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A British MP has accused a Foreign Office minister of “misleading parliament” over his department’s involvement in the secret operation to arrest Julian Assange.
Kenny MacAskill MP, a former Scottish justice secretary, asked the Foreign Office “whether any people working on Operation Pelican were based within [its] Department’s premises.”
Pelican was the secret Metropolitan Police-led operation to seize Assange from his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which was mounted in April 2019.
Junior foreign minister David Rutleytold parliament last week in answer:
“No Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FDCO] officials were directly assigned to work on Operation Pelican.”
However, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request in July last year, the Foreign Office had already admitted:
“Three FCDO officials did some work on Operation Pelican, the most senior of which was Head of Latin America Department.”
Declassified on Tuesday revealed the UK government had assigned 15 staff to Pelican, but this number did not include any Foreign Office personnel.
‘Misled parliament’
Under the Ministerial Code, ministers have a duty to “be as open as possible with parliament” and to “give accurate and truthful information”. A House of Commons guide states that “this requirement governs the answers ministers provide to parliamentary questions”.
The misleading of parliament is a serious charge that can lead to a minister’s resignation or sacking.
David Rutley, the Conservative MP for Macclesfield, has been foreign minister for the Americas and Caribbean since October 2022, and serves under foreign secretary James Cleverly.
A supporter of Rishi Sunak, Rutley has met the US ambassador to Britain and travelled to Colombia and Panama since taking up office.
Kenny MacAskill, MP for East Lothian, told Declassified:
“This new information shows that foreign minister David Rutley misled parliament in answering my recent question. It demonstrates not just the standard obfuscation I have become used to, but actual distortion of the facts about the UK government’s effort to ‘get’ Julian Assange.”
He added:
“The actions of the British government have not simply been to assist the US. They have been active and willing participants in the state-sponsored cruelty meted out to Assange. And then tried to hide it all.”
18 officials
Operation Pelican’s existence was only revealed in the memoirs of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan which were published last year. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case.
For instance, the Home Office and the Cabinet Office have refused FOI requests regarding communication between departments about Pelican. The Foreign Office claimed it holds no information on the matter.
In March, Home Office minister Kit Malthouse even told parliament that his department, despite having eight staff assigned to Pelican, holds no information about which other ministries were involved.
Then, in a later response to a FOI request, the Home Office refused to confirm or deny whether it holds information on inter-departmental communication about Pelican. This refusal to rule out whether the Home Office does hold information on the matter raises concerns that Malthouse may also have earlier misled parliament.
The new information takes up to 18 the number of officials the UK government has admitted to deploying on Operation Pelican.
These included senior officials such as the Deputy National Security Advisor at the Cabinet Office and the International Director at the Home Office, according to documents obtained by Declassified through a FOI request.
Declassified has revealed that four of Britain’s most powerful government ministries, including the Foreign Office, are refusing to say if their officials have met with US authorities to discuss Julian Assange.
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Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
John McEvoy is an independent journalist who has written for International History Review, The Canary, Tribune Magazine, Jacobin and Brasil Wire.
Featured image: Police ejecting Julian Assange from Ecuadorian embassy in London, April 11, 2019. (Screenshot from a YouTube video)
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***
A government-linked Ottawa-based group, Ottawa People’s Commission on the Convoy Occupation (OPC), launched a public commission into the effects of Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest in downtown Ottawa last winter. The globalist-led group claims to want “to address resident’s trauma and losses” due to the convoy. However, they seem to be exploiting residents of Ottawa in order to seize the millions of dollars Canadians donated to the Truckers Freedom Convoy.
RAIR Foundation USA has produced a short documentary that displays some of the OPC’s dirty tactics and the deceptions used to discredit the Freedom Convoy for their own financial gain.
Background
On January 29, 2022, the truckers’ protest known as Freedom Convoy 2022 swept into Canada’s capital Ottawa. It made headlines worldwide before being crushed on February 18 by Prime Minister Trudeau’s militarized police, following his invocation of the Emergencies Act on February 14. The Freedom Convoy, which consisted of thousands of trucks (and supporters of the truckers) across Canada, was a protest against the federal government’s mandate that all US-Canada cross-border truckers had to be vaccinated against Covid. It was also a protest against the lockdowns and mask mandates imposed by the government and against its overreach, justified as pandemic measures in general.
In the aftermath of the Freedom Convoy, Canadians have been divided on whether the trucker’s protest was a legitimate rebellion against government tyranny or an “occupation” that terrorized residents of downtown Ottawa who were forced to endure diesel fumes and endless honking.
The OPC’s two faces
The OPC claims to be an “independent, nonpartisan inquiry” into the “lived experiences” of Ottawa residents during the 2022 convoy “occupation.” The government-backed globalist group was formed this past June, and since its inception, the supposed objective group has released endless self-contradictory statements.
The OPC promised, over the coming months, to actively listen to Ottawa residents (especially those who lived in the downtown “red zone” of the Freedom Convoy) in order “to better understand the impact the Convoy had on us locals,” not to point fingers and place blame they said, but to “find proactive solutions and make recommendations for the future.”
Unfortunately, they seemed to have already made up their minds well before hearing a single testimony, claiming in the media that Ottawa residents were traumatized, scarred, and tortured by the terrible Convoy.
The OPC’s founder, left-wing activist Ken Rubin, said that other current federal and city reviews of the convoy were “barely scratching the surface of the dangerous, undemocratic, and hurtful occupation. I’ve never seen this level of trauma in a community.”
He said it would listen to residents, business owners, workers, and organizations “whose lives were turned upside down” and were subject to insults and so-called torture-level loud noise. It will also examine what failed to happen that might have ended the occupation sooner and how to prevent it from happening again.
“It was such a dramatic event – and it still isn’t over.” He said that the Commission would also hear how residents are being affected by the repeated reappearances of convoy protesters.
Despite the outward displays of bias, the group still claimed that at their Public hearings, all would be welcome and that any locals (especially those most affected downtown residents) could come to testify in a judgment-free space where the respected Commissioners would listen with a compassionate ear. They mentioned on their website that hearings might be separated by “affected neighborhoods, persons with disabilities, experts, journalists, and academics”—they never once mentioned screening and censoring out local speakers at the hearings who had positive viewpoints and experiences of the Convoy—that was– until they were publicly accused of doing precisely that on September 21, 2022, and busted for bias.
During the September 21 hearing, when confronted, they awkwardly stated, “we are not intending to censor out opposing viewpoints…” and “we’re so pleased with the first hearing, we couldn’t have asked for a wider variety of views…”
However, they did censor people who did not follow their biased script. The OPC would not allow Ottawa residents who felt the Convoy was positive and peaceful to speak. They used dirty tactics to weed out speakers who challenged their narrative while simultaneously pretending their hand-picked speakers had come about organically.
For example, on September 15, the Commission told Madeline, a witness who wanted to testify about her positive experiences at the protest, wasn’t welcome to speak, supposedly due to limited space. However, another witness, Christine, was told on September 19 she was welcome to speak because the Commission was led to believe the Convoy negatively impacted her. The Commission’s actions showed they were only interested in stacking the deck with witnesses who supported their narrative.
Are the OPC’s real motivations for financial gain
Many have questioned the motives of the OPC’s self-contradictory approach. Why would they go to such great lengths to pretend to be independent and nonpartisan while simultaneously being so openly, blatantly, and unabashedly biased? Even to go so far as lie and deny in front of the cameras that they were screening out supporters while admitting it the following day? Could the committee have a financial objective?
A deeper dive into the steering committee shows that it is headed by the Chinese National, 21-year-old Zexi Li, a federal government employee suing the trucker’s convoy protesters in a $9.8M class action. She is “seeking damages for emotional and mental distress, headaches, sleeping difficulties, difficulty concentrating, and interference with quiet enjoyment of her home.”
It seems as if the well-funded Commission is helping to gather witness testimony to strengthen Li’s financially motivated case. However, for the witnesses to help Li, it appears the Commission would have to position itself as objective and not biased.
In Canada, if one wants to be considered credible as a witness (or expert witness) in Court, one has to sign a code of conduct and take an oath swearing to be “independent, impartial, objective, and only there to assist the court and not an advocate for a particular party.” (Federal Court Rules schedule)
The left-wing commissioners (who could theoretically act as experts in Court and use this testimony as evidence) keep going out of their way to ask about any extra costs incurred by those in the community who hated the truckers.
On a somewhat related note, in Canada (before 2018), registered Canadian charities who wanted tax-free status could not spend more than 10% of their resources on political activity —that is, until one of the OPC Commissioners (lawyer, head of a Charity and UN representative) Leilani Farha launched a Charter Challenge claiming the law (income Tax Act) limiting Charities political actions violated her freedom of speech (link to PDF Canada_ without Poverty vs. AG of Canada). Farha won, so now “Charities “ can act as lobbyists and still issue tax receipts for donations that pay for their lobbying activities.
Sadly, many of the same tactics deployed in Canada are being used to squash freedom protesters worldwide. As RAIR Foundation USA recently reported, Brazil just froze the bank accounts of peaceful protesters standing up against voter fraud in their latest presidential election. Likewise, the left-wing Supreme Court used Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tactic to harm dissenters.
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Amy is an investigative journalist, founder of RAIR foundation USA, who writes about international politics, cancel culture, wrongful convictions, prison reform, political persecution, and religious persecution.
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***
To end the war in Ukraine, peace champions must win the war of ideas. This requires tackling two often-repeated claims that serve as obstacles to a diplomatic agreement between Ukraine and Russia. The first problematic claim is that the war was unprovoked; the second that Ukraine can achieve a decisive military victory.
To challenge claims the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an “unprovoked” decision of an imperial maniac, the anti-war Left has pointed to the official expansion of NATO –a hostile military alliance on Russia’s borders– as the match that lit the fire, unleashing death, destruction and displacement upon the breadbasket of the world.
NATO’s official expansion from 12 countries at the end of WWII to now 30 countries, including countries sitting on Russia’s neck-was not a neighborhood bake sale or a regional Tupperware party.
It was, however, old news.
Supporters of sending billions more in weapons to Ukraine argue that NATO expansion largely ended 18 years before the Russian invasion, in 2004 with the addition of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Russia President Putin’s order to invade his neighbor, they argue, was untethered to Russian national security concerns.
Two Little Known Documents
To shift public opinion against weaponizing endless war in Ukraine, it’s imperative the Left present persuasive evidence to debunk the impulsive madman myth that suggests one cannot negotiate a diplomatic resolution with an unprovoked leader of 143-million people who rolled out of bed one morning determined to reconstitute the Czarist empire.
The Left must turn its attention to two little-talked about agreements, one signed by President Biden and Ukrainian President Zelensky on Sept. 1, 2021, the other signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleb on Nov. 10, 2021, three months before Russia invaded Ukraine.
The September, 2021, Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership reaffirmed Ukraine as a de facto NATO partner, “to continue our robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.”
Established at the Wales Summit in 2014, the Partnership Interoperability Initiative (PII) encouraged favored non-NATO nations, then Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan and Sweden–the NATO farm team– to share intelligence and participate in NATO-led military interventions, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and join in euphemistically-labeled “war games.”
For Ukraine’s support of NATO operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, as well as cyber defense and Black Sea maritime maneuvers, NATO in 2020 welcomed Ukraine into the club of favored NATO wannabes, awarding Ukraine special status as the 6th Enhanced Opportunity Partner (EOP) to receive military training and participate in the multinational NATO Response Force (NRF) of land, air, and sea troops and Special Operations Forces to deploy in a flash, wherever commanded. Such B list status allowed Ukraine to integrate into NATO’s military command structures to prepare, plan and conduct joint operations.
The NATO Farm Team
The degree of present-day involvement of “enhanced opportunities partners” in NATO remains a mystery shrouded in secrecy, even as NATO conducts mock nuclear exercises during Europe’s largest war since the second world war. For two weeks in October fourteen NATO countries, most unnamed, participated in the annual training and flying missions commanding fighter jets and B-52 capable nuclear bombers, albeit without live warheads, over Belgium, the United Kingdom and the North Sea in a dress rehearsal for a nuclear attack on Russia.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, Steadfast Noonparticipants were to practice conducting strikes with US nuclear equipment loaded onto fighter jets of non-nuclear NATO countries–a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
One does not need a cinematic Hollywood imagination to envision Ukraine, part of NATO’s farm team, one day agreeing or rather inviting the US and NATO to install nuclear equipment on Ukrainian fighter jets targeting Russia–or go one step further to install nuclear weapons in Ukraine itself, much as the US has installed its nuclear weapons in the NATO countries of Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.
Now the argument that Ukraine was not a NATO country, would never be allowed to join NATO, had nothing to do with NATO and, therefore, posed no existential threat to Russia falls flat. As does the argument that Ukraine posed no nuclear threat to Russia because it had agreed to transfer back to Russia the nuclear weapons left in Ukraine following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Who needs nuclear weapons when you can borrow them like a prom dress or store borrowed nukes in your air base garage?
Following an innocuous preamble that references “democratic values, respect for human rights and the rule of law, “the November 2021 US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership committed the US and Ukraine to joint defense and security operations “deepening cooperation in areas such as Black Sea security, cyber defense and intelligence sharing ..”
Crimea
Additionally, the Charter of Strategic Partnership endorsed Ukraine retaking a strategic asset in Russia’s defense operations: Crimea. The document emphasizes the US’s refusal to ever recognize Crimea, home to ethnic Russians, as part of Russia, stating an “unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, including Crimea and extending to its territorial waters …”
Crimea, a peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea, was part of Russia from 1783 until 1954, when Nikita Krushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, peacefully transferred Crimea to Ukraine’s administrative control without seeking a vote of approval from Crimeans. Some historians speculate Krushchev, who had once worked in Ukraine’s mines and married a Ukrainian woman, wanted to make nice in the aftermath of Stalin’s tortuous reign; others conclude Krushchev wanted to extend greater Soviet control over Ukraine.
Even after the transfer, Ukraine allowed Russia’s naval fleet at Sevastopol to remain in place, leasing Crimea to Russia until 2042.
Then came the 2014 Maidan square uprising, revolution, US-backed coup, whatever you want to call it, that overthrew Ukraine’s Russia-friendly President Yanukovych. In a secretly taped phone conversation, State Department official Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, was recorded engineering the transition government, saying “Fuck the EU” should the European Union not approve of her plan.
Russia grew concerned, deeply concerned. MIght the new Ukrainian leaders, hand-picked by Nuland, evict Russia’s defense forces from the Crimean peninsula? In March 2014, a month after Nuland’s taped phone call, Putin ordered troops to march into Crimea.
The Set Up
Only the most naive would believe Russia would ever again surrender Crimea, which was part of Russia for nearly 200 years and affords Russia naval access to the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean.
In signing the U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership, Secretary of State Blinken encouraged Ukraine to pursue a goal–repossession of Crimea– that in all probability would never be realized short of massive human suffering, the likes of which we are witnessing today.
The document reads:
The United States and Ukraine intend to continue a range of substantive measures to prevent external direct and hybrid aggression against Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for such aggression and violations of international law, including the seizure and attempted annexation of Crimea … The United States intends to support Ukraine’s efforts to counter armed aggression … until the restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.
Did Secretary of State Blinken believe Russia’s leaders would play chess or take a nap while Ukraine snatched back Crimea with guns blazing? The subtext of this Strategic Partnership was that the US would pump Ukraine full of weapons so it could fight like hell–or to the last Ukrainian–to reclaim a Russian naval port Ukraine had agreed to lease to Russia for decades. Yes, this was a setup for Ukraine to provoke a war with Russia, so that Ukrainian, not US soldiers, would do the fighting and dying on the battlefield to “weaken” Russia in the interests of maintaining a unipolar world with the US on top.
None of this is to excuse Russia for taking the bait to launch a horrific invasion of Ukraine that has killed or made casualties of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, uprooted eight million Ukrainians from their homes, sent hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing conscription, and worsened the climate crisis with more greenhouse gas emissions from missile launches. Rocket attacks and explosions have reduced infrastructure–railways, electrical grids, apartment buildings, oil depots– to charred rubble, leaving blackened cities blanketed by toxic munitions.
Provocation, Not Justification
The focus on the Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership and two months later the U.S.-Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership (a steroid-enhanced cousin of the former) is not to justify the invasion, but to clarify that the United States and NATO provoked the war from which we all must turn back before we find ourselves engulfed in another world war. In that tragic case, provided we are still alive, the only winners will be the military contractors–Raytheon, manufacturer of the Stinger, surface-to-air missile; Lockheed Martin, the Javelin-a portable anti-tank missile system; and HIMARS rocket.
In a Merry Christmas-Happy New Year gift to bomb-makers, Congress will soon consider a bipartisan amendment to the proposed $850 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to “grant the Pentagon wartime procurement powers.” Such emergency powers would greenlight automatic multi-year renewal contracts for war profiteers to continuously produce more weapons, thus making the US-provoked war in Ukraine a cash cow for military contractors.
How do we turn back? Back to sanity, back to diplomacy?
No Military Solution
Just as we challenge the “unprovoked” claim repeated by the White House and corporate press, we must challenge the fiction that a military solution is the answer.
As Ukraine drove Russian troops out of occupied Kherson, a port city on the Black Sea, reporters championed Ukraine’s victory, telling us Ukrainians –with the wind at their backs–could defeat Russia if only the US and NATO would send more weapons. Days later we learned Kherson was virtually uninhabitable as millions of its Ukrainians struggled to survive following retaliatory Russian missile strikes that knocked out electricity and heat in sub-zero winter temperatures.
To awaken from this nightmare, to disrupt the surge of weapons, to counter the narrative that more rockets and drones will deliver a final military victory for Ukraine, the anti-war Left must build a diverse coalition centered around reasonable demands for a truce leading to a more lasting ceasefire and negotiated peace. To date, over 500 US religious leaders have signed onto a statement calling for a Christmas truce to kick-start diplomatic efforts.
According to Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, a former economic advisor to Russia and global leader in sustainable development, a diplomatic agreement must address three issues of primary concern: Ukraine’s relationship with NATO; semi-autonomy for the eastern Donbas; the future of Russian-annexed Crimea.
How do we elevate diplomacy? Clearly, the sanctions-drunk US State Department tasked with promoting diplomacy has not prevented conflict, only fomented it with Blinken’s 2021 signing of the U.S-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership affirming the right of Ukraine, already a NATO stepchild, to cross Putin’s red line to officially join NATO.
The Peace in Ukraine Coalition
The elevation of diplomacy is the hard work of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition,which calls for a ceasefire and negotiations, as well as investments in climate, healthcare, housing, education and jobs, not more weapons to prolong the fighting in Ukraine.
Launched by CODEPINK, the coalition also includes Veterans for Peace, World Beyond War, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-US, DSA-International, Massachusetts Peace Action, RootsAction, Progressive Democrats of America and others.
Coalition partners share resources to table at farmers markets, circulate petitions, send letters to Congress, pass resolutions at political clubs, erect picket lines in front of congress members’ offices, elevate the voices of diplomacy on CODEPINK Radio, and support the national tour of Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK, and Nicolas J.S. Davies, journalist and researcher, the co-authors of the riveting book, “War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.”
In the words of the authors, “The lesson of this war is the same one we have failed to learn from every other war; that the real monsters are war itself and the morally bankrupt leaders on all sides, who keep feeding it with our resources and our bodies.”
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Marcy Winograd is the Coordinator of CODEPINK Congress and a steering committee member of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition. The coalition calls for a ceasefire, peace negotiations and investments in climate, housing, healthcare and jobs, not endless war in Ukraine. To join the coalition, visit peaceinukraine.org.
Featured image: CODEPINK “No War with Russia Rally, Negotiate Ukraine, Don’t Escalate.” (2022)
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A New Zealand court on Wednesday ruled against the parents of a sick infant who refused to use “vaccinated” blood for the baby’s surgery and instead gave the child’s custody to the country’s health agency.
The parents of the infant, who urgently needed open-heart surgery, had said that they wanted the blood to come from people who have not received the Covid vaccine.
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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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About $1 billion worth of unused COVID-19 vaccines in Canada are set to expire by the end of 2022 due to an excess supply previously acquired by the federal government, wrote Auditor General Karen Hogan in a performance audit tabled today in the House of Commons.
“We found that the Public Health Agency of Canada was unsuccessful in its efforts to minimize vaccine wastage,” Hogan’s office wrote in the performance audit, titled “Report 9: COVID-19 Vaccines,” and tabled on Dec. 6.
“The agency had a surplus of vaccine doses resulting from the obligation to buy doses as specified in advance purchase agreements and the purchase of optional doses.”
The auditor general also said the public health agency’s procurement of enough vaccines for the Canadian public took too long and added that it had “delays in implementing a vaccine management information technology system.”
“This finding matters because vaccine wastage results in a financial cost to Canadians,” read the audit.
Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos told reporters on Parliament Hill today that the government’s vaccine procurement strategy was “very successful” despite the surplus.
“Canada’s overall COVID-19 immunization strategy has been a success,” Duclos said on Dec. 6, while acknowledging that “improvements can and should always be made.”
Duclos also said a total of 10.8 million doses of COVID vaccines have been either destroyed or have expired in Canada to date.
Minister of Public Services and Procurement Helena Jaczek said that “Canada’s vaccine procurement was both effective and efficient.”
“There was care taken [and] due diligence in the handling of the contracts,” she told Parliament Hill reporters on Dec. 6.
International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan said that the federal government is looking to return a large number of unused vaccines to a global vaccine-sharing initiative known as COVAX, from which Canada previously obtained some of its COVID vaccine supply.
“We’ve been continually assessing which each country’s needs have been,” Sajjan said. “So every nation is making a request through COVAX for what those needs are.”
Ontario Surplus
Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk also found a large number of unused COVID vaccines within the province in her annual report, released on Nov. 30.
Lysyk said that the Ontario government wasted 38 percent of its available vaccine doses between February and June 2022 by overestimating the number that would be needed for administering boosters.
In total, Lysyk found that the province wasted 3.4 million doses of COVID vaccines. She also reported a large number of wasted personal protective equipment (PPE) across Ontario—totalling $66 million in value—after it was found to be damaged, expired, or obsolete.
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Marnie Cathcart and The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
Peter Wilson is a reporter based in Ontario, Canada.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
In a recent interview with a YouTube presenter, a British mercenary who fought in Ukraine denounced high levels of corruption, theft, and desertion among Kiev’s troops. According to him, local officials are marked by an “extraordinary incompetence” in dealing with the combat situation and the problems of war. There are cases of stealing of equipment operated by Ukrainian soldiers and militants themselves, which shows that, despite the western media being silent on the matter, Ukraine apparently is still the “most corrupt country in Europe”.
Former mercenary Joseph McDonald told youtuber Nikolas Lloyd some episodes he witnessed in his combat routine in Ukraine. He claims that many packages of advanced military equipment imported from the West simply “disappeared” before being used to supply troops on the frontline. When explaining his experiences in the country, McDonald emphasized a case in which two trucks carrying American missiles and heavy artillery ammunition were stolen, possibly with the connivance of some Ukrainian officers.
“We had two trucks with 84 M4s, 12 SCAR-Heavies… a couple of Javelins, and some M240-Bravo’s, and an absolute truck full of ammo – [which] just went missing in the convoy (…) These vehicles just disappeared as this convoy was in transit. (…) There was an awful lot of looting going on (…) It appears a lot of people who came to volunteer for the Ukrainians were also kleptomaniacs (…) who’d gone there with the intention of plunder. That was a problem that the legion kept having for several months: people who’d turned up to go on the rob”, he said.
During the interview, McDonald also commented on the terrible combat conditions to which the Ukrainian forces are exposed. The mercenary’s comments contrast everything the western media says about Ukraine. According to big media outlets, the situation on the Ukrainian frontline is under Kiev’s control, with Russian troops suffering significant losses and the Ukrainians promoting effective “counter-offensives” day after day. However, McDonald makes it clear that there are high degrees of disorganization and lack of strategic thinking among Ukrainians.
He considers Ukrainian leaders incompetent. There does not seem to be centrality and unity among the commanders of Kiev’s forces. The particular interests of some officers are prioritized over Ukrainian national goals, and this is why there are constantly cases of corruption and theft without any inspection or punishment. Obviously, this has serious consequences for the troops themselves, who become increasingly ineffective, disunited, and really unable to keep fighting under such circumstances.
The British fighter comments that during battle moves, Ukrainian officers seek personal privileges, trying to occupy houses and territories where they are safe and comfortable, rather than strategic positions, with efficient radio connection to communicate with other units and plan effective combat actions. In other words, these commanders seem not to care about actually “winning” but simply about staying safe while their subordinates are damaged by the current escalation.
“The Ukrainian commander… seemed to think that picking a nice house for him and all his drivers to stay in was much more important than picking a house where you had radio coms to your units in the field. After a few weeks of basically being in a [command post] where I did nothing but sit around and smoke cigarettes and barbecue food for the Ukrainian officers once a day, I had enough of that”, he added, remembering a personal experience.
This Ukrainian military chaos has also favored a wave of desertion of fighters. There has been a high number of pro-Kiev military and mercenaries leaving the battlefield. As conditions deteriorate and it becomes virtually impossible to achieve military objectives in the conflict, many combatants simply leave their ranks. Some return to their homes, others flee the country or surrender. McDonald also claims that there is a lot of internal flow between Ukrainian units. Combatants migrate from one battalion to another in search of better working conditions – but fail to find it.
In fact, the personal experience of someone who has been on the ground in Ukraine is very important to show the reality of Kiev’s forces. There is absolutely no credibility in western speeches about “Russian defeat”. Military control is evidently in the hands of the Russians, while the Ukrainian forces are weakened, divided, unmotivated and with several internal problems that prevent them from strategically planning any possible “reaction”.
Corruption is also a central factor to be analyzed in this case. The Ukrainian government has always been known for corruption scandals and this has been aggravated during the conflict, as many of the heavy weapons sent by the West “disappear” from the battlefield precisely because they are sold by corrupt officials on the international black market, supplying terrorist networks abroad.
In the face of these accusations, it is inadmissible that NATO continues to send weapons to Kiev. The best scenario is to stop military aid and encourage the government to negotiate peace by accepting all Russian terms.
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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.
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This incisive article by Prof Tony Hall was first published on May, 2022
***
Like other peoples throughout the world, the Canadian people are in desperate need of independent investigations to look into many facets of government corruption,malfeasance and outright lies perpetrated under the pretext of fighting COVID-19.
A number of these covid mandates remain ongoing. If nothing is done to break their momentum, many more illegal assaults on our lives, livelihoods, health, social harmony, and financial viability are in no doubt in the works. We the people must generate decisive collective actions to put an end to the many-faceted war on humanity adopted by politicians in high office on behalf of the powerful Big Money establishment.
In order to effectively push back, we must find ways of subjecting the top tier of attackers to serious “criminal proceedings”.
Reiner Fuellmich, Thomas Renz, US Senator Ron Johnson as well as many other jurists have been diligent in pushing ahead with this prosecutorial agenda. All these advocates of justice, however, have had to deal with the reality that the largest media venues continue to push criminal tyranny forward. Most of the big communications networks persist in publicizing a well-orchestrated medley of ongoing lies that is preventing the largest mass of humanity from developing genuine awareness of what is really going on.
As long as we continue to allow media bosses to cover up the devastating impacts of the covid mandates, the case for the prosecution will be kept on the margins. Thus the tips of our truth-seeking spears must pierce the bloated deceptions of the huge media apparatus that is the primary weapon in the assault we are facing. As is usually the case in war, the contest for control of human minds forms the main theatre of conflict in the battle to make the future.
Political Accountability and the Enforcement of The Rule of Law
So far there has been no real accountability for the crimes against humanity that have become the main hallmark of the manufactured COVID crisis. Nevertheless, the criminal actions of the likes of Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have been so effectively documented by top researchers, Robert F. Kennedy prominent among them, that even some mainstream media venues have had to take notice.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is part of the same “cabal” as Fauci and Gates. Trudeau should be pictured in this context. He is an obvious person of interest as well as a test case when it comes to the need to exact some high-level accountability for the adoption of COVID mandates.
By responding appropriately to Trudeau, Canadians can claw back some lost legal and ethical ground. A statement would be made that We the people in Canada are capable of safeguarding and enforcing the rule of law even on those in the upper echelons of power and wealth.
Last winter Trudeau managed to show both his cowardly and aggressive sides as he forced on Ottawa a major bout of violent repression. The violence generated by the Prime Minister’s self-indulgent temper tantrum was aimed initially at repressing the people involved in the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy. The federally-directed violence that Trudeau pushed on the nation’s capital aroused much disgust and dismay in many quarters both inside and outside Canada.
Trudeau’s invocation on Valentine’s Day of the emergency measures provisions of Canada’s revised War Measures Act rightfully earned the PM widespread international condemnation. Many astute commentators could easily see that Trudeau resorted to deploying the Emergency Act with the goal of criminalizing and financially ruining his working class critics.
Several elected officials in the Parliament of the European Union publicly condemned Canada’s Prime Minister as the “worst kind” of dictatorial enemy of democracy— indeed as “a disgrace for any democracy.” One EU parliamentarian, Christina Anderson chastised Trudeau
“as a man who tramples on fundamental rights by persecuting and criminalizing his own citizens as terrorists just because they dared stand up to his perverted concept of democracy. [Trudeau] should not be allowed to speak in this House at all.”
Trudeau’s treatment of the Truckers also made big headlines in India. Many commentators pointed to the inconsistency between Trudeau’s defense of East Indian critics of the Indian government’s COVID policies and Trudeau’s own intolerance of domestic criticism when pointed at his own COVID policies in his own backyard.
Sky News in New Zealand pulled out all the stops in raising the alarm about Trudeau’s radical extremism in his effort to silence the Truckers by destroying them. One newsreader referred to both Trudeau and New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, as “vacuous impostors.” See this.
Another Sky News pundit declared in mid-February, “its insane what Justin Trudeau is doing.” He indicated Trudeau was using the Emergency Act “to silence and starve the truckers, to stop them getting their hands on their own money, to stop them getting petrol, to stop them getting food.”
Even Elon Musk jumped on the bandwagon by comparing Trudeau with Hitler. In a tweet Musk had an image of Hitler complaining that he thought his comparison to Trudeau was unfair. Playing on the Trudeau government’s notorious recklessness with national finances, Musk had Hitler declare, “I had a budget.”
Trudeau should certainly have some explaining to do, first and foremost to the people of Canada.
We Canadians are not accustomed to hearing such marked international criticism of our own country as a repressive dictatorship and as “a symbol of civil rights violations.” See this.
Canada has indeed become a prison country under Justin Trudeau’s vindictive and repressive watch. Air travel restrictions offer an example of Trudeau’s jail keeper’s mentality. In Trudeau’s ongoing national lockdown, it remains illegal for Canadians who haven’t taken the COVID jabs to board airplanes that fly to destinations inside or outside Canada.
The extent of the tyranny in Canada is underlined by the thoroughgoing corruption of the Canadian media that, as Trudeau unabashedly boasts, is paid by his regime to spin the news in its favour. See this.
Trudeau’s Recklessness in Canada’s Top Job
Justin Trudeau seems to have no intention whatsoever of trying to offer up some explanation to the Canadian people of his treatment of the Truckers. Moreover, Trudeau seems unwilling to rein in his malicious behavior towards his critics even as he thumbs his nose at international law and at the worldwide infamy in which he has enwrapped the government and country of Canada.
Trudeau continues to seem much more attentive to his mentors at BlackRock and in Davos Switzerland, than to Canadian working people who travelled thousands of miles to bring to Ottawa their well-formulated critiques of the Prime Minister’s nonsensical COVID obsessions.
A former drama teacher, Trudeau seems incapable of any act of contrition let alone any introspection. There is no sign he is even slightly aware of the abject mess he has made of the job he took over by cashing in on his family name. Instead of trying to mend his ways, Justin Trudeau seems to be operating on the principle that a strong offence is the best defense.
Trudeau and his backers are continuing their reign of abuse by trying to cover up a litany of crimes that extends far beyond targeting the Truckers with the police state extremes of the Emergency Act.
Instead of trying honestly to come to grips with the reasons he is becoming an international embarrassment to Canada, Trudeau is setting up a Canadian “investigation” with the aim of smearing and misrepresenting the Truckers. He continues to abuse his office by twisting the law to repress those who have done the most to publicly expose his recklessness in the performance of Canada’s top job.
How Can Justice Be Sought? “Conflict of Interest”
Trudeau has appointed former Ontario Judge, Paul S. Rouleau, to head up a so-called Public Order Emergency Commission. Rouleau, who was appointed a judge by Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, is a longstanding regular donor to Liberal Party of Canada. Rouleau’s Liberal ties seem to form his main qualification for his new job.
Judge Rouleau will lead an inquiry into the Emergency Act fiasco that unfolded last winter. Trudeau has made it clear he wants this inquiry to create the context to put Canadian minds at ease in case of future invocations of the Emergency Act.
PM Trudeau: "We want the people to rest assured that we made the right decisions in the right way — not just in this situation, but also for the ones in the years to come where it (the Emergencies Act) could be used again." https://t.co/DEN7zzSz9Gpic.twitter.com/TMRqhI1zdC
Every indicator suggests that the Rouleau Inquiry is being set up as a whitewash. The aim in the Prime Minister’s Office seems to be to provide cover and the appearance of justification for the brief enactment of Canada’s Emergency Act for a ten-day period last February.
During those ten days the Trudeau Liberals became the primary cause of the emergency in Canada’s national capital. Trudeau did so with his rejection, complete with a tirade of insults, of all the Truckers’ peaceful overtures. The Truckers wanted simply to engage in orderly discussions to explain their opposition to the federal government’s unconscionable imposition of mandatory injections known to cause high rates of death and injury. See this.
The longer the purposeful denial of the well-documented plague of injection injuries and death persists, the more that government support for continuing injection mandates merges into the realm of abject criminality. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that many of our governors, including Justin Trudeau, are engaged in anything other than the premeditated promotion of mass murder.
There are literally thousands of credible reports and scientific essays exploring a variety of issues concerning injury and death rates caused by the pathogenic gene-modifying injections. Some of these discussions involve very public matters like questions concerning the 769 often-televised deaths of high-performance athletes over the course of the last year. See this.
Commentator after commentator repeats the position that nothing remotely like this orgy of public death in sporting events has ever happened before. Insurance actuaries are adamant that they have never seen anything remotely like the rising death rates of working age people in 2021. See this.
We are long past the time when national figures such as Trudeau or the other WEF alumni like Macron, Ardern, or Newsom, can credibly claim that they know nothing about the published commentaries concerning injection injuries and deaths. It must be made clear to them that their real or feigned ignorance offers a credible self-defense.
How many hundreds of millions of now-obsolete COVID injections has Trudeau ordered that are currently stored away in federal vaults?
How much taxpayers’ money spent by Trudeau on these injection purchases has contributed to the growth of capital assets in the Trudeau Foundation’s coffers?
How much of Canada’s foreign aid has been devoted to Trudeau’s desire to help along the agenda of his good friend, Bill Gates, in forcing people in Africa, Asia and Latin America to take dangerous COVID injections?
How much infertility in the Third World and at home has Canada’s reckless injection policies inflicted? How many deaths have been caused by withholding perfectly effective COVID treatments like hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin in order to promote the gene-altering injections?
The fact that it is impossible to say if the injection deaths are to be counted in the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, provides evidence in itself of the lack of any credible procedures for the protection of public safety in this, the largest medical experiment ever conducted on human subjects.
The evidence is overwhelming that there is a very concerted push underway to discourage medical practitioners from diagnosing and chronicling even obvious vaccine injuries. This encouragement to MDs and nurses to look the other way involves a combination of financial incentives and job penalties that have made the COVID industry a cesspool of corruption, deception and fraud. See this.
The evidence is overwhelming that COVID criminals basically threw away all of the rulebooks developed over decades in developing new medical products. There has been no credible federal regulation whatsoever of the process of developing and administering the gene-altering clot shots.
How are we to explain the maniacal quest to universalize at warp speed all the pathogenic injections even for children?
The massive scale of this worldwide crime, one that transcends even genocide, beggars the imagination.
The questions outlined above only begin to scratch the surface of topics that must be looked into with or without the cooperation of the likes of Justin Trudeau. Now is the time to mount the necessary investigations either inside existing agencies of criminal justice or outside them if necessary. There can be no mistaking the difficulties in seeking justice for crimes in which high-level law enforcement officials are implicated.
Such criminal investigations are necessary if the largest mass of humanity is to escape the criminal clutches of those seeking to expand their wealth and power at our expense. Otherwise our species will be pushed further into genetic modification. And the survivors of depopulation will be corralled into the denigration of transhuman enslavement?
Most Canadians Love Their Country and Dislike Trudeau’s “Post-National” Vision
In learning of Trudeau’s creation of the Rouleau inquiry, Canada’s Conservative opposition party immediately went on record to declare “The Liberal Party is doing everything in their power to insure this inquiry is unsubstantial and fails to hold them accountable.” See this.
Trudeau’s strategy is clearly to point police investigations at the Truckers and away from the political machinations culminating in his own decision to invoke on Feb. 14 Canada’s latest iteration of the War Measures Act.
The mandate given the Rouleau investigation has built-in biases including a directive from the federal government that the objective should be to “prevent similar events from happening again.”
Very different understandings no doubt prevail among the many millions of Canadians who appreciated that the Truckers were effectively bringing with them a wide array of citizens’ complaints to Canada’s capital. After two years of unrelenting lies from the government that gave false justifications for useless or often-harmful COVID restrictions, the mood in the country was ripe for a huge liberating exaltation that Enough is Enough.
A very large sampling of the large constituency of those no longer willing to be Trudeau’s COVID guinea pigs turned out to meet the Truckers as they convoyed along the Trans-Canada Highway. The public showed up in very large numbers notwithstanding the frigid mid-winter temperatures. The Liberal Party could never even dream of receiving such a warm cross-Canada reception especially during the height of winter.
The timeless images of this outpouring of civic involvement in the Truckers’ cause effectively makes the case that many Canadians would probably want to see such episodes repeated rather than ended. Would more Truckers’ Freedom Convoys to Ottawa break the tone-deaf intransigence of the petulant Trudeau government.
Many Ottawa insiders who resented the presence of Truckers in the nation’s capital seem to have no problem with Trudeau’s subversive design to re-engineer Canada as the world’s first “post-national country.”
Trudeau demonstrated his idea of post-nationalism when he essentially spit on the most spectacular expressions of proud Canadian nationalism since the time of Canada’s centennial year.
Where the bold actions of the Truckers stimulated many spontaneous displays of love of country in 2022, in 1967 it was Montreal’s Expo 67 that became the focus for the outpouring of patriotism. Ironically Justin’s father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, took advantage of the surge of Canadian nationalism in 1967 as a launching pad for his successful bid to become Prime Minister.
In seeking to explain his sudden absence from Ottawa when the Truckers arrived in the nation’s capital, Canada’s prime minister highlighted his willingness to go along with one of the most discredited aspects of the official COVID narrative. After claiming to be triple jabbed Trudeau indicated he was yet again infected with COVID.
Trudeau then concluded with ridiculous advice. Trudeau called on Canadians to replicate his example. He seemed unaware that this course of action destroys natural immunity making injectees far more vulnerable to a wide spectrum of infectious diseases. Trudeau seemed oblivious to the fact that the clots shots do not prevent infection and transmission of COVID while they do cause high rates of heart attacks, strokes, myocarditis as well as a wide array of other serious ailments.
Canada’s Financial Intelligence Agency Finds No “Ideologically-Motivated Violent Extremism” Among the Truckers in Ottawa
Judge Rouleau was directed to look at pro-Trucker social media with an emphasis on the “impact of misinformation and disinformation.” Another major focus of the investigation, which is to report to Parliament by Feb. 20, 2023, involves “the economic and international impact of the blockades.”
Throughout their time in Ottawa the Truckers performed many major public services. For instance they hosted, along with invited legal and medical experts, a number of very significant public education events. These events exposed for Internet viewers both data and interpretations otherwise withheld from the public by the COVID crime bosses that concurrently control both the majority of the world’s governments as well as the major components of mainstream media.
The logistics of how such a large and complex system of power can be coordinated is one of the major issues requiring proper investigation.
Generally speaking the Truckers in Ottawa remained well disciplined as individuals and as representatives of a larger group. The actions of the Truckers and their supporters simply did not conform to the harsh characterizations that their detractors tried to heap on them.
In all probably there were episodes in Ottawa when some protesters fell short of perfect restraint in all their actions. There were, however, no compelling displays that the Truckers and their supporters showed themselves to be rife with racists, misogynists, Nazis, White supremacists, terrorists, insurrectionists and embodiments of all the other horrible weaponized phrases heaped upon them by Trudeau and much of his bought-and-paid for media.
As time has passes it becomes increasingly clear that the Liberal Party and its NDP hangers-on are trying to create a mirror image of the Biden government’s manipulation of the Capitol Hill episode on January 6, 2021 to invent a new category of “domestic terrorists.” Are the RCMP copying the strategy of the FBI in advancing the Biden government’s agenda? Is the RCMP engaged in planting assets and spies in dissident movements with the aim of persuading the public that some sort of dangerous insurrection is in the works?
In its agenda to criminalize the Truckers, the Trudeau government could not find in Ottawa the evidence it wanted to make the desired case. In fact Barry MacKillop, Deputy Director of FINTRAC, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, indicated to the Public Safety Committee in Parliament during the the week prior to Feb. 14, that “What is happening in Ottawa has not been, to my knowledge, identified as ideologically-motivated violent extremism.”
MacKillop went on to report that his equivalents in the US system of financial intelligence shared this interpretation and did not see any sign of “terrorist” overtones reflected in the Truckers’ stand in Ottawa.
Last week during a public safety committee meeting, FINTRAC's deputy director of intelligence denied that protests in Ottawa were a form of ideological extremism and said that the financial intel agency hadn't seen an uptick in suspicious transactions around the convoy. #cdnpolipic.twitter.com/RQBZHJtXgv
It seems that in light of this verdict from FINTRAC, Trudeau and his Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, shifted their attention to four associated Trucker actions at the Canada-US border crossings. One such site was the Ambassador Bridge crossing at Windsor-Detroit.
With an eye to expediting the flow of car parts for the integrated automotive industry on both sides of the international divide, governments were able to do what was necessary to restore the flow of goods moving across the fabled bridge.
The Coutts Deception?
While the flow of goods across the Ambassador Bridge was fairly quickly returned to normal, the Truckers’ action at Coutts Alberta is only now coming to light as a major focus of Trudeau’s efforts to criminalize his most effective critics.
In the early morning of Feb. 14 only hours before Trudeau and Freeland announced their invocation of the Emergencies Act, there was a flurry of activity at the area of the border crossing between Coutts Alberta and Sweetgrass Montana.
It is easy to imagine that much more than coincidence was at play in the closeness of the timing between the final sequence of events at the Truckers’ stand at Coutts and deliberations in the Prime Minister’s Office leading to the invocation of the Emergency Act.
In the late afternoon of Feb. 13 a ritual took place near Coutts. Members of the RCMP and some of the protestors marked their agreement to end the Truckers’ action with a ceremony. As they all sang the national anthem, police and the Truckers’ group culminated their interactions in a series of police-civilian hugs.
Coutts police honors, greets and hugs truckers who have blocked the US – Canada border for 18 consecutive days. pic.twitter.com/RL4F7l0JBh
Then the RCMP transformed themselves from friends to foes. In the early morning hours of Feb. 14 the RCMP sprung into action to arrest thirteen people. Four of the charged people faced the accusation that they were guilty of a crime known as “conspiracy to commit murder.” Nine more individuals were hit with weapons charges as the media produced a picture of a weapons cache that to this day has not been adequately explained by the RCMP.See this.
To this day the four individuals charged with conspiracy to commit murder remain in jail having been repeatedly denied bail. The clear signal sent by this prolonged incarceration as the drawn-out process inches forward, is that the accused must be very dangerous.
There is quite clearly a thick veil of secrecy draped over many aspects of these criminal proceedings. Members of the public and the media are not allowed to view the court proceedings thus far because of “COVID restrictions.” My own repeated efforts to view the proceedings have been futile. From what I can see the workings of the Lethbridge court is on a par with, say, the Mexican justice system. The stench of corruption, obfuscation and payola is hard to miss.
Five major media agencies, the CBC, Postmedia, CTV News, Global News, and the Globe and Mail, have themselves gone to court seeking access to the search warrants of those facing the unusual charge of “conspiracy to commit murder.” None of these media has been inclined to express much skeptical curiosity when it comes to questioning government interpretations of the manufactured COVID crisis. See this.
Back in late March the commentary of European Union parliamentarian, Christina Anderson, emphasized Trudeau’s anti-democratic strategy in seeking to discredit his critiques by dubbing them as “terrorists.” Trudeau may very well have done precisely that. Either he or his minions might have forwarded political directives to the RCMP.
