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First published on August 1, 2022

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The world is now facing a man-made food catastrophe. It is reaching crisis levels. 

Current policies in many parts of the world place a priority on climate change for realizing a green new deal. Meanwhile, such policies will contribute to children dying from severe malnutrition due to broken food systems, with shortages of food and water, stress, anxiety, fear, and dangerous chemical exposure.

More negative pressure on farmers and the food system is asking for a catastrophe. The immune system of many people, especially children, has lost its resilience and has weakened too far with high risks for intoxication, infections, non-communicable and infectious diseases, deaths and infertility.

Dutch farmers, of whom many will face a cost of living crisis after 2030, have drawn the line. They are supported by an increasing number of farmers and citizens worldwide.

It’s not the farmers who are the most heavy polluters of the environment, but industries who make the products needed for a technocracy revolution to green energy, data mining, and Artificial Intelligence. As more of the WEF plans are rolled out by politicians, inequalities grow, and conflicts are rising all over the world.

The strong farmers’ revolt in the Netherlands is a call for an urgent transition to a people-oriented, free and healthy world with nutritious food cultivated and harvested in respect to natural processes. The cooperation of ordinary people worldwide is on the rise to prevent a mass famine catastrophe caused by the plan of scientism and technocracy to rule and control the world by unelected scientists and elites.

Enough food, access to food is the problem

Farmers around the world normally grow enough calories (2,800) per person (while 2,100 calories/day would be sufficient) to support a population of nine to ten billion people worldwide. But still over 828 million people have too little to eat each day. The problem is not always food; it is access. The UN which wrote in 2015 in the Sustainable Development Goals goal 2: No hunger and malnutrition for all in 2030 will not be reached.

Throughout history many times natural or manmade disasters led to food insecurities for longer periods of time, resulting in hunger, malnutrition (undernourishment) and mortality. The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation. Since the global pandemic began, access to food estimates show that food insecurity has likely doubled, if not tripled  in some places around the world.

Moreover, during the pandemic, global hunger rose to 150 million and is now affecting 828 million people, with 46 million at the brink of starvation facing emergency levels of hunger or worse. In the hardest hit places, this means famine or famine-like conditions. At least 45 million children are suffering from wasting, which is the most visible and severe form of malnutrition, and potentially life-threatening.

With global prices of food and fertilizers already reaching worrying highs, the continuing impacts of the pandemic, the political forces to realize climate change goals and the Russia-Ukraine war raise serious concerns for food security both in the short and the long term.

The world is facing a further spike in food shortages, pushing more families worldwide at risk for severe malnutrition. Those communities which survived former crises are left more vulnerable to a new shock than before and will accumulate the effects, diving into famine (acute starvation and a sharp increase in mortality).

Furthermore, growth of economies and development of nations are currently slowing down due to a lack of workforce due to a sharp decrease in well-being and higher mortality rates.

In the wake of new nitrogen limits that require farmers to radically curb their nitrogen emissions by up to 70 percent in the next eight years, tens of thousands of Dutch farmers have risen in protest against the government.

Farmers will be forced to use less fertilizer and even to reduce the number of their livestock, in some cases up to 95%. For smaller family-owned farms it will be impossible to reach these goals. Many will be forced to shutter, including people whose families have been farming for up to eight generations.

Moreover, a significant decrease and limitations of Dutch farmers will have huge repercussions for the global food supply chain. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest agricultural exporter after the United States. Still, the Dutch government pursues their agenda on Climate Change while there is currently no law to support the implementation, while they will not change much in the planet’s major air pollution. Models used to arrive at the decision of the Dutch government are debated by acknowledged scientists.

In no communication have Dutch politicians considered the effects of their decision on breaking a most important goal in the UN agreement: ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all in 2030.

Unfortunately, Sri Lanka, a country whose political leader introduced zero Nitrogen and CO2 emissions policy, is now facing economic problems, severe hunger, and difficulties to access food upon a political decision that farmers were not allowed to use fertilizers and pesticides. Still, politicians responsible for Nitrogen emissions/climate change in other countries pursue the same green policy.

Furthermore, experts are warning that heat, flooding, drought, wildfires, and other disasters have been wreaking economic havoc, with worse to come. Food and water shortages have been in the media.

On top of that, Australian experts announce a risk for an outbreak of a viral disease in cattle. This could cause an A$80 billion hit to the Australian economy and even more real supply chain issues. Countless businesses and producers go bankrupt. The emotional toll they are facing to euthanize their healthy herds is immense and hardly bearable. It is pushing more farmers to end their life.

Hopefully, the need for the Danish government to apologize, as an investigative report on the cull of more than 15 million minks in November 2020 criticized the action that led to the misleading of mink breeders and the public and the clearly illegal instructions to authorities, will help politicians to reconsider such drastic measures on farmers.

Worldwide, farmers’ protests are rising, supported by more and more citizens who stand up against the expensive mandates for changes to “green policies” that already brought massive miseries and instability.

At a ministerial conference for food security on June 29 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that worsening food shortages could lead to a global “catastrophe”.

Malnutrition responsible for more ill health than any other cause

The increased risk of food and water shortages the world is facing now will bring humanity to the edge. Hunger is a many-headed monster. For decades conquering world hunger has become a political issue in a way that it could not have been in the past. The use of authoritarian political power led to disastrous government policies, making it impossible for millions of people to earn a living. Chronic hunger and the recurrence of virulent famines must be seen as being morally outrageous and politically unacceptable, says Dreze and Sen in Hunger and Public Action, published in 1991.

“For those at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger in the world would be a disaster. For those who need availability of cheap labor, hunger is the foundation of their wealth, it is an asset,” wrote Dr. George Kent in 2008 in the essay “The Benefits of World Hunger.”

Malnutrition is not only influenced by food and water shortage, but also to exposures of extreme stress, fear, insecurity of safety and food, social factors, chemicals, microplastics, toxins, and over-medicalization. No country in the world can afford to overlook this disaster in all its forms, which affects mostly children and women in reproductive age. Globally more than 3 billion people cannot afford healthy diets. And this is in contradiction to what many people think is just a low-income country problem.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic began, about 8% of the population in North America and Europe lacked regular access to nutritious and sufficient food. A third of reproductive-age women are anemic, while 39% of the world’s adults are overweight or obese. Each year around 20 million babies are born underweight. In 2016 9.6% of the women were underweight. Globally in 2017, 22.2% of the children under the age of five were stunting, while undernutrition explains around 45% of deaths among children under five.

As stated by Lawrence Haddad, the co-chair of the Global Nutrition Report independent Expert Group, “We now live in a world where being malnourished is the new normal. It is a world we must all claim as totally unacceptable.” While malnutrition is the leading driver of disease with nearly 50% of deaths caused by nutrition related non-communicable diseases in 2014, only $50 million of donor funding was given.

Malnutrition in all its forms imposes unacceptably high costs – direct and indirect – on individuals, families and nations. The estimated impact on the global economy of the chronic undernourishment of 800 million people could be as high as $3,5 trillion per year, as was stated in a Global Nutrition Report in 2018. While child deaths, premature adult mortality and malnutrition-related infectious and non-communicable diseases are preventable with the right nutrition.

This will be much more at this precious moment, as the population sharply increases in excess mortality and non-communicable diseases among the working age people as recently shown by insurance companies.

Famines cause transgenerational effects

Famine is a widespread condition in which a large percentage of people in a country or region have little or no access to adequate food supplies. Europe and other developed parts of the world have mostly eliminated famine, though widespread famines that killed thousands and millions of people are known from history, like the Dutch Potato famine from 1846-1847, The Dutch Hunger winter 1944-1945 and a Chinese famine of 1959-1961.

The latter was the most severe famine both in terms of duration and number of people affected (600 million and around 30 million deaths) and led to a widespread undernutrition of the Chinese population in the period from 1959-1961. Currently, Sub-Saharan Africa and Yemen are countries with recognized famine.

Unfortunately, global destabilization, starvation and mass migration are increasing fast with more famines to be expected if we do not act today.

Epidemiological studies of Barker and later of Hales showed a relation between the availability of nutrition in various stages of pregnancy and the first years of life and diseases later in life. Their studies demonstrated that people with metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases were often small at birth. More and more research proves the role of nutrition-related mechanisms influencing gene expression. Even the period prior to pregnancy might influence a later risk for insulin resistance or other complications of the fetus.

As demonstrated in a study with 3,000 participants in Northern China, prenatal exposure to famine significantly increased hyperglycemia in adulthood in two consecutive generations. Severity of famine during prenatal development is related to the risk for Type 2 diabetes. These findings are consistent with animal models that have shown the impact of prenatal nutritional status on neuro-endocrine changes that affect metabolism and can be programmed to transmit physiologically across multiple generations through both male and female generations. Early life Health shock conditions can cause epigenetic changes in humans that persist throughout life, affect old age mortality and have multigenerational effects. Depending on which trimester the fetus is exposed to food deprivation or even stress alone a related disease later in life may vary from schizophrenia, ADHD to renal failure and hypertension among others. Other studies of famine exposure in people have produced evidence of changes in the endocrine system and to prenatal gene expression in reproductive systems.

The effects of periods of famine or undernutrition have predominantly been seen in people with low social economic income. However, 1 in 3 persons in the world suffered from some form of malnutrition in 2016. Women and children are 70% of the hungry. There is no doubt that undernutrition increased further during the past six years. Stunting and wasting increased in the most vulnerable. Two out of three children are not fed the minimum diverse diet they need to grow and develop to their full potential.

The hungry people in countries like Sri Lanka, Haiti, Armenia ,and Panama are the tip of the iceberg, opening the eyes of many citizens worldwide to a fast-growing problem as a result of the lockdowns, mandates and coercive policies in climate change, drought and the Ukraine war.

Citizens of the world have been facing for years: excess mortality, a fast decline in infertility and childbirth with a threat to human rights for women and more diseases.

Shocking reports of the UN and WHO acknowledged the health of people and environment is declining. The world is moving backwards on eliminating hunger and malnutrition. The real danger is that these numbers will climb even higher in the months ahead.

The truth is that food innovation hubs, food flats (vertical farming), artificial meats and gene and mind manipulations will not be able to tackle the depressing state humanity is facing.

Zero-Covid policy has brought humanity at risk in its existence. Covid-19 vaccines with a risk for harmhave been rolled out even for children under five years, hardly at risk for a severe disease, but undernourishment that greatly increases susceptibility to major human infectious diseases has not been taken care of.

Conflicts are growing worldwide, increasing instability. Citizens will no longer accept policies without a clear harm-cost benefit analysis.

We need to act now to decrease food and fuel prices immediately by supporting farmers and effective food systems for nutritious food to heal the most malnourished (children and females at childbearing age) in the population.

Let us hope for a return of Hippocrates’ principle: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

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Carla Peeters is founder and managing director of COBALA Good Care Feels Better. She obtained a PhD in Immunology from the Medical Faculty of Utrecht, studied Molecular Sciences at Wageningen University and Research, and followed a four-year course in Higher Nature Scientific Education with a specialization in medical laboratory diagnostics and research. She studied at various business schools including London Business School, INSEAD and Nyenrode Business School.

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At least from the very academic viewpoint, war is a condition of armed conflict between at least two sides (but, in fact, states). There are, historically, several types of warfare as conventional warfare, civil war, lightning war (blitzkrieg in German), total war, hegemonic war, liberation war, war on terrorism, etc. However, according to the used warfare technique, there is, for instance, little war (guerrilla war in Spanish) or according to the (counter)balance of warfare sides, there is asymmetric war as an example.

Asymmetric warfare exists in the case when two sides of combat forces (two states, two blocs, a state vs. one military bloc, etc.) are very or even extremely different regarding their military and other capacities to fight each other. They are as well as very different in the terms of their areas of comparative strategic advantage, Therefore, the confrontation between such two different sides is coming to turn on one belligerent side’s ability/capacity to force the other side to fight on their own terms and conditions.

Another feature of asymmetric warfare is that the strategies that the weaker side has consistently adopted against the stronger side (enemy) often involve targeting the enemy’s domestic political base as much as its forward military capabilities. Nevertheless, in essence, usually, such strategies involve inflicting pain over time without suffering unbearable retaliation in return.

In practice, a very illustrative example of asymmetric warfare was when on March 20^th, 2003, US-led coalition forces invaded (made aggression) Iraq of Saddam Hussein with the objective of locating and disarming suspected (and not existing) Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The coalition forces lead a very fast and overwhelmingly successful military campaign with the occupation of the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Consequently, the Iraqi military forces collapsed and finally surrendered to the occupants. US President Bush Junior declared the official end of major fighting operations in Iraq on May 2^nd, 2003.

On one hand, historically speaking, the casualties during the conventional part of the war were low for major modern and contemporary military conflicts. However, on other hand, the fighting soon has been evolved into an insurgency in which the combination of guerrilla/terrorist attacks on both Western coalition forces and the civilians of Iraq became the everyday norm.

Therefore, by the spring of 2007, the coalition had suffered some 3.500 men and around 24.000 wounded. Some independent sources estimate that total Iraqi war-related deaths are up to 650.000 (the minimum is 60.000). The 2003 Iraqi War is an example of how the asymmetric war can be transformed into guerrilla warfare with unpredictable consequences for the originally victorious side. The same happened with the war in Afghanistan in 2001 which started as an asymmetric war but was finished twenty years later with the victory of Taliban guerrilla forces over the Western coalition.

Nevertheless, the 2003 Iraqi War illustrated several themes that have been prominent in the talks regarding the future development of warfare including the question of asymmetric war as well. In this particular case, one of the focal features of asymmetric warfare was the fact that the fast military victory of the US-led coalition saw the Iraqi armed forces overrun by the technological superiority of the advanced weapons and information systems of the West, particularly of the US. It simply suggested that military revolution was on the way (RMA – revolution in military affairs).

Another feature of asymmetric warfare in Iraq in 2003 was that US-employed military (operational) doctrine has been as well as of focal importance. In other words, the military success of the Western coalition forces was not only the result of pure technological supremacy, but it was as well as the result of superior operational doctrine. A very fast and comparatively bloodless victory for the US-led coalition launched the view that in the post-Cold War 1.0 strategic environment, there were few inhibitions on the use of force by the US Army as at that time still being a hyper-power in global politics and international relations. Therefore, it was not the threat from the time of Cold War 1.0 that some regional conflict or war would escalate into nuclear warfare between two superpowers. In addition, Washington was healing the trauma of Vietnam through asymmetric wars against Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 1991/2003.

It can be said that in the case of the asymmetric war against Iraq in 2003, a focal point was US dominance of information warfare in both the military sense (using satellite systems for communication, weapons targeting, reconnaissance, etc.) and civilian sense (manipulation of the civilian communications and global media images of the warfare). Consequently, Washington succeeded at least in the West to produce an understanding of the war as pro-democratic and preemptive (against the use of WMD by Iraqi forces, in fact, against Israel).

Nevertheless, the point was that this conflict did not end with the surrender of the regular forces (army) of Iraq. It, actually, confirmed some arguments of those who supported the idea of “post-modern” warfare (or “new” wars) out of the regular (standard) type of wars (army vs. an army).

On other hand, the ability to operate using complex informal military networks allowed the Iraqi rebels after the regular phase of the war in 2003 to conduct effective asymmetric warfare, regardless of the overwhelming superiority of Western military technology. The insurgents, as well as, have been able to use the global media in order to present their warfare as a liberation war against Western neo-imperialism. However, the techniques used by the rebels were brutal (terrorism), ruthless, and in many cases targeted against the civilian population, in a campaign supported by outside structures (both governmental and non-governmental) and finance. It is sustained by an overtly identity-based campaign and reflects at the same time the features of the concept of the “post-modern” or “new” wars.

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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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I once described a friend of mine, a French skier, as ‘poetry in motion’. What did I mean by that? Can an athlete truly be a poet? After all, a poet is someone who generally takes great time and care to craft a gem, a poem, a creation to be polished and refined with pumice,  as the famous Latin poet Catullus wrote: āridā modo pūmice expolītum. A craft defined by contemplation, meditation and revision, an exertion not dependent upon the exigencies of the moment, but of a larger conception of time.

When I described my skiing friend Alain, was I christening him as a true poet? What makes poetry? What makes a poet? What does a poet make?

After all, the words ‘poem’ and ‘poetry’ are derived from a Greek root that means ‘to create, to make’.

Is a bricklayer a poet? Hmmm …

When I thought of Alain’s skiing, I thought of something that was graceful, beautiful and possessed of a certain kind of light, perhaps even of symmetry. I did not think of brute force, of hammer blows, of a monstrous subjugation of the snow-clad mountains of Taos Ski Valley, but rather of a a display of exquisite subtlety and skill and adaptation to the terrain.  Even when Homer, the G.O.A.T. in poetry,  dealt with the savage brutality of the Trojan War in his Iliad, he transformed this brutality into something transcendently poetic.

‘Poetic justice,’ on the other hand, connotes something different: closure, a neat declaration of the laws of Karma, a tidy wrapping up of things, a reestablishment of order in a world that was careening into chaos.

Argentina’s wild and improbable run to victory in the football (soccer)  World Cup of 2022 provided us with many examples of football grace, football force and football justice. The incomparable Lionel Messi finally achieved his much-desired goal after much travail in a concluding match with France that featured more moments of thrill and drama than I had remembered in a sporting event. Up 2-0 in the second half, Argentina seemed to be assured of a clear cut win, until a careless penalty was awarded to France and, 97 seconds later, a natural goal was volleyed home by a resurgent Kylian Mbappe to level the score. In extra time Messi struck and Argentina again seemed to have the game in hand before an unlikely Argentinian handball in the box gave France the opportunity to equalise.

Thus the game was reduced – and I use this term deliberately – to a penalty shootout, where luck and fortune have as much weight as skill. Nonetheless, the Argentinians emerged victorious.

Was this poetic justice for the Lionel Messi who had laboured for so many years scoring goal upon goal and registering assist upon assist for his club teams and the national team, whose vision on the soccer pitch was breathtaking? Perhaps. Whatever it was, I believe that the better team in the end did indeed merit the honour of hoisting the trophy.

For me, however, it was the magnificent play of Angel Di Maria that pushed my thoughts into the direction of poetry. Di Maria had been wreaking havoc upon the hapless French up until minute 65, when he was taken off. His speed and ability to thrust unsettled the French, and his creative manoeuvres led to the first Argentinian goal, having drawn a penalty converted by Messi. But it was his breathtaking finish to a play that began with Emi Martinez, the Argentine keeper, and progressed back and forth across the vast pitch to culminate in a strike that justified visions of poetry.

It was the goal of the tournament, a thing of beauty, a creation that emerged from nothing, from the unpredictable chaos of the game into a sublime and unforeseen event.

And isn’t this just what true poetry really is? The distillation of the complexity and messiness of the world into an essence of beauty and truth?  Well, we may argue about whether football produces truth, but we really can’t argue about the spontaneous eruptions of beauty, dependent upon the laws of chance and the skill of players prepared for the vagaries of fate.

After he scored this magnificent goal Di Maria used his hands to create the image of a heart.

It was the fitting exemplar of a majestic culmination.

Di Maria, Messi and Argentina’s manager Lionel Scaloni all hail from the city of Rosario in Argentina, a trio that joined forces, ultimately, in the service of poetic justice and display.

After all, true poetry is nothing more or less than a novel distillation of our disorderly world into that thing of beauty which the great English poet Keats rightly called a joy forever. By these standards Di Maria, Messi and the entire Argentinian team were poets, forged in the crucible of spontaneous necessity, and rendering unto us, we eager spectators, renewed hope in the capabilities of humankind and the exquisite existence of a transcendent and aesthetically delightful order.

Vamos Argentina, vamos Angel Di Maria, vamos poesía!

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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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Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a member of Pfizer’s data safety monitoring board (DSMB), was previously a paid adviser to Pfizer. DSMBs are supposed to be independent, and aren’t if members have previous relationships with the company

German autopsies found “highly unusual tissue inflammation” in people who died shortly after getting the jab, and investigators suspect the inflammation observed would be fatal. They also found spike protein in the tissues of the deceased, but not another key part of SARS-CoV-2. This suggests the actual virus was not part of the problem; the only possible source of the spike protein was the jab

Data from the German health insurance provider BKK, which covers about 10.9 million Germans, show 2.05% of COVID jab recipients sought medical care after their jab

The largest German statutory health insurance dataset, which encompasses 72 million Germans, show massive increases in sudden and unexpected deaths after the COVID jabs rolled out

December 13, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for a statewide grand jury investigation of crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 jabs. He also established an independent Public Health Integrity Committee to analyze and assess federal health guidance before they’re implemented in Florida

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Contrary to the official narrative (and hence popular belief), the COVID shots have no demonstrated safety. In Episode 298 of The Highwire, Del Bigtree interviews attorney Aaron Siri about the various lawsuits his firm has brought to reverse COVID jab mandates.

Siri describes a recent deposition of Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a world-leading vaccinologist who sat on Pfizer’s data safety monitoring board (DSMB). This five-member committee oversaw the safety of Pfizer’s jab. A DSMB is supposed to be an independent group of experts, whose responsibility it is to monitor patient safety and treatment efficacy data while a clinical trial is ongoing.

Pfizer’s Not-so-Independent Safety Monitoring Board

As noted by Siri in the deposition, since the DSMB is supposed to be independent, it’s crucially important that all the members of that board have no potential conflicts of interest and are in fact truly independent of the drug company whose product they’re evaluating.

In the case of Edwards, she was a paid adviser to Pfizer before she was hired (by Pfizer) to be on the DSMB for their COVID jab. According to Edwards, this fact is irrelevant, because that prior relationship did not influence the work she did on the board.

“I say what I believe based on my expertise,” she told Siri. “So, you don’t think financial incentive can sway people’s judgment at all?” Siri asked. “It does not sway my judgment, Sir,” she replied. “Then why have an independent DSMB?” Siri asked. “Why doesn’t Pfizer just have some of its employees on it?”

“Because we are independent; we are independent from Pfizer in this assessment,” she replied. But just how can an independent advisory committee possibly be “independent” if members have prior relationships with the company?

Another noteworthy tidbit from that deposition was Edwards’ comment that she reviewed “lots of reactions and adverse events” from the COVID jab trial. Yet the public has continuously been told there are no bad reactions. So, what was she looking at? And why, if there were “lots of reactions,” did the DSMB conclude that there are no safety concerns?

Of course, we know at least some of what she was looking at. Pfizer trial documents¹ have been released showing the company amassed nine single-spaced pages’ worth of “adverse events of special interest” (see pages 30 through 38²), including 1,223 events with fatal outcomes between December 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021 alone.

A whistleblower who worked on Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial has also come forward with evidence showing data were falsified, patients were unblinded and follow-up on reported side effects lagged way behind. Why didn’t any of these issues concern the DSMB? Was it because there really was no independent DSMB?

What German Autopsy Data Have Revealed

In a mid-December 2022 Substack article, the anonymous writer who goes by the moniker “A Midwestern Doctor” reviewed German autopsy data, which demonstrate:³

• The presence of “highly unusual tissue inflammation” in people who died shortly after getting the jab. As noted by the author, “Pathologists had not observed this phenomena before the COVID-19 vaccines, and they suspected this inflammation would be fatal.”
• The presence of COVID spike protein in the tissues of the deceased, whereas another key part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was absent. This suggests the actual virus was not part of the problem; the only possible source of the spike protein was the jab.

The most recent and “most definitive” study on this subject, according to A Midwestern Doctor, examined 35 people who died within 20 days of getting the COVID jab. After thorough autopsy examination, 10 of the deceased were determined to have died from causes other than the jab.

Among the remaining 25, most died from causes that, in general, have frequently been linked to vaccination. Five died from myocarditis, which could potentially be linked to the shot. In three of those five cases, the COVID jab was determined to be the definitive cause of the myocarditis that led to their death.

As noted by A Midwestern Doctor, “These results are very important for convicting the vaccines if it can also be proven that a large number of unexpected deaths are occurring following vaccination.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what excess mortality data tell us.

German Insurance Provider Data Show Rise in Doctor’s Visits

A Midwestern Doctor also cites data from the German health insurance provider, BKK, which covers about 10.9 million Germans. One of the BKK board members, Andreas Shöfbeck, discovered concerning trends in their data, which he sent to the Paul-Ehrlich Institut, an agency of the German Federal Ministry of Health.

No good deed goes unpunished in the era of COVID censorship, however, so Shöfbeck was summarily dismissed from the board as thanks for his contribution to public health and safety. The BKK dataset showed 2.05% of COVID jab recipients sought medical care after their jab. A Midwestern Doctor continues:⁴

“This concerning safety signal prompted … the AfD [Alternative for Germany, a conservative political party] … to file the German equivalent of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act request] for the rest of the insurance data …

Recently AfD obtained AOK Sachsen-Anhalt’s data, which once analyzed, demonstrated that many of the conditions we associate with COVID-19 injuries noticeably increased when the vaccination campaign initiated … [C]onditions which rose five-fold or more were:”

“AfD also submitted a FOIA request to KBV, the association which represents all physicians who receive insurance in Germany and thus the largest insurance dataset available.”

Largest Insurance Dataset Reveal Rise in Sudden Deaths

The larger statutory health insurance dataset from KBV, which encompasses 72 million Germans, show massive increases in sudden and unexpected deaths after the COVID jabs rolled out.

The following graph is from a press conference presentation by data analyst Tom Lausen (see video below; it’s in German, but you can enable English subtitles).⁵ No mainstream media attended the press conference.

As noted by A Midwestern Doctor:⁶

“… one way that individuals have analyzed the unusual changes in health following the vaccination campaigns has been to assess how far they fall outside of the expected range of variation …

I did a quick calculation for the above graph and found that 2021’s increase from 2016-2020 was 37.7σ [sigma], while 2022’s was 41.0σ. This is quite a big deal (the rarity of an event happening by chance increases exponentially as the σ increases).

For context, a 7σ event has a 1/390,632,286,180 chance of spontaneously occurring (it is thought to occur once in a billion years) … (I was not able to find a reference on the probabilities for the even higher σ events observed here).

Given these numbers, it is very difficult to argue that these events were not caused by something. In this regard, we are also quite fortunate that while the vaccines were rushed to the market over a period of time far too short to establish safety, that process still took a year.

Because of this lag, it is possible to refute the commonly cited argument that these changes were due to COVID-19 or the lockdowns, as these only occurred in 2020 …”

Dramatic Rise in Heart-Related Fatalities

Lausen also presented a graph for German fatalities per quarter involving cardiac problems.^7,8 These six death certificate codes all correspond to “sudden deaths” with cardiac cause. As you can see, heart-related mortality more than doubled in the first quarter of 2021 from the year before, and nearly tripled from the five-year average.

Some have argued that since few shots were given in early 2021, heart-related deaths would not have increased until the second quarter if there was a correlation between the two. However, other data show there was a rapid rise in COVID jab doses administered during the first quarter of 2021 (see graph below), so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there is a correlation.

Also, as with all-cause mortality, the fact that heart-related deaths did NOT spike during 2020 suggests COVID-19 had nothing to do with the rise that occurred in the first quarter of 2021.

Data Analyst Calls for Immediate End to COVID Jabs

In the conclusion of his presentation, Lausen calls for the immediate suspension of the COVID jabs until correlation between the shots and death can be conclusively ruled out. He also calls for:⁹

• Autopsies on all who died suddenly to determine what the massive increase is due to
• Mandatory recording of the COVID jab status of all deceased individuals, and the brand used, and regular publication of these data
• Immediate evaluation of the KBV data by German health authorities
• Informing all doctors and the population at large about the increase in diseases being reported post-jab
• Regular publication of KB e V data linked with COVID jab data held by the Paul Ehrlich Institute and the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s public health institute)

The Shots Also Have Negative Effectiveness

In addition to not being safe, by any standard, the COVID shots are also negatively effective, meaning after 90 days, both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s shots make you more susceptible to COVID.

As shown in the graphic below, Danish data reveal Omicron cases among the jabbed rose dramatically after three months for both injections, giving Pfizer a negative effectiveness of 76.5% at 90 days’ post-jab and Moderna a 39.3% negative effectiveness.

As noted in a series of Twitter posts by Chris Martenson Ph.D.:¹⁰

“If you’ve been vaccinated, and feel like you’ve been getting sick more often than your unvaccinated friends, your impression is correct … The only rational, scientific, ethical, and moral response is to #StoptheShotsNow for everyone under 50 who is healthy. Anything less is profiteering, politics, or personal failure. Or assault and/or homicide if you’re a doctor.”

Florida Governor Calls for Grand Jury Investigation

I’ve reviewed data on side effects and excess mortality in the U.S. in several previous articles, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently did what many of us have been calling for in light of those data.

December 13, 2022, he petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for a statewide grand jury investigation of crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 jabs.¹¹ According to the governor’s press release:¹²

“The pharmaceutical industry and the FDA have refused to release patient-level data for independent researchers.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna have received FDA approval for pediatric and adult patients and continue to be marketed as safe and effective, even though the vaccines do not prevent transmission and adverse events have been minimized and disregarded by the Biden Administration and Big Pharma.

In response, Governor DeSantis has filed a petition to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate crimes and wrongs in Florida related to the COVID-19 vaccines and further recommend enforcement methods.”

Florida Establishes Independent Public Health Committee

DeSantis is also implementing autopsy surveillance of post-jab sudden deaths, and has established a Public Health Integrity Committee, an independent group of expert researchers “charged with assessing federal decisions, recommendations, and guidance related to public health and health care … to ensure that Florida’s public health policies are tailored for Florida’s communities and priorities.”

The Committee, which will be overseen by Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo, consists of the following members:

As noted in the governor’s press release:¹³

“The Biden Administration and pharmaceutical corporations continue to push widespread distribution of mRNA vaccines on the public, including children as young as 6 months old, through relentless propaganda while ignoring real-life adverse events.

At today’s roundtable the Governor and health experts discussed data covering serious adverse events. These risks include coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell’s palsy, encephalitis, appendicitis, and shingles.

‘Health care professionals should always communicate the risks of a medical intervention to their patients in a manner that is clinically appropriate and meets standards of ethical practice. President Biden and Big Pharma have completely prevented that from happening – it is wrong,’ said Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo.

‘With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines.'”

*

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Notes

¹ PHMPT.org 5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports

² PHMPT.org 5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports, Pages 30-38

^{3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9} A Midwestern Doctor December 13, 2022

⁸ Meryl Nass Substack December 19, 2022

¹⁰ Twitter Chris Martenson December 15, 2022

^11, 12, 13 FLgov.org December 13, 2022

Featured image is from NaturalNews.com

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***

“This is quite shocking,” declared South Australia’s Attorney-General and Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Kyam Maher.  “These caves are some of the earliest evidence of Aboriginal occupation of that part of the country.”  That evidence was subtracted this month by acts of vandalism inflicted on artwork in Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain, claimed to be the world’s largest limestone karst landscape and covering over 200,000 square kilometres.

Edward John Eyre, the first European to cross the Plain in 1840-1841, wrote hauntingly of it as “a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into bad dreams”.  In his case, personal circumstances soured the impressions: horses dying of dehydration; a case of mutiny resulting in the killing of his companion John Baxter; the theft of the party’s supplies; the slimmest chances of survival.

The work in question, carvings on chalk limestone, is said to be some 30,000 years old, considered sacred by the Mirning people.  By the time news reached CNN of the incident, eight years had been shaved off the estimate, one more in line with the 1956 dating by archaeologist Alexander Gallus.  In information available on the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, the “finger markings and unique archaeological deposits found in Koonalda Cave provide a rare glimpse of Aboriginal life on the Nullarbor Plain during the Pleistocene.”

The rock art in question is now plastered by crude graffiti, featuring such messages as “don’t look now, but this is a death cave”.  The verdict of archaeologist Keryn Walshe, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the Koonalda Cave is unsurpassed, was gravely unequivocal.  “The art is not recoverable.”  To remove the graffiti from the soft surface would effectively do away with the art itself.  “It’s a massive, tragic loss to have it defaced to this degree.”

Something of a consensus has been reached on how this took place.  A steel case, installed in the 1980s, was breached by digging intruders.  Astonishingly, the Mirning elders seemed to have been the last ones to know about it.  Bunna Lawrie, for instance, only heard about the matter this month.  (Access is usually restricted to a few male elders; the site is closed to tourists.)  “We are the traditional custodians of Koonalda,” he declared in a statement, “and ask for this to be respected and for our Mirning elders to be consulted.”

Put it down to inadequate resources, and a lack of will, which has also seen previous acts of vandalism take place.   “The failure to build an effective gate, or to make use of modern security services, such as wildlife monitoring cameras that operate 24/7, has in many ways allowed this vandalism to occur,” suggested Clare Buswell of the Australian Speleological Federation Conservation Commission in a submission to the Aboriginal lands parliamentary standing committee made earlier this year.

The statement by Lawrie reiterates the point.  “Since 2018 we have been asking for support to secure the entrance as a priority and to offer appropriate Mirning signage.  This support did not happen.”  Other misfortunes had befallen the site since, including the collapse of the cave entrance, and access works that did not involve consultation and were “not approved.”

The destruction of such sites should shock, but each revelation seemingly inures the authorities to them.  The pattern is clear: apologies follow; horror is expressed; and even offers of compensation made to cope with irreversible harm.  But the business of trashing a legacy continues, digestible as the stuff of accident or indifference.

In many instances, laws sympathetic to development and mining also do much to doom such works to extinction.  The rock shelters of the Jukaan Gorge site in Western Australia were remorselessly levelled by Rio Tinto in May 2020, an outcome that was ethically atrocious yet legally sanctioned by the legislation of the day.

Of note was the mining giant’s conduct towards local elders.  The company’s legal team stomped on any protest, haughtily informing members of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) that any emergency application to halt to the company’s works made to the federal government could only take place with the company’s blessing, and with 30 days-notice.  Carol Meredith, the chief executive of the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation, recalled the sharp response from Rio’s lawyers, who stated that “we were not able to engage seeking out an emergency declaration that perhaps would have stopped proceedings, because of our claim-wide participation agreement.”

Within the wheels of the company, blissful ignorance reigned.  Rio Tinto’s head of corporate relations, Simone Niven, was not only based in London but had little idea about the significance of the Juukan Gorge caves.  Relations could hardly be counted as her strong suit.

Conforming to previous instances of such vandalism, penalties are being called for regarding the perpetrators of the graffiti.  Under the legal regime, damaging such sites can carry a fine of $A10,000 or six months in prison. But the harm has been done; again, history has been left poorer, and the dreams worse than ever.

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

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***

As many people must now realise, the word ‘Green’ has been hijacked. 

It used to mean ‘natural’, ‘diverse’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘human scale’.

That was while bona fide ecologists still held sway over the way the word was used.

‘Green’ meant taking a responsible position concerning the management of planetary resources; having empathy for nature, fertility, ecological food and community involvement.

