-Crimean) Ukrainians in all regions of the country being in agreement with that viewpoint, so that the U.S. Government would need to keep secret as much as possible the total dependence of the new stooge-regime in Kiev upon its masters in Washington DC.

The poll also showed that at least until April 2014, the U.S. operation to control Ukrainian public opinion was an outstanding success, because in response to “For each of the countries and organizations I mention, tell me whether you think it has played a mostly positive role or a mostly negative role in the crisis in Ukraine,” 66.4% in (non-Crimean) Ukraine said that Russia had played a “Mostly negative” role, whereas only 27.7% said America did. HOWEVER THE FINDINGS IN CRIMEA WERE DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT: There, “Mostly negative” was 76.2% for U.S., and only 8.8% for Russia; and whereas “Mostly positive” was 71.3% for Russia, it was only 2.8% for U.S.

Apparently, the vast majority of Crimeans were outraged at America’s (and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations’) REJECTION of their 16 March 2014 plebiscite-results to (re)join Russia. And, finally, the question “Please tell me if you agree or disagree: The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status likely reflect the views of most people there/here.” produced: “Agree/Disagree” by 82.8%/6.7% in Crimea, and by 29.5%/48.2% in “Exclusive of Crimea.” Therefore, clearly already by the time of April 2014, Crimea and Ukraine were antipodally different demographic worlds.

Gallup also asked only outside Crimea, “Please tell me if you agree or disagree: Ukraine should return to the course of NATO integration.” and reported no nationwide percentage but only regional percentages, throughout non-Crimean Ukraine, in “South” “East” “Center” “North” and “West”; and ONLY in the West (west of Rivne in the northwest and Khmelnytsky in the southwest, or roughly the area within 200 miles of the Polish border) did more than 50% (53%) “Agree”: by contrast, only 10.3% in South did; only 13.1% in East did; only 32.1% in Center did; and only 37.7% in North (which includes Kyiv, the capital) did.

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded the most the regions that most OPPOSED joining in NATO. Only(and just barely), the West region favored to join NATO, and Russia’s invasion has invaded that region (the anti-Russian region) less than any of the others. This fact suggests that the Russian Government has no intention to include the West region as part of Russia in any final settlement of this war between the U.S. and Russia that is being waged in Ukraine’s battlefields, between Russian military forces and America’s Ukrainian and other military-forces — this proxy-war that Washington intends to start WW III.

That is the demographic background. Now for the historical background:

On 7 June 2015, I headlined “Obama Sidelines Kerry on Ukraine Policy” and reported that, whereas Secretary of State John Kerry had warned the then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko NOT to promise Ukrainians that Ukraine would retake both Crimea and Donbass by force if necessary, Kerry’s subordinate Victoria Nuland privately told Poroshenko to ignoreKerry’s warning — and Obama then nullified Kerry and backed Nuland on that. “Kerry now faces the decision as to whether to quit — which would force the EU’s hand regarding whether to continue with U.S. policy there [violating Obama’s will on that matter] — or else for Kerry to stay in office and be disrespected in all capitals for his staying on after having been so blatantly contradicted by his subordinate on a key issue of U.S. foreign policy.”

He stayed in office; and, then, later, Obama did it yet again — overrode Kerry for his subordinate Nuland — but this time on Syria. Kerry had worked long and hard to get Obama to accept a Syria peace-deal that would enable the people of Syria, and not the USA, to decide Bashar al-Assad’s political future — for Obama to give up trying to overthrow Assad. On 16 December 2015, I headlined “U.S. Ends Its Opposition to Democracy in Syria” and reported that despite Victoria Nuland’s insistence upon overthrowing Assad, Kerry had managed to get Obama’s nominal acceptance of democracy in Syria. (You can see in the pictures there that Nuland scowls at that signing-ceremony.) 

Then, Kerry managed an agreement with Russia on 17 May 2016 regarding Syria-policy, in which Obama nominally gave up on America’s protecting Al-Qaeda in Syria (Russia refused to allow AlQaeda in Syria to be protected from Russia’s bombing, but Obama’s Syria-operation used mainly AQ Syria as its proxy to lead the other jihadist groups to overthrow Assad); and, so, the deal was that Russia could continue to bomb AQ Syria’s forces, and that America would stop bombing Syria’s army forces, and Russia would coordinate with America on eliminating ISIS in Syria.