Like its FBI equivalent in the United States, the RCMP is notorious for subordinating its duties as a law enforcement agency to its role as a political spin doctoring agency. Consider, for instance, the RCMP’s “entrapment” of Muslim patsies with over 200 police assets to create the appearance of an apprehended terrorist episode at the BC Legislature on Canada Day, 2013. See this.
Having been told by Canada’s financial intelligence agency that the Truckers in Ottawa did not display any signs of being ideologically motivated extremists, the Prime Minister’s Office may have asked the RCMP to help them out. The day before the Emergency Act was schedule to be unveiled, the Trudeau government still needed some evidence of “terrorism” to justify both its resort to Canada’s “Terrorism Financing Act” in conjunction with its invocation of the Emergency Act. See this.
How convenient for Trudeau that the RCMP delivered the needed criminal prosecutions in such a timely, last-minute fashion the very same day that the Emergency Act was imposed. Clearly Freeland and Trudeau used the list of charges delivered by the RCMP to help provide justification to press forward their unprecedented interventions. At the heart of those interventions was the declaration that federal authorities would bypass the judiciary in taking control of Canada’s banking system in order to provide new weapons to punish and disable their political foes.
The Coutts affair created the basis of a political upheaval within the government of Alberta as well as a stimulus for added animosity between Trudeau and his would-be nemesis, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. The COVID fiasco has become a major source of division within Alberta’s ruling United Conservative Party (UCP). Some rural MLAs representing the governing UCP sided with the Truckers who parked their vehicles at Coutts.
One of these MLAs is Grant Hunter who travelled to the border crossing along with his grandchildren. Hunter justified his action by asserting, “I brought the grandkids down to the Coutts border today to show them the importance of standing up for freedom and liberty.”
Any move towards regaining some reasonable measure of freedom and liberty cannot proceed successfully until criminal authoritarians like Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland are dealt with. They must be made subject to the rule of law that they seem to have violated and undermined in many ways. Only proper trials can determine if such accusations can be made to stick.
A report that rural UCP MLAs have negotiated the Coutts border blockade to be eased, and in exchange they’ll lift covid rules outside Alberta cities. How does Kenney gov respond? Source: somebody embedded with the truckers who’s promoting a fundraiser for border blockers’ lawyer. pic.twitter.com/WgXxYR11rF
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Dr. Anthony Hallis editor in chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
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***
In a recent interview, distinguished internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologistDr. Peter McCullough shared how studies have indicated that synthetic mRNA from the Pfizer and Moderna experimental COVID vaccines may last permanently in the body, can also transfer to the unvaccinated, and is “changing the human genome.”
“It looks like the messenger RNA is transferring from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated now,” McCullough told Tanya Gaw from Action4Canada on November 24 (beginning at 39:24).
The Dallas-based physician has had a renowned career in the medical field, including authoring 677 articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals, and remains the most published individual in his field in history.
McCullough referenced an article of his where he cited a study by Helene Banoun showing that lipid nanoparticles that carry the mRNA spread throughout the body and “have been shown to be able to be excreted through body fluids (sweat, sputum, breast milk) and to pass the transplacental barrier.”
“And in a paper by Fertig and Colleagues, the messenger RNA is found circulating in blood for at least two weeks” (here), the physician told Gaw. “And the curves were not going down. That’s as long as they looked.”
He stated another paper “found messenger RNA in the vaccinated in lymph nodes for months. It looks like the body’s not clearing it out.”
‘It looks like the messenger RNA IS transferring from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated’ ~ Dr Peter McCullough pic.twitter.com/qk4RcjHBZO
Finally, another study “from Hanna and colleagues in JAMA showed that the messenger RNA is in the breast milk of ill-advised women who took the vaccine during pregnancy or afterwards,” he said.
Summarizing these thoughts, McCullough proposed the rhetorical question:
“Could you actually take a vaccine inadvertently by close contact, kissing, sexual contact, [or] breastfeeding? It looks like the answer is ‘yes.’”
Furthermore, he explained that the mRNA has “never been demonstrated to actually leave the body. They look like they’re permanent, as well as the spike protein that’s produced after them. This is very disturbing.”
“This messenger RNA, it looks like it’s for keeps. Every shot is accumulating in the body with no ability for the body to get rid of it,” the former president of the Cardiorenal Society of America explained.
Discussing the ramifications of this, McCullough explained providing advice for his patients was very difficult. Having first advised his unvaccinated patients to “refrain from kissing and sexual contact with a vaccinated person” for 30 days, he extended it “to at least 90 days” and was considering extending it from that point forward.
“I know there’s married couples and all kinds of personal implications there,” he commented.
The cardiologist related that he had also been told these realities were impacting dating apps where now “one of the most important checkboxes is if someone’s unvaccinated. People really don’t want to date vaccinated people right now.”
Citing two more studies, McCullough conveyed another alarming finding, that since the mRNA remain in the body for an extended period of time, “it looks like they do permanently install into the human genome through what we call reverse transcription.”
“So, this is disturbing that not only does the vaccine not get out of the body, but now they’re changing the human genome. This is shown in the human hepatoma cell line. And so it’s conceivable that two vaccinated people could actually pass the code for Pfizer or Moderna into the baby permanently,” he said. “So, this is very, very disturbing.”
“The government, as they developed these vaccines, they kind of rushed it through the final stages. There was no assurances that these were safe. There was no genotoxicity, no teratogenicity studies. And in autopsy studies, the spike protein produced from the genetic material is found in the heart … [and in] the brain,” the physician explained.
“So, I can tell you everyone who has taken the vaccine has this material in their brain, their heart, their adrenal glands, [and] reproductive organs. It’s really a terrible thought. My heart goes out to people who have taken the vaccine,” he lamented.
McCullough has been a most competent and compelling critic of the draconian COVID-19 restrictions, lockdowns, and mandates imposed over the 2 1/2 years. As an alternative, he has persuasively advocated for the cultivation of natural immunity and early treatment through effective therapeutics.
The prominent doctor, who has also provided significant expert commentary on Fox News, NewsMax, and Real America, told LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen in August 2021 that “the vaccines at this point in time have amounted to record mortality and injury and should be considered unsafe and unfit for human use.”
In addition, McCullough described COVID-19 in September as a “biological weapon.” “It was a government operation that created SARS-CoV-2 and the spike protein,” he declared. “It’s the U.S. government that did it. And they were working on the threat and working on the response … This was all planned … SARS-CoV-2 is a biological weapon.”
Furthermore, during a late October conference, the internist explained why the experimental COVID-19 gene-based injections should be the presumed cause of unusually high excess death rates around the world.
He added in a later interview that “the vaccine accelerates death from other causes. So, if someone has cancer, the vaccine accelerates that. If someone has heart disease, one is more likely to have fatal heart attacks and strokes … The vaccines cause blood clotting … The vaccine is incredibly risky, and basically, it’s achieving its goal. If the goal was to reduce the world’s population, it’s working.”
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Featured image is from Mercola/Screenshot
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
The United States government’s Department of Homeland Security announced Monday it is delaying until May of 2025 requiring people to present REAL ID compliant identification to make it through security checkpoints at American airports. This delay extends a previous delay in implementation of the requirement that was set to expire in May of 2023.
In 2005, when the US House of Representatives considered the REAL ID Act, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) presented a brief speech on the House floor in which he layed out a strong pro-liberty case against REAL ID. You can watch Paul’s speech here.
The new delay is good news for liberty. But, it is not as good of news as many people may expect given that all state governments are now producing identification that is compliant with REAL ID. Likely included is the driver license in your wallet or purse. State governments have fallen in line on Real ID through successive earlier delays in roll out of the REAL ID requirement for air travelers, originally scheduled for implementation in 2008.
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The Conservative government is preparing to deploy the armed forces to smash upcoming strikes this month by hundreds of thousands of workers, including a 48-hour nurses walkout. Plans are also being forwarded to impose new anti-strike legislation aimed at making industrial action largely ineffective.
Up to 100,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are to strike in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on December 15 and 20. The nurses are fighting years long-government pay restraint and support a pay rise of 5 percent above RPI inflation—around 20 precent.
Postal workers on strike at the Bradford North depot October 1, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]
Postal workers in the Communication Workers Union (CWU) are continuing a series of national strikes, with last week’s walkout of 115,000 workers to be followed by stoppages on December 9, 11, 14, 15, 23 and 24.
40,000 rail workers in the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union will continue their strike against Network Rail and 14 train operating companies in a series of 48-hour stoppages on December 13, 14, 16 and 17 and on January 3, 4, 6 and 7, 2023.
To justify repression against workers fighting low pay, the destruction of their conditions and threat of thousands of job losses, the government once again denounced them as stooges of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Conservative Party Chairman Nadhim Zahawi told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday, “This is a time to come together and to send a very clear message to Mr Putin that we’re not going to be divided in this way… Our message to the unions is to say ‘this is not a time to strike, this is a time to try and negotiate’.”
Zahawi warned that, “It’s the right and responsible thing to do, to have contingency plans in place… We’re looking at the military, we’re looking at a specialist response force… surge capacity.” Troops could be “driving ambulances” and working on UK borders during strikes.
At the end of November, 80,000 ambulance technicians, paramedics and 999 call handlers in England and Wales voted for industrial action over pay and staffing. It would be the first by ambulance staff in 30 years. During the 1989-1990 national strike by ambulance workers the Thatcher Tory government mobilised the armed forces in an attempt to break it.
A West Midlands Police motorcyclist escorts a British Army ambulance during the 1989-90 strike. [Photo by West Midlands Police / CC BY-SA 2.0]
Sky News reported,
“Cabinet Office said around 2,000 military personnel and civil servants are being trained to support a range of services – including Border Force at airports and ports – in the event of strike action.
“They include up to 600 armed forces personnel and 700 staff from the government’s specialist surge and rapid response team, as well as other parts of the civil service.
‘Decisions are yet to be taken on deploying troops to these tasks but they are part of the range of options available should strike action in these areas go ahead as planned.”
The Sunday Telegraph reported,
“Cabinet ministers in departments most affected by strike threats, including the Home Office, Transport, Health and Education, gathered this week for a series of Cobra meetings [dealing with national emergencies or major disruption] to coordinate their response.”
Other plans being considered for use against the nurses strikes are bound with the government’s privatisation agenda in the National Health Service. The Sunday Telegraph reported,
“Chemists could be allowed to diagnose patients with minor conditions and prescribe antibiotics for the first time to try to reduce demand for GP appointments and cut record backlogs.” It added, “But the plan is unlikely to be deployed before Christmas because it will take time to train staff and arrange NHS contracts for private pharmacies…”
The government is moving, at the insistence of a rabid right-wing media to legally impose Minimum Service Levels [MSL] during strikes. The Sun and Times, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, demanded the government legislate with no more delay. On Friday, the Sun revealed that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak “is considering new emergency powers to break a winter of strikes”. The government planned to “rush through an anti-strikes Bill,“ that would open a new front in the Government’s war with health, rail and postal unions among others.” The “package may include using agency workers to fill strikers’ crucial roles and making it easier for bosses to replace strikers permanently.” The legislation “would add to legislation currently going through Parliament to ensure a minimum level of service on strike days in key industries, such as rail.”
The Times in a leader comment declared that if Sunak “is to have any chance of reversing the slide in his party’s fortunes, he must find ways to prevent a wave of planned walkouts from paralysing the country.” It said, “Sunak’s decision to press ahead with legislation to require the unions to guarantee minimum service levels during strikes is encouraging.” It would “oblige trade unions and rail operators to ensure that at least 20 percent of trains run during strikes, thereby ensuring sufficient services for people to get to work and school.” Passing the MSL legislation was “a test” that “Sunak, and the Tories, cannot afford to fail.”
The Times stated,
“Nor should the government be deflected by apparent public sympathy for some of the strikers. That is bound to shift as the impact of industrial action starts to disrupt people’s lives.”
Opposing this view in its main editorial Sunday, the Telegraph warned,
“The obvious strategy is for ministers to wait and hope that the public will turn its ire on strikers, especially given that many of the workers planning industrial action have comparatively generous pay and pension arrangements.
“But that is highly risky. Polls show that voters currently back the strikers. Nurses are hugely popular. Inflation is eroding the real value of wages across the economy. There is every chance that public fury will fall on Rishi Sunak’s administration.”
In seeking to suppress strikes, the government relies politically on the trade union bureaucracy. In an interview with the Telegraph, Communication Workers’ Union General Secretary Dave Ward said of the many groups of workers involved in or being balloted for action, “It’s almost like a de facto general strike taking place by the amount of disputes.”
But Ward spoke as someone moving heaven and earth to prevent such a development. This week his union sold-out a month’s long national strike of 40,000 BT workers, resulting in an eruption of anger by CWU members.
Ward told the Telegraph that not only that strikes could be ended by Royal Mail, it could partner with the CWU to establish a competitive edge over its rivals. The Telegraph reported, “Ward rejected claims of inflexibility: ‘We’ve said we will deliver 24/7. We’ve agreed to that.’”
He added,
“What I’m saying to you is, we agreed to explore in a deeper way, how we could develop the infrastructure and Royal Mail and how we develop new products and services.”
Ward stressed,
“If Amazon were in control of Royal Mail’s infrastructure, I guarantee you now they would be leveraging that as a competitive advantage.”
The agenda of the public sector union bureaucrats is no different. Royal College of Nursing General Secretary Pat Cullen stated that threatened strikes could be shelved based on a well below inflation pay deal, citing the example of the deal struck in Scotland with the Scottish National Party government.
“This must be a lesson to ministers elsewhere that negotiations can avert action, and pay offers are put out to members for a vote.”
The Observer reported,
“RCN and Unison suggested to the Observer that if a deal similar to that offered in Scotland – between 5% and 11% depending on staff grades – were put forward, this could be a basis for progress.”
Christina McAnea, general secretary of the largest public sector union Unison told the newspaper,
“It’s in the gift of the government to stop strikes across the NHS this winter.” The health secretary “should learn from the way ministers in Holyrood averted strikes with talks and more pay.”
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Preface
Ten years ago, pesticide and processed food companies spent $45 million — roughly $1 million a day — to defeat a ballot initiative to label genetically modified foods (GMOs) in California. The anti-transparency campaign led by Monsanto, one of the largest producers of GMOs, blitzed the state with misleading messages amplified by a wide range of seemingly independent third parties: from universities, professors, and scientists to many groups that claimed expertise on matters of food, health, nutrition, and science. But investigations would eventually reveal close ties between these so-called neutral groups and the companies fighting transparency.
The following year, 2013, the pesticide companies launched a major public relations salvo to try to win back consumer trust for their GMOs and pesticide products. They soon faced an even bigger PR crisis when the World Health Organization’s cancer research panel concluded, in 2015, that glyphosate — the chemical ingredient in the herbicides that most GMO crops have been engineered to tolerate — is a probable human carcinogen. In the wake of that finding, tens of thousands of people sued Monsanto, claiming exposure to glyphosate-based Roundup weed killers caused their cancers. Monsanto and its allies accelerated their PR efforts, engaging many of the same industry-connected third parties and professors who helped them fight labeling, in an all-out battle to defend glyphosate against science raising cancer concerns.
How do these corporate partnerships and disinformation campaigns work? What financial arrangements exist between pesticide companies and the front groups, professional organizations, and academics they depend on to defend their products? My colleague on the pro-labeling campaign, Gary Ruskin, began filing Freedom of Information requests in 2015 at public universities across the country to investigate these questions. We shared what we were learning about industry influence through the nonprofit research group we co-founded, U.S. Right to Know.
In the years since, U.S. Right to Know has obtained, reported on, and posted online thousands of industry and government documents, including discovery documents released in the Monsanto Roundup cancer trials, and many others acquired through judicial enforcement of public records laws. These once- secret documents provide a rare and invaluable view into how the largest pesticide and food companies work to protect their profits at the expense of public health.
Pulling from these documents — as well as investigative journalism that has exposed elements of this subterfuge — this report showcases the breadth of Monsanto’s deception on glyphosate and adds to the growing literature about how corporations deny science and manufacture doubt about the harm of their products. This report reveals key tactics in the pesticide industry’s disinformation playbook, showing how, like Big Oil and Big Tobacco, they rely on deceptive PR strategies to maintain their “freedom to operate” without meaningful limits — with dangerous consequences for public health and the environment.
The PR effort has been so forceful — especially Monsanto’s efforts to discredit the WHO’s researchers — that some observers have described it as a particularly harsh and aggressive effort to undermine cancer research and prevention.
This report builds on previous reporting I and my colleagues have done on pesticide industry disinformation. This includes a 2015 report, Spinning Food, that documents how food and pesticide industry front groups use covert communication tactics to shape the narrative about industrial agriculture and organic and sustainable food production.
Thanks to a long history of writing and research, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) to Robert van den Bosch’s Pesticide Conspiracy (1989) to David Michael’s The Triumph of Doubt (2020); Carey Gillam’s reporting on Monsanto’s herbicide business and the Roundup cancer trials and her two books, Whitewash (2017) and The Monsanto Papers (2021); the seminal research by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt (2010), and other investigative journalists and nonprofits working for transparency, there is growing awareness about industry spin and its harms to people and planet. We hope this report — by taking a deep dive into one company’s decades-long disinformation campaign to protect its herbicide, and the sector in general, from regulation — can add to this awareness of industry tactics and convey the urgency of action to address it.
Table of contents
Key Milestones
Preface
Introduction
Part 1: What’s at Stake? Health, Climate, and Biodiversity
The Rise of Glyphosate
Part 2: The Spin
Tactic 1: Corrupting Science
Tactic 2: Co-opting Academia
Tactic 3: Cultivating Third-Party Allies
Tactic 4: Tracking and Attacking Scientists, Journalists, and Influencers
Tactic 5: Weaponizing the Web
Conclusion
Part 3: What Can We Do?
Appendix I: Expenses of Key Third-Party Allies Named in Monsanto
Glyphosate Defense Documents
Appendix Il: Debunking the Myth that Pesticides Are Safe and Necessary
Appendix Ill: Science of Solutions
Appendix IV: Recommended Resources & Readings
Endnotes
Introduction
On the morning of April 14, 1994, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment swore in seven tobacco executives for a hearing on the regulation of tobacco products. The video from that day5 — with executive after executive stating a version of “I don’t believe that nicotine or our products are addictive” — is seared into the collective memory of Big Tobacco’s lies and deception. Indeed, for decades before that testimony, tobacco executives had known that cigarettes cause cancer — and that nicotine is, in fact, addictive.
In October 2019, at a House oversight subcommittee hearing on civil rights, Martin Hoffert, a former consultant for Exxon, testified that in the early 1980s, scientists working for the company were already predicting how fossil fuel use would increase carbon dioxide levels, leading to rising temperatures.6 Internal documents would show that as far back as 1968, the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade group, had identified the threat of global warming and the role of the companies in their sector in it.7
Oil industry executives knew fossil fuel use would cause global warming and yet not only hid the science but actively attacked those who raised alarm. Tobacco executives knew and covered up the health risks of their products.8
These industries used now well-documented disinformation tactics to push doubt and denialism.9 Big Tobacco’s spin tactics arguably cost millions of lives as regulations emerged long after it was evident that cigarettes cause cancer — and continue to cost lives. (The WHO estimates 8 million people die annually from tobacco use).10 The fossil fuel sector’s spin pushed science denialism and political inaction that has led to a warming world and is associated with millions of deaths per year,11 with few clear pathways to averting catastrophic climate change.
For decades, the pesticide industry has used similarly deceptive communication strategies to shape the public debate and influence regulators — even manipulating the very science on which policy is made — to distract from the evidence that pesticide-intensive agriculture threatens ecosystems and human health. In this report, we show how pesticide companies not only followed in the footsteps of Big Oil and Big Tobacco, they helped to write the public relations playbook that obscures the dangers of widely used products that science shows are threatening human and environmental health around the globe. This report about Monsanto’s campaign to defend glyphosate tells one piece of a broader story: that for decades, pesticide companies have waged expensive PR campaigns to shape the narrative about science and our food system, pushing the twin ideas that pesticides — a term that encompasses insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and more — are safe and that we need them to feed the world. In recent years, groundbreaking global studies have shown the grave threat agricultural chemicals pose to biodiversity and public health and how they fail to deliver on their promises for greater agricultural productivity, leading to crop loss and weed and pest resistance.12 Yet despite the mounting evidence, the pesticide industry has doubled down on deceptive messaging.
This report comes at a time of ever greater industry consolidation in the agrichemical and seed sector — much like we’ve seen across the economy. By 2020, thanks to recent purchases including the Bayer-Monsanto deal, just four companies controlled 62 percent of the global market for agrichemicals and 51 percent of the global market for commercial seeds, according to ETC Group. Bayer’s market share of agrichemicals, 16 percent, was second only to ChemChina/Syngenta at 25 percent, followed by BASF with 11 percent of the market and Corteva (the rebranded name of the merged Dow and Dupont company) with 10 percent. For commercial seeds and seed traits, Bayer controls 23 percent of the market, while Corteva has a 17 percent market share, with ChemChina at 7 percent and BASF at 4 percent.13
To bring light to the pesticide industry’s PR spin, this report provides a deep dive into one company and one PR campaign: Monsanto, bought in 2018 by German pharmaceutical and agrichemical multinational Bayer AG, and its product defense campaign to promote glyphosate-based herbicides sold under the brand name Roundup, and to protect these products from the threat of regulation. This report builds on a 2015 white paper written by Friends of the Earth’s Kari Hamerschlag along with Stacy Malkan and Anna Lappé, which documents some of the messages and tactics of food industry front groups, including the millions of dollars they spend every year to shape the story of our food system.14
Two major developments in recent years prompted further reporting on this topic: First, new scientific evidence, discussed in Part 1, makes clear the urgency of addressing the health and environmental impacts associated with the pesticide industry’s products, including glyphosate herbicide formulations. Second, access to new evidence from internal corporate documents, obtained over the past five years via legal actions and public interest investigations, provides new insight into how Monsanto ran its propaganda operations, with the help of the pesticide and processed food industries. Thanks to tens of thousands of pages of internal corporate documents made available by these efforts, the public has unprecedented access to how the industry develops strategies to mislead the public. These documents include the “Monsanto Papers” obtained from litigation over glyphosate-based herbicides, and public records made available through an investigation led by colleagues at U.S. Right to Know. (Many of these documents are available on the U.S. Right to Know website and via the University of California, San Francisco, chemical and food industry documents archives.)15
This report adds to a growing body of research and reporting on the deceptive tactics of the pesticide industry: The Intercept’s reporting on the PR spin pushing neonicotinoids, the class of pesticides driving the “insect apocalypse,” and detailing of the tactics industry used to keep the deadly pesticide paraquat on the market for decades; or The New Yorker’s reporting on pesticide company Syngenta’s attacks on the scientist Tyrone Hayes; or DeSmog Blog’s mapping of pesticide industry misinformation outlets. Taken together, this reporting has helped reveal key PR tactics of the pesticide industry and helped expose the myth-making about the safety and necessity of pesticides.
In this report, we add to this research by detailing the spin tactics used to push the most ubiquitous herbicide in the world: glyphosate. We show — using industry’s own words from their own documents — how the largest producer of glyphosate-based herbicides, Monsanto (purchased by Bayer AG in 2018), used stealth tactics to obscure the truth and shape the narrative about this pesticide and our food system more broadly. We detail how the company produced corrupt science, Two major developments in recent years prompted further reporting on this topic: First, new scientific evidence, discussed in Part 1, makes clear the urgency of addressing the health and environmental impacts associated with the pesticide industry’s products, including glyphosate herbicide formulations. Second, access to new evidence from internal corporate documents, obtained over the past five years via legal actions and public interest investigations, provides new insight into how Monsanto ran its propaganda operations, with the help of the pesticide and processed food industries. Thanks to tens of thousands of pages of internal corporate documents made available by these efforts, the public has unprecedented access to how the industry develops strategies to mislead the public. These documents include the “Monsanto Papers” obtained from litigation over glyphosate-based herbicides, and public records made available through an investigation led by colleagues at U.S. Right to Know. (Many of these documents are available on the U.S. Right to Know website and via the University of California, San Francisco, chemical and food industry documents archives.)15
This report adds to a growing body of research and reporting on the deceptive tactics of the pesticide industry: The Intercept’s reporting on the PR spin pushing neonicotinoids, the class of pesticides driving the “insect apocalypse,” and detailing of the tactics industry used to keep the deadly pesticide paraquat on the market for decades; or The New Yorker’s reporting on pesticide company Syngenta’s attacks on the scientist Tyrone Hayes; or DeSmog Blog’s mapping of pesticide industry misinformation outlets. Taken together, this reporting has helped reveal key PR tactics of the pesticide industry and helped expose the myth-making about the safety and necessity of pesticides.
In this report, we add to this research by detailing the spin tactics used to push the most ubiquitous herbicide in the world: glyphosate. We show — using industry’s own words from their own documents — how the largest producer of glyphosate-based herbicides, Monsanto (purchased by Bayer AG in 2018), used stealth tactics to obscure the truth and shape the narrative about this pesticide and our food system more broadly. We detail how the company produced corrupt science, undermined public health institutions, bought influence at the most prestigious universities in the United States, and deployed an army of third-party allies to spread product-defense messaging, including attacks on scientists and journalists. We show how the company tracked and attacked critics and tried to dominate online spaces related to pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Throughout this report, we show how a small group of industry insiders deployed deceptive messaging through seemingly independent voices, using many of the same strategies and funding streams — and sometimes the very same people — the tobacco and fossil fuel industries use to mislead the public.
Why focus on the PR spin around glyphosate? There are certainly more acutely toxic pesticides in agricultural use. There’s paraquat, where exposure to even a capful can be deadly, and the class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, which have increased the toxicity of U.S. agriculture for insects by 48- fold in the past 25 years.16 But while not the most toxic, glyphosate is still toxic to humans and devastating to ecosystems; we discuss in Part 1 the science linking glyphosate to cancer, reproductive harm, kidney disease, monarch butterfly declines and other health and environmental impacts. And, as the most widespread agricultural chemical in the world, a detailing of how long the company knew about this toxicity, how much it did to spin a different story, and how it continues to push doubt, science denial, and deflection as it faces thousands of lawsuits from farmers and gardeners suffering from cancers related to glyphosate use is critically important. Furthermore, the internal documents paint
a clear picture of the PR tactics Monsanto/ Bayer used and the players the company relies on, providing insight into product-defense strategies not used just for glyphosate but across all classes of pesticides.
Finally, this story is important because it is connected to the promotion and defense of genetically engineered crops or GMOs,
first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The connection is simple: most GMO crops sold to date have been developed with traits to express an insecticide or tolerate an herbicide or do both, and nearly all have been engineered with the trait of glyphosate tolerance.17 So, the debates about the risks and rewards of GMOs are intimately linked to the story of the spin around glyphosate safety.
Based on these thousands of pages of internal Monsanto documents and investigative reporting, analyzed together in one place for the first time, this report reveals five pesticide industry disinformation tactics, chronicling how Monsanto worked to:
1. Corrupt the science
We show how Monsanto employees shaped the science on glyphosate, including paying academics, ghostwriting papers, influencing regulatory agencies, and using other covert tactics to shape the scientific and regulatory record;
2. Co-opt academia
We report how Monsanto and other pesticide companies partnered with and paid universities and professors who in turn promoted and defended glyphosate and the GMO seeds designed to tolerate the herbicide. Many of these partnerships were not transparent to the public.
3. Mobilize third-party allies
We describe the large and well-funded third- party echo chamber — the front groups, professional organizations, universities, astroturf campaigns, and others—who disseminated messaging crafted by Monsanto and its PR firms for the purpose of opposing health, safety, and transparency regulations for pesticide industry products.
4. Track and attack scientists, journalists, and influencers
We examine how industry front groups that claim to be “pro-science” — including the Genetic Literacy Project and American Council on Science and Health—targeted the World Health Organization’s cancer researchers, and other scientists and journalists who reported on glyphosate’s links to cancer.
5. Dominate online spaces
We discuss how Monsanto and other companies deployed the same front groups that attacked scientists and journalists in defense of glyphosate to infiltrate online spaces and garner top placement in Google News searches to elevate industry messaging.
This report also documents how the sector’s influence campaigns are themselves big business: Together, six of the trade associations named in Monsanto documents for glyphosate defense — the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, CropLife America, American Chemistry Council, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Corn Grower’s Association and the American Soybean Association — spent $1.3 billion over a five- year period (2015-2019) funding marketing, lobbying, and messaging. (See Appendix I) And, just seven of the non-profit organizations named in Monsanto’s internal documents as key allies in its product-defense strategy spent up to $76 million during that same period. (This is all on top of $206 million Monsanto spent on its reported advertising budget over the three-year period just before the Bayer purchase).18 While glyphosate defense is only part of what these organizations do — in some cases a small part — the size of their budgets conveys the huge resources available to groups that run product-defense campaigns using the disinformation tactics we describe in this report. These groups are an unquestionable industry unto themselves: their purpose is to protect and defend the chemical-intensive food, products, and processes that are the basis of today’s industrial food chain.
As this report goes to press, the European Union is debating whether to reauthorize the use of glyphosate next year. Here in the United States, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in June 2022 that EPA’s approval of glyphosate was unlawful.19 The same month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Bayer’s bid to dodge a $25 million jury award to a California man who said decades of exposure to glyphosate-based Roundup caused his non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma.20 Largely as a result of the pressures from glyphosate litigation, Bayer announced in July 2021 that it would replace its glyphosate-based products in the U.S. residential “Lawn & Garden” market with new formulations beginning in 2023.21 Agricultural use of glyphosate will continue. Numerous other commercial and industrial uses, including on school grounds and in city parks, will also continue. While these uses are still permitted, there is growing public pressure to further regulate the herbicide.
Debates about the future of glyphosate, indeed all formulations of pesticides, should be deliberated in light of what is revealed in this report and in other reporting on pesticide industry public relations spin: The fact that it is now well-documented how the pesticide industry works to shape science and public opinion in order to avoid regulation. In this context, this report raises key questions: How do we expose industry manipulation of the science around pesticides? How do we ensure harmful chemicals like glyphosate are not replaced by even more toxic ones? And, how do we regulate pesticides to protect public health and ecosystems and not remain at the mercy of voluntary action from chemical companies? More broadly, how do we ensure that public officials, not influenced by industry or its third-party allies, make independent policy decisions so critical to our health and the wellbeing of our planet?
In Part 1 we delve into why this matters and what’s at stake for our health, the climate, biodiversity and our future. In Part 2, we describe the spin tactics Monsanto used, including what the internal corporate documents reveal about how the company manipulated the scientific record on glyphosate over many years. In Part 3 we discuss actions that policy makers, media institutions, academics, and everyday people can take to combat industry disinformation tactics like the kinds described here. On pages 76, we provide substantive addendums debunking the myths that pesticides are safe and necessary to feed the world.
Ultimately, the story of deceit this report documents is a story about the pesticide industry’s vulnerability: To evade the regulation and transparency that would impact their profitability and market share, the pesticide industry — just like the oil and tobacco industries — are profoundly reliant on the success of PR subterfuge to maintain profitability. Understanding how this subterfuge works is paramount for journalists, policymakers, and public interest groups working to inform the public about the health and environmental risks posed by the increasing use of pesticides and the availability of safer alternatives.
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***
Fashion has been smashing taboos since Coco Chanel first marketed trousers to women after World War I. But today there are very few norms left to assault in pursuit of publicity-generating controversy. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find the rag trade venturing into truly taboo territory: paedophilia and now suicide — albeit with a fig-leaf of liberal proceduralism, in its guise as medically-assisted voluntary euthanasia.
Last week, fashion brand Balenciaga triggered considerable controversy when an ad campaign featuring young children holding teddy bears dressed in bondage gear hit the headlines. Not to be outdone, Canadian fashion retailer Simons is the source of this week’s fashion rage-clicks, with a video celebrating euthanasia.
The video, titled ‘All Is Beauty’, features ‘Jennyfer’, a terminally ill woman who in October this year opted for Canada’s now widespread euthanasia programme. This has seen doctor-assisted self-deletion grow from 2.5% of all Canadian deaths in 2020 to 3.3% in 2021: in 2021 euthanasia accounted for almost 5% of all deaths in Quebec and British Columbia. But apparently it needs promotion, too: the video feels like an advert for this way of ending your life. It’s styled in heavily boho-consumerist terms, compiling the kind of footage — oceans, bubble-blowing, convivial mealtimes, glowing lanterns — you’d expect in a bourgeois holiday let ad. These, though, are combined with audio voiceover from interviews with Jennyfer herself (who was a real person) in which she talks about seeing beauty in everything even as she plans to end her own life.
Peter Simons, who stepped down as CEO in March, doesn’t appear to see anything wrong with producing glossy holiday brochure-type adverts that present killing yourself as a way of celebrating life. When the campaign launched, he told the advertising trade press in October that it was “an effort to use our freedom, our voice, and the privilege we have to speak and create every day in a way that is more about human connection.” Using his company’s resources and platform to make euthanasia adverts, is, he suggests, a positive act of corporate social responsibility, saying: “companies have a responsibility to participate in communities and to help build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow, and leave to our children.”
The mind shies away from imagining in detail the kind of ‘community’ that high fashion would ‘leave to our children’, based on Simons’s and Balenciaga’s marketing output. But lest anyone be tempted to see this as a sinister conspiracy, it could simply be explained in terms of brute commercial calculation. For as long as you don’t mind a bit of blowback, mining taboos remains an effective marketing strategy.
While Balenciaga has apologised for paedo-whistling in photoshoots, a cynic might observe that in terms of pure profile-raising, the campaign has been a roaring success. And Simons says his company’s promotion of euthanasia is “obviously not a commercial campaign”, but corporations aren’t generally noted for deliberately doing things likely to reduce shareholder profits. It’s probably a safe bet that people who are seriously contemplating asking a doctor to help them end their own life are not also in the market for a Vivienne Westwood tweed bomber jacket. Meanwhile, the Simons video has been viewed a million times.
So this is another company garnering clicks and liberal cachet from taking a stand in favour of ‘freedom’, even the freedom to end your own life. No wonder, then, that the taboo-smashing ratchet goes on, aestheticising all-out war on the prohibitions that uphold our humanist settlement, even when the only ones left are child sexual abuse and choosing to end your own life. It’s at least a century too late, though, to wonder how many of the other taboos whose smoking rubble we now call ‘culture’ were also standing between us and profound darkness.
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Featured image: Screengrab from Simons’s ‘All is beauty’ campaign
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Over the weekend, amid a major energy crisis which is decimating European industry, Western countries announced a price cap that they intend to impose on Russian oil. The idea is that these countries will get together and refuse to pay any more than their stated price for Russian oil – in this case $60 per barrel. The cap will be imposed by making it illegal for Western insurance companies to insure tankers of Russian oil that sell that oil for more than $60.
Russia has, unsurprisingly, not reacted well. It has stated in no uncertain terms that it will not sell oil to customers who demand to pay below the market price. Countries outside of the Western sphere have not even responded to the price cap announcement. They may need to work out alternative insurance arrangements, but this will only further undermine Western financial soft power in the global maritime industry.
So, what will the price cap look like in action? To understand this, we should look at the long-term price trends of Russian oil. In the chart below we see the price for Russian oil since 2010 together with the average price between 2010-22 and the $60 price cap that our leaders have set.
The first thing that stands out is that the price cap we have set is far below the $75 average price for Russian oil in this period. So, we are demanding to pay $15 less than the average price for Russian oil. The second point to note is that prices for Russian oil have only been below the price cap level twice in recent history.
The first time was after the sharp decline in the price of oil that took place in 2014-15. This was caused by two dynamics coming into play at once. Firstly, the US massively increased its output of shale oil and, secondly, the Saudis increased production into a market awash with this new shale oil. With the Saudis backing the Russian position at OPEC+ meetings and US shale oil already baked into the market price, neither of these dynamics is likely in the future. The second time the Russian oil price fell below $60 was during the lockdown.
Throughout the whole period, Russian oil has only fallen below $60 around 31% of the time. The remaining 69% of the time, the price has been above $60. Based on these probabilities, it seems that in the coming months the market price will typically be above $60. When this happens, we will demand to pay less than the market price and Russia will refuse to sell us oil.
In the best-case scenario this will mean we will have to source our oil from elsewhere, likely at a substantially higher price. In the worst-case scenario, we will suffer from serious oil shortages as we find ourselves unable to make up for the Russian supplies that we have lost. This means a lot more inflationary pressure and a lot more potential for shortages. Most of our supply chains, for example, rely on diesel fuel to function. In the case of oil shortages, expect these to translate into shortages of basic goods in your local shop.
History will surely look back on the great European energy crisis of 2022-23 as one of the strangest historical phenomena on record. The Europeans have voluntarily destroyed their economies to impose sanctions on Russia that are having no real impact on their target. As the winter cold sets in, we would be well-advised to change course.
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***
It’s a “done deal.”
Congressional sources tell The Dossier that there is a strong enough appetite in Congress, given the unanimously pro-war Democratic voting bloc, and the significant amount of Republicans who support the perpetual funding of the Zelensky government in Ukraine, to pass a bill by the end of next week that will deliver tens of billions of dollars into Kiev’s coffers.
The Dossier discussed the voting blocs with congressional staff multiple representatives on Capitol Hill, and it is clear that there is indeed some strong resistance to additional heaps of war funding among some factions of the GOP. However, Republican leadership and a majority of Republicans in the Senate continue to support the blank check Ukraine policy.
On Wednesday, the Senate will convene for a classified briefing on Ukraine, through which unnamed intelligence officials in the Biden Administration will make senators feel more comfortable about the merits of forcing the U.S. taxpayer to involuntarily support the White House’s proposed $38 billion overseas grant.
The Ukraine aid will be attached to a mammoth spending bill set to be approved by Congress this month. Republican and Democratic leadership is negotiating on several attachments to the bill, but according to multiple sources, the Ukraine aid is considered a lock.
Congressional leadership has decried calls for oversight of the money transfers, describing such transparency measures as “Russian propaganda.”
Notably, the $38 billion Biden Admin ask is the exact same number requested by Zelensky to fulfill his country’s expected 2023 budgetary deficit. That’s not a coincidence. The Biden Administration has already acknowledged that they intend on keeping Kiev onsides in Afghanistan-like bribery fashion through subsidizing the salaries of their entire government.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr #Zelensky on Tuesday asked the international community to cover an expected budget deficit of $38 billion next year for his war-torn country, with #Moscow’s invasion also badly hitting the economy.https://t.co/cyOEMAtWEH
Having already sent around $100 billion to Kiev, the United States taxpayer is now financing virtually the entirety of its government. While Europe has become increasingly war weary, the U.S. government has continued to remain all-in on the effort. However, the monetary gravy train that is the Russia-Ukraine war is becoming increasingly more costly, and globalist international monetary organizations are throwing out more and more insane numbers. And given that Ukraine has long been considered one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, most of the money “disappears” upon crossing the border.
⚡️ Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction to cost up to 600 billion euros.
World Bank Vice President for Europe and Central Asia Anna Bjerde told Die Press that the cost of rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure after the war will cost from 500 to 600 billion euros.
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Almost two years after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a US drone strike in Baghdad, at least 78 Iraqis filed a lawsuit in an Iraqi court on Sunday, November 27, against then US President Donald Trump and other officials of his administration.
The plaintiffs demanded legal action against the accused, including Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others, in their petition filed at Baghdad’s federal court of appeal. The plaintiffs include the brother of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Muhammad Hassan Jaafar al-Muhandis.
Though the new Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Shia al-Sudanihad promised to take legal action against Trump once in power, it is not clear whether the plaintiffs have the backing of the government or not.
Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s elite al-Quds forces, part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and Muhandis, commander of the Iraqi militia Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), were assassinated in a drone attack on January 3, 2020, near the Baghdad airport.
Trump later claimed responsibility for the assassinations, accusing Soleimani of being a terrorist and being involved in plotting “sinister attacks” on Americans. The US had categorized the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization in April 2019, part of the series of sanctions imposed on Iran following the US’ unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Assassinations triggered popular protests and strong regional response
Both Soleimani and Muhandis were celebrated in Iran and Iraq for playing key roles in fighting against the Islamic State (IS) and reversing its advances. Prior to its defeat, ISIS had taken control over a large part of Iraq and Syria.
The assassinations invited a strong reaction from Iran and mass protests in both Iran and Iraq. Within a couple of days, the Iraqi parliament adopted a resolution asking the government to ensure that all foreign troops leave the country.
On January 7, an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant against Trump for murder under the Iraqi penal code.
On January 8, Iran launched several rockets at Iraq’s Ain Al-Assad military base where a significant section of the US soldiers in the country were stationed. While there were reportedly no deaths, over 100 US soldiers were injured.
Iran also demanded an immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from the region.
Following the assassinations, the US-led international forces came under heavy attacks from local militias, forcing their gradual withdrawal or relocation.
In April this year, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price admitted that the intensity and frequency of attacks on foreign troops in Iraq increased following the US assassination of Soleimani and Muhandis. He noted that between 2018 and 2020, attacks on US forces increased by 400%.
Frequent attacks and rising popular protests in Iraq against the presence of foreign forces, as well as the Iraqi parliament’s resolution forced the government led by Mustafa al-Kadhimi to negotiate with the US government, which ultimately led to the withdrawal of most of the US forces. The US claims that those that remained in Iraq are not there for combative purposes but for training and support.
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Featured image: Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani (L) and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. (Photo: Tasnim news agency)
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A network of Iraqi officials working inside state institutions, including the country’s tax authority and an anti-corruption watchdog, are being investigated over an alleged plot to steal billions of dinars from the tax accounts of international oil companies, Middle East Eye can reveal.
The alleged plotters, who also included officials at the Ministry of Justice, targeted tax deposits paid by the oil companies to the Iraqi General Commission of Taxes (IGCT) in what investigators now believe was a prelude to the so-called “theft of the century”.
The main companies targeted were the China Petroleum Engineering and Construction Corporation (CPECC) and Lukoil Mid-East Limited, a local subsidiary of the Russian energy giant.
The scheme involved fabricating a paper trail of false documentation and cheques issued by the IGCT in July and August 2021 in response to purported requests from the companies for tax deposit refunds.
People falsely claiming to be representatives of the oil companies then tried to cash the cheques – and withdraw them as cash – at branches of the state-owned Rafidain Bank, which holds the IGCT’s tax deposit accounts.
No money was ultimately stolen because the value of the cheques – some worth tens of millions of dollars – and the apparent eagerness of some senior officials to facilitate their payment “drew attention”, a consultant within the Ministry of Finance told MEE.
According to the official, details of the cheques were reported to the Federal Commission of Integrity (FCI), a government agency tasked with investigating corruption in the public sector, which appointed an investigator to examine the case.
Some of the cheques were subsequently stopped, while an attempt to cash one cheque worth more than 44 billion dinars (more than $30m) was refused by a bank official.
But documents obtained by MEE suggest that some officials working inside the IGCT, the FCI and the Ministry of Justice were involved in the fabrication and authentication of documents that facilitated the attempted theft.
Financial investigators also believe the oil companies’ tax deposit accounts were targeted by the same network behind the theft of 3.7 trillion dinars ($2.5bn) from IGCT accounts held at Rafidain Bank between September 2021 and August 2022.
People involved in the investigation told MEE they believed the attempted theft had amounted to a dry run, in which many of the elements of the “theft of the century”, including the use of fake cheques and false documentation, were already in place.
They said it had also helped those involved to test the response of regulatory and auditing bodies, and to further refine their scheme to evade detection. Rather than using people posing as representatives of real companies, for instance, they used shell companies instead.
Crucially, according to one person involved in the investigation, a letter sent from a senior official within the FCI to the IGCT at the end of August 2021 had effectively signalled a “green light” to the thieves by indicating the watchdog would not interfere in the tax authority’s affairs.
Fake documents
The documents obtained by MEE show how the issuing of cheques purportedly to pay tax deposit refund requests from the oil companies in August 2021 triggered a flurry of correspondence and scrutiny involving officials from the IGCT, Rafidain Bank, the FCI and another oversight body, the Federal Board of Supreme Audit (FBSA).
MEE has previously reported how, in the same month, the FBSA, the public spending watchdog, was removed from a role auditing tax deposit refund requests. According to the documents, the FBSA was still performing this role when the CPECC and Lukoil cheques were issued at the beginning of August.
MEE has also learnt that a legal document filed to the IGCT on 8 July 2021, which appears to authorise an Iraqi businessman to act as CPECC’s representative in Iraq, was verified by a notary at the Ministry of Justice and approved by IGCT officials despite obvious indications that it was fake.
The authorisation, which appears to be signed by a CPECC official, grants the businessman broad financial powers that include opening and operating bank accounts, withdrawing and depositing money, and receiving cheques and withdrawing them in cash on behalf of the company.
The authorisation names the businessman as Ali Muhammad Issa al-Jaf, but does not include any further details about Jaf’s relationship to the company or basic information such as his Iraqi identification number.