But then in 1992, ‘The Earth Summit’ (Rio Summit) happened, along with ‘Agenda 21’. And something called ‘Sustainable Development’ became the catch-all promotional spin to sell the prescribed medicine. The deception.

That was the beginning of the end of the ‘Real Greens’ and the arrival of the corporate, banker-backed ‘Fake Green’ agenda we live with today.

The central component of the scam was, of course, ‘Global Warming.’

Let’s remind ourselves. At first it was called ‘The Greenhouse Effect’, then ‘Global Warming’ and then ‘Climate Change’.

Image is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Polar ice cap doomsday theorists, like ex US Vice President Al Gore, came and went. But the ice didn’t.

In Britain the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sought to spearhead the ‘Stop Global Warming’ crusade.

IPCC gave lucrative contracts to around 2,000 scientists with instructions to produce a computer modelled climate graph which would show almost unstoppable ‘warming from CO2’….unless..

‘Unless’ strict measures were taken to – over a number of years – stop countries burning any more than their appointed allowance of fossil fuels. With ‘carbon fines’ imposed on those who did not conform.

Welcome – operation “He who controls the climate agenda controls the world.”

‘Green’ became a word conveying the opposite of its original meaning.  From being a pro human, pro ecological symbol  – it became a symbol of Corporate Green Fascism.

This was verified by Klaus Schwab, head of The World Economic Forum, in his 2020 Davos  announcement of ‘The Great Reset’; an industrialist/banker led agenda with origins in The Club of Rome and Bilderberger groups of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s.

Two leading components of the Great Reset are ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’.

The omega point of the great Davos fanfare was/is ‘Zero CO2 by 2040’.

But please note, CO2 is depicted in ubiquitous media photographs, as smoking factory chimneys. But that has little or nothing to do with CO2. It is nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, water vapour and diverse particulates that form the chief components rising up out of those chimneys. There is nil science on display here. Except the science of the lie.  The CO2 lie.

Zero CO2 quite literally means ‘no air to breathe’, as plant life depends upon carbon dioxide to provide the oxygen we breathe.

Mr Schwab is also pleased to tell us that ‘in order to save the world’ mankind is to lose its human identity and become a digitally programmed cyborg by 2030. An extension of a super computer programme. A ‘Transhuman’.

His chief advisor, Israeli professor Yuval Noah Harari, says “We will do better than God.”

In the meantime, transgenic/genetically modified food is announced as the future of the human diet.

To include synthetic foods produced from animal cells in laboratory petri-dishes and vegetables grown in vertical hydroponic greenhouses that use no soil. Just water and chemicals.  This by 2030.

“Man must not be allowed to do any further harm to the environment” say the fake Greens. Instead, thousands of years of traditional ways of working the land must be phased-out in a single decade.

So, under ‘Green New Deal’ farmers will become redundant, their work taken over by robots. And farm animals, accused of being ‘methane polluters’ will go with them.

Redundant farmers and disenfranchised country dwellers are to be herded into digital 5/6G powered ‘Smart Cities’ to survive on a diet of insects and synthetic meat, synthetic dairy and synthetic vegetable products.

Image is from WEF

I report this as fact, since Klaus Schwab wrote it in his book ‘The Great Reset’,  as well as appearing in somewhat edited form, on the World Economic Forum website.

So ‘Green New Deal’ is simply the contrived reaction to the contrived ‘Global Warming-end-of-the- world’ scare story. A story with not a trace of empirical science to back it up.

CO2 ‘the gas of life’ at just 0.04% of atmospheric content, was chosen to be the scape goat for a totalitarian planetary take-over, a fear based brain washing exercise.

An exercise to cow humanity into believing the end of the world is coming unless…

Unless we embrace a totalitarian New World Order in which all private property is to be transferred into the hands of ‘the dictatorship’, ensuring that “You will have nothing, and you will be happy.” (Klaus Schwab)

Let us remind ourselves once again of the Great Green Deal ‘Save the World’ message:  “For a Zero Carbon future, the world must end its dependency on fossil fuels. All energy must be renewable”.

But had anyone done their homework before this ’saviour pronouncement’ was made?

Seems not; as the intense mining of minerals and the construction of tens of thousands of steel, concrete and aluminium wind generators, combine to consume more energy than they give back.

All this manufacturing, including photovoltaic,  relies heavily on fossil fuels. The very ‘CO2 causing’ agent supposedly to be kept under the ground.  A Green Agenda, Herr Schwab?

At the top of the cult’s pyramid, they know this. The plan has always been to keep the ‘elite’ well housed, well heated and well fed on organic foods.

Fossil fuels will not be phased out, but will be steadily priced out of the market for ordinary people.

Sadly, this is what the fake political and non governmental ‘Green movement’ has also adopted as its ‘ecological message’.

They have been bought-out. They followed the money and not their hearts or their heads.

They ended-up supporting ‘Sustainable Development’. The Rio Summit lie that has, up until now, fooled the world. And they recently adopted as their leader, none other than the newly enthroned monarch of the United Kingdom, King Charles 111.

But is this political, corporate and royal lie already falling apart?

The impositions of trade restrictions on Russia was supposed to give the West the political ‘moral high ground’. A chance to show how well the ‘green energy saviour plan’ would work in meeting the needs of citizens of the European Union, when gas, oil and coal supplies are cut-off or drastically curtailed.

But instead it appears to have caused a frenzied rush to reopen coal mines and buy as much gas and oil as possible from other parts of the world.

So where is the fossil-fuel-free ‘Green New Deal’ now?

In many ways Covid has been the sweetener for Green Deal enforcement at the ground level. It was supposed to get us used to living in fear and permanent acceptance of the autocratic behaviour of megalomaniacs preaching global destruction.

But quite a few of us didn’t buy it. Quite a few of us held firm to the bio diverse, ecological, Real Green agenda for a living breathing planet earth. Bravo!

But ‘we who didn’t buy it’ must do more than individually shout from the roof tops. We must now come together. We must present an impregnable thin red line against the attempted advances of the criminals running this planet.

We must hold the line for truth, wisdom, honour, and a future in which ‘Green’ regains its status as the true ecological sign post to a healed planet and a healed humanity.

*

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher.  He is Co-founder of the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology HARE https://hardwickalliance.org/ . Julian’s 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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***

If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.

Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says:

“… if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”

No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.

US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:

“Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”

In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.

Image is from Children’s Health Defense

Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.

It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.

The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.

The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed:

“… further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”

Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.

The US government was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ the public against anything that threatened its narrative. Big tech corporations monitored and manipulated users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it talked of censoring more than sixteen million ‘pieces of content’ containing opinions or information the government wanted suppressed.

AFL noted that the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, the WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organisation Mafindo” to mitigate ‘disinformation’. Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia and funded by Google.

AFL states:

“What is clear is that the United States government, big tech platforms, and international organizations were fully entangled in an intricate campaign to violate the First Amendment, to silence the American people, and to censor dissenting views.”

The CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were also shown to be driven by politics rather than science.

Across all the major Western nations, there was a clamp down on dissent and a massive censorship campaign to justify a policy framework of social and economic lockdowns, masking, distancing and state intrusion into almost every aspect of private life.

The findings of AFL indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.

The official narrative was about protecting populations from a deadly virus. And any dissent that did seep into the edges of mainstream discourse (like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or a few presenters on Talk Radio in the UK, for instance) tended to focus on politicians going too far on lockdowns and restrictions and being caught up in their egotistical lust for power and control.

Such a superficial explanation avoided a deep, critical analysis of the situation. Indeed, any focus on big finance’s – Wall Street and the City of London – role in this was conspicuous by its absence.

In March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a ‘very entitled’ generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation. BlackRock is the world’s most powerful investment fund.  

Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current economic crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008).

The war in Ukraine as well as COVID are being used to explain the roots of the current economic crisis. But COVID policies were a symptom not a cause of the crisis – they were used to manage what by late 2019 was regarded as an impending economic meltdown. Draconian COVID policies had little to do with a public health emergency.

That much is made clear in the article A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation by Professor Fabio Vighi.

On 15 August 2019, BlackRock issued a white paper instructing the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn”. The message was unequivocal: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’.” It also stated the need to find ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders while avoiding hyperinflation.

Six days earlier, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had in a working paper called for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions”.

Vighi’s shows why the hegemonic class reacted so severely to a public health issue that impacted a minority of the population. This response only makes sense when viewed within the context of economics.

Come late 2019 and especially 2020, pumping trillions into the financial system followed by lockdowns (to prevent hyperinflation) were used as the “unconventional monetary policies” that the BIS had called for on 9 August 2019.

Did you really think the authorities cared so much about something that mainly affected the over-80s and those with severe comorbidities that they would lock down the entire global economy?

Did they really care so much about ordinary people, especially unproductive labour – the working class old and working class infirm – when through the years of imposed austerity, we saw the working classes being treated with utter contempt?

And did those who imposed restrictions and lockdowns really believe there was a ‘deadly’ virus on the loose?

Think of booze parties at Downing Street, Neil Ferguson’s breaking of lockdown rules to carry on an extra-marital affair, Matt Hancock breaking his own COVID rules with his lover, maskless world leaders gathering in London while their servants wore masks, various US political leaders ignoring their own rules and the public theatre of Fauci et al masking up for TV cameras then maskless as soon as they were off camera.

While such people tyrannised populations with fear and lockdowns, it is clear they themselves were unworried about ‘the virus’.

After embarking on a massive anti-Russia media propaganda campaign earlier this year to garner public support for Ukraine, the centres of power in the West are now sending billions of dollars of the public’s money into the coffers of the likes of weapons manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing.

Such corporations are more than happy to profit from sacrificing the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the geopolitical quest to weaken and balkanise Russia so that US interests can gain a dominant, strategic foothold on the Eurasian landmass.

And while billions of dollars are being spent to achieve this, a wholly unnecessary ‘cost of living’ crisis (resulting from reckless economic neoliberalism which has finally imploded) is being imposed on working people in the Western countries – regarded as mere collateral damage when it comes to economic policies, war and corporate profit. The result is misery and poverty and the demonisation of some of the (now striking) workers who were lauded as ‘heroes’ during COVID.

But – of course – the powers that have so much demonstrable contempt for the lives of ordinary people at home and abroad will close down the entire global economy to protect their health!

Those who believe this are testament to the power of propaganda.

COVID-related policies were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.

And the big winner has been Big Pharma, an industry with a track record of dirty tricks, false advertising and death and injury resulting from its products. If, say, Pfizer were an individual, given its corporate crimes, it would be serving a lengthy prison sentence with the proverbial key being thrown away.

But corporations with lengthy corporate rap sheets across many sectors are promoted to the public as being trustworthy and dependable. When governments partner (conspire) with such enterprises, they are conspiring with criminal recidivist companies. And when people purchase stock in them, the same applies.

Given the reference to the global food system at the beginning of this article, of particular interest are the crimes of Dupont and Bayer (see the Powerbase website), and Monsanto and Cargill (see the Corporate Research Project (CRP) website).

And, of course, Pfizer and its disturbing corporate rap sheet also appears on the CRP site.

These immensely wealthy corporations spend millions each year funding various groups and lobbying governments and international bodies. Little wonder that they wield tremendous influence and, in one way or another, become ‘trusted partners’ of governments, the WHO, the WTO and the like.

Image is from The Expose

In Pfizer’s case, trusted so much as being granted ‘emergency use authorisation’ to have its ‘vaccines’ brought to market and then forced on the public via the coercive policies of governments.

Returning to Lippmann, since early 2020 so many people have feared for their lives and have admired with awe leaders who supposedly saved them from destruction. Even now as reports on vaccine injuries, vaccine inefficacy and increased mortality rates since the jab rollouts are largely taboo within the mainstream media, the public are being kept on message as the WHO and Big Pharma work towards a global treaty that will strip all their rights come the next economic meltdown or ‘pandemic’.

This article was written over the Yuletide period, an increasingly secular celebration stripped of religious connotation. These days, ‘in Big Pharma we trust’ might be more apt along with blind faith in a Zuckerberg-esque fantasy metaverse where Facebook is fact, government is truth and Big Pharma is God.

Because (heaven help us) that we should be left to think for ourselves!

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

Featured image is from Union of Concerned Scientists

Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

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***

The above-mentioned quote by the US-American poet and historian Carl August Sandburg does not correspond to reality: man, whether young or old, cannot say “No, I’m not going to war!”, he has to follow.

To this day, this human way of reacting cannot be explained because man has not yet recognised himself – not himself, not his nature, not his mental make-up and not his ways of reacting. Based on depth-psychological knowledge, we know today that early childhood education has had such an effect on their emotional life that they have to leave.

This is not free will. But people can recognise themselves bit by bit with expert help, become aware of their unconscious emotional parts and change their behaviour for the good of humanity. If one can make friends with these psychological thoughts, they will give courage and not stir up new fears.

War is not an inevitable fate; it is  “good business”, a defeat for humanity

Whether World War I or World War II, whether the Vietnam War or the West’s current proxy war against Russia: time and again mothers send their sons to the “field of honour” and afterwards wear a black armband “in proud mourning”. Youth dies before it can begin to live (1).

War is a great misfortune for all of us. Pope John Paul II said on 13 January 2003: “War is never an inevitable fate. War always means defeat for humanity.” To conquer other peoples and dominate them is good business. Never before have the states of the world spent so much money on armaments, forged so many deadly weapons as today. The profits of the global arms industry are astronomical.

Militarism has always played a fatal role in the lives of peoples. The struggle of man against man has always challenged the achievements of culture. The warlike way of life has a brutalising effect and the consequence is usually a relapse into barbarism, which is noticeable in all areas of social life.

Unfortunately, humanity is unable to banish this age-old evil from the world. Power-political, economic and social reasons constantly feed the spirit of violence and lead to destructive wars. In view of the immense human and material sacrifices reported in the history of war, the exhortation of high-minded people who proclaimed the ideal of a peaceful world arose from time to time. The idea of eternal peace is surely as old as humanity itself.

Today we see that war only accomplishes works of destruction; we must never expect our salvation from it. Historical observation even shows that the decline of culture has always been associated with wars. And although this fact is sufficiently well known, no university teacher, no philosopher, no psychologist calls out to the youth: “Don’t go!”

Men of all ages, unfortunately, cannot help it. Education has so affected their emotional life that they have to go. Just as they had to follow father and mother in childhood, they follow political authorities as adults. They carry this feeling of absolute obedience from childhood with them into old age, but they are not aware of it. That is why we cannot and must not condemn them. And the parents, unfortunately, did not know that the upbringing of absolute obedience was a mistake. They usually meant well, but in their ignorance and because of their own childhood experiences, they put their children in distress through questionable educational methods.

The good news is that with the help of a psychotherapeutic professional, people can recognise themselves bit by bit, become aware of their unconscious emotional parts and change their behaviour.

Depth psychology and the dynamics of the unconscious as an essential, highly effective part of life.

In pre-psychological times shaped by the religious Middle Ages, no human being knew anything about himself, about his feelings and about his life. It was only with Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 to 1872) and Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) that people began to see themselves as beings of nature and to observe themselves (2). A short time later, a certain doctor, Siegmund Freud (1856 to 1939), made the discovery in Vienna that humans have an unconscious. That was over 100 years ago.

Unfortunately, as a child of his time, Freud did not understand the world and people. He was conservative and a good patriot. So he thought that Austria-Hungary should win the First World War. The others should perish. In a sense, his psychoanalysis sank; it became a medical thing.

But through the scientific findings of depth psychology, we now know that people can be helped, that they can reorient themselves and change their feelings. The teachings of the individual psychologist Alfred Adler (1870 to 1937) have become a cornerstone of depth psychology and it is impossible to imagine psychological research without them. The further development of depth psychology has proved Adler right on many points. For Adler, character is a creative product of the child, arising from the confrontation with early childhood circumstances, especially the educational influences that are most decisive for the formation of character.

The fundamental insight of depth psychology is the assumption of a dynamic unconscious as an essential and highly effective part of the psychic life of man. For this reason, man cannot say “No, I’m not going to war!” Early childhood education has shaped his emotional life in such a way that he must follow the authority that calls him to arms. Since these are unconscious emotional parts from childhood, his behaviour is not the result of free will. Therefore, he cannot be condemned.

Unfortunately, there are still few psychologists today who take up people’s cause.

But this is not intentional. The knowledge of the young person who turns to the study of psychology falls on the old ground. He is religious, national, patriotic and believer in the state. He usually stands on the standpoint of preserving this system.

Dear readers, I hope we understand each other and that you can come to terms with the psychological train of thought. Only when the inner feeling has arisen in people that one can always say NO and does not have to follow anyone, only then comes the action.

The dynamics of the unconscious in the love relationship between man and woman.

In this context, the author recalls psychotherapeutic conversations during his training and in his own practice. These conversations were also about the dynamics of the unconscious.

Young men turned to the psychotherapist seeking help because they were ruining love with their girlfriends and wives with their attitude of resentment and rejection. Because of their childhood experiences with parents and siblings, they could not affirm the woman, could not put themselves on a par with her. They wanted to be more valid than women and always have the last word; women, on the other hand, were supposed to be good and obey. These men thought self-critically that they were probably being unreasonable because they were harming themselves.

But they were not unreasonable. They were behaving very reasonably because their actions corresponded to their emotional situation. Due to childhood experiences such as being spoiled, coddled and preferred as male offspring, they could not affirm women and wanted to be more valid than them.

Again, parents in their ignorance made the mistake of favouring sons over female siblings and spoiling them. In doing so, they put them in this situation as adults. But instead of being angry and resentful towards the parents, it is very important to understand and reconcile with them.

Therefore, the young men were advised to muster strength and courage to become aware of the unconscious feelings from childhood with the help of a psychotherapeutic professional so that the love relationship can be saved. Since they could not help their irritated behaviour – it was not free will – they should not blame themselves either. They should, however, become aware that there is something here that they cannot master.

A healthy emotional basis had to develop in these men too before they could put themselves on an equal footing with the woman and all other people.

Demands on education

Since we human beings are the product of our experiences in childhood, as adults we only have at our disposal what we have experienced and learned from those in our relationships in terms of trust, courage and knowledge. Parents and siblings are our world. This is where children get their roadmap, so to speak, their compass for life. By the time they get to kindergarten, they already know, they already have an attitude and an opinion about themselves and other people.

Educational methods of the past created the type of person that could cause the tragedy of history. The authoritarian principle, for centuries regarded as the unquestionably valid basis of educational behaviour, already throttled people’s sense of community in their childhood years and equipped them with that readiness for aggression through which a violent world could remain in a state of violence.

Through the findings of scientific psychology we know today that man is to such an extent the product of his upbringing that we may cherish the hope that through better, that is, psychological methods of education we will be able to train people who will be immune to the entanglements of the mania for power. By renouncing exclusive authority and the use of force in the home and school and adapting to the child’s soul with true understanding, pedagogy will produce a type of person who does not have a “subject mentality” and who will therefore no longer be a docile tool for those in power in our world.

The school also has a great task and responsibility. First and foremost, it has to convey the conviction that experiential knowledge, understanding and reason always and everywhere take precedence. From the very beginning, it should teach young people values that correspond to our present day and that are still valid in adulthood. In addition, it should provide young people with a psychological education, the knowledge of themselves and their concerns.

Furthermore, the school has to strengthen the young people’s own strength and self-confidence and divert attention from their own beloved salvation to the salvation of the general public, to the necessity of helpfulness.

The democratisation of education, understood as respect for the child’s personality and as friendly devotion of the educator to his pupil on the basis of consistent guidance without coercion and violence, is called upon to make one of the most valuable contributions to the building of a humane social order.

The unconscious emotional impulses from childhood, which the adult has forgotten and which often do not allow him to become happy, can be clarified psychotherapeutically by a capable depth psychologist and thus get to know himself. It is always possible to grow out of old negative thoughts and feelings and finally decide whether one wants to go to war – or better not.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and a graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych.). For many decades he was a teacher (headmaster) and trained educational specialists. As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/youth-died-before-they-could-begin-live/5776057

2. http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=28358&css; https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-with-whom-can-we-reorganise-society/5800536

Featured image is from The Unz Review

The Plan. WHO’s Ten Years of Infectious Diseases (2020 to 2030), Leading to World Tyranny

By Peter Koenig, December 26, 2022

Excess mortality is reported from Norway – and all over the western world or Global North. Excesses never heard before. In the ranges of between 15% and 25%. In some countries even higher. Worrisome. No clear causes can be detected.

When Will the Peace of Christmas Come Home?

By Hanna Hanania, December 27, 2022

As mayor of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, I have the privilege of lighting the Christmas tree in Manger Square and attending Midnight Mass at one of the world’s oldest churches, built in the fourth century by the Byzantine Empress Helena. But my most important duty is to help give people faith and encouragement.

UN Experts: US Sanctions Violate Iranians’ Human Rights

By Ben Norton, December 27, 2022

Top United Nations experts wrote a letter to the United States government, emphasizing that its illegal unilateral sanctions on Iran violate the human rights of the Iranian people, calling for them to “be eased or lifted completely.”

‘CIA Is Behind Spate of Explosions in Russia’: US Army Special Ops Veteran Claims Intelligence Agency and NATO Ally Are Conducting Sabotage Missions

By Will Stewart and Elizabeth Haigh, December 27, 2022

The CIA is combining with the spy service of a NATO ally in Europe to conduct covert sabotage operations inside Russia, according to new claims. The clandestine campaign is behind many unexplained explosions and fires that have hit strategic or prominent facilities in recent months, says US expert Jack Murphy, an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran.

Netherlands Prime Minister Apologizes for Atlantic Slave Trade. Dispels the Payment of Reparations

By Abayomi Azikiwe, December 27, 2022

Africans on the continent along with those living in other parts of the globe have joined the movement for reparations as compensation from Europe and North America for the centuries-long Atlantic slave trade.

Christmas: Passing on the Lyrical Gift of Language

By Edward Curtin, December 27, 2022

Things, possessions, life on the installment plan or credit card.  This is the season to buy, to accumulate more folderols, to give things to one’s children and each other, which, we like to believe, will bring joy.  It’s make-believe, of course, an adult lie conjured up out of guilt and fear that our lives, the stories we live, the stories we dream, and those that dream us, are insufficiently meaningful to bring our children and ourselves the joy we say we seek.

Video: The Weaponization of the WHO

By James Corbett and Dr. Meryl Nass, December 26, 2022

Solve the intentionally confusing puzzle about what the WHO’s 2023 plans are regarding the “zero draft” for a new and potentially legally binding pandemic treaty, International Health Regulation amendments, recent Intergovernmental Negotiating Body Meetings and more.

Why Putin’s Winter Offensive Will Prompt US Entry Into the War

By Mike Whitney, December 26, 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky did not fly across the Atlantic so he could deliver a speech to the US Congress. That was not the purpose of his trip. The real objective was to produce a galvanizing event that would create the illusion of broad-based public support for the war.

The Boom of the War. Christmas Gift Exchange Between Zelensky and Biden

By Manlio Dinucci, December 26, 2022

Christmas gift exchange between Zelensky and Biden in White House meeting. The Ukrainian president brought to Biden the newly signed law abolishing the Kiev Administrative District Court, already in the crosshairs of the U.S. State Department, which had sanctioned the Tribunal’s president for “human rights violations.”

COP27: Understanding Climate Change and the UN’s Hidden Agenda Behind “Catastrophic Global Warming”

By David Skripac, December 26, 2022

COP27, like all of the UN’s previous annual climate summits (COP1 through COP26), addressed none of the actual existential issues facing humanity. Instead, its delegates, gathered in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, bombarded the rest of us with endless chatter about how human-induced climate change will spell the end of humanity if trillions of dollars aren’t thrown at this alleged catastrophe.  

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On Monday, the Russian Federation Engels airbase in the Saratov region, nearly 400 miles from Ukraine, was attacked for a second time since the beginning of Russia’s SMO.

“Russia’s Defense Ministry said the incident took place in the early hours of Monday, and three servicemen were killed by debris at the Engels airbase, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers that have been involved in launching strikes on Ukraine in the 10-month-old war,” reports the Associated Press.

There have been a number of attacks inside Russia—in Kursk, the city of Bryansk, the village of Staraya Nelidovka in the Belgorod region, and the military airfields at Dyagilevo in the Ryazan region, in addition to Engels.

A powerful explosion at a gas pipeline in Chuvashiya, Russia. pic.twitter.com/agZDANLBy9

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) December 20, 2022

Irkutsk region, Russia…
BAVOVNA 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

An installation at an oil and gas condensate field in the Irkutsk region caught fire, the fire covered an area of ​​1,000 square meters, said governor Kobzev. pic.twitter.com/2rKfxg8E3x

— MAKS 22🇺🇦 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) December 18, 2022

The attacks on gas infrastructure occurred prior to Russia announcing it would resume deliveries to Azerbaijan via the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

The corporate war propaganda media has attributed the attacks to Ukraine. However,  according to the Daily Express, Jack Murphy, described as a former “US Army Special Operations operative,” said last week

that NATO and US intelligence agencies have been running agents inside Russia, directing them to target critical infrastructure in a bid to create “chaos.” Shopping centres, gas pipelines and fuel depots have all suffered damage across Russia in recent months with Mr Murphy pointing to a CIA-directed campaign of covert “sabotage.”

On his website, Murphy writes the “campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines.”

While no American personnel are involved on the ground in Russia in the execution of these missions, agency paramilitary officers are commanding and controlling the operations, according to two former intelligence officials and a former military official. The paramilitary officers are assigned to the CIA’s Special Activities Center but detailed to the agency’s European Mission Center, said the two former intelligence officials. Using an allied intelligence service to give the CIA an added layer of plausible deniability was an essential factor in U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the strikes, according to a former U.S. special operations official.

There is plenty of evidence the CIA has long been involved in precisely these kinds of sabotage operations. Prior to the establishment of the national security state and the CIA, the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), produced a sabotage manual in 1944.

“Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform,” states the manual in its introduction.

Since that time, the CIA has honed its sabotage techniques. In “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,” Thomas C. Reed, a former U.S. Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, writes the CIA, under its notorious boss, William Casey, was responsible for a natural gas pipeline explosion that crippled the flagging Soviet economy in 1982.

“In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” Reed writes.

The National Security Archive has a large number of documents detailing CIA sabotage operations. From the introduction:

The covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency are one element of the forward edge of power in U.S. foreign policy. But the CIA is not a lone ranger, shooting up saloons on its own account. A senior interagency group within the United States government acts as the high command of the secret war.

As Murphy notes, any “covert action undertaken by U.S. agencies must be authorized by a presidential finding,” thus we can accurately assume President Biden signed off on sabotage operations inside Russia. Moreover, President Obama, well before Russia’s SMO, signed “a finding for covert action against Russia before he left office,” and the finding “included language about sabotage operations, according to a former CIA official.”

In other words, the USG had planned subversion operations inside Russia well before the SMO, basically a continuation of decades of sabotage and covert operations targeting the Soviet Union and, after its fall, the Russian Federation.

Following the USG-orchestrated coup in Kyiv, an “allied spy service” began running sleeper cells in Russia, an “extensive network” that included “front companies that were established as platforms to support such behind-the-lines operations,” many that go back at least 20 years, thus revealing the sabotage operations predate the Russian SMO by at least two decades.

The CIA had formed “stay behind armies,” ostensibly to resist an unlikely Soviet invasion of Europe, and these were involved in terrorist acts designed to frighten populations away from voting for socialist, communist, and other leftist political parties.

The covert branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination, under the direction of Frank Wisner, set up Europe’s stay-behind armies. Dubbed Operation Gladio, the CIA established paramilitaries in France (“Plan Bleu”), Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Germany (led by former SS officer Hans Otto), Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Turkey, all apparently trained by NATO in “unorthodox warfare” to be levied against Russia.

During the Cold War, the CIA worked closely with the neo-Nazis in Ukraine and emigre groups. Project AERODYNAMIC (formerly CARTEL, ANDROGEN, AECARTHAGE, between 1949 and 1970) concentrated on anti-Soviet operations, largely confined to propaganda. This entailed working closely with ultranationalists that have long had one goal in mind—the murder of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

The CIA had been instigating nazism in Ukraine since 1951 to destabilize the ussr. They were training even training nazis at least 2015 onwards. Great video on the why it continued. Document is from project aerodynamic, has been publicly released by the CIA, and is on their site. pic.twitter.com/ai129HnpdH

— Hopium of the masses (@HopiumOf_Masses) December 22, 2022

As early as 1949, the CIA used Ukraine—and Belarus, Poland, and the Baltics—as a base of operations to undermine the Soviet Union. The goal of Operation Red Sox was to provide “unprecedented insight into Moscow’s designs in Eastern Europe—and, if possible, to help crack apart the Soviet empire itself,” according to Politico. In addition, the CIA was “stoking nascent nationalist movements in Ukraine” and across the Balkans.

Elsewhere in Europe, the CIA recruited rightwing extremists to engage in various terrorist attacks, as revealed during the trial of Italian fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo (“New Order”), a far-right cultural and extra-parliamentary political and paramilitary organization. It shared a motto with the Nazi Waffen SS.

The Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo staged terror attacks blamed on leftists. The attacks include the 1969 bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 16 people, and in 1970, the bombing of the Rome-Messina train, killing 6 and wounding 100. These terror attacks were called a “strategy of tension.”

The recent CIA-NATO sabotage operation, Murphy explains, is but one of many such efforts to undermine and take down Putin and the Russian Federation.

The NATO ally’s campaign overseen by the CIA is only one of several covert operations efforts being undertaken by Western nations in Russia, according to two former U.S. special operations officials. Alarmed by Russia’s February invasion, other European intelligence services have activated long-dormant resistance networks [Operation Gladio] in their own countries, who in turn have been running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help, according to a former U.S. military official. In addition, as has been widely reported, Ukrainian intelligence and special operations forces are running their own operations behind Russian lines.

In short, there is a multi-nation concerted effort to attack Russia from within, an effort Russia undoubtedly considers a threat to its national security. Vladimir Putin has said on several occasions Russia will respond to existential threats with tactical nuclear weapons.

Putin and his generals will further escalate in Ukraine as the CIA and its saboteurs target civilian and military targets deep inside Russia. “President Putin is actually attempting to retain some semblance of stability in the increasingly destabilized world that’s been thrown into chaos by America’s apocalyptic plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony,” writes Andrew Korybko for the Oriental Review.

Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was commenced as a last resort to uphold the integrity of its national security red lines in that country in particular and in the region more broadly that were being crossed by the US-led West in pursuit of its grand strategic plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony.

That plot, imperative for the USG and its so-called partners, will pull out all the stops in an effort to destroy Russia and China, two major competitors working to establish a multipolar world free of the coercive and often deadly politics of the neoliberal order and its enforcers, the USG national security state, the CIA, the Pentagon, and domestically with the FBI, DHS, and additional “partners,” including Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths excommunicating heretics and megaphoning the state’s forever war narrative.

The war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine—masterminded by the USG following its orchestrated coup against a democratically elected and Russian-friendly government in 2014—will continue until, like Afghanistan, stalemate and defeat present reality as stubbornly unavoidable and the decision is made to retreat (while calling it something else), leaving behind billions of dollars worth of military equipment, and forsaking the lives of abandoned collaborators.

For the indeterminate future, the CIA will attempt to raise an underground army of neo-Nazis and likeminded to fight a low-intensity guerrilla war in Russian “annexed” (by popular vote) Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, and soon Mariupol, Zaporizhia, Kryvyi Rih, and Odesa (the latter four also overwhelmingly voted to be “annexed” by Russia).

This will be the next phase of the war as it dawns on the panhandler Zelenskyy and his USG debt-straddled patron that defeating Russia on its own border is impossible short of lobbing a few thermonukes in the direction of Moscow.

Putin did not decide to use nuclear weapons when the war propaganda media declared triumphantly (and falsely) that he was painted into a corner. As for the USG, if and when it is painted into a corner as the world turns multipolar in rejection of poverty-inducing neoliberalism, there is no guarantee it will not lash out with nukes and begin the process of ending life on the planet.

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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.

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***

An increase in battery fires linked to electric bicycles has caught the attention of municipal and federal officials, who point to public education rather than bans as the best way to keep people safe.

As of late December, there were 206 e-bike fires in New York City in 2022, more than double the number of fires that occurred the year prior, according to a New York Fire Department spokesperson. Those e-bike fires are blamed for 142 injuries in 2022, almost 80% more than in 2021, and six deaths. In 2020, there were just 44 e-bike fires, which were associated with 23 injuries and no deaths, the department said.

The news organization The City reported that New York ZIP codes that are considered low-income areas experienced the highest proportion of e-bike fires, and most of the fires occurred at multiunit residential properties, 31 of which were public housing apartments. The FDNY spokesperson confirmed the accuracy of the reporting.

National Fire Protection Association spokesman Brian O’Connor said other U.S. cities do not appear to track this issue. There have been news reports of e-bike fires in London and Secunderabad, India, where eight people were killed in a September fire at an electric scooter warehouse.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has ordered three e-bike recalls in 2022 due to battery issues, up from one in 2021. The largest recall, of 21,000 e-bikes, was ordered against the manufacturer Ancheer, which sold its bikes through Sears, Walmart and Amazon.

On Tuesday, the CPSC sent a letter to 2,000 manufacturers and importers of micromobility devices, including e-bikes, e-scooters and self-balancing scooters (also called hoverboards), advising them that failing to follow UL safety standards could expose them to enforcement action.

A September 2022 CSPC staff report found that between 2017 and 2021, there were 207 deaths related to micromobility vehicles, 134 of them due to fires. Of the deaths attributed to micromobility product fires, 118 were related to hoverboards, 12 were related to e-scooters — including one dockless rental unit – and four to e-bikes.

The New York City Housing Authority, which regulates public housing, proposed a ban on indoor e-bike storage in public housing in June 2022 but backed off that proposal in October after public outcry. Still, there are reports that private buildings are instituting bans of their own on e-bikes, e-scooters and other micromobility vehicles.

Li-ion batteries are “pretty unique fire hazards,” said NFPA’s O’Connor. “They produce their own heat [and] oxygen, and they produce their own fuel, which is the gas that’s a byproduct of the chemical reaction that happens when they start to fail.” The lithium burns hot and fast and can set fire to adjoining cells in the battery in a cascade called “thermal runaway.” While a watch may have one Li-ion cell, he pointed out, an e-bike may have 200.

The primary problem, fire industry experts and micromobility advocates say, lies with the low quality of cheap batteries and the desire of low-income owners to extend their utility beyond the bounds of safety.

“What you’ve seen in New York [is that] you’re primarily dealing with aftermarket batteries and aftermarket issues with vehicles that might have been crafted on their own via conversion kits,” said James Gross, co-founder of Micromobility Industries, a California-based advocacy group that tracks the industry. “You can do [an aftermarket conversion] very easily with a bike. Is that the right thing to do? Probably not. But is that the most affordable way to do it? Probably yes.”

