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As I write this, Americans are going to the polls to vote for this or that faction of the corporate uniparty. Einstein was right when he said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Every two years, Americans vote for the same uniparty selected candidates expecting the serious issues of inflation, crime, drugs, etc. to be addressed, only to get broken campaign promises and more of the same.

Ukraine is hardly on the radar—and yet tens of billions of dollars added to an astronomical debt, conservatively estimated at over 30 trillion, will not go to help the American people. It will be spent in one of the only growth sectors of the economy— “defense,” where death merchants embrace windfalls—and the destructive, poverty-inducing policies of the federal reserve and central bankers will continue to be explained away as corporate greed.

In fact, the neocons and “humanitarian (sic) interventionists” are pushing to increase weapons sales. “Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said that he expects Congress to grant the authority to allow wartime purchasing power at a level not seen since the Cold War,” writes Dave DeCamp.

To continue arming Ukraine, LaPlante has been calling for the Pentagon to be granted the authority to lock in multiyear contracts for weapons purchases, which are typically reserved for procuring naval vessels and warplanes. The idea is to get arms makers the incentive to ramp up production.

Congress will not seriously address—except during elections—rising crime rates, an opioid crisis, the dissolution of the middle class, and out-of-control inflation (now 20%, not the “official” number of 8.6%). Inflation is driven by a “loose” monetary policy and the foolish injection of trillions of dollars into the economy to mollify an increasingly grumpy populace during a blown-out-of-proportion pandemic.

If you read the “news,” however, you get the impression inflation is created by greedy corporations. Democrats love this fallacious explanation peddled by the corporate media.

During a recent House oversight subcommittee hearing, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., pointed to data from an Economic Policy Institute report which found that more than half of the increased prices people are paying are coming from increases in corporate profits, and not from higher overhead costs associated with operation and labor.

In other words, this Democrat suffers from either a) stupidity and an inability to comprehend economic theory—which you’d think would be part of her job—or b) lying to divert attention away from the real culprits, the ruling financial elite.

Bigger corporate profits account for *over half* of the higher prices people are paying. pic.twitter.com/RZr5O0X4oJ

— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) October 18, 2022

As Ron Paul noted last May as the lockdowns waned, the federal reserve enables the disastrous spending OCD affliction rampant across a bought-and-paid-for Congress.

[Fed Chairman Jerome] Powell does not want to admit that the real reason the Fed will continue to keep rates low is that increasing rates will cause the federal government’s interest payments to rise to unsustainable levels.

Congress will speed up the effort to impoverish the nation, and turn it into a third-world hellhole, by magically creating a mountain of devalued fiat dollars and steering it toward the insatiable maw of the death merchants—all in the deceptive name of saving non-existent “democracy” from the evil machinations of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and other selected enemies.

The Senate has added an amendment to its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to grant the authority [to purchase an endless supply of death machines]. It would allow the Pentagon to make multiyear purchases through 2023 and 2024 of certain arms made by Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, and Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

LaPlante was ecstatic. “They [Congress] are supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base―and I’m talking billions of dollars into the industrial base―to fund these production lines,” he said during a press conference last week.

They are, of course, far less supportive of doing something about an economy that is turning vicious and threatening a recession (in fact, a depression) that will strip millions of Americans of their dignity and ability to maintain a modicum of security for their families.

Zelenskyy and his coterie of nasty Russophobic Nazis are far more important than the welfare of a public that only matters on a day like today, the first Tuesday in November, when ballots are counted, ignored, and stuffed.

In fact, the path we are on—a debt-financed primrose path terminating in poverty and want, to say nothing of thermonuclear war—is precisely what the original neocons called for: endless war and a population locked in serfdom to the state. During Bush’s war, Danny Postel interviewed the academic Shadia Drury, author of The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss and Leo Strauss and the American Right.

The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine.

Strauss and his followers embraced the philosophy of Plato, Nietzsche, Thrasymachus,  and Machiavelli.

[Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, and Carl Schmitt] were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and “creature comforts.” (Emphasis added.)

And perpetual war is what we have endured decade after decade as the neocons wormed their way into the halls of government. The Obama administration, while initially campaigning to end neocon wars, embraced the big kahuna neocon Frederick Kagan to oversee the illegal and devastating (for civilians) war in Afghanistan. Obama made certain the neocon to-do list was accomplished—continuing and expanding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while laying the ground for additional horrors in Syria and Libya. Sanctions continued to be imposed on Iran for its fictional building of a nuclear bomb.

On the so-called Left, excuses were made for Obama’s neocon-ish foreign policy. “More than five years into his presidency, Barack Obama has failed to take full control over his foreign policy, allowing a bureaucracy shaped by long years of Republican control and spurred on by a neocon-dominated U.S. news media to frustrate many of his efforts to redirect America’s approach to the world in a more peaceful direction,” wrote the late Robert Parry in 2014.

The Obama administration’s Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, micromanaged the illegal coup in Ukraine that brought Russian-hating ultranationalists into the government.

The policy directives of the ruling elite span both factions of the USG uniparty. It does not matter who sits in the Oval Office (so long as it is not an outlier like Trump), foreign policy is set in stone, and decided by the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S. policy of support for Ukraine’s sovereignty has been strong across the U.S. political spectrum,” declares Sarah Dixon Klump, writing for the Kennan Institute at the globalist Wilson Center. (In order to put this statement in its proper context, do a non-Google search on Cold War architect George Kennan.)

The late William Green Miller, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Ukraine, according to Dixon Klump,

…recommended that the Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, voice its support for Ukraine’s eventual entry into NATO. In the meantime, however, Miller pointed out that the U.S.—through the signing of the Tri-Partite Agreement of January 14, 1994—is explicitly and formally obliged to support Ukraine in the event that its sovereignty, territorial integrity, or independence is threatened militarily, economically, or politically.