MEE checked the reference number and date of the authorisation with the Ministry of Justice and could find no record of its existence.
MEE has learned too that the notary who initially verified the authorisation on 8 July, and who subsequently confirmed its validity to the IGCT, has been investigated several times on charges of forging authorisation documents, and was moved from Baghdad to a small town outside the Iraqi capital two months ago.
Investigators told MEE that a similar document filed to the IGCT, which claimed to authorise a businessman to act on behalf of Lukoil, also appeared to be a fake.
Foreign oil companies operating in Iraq are required to report to state oil companies in the provinces where they operate.
In a letter to the Basra Oil Company, the state oil company responsible for oil fields in southern Iraq, Lukoil Mid-East Limited said it had not authorised any person or entity to act as its representative to the IGCT, and it has not received any tax refunds in 2021 and 2022. MEE has contacted Lukoil’s media office for comment.
MEE contacted CPECC’s media office, but the company declined to comment. There is no suggestion either company was aware of or involved in the forgery of documents using its name, or in the attempted theft of money from the IGCT’s tax deposit account.
Investigators at the Ministry of Finance told MEE that the verification and acceptance of the fake authorisation documents by officials at the Ministry of Justice, the IGCT and the FCI had directly facilitated the attempted theft.
“It seemed clear that the first attempts to steal these deposits relied on [false] documentation, then manipulating and speeding up the procedures,” said one senior official.
“In this aspect, it was successful. All procedural and oversight obstacles were overcome. It actually culminated in issuing cheques in favour of these companies.”
The investigation into the “theft of the century” plot has been taking place against a backdrop of wider upheaval in Iraqi politics and within the Ministry of Finance.
It was launched in September by the then-acting finance minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar Ismail, who was appointed to the role by former prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi after his predecessor in the post, Ali Allawi, had resigned in August in protest at what he described as endemic corruption in public finances.
But Ismail was forced to resign soon afterwards. At the end of October, Mohammed Shia al-Sudanireplaced Kadhimi as prime minister, and appointed Taif Sami Mohammed as finance minister.
‘Green light’
The first cheque for more than 31bn dinars (more than $21m) was issued in CPECC’s name on 2 August. Documents seen by MEE indicate it was approved by Samer Abdel Hadi Qassem, the IGCT’s acting general manager.
The second cheque, worth more than 12bn dinars (more than $8m), was issued in Lukoil’s name a few days later. Osama Hussam, the assistant director general of the IGCT, then recalled the cheque after it was queried by the FBSA, which was at that stage still auditing tax deposit refund requests.
But, according to the documents, Hussam was overruled by Qassem, who confirmed the validity of the Lukoil cheque on 16 August.
On the same day, Qassem revoked the cheque issued to CPECC on 2 August. The documents do not indicate why the cheque was stopped, but investigators told MEE cheques were routinely revoked if they attracted attention or scrutiny.
Two days later, however, another cheque was issued to CPECC. This one was for the sum of 44,133,732,000 dinars (more than $30m), and once again the documents indicate it was approved by Qassem.
But this cheque was almost immediately reported to the FCI. According to a source involved in the investigation, the large amount was deemed suspicious by junior officials within the ICGT.
“The value of the cheque was highly exaggerated. Whatever the amount of tax deposits left by CPECC, the refund would not be as much as 44 billion dinars,” the source told MEE.
“The value of the cheque and the speed of its issuance indicated something was wrong, despite the IGCT officials’ confirmation of the validity of the procedures and documents submitted by the applicant.”
Sources told MEE that Qassem was arrested in connection with the “theft of the century” investigation in October. MEE was unable to reach Qassem for comment.
The FCI then assigned one of its investigators, Basheer Sabah Hadi, to look into the case. Hadi wrote to the IGCT requesting all documents relating to CPECC’s request to recover its tax deposits.
In response, Qassem asked Rafidain Bank to hold the cheque while the matter was being investigated.
But then, at the end of August, Kareem Badr al-Ghizi, the director general of the FCI’s investigations department, wrote to the IGCT to say that the FCI had not objected to the cheque being cashed.
“We would like to inform you that this authority [the FCI] did not request stopping the cheque in question,” Ghizi wrote, suggesting that information provided by the IGCT indicated there was “no damage to public money”.
The letter continued:
“The FCI – while carrying out its investigative duty – ensures that it does not interfere in the work of ministries and official institutions.”
This, according to the person involved in the investigation, was “the green light that launched the whole process later on”.
“It was a written guarantee from the FCI not to obstruct the process,” he said.
MEE understands that Hadi, the FCI investigator involved in the case, submitted a request for five years’ unpaid leave in late 2021 and left Iraq for an unknown destination. He is currently the subject of an arrest warrant. MEE could not reach Hadi for comment.
Ghizi was removed from his role at the FCI on 6 November by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s office over his failure to prevent the theft of tax deposit money.
The head of the FCI, Alaa al-Saadi, resigned on 13 November after investigators linked a number of officials within the watchdog to the “theft of the century” plot.
The FCI’s media office declined to comment, citing ongoing investigations. It said all officials and former officials were forbidden from speaking to the media about the case.
The headquarters of Rafidain Bank in Baghdad (Mohammed Aqeel/MEE)
Hours after receiving Ghizi’s letter, Qassim contacted Rafidain Bank to authorise it to cash the cheque to CPECC for 44 billion dinars.
On 1 September, a man claiming to be CPECC’s representative in Iraq walked into a branch of Rafidain Bank which holds the IGCT’s tax deposit accounts and asked for the cheque to be paid immediately in cash.
But there was one last snag. The director of the bank insisted that the money needed to be deposited first in the company’s own bank account before it could be withdrawn.
“The director of the bank refused to hand over the money in cash. She insisted on depositing the cheque’s value in the company’s official bank account,” one of the investigators told MEE.
“What is the point of them creating this process if the money just ends up in the company’s account?”
The man did not provide the bank with the company’s account details and walked away empty handed. But investigators believe it was this moment that prompted the final refinement in the “theft of the century” plotters’ plan.
Instead of targeting official companies, they used a network of shell companies and set up bank accounts in their name at Rafidain Bank.
Just over one week later on 9 September, the first cheque was deposited into an account opened two days earlier in the name of one of these companies, Al-Qant General Contracting Company.
The value of the cheque – which was withdrawn as cash the same day – was exactly the same amount as the cheque issued to CPECC which bank officials had refused to cash eight days before: 44,133,732,000 dinars.
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Featured image: Taif Sami Mohammed was appointed Iraq’s finance minister in October (Iraqi Ministry of Finance)
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Newly revealed documents show that political aides for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party government were shocked at the apparent large number of Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members who supported the Freedom Convoy.
Per Blacklock’s Reporter, confidential documents made public as part of the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings have revealed that Trudeau government staffers were shocked that there was sizeable support for the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protesters by both members of the CAF and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
At least eight active members of the CAF publicly supported the Freedom Convoy from bases across Canada, while many more did so in private.
A staff email from Defence Minister Anita Anand’s office urged government workers at the time toplease “see this internal list of Canadian Armed Forces members allegedly involved in the convoy.”
A press aid to Anand wrote back,
“How the [expletive] many soldiers are in the convoy????”
The confidential documents also show that there were so many RCMP members who supported the Freedom Convoy that the police force sent out a 35-page document “regarding the participation of current or prior employees” in the protests.
During the time of the protest, military officials said that any public support for the movement was a breach of its Code Of Service Discipline.
One notable member of the CAF who supported the Freedom Convoy was veteran James Topp.
Inspired by the protest, Topp walked across Canada in protest of COVID-related mandates, and as a result for his public expression is now facing four military issued charges.
Support for the Freedom Convoy among police officers and military members comes as little surprise to many Canadians, as they too were subjected to harsh COVID mandates.
Last year, Canada’s military imposed a COVID jab mandate for all its personnel. As a result of the mandate, many who refused were kicked out of the armed forces via an administrative process called the 5F release.
Those who did not get the jab were not charged however, and the legality of the military jab mandate has been questioned.
While not necessarily mentioning the Freedom Convoy or giving the movement his support, retired CAF veteran Lt.-Gen. Michel Maisonneuve recently drew headlines after he received a standing ovation from senior military officers for giving a rousing speech blasting cancel culture, climate change policies, woke aspects of the armed forces, and leaders who “divide.”
The speech was made on November 9 in Ottawa at a gala event, at which he accepted the prestigious Vimy Award.
Maisonneuve recently defended his words in a column after getting backlash from the mainstream press.
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Featured image is from OffGuardian
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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First published on July 13, 2022
***
“As oil and gas prices rise so does the price of artificial chemical fertilisers – the lynch-pin of industrial agriculture’s claims to be ‘efficient’. In the UK, the price of nitrogen fertiliser has doubled over the past year to around £330 per tonne. With oil currently at over $130 a barrel and with OPEC warning it could reach $200 by the end of the year, it has been suggested that fertilisers could hit GBP 500 a tonne. At these prices, the claimed efficiency of fossil-fuel and fertiliser dependent industrial farming begins to collapse.”
The above extract is from a 2008 Soil Association press release.
In July 2022, the price of oil is just over $100 per barrel and fertilisers are well more than double the 2008 price. In fact, the price of fertilisers has doubled since 2021.
Much has been written in recent months about supply chain crises stemming from the conflict in Ukraine and the effects on gas and oil. Perhaps up to two thirds of the global population are reliant on nitrogen-based synthetic fertilisers for much of their food. As a result, alarm bells have been ringing over fertiliser and food shortages, which will hit the world’s poorest the worst.
With fears of rising prices for natural gas – essential for producing nitrogen fertiliser – we are seeing the vulnerability of a fossil-fuel dependent food system. Nitrogen fertilisers are made from ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process, an energy-intensive approach. Natural gas usually supplies the hydrogen. The nitrogen is derived from the air. This ammonia is used for all nitrogen fertilisers, including anhydrous ammonium nitrate and urea.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, in the period 1961-2014, global nitrogenous fertiliser consumption went from a little more than 10 million tonnes to around 105 million tonnes. This has helped feed and maintain a rapidly growing global population.
But this has come at a high cost in terms of mineral-depleted and microbiological-degraded soils, polluted waterways, unstable nitrogen in soils which release nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and a food system extremely vulnerable to oil and gas price rise volatility due to war, commodity speculation or some other catastrophe.
The situation in Ukraine and the West’s sanctions on Russia aside, the current crisis might not be solely due to the economics of supply and demand. The recent article by Antonia Juhasz ‘Why are gas prices so high?’ reports that current prices are not reflective of supply chain problems. In effect, energy traders are stoking rising prices and volatility when it comes to the price of oil, natural gas and other vital fossil-fuel commodities.
Given the environmental impacts and the vulnerability to price shocks and largely unregulated speculation, it is increasingly clear that the world must move away from its reliance on fossil-fuel agriculture. This also involves delinking from a globalised food system based on long-line supply chains.
For instance, Russia and Ukraine produce more than half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil and 30% of the world’s wheat. Some 45 African and least-developed countries import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia with 18 of them importing at 50% or more.
Regional and local community-owned food systems based on food sovereignty and short(er) food supply chains that can cope with future shocks are required.
How we cultivate food also needs to change.
The EU’s ‘farm to fork’ strategy advocates for at least a 20% reduction in synthetic fertiliser use by 2030 and at least a 50% reduction in pesticides. This has come under fire from the US government and its cronies in the agrochemical sector who forward tired and discredited arguments that this will fuel hunger and starvation and lead to increased land use.
The industry is determined to undermine the EU’s strategy, which also aims by 2030 to more than triple the percentage of EU farmland under organic management (from 8.1% to 25%).
‘A loud lobby for a silent spring’ is a 2022 report by the Brussels-based lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, which details the carefully orchestrated attack on this EU strategy by the industry. Its business model depends on trapping farmers on chemical treadmills.
Rather than rehash the arguments here, readers may turn to author and impact investor Brian Halweil who presented a detailed, research-based takedown of the anti-organic arguments of the pesticide lobby some years back. His piece originally appeared in World Watch Volume 19, Number 3. It can be accessed on the Organic Consumers Association website – ‘Can Organic Food Feed the World?’
Halveil also rebuts the claim that organic fertilisers are insufficient in quantity and effect for maintaining necessary levels of productivity. The arguments for organic methods and agroecological approaches and evidence of their success and scaling up have been well documented (see the 2022 article ‘Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order’ for a brief overview).
Readers are also urged to access the short but excellent backgrounder on YouTube Understanding Our Soil: The Nitrogen Cycle, Fixers and Fertilizer (2021), which describes the deleterious impact of modern synthetic fertilisers on soil, water and the atmosphere and how organic nitrogen-fixing methods can address these problems, not least by restoring and boosting soil fertility.
Of course, no one is advocating an immediate shift to organic cultivation methods. There has to be a gradual and careful phase out and phase in which would take place over a period of many years.
In this respect, Vandana Shiva says in a recent article that it is time governments made the fertiliser industry pay for nitrogen pollution and redirect subsidies from industrial agriculture to ecological farming. Rather than attacking farmers (as is currently happening in the Netherlands), she says new agroecology schools need to be open for farmers to make a transition to ecological agriculture over a three- to five-year period.
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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.
The author receives no payment from any media outlet or organization for his work. If you appreciated this article, consider sending a few coins his way: [email protected]
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.
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First published on April 27. 2022
It’s beginning to look like some bad actors are deliberately taking steps to guarantee a coming global food crisis. Every measure that the Biden Administration strategists have been making to “control energy inflation” is damaging the supply or inflating the price of natural gas, oil and coal to the global economy. This is having a huge impact on fertilizer prices and food production. That began well before Ukraine. Now reports are circulating that Biden’s people have intervened to block the freight rail shipping of fertilizer at the most critical time for spring planting. By this autumn the effects will be explosive.
With the crucial time for USA spring planting at its critical phase, CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest US supplier of nitrogen fertilizers as well as a vital diesel engine additive, issued a press release stating that, “On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately.”
Union Pacific is one of only four major rail companies that together carry some 80% of all US agriculture rail freight. The CF company CEO, Tony Will stated, “The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers.” CF has made urgent appeals to the Biden Administration for remedy, so far with no positive action.
Direct sabotage
CF Industries noted that they were one of only thirty companies subject to the severe measure, which is indefinite. They ship via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa, to serve key farm states including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. The ban will affect nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN), as well as diesel exhaust fluid, DEF (called AdBlue in Europe). DEF is an emissions control product required for diesel trucks today. Without it engines cannot run. It is made from urea. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.
At the same time, the Biden gang has announced a fake remedy for record high gasoline pump prices. Washington announced the EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer. On April 12 the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” initiative by the US Administration to increase the use of domestically-grown corn-ethanol biofuels. Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed the measure would “reduce energy prices and tackle rising consumer prices caused by Putin’s Price Hike (sic) by tapping into a strong and bright future for the biofuel industry, in cars and trucks and the rail, marine, and aviation sectors and supporting use of E15 fuel this summer.”
Only the capitalized “Putin Price Hike” is not a result of Russian actions, but of Washington Green Energy decisions to phase out oil and gas. The energy price inflation is also about to go vastly higher in coming months owing to US and EU economic sanctions on export of Russian oil and likely gas. However the central point is that every acre of US farmland dedicated to growing corn for biofuels removes that food production from the food chain, to burn it as fuel. Since passage of the 2007 US Renewable Fuel Standards Act, which mandated annually rising targets for production of corn for ethanol fuel blends, biofuels have captured a huge part of total corn acreage, more than 40% in 2015. That shift, mandated by law, to burning corn as fuel had added a major price inflation for food well before the covid inflation crisis began. The USA is by far world’s largest corn producer and exporter. Now to mandate a significant increase in corn ethanol for fuel at a time of astronomical fertilizer prices, and fertilizer rail shipping are being blocked reportedly by White House orders, will send corn prices through the roof. Washington knows this very well. It is deliberate.
No wonder the price of US corn reached a 10-year high in mid-April, as exports from Russia and Ukraine, major sources, are now blocked by sanction and war. Aside from the energy-inefficient use of US corn for biodiesel supply, the latest Biden ethanol initiative will add to the growing food crisis while doing nothing to lower US gasoline prices. A major use for US feed corn is as animal feed for cattle, pigs and poultry as well as for human diets. This cynical biofuel order is not about US “energy independence.” Biden ended that in his first days in office by a series of bans on oil and gas drilling and pipelines as part of his Zero Carbon agenda.
In what is clearly becoming a US Administration war on food, the situation is being dramatically aggravated by USDA demands for chicken farmers to kill off millions of chickens in now 27 states, allegedly for signs of Bird Flu infection. The H5N1 Bird Flu “virus” was exposed in 2015 as a complete hoax.
The tests used by the US government inspectors to determine bird flu now are the same unreliable PCR tests used for COVID in humans. The test is worthless for that. US Government officials estimate that since first cases were “tested” positive in February, at least 23 million chickens and turkeys have been culled to allegedly contain the spread of a disease whose cause could be the incredibly unsanitary cage confinement of mass industrial chicken CAFOs. The upshot is sharp rises in prices of egg by some 300% since November and severe loss of chicken protein sources for American consumers at a time when overall cost of living inflation is at a 40-year high.
To make matters worse, California and Oregon are again declaring water emergency amid a multi-year drought and are sharply reducing irrigation water to farmers in California, who produce the major share of US fresh vegetables and fruits. That drought has since spread to cover most agriculture land west of the Mississippi River, meaning much of US farmland.
US food security is under threat as never before since the 1930s Dust Bowl, and the Biden Administration “Green Agenda” is doing everything to make the impact worse for its citizens.
In recent comments US President Biden remarked without elaborating that the US food shortages are “going to be real.” His administration also is deaf to pleas of farmer organizations to allow cultivation of some 4 million acres of farmland ordered left out of cultivation for “environmental reasons. However this is not the only part of the world where crisis in food is developing.
Global Disaster
These deliberate Washington actions are taking place at a time a global series of food disasters create the worst food supply situation in decades, perhaps since the World War II end.
In the EU, which is significantly dependent on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine for feed grains, fertilizers and energy, sanctions are making the covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse. The EU uses its foolish Green Agenda as an excuse to forbid the Italian government from ignoring EU rules limiting state aid to farmers. In Germany, the new Green Party Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir, who wants to phase out traditional agriculture allegedly for its “greenhouse gas” emissions, has given farmers who want to grow more food a cold response. The EU faces many of the same disastrous threats to food security as the USA and even more dependence on Russian energy which is about to be suicidally sanctioned by the EU.
The major food producing countries in South America, especially Argentina and Paraguay, are in the midst of a severe drought attributed to a periodic La Niña Pacific anomaly that has crippled crops there. Sanctions on Belarus and Russia fertilizers are threatening Brazil crops, aggravated with bottlenecks in ocean transport.
China just announced that owing to severe rains in 2021, this year’s winter wheat crop could be the worst in its history. The CCP also has instituted severe measures to get farmers to expand cultivation to non-farm lands with little reported effect. According to a report by China watcher Erik Mertz,
“In China’s Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning provinces, officials have reported one in three farmers lack sufficient seed and fertilizer supplies to begin planting for the optimum spring window…According to sources within these areas, they are stuck waiting on seed and fertilizer which have been imported to China from overseas – and which are stuck in the cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai.”
Shanghai, the world’s largest container port, has been under a bizarre “Zero Covid” total quarantine for more than four weeks with no end in sight. In a desperate bid by the CCP “ordering” increased food production, local CP officials throughout China have begun transforming basketball courts and even roads into cropland. The food situation in China is forcing the country to import far more at a time of global shortages, driving world grain and food prices even higher.
Africa is also severely impacted by the US-imposed sanctions and war ending food and fertilizer exports from Russia and Ukraine. Thirty five African countries get food from Russia and Ukraine. Twenty two African countries import fertilizer from there. Alternatives are seriously lacking as prices soar and supply collapses. Famine is predicted.
David M. Beasley, executive director of the UN World Food Program, declared recently on the global food outlook, “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”
Notably, it was the Biden Treasury Department that drew up a list of the most comprehensive economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus, pressuring a compliant EU to dutifully follow, sanctions whose impact on global grain and fertilizer and energy supply and prices was entirely predictable. It was in effect a sanction on the US and global economy.
These are but the latest examples of deliberate US Government sabotage of the food chain as part of the Biden Green Agenda, of Davos WEF, Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation, as part of their dystopian Great Reset eugenics agenda. Traditional agriculture is to be replaced by a synthetic lab grown diet of fake meats and protein from grasshoppers and worms, worldwide. All for the supposed glory of controlling global climate. This is truly mad.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from NEO
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
What can I say? I dipped in and out of various sessions this year at the Davos event with much interest. Unfortunately, Davos 2023 will be held in less than 44 days. Can you believe it?
EFF is announcing a letter signed by 44 community groups who stand united in opposition to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors authorizing the San Francisco Police Department to deploy deadly force with remote-control robots. The signers include racial justice groups, civil rights and civil liberties organizations, LGBTQ organizations, and labor unions.
A new survey indicates that Americans’ support for Kiev is slipping. According to polling conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the number of citizens who want the White House to pursue a diplomatic path is nearly equal to those who advocate indefinite military aid to Ukraine.
I admit to being skeptical of Elon Musk as a free speech hero. He has moved from one US government-subsidized business to another on his path to becoming the world’s richest person. But there is no denying that his release of the “Twitter Papers” this past weekend, which blew the lid off government manipulation of social media, has been a huge victory for those of us who value the First Amendment.
Sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest companies in the industry reached $592 billion in 2021, a 1.9 per cent increase compared with 2020 in real terms. This is according to new data released today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The film based on the book of the same title, was released in the US in 1984, here available on Youtube in its original format. You can watch here or right below. Watching it gives you a similar impression as listening to and watching the 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF), that played out in Davos, Switzerland, from 23 – 26 May 2022. It displayed a dystopian world, where war is peace and peace is war, where lies are propagated 24/7, so you believe they are the truth, and when you finally look the truth into the eyes, you laugh, because it’s so incredible, that you believe it is just another lie. We are living right in 1984.
After years of illegal persecution, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Kiev lawmakers to draft a law banning the Russian Orthodox Church from Ukrainian territory. The justification would be the “necessity” to ban institutions linked to Russia due to the current conflict.
Until the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Professor John Mearsheimer was mainly known in academic circles as a leading scholar in the “realist” school of foreign policy. That is to say, he takes an unsentimental view of world affairs as being a muscular competition between great powers for regional hegemony.
CNN didn’t come out and directly accuse Russia of sending mail bombs and animal parts to Ukrainian embassies in Europe. There is no evidence of that, not that evidence gets in the way of reality-anemic war propagandists working for the national security state and its corporate media propaganda division.
After initially having her license suspended by the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine for allegedly “spreading covid misinformation” and being ordered to have a psychological evaluation conducted by a doctor of the Board’s choosing, Dr. Meryl Nass, who has never had one patient complaint in her entire 42 years of practicing medicine, who has successfully treated many covid patients, and who is a pandemic expert, is fighting back.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: The WEF Reveals the Agenda for Davos 2023. “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”. Triggering Economic Chaos, Debt, Poverty and Social Tyranny Worldwide…
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First published on December 5, 2021, updated December 18, 2021.
Since publication, important new sections of this confidential Pfizer report have been released.
***
“Have you seen the document dump on the Pfizer vaccine data? It’s a bombshell. No wonder the FDA fought to keep it hidden for 55 years.
Here is the quick takeaway:
By February of 2021, Pfizer had already received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by the vaccine and tens of thousands of reported adverse events, including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.
Bear in mind, this is Pfizer’s own data.” Election Wizard
***
This Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months).
In a twisted irony, the data revealed in this “insider report” refutes the official vaccine narrative peddled by the governments and the WHO. It also confirms the analysis of numerous medical doctors and scientists who have revealed the devastating consequences of the mRNA “vaccine”.
What is contained in Pfizer’s “confidential” report is detailed evidence on the impacts of the “vaccine” on mortality and morbidity. This data which emanates from the “Horse’s Mouth” can now be used to confront as well formulate legal procedures against Big Pharma, the governments, the WHO and the media.
In a Court of Law, the evidence contained in this Big Pharma confidential report (coupled with the data on deaths and adverse events compiled by the national authorities in the EU, UK and US) is irrefutable: because it is their data and their estimates and not ours.
Bear in mind: it’s data which is based on reported and recorded cases, which constitute a small percentage of the actual number of vaccine related deaths and adverse events.
This is a de facto Mea Culpa on the part of Pfizer. #Yes it is a Killer Vaccine
Pfizer was fully aware that the mRNA vaccine which it is marketing Worldwide would result in a wave of mortality and morbidity. This is tantamount to a crime against humanity on the part of Big Pharma.
Pfizer knew from the outset that it was a killer vaccine.
It is also a Mea Culpa and Treason on the part of corrupt national governments Worldwide which are being threatened and bribed by Big Pharma.
Video Interview with Michel Chossudovsky on the The Secret Pfizer Report
Click right corner to access fullscreen
No attempt has been made by the governments to call for the withdrawal of the killer vaccine.
People are told that the vaccine is intended to save lives.
We invite the “Covid-19 Fact Checkers” to peruse this Confidential Pfizer report.
(Oops. It just so happens that Reuters “Fact Checker” chairman and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) James C. Smith “is also a top investor and board member of Pfizer”. “No Conflict of Interest”).
Selected excerpts, tables and diagram from the Report below
Michel Chossudovsky.
Global Research, December 5, 2021, Update with Video Interview on May, 17, 2022
This document provides an integrated analysis of the cumulative post-authorization safety data, including U.S. and foreign post-authorization adverse event reports received through 28 February 2021.
(…)
Pfizer is responsible for the management post-authorization safety data on behalf of the MAH BioNTech according to the Pharmacovigilance Agreement in place. Data from BioNTech are included in the report when applicable.
Reports are submitted voluntarily, and the magnitude of underreporting is unknown.
(…)
Cumulatively, through 28 February 2021 [in less than three months], there was a total of 42,086 case reports (25,379 medically confirmed and 16,707 non-medically confirmed) containing 158,893 events. Most cases (34,762) were received from United States (13,739), United Kingdom (13,404) Italy (2,578), Germany (1913), France (1506), Portugal (866) and Spain (756); the remaining 7,324 were distributed among 56 other countries.
(…)
As shown in Figure 1 [see below], the System Organ Classes (SOCs) that contained the greatest number (≥2%) of events, in the overall dataset, were General disorders and administration site conditions (51,335 AEs), Nervous system disorders (25,957), Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders (17,283), Gastrointestinal disorders (14,096), Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders (8,476), Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders (8,848), Infections and infestations (4,610), Injury, poisoning and procedural complications (5,590), and Investigations (3,693
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La miseria y la desigualdad social persisten como características centrales de las naciones latinoamericanas en general, y para enfrentarla es necesario entender sus raíces históricas. Para ello, destacamos en este ensayo el papel y el carácter de las burguesías latinoamericanas, analizando las principales razones por las que esta clase dominante se opone históricamente a los procesos nacionales que buscan una mayor autonomía y la superación de la pobreza en esta región situada en la periferia sistémica del capitalismo.
Los debates sobre la llamada “cuestión nacional” se iniciaron hace más de cien años, pero siguen siendo fundamentales para la interpretación de las particularidades históricas de nuestra América (en términos de José Martí). Por lo tanto, deben orientar la táctica y la estrategia de las luchas para superar la explotación y la sumisión a los intereses externos, condición de la que aún hoy somos rehenes. En este nuevo siglo, con el agravamiento de la crisis estructural del capitalismo, este escenario se agrava, lo que se observa en una serie de golpes de Estado “modernos” y retrocesos sociales que han estado ocurriendo por toda América.
Sobre la cuestión nacional
En las primeras décadas del siglo pasado se produjeron importantes avances en la lucha de clases, la organización de la clase obrera y la producción teórica –tanto en el mundo como especialmente en América. En el contexto latinoamericano, hacia la década de 1920 se hizo evidente el impacto de la Revolución Rusa: se crearon varios partidos comunistas en las naciones del continente. A raíz de este impulso organizativo, la recién fundada Tercera Internacional (la Internacional Comunista) comenzó a considerar con mayor atención a las naciones americanas, fomentando los debates sobre la cuestión nacional en nuestra América.
Bajo la influencia dialógica de la nueva Internacional, a principios del periodo de entreguerras, todavía dirigida democráticamente por Lenin, se empezaron a sistematizar las aportaciones críticas a una interpretación de la realidad histórica y social de nuestras naciones. Los análisis producidos en el período cuestionaron los dogmas positivistas y eurocéntricos que dominaban las tesis de la Segunda Internacional (la Internacional Socialista, de orientación parlamentaria y pacifista). Sin embargo, a pesar de estos avances analíticos, las limitadas perspectivas socialistas de la Segunda Internacional, anquilosadas por la influencia del positivismo evolucionista del siglo XIX, pronto volverían a tener la hegemonía del movimiento comunista internacional, cuando Stalin subió al poder –con la burocratización política y el materialismo mecanicista que oscurecería la anterior libertad del pensamiento crítico dialéctico.
A pesar de este retroceso, grandes pensadores americanos han mantenido una defensa coherente de un análisis efectivamente dialéctico de la realidad de sus naciones nacientes, manifestándose en contra de las concepciones artificialmente trasplantadas de Europa a América.
En este sentido, buscamos aquí promover una reflexión sobre la cuestión nacional en América Latina, analizando problemas y rasgos fundamentales comunes a la mayoría de los pueblos americanos, en particular: la tesis socio-histórica del evolucionismo social (etapismo, o evolución social por etapas); y su consecuente derivación política práctica, el aliancismo (la alianza sumisa que deberían hacer los trabajadores con porciones supuestamente “nacionalistas”” de la burguesía, según la idea de un supuesto primer momento “democrático-burgués” de la revolución, que sería anterior a la etapa propiamente socialista).
Entre los análisis producidos en este período, los temas más relevantes para pensar la cuestión nacional son: las interpretaciones de la formación social de los países americanos y, en consecuencia, la investigación de las particularidades de los procesos revolucionarios independentistas; la lucha contra el imperialismo, especialmente el de los Estados Unidos; las alianzas serviles de las élites nacionales con las extranjeras; la cuestión agraria (latifundio, etc.), como uno de los principales factores de la formación política, económica y social de nuestras naciones.
Del “sentido externo” de la colonización al imperialismo
Como premisa de las causas fundamentales que subyacen a las desigualdades producidas en los países latinoamericanos, señalamos el “sentido externo” de nuestra colonización –concepto desarrollado por Caio Prado Júnior (2000)–, proceso que vincula el vector mercantil de nuestra evolución nacional a la expansión del mercado mundial. A través de la colonización, sometidos a una metrópoli dominante, nos insertamos en un sistema de poder en el que los circuitos comerciales y financieros seguían la lógica del intercambio desigual, basado en el precepto de “comprar barato y vender caro”. Esta lógica –materializada a costa de la expoliación de la riqueza, el genocidio y la esclavización de los pueblos originarios americanos y africanos– fue la base de la acumulación primitiva de capital (MARX, 2013), convirtiéndose en el fundamento de la formación social de los países de América.
Es importante señalar que la inserción de los países latinoamericanos en la acumulación primitiva está en la base de su formación económica y social. Mientras esto permitió una acumulación sin precedentes a los países centrales, impidió el desarrollo en las colonias, al extorsionar sus riquezas enviándolas al exterior (CUEVA, 1983). Este proceso, mantenido durante más de tres siglos, configuró la herencia colonial y la matriz económica, social, cultural y política de nuestras naciones.
De hecho, el propio Caio Prado generalizó a los demás países del continente su clásica afirmación del “sentido de colonización” brasileño, o sea: el Brasil como siendo parte del negocio capitalista europeo (PRADO Jr., 2000). En “Zonas tropicais da América” (1936, manuscrito del Fundo Caio Prado Jr./Arquivo IEB-USP), él extiende su idea de Brasil a la América Latina en general, en un interesante ensayo desafortunadamente poco conocido –aún no publicado como libro por problemas de derechos de autor (ya que sus herederos siguen teniendo los derechos patrimoniales sobre los escritos y obstruyendo la difusión de las ideas del marxista).
Tomar esta afirmación caiopradiana por su raíz, supone entender la formación que aquí se produce como una experiencia única de colonización, que somete el sentido de la construcción de toda nuestra estructura social a los intereses del mercado europeo (VIEIRA, 2018). La particularidad de nuestra colonización tiene como tríada básica: el latifundio; la tendencia al monocultivo; y el trabajo obligatorio (en el límite, la esclavitud). Como resultado de esta combinación, cristalizó una sociedad segregada que respondía a las necesidades de acumulación exigidas por las economías centrales del capitalismo.
La degradante herencia colonial no fue superada por las independencias políticas –restringidas e incompletas– que se produjeron en el siglo XIX. Estos procesos de independencia truncados sólo respondieron a los cambios en la dominación de los países centrales, y representan un patrón oligárquico-dependiente de desarrollo capitalista (CUEVA, 1983). Las sociedades latinoamericanas, generadas a partir de los procesos de independencia, siguieron teniendo su modo de producción basado en la esclavitud, la concentración de la tierra y la producción de bienes primarios, dirigidos principalmente al mercado externo.
La emancipación del estatus colonial, además de no significar la superación de determinantes fundamentales del período anterior, mantuvo su núcleo y proporcionó la profundización de sus raíces, especialmente por la mayor inserción de los países en el mercado mundial, a partir de los intereses del nuevo dominio imperial que se impuso: el de Inglaterra.
Así, la decadencia de los países ibéricos (Portugal y España), primeros usurpadores de los pueblos y territorios americanos, y la puesta en marcha de procesos de independencia política no supusieron una ruptura de las condiciones de intercambio desigual y de orientación de la producción en función de las demandas externas. Por el contrario, algunos países se integraron más activamente en el mantenimiento de la misma lógica. Esta mayor integración en el mercado mundial se produjo a partir de dos vectores: las condiciones reales de cada país y los cambios derivados del avance de la industrialización en los países centrales del sistema capitalista. De esta manera, se insertaron primero Chile, Brasil y luego Argentina, que habían desarrollado una infraestructura económica en la fase colonial y fueron capaces de producir condiciones políticas estables (MARINI, 2017).
El final del siglo XIX estuvo marcado por importantes cambios en el centro sistémico geopolítico: nuevas potencias se proyectan hacia el exterior, especialmente Alemania y Estados Unidos, este último con una política especialmente centrada en el continente americano. En los países centrales también hay una reorganización de la producción, basada en el aumento de la industria pesada y la tecnología. De este modo, la economía comenzó a concentrar sus unidades productivas, creando las condiciones para la aparición de monopolios. Esta característica es la marca principal de la nueva fase de desarrollo del capitalismo: el imperialismo.
Según Lenin (1987), hasta la transición del siglo XIX al XX, la base del sistema económico era la libre competencia y el libre comercio, en el que la concentración de la producción y el capital, y la aparición de monopolios eran las principales características. A partir de la aparición de los monopolios, marca fundamental del imperialismo, el proceso de acumulación capitalista produciría una tendencia cada vez mayor a la concentración, tanto del capital industrial como del financiero. El resultado de esta reorganización fueron grandes monopolios sedientos de nuevos mercados y nuevas fuentes de materias primas, que obligarían a la anexión de regiones del planeta menos desarrolladas industrialmente. En sus palabras “el capitalismo se transformó en un sistema universal de opresión colonial y asfixia financiera de la gran mayoría de la población del planeta por un puñado de países ‘avanzados’”.
Esta nueva división internacional del trabajo, orquestada por las naciones imperialistas, les permitió obtener grandes beneficios y transferir a otras naciones los costes sociales y económicos de mantener su riqueza. De esta manera, pudieron mantener su posición de dominación hegemónica a través de la reproducción del subdesarrollo, la pobreza y la dependencia de las naciones que subyugaron, como las de América Latina.
En este contexto, vale la pena caracterizar el papel asumido por las burguesías en los países latinoamericanos, pero para ello es necesario destacar primero una característica fundamental de la economía de los países periféricos (con su economía basada en la exportación): a diferencia de los países centrales, en los que la actividad económica está subordinada a la relación existente entre las tasas de plusvalía y la inversión, en los países dependientes el mecanismo económico fundamental proviene de la relación exportación-importación. Así, aunque la plusvalía se obtenga dentro de la economía, se realizará en el mercado exterior, mediante la actividad exportadora. Es decir, el excedente capaz de ser invertido sufre la acción directa de los factores externos, y la plusvalía realizada en la esfera del comercio mundial pertenece principalmente a los capitalistas extranjeros, dejando a las burguesías locales (en la economía nacional) sólo una parte de esta plusvalía.
Estas pérdidas, sin embargo, fueron compensadas por las burguesías latinoamericanas mediante el aumento del valor absoluto de la plusvalía, lo que significa la mayor expropiación y sometimiento de los trabajadores, fenómeno que Marini (2017) denominó “sobreexplotación de la fuerza de trabajo”, y que constituye, en palabras del autor: “el principio fundamental de la economía subdesarrollada, con todo lo que ello implica en términos de bajos salarios, falta de oportunidades de empleo, analfabetismo, desnutrición y represión policial”. En resumen, la compensación a nivel de la esfera de circulación es un mecanismo que opera a nivel de la producción interna en los países latinoamericanos y la sobreexplotación del trabajador está ligada a las fuerzas productivas de estas economías fundamentalmente debido a que la actividad económica más importante está sujeta a la producción de bienes primarios (MARINI, 1990).
Esta compleja formación económica y social, basada en el latifundio y la tendencia al monocultivo, contó siempre con el apoyo y las ganancias de las clases dominantes, socios locales minoritarios de los capitalistas de las naciones poderosas. Son sectores burgueses que se beneficiaron de los intercambios desiguales y actuaron como intermediarios y representantes del capital internacional. Identificar esta particular dinámica de dominación impuesta a los países latinoamericanos es fundamental para buscar construir un verdadero movimiento de emancipación: sin la superación del capitalismo y del imperialismo, que se aprovecha de las bases fundadas en la herencia colonial, no hay posibilidad de garantizar condiciones mínimas de acceso a los bienes comunes y a la riqueza producida socialmente.
Fue en la profundización de las contradicciones generadas por el avance del poder estadounidense sobre los países de América que se desarrollaron las luchas y reflexiones marxistas sobre el imperialismo y las particularidades del capitalismo latinoamericano. La identificación del imperialismo estadounidense como un especial enemigo de los demás pueblos de América ya era evidente en las primeras décadas del nuevo siglo. No ocurrió lo mismo, sin embargo, en relación con el carácter deletéreo de las “”burguesías internas” (antes equivocadamente llamadas “burguesías nacionales”). Y aquí está una de las cuestiones más polémicas de los debates teóricos de las primeras décadas del siglo XX, un debate en el que destacan los grandes marxistas que interpretaron de forma auténtica las cuestiones nacionales de sus países (e incluso de América Latina en su conjunto), como el peruano José Carlos Mariátegui, el cubano Julio Antonio Mella y el brasileño Caio Prado Júnior, entre otros pensadores.
Cabe destacar que en estas primeras décadas, además de la ya mencionada Revolución Rusa (1917) y de otros importantes avances en la organización de los trabajadores de la ciudad y del campo –como la Reforma Universitaria de Córdoba (1918), la organización sindical, la creación de nuevos partidos políticos y las alianzas obrero-campesinas–, también se resalta el impacto de la Revolución Mexicana (1910), proceso que propició el intercambio político e ideológico entre los pueblos de América.
Las burguesías domésticas antinacionales de América Latina
Desde una perspectiva ligada a la praxis revolucionaria, además del problema del imperialismo, otra cuestión fundamental para los pueblos de América es la necesidad de comprender objetivamente la acción política limitante operada por las “burguesías internas” latinoamericanas, una clase dominante que nunca ha sido “nacional”, como pensaron ciertos teóricos críticos sobre todo en la primera mitad del siglo XX, sino siempre una aliada subordinada de las burguesías de los países centrales del capitalismo. Clases, por tanto, “antinacionales”.
Considerando que el proceso de emancipación política está en el origen de la nación, las secuelas de este movimiento implican las particularidades socio-históricas de los sectores que componen las clases sociales aquí generadas. El problema, que involucra directamente la cuestión nacional, está vinculado a temas recurrentes y fundamentales de la tradición marxista, como son: las formas y relaciones sociales que se organizan en nuestros países, la sociedad y el Estado (IANNI, 1995).
La reflexión sobre la “cuestión nacional” se remonta al siglo XIX, época en la que en Europa se produce un intenso debate sobre el significado de “nación”. En este periodo, “naciones” como Serbia, Irlanda y Chequia –pueblos con su propia etnia y lengua– estaban bajo la ocupación de las potencias imperialistas de la época (HOBSBAWM, 1991). El concepto de que la “nación” se caracterizaba por la “unidad” etnolingüística cobró fuerza y, por tanto, cada una de estas unidades debría reunirse políticamente en un único Estado.
Este problema, discutido en el contexto del comunismo internacional por Lenin y Rosa Luxemburgo, impone la necesidad no sólo de recuperar la consolidación de las instituciones políticas que conducen a la dirección y organización del Estado, sino también de tratar los aspectos que explicitan el orden desigual y opresivo dominado por las naciones imperialistas.
Para ilustrar cómo la cuestión nacional fue un tema decisivo en el contexto que condujo a la Revolución de Octubre, Rosa Luxemburg llama la atención sobre el programa del Partido Obrero Socialdemócrata Ruso (POSDR) y sus legítimas preocupaciones al respecto. En el programa del POSDR, el líder de los espartaquistas mostró lo importante que era la supresión de los Estados y la completa igualdad de derechos para todos los ciudadanos, sin diferencia de “sexo, religión, raza o nacionalidad”, y también proclamó las premisas de que la “población de la nación debe tener el derecho de asistir a escuelas libres y autónomas que enseñen el idioma nacional”, y “usar su idioma en las asambleas, así como en todos los cargos estatales y públicos” (LUXEMBURGO, 1988).
Entre los exponentes de los partidos comunistas en Alemania y Rusia, es Lenin quien demuestra, además de la lucha de clases dentro y fuera de los territorios nacionales, la existencia de la lucha entre las “naciones opresoras” y las “naciones oprimidas”, que también debe ser estudiada dentro del horizonte de clase de la correlación de fuerzas y de las condiciones sociales, políticas y económicas que definen las estructuras de una determinada clase social. En un intento de defender la posición de los comunistas en relación con las luchas nacionales contra el imperialismo, el intelectual y dirigente bolchevique reconoce que “hasta ahora, nuestra experiencia común sobre este tema no es muy grande, pero poco a poco iremos reuniendo una documentación más y más abundante”, identificando la cuestión nacional como un elemento decisivo para la consolidación de las “necesidades revolucionarias” (Lenin, 1971).
Esta discusión había impuesto, desde el siglo XIX, grandes debates y desacuerdos en el seno del movimiento socialista: la propia Rosa Luxemburgo estaba en desacuerdo con Lenin, debido a la idea del “origen burgués de las polémicas nacionales” (LUXEMBURGO, 1988). Más tarde, la cuestión se incorporó a los debates sobre el programa del POSDR. Lenin, como uno de los líderes del partido, siempre tuvo el tema en la agenda. Sus afirmaciones a este respecto indicaban que en Rusia no sería posible que la revolución socialista triunfara sin prestar especial atención a la cuestión nacional: pues la ideología estatal del nacional-liberalismo pretende salvaguardar “los privilegios estatales de la gran burguesía rusa” (Lenin, 1986).
La polémica con Rosa Luxemburg se debe a que Lenin entendía que la revolucionaria alemana no había visto lo fundamental que es la cuestión nacional para la autonomía de las naciones, y por tanto su importancia para el proyecto revolucionario. Para Rosa, la defensa de la cuestión nacional por parte de Lenin tendría como resultado la reestructuración del Estado nacional burgués. Sin embargo, es importante señalar aquí que tal apreciación no se corresponde con las afirmaciones de Lenin, para quien la autodeterminación de las naciones debía ser una de las exigencias del programa del partido revolucionario, que como tantas otras sólo podría aplicarse plenamente cuando la revolución socialista fuera victoriosa.
Es notable el esfuerzo de Lenin por elaborar algunas tesis sobre la cuestión nacional, sin quitar del horizonte el “asalto al cielo”, como objetivo central dentro del orden capitalista y la consiguiente lucha de clases que enfrenta el POSDR. La particularidad esbozada es entender que la lucha de clases se desarrolla en un “terreno nacional”, adquiriendo un “carácter internacional”. La lucha de la clase obrera contra la explotación exige una firme solidaridad y una estrecha unidad de los trabajadores de todas las naciones, al igual que la resistencia a la política “nacionalista burguesa” es independiente de la nacionalidad. Así, es necesario comprender el carácter clasista de la cuestión nacional para que no genere ilusiones y confusión entre la claseobrera, evitando así, como bien señala Lenin: “dividir para el placer de la burguesía”; “la negación del derecho de autodeterminación significará, en la práctica, el apoyo a los privilegios de la nación dominante” (Lenin, 1986).