“I think the bikes are just more prone to having people tinker with them a little bit,” said O’Connor. Secondhand batteries and chargers are readily available. Also, physical damage from collisions or water are not always apparent. “Keeping [a Li-ion battery] in a room that gets too hot, gets too cold, both can trigger [a fire]. Charging it too quickly, discharging it too quickly, having the wrong components, mismatching components.”

Because Gross sees the problem as economic — low-income purchasers who use inexpensive e-bikes to help make their living — he has an economic solution. “I think the very easy solution is subsidizing riders who could maybe use some help with the cost of the vehicle. We continue to pass incredible legislation to incentivize electric car purchases. Why do we continue to prop up a lot of the automakers? I think that’s where the conversation should go.”

O’Connor says teaching the public to understand when a battery is failing and what to do before it bursts into flame would save property and lives.

FDNY has published a bulletin that landlords are required to distribute, advising residents of the dangers of Li-ion batteries, how to store and treat them and what to do when they catch fire. The CSPC also gives advice that aligns with FDNY’s.

”As much as we want everyone to use the best batteries they can get, [listed batteries] are more expensive. So I think educating people [that such batteries are]  worth the investment in your safety … [it’s]  something that they would be able to consider.”

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***

Before the COVID-19 era, for ages in medicine it has been said:  “Syphilis is often referred to as “the great masquerader,” as it may present with a wide array of clinical symptoms and may mimic a variety of other diseases making diagnosis challenging.”  There is no doubt that COVID-19 vaccine injury syndromes will far eclipse syphilis, sarcoidosis, amyloidosis, or any other systemic disorder and will assume the throne of “the great masquerader”.  

In a recent issue of Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports, Chatterjee and Chakravarty, report on the wide range of central nervous system and peripheral nervous system syndromes that occur after COVID-19 vaccination.[i] 

Chatterjee A, Chakravarty A. Neurological Complications Following COVID-19 Vaccination. Curr Neurol Neurosci Rep. 2022 Nov 29:1–14. doi: 10.1007/s11910-022-01247-x. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36445631; PMCID: PMC9707152.

Because the vaccines contain lipid nanoparticles loaded with genetic material that code for the damaging Spike protein, each patient faces a Russian Roulette of whether or not the nervous system will be hemodynamically showered with the damaging vaccine particles.

As an example of how distorted authors and editors have become over papers on COVID-19 vaccination, in the abstract of the authors state that COVID-19 vaccination remains the ”only weapon” we have against the illness.  Complete ignorance of the entire field of early treatment of SARS-CoV-2 will be forever to their chagrin upon later reflection.

More worrisome, the authors state that prior neurologic disease is not a reason to withhold vaccination.   I can tell you as senior and experienced academic physician, that indeed the authors and the editors who accepted this paper are demonstrating poor medical judgement.  Good physicians would never have a patient with neurologic disease, for example Guillain-Barre Syndrome or multiple sclerosis, and then administer a novel genetic biological product known to cause further neurologic damage and risk worsened disability and death.

Authors and historians will revisit these words and well up remorse and sadness for patients who have suffered under this profound lapse of medical judgement.   If you have a neurologic disorder shown in the figure that is new or worsened after COVID-19 vaccination, pay a visit to your doctor, and point it out.   Tell them it wasn’t worth it.  That for you the risks of the vaccine did not outweigh the failed theoretical benefits for an easily treatable upper respiratory illness.

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Note

[i] Chatterjee A, Chakravarty A. Neurological Complications Following COVID-19 Vaccination. Curr Neurol Neurosci Rep. 2022 Nov 29:1–14. doi: 10.1007/s11910-022-01247-x. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36445631; PMCID: PMC9707152.

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Alistair Cooke, a British-born writer who became a BBC film critic early in his career who worked mainly in the United States as a journalist, television personality, radio broadcaster had expressed his honest point of view on Hollywood’s film industry when he said that

“I believe that Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.”

Since World War II, Hollywood has been one of the main instruments of propaganda for globalist agendas. It began with US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt who established the US Office of War Information (OWI) from June 1942 until September 1945 whose job was to regulate newspapers, radio broadcasts, Hollywood films and all other forms of media in order to propagandize the public in an effort to gain support for America’s involvement in the war.

The OWI launched a global propaganda campaign that oversaw revisions in collaboration with Hollywood producers, and at times, even rejected film scripts that portrayed the US as a negative force on the world stage.  The OWI’s main job was to reject any film that had anti-war material.

There was also the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) which was a division under the OWI that worked with Hollywood executives to decide which movies could benefit the war effort, for example, it authorized several films that had anti-Japanese propaganda, sort of like todays anti-Russia propaganda you find in many Hollywood films. However, over the last 20 years or so, Hollywood propaganda has even become even worse with the help of its Hollywood celebrities who have become mouthpieces for globalist agendas, so let’s call them for what they really are, ‘Useful Idiots.’

It’s amazing that for the last couple of decades many Hollywood celebrities have become self-described experts and spokespeople for US wars, Big Pharma, climate change and other globalist agendas.

Hollywood celebrities act and sing for a living, wear expensive name-brand clothing, and in some cases exploit their children to be part of the new woke culture.

The so-called “Hollywood activists” such as George Clooney, U2 lead singer Bono, and the rest of them are phony as they can be.

However, in all fairness, there are a handful of celebrities who do not, in any way fall into that category including Mel Gibson who is outspoken critic in Hollywood, comedian and actor George Carlin (R.I.P.), Marlon Brando, John Lennon (R.I.P.) and a handful of others.

When it comes to Israeli occupation and genocide against the Palestinians, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, singer-songwriter and composer Roger Waters, Natalie Portman, and actress Vanessa Redgrave come to mind. In 1978, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for best supporting actress in the film ‘Julia’ gave an acceptance speech at the 50^th Academy Awards which she denounced Israel’s war against the Palestinians.  Redgrave said that “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world.”  The British actress had claimed in the past that far-right Jewish Defense League targeted her for producing the 1977 documentary ‘The Palestinian’. 

Most Hollywood celebrities who toe the line will do and say anything to remain relevant in the film and television industries, so they also follow the mainstream media narratives or listen to their Hollywood bosses, or maybe they are just dumbed-down individuals, just ask outspoken actor and comedian Ricky Gervais who had an iconic opening monologue in the Golden Globe awards ceremony in 2020 that will be remembered for the ages:

So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f**k off, OK? It’s already three hours long. Right, let’s do the first award

Sean Penn and Ben Stiller:  War against Russia

Although talented, two of the most “idiotic” actors in Hollywood when it comes to the war in Ukraine is Sean Penn and Ben Stiller.  Last month, Sean Penn recently visited and lent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky his Oscar while Zelensky awarded Penn the Order of Merit honor because he is “doing everything to help us gather international support”according to Reuters.

The article ‘Sean Penn visits Ukraine’s Zelensky, loans him an Oscar’ stated that “Hollywood actor and director Sean Penn, sanctioned by Russia for criticizing its war in Ukraine, loaned his Oscar statuette to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday.” 

The other actor is Ben Stiller who played a model in Zoolander and many other films called Zelensky his hero.  According to NBC News ‘Ben Stiller meets with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, tells Ukrainian leader ‘You’re my hero’ said that

“The comedy star praised the Ukrainian president — himself a former comedian and actor — as a hero during the meeting, telling him: “You’re amazing” and that “It’s a great honor for me,” Stiller, who was appointed a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in July 2018, said in video capturing the meeting. “It’s really wonderful, you’re my hero. You’re amazing.”  So Stiller jumps on the Zelensky bandwagon just like most of his Hollywood friends to help the Western narrative that the war in Ukraine is about “freedom and democracy.”

But I want to go back to Sean Penn and his incredible hypocrisy when it comes to US wars and regime change.  In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave US forces and NATO the greenlight to remove Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi from power which destroyed Libya in the process.  Here is the interview with Sean Penn on CNN on his claim that it was all Gaddafi’s fault:

Obviously, the war on Libya was run by the Democratic Party so for Penn it was justified.  Now here is Sean Penn questioning the Bush Administration on WMDs in Iraq on December 15th, 2002.  The war on Iraq was basically a Republican Party affair under the Bush neocons (click image below to watch the video):

Sean Penn’s hypocrisy is clearly staggering. He is a total propagandist for the US war machine.  Although Sean Penn has supported Venezuela’s revolution and other causes such as the Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 where he founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization which operated a 55,000 person tent camp for victims of the earthquake, he is still a mouthpiece for the Democratic party and any regime change operation they deem necessary, so it is fair to say that both, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are useful idiots.

Celebrities who Proudly Received their Covid-19 Vaccines

I am not going to get into the global lockdown and the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine and the ridiculous enforcement of wearing facemasks or social distancing rules, so here are what several celebrities have posted on Instagram and twitter after they received their shots :

Lady Gaga:

“Double vaxed + boosted…don’t 4get to still wear a mask this sh*ts contagious ,

America Ferrara:

“Boosted for the holidays! Thankful for the miracle of science and medicine allowing me to be with my loved ones safely this year

Amber Heard:

 “Did someone say ‘vaccine queen’?! ”

Sean Penn (No Surprise here!):

“I’m a lucky man. Lucky to work alongside the ⁦@LAFD & our great frontline @CoreResponse staff, our partners at Carbon Health, USC, & Curative Lab,” he tweeted. “We test & vaccinate thousands per day. We need your support to get more people lucky. Text CORE to 707070 to donate.”

*Note: Sean Penn was interviewed by Yahoo Entertainment and said that “My deep belief personally, is that these [vaccines are] no different than having everybody being able to drive 100 miles an hour in a car” he continued “This is one of those things that should be mandatory. That we all get with the exception — the very few exceptions — for those people who, for whatever medical condition, might offset it, but I do think that vaccines need to be mandatory, and I do think that business — all businesses, the movie business, all businesses — need to take the lead and to be not so timid in dealing with their collective bargaining agreement partners.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

“All right, I just got my vaccine, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, come with me if you want to live.”

Despite all the evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and that wearing a facemask or social distancing does not work which brings me to the conclusion that these Hollywood celebrities are either brainwashed by the mainstream media, or they are just following the lies of Anthony Fauci who was elevated to celebrity status during the Covid-19 “pandemic”.

These people are not role models, they are just following what the medical establishment has prescribed to the public.  They are propagandizing the public to take Covid-19 killer shots which demonstrates that no one should listen to these people. Once you inject the MRNA technology into your body, its forever, its permanent and you cannot detox to get rid of it.  So in other words, don’t listen to these fools.

The Truth about Hollywood

There is no doubt that Hollywood has produced good films in the past but the Hollywood of today should focus on producing better movies and TV shows because most of their films are made only for propaganda purposes. In fact, many films today have no originality, better yet, there should be an alternative Hollywood that produces films without any form of propaganda that are worth watching.

They can produce films that tells us real stories from around the world, like stories that come out of the Palestinian struggle or what is happening in certain parts of Africa as in the Hollywood movie ‘Blood Diamond’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou that tells the story about the Diamond industry and its effects on the African people. Instead they produce propaganda films based on the US Military fighting for democracy or numerous films based on the Jewish Holocaust. When was the last time you saw a film based on the genocide of a Native American tribe on the North American continent?

However, Hollywood is pretty good at producing movies that offend different nationalities and cultures.  As we all know who really runs Hollywood, one documentary that shows some of the most offensive films based on the Muslim world is called

‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’ by Dr. Jack Shaheen.

Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are propagandists who support the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 vaccines and other globalist agendas including the concept of eating bugs as recommended by the World Economic Forum.  The bottom line is that Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are a bunch of clowns that should not be taken seriously, so why do people around the world idolize these people in the first place is beyond me.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Look, the real problem is the media. We no longer have media organizations willing to actually report the truth on any of these political issues or ever do any serious investigation. Gates held a secret gathering to sell his agenda to reduce the world’s population. The Guardian reported that they are known as the “Good Club” which seems to be the same marketing ploy used for ensuring your death which they call life insurance. Fire, theft, and accident insurance are called by their proper name.

They could never sell “Death insurance” so they inverted the name by calling it life insurance and then everyone was willing to buy it. They have done the same thing with ABORTION. They flipped it from the extermination of a child arguing it has no human right until it is born, and they championed it as a Woman’s Right to decide her own body. Justice Ginsberg made it clear that it was NEVER about woman’s rights, it was all about reducing the population of minorities that Gates’ father championed Planned Parenthood and stuck his clinics in minority areas.

Here, they market themselves as the “Good Club” which can only mean one thing – this is the evil meeting that is more akin to a war room. The Guardian wrote:

The names of some of the members are familiar figures: Bill Gates, George
Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller and Ted Turner. But
there are others, too, like business giants Eli and Edythe Broad, who are
equally wealthy but less well known. All told, its members are worth $125bn.
The meeting – called by Gates, Buffett and Rockefeller – was held in
response to the global economic downturn and the numerous health and
environmental crises that are plaguing the globe. It was, in some ways, a
summit to save the world.

It was at this meeting that Gates sought to get others to join him and his real goal of reducing the population using the 2007-2009 financial crisis as an excuse to get together despite the fact it was caused by overleveraged mortgages. Instead, Gates cleverly steered the meeting to his real objective global health issues such he blended with overpopulation and disease.

I find it unimaginable how you can be so obsessed with overpopulation and then want to create vaccines to increase the population. Worst still, not a single mainstream media has the guts to ever be a real media organization anymore.

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***

Top United Nations experts wrote a letter to the United States government, emphasizing that its illegal unilateral sanctions on Iran violate the human rights of the Iranian people, calling for them to “be eased or lifted completely.”

Top United Nations experts have criticized US government sanctions for violating the human rights of Iranians.

They made it clear that the unilateral coercive measures that the United States has imposed on Iran violate international law.

A group of UN special rapporteurs stressed that these sanctions have a “negative impact” on “the enjoyment of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in the Islamic Republic of Iran and on the right to health and the right to life.”

Violating Iranians’ right to life is a roundabout diplomatic way of saying that US sanctions are killing them.

The UN experts sent a formal letter to the United States condemning its sanctions and requesting that it investigate and remove them.

The special rapporteurs expressed their “serious concerns about the U.S. sanctions as a significant contributing factor in Iran’s environmental degradation, which negatively affects Iranian people’s rights to a healthy and sustainable environment, to health, to life, and to an adequate standard of living.”

They added that “U.S. sanctions impede the enjoyment of the right to education” in Iran.

Washington constantly accuses Tehran of violating its people’s rights. The US government also publicly claims to support the struggle against climate change and pollution, and on paper it recognizes that people have the right to a clean environment.

But Washington’s “sanctions against Iran contradict what seems to be a clear US position on this matter,” the UN experts said.

“It is time for sanctions that impede Iran’s ability to improve the environment and reduce the ill effects on health and life, to be eased or lifted completely so that Iranians can access their right to a clean environment, the right to health and to life, and other rights associated with favourable environmental conditions,” they insisted.

#US sanctions contribute to environmental harm and prevent all people in #Iran, including migrants and Afghan refugees, from fully enjoying their rights to health and life and a clean environment – UN experts
👉 https://t.co/OtChnuqRWW pic.twitter.com/WPSsSAdgGv

— UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) December 20, 2022

The UN special rapporteurs noted:

Since 1979, the United States of America has imposed a broad and complex network of stringent financial, economic, and trade sanctions against Iran, including a comprehensive trade ban, significant measures to isolate Iran from the international financial and commercial system, as well as secondary sanctions against non-U.S. parties that engage in dealings with Iran.

Some (but not all) of these sanctions were removed or eased in 2015, when US President Barack Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement with Iran that was also joined by the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, France, China, and Russia), Germany, and the European Union.

In 2018, US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, in violation of a UN Security Council resolution, and subsequently imposed more sanctions on Iran, in clear contravention of international law.

The UN experts noted that the Trump administration not only re-imposed “sanctions that had been lifted or eased under the JCPOA”; it also “introduced additional measures. These sanctions targeted Iran’s energy, shipbuilding, shipping and financial sectors, and included the listing of more than 700 individuals, entities, aircraft and vessels.”

Unilateral sanctions violate a broad scope of human rights including the right to favorable environment negatively affecting right to health and right to life of all people in the country https://t.co/WJK4toNXZy

— Alena Douhan (@AlenaDouhan) December 20, 2022

US threats of secondary sanctions on foreign countries and firms that do business with Iran, as well as overcompliance, make the unilateral coercive measures even more punishing, the UN special rapporteurs wrote:

The full impact of the U.S. sanctions in Iran is magnified by considerable overcompliance on a global scale resulting from complex, time-consuming and/or costly compliance procedures; extraterritorial enforcement and fears of penalties for inadvertent breaches; and sanctions-related obstacles to financial transactions for goods and services that the sanctions do not prohibit.

The primary author of this letter, the top UN expert on sanctions, Alena Douhan, has previously released reports detailing the catastrophic impact that illegal US sanctions have had on civilians in Venezuela and Syria.

She said these “outrageous” US sanctions are “suffocating” millions of civilians and “may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The UN's top expert said “outrageous” Western sanctions on Syria are “suffocating” millions of civilians, and “may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The US-EU-Israel-Gulf proxy war on Syria made its economy shrink by 90%.

90% of Syrians live in poverty https://t.co/XtHCuCHhYP

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 12, 2022

The letter concerning US sanctions on Iran was signed by the following UN human rights experts:

• Alena Douhan, special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights
• Richard Bennett, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan
• Ian Fry, special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change,
• Tlaleng Mofokeng, special rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health
• Livingstone Sewanyana, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
• Obiora C. Okafor, independent expert on human rights and international solidarity
• Fernand de Varennes, special rapporteur on minority issues

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***

One has to put some context around the appearance of Saint Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday evening before the U.S. Congress. Those with a modicum of accurate background information could smell a rat behind all the hugs, kisses, and stormy applause. The real record renders the smell a stench. Alas, neither the accurate record nor the stench can find its way into the corporate media.

Here’s the thing – in the words of humorist Will Rogers: “The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so; that’s the problem.”

A Help Desk

One can expect serious writers like Joe Lauria of Consortium News to post some thoughts apres-St. Zelensky-tour-de-force, in due course. But everyone is entitled to some time off for Christmas and something needs to be said – like now.

Happily, much has already been written and spoken that exposes the dominant (propaganda) narrative for what it is – drivel. For example, readers can find much helpful sustenance in an extremely detailed piece Lauria wrote on July 2, 2022 about what actually happened in Ukraine over the past several years. See this.

Joe’s piece came in response to spurious charges by a Orwellian ‘rating’ group, led by the usual suspects, called “NewsGuard”. Consider Lauria’s piece required reading; you may find it on the final exam.

For those who prefer video, I gave a kind of tutorial on July 7, 2022, with emphasis on how Russia views the stakes in Ukraine: “Ukraine: A Taste of The Truth”.

I have also done several other videos on the general subject. (See: Youtube or raymcgovern.com.)

Not-So-Much Journalists

Reading the two articles below confirms the truth of Will Rogers’s adage – in present circumstances a dangerous one – that THE problem is “what people know that ain’t so”. You may wish to tell your friends to read/watch Lauria and me (above), as a sort of inoculation against the rubbish below:

Volodymyr Zelensky Is the Leader of the Free World
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News, December 22, 2022

When my stomach finally settled after reading this one, I tweeted:

Will editor Marc Ash’s panegyric for Zelensky https://t.co/GWwvKsCAyr raise enough $ to save “Reader Supported News”? Depends on naivete of folks with deep pockets. They are now told "Zelensky Is the Leader of the Free World; there can be no more compelling or effective leader"

— Ray McGovern (@raymcgovern) December 22, 2022

Zelensky’s message: Ukraine is fighting for good over evil
By Andrew E. Kramer, December 21, 2022

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Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seen earlier this year. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service)

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***

Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared before a joint session of Congress to plead for more billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia. 

One particular sentence in Zelensky’s address caught my attention: “We Ukrainians will also go through our war of independence and freedom with dignity and success.” The sentence prompted an enormous applause from the members of Congress.

There is one big problem with Zelensky’s statement, however. The war between Ukraine and Russia has nothing to do with freedom. Instead, it has everything to do with NATO, the old Cold War dinosaur that ginned up the crisis that led to this highly deadly and destructive war.

Operating through NATO, the Pentagon was insistent on incorporating Ukraine into NATO. Zelensky too wanted Ukraine to join NATO. For at least the last 25 years, Russia has made it clear that Ukraine’s joining NATO was a “red line” for Russia. The last thing Russia wanted was Pentagon bases and nuclear missiles installed on Russia’s border, just as the last thing that the Pentagon would want is Russian bases and nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba. Russia consistently made it clear that if Ukraine crossed that “red line,” Russia would invade Ukraine to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

Thus, everyone knew what the stakes were if the Pentagon, NATO, and Ukraine persisted in making Ukraine a member of NATO. They knew that if they persisted, Russia would end up invading Ukraine. 

Knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally ignoring and disregarding Russia’s “red line,” the Pentagon, NATO, and Ukraine continued down the road toward making Ukraine a member of NATO, knowing full-well that that would result in a Russian invasion of Ukraine to prevent that from happening.

Thus, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky was faced with a fateful choice. If he decided that Ukraine would not join NATO, there would be no Russian invasion of Ukraine. If he decided that Ukraine would join NATO, there would be a Russian invasion of Ukraine, one that was certain to result in massive death and destruction on both sides. 

Zelensky chose the second option. In making that choice, he was saying that the deaths and suffering of tens of thousands of his citizens and the destruction of his country were worth Ukraine’s joining NATO. That’s quite a choice. Another president might have decided the massive death and destruction that would be unleashed in such a war would not be worth joining NATO. 

In any event, the war between Russia and Ukraine is not about freedom, as Zelensky said to Congress. It’s about Zelensky’s wish to have Ukraine join NATO.

And let’s keep in mind that NATO was part of the old Cold War racket that was used to justify the conversion of the U.S. government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which is a type of governmental structure that wields totalitarian-like powers. When the Cold War racket suddenly came to an end, the old Cold War dinosaur NATO should have gone out of existence, just as the Warsaw Pact did.

During the entire Cold War racket, the fear that the Russians and other communists were coming to get us was used to justify ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its ever-growing army of voracious “defense” contractors who loved feeding at the public trough. The Pentagon and its “defense” contractors were clearly not ready to let go of their Cold War cash cow. 

That’s what NATO’s absorption of former members of the Warsaw Pact was all about. By installing U.S. military forces and missiles ever closer to Russia’s border, the Pentagon’s aim was to incite a Russian reaction, which would then bring back the lucrative Cold War racket. Thus, the Pentagon knew exactly what it was doing when it persisted in absorbing Ukraine into NATO. And it clearly got what it was aiming for — a renewal of its Cold War racket and ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess.

One of the unanswered questions is how much of the $100 billion in U.S. taxpayer money that U.S. officials have given to the Ukrainian government has been used to line the pockets of Ukrainian officials. After all, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. There is no reason to believe that the Ukraine-Russia war has suddenly converted Ukrainian officials into honest and honorable government officials. 

Finally, there is something else to consider that is of critical importance. The federal government’s debt now exceeds $31 trillion. U.S. officials, led by President Biden, continue spending money like there was no tomorrow. That includes almost a trillion dollars being given to the Pentagon to keep us “safe” from the threats that it itself induces. Ever-increasing federal spending, debt, taxation, and monetary destruction constitutes a grave threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people. In pleading with Congress to give the Ukrainian government even more billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money, it’s too bad that President Zelensky gives short shrift to the continued destruction of our own freedom and well-being here at home.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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***

The CIA is combining with the spy service of a NATO ally in Europe to conduct covert sabotage operations inside Russia, according to new claims.

The clandestine campaign is behind many unexplained explosions and fires that have hit strategic or prominent facilities in recent months, says US expert Jack Murphy, an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran.

Separately other European intelligence services have allegedly been ‘running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help’, as has Ukraine.

His claims follow as a new fire struck a shopping mall in Krasnodar region, in southern Russia, the latest in dozens of such incidents. It comes as Putin issued another chilling warning to the West on Christmas day.

A gas pipeline explodes in the republic of Chuvashia, some 360 miles east of Moscow

In Ukraine today, air raid sirens have been going off around the country as some decide to move their Christmas day to avoid celebrating on the same day as Russia.

Oil and gas facilities, railways, fuel depots, power plants and shopping malls have been hit across Russia by mysterious explosions, with rumours of sabotage.

‘The campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines,’ said Murphy in a post.

‘The campaign is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.’

He cited anonymous US sources including three former intelligence and two military officials, and a sixth source ‘who has been briefed on the campaign’.

The CIA has denied the allegations.

‘The former officials declined to identify specific targets for the CIA-directed campaign, but railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants in Russia have all been damaged in unexplained incidents since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February,’ wrote Murphy on his website.

No US officials were involved on the ground, he said, but the strikes had used an ‘allied intelligence service’ and were approved by US president Joe Biden, he asserted.

‘While command and control over the sabotage program resides with the CIA for legal reasons, the NATO ally has a strong say in which operations go forward since it is their people taking the risks.’

Click here to read the full article.

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Featured image: Thick black smoke shoots into the sky at a shopping mall housing the first Russian IKEA store. Moscow, December 9

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***

🚨🚨 WHO Director General – ‘So if its going to be used its better to focus on those groups who have risk of severe disease rather than as we see some countries are using to give boosters to kill children’

➡️ If he intentionally meant to say that is quite some statement 🤔 pic.twitter.com/99gzYYo3Sn

— Jamie Jenkins (@statsjamie) December 22, 2021

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First published on November 29, 2022

***

The well-established link between the COVID-19 mRNA shots and blood clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is reason enough to stop the vaccine program, argues a London oncologist.

And further, the average age of death from COVID-19 in the United Kingdom is 82, which is higher than the age for all other causes, 81.

But there is another reason enough to halt the shots, wrote Dr. Angus Dalgleish, professor of Oncology at St. George’s University of London, in a letter to the British Medical Journal.

“As a practising oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster, usually so they can travel,” he wrote to the BMJ’s editor in chief, Dr. Kamran Abbasi.

“Even within my own personal contacts I am seeing B cell-based disease after the boosters,” he wrote. “They describe being distinctly unwell a few days to weeks after the booster – one developing leukaemia, two work colleagues Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an old friend who has felt like he has had Long Covid since receiving his booster and who, after getting severe bone pain, has been diagnosed as having multiple metastases from a rare B cell disorder.”

Dalgleish said he has enough experience in the field “to know that these are not the coincidental anecdotes that many suggest, especially as the same pattern is being seen in Germany, Australia and the USA.”

He said his observations fit the pattern observed around the world of innate immune suppression for several weeks after mRNA vaccination.

“All these patients to date have melanoma or B cell based cancers, which are very susceptible to immune control – and that is before the reports of suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments.”

Dalgleish concluded:

“This must be aired and debated immediately.”

A recent study found a sharp rise in cancer in people under 50.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital cited increases worldwide in cancer of the breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver and pancreas.

One of the nation’s most prolific pathologists, Dr. Ryan Cole, has reported a significant rise in cancer cases in his Boise, Idaho, lab.

He has received data from oncologists indicating the mRNA vaccines disrupt the immune system. He said in an interview that physicians report “seeing the weirdest cancers, and cancers that we have been able to keep in check and treat, taking off like wildfire – going stage 2, stage 3, stage 4, just like that.”

Meanwhile, a professor at MIT has coauthored a paper that found a 25% increase in heart attack emergency calls among young Israelis after the country’s mRNA vaccine rollout.

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Featured image: Navy Seaman Milan Torres prepares a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to be administered to a patient at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, Dec. 14, 2020. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)

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First published on November 29, 2022

***

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, last year at the Atlantic Council, called people who spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation “criminals,” in his calls for censorship of misinformation online.

However, this year, Dr. Bourla is himself found responsible by the UK’s pharmaceutical regulator of making “misleading” statements about vaccination of children.

Last December, in an interview with the BBC, Dr. Bourla said that “there is no doubt in my mind that the benefits, completely, are in favor of” vaccinating children between the ages of five and 11.

He continued to say that “Covid in schools is thriving.”

“This is disturbing, significantly, the educational system and there are kids that will have severe symptoms.”

The interview was conducted before the vaccine was approved for children between the ages of five and 11 in the UK.

After the interview was published, parent campaign group UsForThem filed a complaint with the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA). The complaint accused Dr. Bourla of making “disgracefully misleading” comments about vaccinating children and that the comments were “extremely promotional in nature,” and that he violated several clauses of the code of practice by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI).

“There is simply no evidence that healthy schoolchildren in the UK are at significant risk from the SARS COV-2 virus and to imply that they are is disgracefully misleading,” the complaint said.

PMCPA convened a code of practice panel that found that Dr. Bourla had indeed violated the code of practice in a few ways, including failure to present information to the public in a factual and balanced manner, misleading the public, and making claims that cannot be substantiated.

The Telegraph reported Pfizer appealed against the findings of the panel and strongly disagreed with UsForThem’s claims that the CEO violated the code of practice. The company argued that Dr. Bourla’s remarks were based on “up-to-date scientific evidence” and they could be proven through “publicly available independent benefit-risk assessments.”

An appeal board upheld that Dr. Bourla misled the public, made claims that were unbalanced, and made unsubstantiated claims.

However, it ruled against claims that Pfizer discredited the industry, encouraged reckless use of a treatment, and did not maintain high standards.

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It is still estimated that over 75% of Conservative MPs, including those in government, are  registered members of the CFI lobby group that supports a foreign, non-NATO power in the Middle East that is a close ally of Russia – Putin and Netanyahu being close political associates.  According to the Israeli Statistics Bureau, 15% of the population of Israel are native Russian speakers. That’s slightly more than 1 million.   Up to one third of all Israeli Jews (2.5 million) have some roots from the former Soviet Union.

The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is a British parliamentary lobby affiliated to the Conservative Party, which is dedicated to strengthening military and political ties between the British Conservative Party and the extremist Right-wing Israeli Likud party.

In 1995 Conservative politician Robert Rhodes James called it “the largest organisation in Western Europe dedicated to the cause of the people of Israel”.

By 2009, according to the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches – Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, around 80% of Conservative MPs were members of the CFI.  In 2013, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, called CFI “by far Britain’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group.”

During the past 12 years of Conservative government, the amount of bilateral trade with the state of Israel has multiplied dramatically and includes substantial contracts for both classified military, defence and espionage equipment notwithstanding that Israel is not a member of NATO and should not be involved in Britain’s national security or defence requirements.  Nevertheless, the UK has signed a trade and partnership agreement with Israel, which is now  in effect.

This trade and partnership agreement includes provisions on:

trade in goods – including provisions on preferential tariffs, tariff rate quotas and rules of origin, intellectual property and government procurement.  Tariff rates for bilateral trade in goods between the UK and Israel continue to apply as set out in the agreement. However, in some cases, the non-preferential applied rates may, in fact, be lower because of changes in the UK’s Most Favoured Nation tariff schedule

For the UK Conservative government to have become so closely interconnected with an alleged corrupt Prime Minister of a non-NATO, foreign power in the Middle East that is an extremist, hard-Right, undeclared nuclear weapon state, by allowing it to have become a major defence supplier to the UK, compromises British national security to an extent that far outweighs that of China.  It is an outrage that the security of the state, the British state, has apparently been allowed to have become so compromised when the primary duty of any government is the security of the nation.

It should be noted that Israel is one of the very few countries in the world that is neither a ratified party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the UN nor of the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

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Hans Stehling (a pen name) is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Over the last few decades the demand to pay reparations for African enslavement has drawn support from around the world.

Africans on the continent along with those living in other parts of the globe have joined the movement for reparations as compensation from Europe and North America for the centuries-long Atlantic slave trade.

The initial move in any reparations process would be a formal apology from the nations, governments and corporations involved. Many nations within Western Europe and later the United States and Canada profited immensely from the enslavement of African people.

In fact, scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Vincent B. Thompson and many others have made the argument that without the exploitation and oppression of African people, the feudal and capitalist economies of Western Europe and North America would have never gained dominance within the world economic system after the 15th century. Such an historical fact means that the current international bourgeoisie owes its global status to the labor power, waterways and natural resources of the African continent and would therefore be liable for incalculable amounts of monetary damages extending back nearly six centuries.

As a result of the institutional racism which grew out of the slave and colonial systems, Africans and their descendants still suffer today from national oppression, discrimination based on color and economic exploitation which has its origins in the antebellum period and the rise of imperialism. In the U.S., segregation was legal up until the mid-1960s when the Civil Act of 1964 was passed by both chambers of the Congress. The following year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law even though well into the 21st century, the right to universal suffrage remains a source of struggle.

Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte on December 19 delivered an address at the national archives where he expressed his deep regret that Dutch history had been marred by involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. This speech grew out of a commission which was established in 2020 amid the worldwide demonstration against racism prompted by the police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The role of the Netherlands commission was to examine the colonial history of the country which profited from the enslavement of African people in several territories in North America, South America and the Caribbean. In 2021, the commission concluded that the Netherlands needed to accept its responsibility for what was described as a “crime against humanity.”

In the 20 minutes speech, Rutte apologized for:

“[T]he actions of the Dutch state in the past: posthumously to all enslaved people worldwide who have suffered from those actions, to their daughters and sons, and to all their descendants into the here and now. For centuries the Dutch state and its representatives have enabled and stimulated slavery and have profited from it. It is true that nobody alive today bears any personal guilt for slavery…(however) the Dutch state bears responsibility for the immense suffering that has been done to those that were enslaved and their descendants.”

Yet those African descendants who were present at the speech were not impressed with the Rutte apology. During the address the prime minister ruled out the payment of reparations. Instead, he announced that his government would be establishing a fund of $US212 million to tackle some of the problems stemming from past injustices.

Africans whose ancestors were enslaved by the Dutch accused Rutte of being disingenuous in his statements. Residents of existing and former colonies of the European country say they had not been consulted prior to the speech. Others claimed that the timing of the apology was ill-timed since the 160th anniversary of the abolition of enslavement in the Dutch colonies will be commemorated during 2023.

Dutch retiree Waldo Koendjbiharie said of the speech by the Dutch leader that:

“It’s about money. Apologies are words and with those words you can’t buy anything.”

Another African descendant from the South American state of Surinam, which was colonized by the Netherlands, Roy Kaikusi Groenberg of the Honor and Recovery Foundation, emphasized:

“It takes two to tango — apologies have to be received. The way the government is handling this, it’s coming across as a neo-colonial belch.”

The Dutch Role in Slavery and Colonialism

This area of Europe would emerge as a critical player in the Atlantic slave trade and colonization in the Western Hemisphere, Africa and Asia during the early 17th century. The Dutch fought a war of independence against the Spanish crown during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Several rival European states were seeking to dominate the trade in human beings and commodities during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Dutch fought both Spain and Portugal to claims its own place within the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Western Hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific.