And, then, Kerry signed a Syrian ceasefire agreement on 9 September 2016, and barely a week later, on 17 September 2016, Obama violated that ceasefire agreement by (through his SecDef) bombing Syria’s army that were protecting Syria’s main oil field at Deir Ezzor. That’s when Putin learned not to trust ANYTHING from the U.S. regime.

Whereas Hillary Clinton had been at least as neocon as was Obama himself, Kerry had done everything he could to prevent a nuclear war, but Obama (like Biden) was on that path — the path to nuclear war. Kerry didn’t really fit in. The Deep State was solid against him.

Now, in the continuation of the Obama Administration’s ceaseless determination for the U.S. to conquer Russia and to defeat any ally of Russia such as Syria, Obama’s V.P. and now President, Joe Biden, brings the world to the precipice of WW III against both Russia and (like Trump) China while refusing to back down from Trump’s wars against also both Venezuela and Iran.

And Victoria Nuland is now #2 under Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is just as rabid a neocon as is she and as is Biden himself. And, just as Nuland had beaten Kerry by getting his achievements nullified by President Obama, she is apparently again receiving support from the top, to have the U.S. Government guiding Ukraine’s Government to invade Crimea.

On 14 December 2022, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty bannered “In Satellite Images Of Russian-Occupied Crimea, Experts Point To Potential Targets For Ukraine” and reported that private U.S. military contractors are supplying Ukraine’s Government with detailed satellite images of Russia’s military defenses in Crimea for Ukraine’s missiles to target and take out.

This would, in the view of Russians, be a Ukrainian invasion of Russia using U.S. intelligence and more, in order to do it, and, therefore direct war between America and Russia.

It would be a dream for Victoria Nuland and the rest of the U.S. Deep State, including all of the billionaires who financed Joe Biden’s political career. Of course, the ‘opposition’ Party, the Republicans, are also almost 100% solid for the neocon agenda (U.S. global imperialism), right up to and including global nuclear conflict. Apparently, all of America’s (and allied) billionaires are for it — none has come out, really, against it.

And, within the empire, the general public hardly even cares about it: the exit-polls show that international relations (“foreign policy”) was at the very bottom of American voters’ concerns. The whole world could be destroyed like that — as-if it didn’t even matter.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Featured image: CODEPINK “No War with Russia Rally, Negotiate Ukraine, Don’t Escalate.” (2022)

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A huge flow of money is subtracted from our vital needs and is poured by the European Union into Ukraine, where it fuels war and corruption.

EU foreign ministers have allocated another 2 billion euros for military support to Ukraine. The “European Peace Fund”, which has been used to arm and train Kyiv’s army since 2021, is set to increase on an annual basis from the initial 400 million to over one billion euros. This adds more funds to the 30 billion euros that the EU spent from January to October to arm Ukraine.

In addition to these expenses, the European Union has decided to give the Ukrainian government 19 billion euros in a loan form, knowing full well that they will never be repaid. In a summit that President Macron convened in Paris to provide Kyiv with further financial aid, the President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen announced that “the international community has decided for next year to inject at least 1.5 billion euros financial aid per month into Ukraine”.

In a country already characterized by widespread corruption at all levels, it is practically impossible in the current chaotic situation to control the actual destination of this enormous flow of money and weapons. A large part certainly ends up in the hands of power groups, which makes it disappear in the clandestine circuits of tax havens. What guarantees the European Union can give on anti-corruption controls is demonstrated by Qatar gate. The vice president of the European Parliament Eva Kaili, a Greek socialist exponent belonging to the Socialists and Democrats Group (the Italian Democratic Party is a member of it), was arrested together with others (including 4 Italians) for corruption, money laundering and participation in a criminal organization on a mandate of the Belgian Justice.