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Cuando examinamos el caso de América, pronto se hace evidente que esta noción de “nación”, a diferencia de la de los europeos e incluso los asiáticos, no se ajusta a nuestros pueblos. No podemos pensar en nuestras naciones mestizas predominantemente en términos étnicos, y mucho menos lingüísticos (dadas nuestras lenguas impuestas por las metrópolis). Estos formatos prefabricados de interpretación que nos llegaban (y siguen llegando) desde la realidad europea, perturbaron la autenticidad de muchos análisis de la tradición crítica, sobre todo hasta mediados del siglo XX.
Para entrar en este debate, es necesario primero darse cuenta –como muestra Caio Prado (2000)– de que nuestros países se constituyeron a partir de la expansión mercantil de las fronteras europeas. Esta condición nos sitúa en la “periferia” del capitalismo, este sistema cuya consolidación se basaría no sólo en la riqueza material, sino también en el conocimiento indígena (CASTRO, 1951).
Tales discusiones fueron centrales en aquellos tiempos de formación de una auténtica reflexión sobre las realidades nacionales, dando lugar a una problemática polarización: en un extremo, los marxistas de concepción mecanicista o dogmática, que intentaban encajar artificialmente nuestras realidades en el modelo europeo (entonces considerado “universal”); en el otro extremo, los intelectuales progresistas, a veces cercanos al marxismo, pero excesivamente relativistas, que se desviaban de la tradición crítica totalizante, al exagerar las supuestas “especificidades regionales” de sus pueblos (LÖWY, 2006).
A partir de estas dos concepciones defectuosas, los errores de interpretación histórica darían lugar a graves malentendidos políticos. En el campo de las ideas revisionistas destaca el pensamiento nacionalista-ecléctico de Haya de la Torre –de la Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana. Se trata de una posición procedente de la pequeña burguesía, y que daría lugar a una especie de indigenismo “filantrópico” (MARTINS-FONTES, 2018).
Haya visitó la URSS y fue un admirador de Lenin, pero no del Lenin total –intelectual y hombre de acción– sino del gran líder que movilizaba a las multitudes. Además, absorbió ciertas ideas antiimperialistas (HAYA DE LA TORRE, 2017); pero sólo en la medida en que interesaba al paternalismo aprista burgués-nacional, con sus pretensiones de gran vanguardia libertaria.
En el otro polo de estos equívocos, el error del marxismo vulgar (de matriz eurocéntrica) deriva del intento de elaborar los problemas de América dentro de esquemas que, si bien pudieron ser acertados en el caso de los pueblos europeos, no fueron adecuados para nuestros pueblos, impidiendo la elaboración de una visión más justa que pudiera tener eficacia práctica. Este problema tuvo su “resolución” histórica, como sabemos, en la dura derrota sufrida por el movimiento socialista en muchos de nuestros países a partir de la década de 1960, con la instalación de regímenes militares contrarrevolucionarios “bonapartistas” (RAGO FILHO, 2001).
Entre las cuestiones fundamentales de estos debates estaba la idea de que el colonialismo en nuestras naciones había conformado modos de producción “feudales”, y que esto había dejado huellas después de la independencia, por lo que era necesario llevar a cabo una “revolución burguesa” previa. La consecuencia de esto sería la orientación estratégica que defendía la alianza de los comunistas, de forma sumisa, con fracciones de las clases dominantes (partes de la burguesía que se creían con intereses “nacionales”).
***
A partir de las vastas consecuencias sociales y teóricas de la Revolución Rusa, se crearía la Internacional Comunista, organización en cuyo seno se profundizarían las discusiones marxistas sobre la realidad de los pueblos de América. En estos nuevos debates, grandes pensadores críticos de América vendrían a jugar un papel protagónico, aportando certeras interpretaciones histórico-dialécticas de nuestras cuestiones nacionales, conceptos que convergen en la necesidad de un movimiento obrero independiente (reuniendo campo y ciudad) –lo que, aunque establezca alianzas puntuales de urgencia, no se someta a supuestas parcelas burguesas “nacionales” (inexistentes).
Hoy, en un contexto de agravamiento de la crisis estructural del sistema, con el consiguiente aumento de la violencia capitalista (actualmente en forma neoliberal), vemos el verdadero rostro de la burguesía latinoamericana: entreguista, antinacional y hasta fascista, cuando siente amenazado su poder.
Yuri Martins-Fontes, Solange Struwka, Paulo Alves Junior**
octubre de 2022
Referencias bibliográficas
CASTRO, Josué. Geopolítica da Fome. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1951.
CUEVA, Agustín. O desenvolvimento do capitalismo na América Latina. São Paulo: Global, 1983.
FERNANDES, Florestan. Poder e contrapoder na América Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1981.
HOBSBAWM, Eric. Nações e nacionalismos desde 1780. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991.
HAYA DE LA TORRE. La devoción por Lênin (original: Claridad, nov. 1924, ano 2, n.7). Vanguarda Aprista. Disp: vanguardiaaprista.com. Acesso: 01/ago/2017.
IANNI, Octavio. O labirinto latino-americano, Petrópolis (RJ): Vozes, 1993.
LÊNIN, Vladimir Ilitch. Lenine e a IIIª Internacional. Lisboa: Estampa, 1971.
LÊNIN, Vladimir Ilitch. O imperialismo: fase superior do capitalismo. São Paulo: Global, 1987.
LENIN, Vladimir Ilitch. Obras escolhidas. São Paulo: Alfa Ômega, 1986.
LÖWY, Michael (org.). O marxismo na América Latina. São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2006.
LUXEMBURGO, Rosa. A questão nacional e a autonomia. Belo Horizonte: Oficina de Livros, 1988.
MARIÁTEGUI, José Carlos. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Amauta, 1989 [1928]
MARINI, Ruy Mauro. Dialética da Dependência (trad. Marcelo Carcanholo e Carlos E. Martins). México: Editora Era, 1990 [1973].
MARINI, Ruy Mauro. Subdesenvolvimento e revolução. Florianópolis: Insular, 2017 [1968].
MARTINS-FONTES, Yuri. Marx na América: a práxis de Caio Prado e Mariátegui. São Paulo: Alameda/Fapesp, 2018.
MARTINS-FONTES, Y. STRUWKA, S.; ALVES Jr., P.. Pensamento crítico e questão nacional na América Latina do entre-guerras. In: SUZUKI; NEPOMUCENO; ARAÚJO (orgs.). A dimensão cultural nos processos de integração entre países da América Latina. São Paulo: PROLAM-USP/FFLCH-USP, 2021. Acesso: 6 jun. 2022. Disp: http://www.livrosabertos.sibi.usp.br/portaldelivrosUSP/catalog/download/735/653/2420?inline=1
MARX, Karl. O Capital: para a crítica da economia política (Livro I, volume II). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2013.
PRADO JÚNIOR, Caio. A Revolução Brasileira. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1966.
PRADO JÚNIOR, Caio. Formação do Brasil contemporâneo. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 2000 [1942].
RAGO FILHO, Antonio. Sob este signo vencerás! – a estrutura ideológica da autocracia burguesa bonapartista. Cadernos AEL, v.8, n.14/15, 2001.
VIEIRA, C. A. Cordovano. Passado colonial e reversão no Brasil contemporâneo. In: LIMA Fo.; MACEDO; NOVAES (orgs.). Movimentos sociais e crises contemporâneas: à luz dos clássicos do materialismo crítico (v. 3). Marília (SP): Lutas Anticapital, 2018.
Notas
* Este ensayo es una versión revisada de la primera parte del artículo “Pensamento crítico e questão nacional na América Latina do entre-guerras”, capítulo del libro A dimensão cultural nos processos de integração entre países da América Latina(Prolam-USP/ FFLCH-USP, 2021).
**Sobre los autores:
Yuri Martins-Fonteses doctor en Historia Económica (USP-Brasil/CNRS-Francia), con estudios posdoctorales en Ética y Filosofía Política (USP) e Historia, Cultura y Trabajo (PUC-SP); escritor, filósofo y coordinador del Núcleo Práxis da USP.
Solange Struwkaes doctora en Psicología Social (USP); profesora adjunta de grado y postgrado en la UNIR (RO); miembro del Movimento de Mulheres Camponesas (Brasil) y coordinadora del Núcleo Práxis da USP.
Paulo Alves Jr. es doctor en Sociología (Unesp); profesor asistente de Historia en la Unilab (BA); coordinador del Núcleo Práxis da USP y miembro del Centro Integrado de Investigação Transdisciplinar ‘Cultura, Espaço e Memória’ de la Universidad de Oporto.
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***
EFF is announcing a letter signed by 44 community groups who stand united in opposition to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors authorizing the San Francisco Police Department to deploy deadly force with remote-control robots. The signers include racial justice groups, civil rights and civil liberties organizations, LGBTQ organizations, and labor unions.
“SFPD’s proposal, if approved, threatens the privacy and safety of city residents and visitors. Police in the United States have killed 1,054 people in the last year. Black Americans are three times more likely than white Americans to be killed during police encounters. San Francisco is no exception; according to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013 to 2021, Black people were 9.7 times as likely and Latinx people were 4.3 times as likely to be killed by SFPD as a white person by population. According to Mission Local, from 2000 to 2021, over 30 percent of fatal police shootings in San Francisco killed Black people, even though Black people were only about 5 percent of the city’s population. And despite California having one of the strongest laws governing police use of deadly force in the country, unarmed people and bystanders are killed with disturbing frequency.
There is no basis to believe that robots toting explosives might be an exception to police overuse of deadly force. Using robots that are designed to disarm bombs to instead deliver them is a perfect example of this pattern of escalation, and of the militarization of the police force that concerns so many across the city.”
We thank all of the groups who signed onto this letter, and the many groups and residents who attended today’s Stop Killer Robots rally outside of city hall. We again commend Supervisors Walton, Ronen, and Preston for their continued leadership in support of civil rights and civil liberties issues.
The policy passed with a vote of 8-to-3 last week, but is not effective without another vote at the Board of Supervisor meeting on Tuesday, December 6. Responding to public outcry, Supervisor Mar announced he will be changing his vote. We thank him for doing so, and urge other members of the Board to do the same.
Residents must continue reaching out to their supervisors and tell them to vote against SFPD’s killer robots. You can find an email contact for your Board of Supervisors member here, and determine which Supervisor to contact here. Here’s text you can use (or edit):
Do not give SFPD permission to kill people with robots. This broad policy would allow police to bring armed robots to every arrest, and every execution of a warrant to search a house or vehicle or device. Depending on how police choose to define the words “critical” or “exigent,” police might even bring armed robots to a protest. While police could only use armed robots as deadly force when the risk of death is imminent, this problematic legal standard has often been under-enforced by courts and criticized by activists. For the sake of your constituents’ rights and safety, please vote no.
*
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A new survey indicates that Americans’ support for Kiev is slipping. According to polling conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the number of citizens who want the White House to pursue a diplomatic path is nearly equal to those who advocate indefinite military aid to Ukraine.
The survey shows a declining number of Republicans who want to give military assistance to Kiev, carrying on a six-month trend. Global Affairs polling in March found that 80% of GOP-leaning respondents wanted the White House to arm Ukraine. That number declined to 64% in July, and was down to 55% in the latest poll released on Sunday. Democratic Party support has also dropped, though at a slower pace.
Additionally, the results show waning approval for the Joe Biden administration’s policy regarding the war in Ukraine. The US and its NATO partners have committed to providing the country with military aid for as long as it needs to win the war, all the while urging Kiev not to negotiate with Moscow.
However, the new polling indicates that only 48% of Americans agree with arming Ukraine indefinitely. That figure is down by 10% since July, with the number of citizens urging for long-term military assistance now nearly equal to those who want Biden to push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to talk with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
The vast majority of Americans continue to oppose direct involvement in the war. Only 32% of respondents said they want US troops deployed to Ukraine.
While some taxpayers may be growing tired of paying for massive aid shipments to Kiev, nearly three-quarters of people responding to the poll said they continue to back the Western economic war on Russia despite the impact sanctions might have, including skyrocketing inflation in the US and soaring fuel prices in Europe.
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Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman.
Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seen earlier this year. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service)
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The Department of Defense secretly altered the most advanced weapons systems the US has transferred to Ukraine. The change prevented the platform from firing long-range munitions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The White House has sent 20 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Ukraine over the past six months, out of a total of 38 units authorized for Kiev. Without telling their Ukrainian counterparts, the Pentagon outfitted the systems with a component to prevent them from firing munitions with a range of over 50 miles.
President Joe Biden has sent thousands of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GLMRS) rockets to Ukraine with a range of 50 miles. However, Kiev has repeatedly requested the longer-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which can strike targets nearly 200 miles away. Both munitions can be fired from the HIMARS platform.
The Biden administration has said it will not transfer rockers with a range longer than 50 miles out of concern the munitions will be used for attacks on Russian soil. Ukraine has offered the White House control over selecting targets in an effort to alleviate US concerns, but Washington apparently has yet to budge on the issue.
The Journal spoke with American officials who said the Biden administration fears that sending longer-range munitions will escalate the war. Some NATO members, such as Latvia, have disagreed with Biden’s decision and urged him to supply the weapons, arguing it is unwise to let Russia determine Western policies.
“We should allow Ukrainians to use weapons to target missile sites or air fields from where those operations are being launched,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said on the sidelines of last week’s NATO summit, adding that allies “should not fear” retaliation by Moscow.
Additionally, the US officials said the modification for the HIMARS indicates distrust between Washington and Kiev. “[The alterations] reflect apprehensions among administration officials that their Ukrainian partner might stop keeping its promise not to strike Russian territory with US-provided weapons,” the Journal added.
*
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Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman.
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***
Sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest companies in the industry reached $592 billion in 2021, a 1.9 per cent increase compared with 2020 in real terms. This is according to new data released today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The increase marked the seventh consecutive year of rising global arms sales. However, while the rate of growth in 2020–21 was higher than in 2019–20 (1.1 per cent), it was still below the average for the four years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic (3.7 per cent).
Supply chain issues seen in 2021 likely to worsen due to Ukraine war
Many parts of the arms industry were still affected by pandemic-related disruptions in global supply chains in 2021, which included delays in global shipping and shortages of vital components.
‘We might have expected even greater growth in arms sales in 2021 without persistent supply chain issues,’ said Dr Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Director of the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. ‘Both larger and smaller arms companies said that their sales had been affected during the year. Some companies, such as Airbus and General Dynamics, also reported labour shortages.’
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has added to supply chain challenges for arms companies, not least because Russia is a major supplier of raw materials used in arms production. This could hamper ongoing efforts in the United States and Europe to strengthen their armed forces and to replenish their stockpiles after sending billions of dollars’ worth of ammunition and other equipment to Ukraine.
‘Increasing output takes time,’ said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, SIPRI Senior Researcher. ‘If supply chain disruptions continue, it may take several years for some of the main arms producers to meet the new demand created by the Ukraine war.’
While reports indicate that Russian companies are increasing production because of the war, they have had difficulty accessing semiconductors. They are also being impacted by war-related sanctions. For example, Almaz-Antey (not included in the Top 100 for 2021 due to lack of data) has stated that it has not been able to receive payments for some of its arms export deliveries.
US companies dominate the Top 100, but sales decline
The arms sales of the 40 US companies in the listing totalled $299 billion in 2021. North America was the only region to see a drop in arms sales compared with 2020. The 0.8 per cent real-terms decline was partly due to high inflation in the US economy during 2021. Since 2018, the top five companies in the Top 100 have all been based in the USA.
A recent wave of mergers and acquisitions in the US arms industry continued in 2021. One of the most significant acquisitions was Peraton’s purchase of Perspecta, a government IT specialist, for $7.1 billion.
‘We can probably expect to see stronger action from the US government to limit arms industry mergers and acquisitions in the next few years,’ said Dr Nan Tian, SIPRI Senior Researcher. ‘The US Department of Defense has expressed concern that reduced competition in the industry could have knock-on effects on procurement costs and product innovation.’
Europe: Aerospace sales fall, shipbuilding rises
In 2021 there were 27 Top 100 companies headquartered in Europe. Their combined arms sales increased by 4.2 per cent compared with 2020, reaching $123 billion.
‘Most of the European companies that specialize in military aerospace reported losses for 2021, which they blamed on supply chain disruptions,’ said Lorenzo Scarazzato, a researcher with the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. ‘In contrast, European shipbuilders seem to have been less affected by the pandemic fallout and were able to increase their sales in 2021.’
Dassault Aviation Group bucked the trend in the military aerospace sector. The company’s arms sales saw a sharp 59 per cent increase to $6.3 billion in 2021, driven by deliveries of a total of 25 Rafale combat aircraft.
Chinese companies drive rapid growth in Asian arms sales
The combined arms sales of the 21 companies in Asia and Oceania included in the Top 100 reached $136 billion in 2021—5.8 per cent more than in 2020. The eight Chinese arms companies in the listing had total arms sales of $109 billion, a 6.3 per cent increase.
‘There has been a wave of consolidation in the Chinese arms industry since the mid 2010s,’ said Xiao Liang, a researcher with the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. ‘In 2021 this saw China’s CSSC becoming the biggest military shipbuilder in the world, with arms sales of $11.1 billion, after a merger between two existing companies.’
The combined arms sales of the four South Korean companies in the Top 100 grew by 3.6 per cent compared with 2020, reaching $7.2 billion. This was largely due to a 7.6 per cent rise in arms sales by Hanwha Aerospace, to $2.6 billion. Hanwha’s arms sales are expected to grow significantly in the coming years, after it signed a major arms deal with Poland in 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Other notable developments
Six Russian companies are included in the Top 100 for 2021. Their arms sales totalled $17.8 billion—an increase of only 0.4 per cent over 2020. There were signs that stagnation was widespread across the Russian arms industry.
The five Top 100 companies based in the Middle East generated $15.0 billion in arms sales in 2021. This was a 6.5 per cent increase compared with 2020, the fastest pace of growth of all regions represented in the Top 100.
The aggregated arms sales of the four Top 100 companies based in Japan was $9.0 billion, a decline of 1.4 per cent compared with 2020.
This is the first year in which a Taiwanese firm appears in the Top 100. NCSIST (ranked 60th), which specializes in missiles and military electronics, recorded arms sales of $2.0 billion in 2021.
Private equity companies are becoming more active in the arms industry, particularly in the USA. This could affect the transparency of arms sales data, due to less stringent financial reporting requirements compared with public companies.
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Featured image: Close-up of the Head of a Sidewinder Rocket on a Fighter Jet. Photo. Shutterstock
Schwab also warned those who trivialized or hijacked the event’s key messages, like the often-mentioned Great Reset, that they would be treated with contempt.
At the key note address Klaus Schwab said:
“This war is really a turning point in history, and it will ‘reshape’ our political and economic landscape in the coming years.” – Klaus Schwab.
‘Cooperation in a Fragmented World’ will be the theme of the Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos, Klosters from 16-20 January, 2023. Over 2,500 leaders from government, business, and civil society will attend.
“Taking place at a pivotal time for the world, the Annual Meeting 2023 will bring together more than 2,500 leaders from government, business and civil society. The Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have triggered big changes. The promise of a “decade of action” could turn into a decade of uncertainty and fragility if systemic risks aren’t addressed.
To navigate the current cascading crises but, more importantly, to drive tangible, system-positive change for the long term, the World Economic Forum is holding its 53rd Annual Meeting in January to reaffirm the value and imperative of dialogue and public-private cooperation.”
1. Energy and Food Crises in the context of a New System for Energy, Climate and Nature
2. High Inflation, Low Growth, High Debt Economy in the context of a New System for Investment, Trade and Infrastructure
3. Industry Headwinds in the context of a New System for Harnessing Frontier Technologies for Private Sector Innovation and Resilience
4. Social Vulnerabilities in the context of a New System for Work, Skills and Care
5. Geopolitical Risks in the context of a New System for Dialogue and Cooperation in a Multipolar World
You can expect Klaus Schwab and his confab to fly into Davos on carbon-heavy planes and eat filet mignon while directing us to “cycle and eat bugs”.
Over 400 sessions were held last year, all aligned with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. They’re all working towards global government and digital control via the UN SDG’s.
They say we’re at a critical inflection point today. The sheer number of crises calls for bold action.
At the Annual Meeting, government, business, and civil society leaders will discuss the state of the world and priorities for the year. Through their cherished public-private collaboration, it will provide a platform for so-called “constructive, forward-looking dialogue”.
They’re building solutions to problems they’ve created. The Davos Men have been trained to believe in and support a globalist form of unelected government, where business is the driving force.
Don’t also forget that the WEF isn’t just a talking shop like some fact checkers and the mainstream media would have you believe. WEF has the same formal status as an official international institution like the Red Cross or the International Olympic Committee.
Hence, it’s going to be another round of globalist announcements, causing havoc without actually fixing anything. Watch as they decide outside of democracy and bring in predetermined solutions such as digital identity, CBDC, and carbon tracking. Through this, they can control and enslave governments and people.
TruthTalk.UK will be covering this event.
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The writer and editor of TruthTalk.UK, Sikh for Truth, is a well-known freedom fighter who studies surveillance technology such as Vaccine Passports, Digital Identity, and Central Bank Digital Currencies. You can email me on [email protected].
Comments Off on The WEF Reveals the Agenda for Davos 2023. “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”. Triggering Economic Chaos, Debt, Poverty and Social Tyranny Worldwide…
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First published on June 3, 2022
***
You remember “1984” by George Orwell?
The film based on the book of the same title, was released in the US in 1984, here available on Youtube in its original format. You can watch here or right below.
Watching it gives you a similar impression as listening to and watching the 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF), that played out in Davos, Switzerland, from 23 – 26 May 2022.
It displayed a dystopian world, where war is peace and peace is war,
where lies are propagated 24/7,
so you believe they are the truth, and when you finally look the truth into the eyes, you laugh, because it’s so incredible, that you believe it is just another lie.
We are living right in 1984.
That’s the WEF. That’s Davos. That’s the Globalists.
That’s the dark cult of the elite, the truth of the eugenists.
That’s what the Great Reset, UN Agenda 2030 – and the 4th Industrial Revolution would have in store for us, if we allowed it to happen – that’s Klaus Schwab’s wet dream.
He and his WEF – and all the elite-adherents – believe this will be their future world, a dystopian world, where nothing is what it seems, with a drastically reduced population, with the surviving people being digitized transhumans, slaves for the elite, who own nothing but are happy.
That’s what the WEF’s plans are, or rather were, before Davos 2022, with WHO holding its annual World Health Assembly in parallel with the WEF – remember, there are no coincidences – debating on how to overrule the sovereignty of its 194 member countries with an all controlling “Pandemic Treaty”, transferring the privately owned WHO into WHT, for World Health Tyranny.
Yes, 80% of the WHO is owned by private interests, it’s not really a UN agency, it responds to those who fund it: largely Big Pharma, Bill Gates, and numerous other private interest groups and billionaire individuals.
They are failing bitterly.
At least for now. Globalization, their dream, is falling apart. They will continue trying, and we have to be on continuous alert.
Remember, Freedom doesn’t come for free.
We have to fight for it.
But We, the People, shall overcome!
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
The United States is deliberately misleading Ukraine so it can use its territory to prosecute its war on Russia. It is a cynical manipulation tantamount to genocide. The US has no vital national security interests in Ukraine nor does it care whether its cities and people are pounded into oblivion.
An international vaccine passport, digital identity, a social credit system and a central bank digital currency (CBDC) form a digital control system that will lock down the population in perpetuity. Facial recognition is an essential part of the control structure, as it’s the “password” to your digital identity.
Europe just announced a $60 per barrel of oil cap against Russian oil at the same time Putin and China are increasing trade. Europe is facing a slow boiling energy disaster. Meanwhile OPEC+ says they’re not changing anything which means 2 million barrels of oil will continue to be slashed from daily output.
On the 24th of November, minor anti-lockdown protests that had begun at the start of the month following the decision by the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to re-impose restrictions, would grow exponentially in the aftermath of an apartment fire in the north-western Xinjiang province, leading to the deaths of ten residents, with lockdown restrictions being blamed on preventing firefighters from reaching the scene.
The public is becoming increasingly disturbed with reports of death among the vaccinated. It is natural to ask “was the death caused by vaccination?” The most definitive way of answering that question is with autopsy. Schwab et al reported on deaths after vaccination with detailed autopsies in Heidelberg, Germany.
The British government assigned at least 15 people to the secret operation to seize Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, new information shows. The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government.
The history of folklore as an area of study is relatively recent compared to its ancient origins. In the eighteenth century the role of Enlightenment science in changing attitudes towards the study of folklore soon showed benefits with an increased understanding of ourselves and our history of survival throughout the centuries.
Here’s the mainstream narrative: The status of the war in Ukraine is best understood as a competition between the narrative and reality. The narrative consists of what you hear from mainstream media, the White House, the Pentagon and official sources in the U.K., France, Germany and both EU and NATO headquarters in Brussels. The reality consists of what’s actually going on based on the best available sources. Let’s consider the narrative first.
Escalation is proceeding as it did in Vietnam. A Washington puppet would not have voiced a provocative proposal without Washington’s permission. By “inside Russia” Rinkevics means territory beyond the territory Russia recently reincorporated. He is calling for widening the war by crossing a red line that President Putin could not ignore.
Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues. As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy involving Simon & Schuster and Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The report with the same information was repeated across the media.
On November 30, the European Commission, the executive of the European Union, proposed “options to Member States to make sure that Russia is held accountable for the atrocities and crimes committed during the war in Ukraine.”
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Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”.
This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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Video. Interview with Michel Chossudovsky, December 5, 2022
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After years of illegal persecution, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Kiev lawmakers to draft a law banning the Russian Orthodox Church from Ukrainian territory. The justification would be the “necessity” to ban institutions linked to Russia due to the current conflict. With this, once again the Ukrainian government shows that it does not prioritize popular interests, considering that Orthodoxy is the majority religion of the Ukrainian people.
The new Ukrainian measure comes amid the recent initiative to extinguish all Russian organizations active on Ukrainian territory. Previously, companies and associations linked to Russian citizens had already been outlawed. Now, the focus is on attacking religious institutions. In addition to calling on lawmakers to approve a law to prohibit the Moscow Patriarchate’s activities in Ukraine, Zelensky also signed a Decree ordering the Security Council to impose personal sanctions against representatives of Russian religious groups, which will target all the clergy of the Orthodox Church.
In his statement on the matter, Zelensky said that Kiev cannot allow Russia to “build an empire” and “weaken Ukraine from within”, nor to “manipulate” Ukrainian citizens in favor of the so-called “Russian aggression”. In other words, Zelensky asserts that he wants to end Russian-Ukrainian ties and prevent the continuity of cultural and religious heritage between the two countries.
Zelensky’s argument is absolutely fallacious. In fact, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is part of the Moscow Patriarchate, but this is a consequence of the historical formation of that region. Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were for centuries a single empire, not different states, with the fragmentation of the region being a post-Soviet political phenomenon. The distribution of the canonical territories of the Church does not necessarily follow the laws of the legal borders of the National States, since the borders are constantly changed as a result of political events, while in the Church the changes are not so frequent.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has always had broad administrative autonomy, and there has never been any kind of political imposition by the Moscow Patriarchate on the local faithful. There is no data to corroborate Zelensky’s claim that Russia is building an empire to “weaken Ukraine from within”, this rhetoric being just an attempt to disguise the indisputable fact that the Kiev regime is promoting religious persecution against the majority faith of its own people.
However, this is not really surprising. Since 2014, the Orthodox Church has been persecuted in Ukraine. The genocide in Donbass included since its beginning the massacre of Orthodox Christians linked to Russian traditions, as well as the bombing of churches, monasteries, and the assassination of clergymen in the Eastern oblasts. The situation worsened in 2019, when, after an anti-canonical maneuver financed by NATO, a Ukrainian ultranationalist schism that had been formed in the 1990s came to be “recognized” by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and then the Kiev regime began a wave of support for this sect, considering it a kind of “Ukrainian national church” to the detriment of the real Orthodox Church – which is linked to Moscow.
Since then, the Ukrainian state has carried out various crimes against Orthodoxy, including using police force to illegally confiscate properties of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine and give them to the schismatic nationalists. It is important to mention that the nationalist ideology of this schism is so strong that in religious rituals it is even common to venerate Ukrainian national leaders as Christian saints, including the Nazi agent Stepan Bandera – which is why this “church” receives wide support from the neo-Nazi regime and the West.
In this sense, what is happening now is not something actually “new”, but the formalization and officialization of a persecutory practice that was already becoming common in the recent years. At first, the Church was persecuted mainly in Donbass, illegally. Now, the State will be able to carry out operations against Orthodoxy throughout the entire national territory – and in full accordance with the legislation of the neo-Nazi government.
This is just one more step in the project of anti-Russian cultural genocide. After banning literature, music and language, now they ban religion. In fact, Ukraine’s de-russification campaign can only be stopped with the success of Moscow’s special military operation. Kiev is determined to serve the Western interest in removing any ties between Russia and Ukraine, even if this is not in the benefit of the local people, considering that even among ethnic Ukrainians the Orthodox Church is the majority religion. Kiev’s plan is to replace the legitimate, traditional Orthodox Church followed by the majority with the Western-backed ultranationalist schismatic sect.
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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.
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***
Laying the groundwork for forced vaccination…
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Featured image is from SHTFplan.com
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Comments Off on Video: Canadian Psychiatric Association Targets Anti-Vaxxers. The Unvaccinated are Categorized As “Having a Mental Problem” Requiring Treatment
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***
Europe just announced a $60 per barrel of oil cap against Russian oil at the same time Putin and China are increasing trade. Europe is facing a slow boiling energy disaster.
Meanwhile OPEC+ says they’re not changing anything which means 2 million barrels of oil will continue to be slashed from daily output.
All Putin has to do is cut uranium sales to Europe and the U.S. and it will be lights out.
We are watching these moron globalists destroy our way of life right before our eyes, and the latest moves this weekend prove my point.
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***
The time has come to pick up threads from my blog of January 27 titled The West co-opts the Taliban. Indeed, the wheel has come full circle since the three-day conclave in Oslo on January 23-25 between a core group of Western diplomats with Taliban officials failed to work out a reasonable modus vivendi. The pendulum has since swung to the other extreme.
Afghanistan has once again become the cockpit of big power rivalries due to developments intrinsic to Afghan situation, a regime change in Pakistan and the shifts in regional politics in Central Asia due to the fallouts from the collective West’s proxy war with Russia in Europe.
To recapitulate, Russia and China brilliantly undercut the US’ attempt in Oslo to co-opt the Taliban government as its partner. The terms of partnership were not acceptable to the Taliban, especially the leeway that the US and British intelligence sought to stage covert operations from Afghan soil.
Russia and China created space for Taliban to negotiate with the US by simply offering them the prospect of a beneficial relationship. The US’s core objective was to use Afghanistan as a staging post for its containment strategies against Russia, China and Iran.
Since then, the US estimates that with Russia bogged down in Ukraine and China remaining extra-cautious in consorting with Moscow, a window of opportunity is available for it to proactively work toward promoting regime changes in Central Asia and wrest the region from the Russian orbit.
Attempts were made in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan but the regimes in those countries were vigilant.The failed attempts once again drew attention to the importance of Afghanistan as a high ground in the geopolitics of the Central Asian region. Hence the need to regain control over Kabul.
This is a truly collective effort by the Western intelligence, with the US, UK, France and Germany in the lead role. Unsurprisingly, the West’s focus has shifted to the northern regions of Afghanistan bordering the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia.
With a pro-Western regime in power in Pakistan, the US gets a free hand to work with the non-Taliban groups. The Western powers assess that the so-called National Resistance Front (NRF) led by the Panjshiri leader Ahmed Massoud provides a congenial platform for advancing their regional agenda.
Apart from the Massoud clan’s decades-old links with the French intelligence, Ahmed Massoud himself was trained in Sandhurst. The Panjshiris are irreconcilably opposed to Pashtun rule and also have ethnic affinities with Tajikistan.
Enter Emmanuel Macron. France has a score to settle with the Kremlin ever since Russia’s Wagner Group summarily replaced the French Legion as the provider of security to the Francophone countries in the Sahel region, which were historically France’s playpen. Macron intends to retaliate in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
In this shadow play, Macron sees as quasi-ally the president of Tajikistan Imomali Rahmon. Now, Rahmon’s inscrutable mind is never easy to fathom and is rather complicated in this case, as Tajik-Russian equations are also involved, but he does seem to prioritise that there is a lot of money that the West is prepared to spend to foster the NRF and Massoud, and this western venture is for sure going to be for the long haul.
Rahmon’s trump card is that Tajikistan is the gateway to Panjshir and it can provide a transit corridor for the flow of Western money, men and materials to boost the NRF’s capability to wage an armed struggle and emerge quickly as a credible political entity regionally.
Dushanbe hosted the so-called Herat Security Dialogue earlier this week to facilitate a meet-up between the NRF (Massoud) and sundry other disgruntled Afghan politicians hostile toward Taliban rule and domiciled in the West, with the US and European intelligence officials mentoring the event.
Clearly, the venture aims to broad-base the NRF by bringing on board all anti-Taliban elements. Interestingly, a sideshow at Dushanbe was that the Afghans networked with hand-picked invitees from regional states as well, including Russia and Iran, largely self-styled “liberals” who are willing to subserve the West’s agenda.
In a nutshell, the venture aims to build up another Afghan resistance movement to oust the Taliban from power. The ground is being prepared for a new civil war where the West hopes to emerge victorious eventually but without having to put “boots on the ground.”
However, this incoming civil war is going to be very unlike all previous ones in Afghan history. For, this is being projected as a culture war — a struggle for dominance between groups within the Afghan society arising from their different beliefs or practices — although quintessentially it could be regraded as yet another grab for political power with foreign help.
It bears similarity with the culture wars playing out in America during the past two decades and more between the liberal secular society and a conservative opposition that rooted its worldview in divine scripture. Today, in America it is playing out in vicious fights over abortion, gay rights, religion in public schools and the like.
The culture war in Afghanistan too will inevitably expand from issues of religion and family culture to take over politics almost totally, creating a dangerous sense of winner-take-all conflict over the future of the country, as is happening in America.
The paradox here is that the proposed insurrection by Panjshiris is taking place in the name of Democracy, whereas, democracy at its core is an agreement that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead we’ll talk through those differences howsoever long it may take. Massoud’s NRF, on the contrary, is wedded to violence to overthrow the Taliban government which has been in power for only a little over a year.
During this past year, Taliban coped with an extraordinary situation and the glass is half-full, objectively speaking. Yes, there are things happening out there that do not conform to the western norms of liberal democracy. Nonetheless, the rule of law exists — except that Islamic law is the guiding principle. Indeed, the belief that religious expression can contribute to democracy has a long history even in western countries, as does the belief that any religion is a good thing.
Fundamentally, there is a dangerous misconception here since politics at its core is nothing but an artifact of culture. And culture underwrites politics in all countries, including America or France. To be sure, the Taliban will see the incoming civil war promoted by the West as an existential threat to their way of life, to the things they hold sacred.That is to say, the Taliban’s resistance to the NRF will be rooted in fear of extinction. They will fight to death for a way of life.
Why is the West doing this to Afghanistan after having destroyed that country’s social fabric through the past two decades perpetrating such horrific war crimes? At the very least, first return that country’s money in western banks and allow the Afghan nation a decent respite to lick its war wounds, before inciting another civil war. At the present juncture, without doubt, it is the humanitarian crisis that ought to be the number one priority for the international community.
Abdul Latif Pedram, a rare progressive-minded Afghan politician known for his integrity, wrote in a tweet, “I was invited to the security meeting of Herat (at Dushanbe), but I did not participate in the meeting due to the presence of corrupt people.”
Indeed, it is an insult to the Afghan people that the westerners continue to treat them like mute cattle. Pedram added that the invitees to the Dushanbe meeting were all associated with the corrupt regime that the Taliban replaced, and are bankrupt in ideas to improve the tragic situation in his country.
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Yuri Martins-Fontes es doctor en Historia Económica (USP-Brasil/CNRS-Francia), con estudios posdoctorales en Ética y Filosofía Política (USP) e Historia, Cultura y Trabajo (PUC-SP); escritor, filósofo y coordinador del Núcleo Práxis da USP.
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A professora, historiadora e militante comunista Anita Leocadia Prestes segue ativa em sua militância, pesquisando, produzindo livros preciosos à historiografia nacional, palestrando a jovens estudantes e militantes sociais, divulgando suas ideias críticas que têm por horizonte o socialismo e emancipação humana – a revolução necessária que, pode tardar, mas chega.
Em meados do ano passado, a professora se engajou em alguns dos projetos de educação socialista do Núcleo Práxis de Pesquisa, Educação Popular e Política da Universidade de São Paulo. Sua participação, rica em conteúdo e postura de vida, suscitaria, mais tarde, no âmbito de uma reunião da coordenação desta entidade político-educacional, a ideia de uma entrevista dialógica. O diálogo foi então construído paulatinamente, ao longo dos meses seguintes. Neste processo contei com significativos aportes – revisões e críticas – de camaradas, dentre os quais agradeço especialmente aos professores e também coordenadores do Núcleo Práxis: Paulo Alves Junior (Unilab), Solange Struwka (UNIR) e Pedro Rocha Fleury Curado (UFRJ)1.
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Entre dezembro de 2021 e março passado – mês em que a agremiação política pela qual Anita militou durante grande parte da vida, o Partido Comunista Brasileiro, celebrava um século de existência – mantivemos este denso e prazeroso colóquio, ora por videoconferência, ora por escrito, o qual se apresenta a seguir. Nele, Anita Prestes expõe, com a franqueza que lhe é característica, suas impressões acerca da realidade histórica brasileira e internacional, inclusive comentando o recente capítulo ucraniano da nova Guerra Fria; trata da trajetória do centenário PCB, do comunismo, e das dificuldades da conjuntura política do país e do mundo; conta-nos ainda algo de sua própria história e da de seus pais, e expõe sua visão sobre a importância da educação, engajamento e compreensão do marxismo para a efetividade das lutas sociais.
* Entrevista publicada originalmente na Revista Expedições: Teoria da História e Historiografia, da UEG, no primeiro semestre de 2022, como parte do dossiê temático “100 anos do Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB)”. Disponível em:
Nossa última conversa, fechando a entrevista, deu-se no simbólico 8 de março de 2022, Dia Internacional das Mulheres, ocasião em que a professora lembrou que tal comemoração era inicialmente realizada por socialistas, e que somente mais tarde a data passaria a ser adotada também pela burguesia, como forma de tentar esvaziar – como fazem com tantas outras datas e causas – sua face reivindicativa.
Apresentação: Anita Prestes
Nascida às vésperas da Segunda Guerra Mundial, em um cárcere feminino da Alemanha nazista, Anita Prestes se radicou no Brasil somente após o fim do Estado Novo, já com nove anos de idade. Sobreviveu a ditaduras, foi exilada e vivenciou golpes de estado – o último agora em 2016, sobre o qual, observa ela, passamos a viver nova época de “desrespeito aos direitos fundamentais”.
Docente de História do Brasil na Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – desde o início dos anos 1990, hoje aposentada –, e do Programa de Pós-graduação em História Comparada da mesma universidade, Anita se gradua inicialmente em Química Industrial, também pela UFRJ, nos anos 1960; aí mesmo conclui seu mestrado em Química Orgânica – profissão que entretanto não chegou a exercer, dado o pronunciado anticomunismo de então.
Desde os anos 1950, foi militante da União da Juventude Comunista, ala jovem do PCB. Já no começo dos anos 1970, perseguida pela ditadura militar que se instalava, tem de se exilar: segue para a União Soviética, onde em 1975 defende seu doutorado em Economia e Filosofia, pelo Instituto de Ciências Sociais de Moscou (URSS). Regressa ao Brasil em 1979, depois da Lei de Anistia. Em 1989, termina seu segundo doutoramento, agora em História Social, pela Universidade Federal Fluminense, com tese intitulada “A Coluna Prestes”.
É autora de mais de uma dezena de livros, dentre eles algumas obras historiográficas com precioso trabalho documental, publicadas nos últimos anos, em que sua atividade tem sido intensa. É o caso das ricas biografias políticas de seu pai, Luiz Carlos Prestes: patriota, revolucionário, comunista (Expressão Popular, 2006), e Luiz Carlos Prestes: um comunista brasileiro (Boitempo, 2015); da biografia de sua mãe, Olga Benario Prestes: uma comunista nos arquivos da Gestapo (Boitempo, 2017), em que além de apresentar detalhes da intensa vida da militante comunista alemã, traz documentos históricos raros; e mais recentemente, também da obra memorialística Viver é tomar partido: memórias (Boitempo, 2019), em que Anita Prestes narra sua história de vida e expõe seu pensamento e ideais, relacionando também a narrativa a aspectos chave da história mundial.
Assim como seu pai, criador de três escolas e sabedor da importância do ensino como um dos passos para a revolução, a professora Anita é uma firme defensora da educação política popular. No ano passado, em plena crise generalizada – política, sanitária e, vale dizer, para tantos também psicológica –, com ânimo exemplar ela se dispôs a ministrar curso sobre o pensamento de Lênin – “Luta de classes, estado e democracia” –, no âmbito do referido projeto educacional do Núcleo Práxis-USP, uma atividade gratuita periódica voltada para a formação política de estudantes, trabalhadores e militantes de partidos, movimentos sociais e associações comunitárias. Não bastasse sua elogiada contribuição enquanto educadora, que em participação concorrida atraiu mais de uma centena de jovens e militantes sociais (curso disponível na rede), Anita vem colaborando ainda com outro impactante projeto dessa instituição, vinculada ao Laboratório de Economia Política e História Econômica (LEPHE-USP): o “Dicionário Marxismo na América”, enciclopédia histórica do pensamento dialético da práxis de nosso continente, cuja pesquisa e organização começou em 2020, e que está em vias de trazer ao público verbetes com as contribuições ao materialismo histórico de mais de uma centena de marxistas americanos, incluindo análises críticas da militância e obras desses autores que desenvolveram por aqui o pensamento iniciado por Marx e Engels – para que os novos revolucionários do século XXI possam recordar e fazer reviver essas belas histórias de vida, atuação teórica e política2.
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Entrevista com Anita Prestes
YMF: Professora Anita, queria agradecer sua disposição para esta conversa, em que se pretende tratar de temas menos abordados em outras de suas entrevistas. Inicialmente, você poderia nos falar um pouco de sua formação educacional e política desde a infância até a juventude? E ainda, você iniciou estudos nas ciências naturais, por vezes chamadas (equivocadamente) “exatas”, e somente depois enveredou pelas ciências humanas; esta passagem pelas ciências naturais, pela cientificidade técnica mais estrita, pragmática ou “objetiva”, aportou-lhe algo de significativo, de duradouro em sua trajetória filosófica rumo ao comunismo marxista?
ALP: Agradeço o interesse pela minha trajetória de vida. Devo lembrar que cresci e fui educada numa família comunista: primeiro minha avó paterna Leocadia Prestes e minha tia Lygia Prestes, depois, a partir dos nove anos, com a vinda para o Brasil, o convívio com meu pai assim como com numerosos companheiros comunistas. Sou fruto desse ambiente e naturalmente fui aos poucos aderindo às ideias comunistas, que sempre me pareceram as mais justas.
Quando tive que fazer a escolha de uma profissão, optei por Química Industrial, que naquele momento me atraía muito pela perspectiva de poder me dedicar à pesquisa voltada diretamente para uma aplicação industrial e, ao mesmo tempo, a oportunidade de trabalhar numa grande empresa e participar da vida sindical dos seus trabalhadores. Cheguei a fazer estágio na fábrica de borracha da Petrobras, a Fabor, em 1963 e 1964. O término do meu curso na então Escola Nacional de Química da Universidade do Brasil foi em junho de 1964, e eu já tinha assegurada minha contratação nessa unidade da Petrobras. Entretanto, com o golpe de 1o. de abril de 1964, todas as portas se fecharam para mim, tanto na Petrobras quanto em qualquer outra empresa. O anticomunismo era uma realidade e eu, filha de Prestes, um alvo preferencial. Ainda, com a ajuda de um professor, consegui uma bolsa da Capes e pude fazer um mestrado em Química.
Ao mesmo tempo, eu era uma ativa militante do PCB e, para dar continuidade às atividades no partido fui forçada a ingressar na clandestinidade, em que permaneci vários anos até o início de 1973, quando com a ajuda dos companheiros saí do país e me exilei na URSS, pois no Brasil corria o risco de ser presa, torturada e inclusive “desaparecida”, como aconteceu com tantos outros companheiros durante aqueles “anos de chumbo”.
Certamente, todos os conhecimentos que adquirimos durante a vida são úteis; mas não sei precisar em que medida o contato com as ciências naturais contribuiu para minha assimilação da teoria marxista e atuação política no PCB e, posteriormente, fora desse partido, na luta pelos ideais socialistas e comunistas que abracei desde muito jovem.