Russia considers Ukraine and NATO a red line, the same as the US would declare a violation of a red line if Russia placed its war machines and troops up against the US-Canada or Mexico borders. Hubris and double standards rule the day in the “indispensable nation,” as the advocate of child murder, Madeline Albright, who defended the engineered death of over 500,000 Iraqi children, described the USG.

The wishes of the American people have nothing to do with such foreign policy decisions and their needs are routinely dismissed. The wisdom of spending trillions of dollars to overturn elections, invade foreign countries, kill disfavored people abroad, and build a police and surveillance state at home is rarely discussed.

Democrats and Republicans put on a good show, making millions of Americans believe there are distinctive differences between what are in reality two factions of a uniparty that takes marching orders from the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations (as Hillary Clinton admitted.)

Millions of Americans are sadly misinformed on the growing daily prospect of thermonuclear war. Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no Robert Kennedy behind the scenes arranging diplomatic exchanges between the USG and Russia. The neocon and lib interventionists have left the decision to negotiate the fate of humankind up to a man threatened with murder if he does not tow the neo-nazi line on Russia.

The neocons are not and never have been interested in diplomacy. They sincerely believe they make their own reality and thermonuclear war is not on the agenda.

As an adviser to George W. Bush (said to be Karl Rove) declared in 2004 during an interview with Ron Suskind of The New York Times,

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

However, if we follow the rationale of neocons and liberal interventionists—that Russia is an evil empire and the USG must depose Putin—the new reality will be nuclear winter and the extinction of life on planet Earth.

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

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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***

The Arab League met in Algeria for the first time in two years, and their final declaration called for freedom for the Palestinian people who have suffered under a brutal Israeli military occupation for almost six decades.  The meeting of nearly 22 nations across the Middle East and North Africa coincided with Israeli elections, which has brought to power a far-right party that wants to annex the West Bank and deport Palestinians from their homes.

Arab leaders attending the meeting tip-toed around the Abraham Accords, which saw the United Emirates and Bahrain normalize their relations with Israel, with Saudi Arabia later allowing for over-flights of the Kingdom by Israeli aircraft, and is seen as a potential precursor to wider Arab normalization with Israel.

Although the Arab world is deeply divided and polarized, the League managed to deliver a final declaration focused on the core issue of Palestinian human rights and freedom.

The Arab League General Secretariat affirmed its rejection of all Israeli settlement plans, condemned what it described as the annexation of Palestinian territory, stressed the need to compel the Israeli occupation to implement the relevant UN resolutions and work toward a comprehensive and fair two-state solution under the 2002 Arab peace initiative.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said,

“Our main and first cause, the mother of all causes, the Palestinian issue, will be at the heart of our concerns and our main priority.”

United Nations 

Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, attended the meeting and appealed for unity across the Arab world.

“Division opens the door to foreign, non-Arab, interference, terrorism, manipulation, and sectarian strife. But united, your leadership can shape a region that makes the most of its enormous potential and contributes to global peace and security,” Guterres said.

Foreign intervention in the Middle East has mainly come from the US. Muammar Gadhafi of Libya famously addressed the Arab League in 2008 and held up a paper that was sent to him and all other Arab leaders from the US telling them what their agenda was to be, and the expected results of that Arab League meeting.  Gadhafi went on to prophetically warn his counterparts that the US had eliminated Saddam Hussein, and they could all expect they would be next.

Guterres focused attention on the continued suffering of the Palestinian people, underlining the UN’s explicit position that the occupation must end.

“Our shared goal remains two States – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security, with Al-Quds/Jerusalem as the capital of both States,” he said.

“We must do all we can to ensure the continued success of the Black Sea Grain Initiative to provide relief to those in need, including countries in the Middle East and North Africa relying on accessible and affordable food and fertilizers — both from Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” he said.

The UN is concerned with global famine due to the Ukraine war, but where was the UN when the huge wheat stores in northeast Syria were stolen by the Radical Islamic terrorists utilized by the US-NATO attack on Syria for ‘regime change’?  The wheat was taken to Turkey and then sold to the EU where France used it for their croissants, and Italy for its pasta.

Syria was not invited back

Syria’s participation in the Arab League has been suspended since November 2011, which demonstrates a large group of Arab nations supported the US-NATO attack on Syria using the Muslim Brotherhood ideology and terrorist foot soldiers.

In July 2022, Algeria’s foreign minister decried Syria’s decade-long suspension from the Arab League during a visit to Damascus, indicating support for the war-torn country’s return to the organization under President Bashar Assad.

Arab countries have inched closer toward restoring ties with Syria in recent years, most notably the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In October 2021, Jordan’s King Abdullah II received a call from President Assad, the first between the two leaders in a decade.

“Syria’s absence from the Arab League harms cooperation between Arab countries,” said Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, speaking at a news conference with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, and having met with President Assad while delivering a letter from Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboun.

Israeli elections and far-right move

While the Arabs were meeting in Algeria, Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial on corruption charges, was engineering his return to power in Israel through an unusual alliance with an ultra-nationalist party.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Israel’s Jewish Power faction, lives in the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba in the Palestinian city of Hebron. The far-right extremist leader appears likely to take a senior role in government after the Religious Zionism bloc he co-heads, with Bezalel Smotrich, became the third-largest in parliament with 14 seats, the largest gain of any religious party in Israel.

Ben-Gvir has demanded to be appointed as a public security minister in the new Netanyahu government.  That position is problematic because of the history of Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted in 2007 of racist incitement and support of a terrorist group on both the US and Israeli terror blacklists. In the past year, he led a settler storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosquecompound and has previously acted as a legal defense for Lehava, a racist group, which has called for the full expulsion of Palestinians, and a ban on Christmas. It views Christian churches as places of idol worship.  The Israeli government has long had the plan to convert churches and Bethlehem into tourist attractions devoid of any connection to practicing Christianity.