The Dutch West India Company and its counterpart known as the East India Company established numerous stations around the world. The company fought several wars with states in addition to Spain and Portugal.

Between the early 17th century to the concluding years of the 18th century, competition was fierce between France, England and the Dutch. Eventually, the Dutch would be overwhelmed by the military and commercial successes of other Western European powers such as France and Britain.

One source says of the impact of Dutch colonization that:

“Dutch West India Company, byname of West India Company, Dutch West-Indische Compagnie, Dutch trading company, was founded in 1621 mainly to carry on economic warfare against Spain and Portugal by striking at their colonies in the West Indies and South America and on the west coast of Africa. While attaining its greatest success against the Portuguese in Brazil in the 1630s and ’40s, the company depleted its resources and thereafter declined in power. It was dissolved in 1794. The company also established several colonies in the West Indies and Guyana between 1634 and 1648, including Aruba, Curaçao, and Saint Martin, but later lost many of them to the French. The Dutch colony in North America, New Netherland (renamed New York in the mid-1660s), became a province of the company in 1623. A combination of low Dutch immigration, autocratic administration, and under-investment, however, damaged the ability of New Netherland to compete with the neighboring English colonies, and it was ceded to the English in 1667. The Dutch West India Company was much less successful than the Dutch East India Company, its counterpart in Southeast Asia. The West India Company was taken over by the state in 1791 and was dissolved in the wake of the French invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1794.”

Even today in the 21st century, the Kingdom of the Netherlands is composed of the European capital and other island nations in the Caribbean. The Caribbean part of the Kingdom is made up of the islands of Aruba, Curaçao, St Maarten, Bonaire, Saba and St Eustatius.

The Netherlands joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Since this time period, successive governments and the monarchy have been loyal members of the western military alliance.

The Netherlands: A Center of “International Law” for Imperialism

Prior to the advent of World War I and II, The Netherlands attempted to maintain its foreign policy based on neutrality. Nonetheless, the country was occupied by the Nazis in 1940 forcing its leaders to take refuge in England.

In 1945 after the conclusion of WWII, The Netherlands would be a founding member of the United Nations. Later the country benefited from the Marshall Plan along with the aid airlifts in 1953 when over 1800 people died in catastrophic flooding. See this.

During the last two decades, the Netherlands has become a venue for trials over alleged human rights abuses carried out in the former Yugoslavia and the African continent. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been exclusively pro-occupied with the investigation, extradition and prosecution of African state actors and rebel organizations.

For this reason, the ICC has become a controversial institution as several African governments have criticized the court and threatened to withdraw from the Rome Statute, which created the framework for the ICC in 1998. Efforts were underway for several years to bring the former president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, and the current President William Ruto, to the Netherlands to stand trial over events which occurred in 2007-2008. Both cases against the two Kenyan leaders were subsequently dropped due to lack of evidence.

The former president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, was kidnapped by French paratroopers in April 2011 and transported to the Netherlands where he remained for nearly a decade awaiting and standing trial over efforts he carried out to prevent the current French and U.S.-backed regime from taking power in this West African state. President Gbagbo was acquitted by the ICC also as a result of a lack of evidence. These are just two examples of the injustices perpetrated by the Netherlands government in alliance with imperialism operating under the guise of international law.

Consequently, until the Netherlands pays reparations for its role in the enslavement and colonization of African and Asian peoples, its apologies under the present administration of Rutte will remain a hollow gesture. Beyond the era of African enslavement to the present, the Kingdom of the Netherlands cannot escape its culpability in the ongoing oppression and exploitation of African and other peoples.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

“The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.” – Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths

Things, possessions, life on the installment plan or credit card.  This is the season to buy, to accumulate more folderols, to give things to one’s children and each other, which, we like to believe, will bring joy.  It’s make-believe, of course, an adult lie conjured up out of guilt and fear that our lives, the stories we live, the stories we dream, and those that dream us, are insufficiently meaningful to bring our children and ourselves the joy we say we seek.

Driven by a pure sense of guilt devoid of any sense of redemption in a capitalist materialist culture, we buy and buy, accumulate and accumulate, in the vain hope that such tangible “gifts” will bring a magic that we can possess.  Our exchange of gifts is a consumer culture’s parody of the true meaning of a gift: that gifts are given to be given away, to be passed around, like the peace pipe of native American Indian tribes.

As Lewis Hyde writes in his extraordinary book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, “… a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift.  The spirit of a gift is its constant donation.”  What we are given, in the inner and outer world, must be shared, allowed to circulate.

But we like to own, to stop the flow.  As a result, we have become stuck, selfie people who can’t understand that to possess is to be possessed.

Stop, pose, click.  Got it!

Describing art as a way of life, or walking life’s way as an art, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it thus:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values.  This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous consciousness, namely the period of childhood.

The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential – not by things, as a commercial civilization would have us believe.  From infancy to old age, we crave stories that will allow us to make sense of our lives, to give them shape and spiritual significance.  And the greatest gifts we can give each other are stories that draw on the mystery and sacredness of existence, stories that express, in ravishing language and a musical spirit, clarification for our lives.  Stories that help us resist the nihilistic ethos of our times, the violence and deceit that defines them.

For example, long ago a Jewish boy was born in a stable because his parents couldn’t get a room anywhere.  The parents then had to flee with the boy because the government was murdering children and was out to get him.  Later in life, this child Jesus, became a radical opponent of church and state, preached peace, love, non-violence, and living by faith, not money; he embraced the outcasts, condemned the hypocrites, and was finally executed as a radical criminal by the state.  But his spirit was undefeated; he conquered death; and his name has become synonymous with love and kindness to such a degree that we celebrate his birth as the light of the world as the darkest days of the year turn brighter.

It’s a beautiful story from beginning to end, and if heeded, would bring massive resistance to the way things are throughout the world.  No wonder it has touched the hearts of so many for so long.

Sadly, however, Wordsworth put it perfectly when he said that, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” And the consumer-gift-stories we indirectly tell our children by participating in the madness of holiday shopping are tales unfit for young ears.

To live to buy is to tell them lies.

Our children (and all of us) wish not things but stories that will help them face life with enthusiasm and courage.  When I was a young boy, my father would ease me to sleep with “Jiminy Cricket Stories,” imaginary improvisations on Pinocchio and his conscience.  They were in no way trendy like the most recent Pinocchio film adaptation, but fundamentally sound as in the song As Time Goes By – it’s still the same old story.

I can’t remember any of his stories today, but what stays with me is their underlying theme, their spirit: to become a real boy, a genuine person, one must determine to tell the truth.  One must be brave, truthful, and unselfish.  Yet even more, when I think of them, I feel my father’s unconditional love and the timbre of his lilting voice.

These stories about truth and bravery contained hard but vital lessons for a father to pass on to a son, but he did it in such an entertaining way that I took the lessons to heart.  Ever since, in gratitude and wonder, I have been trying to make my story adhere to that spirit of truth.  Trying; for as we all know, truth is a hard taskmaster.  We never hold it, only seek it, and can only approach it if we are possessed by language and allow its musical spirit to carry us on into the unknown.

When I became a father myself, I tried to pass on to my children a love for stories and the words we use to express our lives.  Without words, and the ability to use them meaningfully, we are lost in the world of things, a place where consuming replaces creating.  So from infancy onward, my wife and I would read to them, and eventually I began to tell them imaginary stories of my own, “Willy Daly Stories,” inspired by a boyhood pal.  They would hang onto each word, and swing into depths of reverie as I strung them together into tall tales.

“At the bottom of each word/I’m a spectator at my birth,” wrote the French poet Alain Bosquet.

Entering into this creative spirit, Susanne and Daniel would ask me. “Is that really true?”  And I could not lie and say no.  So they would laugh, I would grin, and we would go on.

Like all children, they loved these stories, the ones I told and the ones we read.  They entered into them and they, into them; their inner worlds germinated.  When they were very young, each started to read, not haltingly but fluently and with amazing comprehension.  “Out of the blue” something clicked (and neither was “taught” to read, but was read and talked to by my wife and me as though they comprehended everything, even the most abstruse words), and from that day on the words that they previously heard became theirs.  They received the gift, even when they didn’t understand the meaning, they grasped the music.

Now it has passed to my grandchildren, Sophie and Henry, who are children of the word, lovers of the epiphanies stories can disclose.

“The bright book of life,” as D.H.Lawrence called the novel, opened to them.  Novel: New.  New life forever arising out of the old.  Miraculously (is there any other word for it?), they were in possession of the gift of words that they could pass on; they had the power to hear and tell their own stories, to understand their lives, not as the pursuit of things, but as the pursuit of meaning.  They felt proud and I felt blessed.

“Art tells the truth,” wrote Chekhov.  Indeed.  And the wheel of life turns with the seasons.  The gift of stories is passed on.  Christmas turns to New Year’s.  People pass on, but so do stories.  The things are forgotten.

The wordsmith Leonard Cohen sang in his song, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” that “I hope you are keeping some sort of record.”  The words stick on the page, but the beautiful melody carries them into our present and into the future and we imagine stories carrying us on as the music and the words don’t stop and we keep humming the tune and imagining as we move along to that which cannot be said and about which it is impossible to be silent, to paraphrase Victor Hugo.

My daughter: Susanne. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne: “There are children in the morning/they are leaning out for love/and they will lean that way forever/while Suzanne holds the mirror.”

My son: Daniel.  Like brave Pinocchio being swallowed by Monstro, and Daniel in the Lion’s den, the stories of courage and derring-do, told indirectly.

Daniel Berrigan, my friend and mentor, the puckish fierce poet of beauty and peace, whose fierceness belied his tenderness.

The Biblical Susanna, the falsely accused, and Daniel her liberator.

Names contain multitudes, tales never told, stories traveling on.  Daniel and Susanna ever new.

The gifts must be given away, like playing or listening to live music.  Here and gone; one time only.  Like life.

I recently saw a book for sale at my local library – From my Father, Singing by David Bosworth – a beautiful book, a true work of art.  I read it once at the suggestion of my storyteller father, and have just reread it.  I am grateful to Bosworth for his gift and to my father for passing on the word.  It is a tale in the form of a letter from a father to a son, a father in search of the meaning of his own father’s life, that elusive gift that can only be found in a story, in the telling.

The letter writer, our author, is in flight from a life lived “according to script,” a wife in love with money, shopping, and things, his dead-end job – “the place where I pretended to earn our living” – a life of pretense and lies, a living death in which all efforts were made to deny its meaninglessness: “to have fun, to keep busy, to buy something, to face the bleak descent of Sunday evening by preparing already for the following weekend.”

In order to explain himself to his son, a young infant, he explores his own childhood, the life he lived caught between his parents’ conflicting worlds.  In the end, by fashioning this letter, by putting word behind word behind word, he comes to understand and appreciate his father and consequently himself; he composes a letter to his son (who cannot yet read but whom we know will) “intended as a gift, a living legacy in words.”

Yes, art tells the truth.

Pass on the word, the true gift.

Here is Bill Joel’s gift to his daughter.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image is a screenshot from this video

He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book, click the cover page.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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Whereas in America (which makes and sells half of all of the world’s war-weapons), the manufacturers of war-weaponry are privately owned and succeed only by enriching their investors, Russia’s manufacturers of war-weapons are majority-owned by the Government and succeed only by winning Russia’s wars — serving the Government, which controls these companies, instead of serving private investors, who control the Government itself by lobbying and political donations.

In America, the arms-manufacturers control the Government in order to control their markets, which are their own Government and secondarily its ‘allied’ or vassal-Governments (which also buy their products). Russia never privatized its war-industries; so, they serve the Government — the public, not investors (who, in turn, control the Government in order to be able to control those corporations).

Ever since America’s failed war against Vietnam, the U.S. Government has been accustomed to military failure. That war began in 1954 when President Eisenhower “sent 700 military advisers to South Vietnam” without seeking congressional approval, and in violation of the U.S. Constitutional requirement for there to be no U.S. standing army and thus explicitly that only after a congressional declaration of war can a President send any U.S. forces to any foreign country.

Ike relied upon his immediate predecessor President Truman’s precedent of having done the same thing (violated the Constitution) by sending a force for “police action” (lying that it wasn’t military) to start his war to conquer Korea by enforcing Truman’s General Order #1, on 17 August 1945, to stop North Korea’s forces from advancing into South Korea.

Ike then hid from JFK this and other traps that were awaiting him in Vietnam, and in Cuba. According to JFK’s description of his 19 January 1960 meeting with Ike prior to assuming office, JFK said, regarding Vietnam, “Eisenhower never mentioned it, never uttered the word Vietnam.” Ike never mentioned the 700 troops in Vietnam, but JFK found that he had inherited that.

So, “In May 1961, Kennedy sent 500 more American advisers to Vietnam” — he just continued Ike’s unConstitutional policy there; it was the path of least resistance. Soon, however, he learned that it was a dreadful mistake, and that Ike had silently left minefields for him and had aimed to get his successors blamed for Ike’s disastrous decisions (which Kennedy learned too late). “By early November 1963, the number of US military advisers had reached 16,000”, but Kennedy already knew that he was trapped and would be attacked especially by Republicans if he changed course. He was just learning the ropes, and starting to think about how to change course, when he got assassinated (and his V.P. Johnson continued those errors).

That war ended in a U.S. defeat when President Ford withdrew the last U.S. troops from Vietnam by helicopters on 30 April 1975. (He, of course, failed to win election. His successor, Carter, then failed to win re-election, due to Ike’s having stolen Iran in 1953 and Carter’s suffering the resultant Iranian anti-American fervor in 1979, which doomed his campaign and brought in President Reagan.)

Afterward, the only successful U.S. wars were two very limited ones, both waged by President GHW Bush: one to seize and capture Panama’s leader and drug-trafficker Manuel Noriega on 3 January 1990; the other to expel Iraq’s forces from Kuwait during 24-28 February 1991.

America’s other wars were failures, or, at best, partial failures:

• Grenada in October 1983,
• Beirut in 1983-4,
• Libya in 1986 and again in 2011,
• Somalia 1992-95,
• Haiti 1994-5,
• Yugoslavia 1995-2000,
• Afghanistan 2001-2021,
• Philippines 2002-2017,
• Iraq 2003-22,
• Libya 2011-2022,
• Syria 2012-2022, and
• Ukraine (coup) 2014-2022.

(They all were successes for America’s arms-makers, however.)

None of America’s invasions after WW II was justified, nor was any of them in accord with America’s Constitution.

All of them were done in order to use, test-out, and to wear-out and replace, U.S. weapons, so as to increase sales-volumes and enrich political donors, who got the congresspeople elected that they wanted elected, to vote for these invasions and for the military appropriations. The system succeeded at what it was designed to do: produce profits for those American international corporations, whose owners control the U.S. Government.

And then there are the U.S. regime’s many other undeclared wars, which are partnerships with U.S.-allied regimes in which America supplies only the weaponry and training but no direct fighters, such as in America’s partnership with the Sauds to grab control over Yemen — causing mass starvation in Yemen. (It burns up lots of U.S. weapons, thus likewise pumping U.S. weapons-sales and profits.)

Russia has been spending $70 billion annually on its entire military; America has been spending (not just in its ‘Defense’ Department but in allDepartments) around $1.5 trillion per year, for its military.

In crucial military technologies, Russia is the world’s leader.

For example, on December 23rd, South Front headlined “KINZHAL HYPERSONIC MISSILE PROVED TO BE UNSTOPPABLE IN UKRAINE: RUSSIAN MILITARY CHIEF”, and it’s no mere brag by Russia; it is true. (Such missiles would be unstoppably in any nation.)

Furthermore, on November 14th, I headlined “U.S. GAO Finds Failure Is the Norm in U.S. Military Aircrafts”. That’s what happens when the military manufacturers serve their investors instead ofthe public.

On June 17th, U.S. military expert Alex Vershinin headlined at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, “The Return of Industrial Warfare”, about how inferior America is militarily as compared to Russia, and he argued — without mentioning or even showing any awareness of it — that America’s replacing industrialization (the manufacturing economy) with financialization (the financial-services economy) had done this (hollowed-out America’s military).

I would argue more specifically that the resultant intense corruptness in America’s military has done this.

The U.S. ‘Defense’ Department is the ONLY federal Department that can’t be audited.

Its opportunities for graft are unlimited (or else are limited only by the value of the dollar, which would mean that the dollar’s international value is bound to crash and collapse some day, as having been the ultimate Ponzi scheme). In fact, trillions of dollars in spending by the Pentagon simply cannot be traced. Nobody knows, or can find out, where it went.

Another reason why Russia gets far higher bang for each military buck spent is that whereas America’s military is designed to expand the American empire throughout the world, Russia’s is designed to protect the nation’s sovereign independence and to ward-off America’s constant (ever since 1945) aim to turn Russia into yet another U.S. ‘ally’ (vassal-nation).

Whereas America’s billionaires drive America’s military for increasing their empire, the Russian population drive Russia’s military for the nation’s protection and very survival.

There is no evidence — none — that Russia, spending $70 billion annually on its military, is militarily inferior to America, which spends $1.5 trillion per year on its military.

In a country that spends 20 times more for its military but gets military inferiority instead of military superiority, deceiving the public is essential (in order to function as being a ‘democracy’, which the U.S. Government needs in order to be able to call any country it aims to take over — or regime-change — a “dictatorship”). And that is the way it is done, and has been done, for decades, now. So, the military has been, at least since 2001, the highest-respected institution of all, by the American people. The trick has been very successful.

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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: Ukraine has began fielding US M777 howitzers to repel Russia

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***

Solve the intentionally confusing puzzle about what the WHO’s 2023 plans are regarding the “zero draft” for a new and potentially legally binding pandemic treaty, International Health Regulation amendments, recent Intergovernmental Negotiating Body Meetings and more.

Learn all about the corrupt public health organization “with teeth” with guest James Corbett and Meryl Nass, M.D on ‘Good Morning CHD.’

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Featured image is screenshot from the video

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In his address to the US Congress on December 21, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that he seeks  “absolute victory” over Russia, employing the word “victory” 11 times. Writing for the Washington Post, renowned journalist David Ignatius describes Zelensky’s visit to Washington as it was: a “war summit”. Ignatius concludes that this summit ended however with a gap between the Ukrainian and his US counterpart Joe Biden. The latter during their joint press conference indirectly answered the insistent requests for more potent weapons being sent to Ukraine by saying that providing Kiev with long-distance missiles “would have a prospect of breaking up NATO” and “and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world.” Not only that, he added that his NATO allies are “not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third world war.” Acknowledging that perhaps he had already “said too much”, Biden then reassured his Ukrainian ally standing next to him, by telling him “as I said, Mr. President, you don’t have to worry — we are staying with Ukraine as long as Ukraine is there.”

Although the Zelensky cult has been fading for a while, he was enthusiastically applauded by American lawmakers several times and the Western media has emphasized it. However, besides the aforementioned gap, there were blatant incongruenties in his speech also.

Zelensky boasted of a first Ukrainian “victory”, which consists of supposedly having “defeated Russia in the battle for minds of the world”, and he added that “Americans gained this victory” by “uniting the global community” – when in fact Biden has been struggling to maintain his international coalition to support Kiev. Although the Ukrainian leader claimed “Europe is now stronger and more independent than ever”, the truth of course is that the continent is facing a severe energy crisis which has only served Washington’s interests. Moreover, Biden’s aggressive $369 billion subsidy package, which hurts Europe, has been described by French President Emmanuel Macron as an issue that could “divide the West”. So much for “union”.

Still talking about the information war, Zelensky himself admitted it is still necessary “to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory.” By saying that, he basically conceded that the vast majority of the world does not support Kiev – and truly African nations and other emerging states have been increasingly building on multi-alignment, and non-alignment, while developing beneficial relations with China and Russia.

When the Ukrainian President mentioned having visited Bakhmut, he said that “the Ukrainian Donbass stands”. It is quite ironic that when Zelensky, talking about Donbass, said that “every inch of that land” is “soaked in blood”, he failed to mention the fact that this very region had been regularly shelled by Kiev for 8 years before the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict started in February 2022.  Ukrainian human rights violations in Donbass have in fact been heavily white-washed by the West and so has been the ugly reality of the Azov battalion’s neo-Nazi leanings.

But one thing Zelensky did say during his speech: he said that although the Ukrainians have artillery, and thanked the US for that, it is not “enough” (which elicited some uncomfortable laughter from some of the US lawmakers – audible at around 11min in the C-SPAN clip) and that “more cannons and shells are needed.” It is significant, though, that there was enthusiastic applause when the Ukrainian President clarified that his country “never asked the American soldiers to fight on our land instead of us” and that “Ukrainian soldiers can perfectly operate American tanks and planes themselves”. Ironically, in doing so, he echoed the August sarcastic remarks of Sergey Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of the Russian presidential staff, about NATO being eager to fight against Moscow “to the last Ukrainian” soldier.

Although many American voices have been calling for direct and even nuclear war against Russia, Biden, during the aforementioned joint press conference, has explicitly signaled that this is not his desire. He prefers, it would seem, to keep using Ukraine and Europe as proxies.

On January 30, before the current crisis began, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg had already reiterated that (US-led) NATO would not send troops in case Russia attacked its neighbor, but reassured the Atlantic Alliance would in any case provide “support” to Kiev. His words seem to have passed the test of time so far. Commenting on this, I wrote, on February 1st, that such a “support” could end in a humanitarian disaster with undesired consequences to Europe and the West itself. I also remarked that, in a perverted way, former US president Donald Trump’s remarks about the crisis being a “European problem” made a lot of sense. The Europeans as well as the Ukrainians themselves, of course, have been paying the hard price for the misguided policy of “encircling” Russia. I’ve also written on how the US profits from prolonging the conflict in Ukraine – to Europe’s detriment.

The problem with this kind of indirect tension game is that proxy actors themselves are sometimes unpredictable (they can get tired of being used by such an “ally”) and, moreover, tensions may escalate too much and spiral out of control, as we’ve already seen. Although Biden has admitted quite candidly that he does not wish to enter into direct conflict with Moscow so as not to provoke a world war,  Washington in any case has been playing a dangerous game, which increases the risk of such a war.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

Featured image: President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Wednesday, December 21, 2022, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz) 

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***

“The war in Ukraine is not a Call of Duty fantasy. It is an enlargement of the human tragedy that NATO’s eastward expansion created. The victims do not live in North America. They live in a region that most Americans can’t find on a map. Washington urged the Ukrainians to fight. Now Washington must urge them to stop.” Colonel Douglas MacGregor, The American Conservative

Volodymyr Zelensky did not fly across the Atlantic so he could deliver a speech to the US Congress. That was not the purpose of his trip. The real objective was to produce a galvanizing event that would create the illusion of broad-based public support for the war.

That is why the speech was broadcast on all the mainstream media channels and that is why Congress repeatedly greeted Zelensky with raucous applause. Once again, the cadres of voracious elites who control the political levers of power in America, are determined to drag the country to war, which is why they portray a cross-dressing “thug in a gym suit” as a Churchillian figure of unshakable principles. It’s all public relations. It’s all an attempt to garner support for a conflict which will soon involve young American men and women who will be asked to die so that wealthy elites can maintain their grip on global power.

Zelensky’s trip to Capitol Hill was timed to coincide with Putin’s winter offensive, which is expected to crush the Ukrainian Armed Forces and bring the war to a swift end. The Biden administration understands the situation but does not have weaponry or manpower to impact the outcome.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Washington doesn’t have a plan for prolonging the conflict or beefing up its combat forces. It does have a plan, that is evident by the way the administration has rejected negotiations at every turn. What that tells us is that Washington is still committed to defeating Russia whatever the cost. In practical terms, that means that the US must create an incident that will serve as a justification for escalation. The incident could be related to Zelensky’s unexpected trip to Washington or, perhaps, it could be linked to the detonation of a nuclear device somewhere in Ukraine. Check out this excerpt from an article at RT:

The risk of Kiev attempting to build a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ remains, a senior Russian diplomat has said….

“Ukraine has the potential necessary to make a ‘dirty bomb,’ it doesn’t take much effort. Especially since Ukraine has been a nation advanced in nuclear technology since the Soviet times, [and] has many technologies and expertise,” Mikhail Ulyanov told journalists on Wednesday, as quoted by RIA Novosti…

General Igor Kirillov, the commander of the Russian military branch responsible for protecting troops from weapons of mass destruction, claimed in October that Kiev was “at the final stage” of producing a dirty bomb.” (“Radioactive threat from Kiev persists – Moscow“, RT)

The means by which a false flag is carried out, is completely irrelevant. What matters is that — according to political analyst John Mearsheimer– “The United States is in this to win”, that is, the US foreign policy establishment is not prepared to let the Russian army prevail in Ukraine and impose its own settlement. They’re going to find a way to intensify the conflict and bring foreign troops into the theater. That’s the objective, and that’s what they’ll do once they’ve figured out an excuse for escalation. Bottom line: The US is not going to throw in the towel and call it quits. This is a long-term project that could drag on for years if not decades.

Political analyst Kurt Nimmo thinks that NATO might join the fighting. Here’s a short blurb from Nimmo’s latest at Global Research:

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.” (“NATO Decides to Attack Russia in Ukraine– Ukraine is unable to defeat Russia. The next step is for direct NATO involvement“, Kurt Nimmo, Global Research)

Nimmo could be right but, maybe not. It appears to me that NATO is hopelessly divided on the issue. A number of NATO countries will not join in a war against Russia regardless of the circumstances or the amount of pressure from the White House. The more likely scenario was presented by Colonel Douglas MacGregor who laid it out in an article at The American Conservative on Tuesday. Here’s what he said: .

The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the Zelensky regime in Kiev is reaching a strategic inflection point not unlike the one LBJ reached in 1965… Like South Vietnam in the 1960s, Ukraine is losing its war with Russia… The real danger now is that Biden will soon appear on television to repeat LBJ’s performance in 1965, substituting the word “Ukraine” for “South Vietnam”:

“Tonight, my fellow Americans I want to speak to you about freedom, democracy, and the struggle of the Ukrainian people for victory. No other question so preoccupies our people. No other dream so absorbs the millions who live in Ukraine and Eastern Europe… However, I am not talking about a NATO attack on Russia. Rather, I propose to send a U.S. led coalition of the willing, consisting of American, Polish, and Romanian armed forces into Ukraine, to establish the ground equivalent of a “no-fly zone.” The mission I propose is a peaceful one, to create a safe zone in the Western most portion of Ukraine for Ukrainian Forces and refugees struggling to survive Russia’s devastating attacks…”

NATO’s governments are divided in their thinking about the war in Ukraine. Except for Poland and, possibly, Romania, none of NATO’s members are in a rush to mobilize their forces for a long, grueling war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine. No one in London, Paris, or, Berlin wants to run the risk of a nuclear war with Moscow. Americans do not support going to war with Russia, and those few who do are ideologues, shallow political opportunists, or greedy defense contractors.” (“Washington is Prolonging Ukraine’s Suffering“, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, The American Conservative)

This, I think, is the much more plausible scenario. The Biden Administration will enlist a handful of countries that agree to troop deployments to west Ukraine ostensibly for humanitarian reasons. At the same time, they will allow disparate Ukrainian forces to continue the random shelling of Russia-controlled areas as well as locations on Russian soil. There will undoubtedly be an effort to control the skies over west Ukraine (no-fly zone) and to conduct attacks on Russian formations in the east. Most important, vital supplylines from Poland will remain open to accommodate the flow of men, munitions and lethal weaponry to the front. MacGregor appears to anticipate these developments given his comments at the beginning of the article. Here’s what he said:

During a speech given on November 29, Polish Vice-Minister of National Defense (MON) Marcin Ociepa said: “The probability of a war in which we will be involved is very high. Too high for us to treat this scenario only hypothetically.”The Polish MON is allegedly planning to call up 200,000 reservists in 2023 for a few weeks’ training, but observers in Warsaw suspect this action could easily lead to a national mobilization.

Meanwhile, inside the Biden administration, there is growing concern that the Ukrainian war effort will collapse under the weight of a Russian offensive. And as the ground in Southern Ukraine finally freezes, the administration’s fears are justified. In an interview published in the Economist, head of Ukraine’s armed forces General Valery Zaluzhny admitted that Russian mobilization and tactics are working. He even hinted that Ukrainian forces might be unable to withstand the coming Russian onslaught.”(“Washington is Prolonging Ukraine’s Suffering“, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, The American Conservative)

The plan to lure Russia into a war in Ukraine goes back at least a decade. And what we know now from comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is that Washington never sought a peaceful resolution to the conflict but worked tirelessly to install a Russia-hating regime in Kiev that would help it to prosecute its war on Russia. The gathering of nearly 600,000 Russian combat troops in or around Ukraine threatens to derail Washington’s strategy and end the war on Russia’s terms. Washington can’t allow that to happen. It cannot allow the world to see that it was beaten by Russia. Thus, Washington must pursue the only option left to them, the deployment of US troops to Ukraine.

Perhaps, cooler heads will prevail and the administration will pull back from the brink, but we think that is highly unlikely. We think the decision has already been made: We think the United States is going to war with Russia.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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). 

All images in this article are from TUR

“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

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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   

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Christmas gift exchange between Zelensky and Biden in White House meeting. The Ukrainian president brought to Biden the newly signed law abolishing the Kiev Administrative District Court, already in the crosshairs of the U.S. State Department, which had sanctioned the Tribunal’s president for “human rights violations.” The real reason the Tribunal was abolished is that it had opened proceedings against the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and their crimes. For his part, Biden gave Zelensky the first Patriot missile battery and a pledge to provide him with another $45 billion in 2023, adding to the $100 billion already given in the form of weapons and military assistance. Zelensky said in his address to Congress that what the U.S. provided to Ukraine for the war is “an investment in global security and democracy.”

The U.S. Congress has approved military spending of $858 billion for 2023 (13 times that of Russia). The Pentagon’s budget alone shows a 10 percent increase over last year’s, or $70 billion more, or $36 billion more than the President’s own request. U.S. military spending, relative to the Pentagon budget alone, is equivalent to that of the next 10 countries with the highest military spending on a global scale.   Added to the Pentagon budget are other military expenditures of about $400 billion, bringing actual U.S. military spending to more than $1.2 trillion. This colossal increase, headlines the New York Times, creates “a new boom for arms manufacturers.” All this confirms Washington’s willingness to continue to fuel the war against Russia, which is causing an unprecedented crisis in Europe.

On December 15, in an institutional ceremony held in Moscow, the Daria Dughina Medal was established by the Eurasian Movement in honor of the journalist who was murdered last August. This year, it was awarded to Russian-Ukrainian musician Akim Apachev and Hungarian film director Maya Nogradi, editor of Grandangolo, for her film For the Children of Donbass, broadcast on Byoblu on Dec. 1, 2021, viewable here.

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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: President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Wednesday, December 21, 2022, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

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***

On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination.  It garnered a great deal of attention.

Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many more times.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man whom I hold in the highest esteem, tweeted that it was “the most courageous newscast in 60 years.  The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

While I completely agree with his second sentence, I was underwhelmed by Carlson’s words, to put it mildly.  I thought it was clearly “a limited hangout,” as described by the former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

Or listens carefully.

Carlson surely said some things that were true, and, as my friends and many others have insisted, he was the first mainstream corporate journalist to say that “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing.  Or a little of both.  It is a weasel word.

And the source for Carlson’s claim was an anonymous source, someone who he said “had access” to the JFK files that were never released.  We know, of course, that when The New York Times and its ilk cite “anonymous sources,” claiming that they have told them this or that, this raises eyebrows. Or should.  Anyone who closely follows that paper’s claims knows that it is a CIA conduit, but now, those who know this are embracing Tucker Carlson as if he were the prophet of truth, as if a Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox TV host who is paid many millions of dollars, has become the Julian Assange of corporate journalism.

In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch.  Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?

So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.

For five minutes of the 7:28 minute monologue, he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that the claim that both acted alone is weird and beyond any odds; that the Warren Commission was shoddy; that the CIA weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” in 1967 according to Lance De Haven-Smith’s book Conspiracy Theory in America; that the CIA’s brainwashing specialist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West visited Jack Ruby in jail and declared him insane, contrary to all other assessments of Ruby’s mental state; and that the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy in the president’s assassination.

All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination.  Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.

But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.

Carlson said that just that day – December 15, 2022 – when all the JFK documents were due to be released but many were withheld, “we spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents.”  Who would have such access, and how, is left unaddressed, but it is implied that it is a CIA source, but maybe not.  It is strange to say the least.

Carlson then said he asked this person, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?”  And the answer was “I believe they were involved.”  Carlson goes on to say, “And the answer we received was unequivocal.  Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”

“Hand” can mean many things and is very vague.  For example, in front of his wife, a man tells his friend, “I had a hand in preparing Christmas dinner.”  To which his wife, laughing, replies, “Yes, he did, he put the napkins on the table.”

To “believe” something is very different from knowing it, as Dr. Martin Schotz, one of the most perceptive JFK assassination researchers, has written in his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

On Belief Versus Knowledge

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.

“Unequivocal” does not accurately describe the source’s statement, which was: “I believe.”  That is, unless you take someone’s belief as evidence of the truth, or you wish to make it sound so.

Note that nowhere in Carlson’s report does he or his alleged source say clearly and definitively that the CIA/National Security State murdered President Kennedy, for which there has long been overwhelming evidence.  Such beating-around-the-bush is quite common and tantalizes the audience to think the next explosive revelation will be dispositive.  Yet no release of documents is needed to confirm that the CIA killed Kennedy, as if the national security state would allow itself to be pinned for the murder.

Waiting for the documents is like waiting for Godot; and to promote some hidden smoking gun, some great revelation is to engage in a pseudo-debate without end.  It is to do the killers’ bidding for them.  And it is quite common. There are many well-known “dissident” writers who continue to claim that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the CIA/national security state killed the president.  And this is so for those who question the official story.  Furthermore, there are many more pundits who maintain that Oswald did the deed alone, as the Warren Report concluded and the mainstream corporate media trumpet.  This group is led by Noam Chomsky, whose acolytes bow to their master’s ignorant conclusions.

Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2263.

While it is true that some people change dramatically, Tucker Carlson, the Fox Television celebrity, would be a very unlikely candidate.  He defended Eliot Abrams and praised Oliver North; supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; went to Nicaragua to support those Contras; smeared the great journalist Gary Webb while defending the CIA; supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and much more.  Alan MacLeod chronicled all this in February of this year for those who have known nothing of Carlson’s past, including his father’s work as a U.S. intelligence operative as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the body that oversees government-funded media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America – all U.S. propaganda outlets.

Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK.  Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?