YMF: Você poderia nos narrar brevemente como se deu seu ingresso e trajetória nas atividades de militância política do PCB, agremiação partidária que é parte contundente da construção histórica do Brasil contemporâneo – e que ora completa um século de existência? Na década de 1950 você já atuava na União da Juventude Comunista, participou de greves secundaristas; como foi este começo? Além de sua própria história de vida e, claro, da influência de seus pais, quais foram as pessoas, companheiros, coletivos, ambientes que atraíram a jovem Anita para o ativismo socialista? Como era o dia a dia de uma estudante e militante em meados do século XX?
ALP: No início do ano de 1950, com 13 anos de idade ingressei na Juventude Comunista aqui no Rio, onde morava com minhas tias, pois meu pai, desde o final de 1947 vivia na clandestinidade, uma vez que fora decretada sua prisão preventiva. Participei de uma greve contra os “tubarões do ensino”, ou seja, contra os donos de escolas particulares que haviam aumentado muito as mensalidades escolares. Eu cursava o segundo ano ginasial numa escola, cujo dono era simpatizante do PCB e, tanto eu quanto outros filhos de comunistas, estudávamos de graça. Era uma escola de composição bastante popular e, portanto, não havia sentido levar à frente uma greve contra seu diretor, que cobrava preços populares dos alunos. Mas, naquela época, eu não tinha maturidade suficiente para entender isso, e me recusar a participar de uma decisão, errônea, naquele caso.
Pouco depois, por decisão da direção do PCB, fui enviada para Moscou acompanhada pela minha tia Lygia, pois no ambiente de “guerra fria” então existente a família recebia muitas ameaças e temia-se a possibilidade de eu vir a ser sequestrada. Nos sete anos que vivi e estudei na URSS, onde fiz todo o curso secundário, solicitei e obtive permissão para ingressar e participar das atividades da Juventude Comunista da União Soviética (o Komsomol), o que certamente contribuiu para minha formação como militante comunista.
Ao regressar ao Brasil, no final de 1957, procurei me reintegrar à realidade brasileira e, a partir, de 1959 passei a atuar numa base estudantil universitária do PCB, no Rio de Janeiro. Ao ingressar na Escola de Química, no início de 1960, dei continuidade à minha atuação no movimento estudantil e fui membro do Comitê Universitário do PCB nesse estado. Com o golpe de 1964, passei a atuar clandestinamente nas atividades do PCB, principalmente no estado de São Paulo.
YMF: Na apresentação desta nossa conversa, mencionava a importância que você, assim como seu pai, dão à educação, sobretudo a educação popular, como fator imprescindível no processo de uma construção revolucionária. Em seu livro “Luiz Carlos Prestes: um comunista brasileiro” (2015), entre outros, em que a professora revela nuances da atuação e pensamento político desse grande líder comunista, consta que ele chegou a criar três escolas, tendo atuado inclusive como professor. Esta valiosa preocupação do então jovem tenente com a educação soa como algo inusitado, pouco comum, ainda mais se olhamos o irracionalismo e antinacionalismo que caracterizam hoje grande parte das forças armadas brasileiras. Para Prestes, que viveu uma outra época da instituição militar, era fundamental educar os jovens para transformá-los em cidadãos conscientes da realidade do país; e de fato seu esforço surtiu efeito. Como relatado em seu artigo “L. C. Prestes: um jovem militar empenhado na educação de seus subordinados”, a experiência pedagógica de seu pai, empreendida na Companhia Ferroviária de Deodoro (RJ), serviu-lhe de modelo para o trabalho educacional que organizaria, quando transferido ao I Batalhão Ferroviário de Santo Ângelo (RS). Através desta “relação pedagógica”, que incentivava a iniciativa dos soldados, sem desprezar a disciplina – e que excluía a violência dos castigos corporais –, ele consegue conquistar “hegemonia” junto a seus subordinados, consolidando mais tarde, a partir desta prática como educador, o grupo que, saído desta unidade militar, viria a se tornar a “espinha dorsal da Coluna Prestes”, após os levantes de 1924. Você poderia comentar este singular episódio da história brasileira?
ALP: Efetivamente, meu pai, Luiz Carlos Prestes, desde muito jovem revelou preocupação com a educação dos seus subordinados não apenas no sentido de elevar seu nível de conhecimentos, de alfabetizá-los, pois eram em sua maioria analfabetos, mas também transformá-los em cidadãos conscientes do seu dever de participar da construção de um futuro de justiça social e democracia para todos os brasileiros. Certamente ele sofreu a influência da mãe que, desde muito jovem, quis ser professora; e que, quando afinal já viúva, livre das restrições familiares, conseguiu trabalhar no magistério da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, passaria a dar aulas nos subúrbios, em escolas noturnas para mulheres das camadas populares, empregadas domésticas, comerciárias, etc.
Durante os anos de atuação no Exército brasileiro, seja no Rio de Janeiro, seja no Rio Grande do Sul, o jovem Prestes, primeiro como tenente e depois como capitão, tratou de criar escolas e educar seus subordinados – no sentido amplo deste termo. Tal comportamento da parte de um oficial do Exército era naquela época totalmente inusitado, pois em geral os subordinados eram maltratados pelos seus superiores, assumindo atitudes elitistas, e com frequência adotando os castigos corporais como maneira de supostamente “educar” os recrutas e soldados. O trabalho pedagógico realizado por Prestes tanto no Rio de Janeiro quanto no Rio Grande do Sul deu-lhe enorme prestígio junto aos seus subordinados, o que contribuiu decisivamente para que estes o acompanhassem com entusiasmo e dedicação durante toda a epopeia da Coluna Prestes.
YMF: Qual é, na sua opinião, a importância da educação, da educação popular, no caminho de construção do que Gramsci chama de “hegemonia”, e que tem como base algumas premissas culturais, ou seja, intensos e continuados trabalhos de crítica que precedem, diz o marxista italiano, “toda revolução”? A educação, embora sujeitada e limitada pelas classes dominantes, sempre pode ter um teor emancipatório, subversivo – como bem observa Paulo Freire 3. Em que circunstâncias e até que ponto a educação é revolucionária?
ALP: No que me diz respeito, da mesma maneira que meu pai, considero que o trabalho pedagógico junto aos setores populares não deve estar desligado da atividade prática de Vide, dentre outras obras: FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia da Autonomia. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1997. Participação na luta pelas causas justas, que podem mobilizar em diferentes momentos os diversos setores da população. Os escritos de Antonio Gramsci referentes à atividade pedagógica dos comunistas também têm esse sentido. Aliás, V. I. Lênin, o principal artífice da Revolução Russa de 1917, escreveu muitas vezes a respeito da importância da articulação do conhecimento teórico do marxismo com a atividade revolucionária transformadora da sociedade. O conhecimento teórico desligado da prática revolucionária é totalmente ineficaz, estéril.
A educação é muito importante no processo de emancipação de um povo, mas não pode ser reduzida apenas à transmissão de conteúdo: o conhecimento livresco não é suficiente. Para além dele, é fundamental estar engajado nas lutas sociais que acontecem nos locais de trabalho, de estudo; todos os setores têm suas reivindicações, é preciso participar destes movimentos. Reivindicações não faltam: saúde, moradia, o próprio ensino. Não se trata de esperarmos um suposto “grande dia da revolução”; temos de construí-lo. Uma comunidade popular não se mobiliza de uma hora para outra: é no processo de se unir e lutar por pautas específicas, que começa o aprendizado da organização popular. Antes de se transmitir a teoria marxista a uma comunidade, antes de se tentar promover o envolvimento popular em lutas mais gerais, é preciso aproximar-se das pessoas e de suas realidades, somar forças – o que se dá através das lutas específicas. Depois, deve-se ir mais adiante: mostrar que a teoria é necessária. O ensino não deve ser só teórico. Isto cria no máximo “marxólogos”, mas não “marxistas”.
No PCB, durante os anos da legalidade (1945-1947), houve um interessante trabalho de base – os Comitês Democráticos Populares –, que buscavam atuar em torno das reivindicações dos trabalhadores; uma de suas principais demandas era a alfabetização – o que tinha uma motivação diretamente política, já que nessa época era proibido o voto dos analfabetos. Outra medida então adotada pelo PCB foi a criação de organizações partidárias de base femininas, importantes no combate ao machismo – muito presente mesmo entre os membros do partido; tentava-se contribuir para que os militantes percebessem que a luta pela emancipação da mulher não pode estar desligada da luta de classes. Mas logo depois veio a repressão e essa importante experiência foi destruída.
Querer organizar um grupo popular com a proposta de discutir diretamente o socialismo não funciona, pois isso não faz parte da realidade do povo. As pessoas se organizam em torno daquilo que elas estão sentindo. Vivemos uma época em que as massas estão muito despolitizadas. Para formar o “bloco histórico” de que falava Gramsci exige-se tempo e trabalho paciente de organização. Não se deve esperar resultados rápidos; ou levantar palavras-de-ordem abstratas, avançadas, mas que não fazem sentido à grande maioria. Tem-se usado bastante uma consigna que a meu ver é falsa: “o povo deve ir para a rua”. É falsa, pois as pessoas vão para as ruas desorganizadas e voltam para casa desorganizadas. Falta um trabalho prévio de organização popular nos locais de trabalho e de convivência, trabalho necessário para que os setores populares tenham condições de influir na vida nacional e chegar a mudar seu rumo.
YMF: Na ocasião do aniversário de 100 anos do PCB – este partido histórico que entre construções e reconstruções, contribuições teóricas, ações políticas, críticas e autocríticas, inscreveu-se com profundidade na história contemporânea do Brasil –, tratemos de um problema bastante grave: o discurso dominante dos momentaneamente vencedores, esta mistura de modulação de opinião pública e misticismo, com toques de arrogância, com que o capital tenta dissipar aos olhos desatentos os ventos da crise estrutural. Completou-se, há pouco, 30 anos do dia em que oportunistas, que estavam na direção então “reformista” do PCB, tentaram dissolver o partido, e inclusive proibir o uso da própria sigla, mediante um golpe interno “liquidacionista” que só não se levou a cabo devido à ação firme de resistência e depois de reconstrução promovida pelo Movimento Nacional em Defesa do PCB, liderada, entre outros, por Ivan Pinheiro. Os golpistas, hoje já esquecidos pela história e agonizantes do neoliberalismo em declínio – cujo partido de ocasião, na época fundado com nome ainda “socialista”, já deixou de existir, diluindo-se entre a direita “liberal” e o poço fisiológico do “centrão” –, agiram no embalo da campanha ideológica patrocinada pelos EUA, cujo lema propagado às massas do globo era: “chegamos ao fim da história”. Como a professora observa em artigos dedicados ao centenário do partido, a política pecebista vinha já há algumas décadas sendo marcada pelo “aliancismo”, a estratégia da revolução em “etapas”, desvio que culminaria nesse golpe partidário de 1992. Que fatores levaram o comunismo brasileiro a esta situação?
ALP: Por volta de 1979 e 1980, Luiz Carlos Prestes, que era ainda o secretário-geral do Partido Comunista Brasileiro, entendia que haviam se esgotado as possibilidades de conciliação com o grupo então dirigente deste partido, considerando, inclusive, que a militância partidária que vinha sendo formada nos últimos tempos havia tido sua formação sob a égide da estratégia nacional-libertadora (o que vigorou durante décadas na trajetória política pecebista). Como ficara evidente, tal orientação não poderia condicionar a formação de um partido e de uma militância voltados para os objetivos da revolução socialista.
Na prática, a militância partidária tinha sido preparada para a realização dos objetivos “nacionais-libertadores”, definidos no programa do PCB – ainda que os comunistas brasileiros tenham estado sempre à frente de todas as causas justas que mobilizaram os setores populares no país. Porém, um partido nacional-libertador não poderia conduzir os trabalhadores e as massas populares rumo à revolução socialista; ficaria restrito à luta pela emancipação nacional – entendida como eliminação da dominação imperialista e do latifúndio, com vistas a se garantir um suposto “capitalismo autônomo”. Como escreveu Prestes: “é impossível construir um partido efetivamente revolucionário, capaz de enraizar-se na classe operária, se se baseia numa falsa concepção da revolução” 4.
Durante os anos 1980 o PCB sobreviveu, decadente e adesista ao Governo, com sua direção dominada pelos remanescentes do chamado “pântano” – o grupo que era majoritário no Comitê Central (CC) do partido, assim denominado devido a suas posições de centro, indefinidas, conciliadoras e sem princípios –, cujo controle da máquina partidária lhes permitiu garantir a reeleição ao CC em seguidos congressos partidários, até 1992. Nesse ano ocorreu a cisão encabeçada por Roberto Freire, com a fundação do hoje já extinto Partido Popular Socialista (PPS), e a manutenção da sigla do PCB por um grupo minoritário de militantes, entre os quais havia alguns membros do CC que fora coordenado por Giocondo Dias e Salomão Malina (conhecidos articuladores do “pântano”).
De certo modo, o antigo e tradicional PCB deixou de existir da forma como era – um fenômeno que ocorreu não só no Brasil, mas de uma maneira geral, no cenário mundial, em grande medida fruto da derrota do socialismo existente na União Soviética e nos países socialistas do Leste Europeu.
YMF: Após a derrota econômico-política da URSS na Guerra Fria, impulsionada, como explica I. Mészáros [5], pela crise estrutural capitalista, dá-se a consolidação da hegemonia estadunidense, o que culminaria no panfletário – e até ingênuo – discurso de “fim da história”. Momentaneamente sem rivais, os EUA reinaria por toda a década de 1990. Neste período de refluxo conservador, as lutas marxistas mais ativas, sobretudo as que envolvem enfrentamentos diretos – caso de guerrilhas socialistas e comunistas (FARC-EP e ELN, na Colômbia, EZLN, no México), de movimentos sociais de resistência (MST), e de governos democrático-socialistas (Cuba) ou mesmo de viés social-desenvolvimentista (Venezuela) –, passaram a ser perseguidas não só pela força das armas e a asfixia econômica, mas também através de forte investimento em propaganda. Mais tarde, contudo, nos anos 2000, a hegemonia dos EUA começa a arrefecer, dando espaço à multipolaridade em que ascende o bloco de oposição liderado por Rússia e China, época na qual diversos governos progressistas chegam ao poder. Porém, com a crise econômica mundial de 2008, as dificuldades das nações periféricas se agravam, abrindo-se novo período de golpes pelo mundo, como se tem visto pela América. Já para além dos oceanos, a OTAN, comandada desde Washington, parece querer cercar seus opositores mais contundentes: China e Rússia. Neste movimento, vemos agora mais um conflito deflagrado, na Ucrânia – país até então com estatuto de “neutro”, mas que após o recente golpe “laranja”, incentivado publicamente pelos EUA e UE, estava na iminência de ingressar nessa aliança militar atlântica como mais um subalterno dos estadunidenses. Neste contexto histórico adverso, como a professora entende a atual conjuntura política internacional?
ALP: De fato, a OTAN está cercando a Rússia. Se a Ucrânia ingressasse nesta organização, seria um perigo para os russos e para a estabilidade geopolítica. Após a queda da União Soviética, por um período os Estados Unidos dominaram o mundo sem contestação. Com a ascensão de Vladimir Putin, a economia da Rússia foi reorganizada e o país voltou a desempenhar um papel importante na arena mundial. A Rússia é hoje um país capitalista, e Putin, um líder autoritário; mas não se trata de uma potência imperialista nem fascista. Já na Ucrânia de hoje, após o golpe de 2014 que depôs o presidente eleito Viktor Yanukovych, temos um regime de tipo fascista.
Do ponto de vista geopolítico, é positiva para a luta das forças progressistas mundiais a divisão de forças presente hoje no cenário internacional, entre China e Rússia de um lado, e Estados Unidos de outro. Mas os EUA não vão admitir a consolidação desse equilíbrio: temos, por exemplo, desde o início deste século e sob sua inspiração e direção, as chamadas “revoluções coloridas”. O propósito dos EUA é a dominação do mundo: com esse objetivo tentam transformar o território ucraniano em base estratégica para ameaçar ou atacar a Rússia.
Em resumo, vejo esta guerra como uma empreitada do imperialismo dos EUA e dos seus aliados da OTAN.
YMF: Voltando ao caso do retrocesso brasileiro, parece consensual que sem alianças políticas não é possível hoje se eleger um governo efetivamente socialista, e nem mesmo pautado por um reformismo social-desenvolvimentista – como o de Lula. Por outro lado, é urgente que seja eleito um governo progressista, não só como gesto humanitário – para atender a demanda de milhões de miseráveis desassistidos pelas últimas aventuras das elites –, mas inclusive para que os socialistas possam encontrar mais espaços, racionalidade e estabilidade para fortalecer seus projetos. No Brasil de hoje, Lula é possivelmente o único representante do campo progressista que tem chances de se eleger. Pensadores marxistas como Caio Prado e Mariátegui defendiam certas alianças pontuais com setores menos atrasados da burguesia, no sentido de se lograr reformas de urgência humanitária; mas ambos reforçavam que, neste caso, jamais a direção do processo poderia ser passada das mãos dos trabalhadores às das classes dominantes. As alianças que o PT fez nos últimos mandatos foram necessárias para vencermos o pleito? Foram por demais temerárias? E agora, diante do perigo fascista alimentado pelo golpismo das elites, até que ponto é possível se efetivar uma aliança sem abrir flancos para novos golpes? Qual o limite para uma aliança política, neste momento histórico do país?
ALP: No início deste século, houve na América Latina a eleição de governos progressistas, como: no Brasil, os do Partido dos Trabalhadores, com os presidentes Lula e Dilma; na Argentina, com os presidentes Néstor e Cristina Kirchner; e no Chile, com os presidentes Ricardo Lagos e Michelle Bachelet. Estas experiências revelaram obstáculos praticamente intransponíveis, por eles encontrados, para garantir a governabilidade, ao tentar empreender algumas medidas de redistribuição da renda nacional e de atendimento às demandas dos setores sociais mais desfavorecidos, sem mobilizarem os trabalhadores nem contarem com movimentos populares organizados e dirigidos por forças revolucionárias, empenhadas na luta por transformações profundas dessas sociedades – as quais em maior ou menor grau apontassem para a única solução hoje possível para a crise sistêmica do capitalismo (que tende a se agravar): um governo popular que começasse a trilhar o caminho para o socialismo.
A ausência de tal perspectiva levou à derrota desses governos progressistas e à sua substituição por coligações submissas aos interesses do imperialismo e, em alguns casos, dirigidas por elementos fascistas como, no exemplo do Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro.
Uma exceção deve ser apontada: o governo da Venezuela liderado pelo comandante Hugo Chaves, que realizou significativas transformações nas Forças Armadas do país e avançou na organização popular, fator que tem impedido, inclusive sob o governo de Nicolás Maduro, os sucessivos golpes de direita orquestrados pelo imperialismo estadunidense. Na Venezuela foram criadas brigadas populares com dois milhões de militantes armados, conscientes e dispostos a defender a Revolução Bolivariana.
Penso que hoje no Brasil, mesmo que Lula seja eleito, ele não conseguirá realizar um governo do tipo “estado do bem-estar social”, conforme intenção que declarou há algum tempo, pois a gravidade da crise atual do capitalismo não permite que tal política possa ser empreendida. Se na Europa Ocidental esse modelo foi superado e abandonado, no Brasil, dadas as gritantes desigualdades sociais existentes, tal perspectiva está a meu ver inteiramente descartada. Para avançar na solução dos graves problemas nacionais são necessárias profundas reformas estruturais – inaceitáveis para o grande capital, empenhado na garantia dos seus privilégios. Vencer tais resistências só será possível com organização e mobilização popular e sob a liderança de forças políticas dispostas e empenhadas a elaborar um programa de transformação revolucionária da sociedade brasileira.
Caso contrário, teremos novos golpes e o advento de governos cada vez mais à direita. Essa alternância entre governos “progressistas” e governos de direita poderá permanecer por um longo período se não se avançar na organização popular e na formação de lideranças revolucionárias capazes de dirigir esse processo de organização e luta dos setores populares. Estaremos assim condenados a assistir as disputas e acordos entre os setores das classes dominantes, sempre distantes das necessárias mudanças sociais capazes de atender aos anseios populares legítimos; comportamento que caracterizou os governos do PT, presididos por Lula e Dilma.
Veja que Lula se elegeu com a “Carta aos Brasileiros”, e governou sem organizar o povo. Porém, nos últimos governos do PT, suas políticas já não satisfaziam o imperialismo – que queria mais. Assim, sem apoio popular, veio o golpe de 2016. Não foram implementadas reformas estruturais: reforma agrária, ou medidas contra o poder do grande capital. Os governos progressistas têm de se apoiar nas organizações populares para conseguir ter respaldo, e assim tomar medidas efetivas: executar reformas sociais profundas, as quais sempre atingem os interesses do grande capital. Se não há forças populares organizadas para sustentar isto, vêm os golpes.
Ainda que seja melhor para os socialistas, para o povo, que Lula seja eleito, se ele não se apoiar nas organizações populares ficaremos sempre neste vai-e-vem, nesta alternância entre reformistas e reacionários – de modo que em seguida aos avanços do governo anterior, os conservadores fazem retroceder suas reformas.
YMF: Como resultado do retrocesso dos anos 1990, ocorreu um refluxo na postura de “ação” de certo marxismo que, a partir da derrota soviética, torna-se cada vez mais “teórico”. Prestes era um marxista que não se bastava em teorizações, que trabalhava ombro a ombro com seus subordinados; daí que, como você afirma, não tenha podido escrever tudo que deveria. Conforme sugere Sartre [6], não é possível “viver” a história e “escrever” sobre ela em um só tempo. Como a professora vê esta academicização do marxismo, a teoria “entre muros”, a pouca capilaridade do “socialismo universitário” – e até certo comodismo e consumismo que parecem afetar a postura de alguns críticos bem colocados no sistema, cujos modos de vida torna seus cotidianos tão semelhantes aos daqueles burgueses alvos de suas críticas? Nesta conjuntura de esfriamento da “ação” revolucionária, em que o discurso neoliberal predomina junto ao poder formador da opinião pública, o mercado está conseguindo se apropriar de parte da produção marxista, desviando-a de seus fins, vendendo-as como “filosofia pura”? Veja-se as edições “marxistas de luxo” – tão distantes da realidade de um estudante ou trabalhador – que brilham nas estantes de livrarias; ou o caso dos que escrevem “teoria marxista” apenas por ofício e soldo, sem identificação filosófica ou ideológica – os tais “marxólogos”. Como exemplo, a professora se recorda que, na data de sua palestra no citado curso do Núcleo Práxis- USP, após sua fala, participamos juntos do lançamento – com um ano de atraso – do livro “Caio Prado: historia y filosofía” [7], tradução castelhana realizada voluntariamente por militantes, com fins educacionais de difusão do comunismo brasileiro. Este retardo se deu, como debatido na ocasião, por uma questão ínfima de dinheiro de “direitos autorais”, em que gente supostamente afeita ao marxismo tentou não só coibir, mas chegou às vias da ameaça jurídico- econômica contra editores e educadores ativistas. Como podemos superar este refluxo da práxis, esta teoria sem ação – este movimento ambíguo do marxismo que, embora teoricamente refinado, distancia-se das lutas populares?
ALP: O grande Vladimir Ilich Lênin sempre destacou a importância de a atividade teórica dos marxistas estar articulada, ligada e integrada à atividade prática de transformação revolucionária da sociedade. Aqueles intelectuais, acadêmicos, que na universidade ou fora dela dedicam-se exclusivamente a estudar e escrever sobre o marxismo, sem preocupar-se com a aplicação efetiva da teoria à luta revolucionária, podem ser denominados de “marxólogos”, mas jamais de verdadeiros “marxistas”.
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lênin, Antonio Gramsci, assim como os latino- americanos José Carlos Mariátegui e Julio Antonio Mella, e tantos outros teóricos do marxismo pelo mundo, foram pensadores mas também lideranças revolucionárias empenhadas em contribuir para o avanço da revolução em seus países e na arena mundial. Lembremos Marx e Engels acompanhando de perto a Comuna de Paris; Lênin dirigindo a Revolução Russa; e Gramsci à frente do Partido Comunista Italiano, liderando a luta dos trabalhadores italianos. Muitos outros exemplos poderiam ser aqui citados.
Luiz Carlos Prestes não foi um teórico do marxismo, nem teve esta pretensão. Estudou o marxismo com o objetivo precípuo de contribuir para a realização das transformações revolucionárias no Brasil, que pudessem garantir o avanço no caminho da Revolução Socialista em nosso país. Foi a esse objetivo que dedicou toda sua existência. Isso não significa que desprezasse a teoria; sempre, mesmo nas condições mais difíceis que enfrentou durante a vida, procurou estudar e aprofundar seus conhecimentos teóricos. Mas ele não teve oportunidade de chegar a ser um teórico; foi principalmente um revolucionário.
Como mencionei anteriormente, e reitero, acredito que a educação popular é um dos meios de se levar a teoria revolucionária ao conhecimento dos trabalhadores. Porém, o principal caminho a ser trilhado é a conjugação da participação nas lutas populares, com o estudo da teoria, tendo-se em vista a prática transformadora da realidade – realidade que é onde se dão essas lutas.
Não basta se ensinar política ou teoria marxista para os trabalhadores, sem que estes trabalhadores estejam realmente inseridos nas lutas que dizem respeito aos seus interesses – aos interesses dos setores aos quais eles pertencem.
YMF: O problema do encastelamento acadêmico é uma questão delicada, mas que hoje ressoa no ambiente intelectual marxista e demanda autocrítica. Relacionada com esta “acomodação teórica”, está a apropriação mercadológica capitalista, que torna “mercadoria” as lutas sociais, os ícones, as ideias contestatórias – algo que afeta não só a luta comunista, mas também as lutas feministas, étnicas, não-binárias, movimentos que, na história, por vezes não deram a necessária importância ao componente de “classes” envolvido em suas disputas, cedendo aos acenos sedutores do capital. Entretanto, ainda que as elites tentem esvaziar qualquer luta ou reivindicação – “amaciando” as revoltas –, parece que há hoje um crescente ganho em consciência de classe, de maneira que essas lutas têm ganhado força e, por sua vez, vêm sendo importantes à resistência socialista. Como a professora vê a ascensão, nas últimas décadas, de movimentos étnicos e de gênero realmente de classe, superando movimentos burgueses de outrora (que pretendiam separar as questões identitárias da luta de classes)? Você se identifica com as pautas atuais do “feminismo de classe”?
ALP: Penso que essas causas consideradas “identitárias” se justificam, mas devem estar articuladas entre si e, em particular, com a luta geral de todos os explorados pelo poder político – contra o poder do capital. O capital é o inimigo principal que deve ser derrotado, para que as causas “identitárias” também possam ser enfrentadas com sucesso.
O grande capital utiliza todos os meios à sua disposição para desviar os trabalhadores de sua luta pelo poder e, com isso, dividi-los e impedir que o verdadeiro inimigo dos explorados – a grande burguesia – seja vencida.
Considero que as mulheres são duplamente exploradas na sociedade capitalista; e, por isso, a luta pela sua verdadeira emancipação, incluindo a superação de todo tipo de discriminações que as oprimem, deve estar profundamente associada à luta pela conquista de um poder popular, que aponte para a revolução socialista e a construção de uma sociedade em que a igualdade entre os sexos seja crescentemente incentivada e organizada. Este será sempre um processo longo e de muita dificuldade, pois a mentalidade machista está profundamente enraizada – e é ainda incentivada – no mundo regido pelas leis do mercado e do capital.
YMF: Professora, qual você considera a principal contribuição teórica de Luiz Carlos Prestes ao pensamento marxista? E quanto a sua mãe, Olga Benario, qual a principal contribuição dela, em sua breve vida, à revolução? Finalmente, como você, Anita, entende o pensamento marxista, o “ser marxista”?
ALP: Conforme falava, Prestes não se dedicou à teoria marxista, nem pretendeu fazer isto; sua principal contribuição ideológica à Revolução Brasileira foi a luta permanente, durante toda sua vida, contra as tendências reformistas do capitalismo, extremamente presentes até hoje nos meios de esquerda de nosso país. Os comunistas, segundo Prestes, deveriam estar permanentemente dedicados à aplicação criativa da teoria marxista à nossa realidade nacional, buscando sempre os caminhos mais justos para o avanço rumo à Revolução Socialista. Na busca desses caminhos erros seriam cometidos e, por isso, ele defendia a necessidade de empenhar-se no seu reconhecimento e no esforço pela sua correção, garantindo desta maneira novos avanços.
Olga Benario Prestes, minha mãe, foi uma revolucionária, comunista e internacionalista. Tanto ela quanto meu pai resistiram – sem jamais capitular – a todas as provações que a luta de classes lhes impôs. Isto porque, de acordo com as palavras de meu pai, ambos possuíam profunda convicção científica da justeza da causa revolucionária à qual haviam dedicado suas vidas.
Já no que me diz respeito, considero-me uma intelectual marxista, comprometida com os interesses populares. Desta forma, com minha produção intelectual procuro contribuir, ainda que modestamente, para a organização, mobilização e conscientização dos trabalhadores e dos setores oprimidos pelo capital em nosso país.
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* Entrevista publicada originalmente naRevista Expedições: Teoria da História e Historiografia, da UEG, no primeiro semestre de 2022, como parte do dossiê temático “100 anos do Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB)”. Disponível em: https://www.revista.ueg.br/index.php/revista_geth/article/view/13222.
Notas
1 Agradeço ainda aos demais camaradas e membros do Núcleo Práxis da USP que em tantas conversas e reuniões apoiaram a elaboração desta entrevista.
2 O vídeo do curso com a participação da professora Anita está publicado no portal oficial do Núcleo Práxis-USP, disponível em: nucleopraxisusp.org. Mais informações sobre o “Dicionário Marxismo na América”, projeto editorial de difusão do pensamento socialista (no prelo), são encontradas no mesmo endereço.
3 Vide, dentre outras obras: FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia da Autonomia. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1997.
4 Em a Voz Operária, n. 167, março de 1981.
5 Vide: MÉSZÁROS, István. A crise estrutural do capital. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
6 SARTRE, J.-P. Que é Literatura?. São Paulo: Ática, 1989.
7 PRADO Jr., Caio.Caio Prado: historia y filosofía. Rosário (Argentina): Último Recurso/Núcleo Práxis-USP, 2020. Tradução coletiva organizada e coordenada pelo N. Práxis-USP. Mais informações sobre a obra e o debate podem ser encontradas no portal: nucleopraxisusp.org.
Referencias bibliográficas
CASTRO, Josué. Geopolítica da Fome. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1951.
CUEVA, Agustín. O desenvolvimento do capitalismo na América Latina. São Paulo: Global, 1983.
FERNANDES, Florestan. Poder e contrapoder na América Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1981.
HOBSBAWM, Eric. Nações e nacionalismos desde 1780. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991.
HAYA DE LA TORRE. La devoción por Lênin (original: Claridad, nov. 1924, ano 2, n.7). Vanguarda Aprista. Disp: vanguardiaaprista.com. Acesso: 01/ago/2017.
IANNI, Octavio. O labirinto latino-americano, Petrópolis (RJ): Vozes, 1993.
LÊNIN, Vladimir Ilitch. Lenine e a IIIª Internacional. Lisboa: Estampa, 1971.
LÊNIN, Vladimir Ilitch. O imperialismo: fase superior do capitalismo. São Paulo: Global, 1987.
LENIN, Vladimir Ilitch. Obras escolhidas. São Paulo: Alfa Ômega, 1986.
LÖWY, Michael (org.). O marxismo na América Latina. São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2006.
LUXEMBURGO, Rosa. A questão nacional e a autonomia. Belo Horizonte: Oficina de Livros, 1988.
MARIÁTEGUI, José Carlos. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Amauta, 1989 [1928]
MARINI, Ruy Mauro. Dialética da Dependência (trad. Marcelo Carcanholo e Carlos E. Martins). México: Editora Era, 1990 [1973].
MARINI, Ruy Mauro. Subdesenvolvimento e revolução. Florianópolis: Insular, 2017 [1968].
MARTINS-FONTES, Yuri. Marx na América: a práxis de Caio Prado e Mariátegui. São Paulo: Alameda/Fapesp, 2018.
MARTINS-FONTES, Y. STRUWKA, S.; ALVES Jr., P.. Pensamento crítico e questão nacional na América Latina do entre-guerras. In: SUZUKI; NEPOMUCENO; ARAÚJO (orgs.). A dimensão cultural nos processos de integração entre países da América Latina. São Paulo: PROLAM-USP/FFLCH-USP, 2021. Acesso: 6 jun. 2022. Disp: http://www.livrosabertos.sibi.usp.br/portaldelivrosUSP/catalog/download/735/653/2420?inline=1
MARX, Karl. O Capital: para a crítica da economia política (Livro I, volume II). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2013.
PRADO JÚNIOR, Caio. A Revolução Brasileira. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1966.
PRADO JÚNIOR, Caio. Formação do Brasil contemporâneo. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 2000 [1942].
RAGO FILHO, Antonio. Sob este signo vencerás! – a estrutura ideológica da autocracia burguesa bonapartista. Cadernos AEL, v.8, n.14/15, 2001.
VIEIRA, C. A. Cordovano. Passado colonial e reversão no Brasil contemporâneo. In: LIMA Fo.; MACEDO; NOVAES (orgs.). Movimentos sociais e crises contemporâneas: à luz dos clássicos do materialismo crítico (v. 3). Marília (SP): Lutas Anticapital, 2018.
In questa puntata di Grandangolo Dentro la Notizia riportiamo l’intervista integrale (di cui abbiamo anticipato un estratto in Grandangolo 72), effettuata a Mosca da Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti, a Olga Zinoviev, responsabile del Centro internazionale di ricerca e formazione Zinoviev all’Università Statale di Mosca, copresidente del Club Zinoviev.
Alla domanda “La Russia è in guerra. Come vede la situazione?”, Olga Zinoviev risponde:”Non è la Russia in guerra, ma l’intero Occidente è in guerra contro la Russia. Non è stata una nostra decisione rendere così complicata la vita del popolo ucraino. È sicuramente una decisione dell’Occidente distruggere tutto ciò che determina il nostro futuro. I paesi occidentali e in primo luogo l’Inghilterra, gli Stati Uniti e i loro satelliti, non sopportano che abbiamo una nostra vita, sono messi a disagio perfino dalla nostra stessa esistenza, sia quando c’era l’Unione Sovietica, sia oggi che c’è la Russia. L’Unione Sovietica è stata distrutta agli inizi degli anni Novanta. E hanno pensato di poter adottare la stessa ricetta per distruggere la vita di altri paesi: la Siria, il Libano e così via. Anche verso la Federazione Iugoslava hanno adottato lo stesso metodo. Per questo hanno bombardato la Federazione Iugoslava, un paese indipendente. Alexander mi diceva che era l’inizio di un piano per distruggere la Russia. E aveva ragione”.
Alla domanda di che cosa pensi della posizione assunta dall’Unione Europea, Olga Zinoviv risponde: “Temo per l’Europa, perché gradualmente perde la propria indipendenza già compromessa fin dall’inizio dal progetto dell’Unione Europea che in realtà era il progetto degli Stati Uniti per esercitare la loro egemonia sull’Europa” Ribadisce quindi il concetto; “Il mondo multipolare rappresenta la nostra visione del mondo. Abbiamo così tante popolazioni, abbiamo così tante lingue. Perché siamo obbligati a pensare in inglese, perché siamo obbligati a obbedire, come se fossimo sotto le armi, a ciò che Washington vuole da noi? Abbiamo diverse religioni, diverse culture, culture enormemente interessanti”.
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In the two years since the World Health Organisation declared the beginning of the COVID-19 ‘Pandemic’, anti-lockdown protests around the world have been routinely demonised by corporate media outlets.
Regularly lambasted as being ‘organised by the far-right’ and ‘super-spreader’ events, protests against lockdowns and vaccine mandates have also drawn a brutal state response in a number of Western countries, including Germany, Holland, and perhaps most notably, Canada.
In January 2022, following Ottawa’s decision to impose a vaccine mandate on truck drivers re-entering the country from the US, the world’s largest land border and a vital component of the Canadian economy, a nationwide Freedom Convoy would commence in the second largest country on the planet.
In response, the government of Justin Trudeau – previously mooted by the World Economic Forum as one of its ‘Young Global Leaders’ – would respond in an authoritarian fashion, freezing the bank accounts of protest organisers and attacking demonstrators using mounted Horses and teargas canisters.
Therefore, onlookers were bemused this week by Trudeau’s declaration of support for anti-lockdown protesters in China, currently demonstrating against Beijing’s ‘zero-Covid’ policy.
Indeed this was a view echoed by the western media in lockstep, less than a year after the same outlets were condemning European and American demonstrators for carrying out the exact same actions.
To understand the sudden change in attitude towards anti-lockdown campaigners by the corporate press, one must first look at other events that also occurred in January of this year.
During the same week as the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos Agenda event, the two-year ‘Pandemic’ narrative collapsed almost instantaneously in multiple western countries including Ireland and Britain. The WHO, a body with a known record of corruption and ties to pharmaceutical giants, would also call for the ending of all travel restrictions during the same period.
In further coincidental timing, a week after the Davos event, Hungarian business magnate and Open Society founder George Soros would give a speech to the Hoover Institution in the United States, outlining his view of CCP Chairman Xi Jinping as being the ‘greatest threat that open societies face today’ and predicted that widespread opposition to the Chinese leader’s ‘zero-Covid’ policy would eventually lead to his removal from office. It would be a view that Soros would again express during his address of the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit in May of this year, and indeed, it is a situation that is now playing out in real time.
On the 24th of November, minor anti-lockdown protests that had begun at the start of the month following the decision by the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to re-impose restrictions, would grow exponentially in the aftermath of an apartment fire in the north-western Xinjiang province, leading to the deaths of ten residents, with lockdown restrictions being blamed on preventing firefighters from reaching the scene.
In classic colour revolution style, the ‘A4 Revolution’ has been given coordinated sympathetic coverage by the mainstream media, similar to the 2014 Euromaidan Ukrainian regime change operation, in which the Open Society Foundations also played a key role. What has been given less coverage however, is the decision by Chinese authorities to listen to the legitimate grievances of anti-lockdown protesters and subsequently remove restrictions in Guangzhou and the city of Chongqing, the focus shifting to the wider demand for the removal of Xi Jinping’s leadership instead.
Indeed, this was echoed in an article supportive of the protests by the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan-era Neoconservative foundation that effectively acts as a privatised version of the CIA, fomenting regime change from Libya, to Belarus, and now, using anti-lockdown protests that would have been widely condemned less than a year ago, China.
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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Support him on Patreon.
Featured image: Protesters carry blank papers and chant slogans as they demonstrate in Beijing, China against the country’s notoriously strict COVID-19 lockdown measures, on Nov. 27, 2022. In response, the Chinese government has eased some of them.(NG HAN GUAN/AP)
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The public is becoming increasingly disturbed with reports of death among the vaccinated. It is natural to ask “was the death caused by vaccination?” The most definitive way of answering that question is with autopsy. Schwab et al reported on deaths after vaccination with detailed autopsies in Heidelberg, Germany.[i]
Of 35 fatalities within 20 days of injection, 10 were ruled out as clearly not due to the vaccine (e.g. drug overdose). The remaining 25 (71%) had final diagnoses consistent with a vaccine injury syndrome including myocardial infarction, worsening heart failure, vascular aneurysm, pulmonary embolism, fatal stroke, and vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia. Interestingly, 5 cases had acute myocarditis as the cause of death with the histopathology in the heart muscle showing patchy inflammation very similar to what was seen in the deltoid muscle were the mRNA vaccine was injected.
Schwab, C., Domke, L.M., Hartmann, L. et al. Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination. Clin Res Cardiol(2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00392-022-02129-5
So the report has told us:
1) 71% of deaths that occur within 20 days of taking vaccine appear to be due to conditions well known to occur with COVID-19 vaccination,
2) inflammation in the heart was coincident with the same pattern of inflammation in the arm. Thus we can conclude death within a few days of vaccination is most likely due to the genetic product and that inflammation in the arm may be a surrogate for a similar process in the heart. The very high yield of post-vaccination autopsy should spur families and physicians to push for post-mortem exams so we can learn more on how this medical procedure is leading to such a large loss of human life.
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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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The British government assigned at least 15 people to the secret operation to seize Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, new information shows.
The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government.
The Australian journalist has been in Belmarsh maximum security prison for the past three and a half years and faces a potential 175-year sentence after the UK High Court green-lighted his extradition to the US in December 2021.
‘Pelican’ was the secret Metropolitan Police operation to seize Assange from his asylum, which eventually occurred in April 2019. Asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Image: Sir Alan Duncan
The operation’s existence was only revealed in the memoirs of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan which were published last year. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case.
But the Cabinet Office recently told parliament it had seven officials working on Operation Pelican. The department’s role is to “support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government”, but it also has national security and intelligence functions.
It is not immediately clear why the Cabinet Office would have so many personnel working on a police operation of this kind. Asked about their role, the Cabinet Office said these seven officials “liaised” with the Metropolitan Police on the operation.
The Home Office, meanwhile, told parliament it had eight officials working on Pelican. The Home Office oversees MI5 and the head of the department has to sign off extraditions to most foreign countries. Then home secretary Priti Patelordered Assange’s extradition to the US in June.
‘Disproportionate cost’
Other government ministries refused to say if they had staff working on Pelican, including the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).
The MoJ is in charge of courts in England and Wales, where Assange’s extradition case is currently deciding whether to hear an appeal. It is also in control of its prisons, including Belmarsh maximum security jail where Assange is incarcerated.
When asked if any of its staff were assigned to Pelican, the MoJ claimed:
“The information requested could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.”
It is unclear why the Home Office, a bigger department with more staff, could answer such a question, but the MoJ could not. There is no obvious reason why the MoJ would have staff assigned to Pelican, so revelations that it did would cause embarrassment for the government.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office told parliament it had no staff “directly assigned” to Pelican, but refused to say if people working on the operation were located on its premises.
‘Julian Assange’s Special Brexit Team’
Sir Alan Duncan, foreign minister for the Americas from 2016-19, was the key UK official in the diplomatic negotiations between the UK and Ecuador to get Assange out of the embassy. In his memoirs he wrote that he watched a live-feed of Assange’s arrest from the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office alongside Pelican personnel.
After Assange had been imprisoned in Belmarsh, Duncan had a drinks party at his office for the Pelican team.
“I gave them each a signed photo which we took in the Ops Room on the day, with a caption saying ‘Julian Assange’s Special Brexit Team 11th April 2019’”, he wrote.
Ecuador’s president from 2007-17, Rafael Correa, recently toldDeclassified he granted Assange asylum because the Australian journalist “didn’t have any possibility of a fair legal process in the United States.”
He added that the UK government “tried to deal with us like a subordinate country.”
In September 2021, 30 former US officials went on the record to reveal a CIA plot to “kill or kidnap” Assange in London. In case of Assange leaving the embassy, the article noted,
“US officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.”
These assurances most likely came from the Home Office.
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Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
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The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. –Zeno
The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order. –Henry Miller
Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.- Standing Bear
Introduction
The history of folklore as an area of study is relatively recent compared to its ancient origins. In the eighteenth century the role of Enlightenment science in changing attitudes towards the study of folklore soon showed benefits with an increased understanding of ourselves and our history of survival throughout the centuries. Soon, the influence of nationalist Romanticism paved the way for much research and support for folklore as an integral part of every country’s cultural heritage in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century folklore had moved from being the culture of ‘backward peoples’ to becoming a major tool in the hands of the state, leading to very different approaches to folklore in the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Post World War 2 and the decline of nationalism, folklore and folk music have taken a back seat in the spread of globalised cosmopolitan commercialism.
However, the anxiety over the rapid pace of the destruction of nature (land, forests, wildlife, and seas) in the twenty-first century paves the way for a re-evaluation of folklore, not as an ancient tradition that was perceived to be replaced by science in the nineteenth century, but as a pro-nature ideology that was cleverly replaced by anti-nature industrialisation, thereby choking off its continuing relevance as an important part of our cultural and political struggle to end the ruination of the planet.
Taking place every winter in villages and cities in Romania’s eastern region of Moldova, the Dance of the Bear symbolizes the death and rebirth of time. Performed between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, this ancient ritual brings together the whole community, who gather to watch the performance. The Dance of the Bear sees men of all ages, and increasingly more women, dress in real bear skins and dance to the rhythm of pan flutes and drums, to ward off evil spirits and ring in the new year. Traditionally, the procession, which can include between six and 24 bears, would visit every household of the village.
History of folklore
Folklore is generally defined as the traditions common to a culture, subculture or group of people. It encompasses oral traditions such as tales and legends, material culture such as traditional building styles and customary lore such as the forms and rituals of Christmas, weddings, folk dances and initiation rites. Folklore is transmitted from place to another or one generation to the next and these traditions tend to be passed informally from one person to another through demonstration or verbal instruction.