Besides deporting all Palestinians, Ben-Gvir also plans to expel Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and have been democratically elected to the Knesset, along with leftist Israeli Jews who are MPs.

“When we form the government, I will promote the Deportation Law, which will deport anyone who acts against the State of Israel or IDF soldiers,” Ben-Gvir said in an interview last August.

Ben-Gvir pulled his gun and admonished police officers responding to an altercation with Palestinians,

“If they are throwing stones, shoot them.”

The path forward for Netanhayu’s government may depend on the upcoming November 8 elections in the US, where Republicans may make gains, which may be a green light for Netanyahu and extremism.

The settlements

The 1949 Geneva Convention, which Israel signed, it is prohibited for an occupying power to move its own population into the territory. Since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, numerous UN resolutions affirm that Israel’s occupation is illegal, and the settlements on the West Bank have no legal basis.

Despite the international consensus, Israel continues to build illegal settlements on the West Bank, which currently number over 100, with 450,000 Israeli settlers living there, and another 220,00 Jewish settlers living in East Jerusalem.

Israel is an apartheid state

On March 25, 2022, Michael Link, UN Special Rapporteur, concluded that Israel met the conditions of an apartheid state. His findings reported that an institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination has been established, a system of alien rule had been established with the intent to maintain the domination of one racial-national-ethnic group over another, and the imposition of this system of institutionalized discrimination with the intent of permanent domination had been built upon the regular practice of inhumane acts.

The question for liberal western democracies is, “Can democracy, religious extremism, and apartheid policies co-exist?” A follow-up question is, “Can the west continue to support Israel?”

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

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

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***

Thursday’s report by investigative website The Grayzone, that British Military Intelligence is planning to train Ukrainian insurgents in order to carry out a terrorist campaign in Crimea, comes at a time of increasing tensions between Moscow and London.

The Kremlin has already accused Downing Street of being involved in the Nord Stream explosions on the 26^th of September, the Kerch Bridge explosion on the 8^th of October, and last Saturday’s drone attack on the key Crimean port of Sevastopol, with UAVs being a key component of a recent military aid package gifted to Kiev by London.

Indeed, Britain’s role in the current Ukraine crisis goes as far back as November 2013, when the Euromaidan colour revolution was launched in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU trade deal in order to pursue closer ties with neighbouring Russia.

Britain’s history of arming and training terrorist groups however, as outlined in last week’s report, goes back even further.

In 1971, the occupied north of Ireland had been in the grip of violence for two years.

Inspired by the civil rights campaign taking place in the United States at the same time, the north’s Nationalist community – those in favour of Irish reunification and generally descended from the indigenous Irish population – had begun a campaign in 1967, demanding equal rights within the British-created statelet.

Though peaceful in nature, the civil rights movement would be violently beaten and teargassed every time they took to the streets, by a police force composed almost entirely of Unionists, those in favour of remaining under British rule and generally descended from English and Scottish settlers, planted in the region in the 17^th century.

As a result, support for militant Irish Republicanism was quickly growing and the Provisional IRA would be formed in December 1969.

The British Army, deployed to the region earlier in the year in order to enforce London’s rule, would quickly take sides in the emerging conflict.

To this end, the Military Reaction Force (MRF) was formed; a clandestine special forces unit intended to trigger a civil war between the IRA and Loyalist factions in order to draw Republican attention away from Crown Forces.

In order to implement this strategy, the MRF would carry out the murders of unarmed Nationalist civilians, usually in drive-by shootings, in the hope that the IRA would blame Loyalist groups such as the UVF and UDA.

The Unit would directly with Loyalist terrorists on the 4^th of December 1971 however, when they arranged for British army checkpoints to be cleared from the New Lodge, a staunchly Republican area of Belfast, thus allowing a UVF team to bomb a local pub, McGurk’s Bar, leaving 15 civilians dead. This attack would mark the beginning of formal relations between British Military Intelligence and Loyalist death squads, a relationship that would soon escalate.

In 1974, relations between London and Dublin had been placed under significant strain owing to British atrocities in the north such as the Ballymurphy massacre, the 1971 murder of nine civilians by British paratroopers over the space of two days in Belfast, and Bloody Sunday in Derry, when British paratroopers again opened fire on a civil rights demonstration in January 1972, leaving 14 men dead.

Indeed, following the initial outbreak of hostilities in 1969, then-Taoiseach Jack Lynch had mooted the possibility of sending troops to the north, and in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Irish police stood by as demonstrators burned down the British Embassy in Dublin.

Britain, fearing that the southern state would dissent from its traditionally pro-British stance and become a state sponsor of the IRA, decided that a message had to be sent.

On the 17^th of May 1974, a Friday, three no-warning car bombs would detonate during rush hour traffic in Dublin, killing 27 people and injuring 300. A further seven people would be killed 90 minutes later when another bomb detonated in the border country of Monaghan, intended as a diversion to allow the bombing team to escape back into the occupied north. The death toll would be the largest of any single day during near 30 years of conflict.

The bombings, carried out by the UVF under the direction of the MRF’s successor, the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU) would ultimately result in the 26 County administration returning to its pro-British stance, and no further attacks would be carried out in the southern state on the same scale. In the north however, British Military Intelligence would continue to work hand in glove with Loyalist death squads, a relationship that would grow to accommodate the UDA as the 1980s dawned.

Although it had not yet carried out attacks on the same scale as the UVF, the UDA dwarfed its more well-known counterpart in terms of membership, counting 40,000 at its peak. It was not long before British Military Intelligence saw the group’s potential for use as a proxy, thus the Force Research Unit (FRU) was born.