No doubt any crumb of national news coverage about the CIA and the assassination by a major corporate player elicits an enthusiastic response from those who have tried for many years to tell the truth about JFK’s murder.  One’s first response is excitement.  But such reactions need to tempered by sober analyses of exactly what has been said, which is what I am doing here.  I, too, wish it were a breakthrough but think it is more of the same.  Much ado about nothing.  A way to continue to foster uncertainty, not knowledge, about the crime.

I see it as a game of false binaries in the same way the Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as mortal enemies.  Yes, there are some differences, but all-in-all they are one party, the War Party, who agree on the essential tenets of U.S. imperial policy.  They both represent the interests of the upper classes and are financed by them.  They both work within the same frame of reference. They both support what Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, rightly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).

If one asks a dedicated believer in the truthfulness of The New York TimesCorporation or NPR, for example, what they think of Tucker Carlson, they will generally dismiss him with disdain as a right-wing charlatan.  This, of course, works in reverse if you ask Carlson’s followers what they think of the Times or NPR.  Yet for those who think outside the frame – and they are all non-mainstream – a different picture emerges.  But sometimes they are taken in by those whose equivocations are extremely lawyerly but appeal to what they wish to hear.  This is exactly what a “limited hangout” is.  Snagged by some actual truths, they bite on the bait of nuances that don’t mean what they think they do.

Left vs. right, Fox TV  vs. The New York Times, NPR, etc.: Just as Carlson’s father Dick Carlson ran the CIA-created U.S. overseas radio propaganda under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, so too the present head of National Public Radio, John Lansing, did the same under Barack Obama.  See my piece, Will NPR Now Change its Name to National Propaganda Radio.  Birds of a feather disguised as hawks and sparrows in a game meant to confuse and create scrambled brains.

Lastly, let me mention an odd “coincidence.”  On December 6 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., nine days before the partial JFK files release and Tucker Carlson’s monologue, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization devoted to JFK research, gave a presentation showcasing what was advertised as explosive new information about the Kennedy assassination.  The key presenter was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK assassination researcher who has sued the CIA for documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA operative George Joannides.

On November 22 Morley had published an article titled “Yes, There is a JFK Smoking Gun.”  It was subtitled: It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still “Denied in Full.”  The documents he was referring to allegedly concern contacts between Oswald and Joannides in the summer and fall of 1963 in New Orleans and in Mexico City.

“They [the CIA] were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year,” wrote Morley.

Well, the “smoking gun” documents were not released on Dec 15, although on November 20 and then again at The National Press Club on December 6, Morley spoke of them as proving his point about the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, which has been obvious for a long time.  Although he said he hadn’t seen these key documents but was awaiting their release, he added that even if they were not released that will still prove him correct.  In other words, with this bit of legerdemain, he was saying: What I don’t know, and may not soon not know, supports what I’m claiming even though I don’t know it.  And even if the files were released, he writes, “As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.”  So the smoking gun is not a smoking gun and the waters of uncertainty roll on and on into the receding future.

CIA incompetence, not complicity.  Of course.  It ain’t necessarily so.  Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.

Morley is one of  many who still cannot say that the CIA killed the president.  Tucker Carlson can speak of its “involvement” just like Morley. We need more information, more files, etc.  But even if we get them, we still won’t know.  Maybe by 2063.

My question for Tucker Carlson: Who was your anonymous source?  And did your source see the documents that were never disclosed?  What specific documents are you referring to?  And do they prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or just suggest “involvement”?

Finally, as I said before, even as there has long been a mountain of evidence for the CIA’s murder of JFK (and RFK as well, although that is never mentioned), many prominent people continue to play as if there is not.  Listen to this video interview between Chris Hedges and former CIA officer John Kiriakou.  It is all about the nefarious deeds of the CIA.  Right toward the end of the interview (see minutes 32:30-33:19), Hedges says,

“So I have to ask [since he has to answer] this question since I know Oliver Stone is convinced the CIA killed JFK … I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up …”  and they both share a mocking laugh at Stone as if he were the village idiot when he knows more about the JFK assassination than the two of them put together, and Kiriakou says he too has not seen such evidence.  It’s a disgusting but typical display of arrogance and a “limited hangout.”

Criticize the CIA only to make sure you whitewash them for one of their greatest achievements: the murder of President John F. Kennedy.  This is straight from Chomsky’s playbook.

Beware double-talkers and the games they play.  They come in different flavors.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image is from Behind the Curtain

He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book, click the cover page.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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An earlier version of this posting mistakenly referred to a European Council Amendment of Resolution 2361 which “no longer objects to compulsory vaccination”. That information is incorrect. See: Resolution 2361 (2021) entitled “Covid-19 vaccines: ethical, legal and practical considerations”

***

First published on April 11, 2022.

The EU Vaccine Passport Restrictions are Dramatic. Fundamental Rights are being violated.

The substance of the EU procedures concerning the vaccine passport are contained in the EU EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM. (summary below, scroll down for Selected Excerpts and Complete Text).

Summary

.

The Pandemic Treaty = Digital Tyranny

The MEMORANDUM outlined by the EU points to the derogation of fundamental human rights entrenched in the adoption of the EU Digital COVID Certificate Framework.  

As noted in the above Summary, the intent is to extend the Regulation which expires on June 30 2022 for another twelve months until June 30th, 2023.

This extension plays a key role: 

The EU Digital COVID Certificate Framework is slated to be tied into negotiations pertaining to a worldwide “Pandemic Treaty” which were initiated in early March 2022.

On March 3, the EU Council gave:

“a green light to start negotiations on an international pandemic treaty… The Council adopted a decision to authorise the opening of negotiations for an international agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”

What is the timeline

The procedure is slated to be presented to the 76th World Health Assembly in 2023, “with the aim to adopt the instrument [namely the pandemic treaty]  by 2024.”

The object of the Pandemic Treaty consists in creating by 2024  a global health governance entity under WHO auspices.

In turn the Pandemic Treaty would be tied into the WHO’s QR Verification Code project, which is intent upon creating a global digital data bank of 8 billion people.  Both initiatives are to be carried out concurrently by the WHO in liaison with ID2020 and the Gavi Alliance, both of which are funded by the Gates Foundation.

Peter Koenig describes the QR Code as

“an all-electronic ID – linking everything to everything of each individual (records of health, banking, personal and private, etc.).”

According to David Scripac 

 “A worldwide digital ID system is in the making. [The aim] of the WEF—and of all the central banks [is] to implement a global system in which everyone’s personal data will be incorporated into the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) network.”

The March Towards World Government

A Worldwide QR Verification Code lays the groundwork for the instatement of “a Global Police State” controlled by the financial establishment. It’s part of what the late David Rockefeller entitled “The March towards World Government” based on an alliance of bankers and intellectuals.

What is the legitimacy as well as the science behind this diabolical project?

NONE.

Amply confirmed: THERE IS NO PANDEMIC. The alleged Covid-19 Pandemic is based on “Fake Science”. Both the EU Digital COVID Certificate Framework as well as the WHO QR Verification Code are based on outright lies and fabrications. It is now well established that the PCR test which has been used to “detect SARS-CoV-2” is totally invalid.

“Both the WHO and the CDC (with the usual innuendos) have confirmed what was known from the very outset in January 2020, namely that the RT-PCR test used to justify every single policy mandate including lockdowns, social distancing, the mask, confinement of the labor force, closure of economic activity, etc. was flawed and invalid”

The EU Memorandum (below) confirms two types of tests for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 both of which have been declared invalid:

“According to Regulation (EU) 2021/953, test certificates are to be issued based on two types of tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection, namely

[1] molecular nucleic acid amplification tests (‘NAAT’), including those using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (‘RT-PCR’), and

[2] rapid antigen tests, which rely on detection of viral proteins (antigens) using a lateral flow immunoassay that gives results in less than 30 minutes, provided they are carried out by health professionals or by skilled testing personnel. (emphasis added)”

The  legitimacy of the EU Digital Covid Certification Framework, the Pandemic Treaty and the QR Verification Code rests on the presumption that the alleged “Covid-19 Pandemic is Real” and that the “mRNA Covid-19 vaccine constitutes a SOLUTION to the alleged Covid-19 pandemic.” 

The CDC confirms that the PCR test does not effectively differentiate between “SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses”. As of 31 December 2021, the CDC has declared the PCR test as invalid. 

For further details and analysis click here

Sustained by media disinformation and government propaganda, the mRNA vaccine was put forth as a solution to curbing the pandemic and saving lives.

The Vaccine does not Save Lives 

Amply documented, the Vaccine has triggered from the outset in December 2020 an upward trend in mortality and morbidity.

Extending the Vaccine in the EU as outlined in the “Memorandum” is a crime against humanity. The EU Memorandum must be immediately suspended.

Video: In many countries, there was a significant shift in mortality following the introduction of the mRNA vaccine

The evidence is overwhelming. The official figures (April 2022) point to approximately:

But only a small fraction of the victims or families of the deceased will go through the tedious process of reporting vaccine-related deaths and adverse events to the national health authorities.

The following statement contained in the EU Memorandum is nonsensical:

“Increasing vaccine uptake remains a crucial objective in the fight against the pandemic, given the protection against hospitalisation and severe disease afforded by vaccination

Amply documented, it’s the Covid-19 mRNA “Vaccine” rather than the SARS-CoV-2 virus which is “the killer”. 

In the words of Doctors for Covid Ethics:

“The signal of harm is now indisputably overwhelming, and, in line with universally accepted ethical standards for clinical trials, Doctors for Covid Ethics demands that the COVID-19 “vaccination” programme be halted immediately worldwide.

Continuation of the programme, in the full knowledge of ongoing serious harm and death to both adults and children, constitutes Crimes Against Humanity/Genocide, for which those found to be responsible or complicit will ultimately be held personally liable.”

The Procedures described in the EU Memorandum should be immediately suspended. The Justification for a “Pandemic Treaty” is Based on Lies and “Fake Science”. 

See Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book, specifically Chapters I-III.

The Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky,

As a means to reaching out to millions of people worldwide whose lives have been affected by the corona crisis, we have decided in the course of the next few weeks to distribute the eBook for FREE.

Price: $11.50. FREE COPY Click here to download.

---

Excerpts of the EU MEMORANDUM, with links to the complete text below.

The document in pdf can be accessed HERE.

The complete document in pdf can be accessed HERE. 

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First published on December 22, 2022

Another United Nations climate conference has come and gone. The twenty-seventh, to be exact.  

Its forgettable full name is the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Or COP27, for short.  

COP27, like all of the UN’s previous annual climate summits (COP1 through COP26), addressed none of the actual existential issues facing humanity. Instead, its delegates, gathered in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, bombarded the rest of us with endless chatter about how human-induced climate change will spell the end of humanity if trillions of dollars aren’t thrown at this alleged catastrophe.  

There was the usual call to action made by the same old summit attendees, who implored nations to reduce carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions before it’s too late to save “Mother Earth.” To that familiar refrain they added a new note: a proclamation of “climate justice” that focused on the need for rich countries to scale up “investment for climate and development” to the lofty tune of $2 trillion a year.  

But could all that blather about climate catastrophe and climate justice be nothing more than a smoke screen covering up a nefarious scheme—a scheme designed to monopolise the world’s resources for the benefit of a select few?    

Before we answer that question, let’s first go over some true facts about climate change and cover the variables that contribute to it. (Note: Natural climate cycles shouldn’t be confused with deliberate weather modification—a separate topic we will discuss further down in this article.)  

Is Climate Change Real?  

First, the question that is probably on everyone’s mind: Is climate change real? Yes, it is. It has been a natural, normal, nonstop phenomenon ever since Earth was formed.  

Second, the corollary question: Is it occurring as a result of human activity? No, it is not.  

To date, not a single scientific study has positively attributed all or part of observed climate change to anthropogenic (man-made) causes.

Granted, there are numerous computer models spewing out doom-and-gloom predictions. But, like all computer models, their outcomes can be manipulated by the variables entered into the algorithms. That is, the programmer can input certain parameters that will enable a specific desired outcome. The sole purpose of these computer models is to present a polished veneer that appears to be credible science. In actuality, these models are hiding the truth and keeping the deception called the “climate crisis” alive.  

A case in point is the infamous “hockey stick” computer-generated temperature graph produced by the equally infamous Michael Mann, a Penn State University professor of atmospheric science. After its initial sensational release in 1998, Mann’s graph was incorporated into the UN’s highly influential Third Assessment Report on climate change in 2001. Since then, the persuasive illustration has been used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to deceive the public into believing the theory of man-made global warming.  

Professor Mann’s graph purports to show the average global temperature over the past 1,000 years. For the first 900 years the graph portrays very little variation in global temperatures. They trend in as straight a line as the shaft on an ice hockey stick lying horizontally on its back side (see below). Then suddenly, in the twentieth century, the graph displays a precipitous rise in global temperature, looking like the hockey stick’s curved blade. 

   Michael Mann’s 1998 “hockey stick” temperature model. Source. 

Mann suggests that this sudden rise in temperature is all due to a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere.  

There is, however, a major problem with the hockey stick diagram: It’s utter fiction.  

In reality, there have been numerous quantifiable stages of cooling and warming of the earth’s climate spanning the millennia. Here are a few notable examples:  

• Fourteenth-century Europe was in a mini-ice age, as revealed by this article in Climate in Arts & History. During the Little Ice Age (1300 CE–1850 CE) global temperatures were significantly cooler—by as much as 2°C (3.6°F), particularly in North America and Europe.  
• Going back further, between 1000 CE and 1350 CE, identified as the Medieval Warming Period, temperatures were significantly warmer than current ones—and that was long before the industrial period. More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in forty countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warming Period was as hot or hotter than at present and was a global phenomenon, not just a European regional climate condition, as the IPCC wrongly speculates.  
• Going back further still, there were more warm spells, including a prolonged period during the Bronze Age, known to geologists as the Holocene Maximum (5000 BCE–8000 BCE). During this period, temperatures were significantly warmer than they are today. In fact, a fascinating study conducted by Myers et al. and published inThe Cryosphere Discussions in 2020 concludes that average temperatures, especially in East Antarctica, were a full 5°C (9°F) warmer than at present.  

Yet, despite his having flattened nine centuries of climate variation with his flawed computer program, Michael Mann’s fraudulent temperature model is still being used by the UN’s IPCC.  

Why? Why won’t the IPCC acknowledge that the climate has always changed, as the above three examples demonstrate—and changed, mind you, without any help from us humans?  

We’ll touch on possible motives for the IPCC’s misinformation at the end.  

For now, let’s stick to how the powers-that-be have gone about blaming human activity for natural climate cycles andhow they have hyped a made-up climate catastrophe reminiscent of the fairy-tale emperor’s imaginary clothes.      

Enter, in the decade of the 1960s, the theory of “anthropogenic global warming” or “man-made global warming.” The false notion was first adopted in 1968 by the Club of Rome in its efforts to promote the supposed need for population reduction. It has since been used to great effect by the UN and by other intergovernmental organizations as well as national governments around the world.  

The anthropogenic warming theorists claim that the CO₂ produced by human activity at the start of the twentieth century should have caused the earth’s temperature to rise. They insist there is a direct correlation between CO₂ and global temperature.As CO₂ increases, global temperature, they allege, increases in lock step.    

But is that actually true? Well, if we accept the findings presented by George S. Benton in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 1970), a startlingly different picture emerges.  

This intrepid scientist found that, in the 60 years between 1880 and 1940, the earth’s temperature rose approximately 0.6°C (1.0°F). That warming trend took place long before cars and aircraft were invented. Moreover, in the same period, industrial development was relatively insignificant.  

Then, during the post-WW2 economic boom in the 1950s and 1960s, industries were expanding and human production of CO₂ was soaring to new levels. Per the man-made warming theory, global temperature should have increased in those decades. But it didn’t. Instead, it fell significantly—some 0.3°C to 0.4°C—for three decades.  

These facts certainly do not correlate with the global warming theory.

In reality, the earth’s atmosphere didn’t start to warm in the twenty-first century until 1975. This warming trend continued until 2016, when global temperatures were at their peak; they have been declining ever since.  

The proof? All satellite datasets collected from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), the UK Meteorological Office, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and the University of Alabama (UAH) show global temperatures have been declining since 2016, despite increasing amounts of atmospheric CO₂.  

If we look hard enough, we can find scientific articles laying out these hard facts. For instance, a report from Chris Morrison in The Daily Sceptic informs us that temperatures in the South Pole are now the coldest they have been since records began in 1957 and that Arctic sea ice is making a silent comeback.  

And yet, all of these data have, inexplicably, escaped the attention of mainstream media reporters.  

In the meantime, numerous climate change alarmists, notably former US Vice President Al Gore, desperately cling to the notion that there is a clear correlation between CO₂ and temperature.  

These climate cultists often refer to evidence collected from ice core samples to substantiate their claims.  

To wit: In the 1990s, the classic Vostok ice core sample taken in East Antarctica appeared to show temperature and carbon fluctuations moving in unison. Based on that sample, man-made climate change believers tried to make the case that as CO₂ increased, so, too, did temperature, with no lag time between the two variables. They convinced the scientifically illiterate masses that CO₂ influences temperature.  

But by the early 2000s, new scientific data—this 2001 report by Manfred Mudelsee in the Quaternary Science Reviews (QSR), for instance—made it clear that the exact inverse is true: CO₂ lags temperature. Put another way, temperature changes always precede CO₂ changes.  

Thus, the entire ice core theory was turned on its head by data proving that CO₂ increases as a result of temperature rising, not the other way around. After the temperature rises, it takes, on average, 800 years before CO₂ starts to inch up. This lag is sometimes as much as 2,300 years, other times as little as 300 years.    

The extraordinary thing is that the CO₂ lag is well accepted by climatologists yet is virtually unknown outside these circles. And it is this very same lag that climate charlatans like Al Gore fail to mention when presenting evidence obtained from ice core data.  

Therefore, from the evidence presented above, we can conclude that CO₂, like other greenhouse gases, does notdrive the earth’s climate.  

And that brings us to our next climate-related topic—greenhouse gases.  

Greenhouse Gases  

Gases that trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere are called greenhouse gases (GHG). These are naturally occurring gases that absorb and release infrared radiation within the thermal infrared spectrum. The absorption and release of radiation reduces heat loss from the earth, which in turn causes an increase in atmospheric temperature.  

This reaction is what is commonly referred to as the greenhouse effect. Without these important gases, the earth would be a very cold and uninhabitable place—up to 32°C (57°F) colder, on average.  

By far the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. It constitutes 95 percent of the greenhouse gases by volume and has a dominant effect on our climate.  

Other natural greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide, (N₂O) are present but make up only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases. Methane, for example, constitutes as little as 0.000175 percent of all atmospheric gases and 0.036 percent of all greenhouse gases. And nitrous oxide’s concentration in the atmosphere is even lower, at 0.000034 percent.    

The second most abundant greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. Although CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, it is a natural gas,not a pollutant. It is a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle, without which all vegetation on earth would die. Natural levels of CO₂ are approximately 0.04 percent of the total atmosphere.  

Of the 0.04 percent that is CO₂, 95 percent comes from a combination of volcanic activity, decomposing vegetation, bacteria, and the earth’s oceans.  

Therefore, the human contribution to the overall CO₂ in the atmosphere is only 0.0016 percent. And yet it is this miniscule, insignificant percentage that we are supposed to believe is, in some miraculous way, driving humanity toward a climate catastrophe.  

What an illogical and unsupportable conclusion. Even if all human fossil fuel-burning activity were to cease tomorrow, the world’s oceans and volcanoes would continue to produce the vast majority of all CO₂ found in the atmosphere_.  

And even if humans could drastically reduce the level of CO₂, there would be no significant effect on the climate, as we have already seen from the scientific data presented above. Thus, the belief that CO₂ or any other GHG gas (i.e., N₂O) is the prime driver of all climate in the world is preposterous.   

The notion that carbon dioxide is “bad” is equally preposterous. CO₂ is the essential nutrient that generates all life on earth—and has only beneficial effects.  

For instance, plants are so improved by more CO₂ that greenhouse operators often increase the CO₂ concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This should be no surprise, since plants and animals evolved when CO₂ concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Granted, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields over the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO₂ in the atmosphere.  

In addition, research provided by author, public speaker, and climatologist  Timothy F. Ball from the University of Winnipeg reveals “current levels of 392 parts per million (ppm) are approximately one third the optimum for most plants. Empirical evidence from CO₂ levels injected into commercial greenhouses indicate optimum yields at levels between 1000 and 1200 ppm. Interestingly, this is the average level of the last 300 million years.”  

A Word on Nitrous Oxide  

Recently, nitrous oxide (N₂O) has made headlines by joining carbon dioxide and methane in the climate cultists’ pantheon of dreaded anthropogenic gases. In their view, increasing concentrations of N₂O, like CO₂, will lead to unusual and unprecedented warming and thus result in disastrous consequences for humanity.  

Based on this egregious lie, countries around the world are in the process of destroying conventional farming by reducing or eliminating the use of nitrogen fertilizer and its byproduct, N₂O.  

In Canada, for example, the Liberal regime is determined to reduce the use of nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture. According to Climate Depot, Liberal Party leaders “want Canadian farmers to reduce their emissions from fertilizer, specifically nitrous oxide emissions, to 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030.”  

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the government plans to shut down 3,000 farms for the supposed purpose of preventing catastrophic warming from N₂O emissions.  

That unsubstantiated claim is effectively refuted by the 2022 research paper Nitrous Oxide and Climate by physicist C. A. de Lange et al. In their detailed analysis, Professor de Lange and his team prove that restricting N₂O emissions is not only completely unnecessary but dangerous as well.  

Under the guise of saving the planet, the vilification of N₂O is nothing more than a ploy by the Agenda 2030 conspirators to intentionally create food scarcity. Clearly the UN’s agenda is not about “ending hunger and achieving food security,” as it claims, but about achieving food insecurity worldwide.    

We may conclude from all the scientific evidence presented above—ice core data, satellite data, and field research—that none of the climate changes over the past several millennia can be explained by CO₂ or by any other greenhouse gas_.  Therefore, the fundamental principle that climate change is occurring due to human activity is absolutely false.     

So, you may be asking, how, then, is the earth’s climate changing? If CO₂ and N₂O are not causing climate change, what is?    

What Does Drive the Earth’s Climate?  

For over two decades, scientists have known that solar activity is the primary driver of climate change.  

In 2011, several leading scientists in Canada set out to prove this cause-and-effect relationship. In a first-of-its-kind event, they appeared before the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Energy to challenge the anthropogenic global warming theory. Of the four scientists who appeared at the hearing, three were specialists in the field of climatology.  

Professor of Earth Sciences Ian Clark from the University of Ottawa was the first of the three to address the committee. Here is what he had to say:  

We have not really seen any global warming for the past 10 years. . . .  This is in stark contrast with the IPCC forecast of an increase of some 0.2 degrees per decade.”  

Clark explained that twentieth-century warming is merely one of a series of warm periods over the past 10,000 years. During these intervals, he noted, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere held relatively steady and, what is more, “CO₂ had nothing to do with these warming periods.”

He demonstrated that in the past 500 million years there has been no indication of a correlation between temperature and CO₂—despite the proven lag factor. How could this be? Water vapor, he related, is responsible for the majority of the greenhouse effect—not CO₂ or any other GHG.

Most importantly, Clark said that “unlike CO₂ [correlations], we have very good correlations between various measures of solar activity and temperature.” He then showed the Senate committee some graphs illustrating the effects of increased solar activity on temperature: as solar activity increased, so, too, did global temperature, and vice versa.  

University of Ottawa Distinguished Professor Jan Veizer spoke next:

Many people think the science of climate change is settled. It is not. . . . [The sun] drives the water cycle; the water cycle then generates climate, and climate decides how much jungle, how much tundra and so on we will have, and therefore drives around the carbon cycle. . . .  The sun also warms the oceans that emit CO₂ into the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO₂ is thus the product and not the cause of the climate.

Got that? “Atmospheric CO₂ is thus the product and not the cause of the climate.”

The third scientist to speak at the hearing was Carleton University Professor of Geology Timothy Patterson. He discussed how his field research in the fjords of British Columbia has revealed consistent correlations between solar cycles and climate over the past 5,000 years:

Hundreds of other studies have shown exactly the same thing. . . . The sun, and not variations in carbon dioxide, appears to be the most important driver of climate change. . . . Solar scientists predict that by later in this decade the sun will be starting into its weakest solar cycle of the past two centuries, and this will likely lead to unusually cool conditions on earth, which may persist for decades. . . . It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world.”

So there we have it. Everything that happens in earth’s atmosphere comes down to the sun. It is the driving force behind climate change and has been since the beginning of time. CO₂ is irrelevant—especially CO₂ stemming from human activity.

That said, there is, however, one aspect of the earth’s atmosphere that is being manipulated by intentionally disruptive human actions. One of the terms for this manipulation is “weather modification.”

Weather Modification

Since the differences between “weather” and “climate” are often misunderstood, let us first look at what differentiates weather from climate before we delve into the topic of weather modification—also referred to as Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD).

Unlike climate, which describes the prevailing weather conditions in a vast area of the globe over a long period of time, weather describes the state of the atmosphere at a specific location and at a specific time. Weather refers to certain characteristics of the atmosphere—temperature, wind, precipitation, and humidity.

It is in the arena of weather that some scientists employed by various government agencies have found ways to alter—even weaponize—local weather phenomena to their advantage.

Judging by reports posted on CNN recently, one could be excused for thinking that weather modification—through either “cloud seeding” or Stratospheric Aerosol Injection(SAI) geoengineering—is a newfangled notion. In reality, the origins of this cloud-seeding technology date back to the 1940s.

In the late 1940s, for example, American mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, was researching weather modification through cloud seeding and its potential uses in climatic warfare.

By the 1960s, atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut (and, yes, brother of famed novelist Kurt Vonnegut) had vastlyimproved the cloud-seeding techniques then in use. While at General Electric Research Laboratory, he employed a solid solution of silver iodide crystals and silver bromide in the cloud-seeding mixture. Silver iodide’s hygroscopic qualities insure that water particles quickly bond with silver iodide’s solid crystalline structure.  

Unsurprisingly, the technology discovered by Vonnegut was put to active military use by the American Empire in its war against Vietnam. From 1967 to 1972, the US Air Force ran Operation Popeye, a highly classified rainmaking program deployed in Southeast Asia. The objective of the operation was to hamper the movement of North Vietnamese troops and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh trail network by prolonging the monsoon season.  

From then on, the potential military benefits of wartime deployment of weather modification technologies were self-evident. So self-evident, in fact, that by 1977 the UN was compelled to introduce a convention prohibiting the use of environmental modification technology in warfare. Both the US and the Soviet Union ratified that convention in 1980.  

Nevertheless, in August 1996, a report commissioned by the US Air Force revealed that the US military was still considering and potentially developing “weather warfare”—specifically, ENMOD systems that would offer “the war fighter a wide-range of possible options” (like generating precipitation or fog or storms) in order to defeat or coerce an adversary.  

Since then, it appears that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has also been actively involved in ENMOD research, as this March 2009 report in Science magazine informs us.  

However, out of all the weather modification techniques we have briefly examined, none could wreak more potentially devastating effects on the planet than the aforementioned SAI geoengineering. Using this technology, scientists are attempting to play God by interfering with the natural, interconnected climatic life cycle between the sun and the earth.  

I’m speaking now of the insane scheme outlined in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, January 2019 edition), which proposes to inject aerosols into the stratosphere for a prolonged period of time as a means of mitigating the “significant impacts from climate change.”  

What do the authors mean by “impacts”? They’re borrowing the standard propaganda line from the global warming gospel, which infers or outright states that severe weather events—tropical cyclones, hurricanes, and tornados—are all on the rise because of global warming.  

But beware believing them! A quick search on Marc Morano’s Climate Depot reveals numerous studies presented by scientists from around the world—USA, Norway, Germany, and elsewhere—providing evidence to the contrary. Their data refutes the absurd, politically motivated concept being pushed by President Biden, his fellow Democrats, and other climate alarmists—the flawed concept that the world is currently experiencing a “climate emergency” aka “climate crisis.”  

Therefore, since there really are no significant impacts from human-induced climate change, the entire SAI geoengineering concept must be based on a false premise. Obviously, operating on the basis of a false premise can be dangerous. This technology is still in its infancy, but if allowed to proceed to its full development stage, it could have devastating consequences for the environment on a global scale.  

If the UN sponsors and delegates at the COP27 summit were actually concerned for humanity’s well-being, at the very least they should have discussed the possible impacts that weather modification is having on the environment. Also, they should have dealt with the two real existential crises threatening humankind’s survival: the reduction in male sperm counts and soil degradation around the globe.  

To wit: The world population recently hit eight billion, but birth rates across the world are consistently declining. Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and a leading scholar of reproductive health, projects that sperm counts of the median male are set to hit zero by 2045.

With the introduction in the 1970s of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in plastics, male sperm counts have dropped 50 percent to 60 percent—an average of 1 percent to 2 percent per year—between 1973 and 2011. A recent study from Israel has found that sperm counts worldwide have plunged 62 percent in under fifty years—a decades-long trend that is still accelerating.

COP27 delegates also never discussed the damaging effects GMO crops are having on the environment. (That topic hasn’t been broached at any UN conference, come to think of it.) GMO crops are sprayed with herbicides, such as Bayer’s Roundup, which contain the active ingredient glyphosate, the most ubiquitous cancer-causing herbicide/antibiotic on the planet. Moreover, the devastating effects chemical farming is having on the air we breathe and on the erosion of arable land is also never mentioned at any UN gathering.  

I repeat: If the governments represented at the COP27 summit were actually concerned about saving humanity and wildlife and the environment from all manner of toxins and pollutants, the aforementioned crises would have been at the top of their agenda.  

But, then again, COP has never been about saving the planet or humanity.  

The Real Agenda behind the Man-Made Climate Change Narrative

Since the inception of the aforementioned Club of Rome, a neo-Malthusian think tank founded by David Rockefeller in 1968, the technocrats who seek to rule the planet have been steadily moving humanity toward a neo-feudal dystopian nightmare. For proof, see here and here and here.

In addition to working in or with the UN and its affiliated organs—the World Health Organization (WHO), the IPCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to name a few—these social engineers have been busy harnessing the power of central banks, investment banks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), labor unions, philanthropic foundations, and billionaires in their bid to eliminate what little remains of national sovereignty and to slowly privatize everything on earth (including “natural assets” such as water and entire ecosystems). 

And, although that conquest by the supranational oligarchy and their social engineers has been in the works for years, their timeline for achieving their goals has been greatly accelerated since 2019 with the launch of the COVID plandemic.

The kickoff of the COVID-19 threat represented the first “COVID” chapter of the cabal’s global takeover playbook. The fear that was created by the introduction of an alleged deadly virus provided the perfect pretext for governments around the world, under the direction of the WHO, to suspend the rule of law and implement draconian measures such as curfews, lockdowns, physical separation, biometric surveillance, and mask wearing—steps that normally would never be accepted by the public but that under the guise of “public safety” were implemented virtually unchecked around the world.

With the successful completion of the COVID chapter, the second “save the planet from catastrophic climate change” chapter in the cabal’s playbook is proceeding as planned. For almost thirty years, the UN and its satellite organizations—the IPCC being the one most tied to this article—have been manipulating the temperature record, utilizing flawed computer climate models, and lying with unverifiable statistics in their bid to fool the world’s population into believing there is a coming climate apocalypse.

I cannot overemphasize the fact that both the “COVID” chapter and the “save the planet from catastrophic climate change” chapter are from the same playbook. Meaning, they are not isolated agendas. The COVID narrative was the test run for what we can expect to see roll out in the very near future with regard to the climate swindle.

For example, the plandemic lockdowns, which were so instrumental in destroying the global economy while simultaneously enriching the billionaire class, are once again being gradually unleashed on an unsuspecting public, but this time in the form of “climate lockdowns.”  

Here’s one illustration of what I mean. The unelected officials at the UN and WEF are introducing the concept of the “15-minute city” as a way to “save the planet” from global warming.

Under this new control grid scheme, cities will be divided into 15-minute districts. Residents will be confined to their respective district to conduct daily business through a series of electronic gates located at key roads leading in and out of the city. After a resident registers his motor vehicle details, every movement his vehicle makes will be tracked and traced via smart cameras. The totalitarians will grant passes to people who need—or how about simply want­—to travel to adjacent zones. If, however, a driver exceeds his maximum allotment of crosses between zones, he will be fined.

Already, on November 29, 2022, the UK’s Oxfordshire County approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones—and that’s only the beginning. Similar plans are being drawn up for the cities of Paris, Brisbane, Melbourne, Portland, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires.

It’s also worth emphasizing that all of the measures implemented by the ruling oligarchy in both chapters of the playbook have absolutely nothing to do with the stated intent of either ensuring public safety or saving the planet from harm.

Not convinced? One need only look at the Finance for climate action: Scaling up investment for climate and development document released at the COP27 summit to see what is really at play. The document is filled with the usual globalist predatory institutions—Global Public-Private Partnerships (G3P) working in tandem with central banks and international asset management corporations. 

On page 44, for instance, we find the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), launched at COP26 in 2021. GFANZ, along with its slew of over 550 major financial institutions, including HSBC, BlackRock, State Street, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, to name but a few, is apparently leading the charge to facilitate “the decarbonization of the economy.” But, as Whitney Webb explains in her detailed article, GFANZ’s “plans ultimately amount to a corporate-led coup that will make the global financial system even more corrupt and predatory and further reduce the sovereignty of national governments in the developing world.”

And on page 9 of the document, there’s even the clause about “expanding the use debt/climate/nature swaps”—a euphemism used by the predator class to conceal the theft of a nation’s land and natural resources.  

Slogans such as “sustainable agriculture” or “global net zero greenhouse gas emissions” (read: the de-industrialisation of the developing world) used in the document are still more thinly veiled attempts to obfuscate their true agenda.

In conclusion: The climate change “threat” has no more to do with saving the environment than the propaganda about the scamdemic has to do with keeping people “safe and healthy.” Instead, the real scheme behind the man-made climate change/saving Mother Earth narrative is simply a debt-based scam to monopolize the world’s resources for the benefit of the ruling oligarchy, while simultaneously expanding the framework that will, if allowed to come to fruition, manipulate, regulate, and control every single aspect of our lives.

Is that really the kind of world we want to live in?  

It’s time to lift the veil and expose the lie behind the UN’s catastrophic climate change narrative.

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David Skripac has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Aerospace Engineering. He served as a Captain in the Canadian Forces for nine years. During his two tours of duty in the Air Force, he flew extensively in the former Yugoslavia as well as in Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.