In 1846, the British writer W. J. Thoms invented the word ‘folklore’ to replace ‘popular antiquities’ or ‘popular literature’. The meaning of ‘folk’ at the time generally meant rural, poor and illiterate peasants. ‘Lore’ comes from Old English lār ‘instruction’, the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, frequently passed along by word of mouth.
The initial basis for the study of folklore derived from changing ideas about the peasantry who were seen to be losing their culture in the fast developing process of industrialisation. During the Enlightenment, the philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), not only wroteabout the importance of the nation and patriotism but he also gave the idea of the ‘people’ a new significance when he stated that “there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant”. If the people were defined as significant (not backward and uncultured), then their culture and folk traditions were also significant and necessary for the process of nation building.
Thus, local traditions and rituals which were largely ignored previously were transformed into an area of culture and history that could be studied, and “from the 1860s there was a boom in the collection and discussion of folklore – the rise of social Darwinism, a growing population and increased urbanisation generated an upsurge in the idea of survivalism and a fear that these rural traditions might be lost.” In England, the first female president of the Folklore Society, Charlotte Sophia Burne (1850–1923) defined folklore as:
‘the generic term under which the traditional Beliefs, Customs, Stories, Songs and Sayings current among backward peoples, or retained by the uncultured classes of more advanced peoples, are comprehended and included.’
As we can see from this quote, folklore was perceived as “relics of behaviour from the distant past” that has been passed down through the generations. The middle and upper classes, largely the beneficiaries of industrialisation, had a background of success and wealth that buttressed their view of the working class and peasantry as the ‘uncultured classes’. In many countries the changes in society brought about by industrialisation created an anxiety about cultural loss:
“Encroaching modernity caused the Victorians to worry that old traditions were under threat and in need of preservation. A rising panic at the changes wrought by technology, industrialisation, and burgeoning capitalism collided with fears about the booming population and the move to city life, creating a nostalgia for the rural idyll. It was against this backdrop that an interest in recording folklore grew, alongside an anxiety that it was a way of life quickly passing.”
Enlightenment
Image: Carved idol of Peko. Radaja Seto Museum Photo by Ivo Kruusamägi Peko (Finnish spelling Pekko, Pekka, Pellon Pekko) is an ancient Estonian and Finnish god of crops, especially barley and brewing.
The Enlightenment approach to folklore involved a “systematic, scientific study of behaviour – the folklore collected dispassionately for future analysis” and, moreover, the benefits of such study were quickly becoming apparent:
“Nobody now disputes that the superstitions, the customs, the tales, the songs, and even the proverbial sayings of a people may throw unexpected light upon its history; and from the investigation and comparison of such things as these, once deemed unworthy of notice, scientific men have begun to reconstruct the unrecorded past of humanity.”
The new interest in mythology and folklore also became a tool in the hands of Enlightenment rationalists and skeptics who used it to undermine Christianity and the Church. As Robert D. Richardson noted:
“When Pierre Bayle scoffs at the story of Athena being born without the aid of a mother from the head of Jupiter, he does it in such a way as to emphasize the story’s similarity to that of Christ’s having been born without the aid of a mortal father. If we smile at the miracles in Greek mythology, how can we not smile at similar miracles in the Bible?” -The Enlightenment View of Myth and Joel Barlow’s “Vision of Columbus” Author(s): Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
However, the study of folklore and mythology also revealed ancient and pre-Christian beliefs centered around a profound respect and worship of nature. In his book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941) speculated that: “shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture.” Frazer’s thesis was that “old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king.” Frazer proposed that “mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.”
Image: Prajapati with similar iconographical features associated with Brahma, a sculpture from Tamil Nadu.Prajapati’s role varies within the Vedic texts such as being one who created heaven and earth, all of water and beings, the chief, the father of gods, the creator of devas and asuras, the cosmic egg and the Purusha (spirit).
Romantic nationalism
With the rise of Romantic nationalism during the nineteenth century, folklore took on a new significance as the ‘soul’ of the people. The nation state claimed its political legitimacy based on an organic unity of the people which in turn was based on elements such as “language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs of the nation in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture.” This unity from below was emphasised by nationalists in reaction to the dynastic or imperial hegemony of feudalism which claimed its authority from above, for example, the divine right of kings who were mandated by God to rule over the people.
Folklore was useful to nationalists from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, not only to counter the old ideology of monarchy but it also served to counter the future threat of socialist ideas. For nationalists, the rural-based folklore of the people could form the basis of a class-conciliatory popular ideology in opposition to the spreading socialist concepts of working class culture, class warfare and revolution among the radicals. The rise of the socialist movements, culminating in the creation of Soviet Russia in 1917 heralded both positive and negative views of folklore.
The Soviet Union
Folklore studies thrived in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as there was little state control and the government was more concerned with the new economy, trying to reverse decades of underdevelopment. However, by the late 1920s the Soviet government “repressed Folklore, believing that it supported the old tsarist system and a capitalist economy.” Stories about feudal princes and princesses eventually came under criticism by the Soviet government:
Image: Xochiquetzal, from the Codex Rios, 16th century.In Aztec mythology, Xochiquetzal was a goddess associated with fertility, beauty, and love, serving as a protector of young mothers and a patroness of pregnancy, childbirth, and the crafts. Worshipers wore animal and flower masks at a festival, held in her honor every eight years.
“They saw it as a remnant of the backward Russian society that the Bolsheviks were working to surpass. To keep folklore studies in check and prevent inappropriate ideas from spreading amongst the masses, the government created the RAPP – the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. The RAPP specifically focused on censoring fairy tales and children’s literature, believing that fantasies and “bourgeois nonsense” harmed the development of upstanding Soviet citizens. Faerie tales were removed from bookshelves and children were encouraged to read books focusing on nature and science.”
A new way of seeing folklore was developed that put emphasis on “traditional legends and faerie tales [that] showed ideal, community-oriented characters, which exemplified the model Soviet citizen” in particular “tales that showed members of the working class outsmarting their cruel masters, again working to prove folklore’s value to Soviet ideology and the nation’s society at large.”
Certain customs were changed (in terms of content) or adapted (in terms of form), for example, the Christmas tree. In Russia, the tradition of installing and decorating a Yolka (tr: spruce tree) for Christmas was very popular but fell into disfavor (as a tradition originating in Germany – Russia’s enemy during World War I) and was subsequently banned by the Synod in 1916. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Christmas celebrations and other religious holidays were prohibited under the Marxist-Leninist policy of state atheism in the Soviet Union. Although the Christmas tree was banned, people continued the tradition with New Year trees which eventually gained acceptance in 1935:
“The New Year tree was encouraged in the USSR after the famous letter by Pavel Postyshev, published in Pravda on 28 December 1935, in which he asked for trees to be installed in schools, children’s homes, Young Pioneer Palaces, children’s clubs, children’s theaters and cinemas.” See this.
The Yolka tree remains an essential part of the Russian New Year traditions when Ded Moroz or ‘Grandfather Frost’ (with assistance from his granddaughter Snegurochka,’Snow Maiden’), like Santa Claus, brings presents for children to put under the tree or to distribute them directly to the children on New Year’s morning performances. Thus, native folklore and traditions in Russia and the Soviet Union were customised to suit the changing material conditions of society in a rational process of adaptation that contrasted sharply with the irrationalist over-importance given to them in Nazi Germany.
Image: In Māori mythology, Rongo or Rongo-mā-Tāne (also Rongo-hīrea, Rongo-marae-roa,[1] and Rongo-marae-roa-a-Rangi[2]) is a major god (atua) of cultivated plants, especially kumara (spelled kūmara in Māori), a vital crop.
National socialism
The rise of the national socialists in Germany in the 1930s also shifted folklore in a new direction as the Nazis not only linked the concept of peasant folklore with that of national unity, but looked abroad for suitable models (the “strong and heroic” Nordic tradition), despite feeling ‘guilty’ about the ‘foreign elements’ in German folklore:
“After 1935, German folklore professors were under pressure adapt their theories and findings to the National Socialist Weltanschauung [worldview]. This not only implied the obligation to join in the search for Nordic-Germanic symbols at the expense of other interests, but it also meant giving priority to those elements that might be of immediate ideological usefulness to the Party.” [1]
According to the German anti-Nazi philosopher Ernst Bloch, “Hitler painted the ethnic heterogeneity of Germany as a major reason for the country’s economic and political weakness, and he promised to restore a German realm based on a cleansed, and hence strong, German people.”
Folklore, as part of the ideology of German national self-consciousness, became a way of reading and understanding history itself:
“The social and religious order of the Nordic-Germanic tribes, they claimed, was the order of the present and, certainly, the order of the future. In their effort to strengthen the German national self-consciousness, the Nazi ideologists emphasized not only an identification with the heroic age but also a deep contempt for the Roman civilization. In their view, the glorification of Rome and everything Roman had led to a serious weakening of Germany’s folk unity. The “healthy” resources of Germany’s own past had been sacrificed to the admiration of Rome.” [2]
This Romanticist, irrationalist view of history (and ‘folk unity’) was part of the glorification of the peasant as the repository of the primary culture of traditional heritage. The peasant, previously seen as backward and uncultured, was now held up as the ideal model for society and culture as elites worried about the growth of the working class. The study of folklore was also reduced to a limited racial point of view to justify German ‘superiority’ that would underpin the German elite’s desire to conquer Europe.
Overall we can see that in the twentieth century folklore and myth served multiple purposes in differing political ideologies of nationalism, national socialism, and socialism.
Susanoo subduing and making a pact with various spirits of disease (dated 1860, copy of original work by Katsushika Hokusai) Susanoo (スサノオ; historical orthography: スサノヲ, ‘Susanowo’) is a kami in Japanese mythology. The younger brother of Amaterasu, goddess of the sun and mythical ancestress of the Japanese imperial line, he is a multifaceted deity with contradictory characteristics (both good and bad), being portrayed in various stories either as a wild, impetuous god associated with the sea and storms, as a heroic figure who killed a monstrous serpent, or as a local deity linked with the harvest and agriculture.
Folklore past, present, and future
Image: Yggdrasil (from Old Norse Yggdrasill [ˈyɡːˌdrɑselː]), in Norse cosmology, is an immense and central sacred tree. Around it exists all else, including the Nine Worlds. Yggdrasil is an immense ash tree that is central to the cosmos and considered very holy. The gods go to Yggdrasil daily to assemble at their traditional governing assemblies, called things.
In the past, our ideas about folklore were defined as traditional or modern by contrasting Enlightenment and Romanticist theories that revealed differing concepts of time. As Diarmuid Ó Giolláin writes:
“The traditional and the modern are usually understood to be in a negative relationship to one another, the one looking backwards, the other forwards, the one static, the other dynamic, the one repetitive and the other innovative. The notion of time in traditional societies is understood as being repetitive and circular; reflecting the rhythms of nature, with the events of the beginning of time constantly being reactualised through myth and ritual, while time in the historic religions and in modern societies is seen as linear and irreversible.” [3]
The linear view is teleological, encompassing patriarchal religion and capitalism that only moves in one direction (towards the Day of Judgement), and with growth as its model, despite the fact that we live in a world of limited resources. In opposition to this view, there is the circular view of time in traditional societies which reflected the ever-changing seasons and respect for nature.
The idea of linear time is reflected in Frazer’s view of folklore as being on a continuum “from magic through religion to science”. However, this is a sleight of hand that misses the point that folklore has been an important part of pre-Christian, pagan, and pro-nature ideology that was not replaced by science, but instead by an anti-nature ideology that uses science to justify and legitimise its industrial-scale extractivism and exploitation of nature.
The difference between folklore and science was not an epistemological difference (tradition v science) but a consequence of capitalist exploitation that operates through the destruction of nature and then tried to legitimate itself by hiding in a cloak of modernity, while at the same time negating past pro-nature practices. There was no reason why the pro-nature continuum of folklore could not have been seen as one that continued to the present and on into the future, as people’s connection with nature had not fundamentally changed (nature being, of course, the vital source of our sustenance).
Our unchanged relationship with nature can be seen in the continuation of practices associated with folklore, the culture of respect and reverence towards nature, such as Hallowe’en, Easter eggs and hares, Christmas trees, and bonfires (as a few Western examples), despite increasing commercialisation.
A similar argument was made that portrait painting was ‘outmoded’ by photography (a very different and mechanical process), yet portraiture has continued to today in full strength with national portrait galleries and portrait competitions. The importance of portraiture lies in its ability to evoke emotions beyond the literal interpretation of the subject, making the person who views a portrait feel something, which connects them to the artist’s feelings, thoughts and desires.
The anti-nature continuum of the wilful exploitation of nature (such as the ongoing destruction of the Amazon and wildlife, the global and mass use and abuse of animals, transnational polluting industries, chemical-driven industrial crop land, and factory ship over-fishing that is emptying our seas) also continues to today in parallel with traditional pro-nature folklore customs and traditions.
The conflict between industrialisation of nature and respect for nature is sharply highlighted by Yuval Noah Harari when he writes:
“The fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings, each with complex sensations and emotions, live and die on a production line. Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.”
The importance of folklore is not that it ties us in with our past, but that it connects us into an understanding of nature in a meaningful way. If there is a distance between people and nature, it is as a result of an unfortunate coincidence of certain groups and the location of fossil fuels globally, as Michael Cronin writes:
“It is often the poorest people on the planet speaking lesser-used languages in more remote parts of the world that find themselves at the frontline of the race to extract as much fossil fuel resources as possible from the earth. […] Bram Buscher, a geographer, has coined the term ‘liquid nature’ to describe the way in which fields, forests and mountains lose there intrinsic, place-based meaning and become deracinated, abstract commodities in a global trading system.” [4]
Cronin quotes Russ Rymer on the importance of local knowledge built up over generations:
“When small communities abandon their languages and switch to English or to Spanish, there is a massive disruption in the transfer of traditional knowledge across generations – about medicinal plants, food cultivation, irrigation techniques, navigation systems, and seasonal calendars.” [5]
Cronin points to the importance of local knowledge contained in the Irish language (an ancient but threatened language), for example, which has “linguistic resources in abundance”, [6] and is particularly important in the “shift from an ideology of extractivism [anti-nature] to an ideology of regeneration [pro-nature]”. [7]
Folklore of sacred trees
The strong connection between people and nature has never gone away, and can be seen in past and present attitudes towards trees, for example. In a recent development in Co. Cork in southern Ireland a local Christmas tree grower now rents his Christmas trees. The grower gives the renter instructions on the care of the tree and it is returned to him in January, when it is re-potted and numbered. Why? Because many who rent the trees wish to have the same tree returned to them in the following year.
This emotional connection with trees has a long history on a global scale. Helen Keating gives nine examples of English tree lore: “Our lives have been so closely linked with trees since prehistoric times, they’ve been the subjects of legends, folklore and mythology.” Zteve T Evans looks at examples of Irish tree folkore: “It is believed that the ancient Celtic people were animists who considered all objects to have consciousness of some kind. This included trees, and each species of tree had different properties which might be medicinal, spiritual or symbolic. […] Some species of tree featured in stories from their myths, legends and folklore.”
J. A. MacCulloch noted that:
“Pliny said of the Celts: “They esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree on which it grows. But apart from this they choose oak-woods for their sacred groves, and perform no sacred rite without using oak branches. […] A people living in an oak region and subsisting in part on acorns might easily take the oak as a representative of the spirit of vegetation or growth. It was long-lived, its foliage was a protection, it supplied food, its wood was used as fuel, and it was thus clearly the friend of man. For these reasons, and because it was the most abiding and living thing men knew, it became the embodiment of the spirits of life and growth.” See this.
The global belief in tree deities demonstrates the ancient awareness of the value of trees for our existence and survival in folklore. We are becoming acutely aware of the importance of trees today with modern science giving us much knowledge of forests as carbon sinks, showing there is no conflict between science and folklore but, in fact, a major conflict between pro- and anti- nature ideologies, as the destruction of nature continues unabated. All over the world today the wealth of folklore is being developed and added to through collection and research. People everywhere participate in and learn about their country’s folklore through their education systems as well as their family and community traditions. However, we need a major re-evaluation of folklore, not as an atavistic return to pagan primitivism, but as an important step in returning our societies back to the pro-nature philosophy and consciousness of our ancestors. Our survival as a species depends on it.
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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáinis 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. Caoimhghin has just published his new book – Against Romanticism: From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment and the Culture of Slavery, which looks at philosophy, politics and the history of 10 different art forms arguing that Romanticism is dominating modern culture to the detriment of Enlightenment ideals. It is available on Amazon (amazon.co.uk) and the info page is here.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[1] ‘Folklore as a Political Tool in Nazi Germany’ by Christa Kamenetsky, p221 (The Journal of American Folklore, Jul. – Sep., 1972, Vol. 85, No. 337 (Jul. – Sep., 1972), pp. 221-235 Published by: American Folklore Society)
[2] ‘Folklore as a Political Tool in Nazi Germany’ by Christa Kamenetsky, p227 (The Journal of American Folklore, Jul. – Sep., 1972, Vol. 85, No. 337 (Jul. – Sep., 1972), pp. 221-235 Published by: American Folklore Society)
[3] ‘ Rethinking (Irish) Folklore in the Twenty-First Century’ by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, p39 (Béaloideas, 2013, Iml. 81 (2013), pp. 37-52, An Cumann Le Béaloideas Éireann/Folklore of Ireland Society)
[4] Irish and Ecology by Michael Cronin (Foras na Gaeilge, 2019) p13/14
[5] Irish and Ecology by Michael Cronin (Foras na Gaeilge, 2019) p20
[6] Irish and Ecology by Michael Cronin (Foras na Gaeilge, 2019) p39
[7] Irish and Ecology by Michael Cronin (Foras na Gaeilge, 2019) p32/33
Featured image: Slovenia – Ptuj – Kurentovanje: celebration of coming spring – “Kurent”s urging winter to leave Kurentovanje is Slovenia’s most popular and ethnologically significant carnival event first organised in 1960 by Drago Hasl. This 11-day rite of spring and fertility highlight event is celebrated on Shrove Sunday in Ptuj, the oldest documented city in the region, and draws around 100,000 participants in total each year.
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Here’s the mainstream narrative: The status of the war in Ukraine is best understood as a competition between the narrative and reality.
The narrative consists of what you hear from mainstream media, the White House, the Pentagon and official sources in the U.K., France, Germany and both EU and NATO headquarters in Brussels.
The reality consists of what’s actually going on based on the best available sources. Let’s consider the narrative first.
According to the White House, EU and NATO, things are going relatively well for Ukraine. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have advanced in eastern Ukraine along a line that runs parallel to the Russian fortified lines between Donetsk and Luhansk.
Ukraine has also reoccupied the regional capital of Kherson, which lies strategically on the Dnieper River, and is Kyiv’s main access to the Black Sea and international trade.
Based on these advances, the narrative says that Russia is in retreat, Russian troops are demoralized, Putin is in jeopardy of being replaced and complete victory for Ukraine is just a matter of time.
The narrative is then used as a basis for increased financial aid from the United States (over $60 billion and growing) and increased weapons shipments from NATO members. President Zelenskyy touts these accomplishments in his customary green T-shirt on video presentations to the U.N., G20 and other international audiences.
Here’s the reality…
The actual situation on the battlefield is almost completely at odds with the narrative. Ukraine did make advances in the east, but they were against lightly defended Russian positions on or near open terrain.
The Russians organized an orderly retreat to fortified lines and let the Ukrainians have the open land. Russia withdrew from Kherson because they regarded it as a nonstrategic salient.
They withdrew to the east bank of the Dnieper River while allowing Ukrainian troops to reoccupy the center of Kherson. Russia avoided a fight over a city of little strategic value while retaining a chokehold on river traffic from the east bank. Russia regarded Kherson as a nonstrategic salient.
The Russians essentially organized an orderly retreat to fortified lines and let the Ukrainians have the open land, which will become a killing field for Russian artillery.
Even with that withdrawal, almost all the industrial, technological and natural resource capacity of former Ukraine is in the Donbas now under Russian control.
In the meantime, Russia is now preparing to launch a massive counteroffensive. Russia has completed its 300,000-person mobilization. Over 180,000 of those troops are now deployed behind Russian lines in combat formations. The remaining 120,000 troops will arrive soon. This brings total Russian strength up to about 30 divisions.
They are being supplemented with Iranian drones, a major force multiplier. The major objectives of this counteroffensive are Kharkiv in the northeast, Odesa in the southwest, and Zaporizhzhia in the center part of the country on the Dnieper River.
Completion of these missions will give Russia control of the entire coast from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. It will also give Russia control of the Dnieper River and the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.
Russia will incorporate all of this territory into the Russian Federation and will likely move further into Moldova to reunite with a pro-Russian corridor called Transnistria with its capital in Tiraspol. At that point, Russian strategic objectives will be complete. Ukraine will be left as a rump state between Kyiv and Lviv.
Ukrainian officials are preparing for a brutal winter ahead by evacuating civilians from cities likely to be the scene of new battles with Russian troops. These Ukrainian expectations seem at odds with the mainstream narrative of victorious Ukrainians on the offensive against demoralized Russian troops.
Meanwhile, AFU strength has been greatly diminished due to high casualty rates. Meanwhile, advanced weapons supplied to the AFU will be of little use because the AFU has not been trained to use them and there are logistical obstacles to moving them to the front lines.
Many so-called Ukrainian troops are actually Polish forces in Ukrainian uniforms. Again, Russian forces are well-rested and well-supplied, and are being supplemented with Iranian drones, a major force multiplier.
The economic impact of these developments is momentous. Biden has vowed that the sanctions will not be lifted until Russia leaves Ukraine. But Russia is not leaving. This implies that sanctions will continue indefinitely.
The sanctions have had little economic impact on Russia. But the effect on Europe and the U.S. has been devastating including energy shortages, inflation and supply chain disruption. These effects will persist and cause the EU and U.S. to fall into a severe recession in the first half of 2023.
The dollar will remain strong for reasons independent of the war in Ukraine, having to do with a growing global liquidity crisis. Stocks will fall significantly due to recessionary conditions.
Bonds will perform well as interest rates decline alongside economic decline. Gold will remain strong as more countries look for ways to avoid U.S. economic sanctions and as central banks diversify away from dollars toward gold.
Brace yourself for more volatility as we head toward the winter months. Moving cash to the sidelines is a prudent thing to do.
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James G. Rickards is the editor of Strategic Intelligence, Project Prophesy, Crash Speculator, and Gold Speculator. He is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 40 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street. He was the principal negotiator of the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) by the U.S Federal Reserve in 1998. His clients include institutional investors and government directorates.
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This corrupted CEO must be investigated with Bancel of Moderna, and if they are clean, praise. But if shown they were reckless and their vaccine killed people, if shown the trials were fraud and corrupted and the vaccine is dangerous, we clean this guy out financially and jail him for 25 years!
‘Pfizer’s CEO has been rapped by the UK’s pharmaceutical watchdog for making “misleading” statements about children’s vaccines, The Telegraph can disclose.
“Covid in schools is thriving” adding: “This is disturbing, significantly, the educational system, and there are kids that will have severe symptoms.”
The interview was published on Dec 2 – before the vaccine had been approved by Britain’s medical regulator for this age group.
Shortly after the article’s publication, a complaint was submitted to the pharmaceutical watchdog – the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) – by UsForThem, a parent campaign group which was set up to promote the plight of children during the pandemic.
‘Extremely promotional in nature’
The complaint alleged that Dr Bourla’s remarks about the children’s vaccine were “disgracefully misleading” and “extremely promotional in nature”, arguing that it breached several clauses of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry’s (ABPI) code of practice.
In September 2021, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), had advised against a mass roll-out for children aged 12-15, saying the “margin of benefit” was “considered too small” and citing the low risk to healthy children from the virus.
But less than a fortnight later, ministers gave the green light for youngsters to be given a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab with the UK’s chief medical officers arguing that this would help to keep schools open.
A code of practice panel, convened by the PMCPA, found that Pfizer had breached the code in a number of different ways, including by misleading the public, making unsubstantiated claims, and by failing to present information in a factual and balanced way.
‘Up-to-date scientific evidence’
Pfizer appealed against the findings, strongly refuting UsForThem’s claims that Dr Bourla had breached the code of practice. They argued that his remarks were based on “up-to-date scientific evidence” and could be substantiated by the “publicly available independent benefit-risk assessments”.
Earlier in November an appeal board met to consider their arguments. The breaches of the code relating to misleading the public, making unsubstantiated claims and the lack of balance were upheld.
But the more serious findings – including that Pfizer had brought discredit to the industry, had encouraged irrational use of a medicine and had failed to maintain high standards – were overturned. PMCPA said the full case report will be published in the coming weeks.
A spokesman for Pfizer said they are “committed to the highest levels of integrity in any interaction with the public”.
They added:
“We are pleased the UK’s PMCPA Appeal Board found Pfizer to have maintained high standards and upheld confidence in our industry, the two most serious rulings in this complaint from a UK campaign group.
“In the UK, we have always endeavoured to follow the principles and letter of our industry Code of Practice throughout. We will review the case report in detail when we receive it, to inform future activity.
“Throughout the pandemic, our communications have been focused on providing clarity regarding the progress of our science and supporting transparent scientific exchange in the interests of public health.” UsForThem were approached for comment.’
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Comments Off on “Pfizer’s CEO rapped by Regulator for making ‘Misleading’ Statements about Children’s Vaccines”; Dr Bourla Claimed “Benefits in Favour Vaccinated Youngsters Aged 5 to 11 against Covid”
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Republicans in the Senate have threatened to block the National Defense Authorization Act unless a vote is held on the current COVID vaccine mandate for military personnel.
The effort is being headed up by Florida Senator Rick Scott and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, along with 11 other senators, including Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
As a veteran & member of @SASCGOP, I fully support our military & have fought hard for big nat'l security wins in the NDAA. But, before this bill moves forward, we must stand with our military members & reverse the @DeptofDefense's COVID vax mandate. U.S. readiness depends on it. pic.twitter.com/DoRgn5cJZh
“I think on the NDAA one thing that’s going to be important is that we don’t give cloture unless they agree that we’re not going to keep kicking people out of the service for their – if they’re unvaccinated,” adding “I think that we’ve got to start standing up for people.”
In a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Senators state
“The Department of Defense COVID-19 vaccine mandate has ruined the livelihoods of men and women who have honorably served our country.”
“While the Department of Defense certainly must make decisions that will bolster military readiness, the effects of the mandate are antithetical to readiness of our force, and the policy must be revoked,” the letter further states.
I’m opposing moving forward on the NDAA unless the Senate votes on an amendment to prohibit discharges from the Armed Forces solely because of vaccination status. The amendment will also reinstate service members already discharged w/ back pay. Read more: https://t.co/ejcYF64Koapic.twitter.com/4qa3Gu74r4
“The vaccination mandate has forced our nation’s young patriotic men and women to choose between their faith, their medical autonomy and their careers.”
“At a time when the military is struggling to meet targets for recruitment, the administration is firing soldiers we invested in and trained,” Paul further noted.
For five decades now, the NDAA has been viewed as vital legislation for Congress each year, covering spending for the military, including the annual pay raise and new program starts.
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Featured image: Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source.)
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”William Burns, US ambassador to Moscow writing to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, 2008
“There’s nothing inevitable about the “multipolar world”. Its emergence depends entirely on a war that is just beginning and whose outcome is still unknown.” From the text
According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center: “About half of Americans… say they are either extremely (24%) or very (26%) concerned about the possibility of U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine leading to a U.S. war with Russia.” (“Americans’ Concerns About War in Ukraine: Wider Conflict, Possible U.S.-Russia Clash”, Pew Research Center)
This is a smaller percentage than one might expect given the risk that an unexpected escalation that could trigger a nuclear war. Even so, this is what the data tell us and the data don’t lie.
But here’s the interesting part: Even though half of the country is worried about a direct conflagration with Russia, they still overwhelmingly support the other measures Biden has taken to punish Russia for its alleged “aggression”. Here’s more from the survey:
Wide support in both parties for U.S. actions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Sizable majorities of both Republicans (73%) and Democrats (80%) say they approve of the U.S. placing strict economic sanctions on Russia. Similar shares say they approve of sending military equipment and weapons to Ukraine.
What does this mean? Why do Americans overwhelmingly support onerous sanctions, additional troop deployments, and the endless provision of lethal weapons when –at the same time– they acknowledge that they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility “of a U.S. war with Russia?” Don’t they realize that these hybrid attacks on Russia are a form of warfare that will eventually lead to a direct military clash between Washington and Moscow?
And why do Americans support these draconian measures anyway? Don’t they know that Putin warned that NATO expansion to Ukraine would force Russia to respond militarily? Don’t they know that many of our brightest foreign policy experts have warned against NATO expansion to Ukraine? Don’t they know that Russia has repeatedly warned that NATO expansion could lead to war? Don’t they know that the democratically-elected president of Ukraine was toppled in a CIA-backed coup in 2014 and replaced with a Washington stooge?
Don’t they know that Washington has been planning to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia in order to spread its military bases across Central Asia (to encircle China) for at least the last 8 years? Don’t they know that the Ukrainian army had been shelling residential areas in the area inhabited by ethnic Russians for 8 days before Putin was forced to send in his troops?
Don’t they know that –if Zelensky had maintained the status quo and Ukraine had remained a “neutral” country– the war never would have begun?
Don’t they know our own Director of the CIA called NATO membership for Ukraine the “reddest of red lines” for Russia?
Don’t they know that NATO’s eastward expansion is, and has always been, a material threat to Russia’s national security? Aren’t Russian mothers and children deserving of the same safety and security provided to American mothers and children or should we insist that they live with Washington’s combat troops, tanks and nuclear missiles pointed at them across the border? Aren’t they entitled to live their lives without NATO’s gun pointed at their heads or Washington’s dagger put to their throats? This is from an article at antiwar.com:
NATO has long known that Russian leaders since the end of the Cold War–not just Putin–have perceived NATO’s eastward expansion, and particularly its expansion to Ukraine, as a threat. In response to NATO’s statement at the 2008 summit in Bucharest, the Russian leadership made clear that they saw this promise as an existential threat. Putin warned that NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was “a direct threat” to Russian security.…
How could Russia not see NATO as a threat? … How else could Russia perceive an alliance that moved to its borders, absorbed its neighbors, but exclusively excluded it as anything but hostile? Robert Gates observed that it was “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”…
In a February 2022 press conference, Putin said,
“Today we see where NATO is: in Poland, in Romania and in the Baltic states. . .. Now anti-ballistic missile launchers are deployed in Romania and are being set up in Poland. They will probably be there soon if they are not yet built. These are MK-41 launchers that can launch Tomahawks. In other words, they are no longer just counter-missiles, and these assault weapons can cover thousands of kilometers of our territory. Isn’t this a threat to us?”
Weeks before, Putin had also complained that “elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia.” He spoke again of the MK-41 launchers in Romania and, soon, in Poland. At that time, he added that “If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems.This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.” (“Stoltenberg’s Provocative Pledge on Ukraine’s NATO Membership”, Ted Snider, antiwar.com)
How is it that the American people don’t know these things?
How is it that the vast majority of them think that ‘Putin started the war’ or that the war started on February 24 when Russian tanks crossed the border into Ukraine?
How can the majority of the population in a democratic country that is (ostensibly) committed to free speech and freedom of the press be so tragically misinformed, propagandized and indoctrinated?
Is that it? Are Americans actually the most weak-minded, brainwashed sheeple on earth? This is from The American Conservative:
“From the onset of the Ukraine war, the corporate media, politicians, and all the controlled NGOs throughout America and Western Europe were lockstep in their claim that the Russian military action in eastern Ukraine was unprovoked and unjustified—an act of aggression that could not be allowed to stand.
There was one problem with this propaganda blitz: it was totally untrue. The Deep State—the government elites, intelligence community, and the military establishment—has spent decades threatening and provoking Russia by pushing NATO up against their border.
You do not have to like Russia to see this, and you can detest Vladimir Putin until the cows come home. The fundamental issue remains the same: the Russians view NATO on their border as an act of aggression and a threat to their national security, and we have known this for decades.
So, no, the war in Ukraine did NOT start on February 24.
And, no, “evil” Putin did NOT start the war.
What the evidence shows is that this Ukrainian conflict is another bloody confection that was conjured up long-ago in elite think tanks and neocon hideaways where Russia’s economic integration with Europe (and the eventual emergence of a free trade zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok) was seen as “real and present danger” to Washington’s voracious lust for global power.
These same elites settled on Ukraine as the launching pad for their war on Russia despite the fact that Ukraine would ultimately face disintegration as part of a Moscow-imposed final settlement and despite the fact that all of Europe would be plunged into another Dark Ages of energy and food scarcity, widespread deindustrialization and third-world destitution. Check out this quote from foreign policy giant George Kennan, who authored America’s “containment” strategy that was used during the Cold War. Here’s what he told the New York Times in 1998:
‘I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.” (“Blame the Deep State for Carnage in Ukraine”, George D O’Neill jr, The American Conservative)
Have you wondered why respected foreign policy analysts like George Kennan, former Sec-Def William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. all oppose NATO membership for Ukraine?
Have you ever asked yourself why a foreign policy mandarin like John Mearsheimer would put his reputation on the chopping block to inform the people that if the policy persists Ukraine will be obliterated and the US will likely end up in a nuclear war with Russia? Here’s Mearsheimer:
“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked… What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they’ll ultimately become part of the west because we will ultimately defeat the Russians…. And, of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this and the Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and, instead, want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked. And, what we are doing is, in effect, encouraging that outcome.” John Mearsheimer, “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path”, You Tube, 1:32
The United States is deliberately misleading Ukraine so it can use its territory to prosecute its war on Russia. It is a cynical manipulation tantamount to genocide.
The US has no vital national security interests in Ukraine nor does it care whether its cities and people are pounded into oblivion.
What matters to Washington is delivering a blow to Russia, seducing Russia into a conflict that will cause it to “overextend itself militarily or economically” (Rand), thus, rendering it incapable of projecting power beyond its borders. That’s the goal, and that has always been the goal, to “weaken Russia”. None of this has anything to do with Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. It’s all about power; pure, unalloyed geopolitical power.
Bottom line: Foreign policy elites and their globalist allies have decided that the only way to arrest America’s accelerating economic decline and preserve the nation’s role as the world’s preeminent superpower, is through the use of military force.
Clearly, that decision has already been made. What we’re seeing in Ukraine (and soon Taiwan) is further evidence that America’s hawkish powerbrokers are not going to relinquish their exalted position in the world without a fight. They are going to use every weapon in their arsenal to maintain their vice-like grip on power. This tells us that the transition away from the “rules-based system” will not be quick or bloodless. And– despite optimistic predictions to the contrary– there’s nothing inevitable about the “multipolar world”. Its emergence depends entirely on a war that is just beginning and whose outcome is still unknown.
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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).
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While the United States’ European allies are now fighting aggressive American subsidies (a crisis that risks dividing the political West), Taiwan, another US ally, also faces Washington’s protectionism. This fits into the US pattern of hurting close allies in many different ways.
Biden and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook are visiting Arizona on December 6 to launch the $12 billion American plant of chip giant TSMC – it is the company’s first advanced chip in the US. The US $52 billion chip subsidy bill (passed in July) has been described as vital to the construction of the TSMC plant in Arizona. This will basically transfer Taiwan’s productivity and its most advanced technology to the US and such news has not been well received in Taiwan.
Journalist Zhang Zhouxiang has described this new development as TSMC draining itself. According to him, Taiwan is moving “high-end jobs” away, which hurts Taiwanese economy.
Semiconductors play a key role in cybersecurity and military applications. Since the pandemic, there has been a shortage of chips (semiconductors) and earlier this year the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo described this situation as a “national security” issue.
Regarding chips, national interests and national security concerns are thus often intertwined. The British government has basically imposed a semiconductor blockage on China, by having taken actions to retrospectively block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab (one of the country’s largest semiconductors plants) to Nexperia, a Dutch company owned by China’s Wingtech. Just days before, the German government had blocked the sale of Elmos Semiconductor’s factory to Silex, a Swedish subsidiary of China’s Sai Microelectronics. In both Germany and Britain concerns about security and economic as well as technological sovereignty have been voiced. There are also concerns about the possible outflow of technical know-how.
Likewise, as part of the ongoing New Cold War, the US government, in early October, banned Chinese companies from purchasing (without a license) both chip-making equipment and advanced chips. Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan went so far as to describe the American ban as “all but a declaration of a technology war”. Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has also described the American chip restrictions as a “de facto declaration of economic war” (against China), and added that it is a “disproportionate response”.
Chipmaking has been a new front in American-Chinese tensions, and now, with the aforementioned German and British decision, tensions are also escalating in Europe. Such European decisions are also the result of Washington’s pressure, according to Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo‑technology at Eurasia Group.
In February, amid the escalation of tensions between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, I wrote on how Taiwan stands between the two superpowers in their technological competition. Amid the ongoing chip race, many different countries have introduced incentives to foster the semiconductors’ industry. Taiwan is the planet’s largest chip manufacturer and is also the center of Chinese-US tensions today. This is the ironic context of TSMC’s Arizona move.
It is increasingly difficult today to insulate industries from geopolitical disputes. Beijing aspires to become a tech superpower, something which American political elites will not tolerate. Although the Chinese semiconductor industry has been growing quite quickly, it still remains behind the cutting edge in chips, largely due to American efforts to block Chinese endeavors to acquire the necessary equipment and know-how.
However, the American economic war on Beijing in fact endangers the global microchip industry itself and increases the risk of butterfly effects, China being a key part of the globalized world. Moreover, while the US never had an intensive economic relationship with its Soviet rival during the old Cold War, China today remains the United States’ third largest market for exports. In addition, as historian and foreign-policy analyst Max Boot has remarked, a single factory in China, Foxconn, is reported to produce about half the world’s iPhones, for example. This being so, according to Boot, while Washington does not want to see any Western technology being “transferred” to the Chinese military, it can’t, on the other hand, endanger supply chains for chips and other vital parts.
Moreover, the so-called American “chip war” and its export curbs can in fact bring record losses for Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean makers (all of these nations being US allies).
Washington’s aggressive subsidies and protectionism have arguably stopped the country from rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement among 12 Asia-Pacific nations). Its Inflation Reduction Act in turn has alienated important allies such as Germany and France – the very states Washington counts on in its plans to counter China.
Harvard professor William Overholt has stated that today the US “wants everybody to join economic alliances” with them, while not giving anything in return. Meanwhile, ironically, Communist-Party ruled China, according to him, has promoted freer trade and investment around the world.
With the Belt and Road Initiative, among others, geoeconomics has been the very core of Beijing’s geostrategic approaches. Washington, in turn, has been dangerously weaponizing its economic and financial policies to “counter” China and Russia, also hurting close allies in the process. The irony is that the more the US employs economic leverage to aggressively coerce other states, the greater the incentive to come up with alternatives against Washington.
To sum it up, currently, the US is overextended and overburdened, trying to simultaneously encircle and contain both Moscow and Beijing. Its aggressive protectionism in turn has been enraging and alienating important allies, such as the EU and Taiwan. All of this signals the decline of the American superpower and of the US-led global order.
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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
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“Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics called for NATO to allow Ukraine to conduct strikes inside Russian territory, adding the alliance should not fear Moscow’s response. The White House has resisted sending Kiev missiles with the range to hit targets inside Russia.
“During an interview on the sidelines of NATO summit in Romania, Rinkevics stated ‘we should allow Ukrainians to use weapons to target missile sites or air fields from where those operations are being launched.’ Allies ‘should not fear’ escalation from Moscow, he added. ”
Escalation is proceeding as it did in Vietnam. A Washington puppet would not have voiced a provocative proposal without Washington’s permission. By “inside Russia” Rinkevics means territory beyond the territory Russia recently reincorporated. He is calling for widening the war by crossing a red line that President Putin could not ignore.
It is, of course, Washington that has widened the Kremlin’s limited military operation into an ever larger war with increasing Western participation. But it was President Putin’s decision in favor of a slow moving limited war, which did not hamper Ukraine’s ability to fight the war, that enabled Washington to widen the war. Washington had plenty of time to create the narrative and control the explanation of the war. Washington’s propaganda created sympathy for Ukraine and hatred of Russia. What the Kremlin needed was a quick decisive victory and a new Ukrainian government before Washington had time to react.
More importantly, by entering the conflict with insufficient soldiers and no reserves, the extended Russian lines became indefensible. Russian pullbacks were used in the West to create the impression that Russia could be defeated. The UK Telegraph even wrote a few days go that Ukraine would be in Crimea by Christmas.
The belief that Russia can be defeated will prevent realistic negotiations and will encourage more provocations that sooner or later will cross a red line that cannot be ignored. The go-slow limited military action is a certain path to wider war. Before long Washington will be too involved, too committed to step back. Far from being limited, the conflict is leading to nuclear confrontation. If the Kremlin cannot find the wisdom to quickly bring the conflict to an end, it will spin out of control.
The Kremlin seems to be having a difficult time recognizing reality. For many months the Kremlin has been complaining about each new “indirect” participation by the US/NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has recently elevated this complaint to “direct participation.” In other words, the Kremlin has finally acknowledged that the US/NATO are at war with Russia. See this.
Lavrov admits that the risk of escalaion into nuclear war is enormous.
So why doesn’t the Kremlin do what it should have done long ago and bring the conflict to a quick close by destroying the infrastructure that permits Ukraine to continue the war and replace Zelensky, an American puppet, with a leader friendly to Russia?
Conflict became inevitable when the Kremlin stood aside and permitted Washington to overthrow the Ukrainian government and install a puppet. The conflict moved forward when the Kremlin refused the Donbass’ request to be reincorporated into Russia along with Crimea. In 2014 I said that this mistake would result in war. When the conflict began last February, it was clear that anything but a quick decisive Russian victory would result in US/NATO involvement.
For the Kremlin the lessons remain unlearned. More pointless complaints, ignored by the West, issue from the Kremlin while its spokesman gives assurances that Russia has no intention of removing Zelensky.
There seems to be no Kremlin decision to correct the highly unfavorable situation the Kremlin has created for itself.
Leaders don’t like to admit mistakes. This is especially the case when leaders decide on a course of action based on moral considerations, which Putin did. He tried for eight years to keep Donbass in Ukraine with the Minsk Agreement that Ukraine and the West refused to keep. He decided on a military operation limited to clearing Ukrainian soldiers out of the Donbass republics, and refused to invade and conquer Ukraine. Not desiring a ruined and poverty-stricken Ukraine on Russia’s border, Putin left secure until very recently Ukrainian power, water, and transportation infrastructure that permitted Ukraine, armed and trained by the West, to engage in a full-scale war that the Kremlin pretended to itself was limited. But from what Putin recently told Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, these recent infrastructure attacks are not components of a revised Russian war policy. They are tit for tat exercises. Putin explained the attacks on Ukrainian war-enabling infrastructure as retaliation for attacks on the Crimea bridge and Nord Stream pipelines. See this.
In other words, it seems that the Kremlin’s policy is to kick the can down the road. Putin is still wedded to his limited damage operation to free the areas that wish to escape the tyranny of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian government, and Putin still lacks the realization that Washington’s involvement has cancelled his “limited military operation.” If Putin fails to realize that he is in a war and to use the necessary force to bring it to a quick end, he will lose control of the situation.
Putin’s intentions were good, but suffered from a lack of realism. The Kremlin must have assumed that it was the only player on the chessboard.
The Kremlin’s mistakes have compounded. Possibly the Kremlin has left it too long, but unless the Kremlin is content with something like a demilitarized zone and an unresolved conflict like in Korea, the alternative of knocking out Ukraine in 48 hours and installing a new government could end the conflict before Washington escalates it further.
Waiting has never paid off for Putin. Waiting let Washington train and equip a large Ukrainian army.
More waiting is letting NATO build a large army on Russia’s border, expanding the NATO force from 40,000 to 300,000 according to NATO’s Secretary General.
A NATO member’s top general says US troops are combat ready on Russia’s border, ready to “fight immediately.” See this.
The Kremlin’s confusion and indecisiveness guarantees a larger war.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The US Army has awarded Raytheon a $1.2 billion contract to produce an air defense system for Ukraine as part of US military aid for the country.
The contract is for six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), a system the US recently began providing Ukraine. The funds for the contract are coming from the fifth package from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allows the US to purchase arms for Kyiv.
NASAMS typically take 24 months to produce, but the US Army said it will work to expedite the timeline. Either way, the systems will likely take at least about two years to deliver, demonstrating how the US is planning to support Ukraine against Russia in the long term.
Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, has benefited greatly from the US’s Ukraine policy. The company, and other US defense contractors, are getting contracts to make weapons for Ukraine, to replenish US military stockpiles, and for US allies in Europe.
Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes said last week that the US is looking to send NASMS deployed in the Middle East to Ukraine. “There are NASAMS deployed across the Middle East, and some of our NATO allies and we [the US] are actually working with a couple of Middle Eastern countries that currently employ NASAMS and trying to direct those back up to Ukraine,” Hayes said, according to POLITICO.