A clandestine unit in the same vein as the MRF and SRU, the FRU’s purpose was to turn the UDA into a more ‘professional’ force, one that targeted IRA members, rather than the Nationalist civilians that both the UDA and UVF were known for killing in indiscriminate attacks.

To this end, the FRU would send Brian Nelson, a senior UDA figure, to South Africa in 1985, where a weapons deal was organised with Armscor, the official defence contractor of the-then Apartheid state. An arrangement that would lead to a deadly escalation of the UDA’s murderous campaign and would ultimately result in the killing of human rights lawyer, Pat Finucane.

Finucane, a Belfast native, had rose to prominence in the 80s through his representation of high-profile Republican prisoners, including IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Quickly becoming a thorn in the side of the British establishment, the final straw would come in November 1988, when he successfully defended an IRA Volunteer against charges related to the deaths of two British soldiers.

On the 12^th of February 1989, a UDA unit smashed down the front door of Finucane’s family home and shot him 14 times as had Sunday dinner with his wife and children. Less than a month beforehand, senior Thatcher cabinet member Douglas Hogg had given a speech in the House of Commons, where he spoke of solicitors in the north of Ireland who were ‘unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA’, effectively sanctioning Pat Finucane’s murder at the highest level of government.

Indeed, official British sponsorship of terrorist groups was not a tactic confined solely to Ireland at the time, with Downing Street also supporting the Afghan Mujahideen during the same period, a strategy they would also use in Libya and Syria during the past decade, and now, as the new decade dawns, Russia now appears to be the latest target in the long history of British-sponsored terrorism.

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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.

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

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***

As the COVID lies are now being exposed at exponential speed, some of those proven wrong are getting nervous — so nervous, in fact, they’re now pleading for amnesty and to just let bygones be bygones

While some now argue ignorance as their defense, there was no lack of data proving their positions were wrong, dangerous, destructive and deadly, right from the start

Health and government officials weren’t just wrong once and then changed course. No, they’ve doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on errors, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re wrong. Granting amnesty to individuals who have been wrong from Day 1, without a single apology, is an untenable proposition. The price society has paid for their errors is far too great for that

• They were wrong about masks working and natural immunity not working,
• they were wrong about asymptomatic spread,
• lockdowns,
• and the safety and effectiveness of the COVID shots.
• They were also wrong about SARS-CoV-2 jumping naturally from bats to humans by way of a wet market in Wuhan, China,
• and they were wrong when they insisted that mandating an experimental gene therapy was within legal bounds.

Demanding that officials be held accountable for these errors is not gloating. It’s reestablishing a baseline of conduct and accountability to the public.

There can be no amnesty for COVID narrative pushers as people proven right are still being persecuted as “misinformation spreaders,” and illegal government censorship continues without abatement. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security now views censorship and controlling the information space as one of its core duties

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As the COVID lies are now being exposed at exponential speed, some of those proven wrong are getting nervous — so nervous, in fact, they’re now pleading to just let bygones be bygones.

The Atlantic¹ has come under fire for suggesting that all the terrible pandemic-era decisions over lockdowns, school closures, masking and punishing an entire class of people who questioned the efficacy and wisdom of taking a rushed, experimental vaccine — for a virus with a 99% survival rate in most — should all be water under the bridge.

Brown University economist Emily Oster writes in The Atlantic,²

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Brendon Marotta in his Substack Hegemon Media³ recounts:

“I believe perpetrators call for forgiveness because they fear punitive justice. If the perpetrators were held accountable in our current justice system, the scale of the wrongdoing would result in punishments the perpetrators could not bear.

These punishments would also not give those who lost their jobs, businesses, friends, family, health, or freedom anything back. What if there was another way that would be better for both victims and perpetrators?

The wrongdoing of the pandemic has not been acknowledged. Those responsible have made no apologies. Calls for ‘forgiveness’ appear dishonest when those responsible haven’t apologized, which is usually a prerequisite to asking for forgiveness.

Creating equity would mean taking the ill-gotten gains of perpetrators and redistributing them to the people who lost their jobs and businesses during the pandemic. In short, it would mean reparations. Equity is not just about money. Losses during the pandemic were not just financial.

Oster’s plea for the decency that she and the mainstream media and public health officials failed to offer Americans during the throes of the pandemic comes at a point when the COVID narrative has been all but lost by the current administration and the mainstream media.

Their Lies Have Been Exposed

For nearly the last three years, I have been exposing and documenting all of the lies that the global cabal has been promoting in their mainstream media propaganda. As expected they have now been exposed to be falsehoods, cluelessness and lies:

Their Crimes Must Be Reconciled

You weren’t allowed to say goodbye to your loved ones or attend their funerals, but the chosen ones dined at extravagant restaurants and allowed liquor stores and Wal-Mart to stay open. Your small business was destroyed, while Amazon made billions.

These murderous hypocrites killed thousands of seniors by knowingly putting infected patients into old age homes.

They killed thousands more by putting treatable patients on ventilators and Fauci’s remdesivir, and additional thousands were killed by not allowing safe and effective treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to be prescribed by doctors.

They have killed and injured hundreds of thousands through coercion, threats, mandates and a never-ending stream of lies that forced people into taking a dangerous and untested, toxic concoction — a Big Pharma bioweapon.

These “experts” seeking forgiveness, ostensibly because they were just caught up in the “hysteria” of the moment, weren’t wrong. They were lying from the outset and need to pay dearly for their crimes against humanity.

We were scorned, ridiculed, ostracized, censored, fired, deplatformed and wished dead by the authoritarian-minded sheep who demanded compliance, and treated like outcasts by family members who believed the narrative hook, line and sinker.