He is the author of a recently published e-book, “Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified,” and a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Venue of COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh. (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified. Are We Witnessing Humanity’s March Toward Extinction? Viruses Are Our Friends, Not Our Foes

Author: David Skripac

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First published on November 1, 2022

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It began with Pong, an early home video game involving two pixelated paddles and a ball that introduced millions to the thrill of gaming. What started as an arcade game in 1972 entered homes during the 1975 Christmas season. Since then, electronic video gaming has blossomed into a graphically stimulating multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, entertaining more than 3 billion gamers globally.

But with explosive popularity has come problems. Like other electronics, gaming consoles are linked to a range of environmental threats, from the metals and plastics required to manufacture them, to the fossil fuel-derived electricity that powers them, to the challenges of recycling the devices after the rapidly deployed next generation displaces them.

Although these problems aren’t unique to consoles, the meteoric growth and sheer scale of the industry make it an obvious target for environmentally conscious improvements. With its engaged and discerning consumer base, the gaming industry could be primed for an eco-revolution.

Gaming consoles sourced in mining and drilling

Like other consumer electronics, game console components are sourced via complex global supply chains that rely upon the mining of critical elements (including metals and rare-earth elements) and the production of new plastics, with parts assembled via highly specialized manufacturing processes — linking the gaming industry to oversized carbon emissions and the devastating environmental and socioeconomic impacts of mining and petroleum extraction.

A new console’s ingredient list is stunningly long. It includes gold, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, lithium, cobalt and cadmium — the mining and purification of which are associated with huge energy and water usage, as well as environmental harm. Extracting and processing ores often releases large quantities of hazardous chemicals, such as arsenic or mercury, into surrounding communities and ecosystems. Also, much mining is done in tropical developing nations, where poorly regulated extraction and processing cause deforestation and pollution.

Mining in Borneo, Indonesia. A new gaming console’s ingredient list includes gold, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, lithium, cobalt and cadmium — the mining and purification of which are associated with huge energy and water usage, as well as environmental harm. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

But it’s not all bad news: “I think that there’s a lot of environmental awareness about the need to replace those materials,” said researcher Claire Barlow at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. Although progress in that direction is being made, both in terms of engineering and environmental policy, “the downside [is] that the replacements tend not to be so efficient.”

Some raw materials, such as tungsten and gold, are predominantly mined in regions convulsed by civil unrest and inequality, and have been linked to human rights abuses. These so-called conflict minerals have attracted international attention, and the largest console manufacturers have taken steps to track, report and reduce the inclusion of conflict-linked metals in their electronics.

However, other elements such as cobalt are not classified as conflict minerals, so are subject to less stringent monitoring and reporting standards, yet are also commonly mined in dangerous and toxic environments, sometimes by children.

Once extracted, many raw materials go through lengthy, complex refining and manufacturing processes, finally culminating in the production of microchips in highly specialized ultra-clean rooms — all requiring massive amounts of energy.

“Whenever you’re talking about CPUs and GPUs, you’re talking about nanometer-scale engineering and that’s always going to be incredibly [energy] intense,” explained Ben Abraham, founder and CEO of Sydney-based AfterClimate Solutions, a games sustainability consultancy.

In 2019, Barlow and colleague John Durrell took apart a Sony PlayStation 4 to perform a life-cycle assessment of its components. They estimated that the production and distribution of a single console emitted 89 kilograms (196 pounds) of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere. “The main weight of it is the electronics and the control units and that’s the major part of the carbon footprint as well,” Barlow said.

A life-cycle assessment of the Sony PlayStation 4 found that production and distribution of a single console emitted 89 kilograms (196 pounds) of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere. Image courtesy of iFixit PlayStation 4 teardown.

In 2019, Microsoft, in an effort to address consumer concern over the carbon footprint of console manufacture, announced the production of 825,000 carbon-neutral Xbox consoles. The company achieved this by making the consoles using renewable electricity and offsetting the remaining carbon emissions through the Sichuan China Biodigesters project, which distributes small-scale biogas plants to low-income rural households in China. “It’s doing something for [reducing] carbon footprints. It’s very worthy, but it’s absolutely nothing to do with [ending other environmental harm due to] the way they’re making these,” said Barlow. It’s also not clear how profitable, or scalable, this approach is.

There’s another major ingredient that goes into consoles: plastics. The plastic shells that encase gaming electronics are sourced from the world’s oil and natural gas frackwells, with virgin synthetic long chain polymers made in highly polluting petrochemical factories. In the U.S., these are disproportionally located encircling low-income ethnic communities — places like Port Arthur, Texas, and along a sweeping crescent of industrialized Gulf Coast known as “Cancer Alley.” But console manufacturers are taking initial steps to reduce the use of virgin plastics in their products. For example, since late 2021, post-consumer recycled plastics make up at least 28% of new Xbox Series S consoles.

Game consoles: Energy-hungry machines

By the time a new console reaches someone’s home, its production has already generated roughly half of the carbon emissions associated with its entire lifespan. Most of the rest goes into producing the electricity to power this energy-hungry machine.

The latest generation of consoles are capable of impressive performance: highly realistic 4K graphics, vast computer-generated imaginary worlds, immersive multisensory feedback. And to power all this, they use around 200 watts of electricity, placing them at the upper end of household appliances. Multiply that by 3 billion gamers globally.

The Green Gaming Project estimated that 5% of residential electricity use in California is consumed by gaming, including play on consoles, desktop computers and mobile phones. Of those three, “gaming consoles were the largest energy users,” said Norman Bourassa, principal scientific engineering associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where the project was conducted.

“That’s an alarming number,” he said, because it puts game consoles “in the realm of the highest energy users, like refrigerators.”

The Green Gaming Project conducted extensive energy usage tests on 10 different gaming consoles available between 2000 and 2016. They found that many consoles used more than 100 watts to play a game. Image courtesy of the Green Gaming Project.

The project calculated that U.S. gamers spend $5 billion annually on energy to power consoles and PCs. While these costs might not yet be putting too much strain on individual gamers’ wallets, “the hidden cost is all the CO₂ that we’ve emitted,” Abraham noted. U.S. consoles churn through roughly 34 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, associated with an estimated 24 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

Energy efficiency has long been a priority for console manufacturers, and the latest generation is far more energy efficient than its predecessors. However, “we’ve used the [energy] efficiency gains to support more powerful consoles rather than reducing the impact of producing them or producing them less often,” said Mike Hazas, professor of information technology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

As a result, “When there’s a generation change there is an energy consumption jump, but there’s also more fidelity, more features,” said Bourassa. As each new chassis is released, manufacturers do tend to make improvements that can save electricity. For example, “in the PS4 [console] full life cycle they managed to reduce the power consumption and maintain the actual fidelity output of the devices. I recall they did a 40% or more improvement in efficiency.”

While each new generation of consoles sees energy efficiency improvements, simultaneous feature enhancements result in a jump in energy consumption. Each new generation also creates a waste problem through designed obsolescence. Image courtesy of Mills et al. (2018).

Energy savings efforts often don’t save much energy

Some efficiency gains are being driven by national and international policy. In the EU, for example, game consoles and other electronic devices are now required to switch to a low-power standby mode limited to 0.5 watts when not in use. Similar legislation, first adopted in California and since implemented in five other U.S. states, requires standby mode to be initiated within 30 minutes of inactivity and limits maximum power usage.

To meet these requirements, the latest generation of consoles was designed to be extremely efficient when in standby mode. But there’s a problem: Many gamers either don’t know about, or don’t use this feature. “The game design, the gamer’s use of the device, and the energy saving settings in the device are not very well coordinated,” explained Bourassa.

For example, the Xbox Series S’s energy-efficient standby mode uses less than 1 watt, but in many regions the device ships with a less efficient but faster-loading setting called “Instant On,” selected by default. With this setting enabled, the console reboots five to 10 seconds faster, but in standby it uses 10 times more electricity.

“Just think how much money that company spent to design that feature,” mused Bourassa. “They did a lot of research to design it, but I personally think they were probably off the mark in terms of improved energy efficiency settings” that aren’t being used by gamers.

A 2021 analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimated that Xbox Series S and Series X consoles in the U.S. will have wasted 4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2025, simply because the energy-efficient standby mode isn’t being used. The report encouraged Xbox to ship consoles with energy saving as the default option globally, not just in regions where regulations require it.

To meet the requirements of national and international enery-saving policies, the latest generation of gaming consoles was designed to be extremely efficient when in standby mode. But the problem is that many gamers either don’t know about, or don’t use this feature. Image by ELLA DON via Pexels (Public domain).

Another mismatch exists within the architecture of the games themselves. “There are some structural reasons in the way the consoles and games are designed that encourage users to just leave them powered on,” Bourassa said. An example: many games have strategically placed checkpoints where users can save their progress. But when between those milestones, users have found a creative way to take a break without losing their work: They open the options menu.

But what many gamers probably don’t realize is that “when those menus are loaded that console is consuming its max power,” Bourassa explained. Console manufacturers and game designers need to “better address gamer behavior, because right now saving their progress in-game is actually serving to bloat the energy consumption from these devices.”

A related issue: game consoles are often used for more than just playing games. Many consoles support video streaming apps such as Netflix and Hulu, but perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re not very efficient at performing these off-spec tasks. A 2013 report by the NRDC found that streaming a movie on a PS3 or an Xbox 360 used 25 times more energy than watching the same movie on a laptop computer. “It’s horrible,” said Bourassa, “A basic computer was able to stream video at a very efficient rate, the consoles were not.” Consumer education could help ease these energy waste issues.

Maximizing the fun per watt

Not all consoles are created energy-equal. For example, when contrasted to the more energy-intensive machines from Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo’s consoles use a fraction of the energy. The hand-held Nintendo Switch, for example, uses just 35 watts to deliver 1080p-quality (high-definition) video games. The console “uses basically as much power as a phone, because it’s got a battery in it so they [need to] prioritize that super-efficient design,” explained Abraham.

The Nintendo Switch “shows what you can do with a lightweight platform,” agreed Hazas, although he acknowledges that the product only “caters to a specific market.” Sony and Xbox users, on the other hand, have come to expect the highest possible performance and top-end graphics technology as standard. Perhaps if users were informed of a product’s energy consumption profile by manufacturers, then gamers might make that a consideration in their purchases.

The Nintendo Switch is a lightweight platform that uses less energy. But it only caters to a specific market. Image by Alvaro Reyes via Unsplash (Public domain).

A major question for the next generation of consoles is whether manufacturers continue down the path of ever-increasing graphics quality. “Companies have this perception that consumers want 4K video, they want [wide] color gamut, they want very intensive color rendering … and all this comes at an energy cost,” Bourassa explained.

But with many current consoles already offering 4k (ultra HD) graphics, manufacturers are pushing up against the limits of human perception. Although the human eye close up can perceive further graphics improvements, for those sitting more than a few feet from the screen, the improvement is imperceptible — which could bring the energy-gobbling high-resolution race to an end.

“What percentage of the gamers out there actually need that high fidelity, and is it really justified for them to continue on chasing that?” questioned Bourassa.

Abraham agreed: 4K appears “to my eyes like looking out a window. If you can’t see [any improvement beyond that], what’s the point” of higher resolution?

Virtual reality (VR) headsets are disrupting this trend by bringing high-resolution graphics to within inches of the user’s face. These peripheral devices are growing in popularity, with around a third of U.S. gamers saying they owned a VR system in 2020. According to Bourassa’s research, VR headsets use between 15% less and 38% more energy, compared to playing on a conventional screen. Those energy savings were achieved by rendering the maximum image resolution only in the center of the user’s field of vision, a technique known as foveated rendering. Advances in eye-tracking technology could enable continued improvements in VR user experience without increasing energy usage.

With many current consoles already offering 4k (ultra HD) graphics, manufacturers are pushing up against the limits of human perception. Image by Alena Darmel via Pexels (Public domain).

Game distribution conundrum: Disc, download or cloud?

A console’s energy use is only part of its environmental story. Users also need to access games, and there are three ways to do that. Traditionally, games were burned onto an optical disc, consuming more virgin plastic and emitting carbon dioxide during distribution. “Making anything physically always has quite a lot of emissions attached to it, it’s always harder than moving around electrons,” said Abraham.

But over the past decade, digital game downloads have risen in popularity. For most games, digital downloads use less energy, but for the largest games, energy use by the internet data centers providing the download can rival the energy needed to produce and transport physical discs. However, with the increasing availability of renewable energy, “there’s a clear pathway … to digital being net-zero,” Abraham said.

The third, and most recent, option for obtaining new games is cloud gaming, which essentially turns a console into a streaming service. “If you play a video game conventionally, all the graphics and everything else [is] rendered locally,” explained Hazas. “Cloud-gaming moves that rendering to a data center and then the data center would stream that video to you.” While this strategy comes with some computational efficiency gains, it also vastly increases the amount of data traffic being sent through the network, which uses large amounts of electricity.

The surprising finding of Hazas’s research is that digital game downloads and updates “can rival the network traffic generated by a cloud-gaming platform,” but it all depends on the size of the game and streaming resolution. He explained that “the network traffic for a 4K game — if you stream it — is much worse,” compared to downloading the game and rendering it on your own console.

Data centers, like this Google center in Georgia, use huge amounts of energy and require regular hardware updates. Although their operations and energy consumption are largely opaque to the public, estimates suggest that cloud streaming and digital game downloads can rival the energy used to physically distribute game discs. Image courtesy of Google.

“The good news is that the big companies … have been really pushing to use more renewables” to power new data centers, Hazas said.

If companies and governments are “committed to provisioning new renewables, to help phase out fossil fuel generation, [then] potentially the sky’s the limit” for energy use, he said. But Hazas warned that it won’t be easy to provide enough renewable energy to meet surging demand in all geographical locations.

Energy use statistics for big Internet data centers often aren’t publicly available, for security and propriety reasons. So it’s difficult to accurately calculate their present energy consumption. “It’s hard to … get a handle on that,” said Hazas, so “one area for improvement overall, both in terms of energy [use], carbon emissions and hardware refreshes, is more industry transparency.”

The greatest energy overuse risk, Hazas suggests, will arise if console makers continue supporting both local gaming and cloud gaming. “You’re potentially heading to a worst of both worlds” situation, with consoles designed to run high-end games often being used to stream video. “By trying to support all styles and all modes of delivery, we end up raising overall [carbon] emissions,” he said.

Coal mining for energy. Experts say the best case scenario would be if gaming companies and governments committed to provisioning new renewables to help phase out fossil fuel generation. But it’s not easy to provide enough renewable energy to meet surging demand in all geographical locations. Image via RawPixel (Public domain).

Planned obsolescence adds to e-waste

New console generations are released every five to 10 years, on average, and planned obsolescence adds to the global e-waste problem, with 50 million metric tons generated annually. “It’s the ethos that there’s going to be a new one [so] they don’t make them to last, and that is just so immoral,” said Barlow.

As with many electronic devices, game consoles are “intrinsically difficult to recycle,” she added, because sealed unit composite construction makes it extremely hard to extract and purify the component metals and minerals. However, e-waste is “a big potential source of [reclaimed] materials and we do need to be looking at this more profoundly,” she said.

Currently, much e-waste ends up in landfills, threatening future ecological and health impacts. Abraham analyzed the chemical composition of the PS4 processing unit and found it contained 54 different elements, including toxic heavy metals such as chromium and lead. Although the analysis didn’t reveal the element quantities in the device, it was “quite shocking to me that they were present,” he said. If these toxic elements find their way out of landfills, leaching into groundwater, for example, they could pose a risk to humans and wildlife.

Fifty million metric tons of e-waste are generated each year. Planned obsolescence in the game console market, where a new generation of consoles is released every five to 10 years, is adding to gaming’s environmental problems. Image by Rwanda Green Fund via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).

The path to environmentally neutral gaming

Awareness of the oversized environmental impact of home electronics has grown rapidly over the past decade among business leaders and consumers. Microsoft has pledged to make its business carbon-negative by 2030, while Sony aims to be carbon-neutral throughout its supply chain by 2040. Both companies, along with Nintendo, say they’re working to improve environmental sustainability and social responsibility at either end of the supply chain. Among these efforts are a phaseout of hazardous chemicals, avoidance of conflict minerals, and use of recycled plastics in production, while developing recycling plans for outdated devices.

International campaigns are having an effect too. The U.N. Environment Programme’s Playing for the Planet, a voluntary alliance of more than 40 console manufacturers and game developers, aims to reduce CO₂ emissions from gaming by 30 million metric tons by 2030.

Still, a carbon-neutral future for console gaming “hangs on factors disappointingly outside the game industry’s control,” Abraham said. “A big part of it comes down to the larger shift to renewables, and the decarbonization of energy systems.” Environmental neutrality would necessitate major changes in the materials and manufacturing methods used to produce consumer electronics — a prospect presently out of reach.

Nevertheless, the trajectory that console manufacturers choose could be heavily influenced by gamers themselves. “If it became the norm that you didn’t buy a new one, but you just replaced some components to upgrade, that would really be transformational,” said Barlow. But, making consoles more repairable and upgradable “takes a real shift in paradigms of customer expectations,” she said.

“We do need a strong consumer voice saying, ‘we don’t need 8K screens’ or ‘I’m OK with the console that I have,’” said Abraham, but this public awareness and pressure will only be effective if it occurs on a large scale. “One person changing  behavior is like a drop in the ocean, so how do we enable those kinds of choices to be easier or better?”

Nintendo and Sony did not respond to Mongabay’s interview request; Microsoft declined to comment beyond their public sustainability reporting and environmental pledges.

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Sources

Aslan, J. (2020). Climate change implications of gaming products and services. (Doctoral dissertation). doi:10.15126/THESIS.00853729

Mills, E., Bourassa, N., Rainer, L.  Mai, J., Shehabi, A., & Mills, N. (2019). Toward greener gaming: Estimating national energy use and energy efficiency potential. The Computer Games Journal, 8(3), 157-178.  doi:10.1007/s40869-019-00084-2

Mills, E., Bourassa, N., Rainer, L., Mai, J., Shehabi, A., & Mills, N. (2018). Green gaming: Energy efficiency without performance compromise. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Retrieved from: https://www.efficientgaming.info/fileadmin/user_upload/2018_Documents/EPC-15-023-Task-7-Report.pdf

Horowitz, N. (2021). Latest game consoles: Environmental winners or losers? Retrieved from Natural Resources Defense Council site: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/noah-horowitz/latest-game-consoles-environmental-winners-or-losers

Marsden, M., Hazas, M., & Broadbent, M. (2020). From one edge to the other: Exploring gaming’s rising presence on the network. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, 247-254. doi:10.1145/3401335.3401366

Featured image: In 2019, Microsoft, in an effort to address consumer concern over the carbon footprint of console manufacture, announced the production of 825,000 carbon-neutral Xbox consoles. Image by Sam Pak via Unsplash (Public domain).

“You see George, you really had a wonderful life. Don’t you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?” — Clarence, from Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life

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This Christmas, we send to you, our dear readers and authors, some love and light as we extend the free distribution of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s PDF book, The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity.

“The evidence amply documented is that the mRNA vaccine has resulted in an upward worldwide tide in mortality and morbidity.

Reports confirm that the COVID-19 vaccines are killing our children. In the UK, “the worst figures in terms of all-cause deaths are among double-vaccinated teenagers.”“

According to Edward Curtin, CRG Research Associate,

“A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom-loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place.”

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Global Research wishes everyone a joyful Christmas!

It’s a wonderful life… live!

With you in truth, peace and solidarity,

The Global Research Team

First published on December 26, 2020

The Factory

“And such should childhood ever be,
The fairy well; to bring
To life’s worn, weary memory
The freshness of its spring.

But here the order is reversed,
And infancy, like age,
Knows of existence but its worst,
One dull and darkened page;—”

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon – The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems  (1835)  

Introduction

The idea of a child-centred Christmas is taken for granted now but in Dickens’ time it was not so assured. A high child mortality rate, child labour, poverty and, a colder, more utilitarian attitude towards children prevailed.  Dickens’ own childhood experiences were bad as he was set to work long hours in  Warren’s Blacking Factory while his father and family languished in a debtors prison. Dickens wanted to write a pamphlet about children but decided a dramatic story would be more effective. His book, A Christmas Carol, while sales were slow initially, went on to become hugely successful and influential, and has never been out of print since.

Dickens at the blacking warehouse, as envisioned by Fred Barnard

In the 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life (directed by Frank Capra), children are associated with family scenes around the hearth but are shielded from potential financial disaster. It’s a Wonderful Life also performed poorly at first, yet has also become a Christmas staple.

The theme of redemption is important to both narratives and both stories turn on the idea of a change of heart for the better by the adults. This change affected the lives of the children in each story yet the children were not aware of the dangers they were in. Thus the concept of childhood as ‘the fairy well’ was well developed, and the ‘freshness of its spring’ being considered a jewel that only grows more beautiful with age.

In this essay I will look at some similarities between the two stories and at what has made for their enduring appeal.

A Christmas Carol

While many differing ideas seem have fortuitously come together for Dickens during the writing of A Christmas Carol the focus on children seems to have been the  most important. Literary influences are given as The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving and a Douglas Jerrold essay from an 1841 issue of Punch, ‘How Mr. Chokepear Keeps a Merry Christmas’.

In The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon Irving writes:

“It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent could bestow.”

Child labourers, Macon, Georgia, 1909

Dickens was very aware of the tragedy of child workers and legislation being introduce to improve their conditions at the time. The idea of social unity that Dickens utilises at the end of A Christmas Carol is expressed in another passage by Irving in The Sketch-Book, as we hear echoes of the medieval hall resounding to the sounds of the fun organised in the ancient midwinter tradition of the Lord of Misrule, with children once again to the fore:

“After the dinner-table was removed the hall was given up to the younger members of the family, who, prompted to all kind of noisy mirth by the Oxonian and Master Simon, made its old walls ring with their merriment as they played at romping games. I delight in witnessing the gambols of children, and particularly at this happy holiday season, and could not help stealing out of the drawing-room on hearing one of their peals of laughter. I found them at the game of blindman’s-buff. Master Simon, who was the leader of their revels, and seemed on all occasions to fulfill the office of that ancient potentate, the Lord of Misrule, was blinded in the midst of the hall. The little beings were as busy about him as the mock fairies about Falstaff, pinching him, plucking at the skirts of his coat, and tickling him with straws.”

Once again the innocent fun of the children is emphasised.  However, in Jerrold’s essay ‘How Mr. Chokepear Keeps a Merry Christmas’, a different kind of father is described, one for whom image is more important than feeling. Mr Chokepear is described as “he himself declares, he is ‘the best of fathers’ — the most indulgent of men”, yet he receives the wishes of a happy Christmas “from lips of ice.” He is the best citizen and best Christian but for one thing:

“We have said all CHOKEPEAR’S daughters dined with him. We forgot: one was absent. Some seven years ago she married a poorer husband, and poverty was his only, but certainly his sufficient fault; and her father vowed that she should never again cross his threshold. The Christian keeps his word. He has been to church to celebrate the event which preached to all men mutual love and mutual forgiveness, and he comes home, and with rancour in his heart—keeps a merry Christmas! […] Gentle reader, we wish you a merry Christmas; but to be truly, wisely merry, it must not be the Christmas of the CHOKEPEARS. That is the Christmas of the belly: keep you the Christmas of the heart. Give—give.”

Dickens is concerned with genuine Christian ideas of Christmas in A Christmas Carol and not hypocritical ones for show only. Therefore, Scrooge is given the opportunity to redeem himself in a genuine way and this genuine transformation means he will be welcomed into the Cratchit’s house and the house of of his nephew for Christmas celebrations.

Thus Dickens was interested in the idea that the bosses should have a genuine change of heart and not a false annual display of good cheer for their friends. Dickens himself was interested in giving practical help to poor children as well.

Coal tub – “A succession of laws on child labour, the so-called Factory Acts, were passed in the UK in the 19th century. Children younger than nine were not allowed to work, those aged 9–16 could work 16 hours per day per the Cotton Mills Act. In 1856, the law permitted child labour past age 9, for 60 hours per week, night or day. In 1901, the permissible child labour age was raised to 12.”

In 1843 Charles Dickens became involved with  with the London Ragged Schools Union and donated funds for their upkeep. They were established to provide free education, food, clothing, lodging and other home missionary services for poor children.

As Claire Tomalin writes:

“From his own deep self he drew the understanding that a grown man may pity the child he had been, and learn from that pity, as Scrooge does. It was also his response to the Ragged School he had visited, and the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission he had read a little earlier, which showed that children under seven were put to work, unprotected by any legal constraints, sometimes for ten to twelve hours a day, inspiring the scene in which the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two stunted and wolfish children, calling them Ignorance and Want.” [1]

Of course, while the children may be the focus of Dickens’ Christmas main story, they must not be aware that they are, thus retaining the sacred concept of childhood. Therefore in the narrative the children are affected only indirectly through the changed habits of the adults. This was Dickens’ strategy – to show that the cruelty of the world and the preciousness of childhood could exist side by side. Thus the adults could change their realm, positively affecting the children’s realm, without the two realms interacting with each other, as happened in Dickens’ own childhood. Dickens’ story also added to the growing belief in the importance of childhood not only for children but also for stable adults as Scrooge was shown to have had a lonely childhood himself.

Ignorance and Want from the original edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843

Many film versions have been made of A Christmas Carol from Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1901) to A Christmas Carol (2018), a contemporary retelling of the story set in Scotland.

It’s a Wonderful Life

Another popular film with Christmas visions is Frank Capra’s 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life. Almost one hundred years after Dickens’ novel was published, Capra’s film shows a very different kind of vision of society. Rather than the atomised society of the poor in Dickens’ London, Capra shows a community being pulled and pushed in different directions by individuals with very different objectives. George Bailey faces off Henry F. Potter who is trying to take over the town with cheap, exploitative housing schemes and by buying up everything of value in the town.

As Bailey faces bankruptcy of the Bailey Brothers’ Building and Loan through the forgetfulness of his uncle (mislaying a lot of money), Potter seizes the opportunity to destroy Bailey’s bank and take over the town completely. When Bailey arrives home distraught he has angry words with all of his children. They become very upset and burst into tears as they have no idea what has come over their normally loving father.

As a result of this disaster, Bailey wishes he had never been born and is shown a vision of what the town would have become had Bailey’s community spirit and camaraderie with his clients not existed: a mean place, decadent and aggressive with no community feeling or community spirit (like Scrooge, mean, aggressive with no community feeling or community spirit). After the negative scenario he experiences, Bailey rushes home to his wife and apologises to each of his children in turn for his earlier outburst thus keeping the adult and child domains separated, while the adults sort out adult problems.

Unlike Scrooge, in It’s a Wonderful Life the individualist money-pincher Potter is not considered important enough to go through the process of redemption (while he is portrayed as a Scrooge type figure), because  the poor are now portrayed as existing in a community which can ultimately defend itself from Potter’s attacks: by coming together and using collective action to help Bailey. They look to each other for help and not to the rich bankers.

Although both Scrooge and Bailey lend money, Scrooge gives out money to benefit himself while Bailey gives out money to benefit the community. In the earlier ideology of A Christmas Carol, the wealthy must look after or take pity on the helpless poor. However, while Scrooge must save himself, the community saves Bailey.

George Bailey (James Stewart), Mary Bailey (Donna Reed), and their youngest daughter Zuzu (Karolyn Grimes) in It’s a Wonderful Life.

In A Christmas Carol the poor are everywhere but have no real consciousness of their poverty and struggle against poverty despite the odds. In It’s a Wonderful Life the poor are depicted as belonging to a community but gradually grow more conscious of their weak position and unite to defend themselves.

They develop a growing consciousness of the power of the community to use collective action to fight back against those who would keep them poor. As a result, rather than being solely concerned with their own money and future as was shown earlier in the film, they see the importance of community for their own self-protection just in time, and turn up at Bailey’s house to lend, give, donate any money they have to save the bank and their own future. Thus in It’s a Wonderful Life, its the community that redeems itself.

Both Dickens’ book and Capra’s film carried radical messages for their time. Only two years after A Christmas Carol, German philosopher Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, a book written during Engels’ 1842–44 stay in Manchester, important as the city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Engels believed that Carlyle was the only British writer who had taken account of the poor and so was not yet familiar with A Christmas Carol. Meanwhile Marx saw Dickens as one of a few ‘splendid’ fiction writers in England, “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.”

While It’s a Wonderful Life depicts the benefits of a community uniting, it was declared suspect by an unnamed FBI agent who watched the film as part of a larger FBI program aimed at detecting and neutralizing Communist influences in Hollywood. The agent believed that ‘communists’ used two common tricks to ‘inject propaganda into the film’, as Kat Eschner writes:

“These two common “devices” or tricks, as applied by the Los Angeles branch of the Bureau, were smearing ‘values or institutions judged to be particularly American’ – in this case, the capitalist banker, Mr. Potter, is portrayed as a Scroogey misanthrope – and glorifying ‘values or institutions judged to be particularly anti-American or pro-Communist’ – in this case, depression and existential crisis, an issue that the FBI report characterized as a ‘subtle attempt to magnify the problems of the so-called ‘common man’ in society.'”

The organization handed over these incredibly vague results of its investigation to HUAC (House of UnAmerican Activities) which could have led to McCarthyist Hollywood witch hunts. However, the HUAC decided not to follow up on the smears.

Conclusion

In both A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful life, a common theme is the idea that people can change for the better and have a happier life by questioning their own selfish values and motives and by realising that there are greater forces at work which must be reckoned with for survival. Scrooge’s isolation from friends, family and employees led him to fear a lonely death and Marley’s fate. Bailey’s customers also realise that looking after number one might allow them to get by on the level of their own petty concerns, but when something seriously threatening to their homes and families appears on the horizon they are able to club together to prevent the worst. Ultimately it is the children who benefit as the adults unite and solve problems rather than sharing the burden with their children, and in the long term that also makes for a more stable community.

The idea of sheltering children from the cruel world, rather than throwing them head first into it, is still an important issue in the world’s poorest countries today where around one in four children are believed to be engaged in child labour.

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

Note

[1] Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (Viking: London, 2011) p149

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The situation with human rights and the freedom of speech in the Baltic states worsens day by day. The persecution of the opposition began long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though. During the pandemic people had been arrested for “the distribution of gossip”. However, since the events of February 24 2022, the situation has worsened dramatically. In Latvia over 20 people have been arrested and over two hundred people have been fined and interrogated for expressing their views. The similar situation is noticeable in other Baltic States.

After more than 30 years of brainwashing by the ruling class it is clear now that the majority of the population, especially youth, is politically unmotivated. Around 15% of the population do not have the right to vote – they hold an “Alien Passport” because they do not have any ancestors that lived in Latvia before 1940. Media freedom is non-existent and government propaganda is everywhere. Therefore the result of the last election is again a victory of pro-US forces.

The attack on working class rights is still ongoing. Recently, the government has decreased the period and the amount of unemployment benefits. Trade unions are very weak to the extent of non-existent. Their leaders are making dirty deals with the government behind the backs of teachers, medical personnel, policemen, etc. The only real activities by trade unions are the distribution of travel and recreation vouchers and the organisation of festive events.

Failing to address social and economic problems of yet another capitalist crisis, the so-called leaders are proposing the only playing card – nationalism, which has led to extreme russophobia. Despite around 40% of the Russian-speaking population, after years of bans and restrictions in public use, there is now a plan to ban it from school programmes altogether.

The communist symbols are banned. There is a law “banning the glorification of communist past” and “denying the Soviet occupation”. Several people are being tried for this.

Latvia now spends more percentage of GDP to help the Ukrainian military than any other country in the world. At the same time, there is a deterioration of health and education systems. The ongoing privatisation and liberalisation lead to more payable services and rising prices for the basic needs. More and more people cannot afford different kinds of necessary medical treatment. Others have to wait for months or even years to be treated. The lack of medical staff, teachers, firemen, etc is becoming alarming. The population is experiencing deteriorating living conditions. The demographic situation is the worst in 100 years.

The Latvian government has started the massive demolition of monuments related to WW2. The biggest memorial to the fighters against nazism in the Baltic States was demolished, despite the fact that polls have shown a negative attitude towards the demolition. Furthermore, the monument was described by the national architect society as “of historical and cultural importance”. Some of the demolished monuments were actually erected to the people killed by Nazis and to the local partisans. They have even demolished the cemetery of soldiers – just scraped by an excavator. The Day of Victory over Nazism is now officially a Commemoration to the victims of the Genocide against Ukranian people while the government officials commemorate the war victims at the memorial to Waffen SS legionnaires.

The corrupt government sells national sovereignty in order to serve foreign interests, forcing the country to join the conflicting imperialistic camp and making its own populations hostage to a potential military conflict. In order to protect this policy from protests of workers and the public in general, they enforce control mechanisms and restrictions of freedom of speech and expression without any hesitation.

The detainment of people without proper trial and medical help, and with no lawyer provided must be stopped immediately.

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Anton Klindzans is a Latvian blogger, former policy advisor for a left group in the European Parliament where he worked for 9 years. He publishes regularly on different platforms.

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With the announcement of the formation of Israel’s 37th government, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is calling on the Canadian government to expel the Israeli ambassador to demonstrate that it is distancing itself from Israel’s new far-right regime. CJPME notes that the coalition led by Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu, who enshrined Israel’s deeply racist Nation-State Law and whose plans to annex significant portions of the occupied West Bank remain “on the table,” is propped up by even more extreme, far-right elements. The Religious Zionism party (including Jewish Power), whose leaders have promoted vigilante violence, racial segregation, the annexation of the West Bank and the deportation of “disloyal” Israelis and Palestinians alike, is the third largest party in the Knesset and a major coalition partner. Expelling the Israeli ambassador would send a clear and unambiguous signal that the new government’s stated intentions to violate human rights and international law are completely unacceptable.

“Israel’s new far-right government poses a real and immediate threat to the safety and security of Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “Prime Minister Trudeau must expel Israel’s ambassador and prove that Canada doesn’t hold ‘shared values’ with apartheid and a regime of Jewish supremacy,” added Bueckert.

CJPME notes that Israel’s new government has put the lives of Palestinians into the hands of the most extreme far-right and racist figures in Israeli politics. As Israel’s new ‘National Security Minister,’ Jewish Power’s Itamar Ben Gvir will have control over policing agencies which operate in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), as well as development in the Galilee and the Naqab/Negev where Israel has been seeking to diminish the presence of Palestinian Arab and Bedouin communities. Meanwhile, Religious Zionism’s Bezalel Smotrich has been given unprecedented control over the infrastructure of occupation, putting him in control of policy regarding both Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli human rights groups Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and the Israeli Center for Public Affairs have warned that the signed coalition agreements between Likud and Religious Zionism involve measures that amount to “annexing the West Bank to Israel and strengthening the apartheid regime in the West Bank.”