If NASMS in the Middle East are sent to Ukraine, Hayes said those systems would then be backfilled with new ones, meaning more contracts for Raytheon. Hayes said that sending already deployed NASMS gets the system into Ukraine’s hands much faster than producing new systems. “Just because it takes 24 months to build, it doesn’t mean it’s going to take 24 months to get in country,” he said.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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***
Until the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Professor John Mearsheimer was mainly known in academic circles as a leading scholar in the “realist” school of foreign policy. That is to say, he takes an unsentimental view of world affairs as being a muscular competition between great powers for regional hegemony.
But with the Ukrainian “Maidan revolution” in 2014 and then the Russian invasion this February, he became a figurehead for the millions of people worldwide who have misgivings about the wisdom of Western actions in Ukraine. A single lecture delivered in 2015 entitled “Why is Ukraine the West’s fault” has been viewed a staggering 28 million times on YouTube.
His central argument, that by expanding Nato eastwards and inviting Ukraine to join the bloc, the West (and in particular the United States) created an intolerable situation for Vladimir Putin which would inevitably result in Russia taking action to “wreck” Ukraine, is politically unsayable today. His critics denounce him as a Putin apologist; his supporters, however, believe the invasion was proof that he was right all along.
When I meet Mearsheimer, I am keen to focus on what we have learned since the February invasion began. I want to know how can he still maintain that there is “no evidence” that Russia had ambitions to conquer Ukraine? How else are we to interpret that shocking moment when it became clear that the Russians were launching a full-scale invasion — from the North, the South and the East of the country?
“The Russians invaded Ukraine with 190,000 troops at the very most,” he replies. “They made no effort to conquer all of Ukraine. They didn’t even come close. There is no way they could have conquered Ukraine with 190,000 troops. And they didn’t have the troops in reserve to do that. When the Germans invaded Poland, in 1939, they invaded with 1.5 million troops. That’s the size army you need to conquer a country like Ukraine, occupy it and then incorporate it into a greater Russia. You need a massive army. This was a limited aim strategy.”
In which case, what was that limited aim?
“What the Russians have said they have wanted from the beginning is a neutral Ukraine. And if they can’t get a neutral Ukraine, what they’re going to do is create a dysfunctional rump state… They’ve taken a huge swath of territory in the East, they’ve annexed those oblasts that are now part of Russia. And at the same time, they’re destroying Ukrainian infrastructure. They’re wrecking the Ukrainian economy. It’s sickening to see what’s happening to Ukraine.”
This assessment of the situation on the ground is very different from the reports we hear every day of Ukrainian successes and Russian retreats. The underdog nation, by most accounts, is performing astonishingly well against the aggressor.
Mearsheimer concedes that he was surprised by how poorly the Russians have performed, but that doesn’t seem to have affected his assessment of the realpolitik. I put it to him that the progress of the Ukraine war thus far can be seen as a repudiation of his “realist” theory of international affairs. The smaller power is outperforming the greater, in part through the sheer moral conviction of its people defending their homeland — evidence, surely, of the intangible moral element that is missing from his coldly “realist” world view?
“The key word here is nationalism,” he responds. “There’s no doubt that when the Russians invaded Ukraine, nationalism came racing to the fore, and that Ukrainian nationalism is a force multiplier. There’s also no doubt that nationalism is not part of the realist theory of international politics that I have, but nationalism is consistent with realism. Nationalism and Realism fit together rather neatly. But the point you want to remember is that Nationalism is also at play on the Russian side. And the more time goes by, and the more the Russians feel that the West has its gun sights on Russia, and is trying to not only defeat Russia, but knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers, the more Russian nationalism will kick in. You want to be very careful not to judge the outcome of this war at this particular juncture. This war has got a long time to go and it’s going to play itself out in ways that are hard to predict. But I think there is a good chance that in the end, the Russians will prevail.”
Bleakly, Mearsheimer now believes that the opportunity for peace has been lost, and that there is no realistic deal that could be reached in Ukraine. Russia will not surrender the gains made in Eastern Ukraine, while the West cannot tolerate their continued occupation; meanwhile, a neutral Ukraine is also impossible, as the only power capable of guaranteeing that neutrality is the US, which would of course be intolerable to Russia. As he puts it, succinctly:
“There are no realistic options. We’re screwed.”
He believes that escalation is likely, and the chance of a nuclear event is “non-trivial”. He lays out his rationale for why the Russians might well go there, step by step:
“If the Russians were to use nuclear weapons, the most likely scenario is that they would use them in Ukraine. And Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons of its own. So the Ukrainians would not be able to retaliate against the Russians with their own nuclear weapons. So that weakens deterrence. Furthermore, if the Russians use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the West, and here we’re talking mainly about the United States, is not going to retaliate with nuclear weapons against Russia, because that would lead to a general thermonuclear war.”
Western restraint cannot be relied upon in this scenario, he concedes, and the chances of catastrophic escalation remain strong, which is why he considers the current rhetoric among Western leaders about defeating Russia “foolish”.
The British are “major cheerleaders” for the policy, by his assessment, pushing the United States into stronger action. “I think the British are being remarkably foolish, just like I think, the Poles, the Baltic states, and the Americans.”
Sweden and Finland meanwhile, with their Nato membership bids, are only making the situation more dangerous. The idea that Russia is poised to invade either Finland or Sweden is a “figment of the West’s imagination” and their membership of the security pact will only heighten Russia’s sense that it is being deliberately encircled. He believes their applications should be rejected, and that nobody should have the “right” to join a security pact like Nato.
Mearsheimer’s logic all points in the same direction: if there is no peace deal now possible in Ukraine, the only logical outcome is ongoing fighting; ongoing fighting will logically lead to escalation, particularly if Russia appears to be losing; and escalation may very well eventually take a nuclear form, at which point a great power nuclear conflict becomes a real possibility.
A more positive eventual outcome than this, of course, will falsify his theory and prove him wrong. I ask him, if the Ukraine conflict ends less badly — perhaps with Russia withdrawing or accepting a fudge, Ukraine strengthened and no nuclear event — will he admit he was wrong?
“Of course,” he says. “International Politics operates in a world of what I would call radical uncertainty, it’s very hard to figure out what the future looks like, it’s very hard to make predictions… Is there a possibility that the Russians will cave at some point? I think there’s a small possibility. I also think there’s a non-trivial chance that this will lead to nuclear war. And when you marry the consequences of nuclear war with the possibility, in my mind, that means you should be remarkably cautious. Let me illustrate this by this analogy. If I have a gun, and the barrel has 100 chambers, and I put five bullets in that barrel. And I say to you, Freddie, I’m gonna pull the trigger and put the gun up to your head. But don’t worry, there’s only a 5% chance that I will kill you… The question you have to ask yourself is, are you going to be nervous? Are you going to be scared stiff? …The consequences here involve nuclear war. So there only has to be a small probability that John is right.”
The common critique of this line of argument is that it becomes hard to see how the behaviour of a nuclear power could ever be curtailed. The bully could always wield the threat of nuclear disaster to get away with a new atrocity. And that logic also leads to disaster. So where would Mearsheimer draw the line? His answers are unambiguous.
First, he believes without hesitation that the existing Nato countries must be defended, notwithstanding the risks.
“The Baltic states are in Nato. Poland and Romania are in Nato. They have an article 5 guarantee. If the Russians were to attack those countries, we would have to come to the defence of those countries, there’s no question about that. I would support that.”
More surprisingly, on the subject of China and Taiwain, which you might think bears a resemblance to Russia and Ukraine as a smaller Western-backed entity in the orbit of a rival regional hegemon, he takes the opposite view.
“I have a fundamentally different view on China than I do on Russia. And therefore, my thinking about Taiwan is different from my thinking about Ukraine. I believe that China is a peer competitor of the United States, and that it threatens to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. … From an American point of view, that’s unacceptable. And I think that’s correct. I think the United States should not want China to dominate Asia, the way we dominate the western hemisphere. So we’re going to go to great lengths to contain China. And for purposes of containing China, it is important for us to defend Taiwan.”
Mearsheimerism, then, is not quite what either his followers or his detractors might think it is. It is not an anti-war doctrine (his branch of “Offensive Realism” specifically sees aggression as a necessary part of great powers’ survival); nor is it fundamentally sceptical of American power. He supports American power being projected in its interests, but believes that the war in Ukraine is a distraction from the real threat, which is China, and worse, will drive Russia into the arms of China when it is in America’s interests to drive them apart.
A week before we met, Isaac Chotiner published a transcript of a telephone interview with Mearsheimer in the New Yorker. It was ostensibly about Ukraine, but Chotiner pushed Mearsheimer to talk about his recent meeting with Viktor Orbán. Which he refused to do. The effect was to imply that he was covering up murky friendships in the illiberal (and Russia-sympathetic) fringes of Europe.
Mearsheimer tells me, which he refused to do on the phone to Chontiner, that he was in Hungary to promote the translation of his latest book The Great Delusion, and that the prime minister and president requested a meeting via the publisher. He says he jumped at the chance, and ended up having a three-hour conversation with Orbán.
“I was very interested in talking to him for two reasons. One, I was interested in hearing his views on Ukraine, and how his views compare to the views of other European leaders and where he thought this was all headed. But I was also very interested in talking to him about nationalism and liberalism, the relationship between those two isms, this is one of the central themes in my book. What I have in common with Orbán is he thinks nationalism is a very important force, obviously, and I agree with him. But where I disagree with him is I think that liberalism is a very powerful force, and it’s all for the good. He, on the other hand, detests liberalism, so what he sees is liberalism and nationalism as polar opposites, and he favours nationalism, and wants to crush liberalism. I, on the other hand, see nationalism and liberalism as two ideologies that differ in important ways, but nevertheless, can coexist.”
Is he not worried that, whatever the content, by having those kinds of meetings, he will start to be seen as an activist with a political agenda more than an observer and an analyst?
“I’m not an activist, I’m an academic, I’m a scholar. And this is part of my research. My goal is to understand what’s going on in Europe… I’m not condoning Victor Orbán’s policies, or condemning them, I’m simply talking to him to understand what is going on in his mind and what is going on in Hungary and what is going on in Europe more generally… The fact that people are trying to smear me because I talked to Viktor Orbán is hardly surprising in the context that we now operate, because people are really not that interested these days in talking about facts and logic. What they prefer to do is to smear people who they disagree with.”
It is perhaps not surprising that Mearsheimer’s brand of cold realism has become popular in our increasingly multipolar, competitive world. But there is an impassive, observational quality to it which sounds negative and even cynical to the progressive ear. I ask him whether this uncertain, multipolar world is here to stay and if so, is that a good thing?
“I think it’s definitely here to stay. And I think it’s more dangerous than the Cold War was. I was born and raised during the Cold War, and the world was bipolar at that point in time… During the Cold War, we had the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Unipolar Moment, you just had the sole pole, the United States. And today, you have three great powers, the United States, China, and Russia. Now, you could not have great power politics in the unipolar world, because there was only one great power. What we have today, with the US-China competition in East Asia, and the US-Russia competition, mainly over Ukraine, is two conflict dyads. They’re separate conflict dyads — US-China, US-Russia. I would argue that not only do you have two instead of one, each one of those dyads is more dangerous than the conflict dyad in the Cold War.
“The United States and Russia are almost at war in Ukraine, and we can hypothesise plausible scenarios where the United States ends up fighting against Russia in Ukraine. And then we talked about the US-China competition and the problems associated with Taiwan. And Taiwan is not the only flashpoint in East Asia, there’s also the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Korean peninsula. So you can imagine a war breaking out between the United States and China in East Asia, and a war breaking out in Ukraine involving the United States and Russia, I think more easily than you could imagine a war breaking out during the Cold War in Europe, or in East Asia involving the United States and the Soviet Union.
So I think we live in more dangerous times today than we did during the Cold War, and certainly than we did during the Unipolar Moment. And I think if anything, this situation is only going to get worse.”
I really hope you’re wrong, I say.
“I hope I’m wrong too,” he replies.
*
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Freddie Sayers is the Executive Editor of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
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***
The state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to the United States stands out as a signpost of the alignments taking place against the backdrop of the historic churning in the world order. The two leaders went to extraordinary lengths to display bonhomie but how far that impressed the two statesmen — Macron, an erudite mind and the most vocal European statesman on his continent’s integration and strategic autonomy vis-a-vis the US, and Biden, a veteran of international diplomacy — time will show.
Macron already marked his profound difference with the US stance on Ukraine, a topic that dominated his visit, in a remark in Paris on Saturday after his return, during an interview for the French channel TF1. Macron said,
“We must think about the security architecture, in which we will live tomorrow. I am talking, in particular, about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s words that NATO is approaching Russia’s borders and deploys weapons that could threaten it. This issue will be a part of the peace discussions, and we must prepare for what will come after [the Ukrainian conflict], and think how we could protect our allies and, at the same time, provide Russia with guarantees of its own security, once the sides return to the negotiation table.”
Macron made the above remark as the countdown begins for an expected large-scale Russian winter offensive in Ukraine.
While the Joint Statement issued after Macron’s visit shows that the US and France are on the same page in their criticism of Moscow’s conduct of the war in Ukraine, the nuances in the respective articulation by the two leaders during their joint press conferencecannot be missed.
Biden, of course, tore into Putin, personally holding him responsible, but Macron held back. Interestingly, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also may have marked his distance from Biden by initiating a call with Putin on Friday, his second in a row in successive months.
The readout from Moscow highlighted that while Scholz criticised Russia’s conduct of the conflict, he went on to discuss other issues with Putin and they agreed to keep in touch.
Both France and Germany are greatly concerned about a possible escalation of the war in Ukraine whereas the US is focused on supporting Kiev “for as long as it takes.”
Macron highlighted France’s 3-pronged approach: “Help Ukraine resist”; “Prevent any risk of escalation in this conflict”; and, “make sure that, when the time comes, on basis of conditions to be set by Ukrainians themselves, help build peace.”But Biden was categorical that “there is one way for this war to end the rational way: Putin to pull out of Ukraine.”
Macron maintainedthat
“We need to work on what could lead to a peace agreement, but it is for him [Ukrainian president Zelensky] to tell us when the time comes and what the choices of the Ukrainians are.”
Macron indirectly stressed the need for flexibility, saying,
“If we want a sustainable peace, we have to respect the Ukrainians to decide the moment and the conditions in which they will negotiate about their territory and their future.”
Curiously, Biden never once mentioned Zelensky, whereas, Macon openly commended “the efforts of President Zelensky to try and find a way, a path to peace while leading the heroic resistance.”
Macron stressed,
“I believe, very much need to continue to engage with him [Zelensky] because there is a genuine willingness, on behalf of Ukraine, to discuss these matters. And we acknowledge it, and we commend it.”
Apart from Ukraine, as expected, Macron’s main concern was the recent Inflation Reduction Act, a $369 billion package of subsidies and tax breaks enacted by the Biden Administration to boost American green businesses, which, from a European perspective, constitutes a protectionist measure that encourages companies to shift investments from Europe and incentivises customers to “Buy American”.
Only a month remains before the final provisions of the US law enter into force on January 1. Germany and France have hit back by joining forces to back a French push for a more subsidy-based EU industrial policy.
At the White House talks with Macron, Biden conceded that there were “glitches” in the roll-out of America’s multi-billion-dollar package of green subsidies. To quote Biden,
“There’s tweaks that we can make that can fundamentally make it easier for European countries to participate and, or be on their own, but that is something that is a matter to be worked out.”
The remark, perhaps, allows Macron to claim a takeaway from his visit. But how far Biden’s words get turned into practice remains to be seen, as chances of Congress amending the law is debatable, especially as Republicans are set to take narrow control of the House.
Clearly, the Biden-Macron meeting does not include a breakthrough on Europe’s concerns. Biden’s basic stance is that “United States makes no apology,” since the IRA legislation aims to “make sure that the United States continues… not to have to rely on anybody else’s supply chain. We’re — we are our own supply chain.”
Macron noted that he had “some very frank discussions.” He stressed,
“France simply did not come to ask for an exemption or another for — for our economy but simply to discuss the consequences of this legislation… We will continue to move forward as Europeans. And we’re not here simply, really, to ask for ‘proof of love’.”
The Americans are making a fortune from the Ukraine war — selling more gas to Europe at vastly higher prices and boosting arms exports to NATO countries who have supplied military hardware to Ukraine. The EU countries are suffering when the war in Ukraine is tipping them into recession, with inflation rocketing and a devastating squeeze on energy supplies threatening blackouts and rationing this winter.
The greening of America at the cost of European industry castsshadows on the Indo-Pacific strategy. The recent visits by Scholz and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, to Beijing in quick succession underscores that the tensions in the transatlantic alliance as a fallout of the Ukraine war have a spillover effect.
Macron’s visit to Washington showed that France’s main interest lies in “building resilience in the Pacific Islands.” Apropos China, the Biden-Macron joint statement had nothing new to announce. It resorted to a balanced formulation that the US and France will “continue to coordinate on our concerns regarding China’s challenge to the rules-based international order, including respect for human rights, and to work together with China on important global issues like climate change.”
On Taiwan, the joint statement simply reaffirmed “the importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” Conceivably, the crushing defeatTsai Ing-wen suffered in the recent Taiwanese local elections had a sobering effect.
At any rate, in their respective opening remarks at the press conference on the Indo-Pacific strategy, while Biden limited himself to an anodyne remark or two, Macron simply glossed over the subject.
Beijing must be quietly pleased that Michel picked Thursday for his visit. President Xi Jinping appreciated the EU’s ‘“goodwill of furthering relations with China.” Xi noted that the more unstable the international situation becomes and the more acute challenges the world faces, the greater global significance China-EU relations take on.
The EU’s foreign policy is at a juncture on whether to confront or cooperate with China. Global Times wrote that Michel’s visit “sent a signal that represents rational voices, that is, refusing to follow the US and treat China primarily through a political and ideological perspective…What the US wants is hegemony, but Europe wants survival, and the EU cannot achieve that without China.”
The bottom line is that as the conflict in Ukraine escalates, the neocons in the Biden Administration may feel elated, but the incipient tensions in the transatlantic relations can only aggravate.
*
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Featured image: French President Emmanuel Macron (R) and US President Joe Biden met in the White House, Washington, DC, Dec. 1, 2022 (Source: Indian Punchline)
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***
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee. – Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass
Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues.
As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy involving Simon & Schuster and Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The report with the same information was repeated across the media.
The publishing company had offered limited-edition, authenticated, hand-signed copies of the book for $600 each. Nine Hundred collectors and die-hard fans bought a copy, many, no doubt, caught in hero worship and the thought that a Dylan-penned signature would grant them a bit of his fame through the touch of his hand upon their lives.
The quest for immortality takes many forms, and the laying on of hands, even when done remotely through a signature, has long been a popular form of sleight-of-hand.
I once shook hands with an Elvis hologram impersonator and the thrill vibrated for days.
But these Dylan aficionados noticed something strange about the signatures: They didn’t seem to be actual signatures individually written with a pen by Dylan. As anyone knows from their own handwriting, no two signatures are the same, since the human hand is not a copy machine. These signatures were identical.
It turned out that those who smelled a deception were right. Under pressure from astute purchasers, Simon & Schuster had to come clean – sort of. They offered to refund all purchasers for the deception. They released the following statement:
To those who purchased The Philosophy of Modern Song limited edition, we want to apologize. As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form. We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.
This statement is a perfect example of double-talk, and more.
Then Dylan also apologized, saying that he used an auto-pen since he was suffering from vertigo and “during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.” His apology seems sincere compared to the publisher’s double-talk, but then again, so did his signatures. And the controversy has spread to the limited edition prints of his artwork.
“Limited edition prints” – a deception in itself, as if limiting the number of copies of an original painting makes them more original. Ten dittos instead of eleven.
However, I am not primarily concerned with the nuances of this tempest in a teapot, which might disappear as fast as yesterday’s bluster, or it may forever tarnish Dylan’s reputation, which would be a shame if it also damaged the genuine greatness of his songs.
I would like to focus on the following matters that I have seen through its window: language usage, a society of copies, reading texts closely, and the degradation of literacy, all of which are tangled together with non-stop government propaganda disseminated by the corporate mass media to form a major social issue.
First, language. Note in the Simon & Schuster apology the words: “As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form.” This is a clear deception twice over. The books do not contain original signatures; they contain machine copies of it. Phrasing it that way allows the company to plead innocent while also apologizing for its innocence as if they consider themselves guilty. What exactly are they saying they are apologizing for? Deceptions dittoed?
And the phrase “As it turns out,” implies that Simon & Schuster was surprised that the signatures were machine generated, which is highly improbable. It also suggests they are not responsible; such verbiage approximates the common, passive introductory phrase “it so happens” or the equally non-literate “hopefully” to begin a sentence.
“It so happens” that I am writing these words and “it so happens” that you are reading them…as if we are victims of our own free choices. Passive language for victims of fate who have learned to write and talk this way to avoid responsibility even for their own hope, as in: “I hope.” Or maybe the widespread copycat use of “hopefully” is an unconscious attempt to deny pervasive hopelessness. No matter how many times you repeat something doesn’t make it true.
The use of such language is a reflection of an age in which determinism has for decades been repeatedly promulgated to extinguish people’s belief in freedom. Ditto: Saying “the exact same” doesn’t make the same more same through redundancy. You can’t get any more same than same since same means identical, or any more opposite than opposite even if you say “the exact opposite.” The English language is suffering.
To top it off, an esteemed book publishing company nearly a century old concludes with a sentence that a high school freshman – circa 1960 before all the dumbing-down of schooling – would realize was redundant with the words “immediately” (misplaced) and “immediate,” as if repetition would emphasize their contrition. “We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.” Ditto.
But who notices these things?
Discerning readers – whether of the examples above or of a subtle controlled-opposition media article suggesting one thing while meaning another – are becoming rarer and rarer. Ideology, political party allegiances, and plain stupidity block many from grasping propaganda and media claims made out of thin air.
Anonymous sources, subtle phrasing, real or imagined intelligence sources, the use of words such as may, might, possible, could be, etc., are a staple of so much writing and broadcast news that they fly by people used to the speed of the digital life with texting and internet browsing where repetition and copying are king. Yes, speed kills in so many ways. The repetition of talking points across the major corporate media, something carefully studied and confirmed years ago, has become so obvious to anyone who chooses to take the time to investigate. It’s not hard to do but few bother; they are too “busy.” Thus propaganda and gibberish pass unnoticed.
Just as “The Real McCoy” (see the opening “Refrain” of Hillel Schwartz’ The Culture of the Copy) was a fake and the phrase came to represent the genuine to supposedly confirm authenticity, we are now living in an era of the counterfeit everywhere. Counterfeits of counterfeits. Imposters. Actors playing actors. Counterfeit traitors. Fabricated reality and copies of copies. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. Lies about not lying. (See The New York Times’, The Guardian’s, etc. deceptive, hypocritical, and self-serving joint letter asking the U.S government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.)
The Dylan controversy is a very minor example of a major issue that is little appreciated for its devastating impact on society.
For another minor example, we may ask how many times does one have to see the replay of Christian Pulisic’s recent goal against Iran in the 2022 World Cup to grasp its brilliance and to see that he was injured? Two, three, five, ten? And this is a sporting event, not some mall shooting or serious issue of war. In a digital high-tech world repetition is the norm. What does repetition do to the mind?
What does repetition do to the mind?
Despite the great sportsmanship shown by the players from both the U.S. and Iran on the pitch, U.S. Men’s Soccer executives, by deleting the Islamic Republic emblem from Iran’s flag on its social media sites, and the U.S. media tried repeatedly to politicize the game into a battle between the good Americans and the evil Iranians, even while a U.S. regime change color revolution was being attempted on the streets of Iran.
What does repetitious propaganda do to the mind?
Technology has not just allowed for machine signatures but has made us in many ways machine people who need to be hammered over the head time and again – and to like it. To go back again and again for more. Everything but life has become repeatable.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby’s reply to Nick’s statement In The Great Gatsby – “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick tells Gatsby, who responds, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, off course you can!” – perfectly captures the “reality” of a digital screen culture of illusions in which many people have unconsciously come to believe that you can instantly replay life as well.
Indeed, to make people into machines is the goal of trans-humanists Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda. Artificial intelligence (AI) for artificial people. While there are innocent examples of repetition, the use of it is a fundamental tactic of propaganda, whether that be through words or images. And we are drowning in repeated media/government propaganda about the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid19, Iran, China, Syria, etc.
It’s as easy as pie to innocently repeat, as I learned recently when my wife asked me to use her cell phone to take a photograph. Bumpkin that I am who despises these machines, rather than briefly hitting the button I held it down for a few seconds and took the same photo 67 ½ times. It just so happened.
But the propagandists’ repetitions are no accident. You can’t condemn Julian Assange year after year for posting U.S. war crimes – the Afghanistan War Logs – and then try to save your own ass after the man has been persecuted for more than a decade and counting. The media who did this and then wrote the recent letter are counterfeit traitors to the truth and agents of the war criminals. To call them journalists is to misuse language: They are imposters.
What does repetition do to the mind? asked Tweedledum to his identical twin Tweedledee.
Tweedledee replied, Look what it’s done to us.
*
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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***
On November 30, the European Commission, the executive of the European Union, proposed “options to Member States to make sure that Russia is held accountable for the atrocities and crimes committed during the war in Ukraine.”
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission, in selective condemnation, tweeted “Russia must pay for its horrific crimes.”
Russia must pay for its horrific crimes.
We will work with the ICC and help set up a specialised court to try Russia’s crimes.
With our partners, we will make sure that Russia pays for the devastation it caused, with the frozen funds of oligarchs and assets of its central bank pic.twitter.com/RL4Z0dfVE9
The hypocrisy displayed by von der Leyen and the EU is nothing short of remarkable. It would seem the EU collective of unelected bureaucrats suffers from amnesia. Twenty four years ago, Bill Clinton and NATO mercilessly bombed Yugoslavia, targeting civilian infrastructure. Rick Rozoff enumerates the war crimes:
A passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters, a vacuum cleaner factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27 other Chinese injured. Cluster bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium ordnance were used widely. No one, not a single individual, has been held accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and exaggerating atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate a war. Few Western politicians and journalists would have escaped that charge over their roles in 1999.
“There were aspects of the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia that were in breach of accepted norms of warfare, the greatest example being the bombing of the TV station. NATO deliberately targeted unarmed civilian non-combatants, that’s the bottom line,” Duncan Bullivant, author of a report on Kosovo for London’s Centre for European Reform, told the Irish Times in 2000.
No tribunal was organized for the psychopaths responsible for terrorizing and murdering Serbs. Bill Clinton, also responsible for attacking Iraq and killing civilians, in addition to making sure Iraqi children starved to death under a medieval sanctions regime, was not held responsible. In fact, he was described in “Churchillian tones” by aides and the corporate media. Clinton’s illegal and immoral bombing of the former Yugoslavia made George W. Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq easier.
Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.
Ursula von der Leyen and the EU have blood on their hands. European countries inserted Eurofighters, Tornados, MK 80 series bombs, and other munitions and death machines into the Yemen conflict. “Are European arms companies therefore aiding and abetting alleged war crimes committed by the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Yemen?” asks the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
Despite documented attacks on civilian homes, markets, hospitals and schools – conducted by the Saudi/UAE-led military coalition – transnational companies based in Europe continue to supply Saudi Arabia and the UAE with weapons, ammunition and logistical support. European government officials authorized the exports by granting licenses.
Despite ample evidence of war crimes, NATO and the USG received a free pass. “The United Nations’ chief war crimes prosecutor said today that there was no basis for a formal investigation into whether NATO committed war crimes during the bombing of Yugoslavia,” the New York Times reported on June 3, 2000.
NATO is the preferred executioner. Amnesty International, in 2014, criticized the USG and NATO for ignoring its numerous war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan.
NATO was also accused of committing war crimes in Libya. A report issued in 2012 by the Arab Organization for Human Rights, together with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the International Legal Assistance Consortium, detailed wanton violation of human rights by NATO.
“Among civilian sites visited by the mission that had been struck by NATO bombs and missiles were schools and colleges, a Zliten regional food warehouse, the Office of the Administrative Controller in Tripoli, and private homes,” the report notes.
In November of 2011, “the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo, stated that ‘there are allegations of crimes committed by NATO forces (and) these allegations will be examined impartially and independently.’” The crimes include the “lynching” of Moammar Gaddafi, a brutal act that prompted a chortle from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
No special commission was empaneled to look into these war crimes, although the ICC did order the arrest of Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and other supporters. NATO refused to admit civilians were killed after 7,642 air-to-surface weapons were used.
“Although the prosecutor of the ICC said that he would investigate war crimes by both sides, the eagerness with which he seized on allegations of a policy by Gaddafi to encourage rape, with hundreds of victims, and the provision of ‘viagra-type medicaments’ to his forces, did nothing to enhance a perception of objectivity when they went unsubstantiated,” writes Ian Martin, the director of the UN’s support mission in Libya from 2011-12 and the former head of Amnesty International.
The war crimes of the EU and NATO cannot compare to those of the United States Government, an aggressive and repeat offender of international law. Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 state quite explicitly:
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away or for any other motive.
Russia is indeed in violation of this specific protocol. However, here in the “West,” we are only given half of the story. In fact, we are given less than half, and are expected to believe a passel of lies, daily cranked out by the corporate war propaganda media. No mention of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine dedicated to abducting, torturing, and killing ethnic Russians in Lugansk, Donetsk, and elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine. For an example of the brutal punishment these ultranationalists inflict on their enemies, look no further than the arson of the labor building in Odesa.
Corporate media mention of war crimes is highly selective and biased.
No mention of the USG-orchestrated illegal coup overthrowing the elected leader of Ukraine for his crime of seeking a better deal with Russia than the neoliberal espousing EU.
No mention of Neo-Nazi thugs setting fire to a labor building in Odesa, killing around 50 or more anti-Maidan activists (this largely ignored news item is buried beneath stories depicting alleged Russian crimes).
No mention of the ignored Minsk I and II agreements hammered out in 2014 and 2015 to end the “civil war” between the Neo-Nazi brigades embedded in the Ukrainian military and “separatists” in Donbas.
The USG and its European “partners” (in crime) count on the amnesiac perception of a perpetually lied to and manipulated public to support, or remain disconnected and apathetic to its bloody neoliberal wars and resource-grabbing predations.
Iraq serves as the primary example, although what the USG did there is largely forgotten and not considered relevant to the conflict in Ukraine.
Iraq’s civilian population was dependent on industrial capacities. The U.S. assault left Iraq in a near apocalyptic condition as reported by the first United Nations observers after the war. Among the facilities targeted and destroyed were:
electric power generation, relay and transmission;
water treatment, pumping and distribution systems and reservoirs;
telephone and radio exchanges, relay stations, towers and transmission facilities;
food processing, storage and distribution facilities and markets, infant milk formula and beverage plants, animal vaccination facilities and irrigation sites;
railroad transportation facilities, bus depots, bridges, highway overpasses, highways, highway repair stations, trains, buses and other public transportation vehicles, commercial and private vehicles;
oil wells and pumps, pipelines, refineries, oil storage tanks, gasoline filling stations and fuel delivery tank cars and trucks, and kerosene storage tanks;
sewage treatment and disposal systems; factories engaged in civilian production, e.g., textile and automobile assembly; and
historical markers and ancient sites.
However, there is a difference between Putin’s SMO and Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Russia faces an antagonistic enemy on its border, installing missiles systems and conducting military exercises, while supporting rabid ultranationalist Neo-Nazis busy bombing ethnic Russian civilians in Donbas.
Iraq, on the other hand, did not have troops and missiles on the border of the United States, and it did not pose a threat to USG “interests” in the Middle East. It was a neoliberal hit job to take down an Arab nation that was at the time the most advanced in the Middle East (Libya, the most advanced nation in Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa, was also taken out under false “humanitarian” pretense). The neocons lied about weapons of mass destruction, same as they are now lying about Russia wanting to reclaim its lost Soviet territory.
Ursula von der Leyen presides over a criminal organization responsible for the death and destruction of manufactured “enemies” that do not threaten Europe. She is, in essence, calling for the freezing of Europeans dependent on natural gas from Russia at bargain basement prices and war without end or a perceivable exit.
Psychopaths lie and wage war without compunction. Biden and his coterie of neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” have flatly stated there will be no peace until Zelensky and his ultranationalist psychopaths decide to negotiate with Putin. They have absolutely no incentive to do so, considering the manifest and irrational hatred of all things Russian.
“Andriy Biletsky, Leader of the National Corps party, threatened President Volodymyr Zelensky with violence in 2019 if he ordered Ukrainian military forces to pull back from the Donbas,” writes David Shavin.
Biletsky was the first commander of the Azov Battalion and a co-founder of the nationalist movement Socialist National party—in other words, he is a dedicated neo-Nazi guilty, among other crimes, of beating a journalist within an inch of his life. Biletsky’s philosophy can be encapsulated by the following quote: it is the job of the neo-Nazis to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen.”
This is the sort of individual millions of woefully ignorant people unknowingly support when they put a little yellow and blue Ukrainian flag on their social media accounts.
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Many scientists lobbying for the deregulation of agricultural biotechnology ‘new genomic techniques’ (NGTs) in the European Union have either direct or indirect interests in commercialising and marketing new genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They have patents or patent applications or other connections to the seed industry.
CNN didn’t come out and directly accuse Russia of sending mail bombs and animal parts to Ukrainian embassies in Europe. There is no evidence of that, not that evidence gets in the way of reality-anemic war propagandists working for the national security state and its corporate media propaganda division.
Football diplomacy brought Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan together in Doha for the opening of the World Cup 2022 in Qatar. Years of tension between the two were broken with a friendly handshake. The big differences between the two large countries centered on Erdogan’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization banned in Egypt, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and UAE, but not banned in America.
The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is speeding up its design of a common payment system, which has been closely discussed for nearly a year with the Chinese under the stewardship of Sergey Glazyev, the EAEU’s minister in charge of Integration and Macro-economy.
Originally, the Bush Doctrine was a political phrase with the aim to describe the US foreign policy goals during the 43rd US President George W. Bush (Bush Junior), 2001−2009. The doctrine had four basic standpoints. All of them were centered around American military superiority after the Cold War 1.0 as the US being the only global hyperpower in international relations.
Years ago as the head of a fairly large group of psychoanalytic psychiatrists in Philadelphia, a group that had formed in response to the inroads of managed care – inroads that actually kept patients from the insurance benefits to which they were entitled, among other things – the old adage about herding cats was often in the air. Physicians were generally stubbornly independent and they tended to resist any attempts to impose uniformity, even when in agreement with a common mission.
The US military industrial complex has made news with another eye-wateringly expensive product, a near totemic tribute to waste in a time of crisis. The $700 million B-21 Raider stealth bomber was unveiled by Northrop Grumman Corp. and the United States Air Force on December 2 at Airforce Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.
The United States and NATO are supplying Kiev not only with increasing quantities of weapons, but with long-range weapon systems and projectiles that are automatically directed at targets. As a result, Russia uses increasingly sophisticated weaponry. All this results in the escalation to increasingly dangerous levels of military confrontation between NATO and Russia.
On the 31st of January, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau addressed the nation regarding the Freedom Convoy protest movement at a Press Conference from an undisclosed location which was broadcast live.
On the heels of Biden’s September 12th Executive Order titled The National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, I wrote two days later that it “is a complete capitulation of our government to Big Pharma, the biotechnology industry and the entire transhuman cabal that wants to create Humanity 2.0 by changing our genetic structure.”
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink—the company which promises to enable a direct interface between the human brain and computers—plans to begin human trials of its implantable brain chip, the billionaire said during a live-streamed event demonstrating the technology Wednesday. Here’s what it’s all about:
Musk, who co-founded the company, said Neuralink has sought approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human clinical trials for the device and said the company expects it will be able to plant its first brain chip in a human in six months.
Here’s how it works: Neuralink’s brain-computer interface uses thousands of small electrodes embedded in the brain to read signals emitted by neurons and transmit them to a computer.
Musk claimed one of the first real-world applications for Neuralink’s chip could be to restore vision in people who have lost their sight or even restore motor function in people suffering from paralysis, although this wasn’t shown off in any of the demonstrations.
The billionaire and world’s richest person also said he believes one of the early uses of this technology could allow a paralyzed person to interface with a computer by being able to type and move a mouse cursor with their brain signals.
The company demonstrated a surgical robot that it claims is capable of safely implanting Neuralink’s chip onto a human by precisely inserting electrode threads into a person’s brain while avoiding critical blood vessels.
The company’s current implantable chip is around the size of a quarter and Musk claimed it has the same thickness as the piece of skull that needs to be removed to implant it, making it completely unobtrusive—unlike other similar devices which have visible wires and tend to be larger.
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Comments Off on Interface between the Human Brain and Computers: Elon Musk’s Neuralink Could be Trialed in Humans in 2023. Here’s What You Need to Know
My aim is to highlight the splendid scientific and literary achievement of a great and multi-faceted scholar.
Michel has guided the Global Research vessel since he founded this flag ship of enlightened activism in 2001. It has been my great honour and pleasure to work with Michel and the GR Team in the cause of exposing the lies and crimes of Corona officialdom. This exposure forms a necessary condition for restoring a measure of health to our own now-endangered species.
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“You need to designate the group as a terrorist group and seize their assets and impair them.” —Planning Notes of Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister of the Canadian Government. Feb. 13, 2022 in Preparation for a Clampdown on the Freedom Convoy Members
We are in dire need of some effective reckoning with the culprits who manufactured and who continue to exploit the COVID-19 Apocalypse. The terms for such a reckoning were suggested by the many negative commentaries raised in response to a trial balloon calling for a “Pandemic Amnesty.” Brown University Professor, Emily Oster, floated this much-discussed proposal for an amnesty in The Atlantic Magazine.
If Oster’s concepts were to be implemented, all legal accountability would be bypassed and deleted for a catastrophic crime spree mounted in the name of fighting COVID. This criminal activity gave rise to tsunamis of lies about many topics including COVID tests and deaths. The ongoing COVID Hoax continues to energize the accelerating decline in the viability of many societies worldwide.
The manufactured COVID crisis has proven to be a catalyst in the radicalization of increasingly authoritarian dictatorships. These regimes are caught up in intertwined globalist agendas whose effect is to unhinge governments from even a semblance of adherence to the rule of law. This decline into lawless tyranny is already well advanced in many polities including Canada, the United States, Israel, and the UK.
Oster’s essay was published prominently in a venue well within the regime whose aim is to impose a template of mental conformity largely through the legacy media’s imposition of lockstep propaganda.
Oster is clearly speaking for a large and influential constituency with her request that an amnesty should be granted. This double-edged proposal includes an implicit admission that serious crimes have indeed been committed in the name of fighting COVID-19.
Many commentators have aligned their voices in rejecting Oster’s proposal. Ever since the WHO-declared pandemic began, Oster has used her academic and journalistic platforms to actively demonize critics of the COVID officialdom.
A key objective of COVID-driven globalism is to transfer jurisdiction over health care from national governments to the UN’s World Health Organization. This uploading of authority from elected officials to unelected operatives at the United Nations is meant to advance the centralization of authority. Such supranational centralization is avidly sought by the leadership of the World Economic Forum and the corporatist agencies and interests its leadership represents.
Oster argues that the COVID saga developed under a dark cloud of uncertainty and confusion. As she would have it, everyone’s judgment was equally impaired. Getting things right or wrong was, in Oster’s opinion, simply a matter of luck. “We simply didn’t know.”
The Big Kill
Some, however, obviously did know more than others. More important yet, some of those who did hold superior levels of scientific expertise and understanding also had the courage and temerity to speak truth to power. One of them is the outspoken Alberta physician, Dr. Roger Hodkinson. He refers to the unfolding holocaust in our midst as “the big kill.”
Even now, the main critics of the scientific and ethical impoverishment afflicting COVID officialdom continue to face serious recriminations. The critics of lockdowns as well as mandatory masking and COVID jabs are subject to efforts aimed at intimidating them into silence by ruining their careers, reputations, and livelihoods.
As with the assaults on Dr. Charles Hoffe and Dr. Francis Christian in Canada, the persecution of Dr. Peter McCullough in the United States points to the deep corruption permeating many of the medical profession’s governing bodies.
There are scores of illustrations revealing the severity of the witchhunt aimed at those engaged in exposing the unscientific bafflegab integral to the COVID-19 power grab.
Oster’s many critics, including me, have made it clear that we reject the core concepts supporting her proposal for an amnesty. Such a concession makes no sense, but especially now that we are gaining a fuller sense of the enormous scale and intensity of the drive to cull the human population. This depopulation is happening simultaneously with the onslaught of transhumanist projects aimed at altering the genetic, biological and physical characteristics of the enfeebled survivors.
On a more personal level, we refuse to ignore the treatment that Oster and her cronies directed against those of us who now stand vindicated because of our refusals to take the untested gene-modifying jabs.
Saying No to Oster’s Whitewash
Of many dozens of thoughtful critiques of Oster’s Atlantic essay, Neil Oliver’s commentary stands out for its principled balance and coherence. An archaeologist and historian who shot to prominence in making documentary films in the UK, Oliver sees as “absurd” Oster’s argument that an amnesty is required to “move forward.” Oster’s interpretation opens the door to what Oliver characterizes as a cynical “whitewash.”
Oliver reminds us that the Covidian crimes that Oster seeks to sweep under the rug include the hugely destructive travesty of mandatory lockdowns that treated citizens like prisoners to be subdued.
The lockdowns targeted workers and small businesses. The lockdowns were meant to impoverish and demoralize many people; to drive them into depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
Oliver also highlighted the invocation of coercive state power to enforce mandatory masking whose destructive impacts include the extensive damage done to the healthy learning of school-aged children.
“Emergency Measures” as Subversive Means of Grabbing Power and Money
In the prelude to the imposition of the most massive medical procedure ever imposed on the global population, many of even the most basic rules for the development of relatively safe and effective medical products were ignored and thereby transgressed. The requirements for animal and double-blind placebo tests, for instance, were mostly neglected or sabotaged by the drug makers as well as by their cronies in thoroughly captured and corrupted federal regulatory agencies.
One of the main means of bypassing the safety rules was provided by a legal abomination known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). The US Federal and Drug Administration (FDA) clarified the distribution of the Pfizer-BionTech shots was “unapproved” yet “permitted.”
Underlying this internally contradictory statement is officialdom’s ill-backed position that the supposedly new coronavirus was so lethal that it created a global emergency, one that justified the emergency release of improperly-tested medical products.
[See Michel Chossudovsly, The Worldwide Corona Crisis: Global Coup d’État Against Humanity. Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, (Montreal: Centre for Research in Globalization, 2022), Chapter 8, passim]
The legal provisions of EUA were put in place as a one of the sweetheart deals extended by corrupt lawmakers seeking inclusion in Big Pharma’s financial bonanza. The EUA protects drug makers from being sued for the injuries and deaths caused by their hastily produced products. When seen in the light of the abundant evidence of the millions of injuries and deaths caused by the COVID injections, the EUA can be seen as a federal license to kill and to maim on a grand scale.
The criminal abuses of the authoritarian powers claimed in the name of emergency measures, draw on many of the precedents established following the pervasive misrepresentations of the 9/11 false flag. See this.
The widespread mischaracterization of the events of 9/11 in 2001 was exploited to justify the massive inflation of arbitrary powers available to the executive branches at all levels of government. With the new powers came the capacity of top executive authorities to designate, incarcerate and sometimes torture and kill suspected “terrorists” without the safeguards of due process.
Many governments abused the authority to classify their most effective political opponents as terrorists, a travesty being attempted again in the 2020s by the Biden government in USA and the Trudeau government in Canada.
The manufactured COVID crisis resulted in the further expansion of emergency measures powers far beyond those seized in 2001. Beginning in 2020 many governments pushed their agendas forward by invoking the shortcut of regulatory fiat to bypass the more demanding requirements of legislative procedures.
An elaborate collection of emergency measure declarations piled up across Canada culminating in the federal executive branch’s decision in February of 2022 to invoke the outgrowth of the War Measures Act. Some facets of the process attending the Canadian government’s invocation of the Emergency Act on 14 Feb. 2022 will be highlighted below.
A Turn Against the Sanctity of Life and the Mysteries Animating the Unique Spirit of Every Human Being
The COVID emergency measures are already creating the prototype for many “Green” emergency measures to follow. To help this process along we are being subjected to a series of cabal-created and cabal-augmented catastrophes. From war mongering to attacks on food supplies, energy sources, supply chains, as well as on any and all platforms providing economic security for average working people, an unprecedented plan of global depopulation and enfeeblement is well underway.
Suddenly even the façade of respect for the sanctity of human life is being abolished by many of those engaged in our top-down governance. Such governors and their agents apparently want to make a virtue of creating the conditions for the breakdown of human fertility as well as for surges of injury, sickness and premature deaths.