They pushed their agenda too far and too fast out of desperation, as the financial underpinnings of their fake world order began to strain and crumble. This desperation exposed their blatant lies to a vast array of critical thinkers across the world who have not been deterred in exposing the falsehoods on social media, blogs and free-speech websites.

Why We Must Reject Amnesty Plea

The reasons we must reject Oster’s amnesty plea are manifold. First and foremost, while some now want to argue ignorance as their defense, there was no lack of facts and data, right from the start, proving their positions were wrong, dangerous, destructive and deadly.

Since data were readily available, the real question they need to ask themselves is: “Why did I believe all the lies and propaganda?” Self-reflection is needed here. Related to this is Oster’s ridiculous claim that “getting something right had a hefty element of luck.” Absolutely not. Give me one example where luck played a role.

People who got it right did so because they exercised their critical thinking skills and a) read the data, b) correctly analyzed that data and c) drew rational conclusions based on that analysis. Analysis and reason are not reliant on luck.

No luck was needed to know that masks were useless. The published science told us as much. Ditto for the conclusion that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity. No luck was needed to know there was no such thing as asymptomatic spreaders, because again, science. Not only can you not have a “hot” infection without symptoms, but research looking at millions of individuals confirmed what we already knew from basic virology.

No luck was needed to correctly predict that lockdowns would have a dramatically negative effect on health, education and the economy. That was just plain rational, but early cost-benefit analyses also confirmed it.

No luck was needed to know that the COVID jab was useless because data from around the world rapidly grew to show that case rates rose in tandem with the shots. Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky have also demonstrated this.

All were jabbed more than once, and all got COVID — more than once! Seventy percent of jabbed CDC employees also got COVID, and on several occasions, ships where 100% of crew and passengers were jabbed reported outbreaks. None of this would occur if the shots actually prevented infection and spread, and you need no special skills other than clear-headed reason to come to that conclusion.

You also don’t need special skills to see that the COVID shots are killing healthy people. Just look at all the sudden deaths of professional athletes and children. It’s so common they’ve even given it a new name: Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Look at the excess mortality statistics and the skyrocketing life insurance claims.

Oster’s proposition that luck was behind correct analyses is a cop-out and a sign that she’s not ready to accept that she was gullible and irrational — and possibly cruel toward others. Recall, threatening the lives of the unvaccinated and mocking their deaths was basically part of the public policy.⁴

Forgiving the ignorant because they don’t know what they’re doing may be the spiritual imperative, but social etiquette demands that if you WANT someone to forgive you, you FIRST apologize and THEN ask for forgiveness. What’s missing from Oster’s call to forgive her and everyone else who’s been proven wrong is an apology.

Government Officials Must Be Held Accountable

This is even more important when it comes to media and our health and government officials. Granting amnesty to individuals who have been wrong from Day 1, without a single apology, is an untenable proposition. The price society has paid for their errors is far too great for that.

They may ask for forgiveness, and they may be forgiven by many, but they STILL must be held accountable for their errors. Demanding that officials be held accountable for errors is not gloating. It’s reestablishing a baseline of conduct and accountability to the public — something we seem to have lost.

Their reckless behavior has caused people to lose their businesses, their livelihoods; they’ve lost family members to reckless medicine; they’ve lost out on weddings and funerals; drug use and suicides have skyrocketed; children have fallen years behind on their schooling and the economy has been destroyed. The list goes on. Being wrong has a price, and society will be paying it for quite some time.

What’s more, our health and government officials weren’t just wrong once and then changed course. No, they’ve doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on errors, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re wrong, and we’re just supposed to “let bygones be bygones”? Not a chance.

First, we have to set the record straight, so everyone actually knows what the truth is, and then we have to make sure these kinds of errors cannot be committed again. A truce is a distant third on the list of how to move forward.

Those Proven Right Are Still Persecuted

Setting the record straight starts with ending the persecution of those proven to be right. It also requires putting an end to censorship and the promulgation of propaganda.

With regard to the propaganda, this will require rewriting the law. The use of state propaganda against the American public was illegal until 2012, when then-president Obama legalized it through an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).⁵ That amendment must be repealed so that media can again be held accountable for the illegal dissemination of government propaganda.

Moving forward, we also likely need to either abolish or radically reassess the role of medical boards. As it stands, medical boards have been weaponized to silence doctors who go against the state propaganda and tell the truth about COVID.

The latest victim of this government orchestrated persecution is Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most well-credentialed and respected cardiologists in the world. He’s now being stripped of his medical credentials for the crime of speaking truth to the public (and thereby contradicting the legalized propaganda).⁶

He’s also been terminated from his position as editor-in-chief of Cardiorenal Medicine and Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine (RCM) — all without due process. RCM was even so cowardly to publicly claim he “stepped down” as his term of office had ended. As noted by McCullough, there are “powerful dark forces” at work in academic medicine “to expunge any resistance” to the COVID jab.

Editor Forced to Resign Over McCullough’s COVID Paper

Anyone who dares publish McCullough’s research also skates on thin ice. Dr. Jose Luis Domingo, editor-in-chief of the science journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) for the past seven years, was recently forced to resign for that very reason. As reported by the Epoch Times:⁷

“Though Domingo has himself received three vaccinations (two AstraZeneca and one Pfizer), he told The Epoch Times that he has been bombarded with insults, threats, and accusations of being ‘anti-vaccine’ ever since he approved the publication of a scientific paper⁸ [by McCullough, Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh and Anthony Kyriakopoulos] that explores potential mechanisms of harm of injected synthetic mRNA …

This research was co-authored by a team of preeminent scientists, including Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Peter McCullough, an internationally known cardiologist who has published over a hundred peer-reviewed articles during his 40-year career; and Dr. Anthony Kyriakopoulos, a Greek clinical microbiologist, medical doctor, and researcher who has a Ph.D. in medical and molecular microbiology.