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This article was originally published on byoblu.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from World United News

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Palestinian woman tells the story of her connection to the village of Ma’alul (which I visited on July 28, 2022) which was one of 520 villages destroyed by Israel in 1948, and how she and the half million internally displaced Palestinian citizens of Israel are determined to exercise their return to their villages and land despite racist Israeli laws that deny them their right to do so.

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People Died from mRNA-Vaccine-Damaged Hearts, New Peer-Reviewed German Study Provides Direct Evidence

By Dr. Jennifer Margulis and Dr. Joe Wang, December 16, 2022

Medical pathologists from Heidelberg University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany have published direct evidence showing how people found dead after mRNA vaccination died. As this team of six scientists explore in their study, these mRNA-vaccinated patients suffered from heart damage because their hearts were attacked by their own immune cells.

A Poem for Christmas: Christmas Revels (1838)

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, December 19, 2022

The Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) was a well known artist of the nineteenth century and he painted many scenes featuring British and Irish history. His painting Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall (1838) was eventually purchased by the National Gallery of Ireland in 1872. This festive work contains many figures of various ranks and degrees and depicts aspects of the declining traditional Christmas festivities of his time.

Erdogan Jails His Main Rival in the 2023 Election

By Steven Sahiounie, December 18, 2022

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces a tough re-election vote in six months.  His rival, the Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu, is very popular and far ahead in the polls. Erdogan went back in time to find an obscure statement made by Imamoglu in 2019 which Erdogan used to order the Turkish courts to try Imamoglu on the charge of ‘insulting electoral officials’.

Aussies Go 100% Coal! Imagining Life Out from Under the Climate Cloud

By William Walter Kay, December 18, 2022

The real tragedy is what we don’t see. We see billions squandered on wind and solar. Tragic enough, but we don’t see the magnificent electrical infrastructures coal might create if similarly furnished with funds.

Xi of Arabia and the Petroyuan Drive

By Pepe Escobar, December 18, 2022

It would be so tempting to qualify Chinese President Xi Jinping landing in Riyadh a week ago, welcomed with royal pomp and circumstance, as Xi of Arabia proclaiming the dawn of the petroyuan era.

‘Disability Culture’ and the Allure of Victimhood

By Ben Bartee, December 16, 2022

The “Oppression Olympics” – the victimization hierarchy in which more extreme victimhood equals higher social status – is an odd outgrowth of the wider helicopter-mom, “everybody-gets-a-trophy,” “Nerf-the-world” culture that saturated everything circa the 90s. It proliferated from there under the guises of “tolerance” and “equity.”

White House Summit with African Leaders Result in More Promises

By Abayomi Azikiwe, December 16, 2022

During the December 13-15 White House-Africa summit, the Biden administration sought to persuade leaders and officials from 49 states that the United States wants an equal partnership with the continent. This was the first of such meetings since 2014 when the administration of former President Barack Obama was in office.

The Pentagon Budget Normalizes War

By Robert C. Koehler, December 16, 2022

Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I affect real change.”This is the caption of a New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant from several years ago. It keeps popping up in my head — I mean, every day. Like everyone else, I want what I do to matter, to “effect real change.” What I do is write. Specifically, I swim in the infinity of possibility. Humanity can kill itself or it can learn to survive. Most people (I believe) prefer the latter, which is all about discovering how we are connected to one another and to the rest of the universe. This is what I try to write about.

“Israeli Exceptionalism” Is a Canadian Value that Forgives Apartheid Israel All Its Crimes

By Khaled Mouammar, December 16, 2022

Canada at the United Nations just finalized its vote AGAINST a resolution which affirms the inalienable right of Indigenous Palestinian Semites to the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ natural resources, and demands Israel cease any exploitation, damage, or depletion of them. It passed 159-8.

Putin Attempting to Prevent a Repeat of the Clinton-Yeltsin Destruction of Russia

By Kurt Nimmo, December 16, 2022

In a speech delivered in 2007, well before the current crisis, Vladimir Putin “reserved his bitterest complaints… for the US drive to expand Nato into former Soviet eastern Europe and for the plans to deploy parts of the missile shield in central Europe. ‘Why do you need to move your military infrastructure to our borders?’” he asked.

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