What are we to make of this turn, a turn by some of the most powerful people on earth against any reverence for the eternal mysteries animating the unique spirit of every human being? The obsession with shrinking and eliminating carbon footprints is being stretched to outrageous extremes.
The Green preoccupation with eliminating carbon, the primary ingredient in the chemistry of all life, is forming the basis of the eugenic drive to eliminate people along with our footprints. This genocidal event is well reflected by a growing body of compelling evidence. The evidence includes statistics showing startling rises in all-cause mortality since the COVID injections began.
We cannot allow recognition of the lethal crime wave in our midst to be waved aside any longer as “conspiracy theories.” The stakes have become too high to allow for the continuation of such willful blindness especially on the part of those most responsible for the depopulation event unfolding in our midst.
Conflict of Interest Built into the Emergency Act Inquiry
Neil Oliver presents a succinct list of the criteria that would have to be met before there can be any consideration of amnesty for those who maliciously engineered and continue to broaden the manufactured COVID crisis. He asks, “How can you seek an amnesty and seek to put behind you things you are still doing now?” Oliver stipulated that no amnesty should be put on the table without
confessions of guilt
acceptance of culpability
taking of responsibility
necessary punishment
assurances that nothing similar will ever be done again
A common thread running through all these criteria is that there would have to be some sequence leading from probing investigations to fair and objective trials of those credibly accused of pushing and exploiting the COVID crisis. Such a process would have to include provision for studying, formulating, implementing, and enforcing appropriate terms as the preconditions for any kind of amnesty settlement.
In Canada a federal investigation known as the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) is presently taking place. This inquiry veers quite far from the kind of procedures we most require across many configurations and levels of governance as exercised in both the public and private sectors.
Nevertheless, in spite of the abundant shortcomings of the inquiry, the Canadian example opens the door of national and international consideration to some aspects of what a proper investigation of the COVID crisis and its attending crimes might look like.
The Emergency Act was initially invoked by the Liberal Party minority government led by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The enactment came in response to the many-faceted public education activities generated by the Truckers Freedom Convoy and its supporters over a three-week period in late January and February of 2022. The Truckers’ Convoy touched down in Ottawa and in several sympathy protests organized along the Canada-US border.
The Public Order Emergency Commission was established to fulfill the provision of the Emergency Act that calls for a Canadian government inquiry to be followed by a report to both legislative bodies of Parliament. This inquiry is “to examine and assess” the soundness of the Canadian government’s decision to invoke the Emergency Act which it did from February 14 to February 23 of 2022. See this.
The biggest problem with the POEC is that it was largely created of, by, and for the Liberal Party government of Justin Trudeau. Trudeau thus finds himself in a classic conflict of interest. The Trudeau government has engaged in establishing the makeup and procedures to investigate federal actions and decisions for which Justin Trudeau is ultimately responsible.
This setup reflects the problem that Neil Oliver anticipated. In rejecting Emily Oster’s call for a COVID amnesty, Oliver predicted that the main protagonists in creating and exploiting the COVID crisis “are going to investigate themselves and each other.”
How might this Catch 22 be transcended in future processes of investigation? What new departures in procedure would be required to move beyond the phenomenon of having COVID culprits investigate other COVID culprits? In the Canadian context this problem is compounded because of the actions and decisions made by many judges. By and large Canadian judges abandoned their judicial independence by making themselves enforcers rather than objective arbitrators of government COVID measures. See this.
The Liberal Party bias of the Emergency Act Inquiry was well reflected in Trudeau’s choice of a well-known Liberal Party insider, Justice Paul S. Rouleau, to lead the POEC. Before becoming a judge, Paul Rouleau helped elect and staff the Liberal governments of Prime Ministers John Turner and Paul Martin. Paul Rouleau was briefly a partner in Heenan Blaike, the Montreal law firm that hired both Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien after each of them left the job of prime minister. See this and this.
True to his reputation for speciousness, Trudeau explained to the public that the Emergency Act Inquiry was initiated through the Prime Minister’s benevolence rather than on the basis of legislative requirement. Trudeau announced,
“We called this inquiry so Canadians could see exactly why we needed to invoke the Emergency Act, and how, when we invoked it, we invoked it in ways that were responsible, limited and targeted on solving the problems as quickly as possible.”
Whose Violence Against Persons and Property?
The question of whether or not the Trudeau government had “reasonable grounds” to invoke the Emergency Act is the subject of the report being prepared by Justice Rouleau on behalf of the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC). Commissioner Rouleau’s final report is due on February 6, 2023.
A key aspect of the Commissioner’s findings will be based on his assessment of whether federal authorities acted in accord with a key provision of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act (CSIS ACT).
Section 2 (c) of the CSIS Act, which was reproduced in February of 2022 as part of the Proclamation Declaring a Public Order Emergency, stipulates that a threat to Canada’s security exists when “ activities within or relating to Canada [are] directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state.” See this and this.
A major theme addressed throughout many of the Commission’s examinations of more than 70 witnesses during a six-week period, concerned various perceptions concerning the “threat” of “serious violence against persons and property.” Much of this discussion was based on the perceptions of witnesses about what they feared might happen, rather than what actually did happen.
What did happen is a peaceful protest combined with some expressions of civil disobedience in the form of illegal parking and some early rounds of excessive honking.
The discussion of violence in the inquiry’s proceedings would have been much enriched by a more comparative approach. Many Truckers and their supporters surely conceived of their own actions as attempts to put checks on various types of invasive violence directed at people and property through a series of ill-considered government decisions and actions.
Cancelling Out Diverse Perspectives and Interpretations to Impose a Single COVID Narrative on Canada and the World
These irrational and arguably illegal violent acts of the state were not exclusive to Canada but were replicated in varying degrees throughout many of the world’s 195 countries. A key aspect of the global reproduction of similar sets of wrongful government actions has to do with the lockstep managing and messaging of the legacy media in country after country.
How was this many-faceted coordination of media communications achieved? This subject is one that awaits penetrating rounds of national and transnational investigation. Even in the proceedings of the POEC, there are conspicuous absences when it comes to considering the role of the media.
Much like in many other countries, clearly a decision was made far above the level of Parliament and the Supreme Court that the legacy media would direct the responses of officialdom and the public to the manufactured COVID crisis. The big media venues would publicize and legitimize a uniform COVID narrative no matter how specious. They would develop and coordinate a single narrative rather than provide fair and balanced news coverage so that their audiences could have sufficient access to a range of perspectives enabling them to develop well-informed decisions for themselves and their families.
This same single narrative approach was extended even into the now-discredited medical profession where independent analysis became more the exception than the rule.
The Largest Case of Medical Malpratice Ever
Presently the most intense surge of COVID violence against people is being expressed in the unnecessary injuries, illnesses and deaths caused by the COVID injections. We are well past the point when these harms can be dismissed as occasional aberrations or rare events.
The media-reinforced blindspots concerning injection deaths and injuries are fast giving way to growing public understanding that something is going seriously awry when it comes to the extent of the growing harms being done by clot shots.
Even in the course of the Commission’s proceedings Prime Minister Trudeau and the Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, continued the mantra that the injections are “safe and effective.” In fact Trudeau asserted that his continuing promotion of COVID booster shots was an expression of his responsibility to keep Canadians “safe and alive.” See this.
Trudeau’s abject incompetence, let alone his obvious deficit in honesty, integrity and basic common sense, is making his prime ministership increasingly notorious throughout Canada and the world. See video below.
As with many top officials, Trudeau’s empty reassurances in encouraging clot-shot compliance augments the toll of the injured and dead that continue to be cut down by the largest case of medical malpractice ever. Trudeau has not yet even come to grips with the fact that the COVID jabs do not prevent infection from, or transmission of, COVID-19.
🚨 BREAKING:
In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission.
"Get vaccinated for others" was always a lie.
The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated.
This failure of the COVID injections to prevent against transmission makes a lewd mockery of coercive vaccine mandates, of vaccine passports as well as of the schemes to segregate and punish the unvaccinated. As times goes by the anti-science diatribes from the likes of Justin Trudeau help to broaden the predations of an injected bioweapon that sometimes kills people and always attacks their natural immunity.
As for the violence to property, the completely nonsensical and economically devastating lockdowns did infinitely more damage than any of slowdowns in commerce attributed to the Truckers and their supporters. Many of them took action with the goal of bringing an end to the COVID madness, but especially the economic madness done to small business, to wage-earning workers, and to those most endangered by the rapid acceleration of runaway inflation.
The Same Set of Flawed Responses to Similar Bodies of Contrived Evidence
One of the factors that helped mute early public outcries condemning the COVID restrictions and mandates was that the same sets of wrongheaded policies were introduced and implemented on a worldwide basis.
The uniformity of policies and crimes across many international borders helped cultivate forms of groupthink and conformity on an unprecedented scale. How was it that the same set of flawed responses to similar bodies of contrived evidence was replicated in country after country?
The global community requires a global investigation of how it was that the manufactured COVID crisis unfolded worldwide. The United Nations cannot be a credible participant in the conduct of this investigation given its own role, but especially that of the World Health Organization, in the genesis of this fiasco.
Indeed, part of the ongoing COVID-19 power grab and attending crime spree is to advance centralized global governance by empowering the WHO to take the lead role in supplanting the international system of sovereign nation states. Justin Trudeau is a major proponent of this “postnational” globalism. See this.
A major problem with the POEC process in Canada is that it treats the current emergency measures crisis within a national context when this manufactured crisis is best understood as part of a global phenomenon.
Indeed, one of the alarms that helped draw the Freedom Convoy to Ottawa was the realization that Parliament is becoming marginal in Trudeau’s preoccupation with sabotaging Canada’s institutions of national sovereignty. Trudeau and his WEF-groomed cabinet seem especially representative of the thesis that Canada’s current government is more based in Davos than in Ottawa. The appalling reception the Freedom Convoy faced in the national capital could be seen as the reflection of the sickly state of Canada’s Ottawa-based parliamentary democracy.
Government Acts Against the Truckers in the “Fog of War”
Of all the witnesses to appear before the POEC the Finance Minister, neocon Liberal Chrystia Freeland, came closest to setting the crisis in a wider international setting. Her testimony seemed, at least on the surface, to explain much about the genesis of the Trudeau’s government’s main plan in invoking the Emergency Act on Feb. 14.
That plan was to create an “economic incentive” for the Truckers to leave Ottawa by freezing their assets, undermining their businesses, and seizing many millions of dollars donated to their cause on Internet crowd-sourcing platforms. See this.
Freeland explained to the POEC on Nov. 24 that the plan to freeze bank accounts was developed on Feb. 13 in consultation of two unnamed banking officials. One of the bankers proposed to Freeland that the government should “sanction” the Truckers as if they were terrorists.
Within a day, this banker’s advice was adopted and implemented after an early morning First Minister zoom conference. At 4:30 pm on the afternoon of Feb. 14, Freeland and Trudeau announced the Trudeau government’s Emergency Act scheme would include the use of Canada’s financial institution to coerce the Truckers to leave Ottawa.
Without any judicial green lighting and with the proviso that the banks could not be sued for their actions, Canadians learned that financial institutions had started to seize the Truckers’ accounts as part of a larger set of attacks on the viability of their transport businesses. This announcement did result in many Truckers seeking to fend off financial ruin by firing up their rigs and pointing them out of Ottawa asap. See this.
Freeland’s quick willingness to adopt an anti-terrorist orientation towards the Truckers and their supporters is consistent with her militaristic choice of language in the POEC proceedings. Freeland made it clear that she viewed the Truckers as “illegal protestors” trying “to hold our democracy hostage.” Their strategy of parking their trucks in Ottawa for an extended period was the same as “forcing change at gunpoint.” As Freeland saw it, she was immersed in the “the fog of war” when she spoke to the bankers on Feb. 13. See this.
The advice to Freeland from the other banker was very different. He expressed the trepidation that any seizure of trucker’s accounts might be perceived “as the banking system being used as a political weapon of the government.” He added, “we [bankers] can’t be seen as an arm of the government…we can’t politicize the banks.” The unnamed bank officer concluded by suggesting that the Trudeau government might defuse the protest by dropping the mandates. See this.
Further advice to end the mandates came from Alan Kestenbaum. Kestenbaum is the American CEO of Stelco, the Hamilton-based steel maker. In a text he explained to Freeland, “I know it sucks to reverse course and back down, but does it really pay to carry on a policy in support of a mandate for a vaccine that doesn’t stop the spread of omicron.” See this.
What Transpired in the Absence of Formal Talks and Deliberations?
Prominent among the witnesses that appeared before the POEC were some of the main figures that played leading roles in getting the Freedom Convoy rolling and then instrumental once the truckers reached their destinations.
The combined testimony of the Trucker leadership has created a very valuable record of how one of the most significant protest movements in Canadian and even world history came to be. This group of witnesses included Tamara Lich, James Bauder, John Barber, Pat King, Tom Mazarro, Brigitte Belton, Daniel Bulford, Benjamin Dichter and Marco Van Huigenbos.
Like all the witnesses to appear before the POEC the Convoy leaders were cross-examined by lawyers for the POEC, for the government of Canada, and for Ottawa residents and businesses. Other groups permitted to ask questions of the witnesses included the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Democracy Fund and the Canadian Constitutional Centre. Police officers were active both as witnesses and as members of law enforcement organizations with legal standing in the proceedings.
Several witnesses from the Freedom Convoy explained how by the time they reached Ottawa they had the sense of being envoys of a very large and enthusiastic constituency. Many in this constituency of Convoy supporters had turned out to greet the Truckers, assist them, share information with them, thank them, and encourage them in their constructive quest for much-needed remedial change.
Instead of finding a decent and civil reception from the Canadian government, however, the Freedom Convoy members and their supporters were stigmatized collectively by an irate Prime Minister. Trudeau will forever be remembered for calling the diverse array of citizens who wheeled into Ottawa a “fringe minority.
In repeated rounds of antagonistic language, Trudeau made it clear that he regarded the Freedom Convoy group as a reprehensible bunch of bigoted, ignorant and hate-filled fools. When asked to explain his attacks in his testimony at the POEC hearing, Trudeau speciously denied he had called the Truckers “names.” In fact his name calling directed at the Truckers is now legendary throughout the world.
After the Truckers arrived Trudeau made himself scarce. His response made it absolutely clear that the PM and his government wanted no part in talks and deliberation. By doing so Trudeau became the primary decision maker in creating the conditions of the ensuing standoff. The Convoy participants dug in for a prolonged stay.
During their time in Ottawa the Truckers hosted many live events on social media. These events highlighted the presentations of invited doctors, lawyers, academics, and other expert practitioners.
Many of the invited presenters shared interpretations that often exposed the poverty of the standard COVID narrative pushed in lockstep by government officials and the legacy media. In this fashion Millions of people worldwide developed an appreciation for perspectives and interpretations denied them by the censorious zealots of COVID officialdom.
With some few exceptions the Truckers took the high ground on responding to the ritual spurning and defaming by their detractors. Most of the Convoy participants and supporters kept their demonstration sites as well as the locations of their parked habitations tidy. Some made a point of trying to contribute to the community of Ottawa by feeding the homeless, shovelling sidewalks and such.
Trudeau Has Been Contemplating the Invocation of the Emergency Act since 2020
In some ways the standoff provided Trudeau with a platform for the kind of wedge politics the Prime Minister embraces. In his testimony to the POEC, Trudeau indicated he was thinking of invoking the Emergency Act since the first hours of the Truckers’ arrival in Ottawa. Other testimony indicated that Trudeau had considered unleashing the Emergency Act back in the spring of 2020 when the manufactured COVID crisis first began gathering momentum.
Some members of the Trudeau government cabinet, including Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, Attorney General David Lametti and Chyrista Freelandland, referred satirically to the Freedom Convoy as a natural target of martial law and military tanks in the streets of Ottawa. Mendicino tweeted to Lametti asking him, “how many tanks are you asking for?” See this.
As the announcement of the Emergency Act became imminent, the whole project was more and more poised on the need to outlaw the Truckers as terrorists. Ever since the response to 9/11, the power grabs facilitated by the invocation of emergency measures has depended on the demonization of certain groups.
First it was Muslims that were stereotyped as the primary embodiments of “terror.” Now it is working class Truckers whose opposition to COVID policies is being transformed into “domestic terrorism” by federally-funded spin doctors such as Bernie Farber’s so-called “Anti-Hate” Network of former undercover cops and wonkey spin doctors. See this.
Since 9/11 the invention of terrorist enemies has become a lucrative business and, when successful, a source of considerable political traction for ruling parties. It seems that if Justin Trudeau, Chyrstia Freeland and Canada’s propagandistic media monopolies get their way, the Freedom Convoy is on its way to being rebranded as a “home-grown” equivalent of al-Qaeda.
Designate the Truckers as a Terrorist Group, Seize Their Assets, and Impair Them
In his cross-examination of Freeland on Nov. 24, Brendan Miller, one of the lawyers for the organizational outgrowth of the Freedom Convoy, asked the Deputy Prime Minister if she considered Tamara Lich to be a terrorist. Freeland awkwardly tried to deflect the question indicating that responsibility to designate terrorists belonged to other officials in her government.
Then Miller presented Freeland and the national audience of the POEC with a powerpoint slide picturing her own notes of Feb. 13. The notes referred to a a person described simply as “Dave.” When asked, Freeland indicated she couldn’t remember who Dave was.
In Freeland’s own handwriting the televised note indicated, “ You need to designate the group as a terrorist group and seize their assets and impair them.”
This note describes in a nutshell precisely the process that was initiated late in the afternoon of the next day. Is it possible or credible that the Trudeau government developed the banking plan and began to implement it in one day? Or is there much more to this story than anything that was revealed by the Trudeau government in the POEC proceedings?
The other main aspect of the changes that came about with the invocation of the Emergency Act, was the unleashing of police to commit acts of violent assault aimed at clearing Parliament Hill of peaceful protestors. See video below.
Weapons Said to be Smuggled into the Coutts Protest Site By Undercover Infiltrators Employed by the RCMP
The ever-controversial Brendon Miller emerged pretty much as the legal maverick of the Public Order Emergency Hearings. One of Miller’s projects in his lawyering during the POEC proceedings was to seek further evidence on the possibility that Liberal Party operatives, including a prominent PR firm, planted the much-photographed swastika as well as the Confederate flag, amidst the Parliament Hill demonstrations.
This type of tactic is not uncommon in the rough and tumble world of information wars. Planting objectionable images to smear your enemy is standard procedure for some unscrupulous lobbies.
Near the end of the proceedings Brendan Miller and Commissioner Rouleau exchanged criticisms with the result that the former was asked to leave the building. See video below.
Miller complied with Justice Rouleau’s order and then hosted a spontaneous media scrum on Wellington Street where he described his perception of a number of Liberal Party dirty tricks in the timing and redaction of document dumps. See video below.
Brendon Miller questioned Marlin Degrand, an Alberta government intelligence official with a background in the RCMP. The subject was the Trucker’s sympathy protest at Coutts on the border between Alberta and Montana. Here in nearby Lethbridge where I Iive, I have witnessed some parts of a court process involving the Crown’s treatment of four Coutts protestors charged by the RCMP with “conspiracy to commit murder.”
These men were arrested in the early hours of 14 February. The arrests took place shortly before the Emergency Act was announced and a few hours after Freeland penned her note about “the need to designate the group as terrorists.”
This sequence of events raises suspicions that the need was felt in Ottawa on Feb. 13 to have RCMP officials in Coutts immediately come up with some sort of real or fabricated evidence of a terrorist-style event. The RCMP is no stranger to entrapment of targeted individuals with the goal of creating terrorist scares to advance the political agendas of their paymasters. See this.
In his questioning of Degrand, Miller noted that public records show that the RCMP employed two female undercover agents at Coutts “from a very early point in the demonstrations.” Miller continued, indicating that the RCMP infiltrators “smuggled in a hockey bag [with] a whole bunch of guns into the protest.” Is this surprising remark connected to the still-unexplained RCMP photograph of a weapons arsenal alleged to have been seized at Coutts? See this video, see 3 hours, 13 minutes.
Transcripts of the testimony of undercover police agents at Coutts were used in the Crown’s evidence to deny bail to the four men now in jail waiting for their trial sometime in mid to late 2023. These police agents and assets were not present in the bail hearings to be cross-examined. The evidence they have given is thus problematic.
Nevertheless, based on this flawed process four men convicted of nothing were denied bail. They have been sentenced to stay in jail for a year and a half that will culminate in their show trial when their guilt or innocence will be decided.
Who would deny that the Coutts Four can be considered political prisoners in Alberta? When they do get their days in court the judge and jury will be swayed by the fact that they have already been deemed to be dangerous and untrustworthy.
Bail Hearings That Curtail Freedom of Speech, Assembly and Movement When No Guilt Has Been Proven
The abuses of judicial processes in the giving or withholding of bail have been significant in the treatment of those charged with criminal acts in connection to the activities of the Freedom Convoy movement. Many of those so charged are tagged with the nuisance allegation of “mischief.” When bail is allowed, as with the mischief charge directed at Tamara Lich, there are many conditions attached.
These conditions often prohibit the accused from using social media, from talking with certain individuals, and from travelling to certain places. Such conditions imply the accused has already been found guilty of something. Freedom speech, assembly and movement is thus limited and the concept that one is innocent until proven guilty is violated.
Lich herself was jailed for a second time because she broke a condition of her bail by talking with Tom Marazzo at an awards ceremony in Toronto. The ceremony was organized by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms in order to honour Ms Lich with a Freedom Award. See this.
Looking Beyond the Emergency Act Inquiry in Canada
In its zeal to discredit and criminalize the Freedom Convoy movement, the Trudeau government may have committed crimes of its own that violate domestic and international laws. In this sense the proceedings of the Emergency Act Inquiry have produced new evidence that augments prior suspicions especially in relation to the protests at Coutts. The Coutts protests ended on Feb. 15.
The Trudeau government’s suspected violations are consistent with a well-documented pattern that has unfolded in many countries. After 9/11, the waging of the War on Terror was exploited by many corrupt regimes to discredit their main political opponents by smearing them as terrorists. Are Trudeau and Freeland and their accomplices inside government and law enforcement agencies guilty of the same transgressions?
We must look beyond the Canadian Emergency Act Inquiry. The PEOC can be seen as a procedure that has helped to clarify the need for further investigations not tainted by partisanship. These investigations would have to address the growing body of evidence that the manufactured COVID crisis initiated a broader, more many-faceted process aimed at undermining the remaining rights and freedoms of most people on Earth.
In the final analysis we must grapple with the evidence that a hybrid war is being waged on the largest part of humanity. Rather than meeting the violence we are facing with more violence, the time has come to create the basis for a comprehensive judicial process to address the war crimes and crimes against humanity pointed against us. If such a process were to be mounted, then the conditions would be in place to begin discussing a lasting amnesty.
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Anthony J. Hall is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. His Ph.D. is in History (University of Toronto, 1984) and in his academic career he has taught in the fields of Native American Studies, Globalization Studies, and Liberal Education. Prof. Hall is former Editor-In-Chief of American Herald Tribune and publishes widely both in peer-reviewed and popular venues. His most well known books include The American Empire and the Fourth World as well as Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (McGill-Queens University Press).
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will provide $1 million in grant funding to develop “a “public health tool” to predict vaccine “misinformation trends.””
Two federal public health agencies will provide $1 million in grant funding to develop “a “public health tool” to predict vaccine “misinformation trends.”
According to the grants.gov website, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will accept grant applications until Jan. 6, 2023 for research:
“ … to develop a predictive forecasting model that identifies new or reemerging misinformation narratives that are likely to disseminate widely and have a high potential for impact on vaccine confidence.
“The information from this model will then be used to develop a tool that public health agencies could use to predict misinformation trends in the populations served. Finally, the researchers will evaluate the tool’s predictive capabilities on both future social media misinformation narratives and real-world events.”
A single applicant will receive an award ranging from $400,000 to $500,000 to develop “a forecasting model that aims to identify potential misinformation on vaccines and how it will affect people as it spreads on social media,” according to Fox News.
The grant opportunity, announced in October, is part of the “Immunization Research, Demonstration, Public Information and Education Training and Clinical Skills Improvement Projects” funding category.
Public and private actors — including public institutions of higher education, state, city and county governments, independent school districts and nonprofit organizations — are eligible to apply for the funding.
“The grant applications and the discussions could disclose confidential trade secrets or commercial property such as patentable material, and personal information concerning individuals associated with the grant applications, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Government should not be ‘policing thought crimes’
The new grant opportunity captured the attention of media outlets, lawmakers and analysts.
“The grant runs through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has a history of efforts to combat misinformation,” Fox News reported. “Internal documents obtained by American First Legal in July revealed how the CDC coordinated with Facebook, Twitter and Google to counter online content it deemed to be misinformation.”
Several Biden administration officials, includingDr. Anthony Fauci, were deposed or will be deposed as part of a lawsuit against the federal government by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri alleging that government officials colluded with Big Tech platforms to censor content critical of COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), speaking to Fox News about the grant, said the federal government should not be policing “thought crimes:”
“This latest revelation proves the CDC is rolling full steam ahead with their censorship campaign against citizens who speak up. This new scheme to use taxpayer money — intended to further scientific inquiry — to instead stifle researchers and anyone who dares dissent from the Biden administration’s ever-changing COVID narrative is unsurprising and unacceptable.
“The CDC has no business trying to predict future ‘thought crimes’ nor, as they’ve done in the past, leverage their power to collude with big tech companies against the American people.”
“Government agencies have no place in determining what constitutes ‘misinformation,’ particularly in an environment where facts on the ground continue to change.
“As we’ve seen with the COVID vaccines, Moderna’s leadership has now openly admitted that preventing transmission was never an outcome they tested for. Yet the ‘disease of the unvaccinated’ and the assertion that a vaccine would ‘stop the spread’ permeated throughout public health guidance. Who was around to label that ‘misinformation?’”
It remains unclear how the proposed HHS-CDC model will determine what constitutes “misinformation,” but according to JustTheNews, the CDC signaled that “information gleaned from the program will ultimately be used in continuing federal attempts to prebunk and debunk independent research and opinion diverging from approved narratives.”
Multiple government agencies have ‘misinformation’ initiatives in play
The Missouri v. Biden lawsuit alleges a number of First Amendment violations on the part of the U.S. government, including that federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring those who criticized the government’s covid policies.
In 2021, President Biden stated, “They’re killing people,” in reference to social media platforms like Facebook and the “vaccine misinformation” available there, Politico reported in its coverage of the lawsuit.
In July 2021, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and HHS, issued an advisory warning the American public about the “threat of health misinformation” and a Request for Information asking social media platforms to collect data on the “spread and impact of misinformation” and to “prioritize early detection of misinformation ‘super-spreaders’ and repeat offenders” by “impos[ing] clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies.”
Despite Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, federal efforts to combat alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” continue. According to Fox News:
“Despite the ongoing lawsuit and vocal criticism by members of Congress, Biden’s agencies remain focused on countering disinformation from foreign adversaries attempting to influence U.S. elections and on certain topics, including COVID-19 origins, the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal and more.”
This includes initiatives launched by the surgeon general, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Pentagon to fight online content that they claim constitutes “misinformation” and “disinformation, Fox News reported.
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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On the heels of Biden’s September 12th Executive Order titled The National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, I wrote two days later that it “is a complete capitulation of our government to Big Pharma, the biotechnology industry and the entire transhuman cabal that wants to create Humanity 2.0 by changing our genetic structure.”
The Initiative literally opens the floodgates of taxpayer resources and turns over government control to the biotech and Big Pharma industry. Some highlights include:
“We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale-up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.”
“bolster and coordinate Federal investment in key research and development (R&D) areas of biotechnology and biomanufacturing in order to further societal goals”
“Building a Vibrant Domestic Biomanufacturing Ecosystem.”
“expand training and education opportunities for all Americans in biotechnology and biomanufacturing.”
“Federal investments in biological sciences, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing to enhance biosafety and biosecurity best practices throughout the bioeconomy R&D enterprise.”
In sum, our nation has become the vassal of the biodefense cartel to finance its R&D, build its manufacturing capacity and train workers to fill its factories. What’s wrong with this picture?
The Executive Order required a number of reports to be compiled and submitted to the President on how to implement the Order. Just one month later, the White House released the National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan. It dovetails perfectly with the Executive Order except that preparation started on the first day of Biden’s presidency. According to the American Economic Association (AEA),
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration fulfills a commitment that President Biden made on his first day in office: to review existing national biopreparedness policies and develop recommendations for how the Federal Government should update them, based on lessons learned from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other biological threats our Nation faces.
Thus, we can see that this massive transfer of power actually started with Biden’s election and has been orchestrated for theater ever since.
Biodefense Enterprise
The National Biodefense Strategy reveals more details of this Transhuman and Technocratic takeover. One new term that appears 21 times in the document is “biodefense enterprise”. Enterprise normally applies to a commercial business or corporation, but here it states “the United States will support an efficient and coordinated biodefense enterprise to protect the American People and its global interests.” In Annex I: Definitions, we get a glimpse of what biodefense enterprise means:
Stakeholders with a role in the prevention, preparedness, detection, response, and recovery from bioincidents (e.g., Federal and SLTT governments, nongovernmental and private sector entities, and international partners).
Stakeholders? Nongovernmental and private sector entities? International partners?
This language clearly reveals that the “biodefense enterprise” is a massive Public Private Partnership where the managing partner is not the Federal Administration, but rather it is the biotech/Big Pharma industry itself!
Biosurveillance
This term shows up 13 times in the National Biodefense Strategy and is clearly linked to the “biodefense enterprise”:
Enhancing the national biodefense enterprise will help protect the United States and its partners abroad from biological incidents, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate in origin. It will simultaneously build the U.S. innovation base for cutting-edge countermeasures, biosensors, diagnostics, and biosurveillance information technologies, and advance the biomedical and agricultural industries’ biodefense capabilities.
Again, the document offers a definition:
Biosurveillance: The process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information and indications related to all-hazard threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, plant, and environmental health to achieve early detection and provide early warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of the incident, and enable better decision-making at all levels.
Thus, biosurveillance will dovetail perfectly into the industry’s already existing plan for digital surveillance, universal health id’s and digital vaccine passports.
If you think existing surveillance is intrusive and a threat to freedom and personal liberty, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Whole-of-Society
I have discussed the “whole-of-government” strategy where the entire structure of Federal agencies is harmonized to a common purpose and objective. This in itself is a dangerous precedent that permits the weaponization of the whole government toward a common objective.
The concept of whole-of-society is a close relative. Here all sectors of society are lined up for a common purpose. What sectors? Humans, animals, plants and ecosystems. Furthermore, it’s top-to-bottom from national all the way down to local enforcement.
Driving down to local communities is the only way to achieve Section 3.1 Domestic Health Capacity:
Increase vaccine uptake rates for all recommended vaccines to over 85% of American population.
A secondary goal is to expand the propaganda machine to reach 80% of the American public, “while also countering and mitigating the spread of disinformation and misinformation.”
Fast Track From Lab-to-Jab
All cautionary methodologies and testing are thrown to the wind. Vaccines will be created within 100 days of virus detection (i.e., a self-declared “pandemic”), mass produced within 130 days, distributed with military efficiency and speed, and injected into:
…at-risk human and impacted animal populations the necessary vaccine quantities to control a nationally or internationally significant biological incident, within one hundred days following authorization or approval.
Not Your Grandmother’s Vaccine
I know there are some readers who are thinking they would like to get vaccines faster to prevent disease. However, none of this applies to old-school vaccines. Nope. None. This is all pointed toward an endless conveyor belt of mRNA and DNA injections designed to hack your human condition. – you and eighty-five percent of the population, in perpetuity. Biden cleared that up in his original Executive Order:
We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.
Are you ready? Are you awake to what is taking place here?
I have addressed the whole picture in my new book. Solutions and resistance will not arise without understanding the nature of this evil beast that has come upon us.
The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism
Perhaps you can see why I used the word “Evil” in the title of my just-released book. Perhaps you can picture the golden skulls, all ornate and rich looking on the outside, but revealing death underneath. Indeed, Technocracy and Transhumanism are promoting a future that only holds death and destruction for mankind.
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Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.
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CNN didn’t come out and directly accuse Russia of sending mail bombs and animal parts to Ukrainian embassies in Europe. There is no evidence of that, not that evidence gets in the way of reality-anemic war propagandists working for the national security state and its corporate media propaganda division.
Instead, it allowed Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, to insinuate Russia is behind the gruesome acts.
“This campaign is aimed at sowing fear,” Kuleba told CNN’s Matthew Chance in an “exclusive interview” in Kyiv on Friday. “I feel tempted to say, to name Russia straight away, because first of all you have to answer the question, who benefits?”
How in the world does Russia benefit from sending mail bombs and pig eyes to embassies in Europe? It doesn’t. Moreover, such terroristic behavior is not required. After all, Russia is slowly but surely disarming and denazifying Ukraine, and such grotesque behavior is not required and would be extremely counterproductive.
A couple of weeks ago Pramila Patten, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, said Russian soldiers are given Viagra and instructed to rape Ukrainian women.
As it turns out, Ms. Patten was making things up, not that the corporate media felt obliged to set the record straight. In fact, Patten, apparently lacking the ability to construct an original lie, borrowed from the past. The Viagra lie was used during the criminal invasion and destruction of Libya. USG military and intelligence officials later said the absurd claim was bunkum.
“The investigation is going on by the Human Rights Monitoring Team and the International Commission of Inquiry. In their reports so far, there’s nothing about Viagra,” Patten admitted during an interview.
No headlines in the NYT or CNN refuting the claim. For the intellectually lazy headline skimmer who puts a little yellow and blue Ukronazi flag on his social media, the idiotic accusation has become truth, little different than the ugly lies about Huns bayonetting babies during the “Great War” to “end all wars” more than a hundred years ago.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, had a one-word response to Kuleba’s accusation: “psycho.”
Indeed, Ukraine is chock full of psychos, not merely the kind that tells obvious lies, knowing an ignorant public in the “West” will sup it up without question, but also the violent sort that strangles pregnant women to death and burns activists alive.
As to the latter, the arson, and murder of over 50 “separatists” in a Soviet-era labor building in Odesa in 2014, Human Rights Watch called for the Ukrainian government to investigate. Obviously, HRW is clueless as a large percentage of the American public. The Zelensky government, rife with misanthropic neo-Nazis, certainly will not investigate this horrible mass murder. The folks at HRW are either stupid or think we are.
Meanwhile, the “fact checkers” are busy at work trying to cover up and spin the brutal handiwork of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. Good luck with that.
Eventually, reality and truth will triumph over cynical lies and deception, and absurd stories of pig eyes and animal parts mailed to hapless Ukrainian diplomats will be revealed for what they are—psychological operations designed to drum up consensus for an effort to “weaken Russia,” even if that effort terminates in a thermonuclear war.
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Football diplomacy brought Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan together in Doha for the opening of the World Cup 2022 in Qatar.
Years of tension between the two were broken with a friendly handshake. The big differences between the two large countries centered on Erdogan’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization banned in Egypt, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and UAE, but not banned in America.
Erdogan said later that the ministers of both countries will meet and begin a process that may develop into talks to build the relationship between the two. The sideline meeting lasted about 45 minutes at the World Cup. Sisi released a statement that the meeting was a new start in bilateral relations between them. Intelligence delegations from the two sides met in Egypt recently.
“We had narrowly focused talks with Mr. Sisi there and said now let’s have ministers coming and going at a low level. After that, let’s broaden and widen these talks,” Erdogan said, also signaling the possibility of improving ties with Syria.
“Just as this business is now on track with Egypt, things may also get on track with Syria,” he said.
Erdogan had strongly supported Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood as the first elected President of Egypt, following the US-engineered election which saw Lila Jafaar, a US citizen from California, sentenced to five years in prison, in absentia, for election meddling. She was rescued from hiding in the US Embassy in Cairo by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Sisi led the 2013 revolution of the people to oust Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdogan had bemoaned the ouster of Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood associates and supporters.
In 2021, Erdogan began a push to repair broken relationships with Egypt, the UAE, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Erdogan’s support and personal allegiance to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to create a global Islamic State, has been the source of contention between Turkey and other countries.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters on November 28 that Ankara and Cairo may restore full diplomatic ties and re-appoint ambassadors “in coming months”. According to a senior Turkish official, “significant” discussions had begun between them, and Turkey and Egypt are set to start talks on military, political, and commercial issues including energy projects.
Ankara wasted no time in directing Turkey-based media outlets associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and opposed to Egypt’s government, to stop attacking the Egyptian government.
Turkish Intelligence recently began investigations into the Muslim Brotherhood for attacks in Egypt, support of ISIS in Syria, and money laundering operations. Part of the investigation focuses on how the Muslim Brotherhood sent fighters and weapons into Syria. A source told Al-Arabiya, the investigation includes how the Muslim Brotherhood supported ISIS and carried out fundraising for the support of ISIS families in Turkey and Syria. Turkey has arrested Muslim Brotherhood members for creating fake documents for profit.
Turkish private hospitals that carry out organ transplants for foreigners are also under scrutiny by Turkish Intelligence for their links to the Muslim Brotherhood which may have supplied the harvested organs from soldiers and civilians killed in Syria.
In the last 90 days, Turkey has deported some members of the Muslim Brotherhood for crimes. In the last few months, the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey has wire-transferred extremely large sums of money to banks in London and the US, with no known source for those funds.
Turkey has shut down charities that raised funds for people in Yemen and Syria because of their ties to using the funds to support terrorism.
The Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey
Erdogan backed terrorists of all types and nationalities in his effort to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to install a US-backed Muslim Brotherhood government. Once ISIS became a dominant force among the terrorists in Syria, Turkey turned a blind eye and instead focused on attacking the Syrian Kurds who had become military partners with the US occupation forces.
The Justice and Development party (AKP), Erdogan’s ruling party, wanted to dominate regional politics by hosting the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international organization. Brotherhood leaders moved to Turkey and created a network of support forming branches into Syria and the oil-rich Arab Gulf monarchies.
Turkey became the designated depot for weapons the US confiscated in their attack on Libya with the shipment arriving in the southern port of Turkey and then trucked into Syria by Turkish intelligence officers. Turkish Intelligence officer Irshad Hoz was arrested in Egypt for supplying weapons to Muslim Brotherhood terrorists there in the uprising to oust Mursi. Many of the wanted fugitives later were taken in by Turkey.
In 2019, the US Treasury put sanctions on Turkey for support of ISIS networks.
“These jihadists, which include ISIS, have really entrenched networks inside Turkey,” said Merve Tahiroglu, Turkey program coordinator at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).
“It is very unnerving but at the same time quite believable that Turkey hasn’t been really going after these jihadist networks because Turkish law enforcement has been busy hunting down dissidents and government critics,” Tahiroglu told Voice of America.
The Obama administration’s support of the MB
US President Obama supported the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 “Arab Spring” and sought to use the terrorist group as the rulers of a “New Middle East” while aligning with the US and Israel.
“The decision to engage the Muslim Brotherhood marked a historic change in American foreign policy, created a new paradigm in the Middle East, and set into motion a series of events that had catastrophic results: the Muslim Brotherhood’s resurgence, the overthrow of at least two governments, Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s transformation into the ISIS [the Islamic State group] caliphate, failed governments in Syria and Iraq, millions of refugees and displaced individuals, and the resulting destabilizing migration flows,” Rossomando writes.
“The Arab Spring began with rhetoric about freedom and democracy, but we now know it was an Islamist Spring that brought only death, suffering, and oppression. Who knows what might have been had Barack Obama stood against the Brotherhood and its supporters,” concludes Rossomando.
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The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is speeding up its design of a common payment system, which has been closely discussed for nearly a year with the Chinese under the stewardship of Sergey Glazyev, the EAEU’s minister in charge of Integration and Macro-economy.
Through its regulatory body, the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the EAEU has just extended a very serious proposal to the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which, crucially, are already on the way to turning into BRICS+: a sort of G20 of the Global South.
The system will include a single payment card – in direct competition with Visa and Mastercard – merging the already existing Russian MIR, China’s UnionPay, India’s RuPay, Brazil’s Elo, and others.
That will represent a direct challenge to the western-designed (and enforced) monetary system, head on. And it comes on the heels of BRICS members already transacting their bilateral trade in local currencies, and bypassing the US dollar.
This EAEU-BRICS union was long in the making – and will now also move toward prefiguring a further geoeconomic merger with the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The EAEU was established in 2015 as a customs union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, joined a year later by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Vietnam is already an EAEU free trade partner, and recently enshrined SCO member Iran is also clinching a deal.
The EAEU is designed to implement free movement of goods, services, capital, and workers between member countries. Ukraine would have been an EAEU member if not for the Maidan coup in 2014 masterminded by the Barack Obama administration.
Vladimir Kovalyov, adviser to the chairman of the EEC, summed it all up to Russian newspaper Izvestia. The focus is to establish a joint financial market, and the priority is to develop a common “exchange space:” “We’ve made substantial progress and now the work is focused on such sectors as banking, insurance, and the stock market.”
A new regulatory body for the proposed joint EEU-BRICS financial system will soon be established.
Meanwhile, trade and economic cooperation between the EAEU and BRICS have increased 1.5 times in the first half of 2022 alone.
The BRICS share in the total external trade turnover of the EAEU has reached 30 percent, Kovalyov revealed at the BRICS International Business Forum this past Monday in Moscow:
“It is advisable to combine the potentials of the BRICS and EAEU macro-financial development institutions, in particular the BRICS New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), as well as national development institutions. This will make it possible to achieve a synergistic effect and ensure synchronous investments in sustainable infrastructure, innovative production, and renewable energy sources.”
Here we once again see the advancing convergence of not only BRICS and EAEU but also the financial institutions deeply involved in projects under the China-led New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Halting the Age of Plunder
As if all that was not game-changing enough, Russian President Vladimir Putin is raising the stakes by calling for a new international payment system based on blockchain and digital currencies.
The project for such a system was recently presented at the 1st Eurasian Economic Forum in Bishkek.
At the forum, the EAEU approved a draft agreement on cross-border placement and circulation of securities in member states, and amended technical regulations.
The next big step is to organize the agenda of a crucial meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council on 14 December in Moscow. Putin will be there – in person. And there’s nothing he would love more than to make a game-changing announcement.
All of these moves acquire even more importance as they connect to fast increasing, interlocking trade between Russia, China, India, and Iran: from Russia’s drive to build new pipelines serving its Chinese market – to Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan discussing a gas union for both domestic supplies and exports, especially to main client China.
Slowly but surely, what is emerging is the Big Picture of an irretrievably fractured world featuring a dual trade/circulation system: one will be revolving around the remnants of the dollar system, the other is being built centered on the association of BRICS, EAEU, and SCO.
Pushing further on down the road, the recent pathetic metaphor coined by a tawdry Eurocrat boss: the “jungle” is breaking away from the “garden” with a vengeance. May the fracture persist, as a new international payment system – and then a new currency – will aim to halt for good the western-centric Age of Plunder.
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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
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The Pentagon revealed Friday what it believes it can fight China with: the B-21 raider.
Located at an Airforce facility in California, the raider is one of three weapon systems including silo-launched nuclear ballistic missiles and submarine-launched warheads, meant to advance warfare preparations against the “Chinese threat” keeping the US on its toes.
In a statement, the Pentagon said this week of China’s recent military developments that it has birthed “the most consequential and systemic challenge to US national security and the free and open international system.”
Kathy Warden, Chair, CEO, and President of the aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman commented:
“With the B-21 the United States Air Force will deter and defeat threats anywhere in the world,” adding: “The B-21 raider changes everything: reaffirming peace through deterrence, advancing technology, and ushering in a new paradigm in aircraft design, development, and manufacturing.”
Warden also clarified that its operation technique is “extremely advanced compared to the B-2, because the technology has evolved so much in terms of computing capability”, as she stated that the material in the coating wrapped around the B-21 makes it much harder for the adversary to locate it.
As of now, according to Sputnik, six B-21 Raiders are being produced, as the Air Force intends to build around 100 of them that can deploy either nuclear weapons or conventional bombs, which can be manually operated or from a distance.
The Air Force calculated that each B-21 Raider will cost an estimated $692 million to manufacture.
In light of these developments, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian relayed last Wednesday the ways in which the US is devising plans to maintain military hegemony and nuclear power by employing the term “Chinese threat” as a pretext.
The US Defense Department published the 2022 China Military Power Report the day before, claiming that China could catalyze the pace of the modernization of its nuclear forces in the next 10 years, producing around 1,500 nuclear warheads by the year 2035.
During a press briefing, Zhao stated,
“The United States has repeatedly inflated various versions of the Chinese threat theory in recent years to find an excuse to expand its own nuclear arsenal and maintain military hegemony, which is a common US reception,” adding that his country’s nuclear policy is transparent and consistent to the international community.
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Featured image: Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider in a hangar at Plant 42, Palmdale, California. (Licensed under the Public Domain)
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