Their research proposed that alterations in the vaccine mRNA may ‘hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein.’ In doing so, these scientists posited, mRNA vaccines may interfere with the body’s natural immune response.

They described this interference as ‘profound impairment,’ which, they believe, comes about specifically because the spike protein interferes with a critical early innate immune response mechanism, called the type I interferon response.

If they are correct, injected synthetic mRNA will have a variety of negative consequences on human health, including making our bodies less able to control infections and suppress cancer …

About a month after the paper was published, Domingo said, he began receiving angry emails and messages. These included insults, calls to resign, demands to retract the paper, and even threats … The angry messages, he said, were filled with ad hominem attacks against him and against the paper’s co-authors, but did not specify their scientific objections to the contents of the paper …

Though he would have preferred to stay at the helm of the journal until the end of 2023 … Domingo has issued his resignation from the journal to maintain his scientific independence.

He told us he is first and foremost a scientist, and that he does not regret publishing the paper. Despite the attacks, he was not willing to give in to the pressure from the journal’s publisher … Jagna Mirska …

Domingo said that the journal has already picked a successor for his position — someone with clear ties to the pharmaceutical industry: Bryan Delaney, Ph.D. According to his LinkedIn page, Delaney is a toxicologist who currently works for Haleon. Haleon is pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKlein’s new brand name for its consumer health unit.”

What Else Have They Been Wrong About?

The list of so-called “errors” is a long one. They were wrong about masks working and natural immunity not working, they were wrong about asymptomatic spread, lockdowns and the safety and effectiveness of the COVID shots. They were also wrong about SARS-CoV-2 jumping naturally from bats to humans by way of a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Not even a month has passed since we witnessed the stunning revelation that Pfizer never tested its COVID shots for transmissibility before proclaiming publicly that the vaccine protected against transmission. Then they had the CDC put the bioweapon on the childhood vaccine schedule and the same day increased the price of their jab by 400%.

As reported by Rising host Robby Soave (video above) and Vanity Fair,⁹ a report by the Minority Oversight Staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, released in October 2022, concluded that “a research-related incident is the most likely explanation for COVID-19.”

The COVID jab tyrants were also wrong when they insisted that mandating an experimental gene therapy was within legal bounds. Such mandates have since been overturned in a number of districts. Most recently, a New York judge ruled that New York City’s COVID jab mandate for municipal workers was enacted illegally and any employee fired for noncompliance must be immediately reinstated — and receive back pay.¹⁰

According to Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio, the Health Commission’s jab mandate “violates the separation of powers doctrine” enshrined in the state constitution, as well as workers’ due process rights. In his ruling, Porzio noted:

“The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for all residents.”

The New York City law department immediately filed an appeal, which blocked the reinstatement of the workers. Time will tell, but I suspect that in the end, the city will just end up having to pay out even more in back pay.

US Government Still Plans to Police Wrong-Think

As mentioned earlier, amnesty for COVID dictators is impossible in light of continued censorship, and there’s no sign of that ending any time soon. On the contrary, leaked documents show the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has every intention of policing wrong-think.

Biden’s “Ministry of Truth” may have been disbanded in the wake of public mockery, but the plan for such an entity was not shelved. As reported by The Intercept:¹¹

“Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms …

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.

According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information …

In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government …

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the ‘content request system’ at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live …

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target ‘inaccurate information’ on a wide range of topics, including ‘the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.’”

As you can see, censorship is not restricted to COVID issues alone. They include a variety of national politics and geopolitical issues as well. In other words, Americans’ views of the world and our country are being shaped by a propaganda arm of the U.S. government itself — not another country — and the reason they have no qualms about doing this is because Obama legalized the use of government propaganda against Americans during his presidency.

Censorship Is Now a Core Duty of the DHS

In addition to abolishing or radically reforming medical boards, the FDA and CDC, we probably need to do the same to the DHS. As reported by The Intercept, documentation shows the “DHS views the issue of tackling disinformation and misinformation as a growing portion of its core duties.”

I don’t know about you, but when I think about what Homeland Security should be doing, policing and punishing my personal views about health, medicine, climate change, political actors and geopolitical actions is not at the top of the list. Yet that’s precisely what they’re doing, and will be doing more of in the years to come.

To control the information space, the DHS intends to “leverage advanced data analytics technology” and work with nongovernmental agencies and other civil society organizations “to build resilience to the impacts of false information.”

Government Censorship by Surrogate Is Still Illegal

For now, Schmitt is combating this tyrannical and unconstitutional overreach in court. As reported by The Intercept:¹²

“In May, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took the lead in filing a lawsuit to combat what he views as sweeping efforts by the Biden administration to pressure social media companies to moderate certain forms of content appearing on their platforms.

The suit alleges governmentwide efforts to censor certain stories, especially ones related to the pandemic. It also names multiple agencies across the government that have participated in efforts to monitor speech and ‘open collusion’ between the administration and social media companies …

October 21, the judge presiding over the case granted the attorneys general permission to depose Fauci, CISA officials, and communication specialists from the White House.

While the lawsuit has a definite partisan slant, pointing the finger at the Biden administration for allegedly seeking to control private speech, many of the subpoenas request information that spans into the Trump era and provides a window into the absurdity of the ongoing effort.

‘There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by surrogate,’ said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit.

‘It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.’”

No Chance of Amnesty for US Leadership

To bring us back to where we started, with Oster’s plea for amnesty for those who ignorantly chose to be on the wrong side of history, I am not alone in my view that her proposition is an unworkable one.

Sure, on a personal level, many are likely willing and able to bury the hatchet and join hands again with friends and family who shunned and berated them as “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-science anti-vaxxers” (although following the science and the data was precisely what we were all doing).