“We must come to terms with the reality that this far-right government is fundamentally a continuation of Israel’s ongoing racist trajectory,” added Bueckert. CJPME notes that the former ‘change’ government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid oversaw the extrajudicial execution of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the persecution of leading Palestinian civil society organizations, an aggressive and lethal military offensive against Gaza, the rapid expansion of illegal settlements, and an escalation of violence making 2022 among the most deadly years for Palestinians in the West Bank. CJPME argues that any political opposition to the new government in power must also be extended to the underlying structures of domination and oppression which have violated the rights of Palestinians for many decades, which are increasingly understood as apartheid.

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How did our CIA become so immensely powerful and so immensely corrupt?

This book tells a story that feels essentially relevant to me. Nevertheless, it is a story that has not been incorporated into narratives of any of the skeptical and well-informed independent journalists whom I most respect. It is 20 years old now, and the book is as exceedingly readable as it is meticulously documented.

Through wars of conquest beginning in the 19th Century, Japan systematically looted staggering quantities of gold from China, Korea, and SE Asia.

Anticipating defeat in WWII, members of the Japanese imperial family sent the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Chichibu, to bury gold and jewels at dozens of remote sites on occupied Philippine islands. At the conclusion of the war, the driver of Chichibu’s jeep was captured and tortured to disclose the locations of some of the underground sites.

In the Seagraves’ account, the amount of gold is many hundreds of thousands of tons, equivalent in value to the GDP of the entire world today. A portion of this loot funded the Black Eagle Trust, a secret account used to create the CIA and support its clandestine operations, fomenting wars and overthrowing popular governments around the world on behalf of the world’s largest corporations. The M-Fund was used to kickstart “democracy” in Japan by supporting the election of war criminals and reliable anti-communists.

Another major share passed through the personal holdings of Ferdinand Marcos, an American-supported President and then dictator in the Philippines from 1965 – 1986. Other beneficiaries included evangelist Sun Myung Moon, VP Richard Nixon, mobster Meyer Lansky, and Pope Pius XII. In the Seagraves’ story, everyone who came in contact with this treasure was corrupted, participating in murder, treachery, and unspeakable cruelty.

My candidate for the greatest evil in the world today would be the CIA. Whether or not you agree, you have to admit it’s a mystery how this organization acquired so much power so fast. Formed in 1947 from the contained WWII spy operation called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA was already overthrowing foreign governments in 1953, 1954, and 1958, and the American government in 1963. It was the subject of warnings issued by President Truman and by President Eisenhower as he departed in 1961.

By the time President Kennedy left office, it was the CIA that escorted him out, and too abruptly for him to have a chance to warn us. He had exclaimed (after he had been deceived in the Bay of Pigs fiasco) he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” Who better to place in charge of the Warren Commission investigation into his murder than Allen Dulles — who had been CIA director until JFK fired him after the Bay of Pigs?

The book is meticulously referenced with two CDs full of original documents (no longer available on the Web, to the best of my knowledge). But even more convincing is the level of narrative detail that they offer, detail that may not be relevant to the larger historical perspective, but which makes the volume fun to read, as they validate the Seagraves’ sources.

Their two best sources are Ben Valmores and Robert Curtis, both of whom they interviewed extensively. Ben had been a Filipino boy when he was kidnapped by Japanese military officers and recruited to be valet and personal servant to Prince Takeda, cousin of the Emperor. Though he was kept against his will, he was treated well and eventually came to be trusted by the royal family. As the final surrender of Gen Yamashita was foreseen, Prince Takeda entrusted Ben with a trunk full of maps with coded instructions for locating all 175 treasure vaults. Ben faithfully buried the trunks as he had been instructed, and later resisted many attempts to obtain them by trickery until after Takeda’s death in 1992.

Curtis was an American mining engineer, hired by Marcos to track down and recover Yamashita’s gold, then re-smelt it into bars that could not be chemically distinguished from the product of Filipino gold mines. Marcos originally promised Curtis a share of the haul, but betrayed him once he had served his purpose.

Another source for the book was court records from the case of Roxas vs Marcos, Hawaii 1998. Rogelio Roxas was a private Filipino citizen and amateur treasure hunter. From the court findings:

In 1961, Roxas met a man named Fuchugami in Baguio City, who claimed that his father had been in the Japanese army and had drawn a map identifying the location of the legendary “Yamashita Treasure.” …Roxas organized a group of partners and laborers to search for the treasure and obtained a permit for the purpose from Judge Pio Marcos, a relative of Ferdinand. Judge Marcos informed Roxas that, in accordance with Philippine law, a thirty-percent share of any discovered treasure would have to be paid to the government.

…After approximately seven months of searching… the group broke into a system of underground tunnels…Roxas discovered a gold-colored buddha statue, which he estimated to be about three feet in height. The statue was extremely heavy; it required ten men to transport it to the surface using a chain block hoist, ropes, and rolling logs. Although he never weighed the statue, Roxas estimated its weight to be 1,000 kilograms, or one metric ton. Roxas directed his laborers to transport the statue to his home and place it in a closet.

For context, a ton of gold at today’s price is worth about $50 million, not counting the museum value of an ancient work of art. The court document goes on to relate that Roxas’s house was raided by government agents; Roxas himself was arrested and tortured; just at this time, Marcos declared martial law and installed himself as permanent head of the Philippine government after his elected term should have expired. The testimony of Robert Curtis is cited. Curtis had been hired by Marcos originally to process the gold and make it saleable without suspicion. In the end, Marcos didn’t treat Curtis much better than he treated Roxas, and that may have motivated him to testify for Roxas as plaintiff.

Five years after his death, the Hawaiian jury awarded $43 billion to the heirs of Rogelio Roxas, the largest award in the history of jurisprudence. As the Seagrave book went to press, they were still trying to collect it in 2003.

The man who tortured Price Takeda’s driver later became a kingpin for distribution of the gold. He was Severino Santa Romana, or “Santy”, but was known as Jose Antonio Diaz and a dozen other pseudonyms as he opened personal accounts in 42 countries around the world, with private understandings about who really had control of the gold. He was known as an agent of the American CIA, but the Seagraves make the case that he was a double agent whose first loyalty was to the Vatican.

The involvement of the Pope was discreet and indirect. The Vatican held deposits of Nazi gold, which were retained after the war, and received some of Santy’s accounts. After the War, the Italian electorate was leaning too close to socialism for the taste of our CIA, and Operation Gladio was organized to steer Italian politics in a more favorable direction, using bribes, assassinations, and psy-ops. Much of the fuel for this project was siphoned through the Vatican, which made common cause in part because religion is anathema in communist regimes, and in part for reasons of realpolitik.

Meyer Lansky profited through casinos he operated in the Bahamas, used to launder Nazi loot as well as Yamashita’s gold on behalf of the CIA. The connection was made by Paul Helliwell, who served as global banker for the OSS and later continued in that role for the CIA. Helliwell and Santy’s operation was code-named The Umbrella, with 176 bank accounts, all coded and accessed independently by secret agreements.

Through the 1950s, the M-Fund was administered by Americans and secretly deployed to support the right wing of Japanese politics as a bulwark against communism in Asia. Then Vice President Nixon turned the whole $23 billion over to the (temporarily) ruling Japanese politicians in exchange for a kickback to his own 1960 presidential campaign. Nixon didn’t succeed in 1960, but the 23 billion 1960 dollars has mushroomed in value, and the M-Fund continues to support corruption and distort democracy in Japan today.

And Sun Myung Moon? After Marcos was removed from power in 1986, some American entrepreneurs were emboldened to return to the Philippines for treasure-hunting activities. One group called Nippon Star was convened and equipped by right-wing groups in America, including the John Birch Society and Moon’s Unification Church. They recovered a gold-laden freighter that the Japanese Navy had deliberately sunk in Manila Harbor when it became clear that its cargo could not be delivered to Tokyo.

The Seagraves repeat stories of individuals who recovered billion-dollar shares of Yamashita’s gold and deposited it in vaults of the world’s largest and best known banks. One after another, they returned to reclaim their deposits, only to be told that their certificates were forgeries. The Seagraves conjecture that banks held onto the gold and that bank executives converted the loot to their own accounts.

There may be a 9/11 connection. E.P Heidner reports (not mentioned by the Seagraves) that the Black Eagle Trust held $240 billion in U.S. Treasury notes, purchased with Yamashita gold and redeemable on 12 September 2001. In the days following the WTC attacks, the standard procedures for recording bond transactions were suspended, and this wealth was delivered into private hands without a paper trail.

By the time Santy died in 1974, his liver and his sanity had been destroyed by alcohol. He had never lived lavishly, despite the vast wealth under his control. His many identities and reliably subservient behavior make me think of the CIA’s MKUltra program of mind control, a speculation that is my own and not mentioned in the Seagraves’ account.

In the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, why was the US able to set up a system of world trade based on a gold-backed dollar (at a fixed $35 per oz)?

Why was Japan absolved of making reparation payments to foreigners who were raped and tortured and enslaved during the War, while Germany, in much worse shape financially, was expected to pay reparations?

Why was the OSS — which had been created explicitly to provide intelligence for the Second World War — expanded and extravagantly funded after the war had ended? How did large banks come to wield corrupt and surreptitious power in world affairs? All these questions may have a single answer.

The most important story (as we’ve come to expect) is the one we know least about. Some ginormous, unimaginable quantity of gold was used to kickstart the CIA. Money for bribes and dirty tricks and “wet work” and the temptation of officials, domestic and foreign, who might otherwise be inclined toward honesty. Money to overthrow duly elected leaders and support ruthless dictators in lavish style. This year, the son of Ferdinand Marcos returned to power in the Philippines.

My suspicion is that the American Empire with its worldwide promotion of international business interests above all else is built on Yamashita’s gold.

We have grown up as a nation respected for our free institutions and our ability to maintain a free and open society…The last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people…It is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.
— Harry S Truman, in a Washington Post Editorial published 59 years ago today

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***

On December 8, The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington hosted a reception in honor of the 31st anniversary of their Armed Forces. Interestingly, the invitation itself displayed the logos of major military contractors Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney as the event’s sponsors – right below the official Ukrainian emblems and the Ambassador’s name.

These are all American defense and arms corporations and some of the world’s largest weapons and aerospace manufacturers. Half of Lockheed Martin’s annual sales, for instance, are to the US Department of Defense. These four companies have in fact produced many of the anti-tank missiles and the missile defense systems Washington has been sending to Kiev this year. US President Joe Biden’s administration has committed around $19.3 billion so far in military assistance to Ukraine. The Ukrainian conflict has therefore been very good for the event sponsors’ businesses, even amid the supply chain issues related to the pandemic and semiconductors  shortages.

Regarding the aforementioned logos, a think tank expert quoted by journalist Jonathan Guyer remarks that “It’s really bizarre to me that they would put that on an invitation.”  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Mat Duss in turn says that

“sustaining American popular support is absolutely essential for Ukraine’s continued defense. 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.”

Guyer writes on how Lockheed has announced that it will go from manufacturing 2,100 Javelin missiles a year to 4,000 (as they are highly on demand in Ukraine). The corporation’s stocks have climbed about 38% this year. President Biden himself, in May, told Lockheed’s workers at the company’s factory in Alabama that

“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. And every worker in this facility (…) is directly contributing to the case for freedom.”

Corporate interests in the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine are so blatant and obvious that some critics and activists have been calling it a McProxy War.

Their importance is very well exemplified by the ambivalent role played by a billionaire such as Elon Musk, who could very well be called an American oligarch, even though the Western press only describes Russian billionaires this way. Musk itself is the very face of the convergence of Silicon Valley and defense contractors.

I’ve written on how Washington today wages an aggressive subsidy war (for US companies) against its own European allies. By prolonging the unwinnable conflict in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis in Europe (with the high energy costs), Washington thus renders their rival European companies uncompetitive. In this context, the US subsidies package turns out to be a nail in the coffin for Europe’s industry. I’ve also written on how, besides the more visible American geopolitical-military strategies aimed at encircling Russia,  there is also a geoeconomic dispute and an energy angle to the crisis in Ukraine. Government corruption and private interests are entangled with US geopolitics and geoeconomics: Washington has always wanted to have Europeans buying American LNG and has always worked against any Russian-European gas cooperation.

One should add to this game the interests of defense contractors. The world of such contractors, including the Silicon Valley, and its key players is heavily interwoven with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. It in fact makes up not the only so-called “military-industrial complex”, as US President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it in his famous 1961 Farewell Address, but also the deep state. These two concepts are related and should be taken seriously. Conspiracy theories apart, according to political scientist George Friedman, there has been a US deep state inscribed in the country’s civil service since at least 1871 – and it has grown in size and power with the rise of independent agencies such as the CIA. University of Wisconsin–Madison historian Alfred W McCoy in turn claimed, in a 2017 interview to the Intercept, that since the September 11 terrorist attacks the US intelligence community responded in such a way that it “has built a fourth branch of the U.S. government” that is “in many ways autonomous from the executive, and increasingly so.”

Rutgers University-Camden associate professor of history Katherine C. Epstein, in her 2014 book “Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain” details the history of how, at the turn of the twentieth century, with the development of the self-propelled torpedo, both the US and the UK came up with a new paradigm by investing in private sector development and research. This changed property rights and national security legislations, thereby intersecting industrialization, geoeconomics and geopolitics.

Experts like Jenna Bednar and Mariano-Florentino Cuélla, who talk about the American “fractured superpower”, and like Nina Hachigian, who coined to term “formestic” to describe the intertwining of foreign and domestic policy, have focused on the role played by subnational actors such as US cities and States in shaping Washington’s foreign policy. However, much attention must also be paid to private corporations and contractors interests as well as its close relations with the US agencies, that is, the American industrial-military complex and its deep state.

The aforementioned four weapons corporations are not just logos in a Ukrainian embassy’s invitation. They are part of a complex web of interests and they too shape Washington’s foreign policy. To sum it up, they have much to gain from US proxy wars – even at the expense of global peace.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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***

Albin Kurti, the prime minister of Kosovo, blames Russia for the rise in tension in the northern part of the partially recognized country. Kurti said Russia has turned its attention to the tiny country formerly ruled by a KLA terrorist, Hashim Thaçi. He resigned to face war crime charges in The Hague. Thaçi and other politicians are accused of murder, enforced disappearances, persecution, and torture of Serbs.

The Hague war crimes tribunal sentenced Salih Mustafa (M. Albright's friend), the former head of the Kosovo KLA, to 26 years in prison (participation in murders, torture and other crimes).
Ex-president of Kosovo Thaci is also awaiting trial in custody.https://t.co/XEnRllL8wL pic.twitter.com/uG2Zf6RJau

— Blog investigatívnej žurnalistiky (@investigativeSK) December 16, 2022

Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said the region is on the brink of war.

Russia is a convenient scapegoat now that the USG and its propaganda machine have spent months demonizing Putin and telling lies about what is happening in Ukraine. It’s an easy out for Kurti and Pristina. He can shift blame to Russia while ignoring the complaints of a persecuted Serb minority.

Meanwhile, NATO’s KFOR is ready to insert itself in the latest dispute between Serbians and Albanian Kosovars.

We are closely monitoring the situation in northern #Kosovo. @NATO_KFOR  has the capability & personnel to provide a safe and secure environment & freedom of movement for all communities under our #UN mandate UNSCR 1244 of 1999. pic.twitter.com/jalILscp65

— @NATO – KFOR (@NATO_KFOR) December 16, 2022

“Kosovo’s NATO-led international peacekeeping force KFOR said it is still considering the Serbia’s (sic) request to send its own military to the north of the country as exacerbated tensions enter the 12th day,” reports Euractiv.

KFOR prepares for Kosovo. The Western Balkans boiling pot. pic.twitter.com/0FNtc2LzXR

— AgenforInternational 🇪🇺 (@agenfor) December 22, 2022

Considering NATO’s track record in Kosovo following the imposition of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, any KFOR police action in northern Kosovo—where local Serbs have set up roadblocks in response to the arrest of a Serbian police officer by Pristina—will be resented, possibly forcefully resisted.

After Yugoslavia was bombed into submission by USG president Bill Clinton and NATO in 1999 and the country was subsequently carved up, NATO established its KFOR operation in Kosovo to “keep the peace”—instead, the unit engaged in human trafficking of women and children. They became prostitutes and sex slaves for KFOR troops. The Guardian reported in 2004,

In a report on the rapid growth of sex-trafficking and forced prostitution rackets since Nato troops and UN administrators took over the Balkan province in 1999, Amnesty said Nato soldiers, UN police, and western aid workers operated with near impunity in exploiting the victims of the sex traffickers.

According to Amnesty International,

Since the deployment in July 1999 of an international peacekeeping force (KFOR) and the establishment of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) civilian administration, Kosovo has become a major destination country for women and girls trafficked into forced prostitution. Women are trafficked into Kosovo predominantly from Moldova, Bulgaria and Ukraine, the majority of them via Serbia. At the same time, increasing numbers of local women and girls are being internally trafficked, and trafficked out of Kosovo.

Because the scandal was a major embarrassment for NATO and KFOR, it wasn’t widely covered by the corporate media.

The KFOR mission was initially dubbed “Operation Joint Guardian,” but with guardians like KFOR—whoremongers, slavers, torturers—Kosovo is better off without international “peacekeepers.”

It remains to be seen if Kosovo’s Security Force, established in 2009 and slated to take over from KFOR, will carry on the tradition of its corrupt and degenerate progenitor.

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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.

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***

An eight-car collision on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) is now being blamed on Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) assistance system. The crash took place in the Bay Area in California on I-80 and left one person hospitalized and eight others with minor injuries.

According to Reuters, a California Highway Patrol report on the incident says that a Tesla Model S traveling on I-80 at 55 mph crossed several lanes of traffic and then slowed abruptly to just 20 mph, at which point it triggered the crash as other cars still traveling at highway speed had no chance to avoid the slow-moving electric vehicle.

An eight-car collision on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) is now being blamed on Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) assistance system. The crash took place in the Bay Area in California on I-80 and left one person hospitalized and eight others with minor injuries.

According to Reuters, a California Highway Patrol report on the incident says that a Tesla Model S traveling on I-80 at 55 mph crossed several lanes of traffic and then slowed abruptly to just 20 mph, at which point it triggered the crash as other cars still traveling at highway speed had no chance to avoid the slow-moving electric vehicle.

As Tesla expanded its beta program for FSD, the system has been implicated in more and more crashes, and in late 2021 the automaker had to issue a recall for cars running firmware linked to so-called “phantom braking” events, where bad software inappropriately triggered the cars’ automatic emergency braking systems.

That’s just one of a litany of problems associated with Tesla’s assistance systems—which have spawned at least 38 NHTSA investigations by this summer, according to Electrek. Ire directed towards FSD and Tesla’s attitude towards deploying the system on public roads even led to a senate candidacy this year.

FSD is an important revenue stream for Tesla. Earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk told investors that it “will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla,” and the company has repeatedly increased the price of the software package, which now costs $15,000.

Originally, access to the beta software was by invitation only, and using it depended upon maintaining a high score in a driver-monitoring system. But Tesla opened the beta up to any car with the right hardware on the same day as the eight-car crash.

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Jonathan is the automotive editor at Ars Technica, covering all things car-related. Jonathan lives and works in Washington, D.C. EMAIL [email protected] // TWITTER @drgitlin

Featured image is from Aurich Lawson/Tesla/Ars Technica

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***

In a major win for pollinators and other wildlife, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit today ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to protect endangered species from the bee-killing insecticide sulfoxaflor. The court held that the agency’s 2019 decision to allow new uses of sulfoxaflor across more than 200 million acres of pollinator-attractive crops violated the Endangered Species Act.

Today’s ruling comes in response to a legal challenge to the expanded use of the insecticide by the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Biological Diversity.

In a strongly worded decision, the court stated,

“When an agency deliberately ignores Congress’s legislative command, it undermines the will of the people and ultimately our constitutional structure of government.”

The court wrote that by routinely registering pesticides without protecting endangered species, which then prompts the public to sue to gain those protections, the EPA is “engaging in a whack-a-mole strategy for complying with the ESA.”

“For far too long, EPA has bent to the pesticide industry’s desire to get their toxic chemicals to market as quickly as possible,” said Sylvia Wu, a senior attorney at Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case. “Today the court told EPA, ‘No more: Congress tasked the agency with protecting endangered species and the environment at-large, not just the interests of the pesticide companies.’”

In today’s ruling the court gave the agency a 180-day deadline to provide the public with an opportunity to comment on the expanded use of the insecticide.

The EPA originally approved sulfoxaflor in 2013, but the 9th Circuit vacated the approval for failing to comply with the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. FIFRA requires that all pesticide applications must show that the pesticide will not cause “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment.”

The EPA issued the 2019 approval to expand use of sulfoxaflor on a wide range of crops that attract bees, including soybeans, cotton, strawberries, squash and citrus. The agency action came despite the fact that its own scientists found the insecticide could threaten honeybee colonies and other pollinators.

The EPA also weakened the few spraying restrictions it previously had in place to protect native pollinators and other wildlife, eliminating all requirements for buffers even during aerial spraying.

The EPA admitted to the court that it had not considered any of sulfoxaflor’s effects on species protected by the Endangered Species Act. The agency belatedly issued a draft endangered species assessment earlier this summer. In the draft assessment, the EPA found sulfoxaflor is potentially putting 24 species of insects in jeopardy of extinction, including the Karner blue butterfly and American burying beetle.

“This decision is a huge win for monarch butterflies, rusty patched bumblebees and all the other struggling populations of insects and birds constantly under threat from harmful insecticides,” said Stephanie Parent, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity and co-counsel on the case. “It’s long past time for the EPA to take meaningful action to protect our most imperiled wildlife and put protections in place for endangered species before approving use of toxic pesticides on millions of acres of crops.”

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***

Faced with criticism on whether the United States should trumpet its “unbreakable bond” with an incoming Israeli government headed by fascist parties, lawbreakers and homophobes, the Biden administration has squirmed.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken observed defensively this month that Washington would “gauge the government by the policies and procedures, rather than individual personalities”.

What suffering might have been avoided had the US previously been prepared to judge Israel based on policy? Not least, the necessary pressure might have been exerted to prevent 2022 from becoming the bloodiest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005.

But, despite what Blinken says, Israeli governments are never held to account for policy, whether it be illegal settlement-building, the 15-year siege of Gaza and its regular bombardment, or house demolitions in East Jerusalem.

Instead, US administrations have been only too ready to accept from Israel’s leadership any security rationalisation or placatory promise – and declare the most unlikely Israeli prime ministers “peacemakers“.

But Blinken’s observation was preposterous for a further reason.

How exactly can the “personalities” in the new government – the most religious and far-right in Israel’s history – be divorced from its policies?

Consider one such “personality” in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition. In a recent interview with Channel 4, Zvika Fogel not only demanded the scrapping of “proportionality”, the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, but then specified: “If it is one Israeli mother crying, or a thousand Palestinian mothers crying, then a thousand Palestinian mothers will cry.”

Fogel’s view is not surprising. He belongs to the fascist Jewish Power party. Before he became a politician, he served in several senior roles in the Israeli military, including being in charge of Southern Command, which covers Gaza. Over the years, he enjoyed plenty of scope to implement his worldview.

A tight leash?

It is not clear yet whether Fogel will get a government job. But his boss in Jewish Power, Itamar Ben-Gvir, certainly will.

Netanyahu needs to keep sweet Jewish Power and its sister parties: Religious Zionism and Noam. Running together, they won the third-largest tally of votes in last month’s general election. Despite wide support, they represent the interests of the most unhinged, violent elements within the settler movement.

Until this electoral upset, Ben-Gvir was best known for repeated incidents of thuggery and racist incitement.

He has been filmed attacking Palestinian shopkeepers in Hebron and brandishing his personal firearm at Palestinians. In 2007, he was convicted of supporting a terror organisation, the outlawed Kach party of the virulent anti-Arab racist Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Ben-Gvir averted any danger of a second conviction by rebranding Kach as Jewish Power. Now the terror organisation is in government.

Netanyahu understands only too well that he has embarrassed his US superpower patron by getting into bed with openly fascist parties.

This is why last week he did his best to play along with Blinken’s pretence. “Coalitions make interesting bedfellows,” Netanyahu told the US radio station NPR, adding: “They [Religious Zionism] are joining me. I’m not joining them.”

He argued that Ben-Gvir had “modified a lot of his views” since his 2007 conviction – and that in any case, as prime minister, Netanyahu would keep him on a tight leash.

“With power comes responsibility… I certainly will ensure that that will be the case,” he reassured.

Except that is not how it has looked from the way the coalition negotiations have unfolded – not in the least. Netanyahu needs Ben-Gvir propping up his government far more desperately than Ben-Gvir needs to serve as a nondescript rightwing cog, or a placeholder, in another Netanyahu government.

This is going to look like no other Netanyahu cabinet. The new prime minister will be far weaker, far less dominant than the Netanyahu we are used to.

Give away the store

Netanyahu’s top priority is subverting the Israeli legal system so that his current trial on bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges can be brought to a halt. A conviction and jail sentence would finish his political career.

Religious Zionism shares Netanyahu’s goal. They want to destroy what they consider a “leftist” Supreme Court, leaving the way unimpeded to create an even more strictly Jewish society, both religiously and ethnically.

But whereas Netanyahu is looking out chiefly for himself, Ben-Gvir is a zealot. He campaigned on a promise to shake up Israeli politics and drive it even further to the ultra-nationalist, religious right. Given his self-cultivated image as a fearless political bruiser, Ben-Gvir cannot be seen backing down.

Which explains precisely how the coalition negotiations have played out. Netanyahu has given away the store on issues that matter most to Ben-Gvir and his allies.

They will have unfettered control over key areas of policy that can help seed their revolution: security forces inside both Israel and the occupied territories, the running of the occupation, education programmes and Jewish identity.

Netanyahu has no time to waste. Last week, he began rushing through legislation to pass greater powers to his extremist allies and cement their backing.

Ben-Gvir’s main political ally, Bezalel Smotrich of Religious Zionism, will become the first politician with direct power over the misnamed Civil Administration, the military dictatorship that runs the day-to-day affairs of the occupation. He will be able to further immiserate Palestinians while aiding the most extremist Jewish settlers, his friends, in their land grabs.

He can even make conditions harsher in Gaza, by refusing permits to transfer goods into the coastal enclave or awarding permits to Palestinians who need to leave to study or for emergency medical treatment.

All-out war

Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, is being given control of a new national security ministry, a post created for him with vastly expanded powers. His scope for making mischief will be unprecedented.

The role of the previous internal security ministry was to deal with policing inside Israel. Historically, the chief area of friction has been over the police’s treatment of a Palestinian minority in Israel of nominal citizens, a fifth of the Israeli population. These third-class citizens, the remnants of the Palestinian population who survived mass expulsions in 1948, have been forced mostly to live in segregated communities, away from the Jewish majority.

The Palestinian minority has long complained that the Israeli police do not deal with the real crimes that affect them, instead defining any political activity or protest in their communities as criminal. The far-right wants the police to crack down even harder.

Ben-Gvir will oversee not only the regular police but take charge of the Border Police, a large paramilitary force that operates both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. Until now its activities in the West Bank have been run by the Israeli army.

Control of the Border Police gives Ben-Gvir critical leverage over how relations with the Palestinian populations on either side of the Green Line are managed. The Border Police are invariably on the front line in handling Palestinian protests and enforcing house demolitions.

Ben-Gvir will also oversee a notorious undercover unit, the mistaravim, that infiltrates Palestinian protests, often acting as agents provocateur and providing the Border Police with the pretext to violently break up demonstrations and arrest organisers.

His new role will mean Ben-Gvir gets to decide how, or even if, the Border Police enforce Israeli court orders to dismantle structures set up by extremist Jewish settlers on Palestinian land in violation of Israeli law – as well as, of course, international law. Those lawbreakers are Ben-Gvir’s closest allies.

And he will be micromanaging the same police force that is supposed to keep the peace on the al-Aqsa mosque plaza between Palestinian worshippers and Jewish zealots who want to set the Middle East on fire by praying there – as a prelude to destroying the mosque. Those zealots include Ben-Gvir himself.

If all this wasn’t enough, he will oversee the issuing of gun licences too, potentially allowing him to arm a far larger swath of the Jewish population. The outgoing defence minister, Benny Gantz, has warned that Netanyahu is giving Ben-Gvir his own “private army“. That is the aim.

Ben-Gvir now has multiple ways to antagonise, inflame and outrage Palestinian communities on both sides of the Green Line to the point of all-out confrontation. A third intifada has never felt closer.

Pushed to the brink

For decades Israeli governments have required their security services to maintain a precarious balancing act – or what some misleadingly term “shrinking the conflict“.

On the one hand, the job of the military, the police and the intelligence agencies are to crush any sign of Palestinian nationalism, such as support for a Palestinian state, while also driving Palestinians off the bulk of the territory that would constitute such a state, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The long-term aim is to cultivate a sense of hopelessness to encourage Palestinians to look for a life elsewhere, in exile.

But on the other hand, the security services are supposed to avoid using too much force, too quickly or on too many fronts, in case it unites Palestinians into open revolt.

Two major intifadas and several minor ones, including in May 2021, are evidence of the self-sabotaging nature of the task. There is simply no way to enforce apartheid and carry out ethnic cleansing that is not going to be rejected by its victims.

Over the years, Israel has sought to refine its balancing act, through official Palestinian collaboration. The first intifada ended with Oslo’s 1993 “peace process” and promises of a cumulative transfer of powers to a government-in-waiting, the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.

A second intifada erupted only a few years later, in 2000, as it became clear to Palestinians that Israel was not serious about self-rule. It took a new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to help restore the balancing act.

Israel intensified the pressure while Abbas conferred a “sacred” duty on his security forces to keep Palestinian protests off the streets.

Subcontracting the occupation’s security to the Palestinian Authority has bought Israel time.

The point is that, however brutal the current occupation is, and however badly Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens are treated, the Israeli security services’ playbook is to push Palestinian society to the brink, but not – at least intentionally – over it.

War with Palestinians

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have no such qualms. They want escalation and confrontation now, and they want it to the bitter end. Their whole project is premised on a war with the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel, to make inevitable a formal annexation by Israel of Palestinian territory.

They do not want incremental pressure. They do not want security cooperation with the PA. They want the PA gone. They do not want distinctions between Israel and the occupied territories. They do not want welcomes on the White House lawn, or dinner with American Jewish leaders. They do not want Palestinians leaving in 10 or 20 years. They want mass expulsions now.

In their view, only a no-holds-barred war on all Palestinians will be sufficient to crush their resistance and justify expulsions on such a grand scale. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s goal is a second Nakba, a repeat of the events of 1948 when Palestinians were driven out of most of their homeland.

Israel’s direction of travel has long been obvious to Palestinians. A new generation has been readying different vehicles of resistance, such as the Jenin Brigades and the Lions’ Den in Nablus, as faith in the PA erodes ever more deeply. Israel is gradually being forced to take back a “policing” role in West Bank communities as its own trust in PA “security cooperation” collapses.

A recent poll found nearly three-quarters of those living in the West Bank support the creation of armed groups, separate from the Palestinian Authority, to protect their communities.

Netanyahu has now cocked the gun and handed it to Ben-Gvir to start an annexation war. Washington may hope the incoming prime minister can restrain his extremist colleagues. But the truth is they now have the whip hand.

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Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

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***

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has repeated a call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be assassinated, saying that the only way the war in Ukraine could end is if Russia “breaks” and someone “takes Putin out.”

“How does this war end? When Russia breaks, and they take Putin out. Anything short of that, the war’s gonna continue,” Graham said on the Fox News program America Reports on Wednesday.

Graham said the US is “in it to win it, and the only way you’re gonna win it is to break the Russian military and have somebody in Russia take Putin out to give the Russian people a new lease on life.”

Lindsey Graham says the only way the war in Ukraine will end is if Russia "breaks" and someone "takes Putin out" pic.twitter.com/M5do9Oj06q

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) December 23, 2022

The hawkish senator made similar comments back in March when he asked if there was a “Brutus” in Russia who could kill Putin. In his comments on Wednesday, Graham also said the Biden administration should send Ukraine the advanced and long-range weapons that Kyiv has been asking for.

When asked to what extent the US should continue to support Ukraine in the war, Graham replied, “completely, all in without equivocation.” He said the US needs to provide Ukraine with longer-range weapons to help “dislodge” Russia from areas of eastern Ukraine, including Crimea.

He said if Ukraine had larger drones, such as Reapers and Gray Eagles, Ukraine would “kill tons of Russians without losing any Ukrainians in the endeavor.” Ukraine has asked for Gray Eagle drones, which can fly for about 30 hours and are capable of carrying powerful Hellfire Missiles, but the Biden administration has held off from sending them so far.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image: Senator Lindsey Graham (Source: Wikipedia)

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***

The irresponsible and destabilizing work done by some Western journalists concerning the Ukrainian conflict is well known. However, recent data show that the reality appears to be even worse. A study carried out by the University of Mainz revealed that the main German media outlets acted decisively in the dissemination of anti-Russian thoughts in society, making public opinion accept the pro-war actions of the German government. Indeed, there appears to be an extremely complex coordinated effort in which state agents and the private media work together in order to incite the anti-Russian mentality.

The study showed how journalists spread pro-war ideas, with a speech in favor of NATO, inducing readers to support the anti-Russian policy that became the main characteristic of the German government since February. The research focused on journalistic coverage made in the initial months of the Russian operation, between February 24 and May 31, evaluating the content of more than 4,300 different articles published by the eight largest German newspapers and TV stations: FAZ, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Bild, Spiegel, Zeit, ARD Tagesschau, ZDF Today and RTL Aktuell.

The Mainz’s researchers noted that in 64% of the articles Ukraine was described positively, seeming like the “right side”. Specifically regarding Vladimir Zelensky, 67% of the coverage pointed him positively. While, on the other hand, in 88% of the cases Russia was portrayed in a negative way, in addition to Vladimir Putin being described as an “enemy” in 96% of the articles. Also, 93% of the articles point to Moscow as the “culprit” for the conflict, while only 4% place the West as “co-responsible” – the numbers pointing to Ukraine as the culprit are even smaller: 2%.

In only 10% of the analyzed texts, Russian reasons for starting its military operation were considered. The focus of 80% of news coverage was on the narrative exposed in official speeches by Ukrainian, European and American authorities. With this, the German people were practically forced to believe the baseless discourse that Moscow “unjustifiably invaded” Ukraine.

It must also be noted that before the Russian operation began, over the past eight years, the German media – and Western media as a whole – also ignored facts such as the 2014 coup d’état, the presence of neo-Nazi militias in Ukrainian territory and the ethnic genocide in Donbass. So, without knowing these previous facts, naturally German readers, when faced with the Russian bombings in February, believed in the “invasion” narrative, since they were not aware of the local military context.

Another interesting fact is that in 66% of the articles, anti-Russian economic sanctions were defined as the most efficient way to end the war. Regarding military support, 74% of the reports endorsed the “need” to send weapons to Ukraine. Diplomatic measures were mentioned very infrequently, with virtually no support of diplomacy and international dialogue among German journalists. The case is really curious as it reveals how the press tried to help the German government to convince public opinion about the efficiency of coercive measures.