But on the leadership level, amnesty is out of the question. Leaders must be held accountable for decisions based on lies. They must be held accountable for their fraud and deception.

Agency heads must be held accountable for their data manipulation and obfuscation, Big Tech leadership must be held accountable for their efforts to aid government in the circumvention of our Constitutional rights, and mainstream media, including individual hosts and reporters, must be held to account for their propaganda role, which has injured and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans who trusted them.

A court recently ruled Alex Jones must pay nearly $1 billion in damages to families for falsely claiming that no children died in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting,¹³ an event that many in alt media suspected was a false flag operation at the time. Now, that fine is quite a precedent.

What would be the appropriate fine for journalists who claim no one has died from the COVID shot? Or that COVID jab injuries are “exceedingly rare”? What would be the appropriate fine for tech platforms that censor the personal testimonies of the injured and families of the dead, thereby perpetuating the lie that injuries and deaths don’t occur?

What would be an appropriate payout by federal agencies that falsified data to hide adverse effects and deaths? If you guessed in the trillions you would have profoundly underestimated the damage they have done.

No Chance of Amnesty for Enforcers of False COVID Narrative

The American Conservative had this to say about the “Soviet blue-check media” in the United States:¹⁴

“There can be no amnesty for the unthinking enforcers of the narrative of the regime. I don’t know how to put this gently to my fellow members of the blue-check media class, so I will say it bluntly. You guys resemble nothing so much as the info apparatus of some failing ideological state — late-Soviet apparatchiks, only without the erudition that was demanded of regime intellectuals in Moscow back in the day …

In February 2020, the Washington Post published a news story with the headline: ‘Tom Cotton Keeps Repeating a Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory That Scientists Have Debunked.’

More than a year later … the paper ‘rewrote the article’s headline, softening ‘conspiracy theory’ to ‘fringe theory’ and noting that scientists have ‘disputed’ it rather than ‘debunked’ it.’ How generous. How scrupulous …

If the lab-leak theory were a rare instance in which blue-check media abdicated basic journalistic responsibility in favor of elite narrative enforcement, one could forgive and forget, as the Atlantic now demands.

But such lapses are utterly commonplace — systemic, you might say. Remember when Big Tech and Big Media and Big Intelligence teamed up to frame the New York Post’s Hunter Biden reporting in October 2020 as ‘misinformation’ — only to concede, once the election was safely over, that it was, in fact, entirely accurate?

Remember the absolute unanimity with which blue-check media defended the efficacy of COVID vaccines in stopping transmission — before begrudgingly admitting that, erm, actually, they really don’t work as advertised?

Remember when blue-check media were dead-certain that Jussie Smollett was the victim of a racist attack? And on and on and on. Once the falsity of the old narrative is definitively established, most blue-checks shamelessly move on to the next elite narrative in need of media reinforcement — no apology, no introspection.

The few willing to acknowledge their errors, meanwhile, insist they were merely following the ‘expert’ consensus at the time. This is risible. The job of the reporter isn’t to parrot what the experts say at any given moment: it is to question what anyone in power claims.

‘If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out,’ used to be the journalistic motto. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Pfizer, WHO, and 50 former intelligence officials deserve far more exacting scrutiny than Mom.”

Rhetorical Constructs of Manipulative Language

Another rebuttal to Oster’s call for amnesty that I want to highlight is from the anonymous Substack writer known only as “A Midwestern Doctor,” who dissects the “manipulative language” used by Oster in her article. The anonymous doctor writes:¹⁵

“When I read through this article, I realize the author highlighted a very common problem … The author is demanding to receive forgiveness for their conduct, but … is refusing to admit they did anything wrong.

In order to accomplish this, they utilized a variety of manipulative rhetorical constructs that are relatively simple and frequently utilized. Because it is so common to encounter propaganda pieces like this, I thought there might be some value in illustrating my thought process as I read this article.”

The doctor goes on to share screenshots of Oster’s article, with arrows to sentences and thoughts inserted in red. Below are a few of those screenshots. For the rest, please see the original Substack article.¹⁶

Take Control of Your Wealth

Financial collapse is an inevitable outcome of the COVID plandemic. In the video above, finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts and attorney Carolyn Betts review the tools you need to take control of your finances at this critical time in history. We must reclaim our independence from the central banks and denounce their planned digital currency, as both are part of a massive control and slave system.

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Notes

^1, 2 The Atlantic October 31, 2022

³ Brendon Marotta Substack November 1, 2022

⁴ Dana Loesch Substack October 31, 2022

⁵ Business Insider May 21, 2012

⁶ Steve Kirsch Substack October 29, 2022

⁷ Epoch Times October 30, 2022 (Archived)

⁸ Food Chemistry and Toxicology June 2022; 164: 113008

⁹ Vanity Fair October 28, 2022

¹⁰ New York Post October 25, 2022

^11, 12 The Intercept October 31, 2022 (Archived)

¹³ Reuters October 12, 2022

¹⁴ American Conservative November 1, 2022

^15, 16 A Midwestern Doctor Substack October 31, 2022

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A new scientific study published in the sociological journal Minerva details how medical professionals with views contradicting the mainstream narrative on COVID-19 were censored and suppressed. The study, titled “Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy,” also covers how medical professionals pushed back against censorship.

The study was co-authored by a group of scholars from Australia and Israel, and the Yaffa Shir-Raz of the University of Haifa, who leaked a video of an internal meeting at the ministry of health in Israel about how some findings on the relatively rare adverse effects of the Pfizer vaccine were hidden.

On Substack, Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Josh Guetzkow, one of the authors of the study, explained how the study was conducted. The study is “based on in-depth interviews with scientists and doctors around the world who have faced censorship and suppression due to their views on COVID-19.”