Despite Germany having a political posture absolutely submissive to NATO, the decision to join the anti-Russian coercion would naturally not be seen with good eyes by the local population. The country is extremely dependent on Russian gas, and the end of energy cooperation is the cause of a real social and economic catastrophe. Currently, mass protests occur frequently in Germany, as with the arrival of winter the people begin to realize the negative impacts of the government’s stance. However, if the journalistic coverage had been operated honestly, without biased pro-war speeches, possibly the protests would have started earlier, and the people would have put pressure on Berlin not to get involved in the war plans of the Atlantic alliance.

In fact, the researchers showed something that many analysts had already previously denounced: there is cooperation between the main media outlets and the liberal governments in the NATO countries. It is media coverage with intense anti-Russian and pro-war propaganda that allows public opinion to accept the irresponsible measures taken by Western politicians. Whether this action is spontaneous or coordinated between government strategists and press editors is impossible to say. However, considering the high level of public-private cooperation in these countries, it is difficult to think that this is not a planned and strategically calculated action.

In parallel, the independent press, which shows the truth about events in Ukraine, is often censored, with complex intelligence operations in place to remove all forms of pro-Russian content from the internet. This shows how Western discourse on “liberal values” and “democracy” turns out to be a mere propaganda: NATO countries are only interested in ensuring Western unipolarity.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

Peru remains a center of resistance to the removal of President Pedro Castillo in a political coup by the Congress on December 7.

Castillo is still incarcerated on numerous charges including corruption and violation of the state constitution.

The former union leader and left-wing president has rejected these allegations and is demanding to be released from detention immediately. On December 22, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) was in Peru to investigate the current political turmoil.

As part of the assertion that he remains the legitimate head-of-state in Peru, Castillo requested a meeting with the IACHR delegation saying that the conditions under which he is being held are a violation of his human rights. Castillo, along with thousands across the South American country, are calling for the resignation of the recently installed President Dina Boluarte, the immediate release of the former president, the dissolving of Congress and the holding of national elections.

Castillo has received significant international support from several governments throughout the region. Mexico has repeatedly called for the president’s release along with Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, Honduras and others. The Mexican government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has granted political asylum to the family of Castillo, who have already left Peru.

The Mexican ambassador to Peru, Pablo Monroy Conesa, was expelled by the Boluarte government claiming that statements made by officials were hostile to the current coup regime in Peru. Since the impeachment of Castillo on December 7, the military has moved to seized control of all major transportation and infrastructure institutions in the country. This has taken place amid continuing strikes by workers, farmers and youth who have blocked roads, highways, airports and trains. On December 22, the defense minister, Luis Alberto Otarola, was appointed as prime minister of the government in Lima.

Mexican President AMLO announced that his government would seek to maintain diplomatic relations with Peru under the existing administration of Boluarte. The president was concerned about the status of Mexican citizens living and working in Peru.

Telesur reported on the diplomatic crisis between Mexico and Peru that:

“Regarding the current situation in Peru, marked by a political and social crisis, AMLO described Boluarte’s administration as ‘a very questioned government.’ In this sense, he denounced the use of repression in the face of the conflict instead of opting for dialogue and ‘the democratic method’ of early elections. AMLO criticized ‘the attitude of the so-called political class, of the economic and political power groups in Peru.’ The Mexican President accused them of being ‘those who have maintained that crisis in that country because of their ambitions.’”

AMLO characterized the Peruvian society as being under a “state of siege” since December 7 when Castillo was removed from office and arrested by  the security forces. In addition, the Mexican leader criticized United States Ambassador Lisa Kenna who met with the Boluarte government, giving the regime legitimacy.

Other imperialist centers also met with Boluarte including the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK). State Department spokesperson Ned Price went as far as to commend Boluarte for protecting Peruvian institutions and publicly proclaimed the recognition by the U.S. of the coup which resulted in the existing regime. (See this)

The left-wing governments in South America, Central America and the Caribbean are constantly under threat by the U.S. Cuba has been under a blockade for the last six decades and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela defeated numerous coup attempts engineered by Washington and its allies in the region over the last two decades.

Peru has been undergoing political turmoil in recent years. The impeachment of Castillo and the ascendancy of Boluarte marked the sixth person to hold the office of the presidency in as many years.

Castillo is being held in pretrial detention which could last up to 18 months. After this period if he is not released, a judicial panel will decide his fate as it relates to the charges filed against him.

The country has been impacted by the worldwide rise in inflation. In Peru the rate of inflation is approximately 8.5%. Since the December 7 coup, uncertainty has increased both inside and outside the South American state.

A report published by Telesur noted:

“On Thursday (Dec. 22), the visit to Peru of the IACHR Secretary Tania Reneaum and her team concludes. They held meetings with authorities and organizations to gather information on the institutional crisis that the country is going through.

Since December 7, thousands of citizens have taken to the streets to demand new elections, the closure of Congress, and the release of Castillo, whom lawmakers removed to appoint then-Vice President Boluarte in his place. With the support of the Armed Forces, her administration has harshly repressed social protests, which has left 27 citizens dead and dozens of people injured and detained. In this regard, prosecutor Karen Obregon opened an investigation into the heads of the Police and the Army as alleged perpetrators of 10 deaths in the department of Ayacucho.”

State of Emergency Declared by Installed President Boluarte

A 30-day state of emergency was declared by Boluarte after riot police and the military were not able to quell the initial wave of demonstrations. Peru, which in addition to its mining resources, is a center of tourism attracting hundreds of thousands every year to the ancient civilization of Machu Picchu. During early and mid-December, thousands of tourists have been unable to get transportation out of the area due to the popular uprising against the removal of Castillo.

In a first-person account of the situation in Peru, the Jurist printed a report from a law student which said:

“My flight was cancelled, since the protesters had taken over the airport and for safety reasons all the airlines suspended their flights until further notice. For this reason, I had to resort to another means of transport. There were no buses that provided the transportation service, there were only cars and since I needed transportation, I had to travel by hired car. However, I was unable to complete my journey as the roads were blocked…. A little later, the police arrived and started throwing tear gas canisters to try to disperse the protesters. The policemen were throwing many tear gas canisters, and they were also pushing the protesters, despite the fact that there were young people and older adults. This made the protesters angry and a fight started between the protesters and the police. I ran and tried to take refuge in some nearby houses because the situation was getting worse. I was afraid that the police would stop me or that the protesters would attack me.”

In a gesture to the popular movement, the Peruvian Congress passed a bill to hold elections by mid-2024. This measure differed from the proposal put forward by Boluarte who wanted elections to be held by December 2023. However, many outstanding issues remain within the context of these proposals.

Will the state of emergency be lifted along with the release of ousted President Castillo? This an important question because of the more than two dozen people already reported killed since December 7 must be addressed by the judicial system.

The bill in question was sponsored by the Constitutional Commission President Hernando Guerra, a far-right lawmaker and supporter of the party controlled by former presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori. However, this decision to move the elections from 2026, must be approved by the legislative session, which does not convene until March 1, 2023.

This latest political crisis in Peru has regional and international implications. The administration of President Joe Biden has not made any substantial changes in U.S. policy towards Latin America.

The objectives of Washington and Wall Street in the region remain essentially the same. The U.S. wants to maintain control of the domestic and foreign policy of the governments throughout Latin America. This can only be done through the utilization of economic control and military domination.

All throughout South America, Central America and the Caribbean, the masses of people yearn for genuine liberation and sovereignty. In order for these objectives to be realized a protracted struggle must be waged against the U.S. and its surrogates so that total liberation and self-determination can be achieved.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Peru workers in support of Pedro Castillo after coup

One hundred and eight years ago this Christmas Eve, The Great War, the “War to End All Wars” was in its fourth month. It had already bogged down into trench warfare.

For those unfamiliar with the term, it consisted of many miles of trenches on either side of “No Man’s Land,” a strip of land of varying width, cratered with shell holes, filled with broken equipment, concertina wire, bodies, wounded and dying men. The men of both sides lived pretty much in misery, soaking wet, feet rotting, hunkered down in their trenches.

The “strategy” was pretty simple. A General on one side or the other would order his troops to attack. They would charge into a storm of shot and shell trying to take the trenches of their opponents.

Often, they were beaten back with terrible losses. Sometimes they took their objective. Then the General of the other side would order his reserves to the front to counterattack. Often the “victors” would be driven back to their original trench lines. If they kept the captured trenches, the other side would build another trench line and No Man’s Land would be moved a few yards or a few hundred yards one way or the other.

On Christmas Eve, 1914, the front was fairly quiet. In one sector, both sides were celebrating Christmas as best they could. The Germans were singing Christmas Carols and had small trees decorated with candles in their trenches. The British and French heard them and began singing their own carols.

After a while, a lone German soldier entered No Man’s land, singing Silent Night and carrying a lit Christmas tree. He placed it on the stump of a shattered tree and finished the carol. Nobody fired at him. A British officer climbed out of his trench and walked toward the young man. A German officer came from his line and they met and talked. It was decided that, though they would be shooting at each other the next day, that Christmas was something they could share.

Soon, Germans, French and British troops all met together! They shared their various liquors, tobacco and rations, showed photos of loved ones and of home. A soccer field was set up and soccer games were played, Germans vs the Allies.

Both sides discovered they were not fighting monsters, they were fighting people just like themselves, people waiting for the end of the war so they could go back home to their jobs and families.

Then, the Generals on both sides found out about the truce and ordered their men back to their own trenches. They forbade any “fraternization” with the enemy under threat of Courts-martial and a firing squad, and so the war dragged on for four more years and the death toll was in the millions. The devastation was unthinkable. The maimed and crippled were everywhere.

Finally, at Versailles, the armistice was declared and the troops could go home. Two decades later, an even more horrible war broke out and enveloped the world again.

I have often wondered what might have happened had the two armies enjoyed the truce, met their enemies and found them to be just like they were and decided to throw down their guns and go home. The truce could have spread like wildfire up and down the trench lines, and the war could have been over.

I can almost hear them slapping each other on the backs and saying, “If the Generals want this war so much, let them get in the trenches and fight each other. We’re going home!”

What a different world this could have been.

***

Written on Christmas Eve 2014

‘Twas a century ago this Christmas Eve
Heaven seemed to give the soldiers leave
Even to set their guns aside, and in friendship believe.

Christmas carols rang out across that blasted earth
Hungry and tired, both sides dreamt of home and hearth.
Rising from his trench, a young German walked into that No Man’s Land;
In his hands was a candle lit Christmas tree, his song was of a silent night.
Still, no shots from the West. The song done, the tree planted on a shell-blasted stump,
Then, from both sides, officers walked to the tree and talked, a decision was made.
Men decided that, though soon they must kill again, Christmas should be a time of peace.
Along the front a truce was set. Men met, shared songs, rations, liquor and, family photos.
Soccer was the only war that night, Allies versus Germans, and no one knows who “won.”

The night was filled with love and brotherhood, food and schnapps, brandy, rum and song.
Realizing that they were fighting “themselves,” too bad they didn’t throw down their guns.
Up and down the front it could have spread, troops throwing down their guns, marching home.
Calling out to the generals, if they truly wanted a war, to fight it out between themselves.
Ending four years of horror, before it had hardly begun.

*

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(Originally published September 11, 2022)

“I am an Anti-War Activist and I am innocent! I have done more against terrorism than anybody. Everything I have done was always good for the security of the United States and good for security in the Middle East.”

– Susan Lindauer shouting on the day she was arrested by the FBI under the Patriot Act. [1]

“We will need more public support in order for that to happen. And that public support is growing now that we’re making the ties between the false flag of Covid and the vaccinations over the last two years to 9/11. In fact, I’ve developed a presentation on the parallels between 9/11 and Covid, the amazing parallels. I didn’t actually develop it, it was developed by Kevin Ryan, masterfully. What I did was codified it and refined it, and that attracted the attention of Dr. Rashid Buttar. So, I – he wanted me to speak, and I did, in San Antonio, at the advanced medicine there to 1,000 attending medical people. So, that was an incredible opportunity.”

 – Richard Gage AIA (from this week’s interview)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW


Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

An entire generation of new human beings have been born, grew up and are now entering the work force, university and college – all without ever knowing the age before the war on terrorism. The Patriot Act, anti-terrorism legislation, and the threat of attacks is part of daily life. Like taxes and death.

The incident now referred to as the September 11 attacks, or 9/11, has been the principal culprit in transitioning us all to this new normal. Witnessing airlines departing from their courses and crashing into the symbol of financial opulence known as the World Trade Center in New York City served to convince millions of horrified citizens in the United States and around the world that something has to be done to prevent brutalities like this one from assaulting freedom in America and centres around the world.

But along with the masses of hopeful people bowing their heads down as Heads of State Bush and Cheney, dispense their own blessings of military vengeance, another element entered the stage. Blasphemers who look at the facts around the official story and realizing that not only does it not stick together, but a rival explanation bearing the name “false flag” is in clear site.

This group of “harlots” and “trouble-makers” eventually got a name – the 9/11 Truth movement. And it encompassed hundreds of dedicated researchers. And it turns out that one of the most intelligent and thorough contributors to the research is Michel Chossudovsky! On September 12, 2001, he wrote the famous article Who is Osama Bin Laden, which pointed to his persuasive arguments of Al Qaeda as in fact a creation of the CIA!

Since that date, Global Research became a major champion of all public discussion around what was wrong with what we were told and how the U.S. sought it as an excuse for going to war for other reasons.

As the 21st anniversary of the incident which marked the calendar date forever as a day if infamy, the Global Research News Hour marks the occasion by continuing the process of relentless examination of the facts in spite of a persistent rant by politicians and the media to the effect that such an endeavor is another gesture of “conspiracy theory.”

Our first guest, the founder and former CEO at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Richard Gage, AIA, takes us through the events TODAY to not only raise awareness of evidence of the World Trade Center towers being brought down by controlled demolition rather than airplane collisions, but also to hold government authorities accountable through court hearings. He also addresses how he addresses the changing mentality now that mainstream media is not as popular as it used to be. And he also breaks down community events marking the anniversary.

Our next guest, Susan Lindauer, when she tried to raise awareness about what she knew of the attacks after being guided by Intelligence officials, ended up detained under the Patriot Act for “Organizing Resistance to the United States” in Iraq and spent months in jail before her release. She wrote the about the experience in her 2010 book Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act And the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.

Richard Gage, AIA is a 30-year San Francisco Bay Area architect and member of the American Institute of Architects. He is the founder and former  CEO of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He now leads the charge for a new WTC investigation. Be sure to check out events this weekend on the site at RichardGage911.org

Susan Lindauer is an antiwar activist and a former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency Asset covering Iraq and Libya, who negotiated the return of the weapons inspectors to Baghdad.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 362)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW


Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

Transcript of Richard Gage AIA. September 7, 2022

Global Research: So, this is Michael Welch for the Global Research News Hour. I have with me Richard Gage, A.I.A. He is a 30-year old, San Francisco, Bay Area architect and member of the American Institute of Architects. He is the founder and former CEO of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He now leads the charge for a new WTC investigation at richardgage911.org. Mr. Gage became interested in researching the destruction of the WTC high-rises after hearing the startling conclusions of a reluctant 9/11 researcher, David Ray Griffin, on the radio in 2006 which launched his own, unyielding quest for the truth about 9/11. The organization he founded, AE911Truth, now outnumbers more than 3,500 architects and engineers demanding a new investigation into the destruction of all three World Trader Center high-rise buildings on 9/11. He has also been a frequent guest on the Global Research News Hour. Richard, it is a privilege to have you back on the Global Research News Hour. Welcome.

Richard Gage: Thank you, Michael. It’s my privilege, really. Thank you.

GR: Now, if you don’t mind, would you like to explain, first of all, what were your reasons for no longer being associated with AE911Truth?

RG: Well, they weren’t my reasons. They were the PR consultants reasons, actually, over at AE911Truth. Here’s what happened, in a nutshell: Spike Lee, the famous director, became aware of the 9/11 evidence. He saw our documentary, he says, “You’ve got to come here.” He flew me to Brooklyn, and I spent two hours with him presenting the evidence. It was awesome. He was in tears. And he says, “I’m going to get this out on September 11th, on HBO, in my mini-series called ‘New York Epicenters.’” So, we were all excited about that, and then we have a lot of pressure from the industry – movie industry, I guess, HBO or something, on Spike Lee. We also had Slate Magazine putting in his face, a quote that I made in an obscure radio interview about Covid, where I was concerned that the disease that was going around was yet another false flag operation. And a scam, essentially… and the danger of the vaccine, that were forthcoming. So, I was shocked, I think, to – we all were – to hear that he pulled this half-hour segment due to, I think, primarily, the pressure from the media and, perhaps, also, to some extent due to my own comments on Covid which contradicted his own worldview regarding Covid and the vaccines. So, it’s some mix of that. Later, he acknowledged that he, “Didn’t have a choice,” in pulling that 30-minute segment, and that was somewhat reassuring to me. But, in the meantime, the PR consultant for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth had told the board that this was a crisis and that the CEO had to go, because this could plague you for years to come. Which is ridiculous, but it took more than half of our board to vote against keeping me. So, it was quite a vigorous debate, to put it mildly.

GR: Yeah, very devastating, I’m sure. And of course, it centres the whole idea – I mean, if you thought that 9/11 Truth was a difficult one, I mean even just bringing up the whole – any doubts. I don’t know if you were all that certain about it, but doubts about Covid, that’s a no-go, you know? I can sort of relate. You know, you’ve been working continuously, breaking down the science of the collapses and evidence of explosions. Evidence of high temperatures only generated by explosives, and so on. You explained it, Leroy Hulsey, of the Alaska, Fairbanks, explained it here on the show, in detail. His expo – study of WTC 7 – I was just wondering, could you bring us up, more up-to-date as to whether there are new studies or contributions that strengthen your case?

RG: Well, the Hulsey study completely pulled the rug out from underneath the NIST report. This is a foray for those who don’t know about it, a 4-year, $300,000 major university study. So, Professor Hulsey determined that fire was not the cause of the collapse of this building. That the – the building had to have all the columns removed within a second of each other in order for this collapse to occur, which was incredible support for the work that we have done over the last 15 years and assembling 3,500 architects and engineers demanding a new investigation of the destruction of all three World Trade Center skyscrapers. We have put that study out into the academic environment with thousands and thousands of postcards alerting the engineering community to the study. We don’t have any major support that arises anywhere near the level of credibility that the Hulsey study has put forth. And we don’t have support yet from Congress. So, where we are getting some action is in the courts.

GR: Yes.

RG: And we’re delighted to – in fact – have Mick Harrison, the litigation director of the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry representing us in getting our evidence, the 60 exhibits that have already been submitted to the US attorney, to be given to the special grand jury. We have sued to make sure that happens. And we are appealing the faulty decision on the part of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and we’re going to be discussing taking that all the way to the top. So, that’s incredible. We’re making a film to document, for the grand jury specifically, and then for everybody else, also, those 60 exhibits will be brought to life by myself, and experts, with regard to the technical evidence and looking right into the camera, showing them all the evidence. And then, also, Mick Harrison will be explaining to the grand jury what their opportunities are with regard to this evidence, what does the evidence mean in these cases. What are there – who can they subpoena, who can they ask for material persons, material interests. So, we’re filming that now and that’s very exciting. We’ll be discussing that film and the opportunities and updates from the lawyers committee for 9/11 inquiry at our event, which is on September 11th, which is on our website. It will be shown livestream to everybody. It is —

GR: (inaudible)

RG: — nine – excuse me – what?

GR: Just a livestream showing, right?

RG: Yeah, livestream on richardgage911.org. So, that will be there the day before the September 11th event, the lawyers committee, of which I’m on the board. We’re putting our own event together on September 10th with all of the attorneys speaking about different subjects. And that is lcfor911.org.

GR: You know, I was wondering how you’ve been – you said you’ve been lobbying politicians, like for years. And it’s well-known that one outspoken member of Congress, Cynthia McKinney, a vocal supporter of yours and of 9/11 truth generally and you saw what happened to her, she lost her seat. We saw what happened in the investigation into 9/11. Even if you win the support of any politicians that might agree with you, is it realistic to think that anyone would stand up in full view of the mainstream media and spout what is now branded a conspiracy theory?

RG: We will need more public support in order for that to happen. And that public support is growing now that we’re making the ties between the false flag of COVID and the vaccinations over the last two years to 9/11. In fact, I’ve developed a presentation on the parallels between 9/11 and COVID, the amazing parallels. I didn’t actually develop it, it was developed by Kevin Ryan, masterfully. What I did was codified it and refined it, and that attracted the attention of Dr. Rashid Buttar. So, I – he wanted me to speak, and I did, in San Antonio, at the advanced medicine there to 1,000 attending medical people. So, that was an incredible opportunity. Then, at the Red-Pill Expo in Indianapolis, Doctor – excuse me, G. Edward Griffin asked me to speak there, and we did. So, it is getting out there. Now, Dr. Mata Bassetti, who works with the Children’s Health Defense organization is working with me to create a joint presentation. He’ll be taking the COVID side, I’ll taking the 9/11 side. We’re going back and forth, and we’ll have this prepared through the collective evolution YouTube platform of Joe Martino. So, that’s going to be – so, with all these efforts and the legal cases, including the FOIA case that we’re winning in court – there are some success stories – to get the information that NIST and FEMA had in order to produce their final reports on Building 7. That’s now coming to us, and that will yield all kinds of opportunities as well. I think with all of this happening, it may not be this year, but I think it’s rapidly developing, this cross-pollination between these two truth movements is, in particular, going to be extremely effective in waking people up.

GR: Richard Gage, you know, for almost 21 years, people have been speaking out against the official story of 9/11. On the one hand, I would say millions of people have already gotten the message about 9/11 being an inside-job. However, from the standpoint of the professional class and the mainstream media, your position is an urban legend by now, it’s a conspiracy theory. And you know that today, unlike in 2001, much of the public doesn’t trust mainstream media anymore, you know, generally. Partially, I suspect, as a result of 9/11 truth. But, this is presented as the ability of alternative media to spread misinformation without getting their facts straight, you know what I mean? So, this is how you get your beliefs dismissed. And I’m wondering, how do you cope, or adapt, to what I see – and maybe you see it, too – as a different dynamic playing out in world news and analysis?

RG: My job is to continue educating the public, the academic professions, the media, and the government as to the truth about what happened to these three World Trade Center skyscrapers. And now, as acting independent from me, AE911Truth. Now with richardgage911.org, we’re drawing these parallels and being much more effective, and there’s much more acceptance. I cannot speak, I don’t have the crystal ball, as to when we’re going to break through, or when the “conspiracy theory” label is going to be an asset, rather than a liability for the truth movement. So, I don’t have direct answers to your very excellent questions. I just know that we are making progress. That I’ve got more requests for interviews this season than I ever have before. That is a sign, in and of itself, because as you know, I’m not with AE911Truth anymore, and yet, I have doubled the number of interviews I’m being asked to give, such that I —

GR: (inaudible)

RG: — yeah, it’s pretty incredible.

GR: Yeah, well just to secure the point a little, maybe, the point I’m making is that, unlike yesteryear, today you find people embracing lots of conspiracy theories, including a lot that aren’t even true: you notice that chemtrails from airplanes cause climate change; the Earth is flat; man faked the voyage to the moon or vaccines will kill you; the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. People put those all in the same camp. And your analysis of 9/11, while it’s, you know, impeccable, it’s – I guess you could say it’s a needle in a haystack of conspiracy theories. I mean I’m wondering, does this not pose a challenge to you as a 9/11 truther, who is being called a conspiracy theorist yourself, to cope with realities in the public square today?

RG: I don’t think that’s a concern. I have certainly looked into many of these conspiracy theories and I can tell you the world does not work the way we think it does. So, I think anybody evaluating any conspiracy theory, as they call it, or alternative truth-based information, as others call it, has to be evaluated. Evaluate the evidence, I encourage everybody. And this is what I do myself, before you jump on the bandwagon of labelling something a conspiracy theory. That’s what we try to encourage people whom we are educating about the 9/11 catastrophe, also, and the truth about it. I don’t know what else I can tell you about that, Michael.

GR: Okay, fair enough. But before we close, maybe is there an event on the – you mentioned the streaming of the film already. But, I mean, is there anything else happening on the anniversary of 9/11 that maybe you haven’t mentioned to us yet, or maybe a couple of details you’d like to throw in?

RG: Sure, you bet. In the Netherlands, Jan van Aken has a 12-hour presentation on September 11th. I don’t even know how to direct you to that web site, because I don’t know it, but it’s going to be in Dutch if anybody speaks Dutch. The Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth are having their own event on Friday, September 9th. That, people can learn more about on their web site. The Lawyer’s Committee for 9/11 Inquiry is having their event on Saturday, September 10th, beginning, I think, at 1:00 P.M. Eastern. And that’s going to be the board of lawyers with a very interactive environment where people will be encouraged to ask questions and to provide feedback to the lawyers who are deciding, you know, how to proceed with these various cases. They’re looking for people’s feedback. I’ll be speaking as one of the panelists on September 10th there, and I’ll be discussing the evidence for the explosive demolition of the Twin Towers. The film that we’re making that I mentioned, “9/11: Crime Scene to Courtroom,” my event on September 11th brings honour to David Ray Griffin who’s let the 9/11 truth movement know that he only has a few months to live. So, we’re going to be spending time honouring his work and him. And he’ll be watching, as we anticipate he will, at this point. And we’ll – Elizabeth Woodworth will be presenting her decades-long work with David, including the points of consensus in the 9/11 consensus panel, which is 911consensus.org. And so, that and also, we’ll be focusing on Osama Bin Laden who most of us don’t know a whole lot about, even in the 9/11 truth movement. But, James Corbett of the Corbett Report, who will be joining us live, also, in this event, will be introducing his third, in a series of three, film documentary called “False Flags: the Secret History of Al-Qaeda,” which exposes the lie surrounding Osama Bin Laden and some of the truth that we’re still unaware of. That’s a pretty amazing opportunity, as well. So, that all happens September 11th, 10:00 A.M. Pacific livestream, that’s going to be about seven hours in and of itself.

GR: Wow, amazing stuff. And then, just to point out that David Ray Griffin is such a legend, so to have this while he’s still alive, it’s certainly – that alone would be a much, you know, desire to go out and participate while we still can.

RG: Yeah.

GR: Great stuff. It’s been a really speaking to you again, Richard Gage. Best of luck with your upcoming awareness-raising, and take care.

RG: Thanks. Thanks so much, Michael. You take care, too. We’ll see you on the 11th at the event.

GR: Richard Gage, A.I.A. is the founder and former CEO of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. You can follow up on his recent efforts at a WTC investigation at the site, R-I-C-H-A-R-D G-A-G-E 911.org.

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Notes:

1. Susan Lindauer (2010), p.4, ‘Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act And the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq’, published by Susan Lindauer 

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***

The wave of the Polish return migration from the UK immediately before and after Brexit is noticeable both in absolute numbers and in the subjective perception of the Polish community in Britain. Popular understanding of this phenomenon, also based on the justifications given by the returners, most often refers to ethnicity, family ties, traditions, and cultural issues. 

Albeit, considering the scale of Polish migration to the UK (about one million) deeper analyse of that phenomenon considers an important contribution to understanding both the current condition of the Eastern-European economy and the true meaning of crisis and transformation of the capitalist system, of which global labour migrations  constitute a driving force.

Strategies or impulses?

The classical study of migrations likes clear divisions, like into ‘storks’, i.e. seasonal workers, ‘seekers’ roaming between various national labour markets,

‘hamsters’ working to obtain the assumed level of capital (both financial and human one) allowing them to return to the country and permanent emigrants, consistently uninterested in returning to their former homeland (Mąkosa, 2018, p. 143).  Although, the current situation of the global market strongly hinders such clear categorisations.

Moreover, such analysis is not facilitated by the attitude of the surveyed ones.  If we were to rely solely on the explanations of the returnees, we would be dealing with a mix of nostalgia, awakened / restored hopes and aspirations, and/or an accumulation of negative emotions related to emigration, prompting immigrants to act.  It would therefore be a complex of issues relating to ethnicity and family ties, tradition and culture.  Some researchers, however, question such explanations, trying to reach the socio-economic basis for changing the earlier decision to permanently leave the old countries (Fox, Moroşanu and Szilassy, 2015; Cross, 2021).

It is also worth to investigate the socio-economic explanation of these decisions change about the permanent immigration.  Immigrants who have lived in the UK for several years now are going to come back, emphasising ‘sudden impulse’ as the reason for their decisions, which led them to post thousands of photos of ‘the last coffee before return way to Poland’ on social media.  The massiveness of this phenomenon, however, indicates a different motivation than just an ‘impulse’.

Outclassing and back again

Previous research on the East-European emigration to the UK confirms that a significant proportion of newcomers taking up employment in the British labour market felt outclassed in relation to their previous position in their home countries (Johnston, Khattab i Manley, 2015, pp. 197-199, 201-204).  Considering economy as a whole, that means ignoring the potential and tangible losses, e.g. in unearned taxes and undermined growth (Platt, 2021, p. 11).

Also in the realities of the UK education system, ethnic minority representatives choose university more often than the native British youth, but it is much more difficult for them to find a job as graduates, and they are also underrepresented in the apprenticeship (Blundell et al., 2021, p. 13).

It is estimated that in the pre-pandemic period, not using the skills of minority representatives according to the qualifications, costed the UK budget up to £8 billion a year (Šestanović, Qureshi and Khawaja, 2021, pp. 3, 13).  There are doubts whether these objective inequalities and contradictions affect the state of class consciousness of Polish workers in the UK, but an analogous reaction with the opposite direction can be noticed.

Professional advancement in the British labour system created new corporate ties, evolving to the new class identification, which favoured the return to the old countries in the position of the comprador managerial / expert group.  Both of these factors should be examined: the denial of one’s own position within the globalised working class, which is sometimes associated with ethnic or racial prejudices, and the ease of identifying with higher class positions DESPITE real ethnic and cultural barriers.

Liberal uncertainty

Migration studies often focus on the situation of the labour-supplying (sending) countries and carry out a comparative analysis with the host (destination) countries to confirm economic basis of the decision to emigrate (Mąkosa, 2018, pp. 142-143).

Paradoxically, analysing return emigration, non-economic and cultural considerations are emphasised, as well as rationality/optimality of choice is assumed, understood mostly as achieving a level of accumulation that allows active participation in the capitalist market of the home country (Dustmann and Weiss, 2007, p. 250; Dustmann, Fadlon and Weiss, 2010, p. 7; Wahba, 2021, p. 6).

Variability of decisions is considered a natural and immanent feature of the current global labour market, in line with assumptions of ‘liquidity‘, ‘deliberate indeterminacy’ and ‘intentional unpredictability’(Jancewicz, Kloc-Nowak and Pszczółkowska, 2019, p. 104).  The weakness of this approach is its discontinuity (distinguishing national economies in a globalist reality) and inconsistency (mixing the material conditions and  the level of consciousness).  Recognising return migration as a class-conditioned process is therefore an important research gap.

Not-White-Enough, but still not aware…

Of course, the importance of racism and xenophobia should not be underestimated.  Negative and even hostile attitude of the White British is often experienced by immigrants in the UK, including those coming from Eastern Europe, stigmatised as ‘not white enough’ (Manley, Khattab and Johnston, 2019, pp. 926-927; Rzepnikowska, 2019, pp. 63-64).  However intersectionality approach and superdiversity concept prescribe a broader analysis, considering the factors of class, gender, age and health condition (Brynin, Longhi and Zwysen, 2019; Vertovec, 2007).

What should be be examined are not only subjective feelings of intolerance and alienation, but also the objectivised level of inequality and exploitation in the British labour market.  In fact, as Lukács (1988) has convincingly explained, class affiliation does not have to be self-conscious, but depends solely on our attitude to the means of production.

The dialectic distinction between Klasse an sich and Klasse für sich, a class in itself and a class for itself, questions one of the basic assumptions of liberal, or in fact post-humanist, hegemony – namely, the priority of self-identification, eliminating not only the essence of being a worker (also the migrant one), but even being a human being.  In turn, consciousness while consistent with the objective facts is, in fact, the beginning of organisation, which is an indispensable condition for moving from the position of objects guided by misunderstood ‘impulses’ – to the subjectivity, even within the extremely dehumanized modernity.

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Konrad Rękas is a renowned geopolitical analyst and a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Asia Society Report

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***

During this year, the U.S. Government has allocated $112 billion to Ukraine, in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine.

Russia allocates normally $60 billion per year for its entire military, but this year has increased that 40% to $84 billion, because of its invasion of Ukraine.

Russia invaded Ukraine because, on 17 December 2021, Russia had demanded that the U.S. Government and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance stop trying to place its missiles on and near Russia’s borders (especially in Ukraine, which is the nearest of all bordering nations to Moscow);

And, on 7 January 2022 America and NATO said no.

Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a launch-pad for U.S. missiles. That’s what the war in Ukraine is — and always has been — about, from the Russian viewpoint: not being faced with U.S. missiles that are only a five-minute missile-flight-time away from Russia’s central command in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in February 2014, by America’s coup there that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected 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. It would be nuclear checkmate of Russia, by the U.S. (with the assistance of its NATO allies, which then would include Ukraine).

Whereas Russia’s objective is to not become nuclearly checkmated by America placing its missiles that close to Moscow, America’s objective is to nuclearly checkmate Russia in order to capture the world’s largest and most resource-rich country — to force Russia to capitulate and become another U.S. ‘ally’ (that is, vassal-nation).

President Biden had requested Congress to add $38 billion more this year for Ukraine than the $67 billion that was funded earlier in the year, but Congress decided to increase his requested amount by $7 billion (almost a 20% increase in his suggested increase), so that there will be a total of $45 billion added to the $67 billion previously allocated, for a total U.S. allocation to Ukraine this year of $112 billion.

That amount is $28 billion more than Russia will have spent this year for all of its military — the vast majority of which Russian military expenditure isn’t being allocated to the war in Ukraine, but instead to other aspects of Russia’s defense against the threat to its national security from America and its allies. America alone has been spending annually  on its military around 20 times what Russia has been spending on its; and, in order to make America’s expenditure appear not to be so gargantuan as it actually is, large portions of it are being paid out from other federal Departments than the Defense (or Aggression) Department, but the total annual U.S. military expenditures have, for over a decade, been over a trillion dollars per year.

On November 16th, I headlined “U.S. Will Have Spent $100B on Ukraine This Year”, and now it’s clear that my prediction was on the conservative side, by $12 billion.

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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: Blinken at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, Sept. 8. Credit: @SecBlinken

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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

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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

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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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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,”² 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.⁴ 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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