He said the scientists and doctors could be familiar to his audience, but everyone interviewed was kept anonymous in the report. He continued to say that “the current stark reality of censorship and suppression is also undoubtedly familiar to most people reading this, it will be news to many outside our circles.” Therefore, they “felt there would be value in having it documented and discussed in a peer-reviewed academic literature.”

The summary of the report states that “the emergence of COVID-19 … led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy” and a “perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities.”

Supporters of the “official position,” which the authors referred to as “orthodoxy,” responded by moving “to censor those who promote dissenting views.”

The researchers found out that the media and Big Tech played a central role in “attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures.” That was followed by “widespread use” of censorship and “tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position.”

The censorship and suppression tactics that respondents of the study described included

“exclusion, derogatory labeling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication.”

The report states that “mainstream media, which until then had seen them as desirable interviewees, stopped interviewing them and accepting opinion pieces from them.”

Another tactic of suppression was official inquiry, including being threatened with license revocation, lawsuits, and even police searches at private healthcare centers.

Others had their research “retracted by the journal [which had originally published it] after publication,” while many others had their submitted papers “rejected from journals (often multiple times) without peer review” or with the publication process taking longer than usual.

Respondents of the study said they were “shocked and surprised,” but they did not give up. The censorship made them “even more determined and eager to expose the information that was being censored.”

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Before both, Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany, and unelected President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, two Germans, were chosen to economically destroy Europe, beginning with Germany, they were indeed vetted for months by the neoliberal hegemons in Washington and the Pentagon / NATO.

When eventually they “qualified”, they enhanced the media lie-machine, betraying and lying to the people in Europe about energy shortages, food shortages, astronomical inflation – and fear-mongering about the multiple disastrous consequences of these calamities.

They imposed stern energy savings program under threat of severe punishment, including fines and imprisonment. This, despite the fact that German gas tanks are full to about 94 %, the most they have ever been in the last 5 years. The energy situation in other EU countries is similar – it would appear, not at all disastrous.

Yet, the dumbfounded European public went along – with fear and anxiety.

But the German industrialists did not.

They didn’t and still don’t agree with the German – and by association, the European industry-destruction, also called deindustrialization policy. They had in the past already heavily lobbied with Madame Merkel, making semi-secret deals with Russia.

German industrialists know that the divide-and-conquer policy is being imposed by Washington – to reach eventually a unipolar world, which is only possible with a fractured Europe, not with a “United Europe”. The US GDP is estimated to reach in 2022 about US$ 20 trillion, as compared to a fast-catching-up European GDP of some US$ 17 trillion (2022 est.).

German business leaders didn’t go along with official German economic policy. Destroying their country economically is going too far. Knowing that Europe in the long-run needs Russia and with an even longer vision, also China, German industrialists made semi-clandestine pacts with Moscow.

German Chancellor Scholz’s one-day visit to Beijing, meeting with President Xi Jinping, consisted of a large delegation – several dozen representatives of German key businesses and industries. To the delight of Washington, Scholz told the world: “The world needs China.”

It’s now European economic leaders who call the shots; Olaf Scholz has little choice. The WEF, Washington and Brussels appear to be sidelined.

Germany, the people, is very much interested in becoming part of the Xi-Initiative, the Belt and Road. The 25% concession in the port of Hamburg to the Chinese company, Cosco, was a first step – a sign that Germany was ready to sign up to the New Silk Road, the same as did Italy and Greece with Piraeus, already years before.

The original proposal was a Chinese participation of about 35% to 40%. Political pressure from Brussels and from within Germany reduced the Chinese share to 25%. The reduction is unimportant. What counts is Germany’s “entry” into the BRI.

Washington, Brussels and NATO may not like it. But what can they do, if the EU-lead country, Germany, decides to resist the planned collapse?

Europe Signs US$ 17 billion Trade Deal with China

In agreement with France and other EU countries, Olaf Scholz entered into a Trade Deal with China for the equivalent of about US$ 17 billion. See video below.

Finally, prompted by German industrialists, Europe may see the US for what it is. Officials in the Biden Administration are attempting to raise issues about the Sino-German trade, claiming that China wants to separate Europe from the US. Talks about “sanctions” are already emerging. But sanctioning Europe and China — where would it leave the US? Alone and isolated.

Therefore, Washington is thinking twice before applying their usual weapon of mass destruction, sanctioning “misbehaving” partners.

Chancellor Scholz apparently made it clear that the visit to China is the right decision. Washington, NATO and Brussels won’t be able to decouple Germany from China. No way should the United States be able to intervene and interfere.

At the same time, preceding the Scholz visit to Beijing, Germans revealed fears for financial survival in a recent poll (RT, 7 Nov 2022). 

Half of the respondents are afraid, they might not have enough money to financially survive the coming winter, according to the BILD journal of last Sunday (6 November). Most people believe the government’s relief measures to alleviate the industrial fallout of the ongoing energy crunch are not enough.

According to the INSA polling agency (Institute for New Social Answers), only about a third of respondents believe that government measures will help them get by. Another third admitted they would not be able to afford any Christmas presents for their loved ones this season. They also believe that Scholz is not up to the task facing him in the coming years.

Chancellor Scholz’s approval rating is with 25% the lowest of any German Chancellor duirng the past 50 years. His trip to China may improve his popularity.

This negative reaction was triggered by fear that Germany may not be able to handle the announced “energy crisis”. This is clearly a fear reaction by people unaware of the hoax behind the crisis; not knowing that Germany’s, like most European countries’ energy reserves, are at their highest for years, and before Chancellor Scholz’s trip to Beijing.

Their fear was also driven by inflation and the ever-increasing cost of energy, combined with worries about a potentially “chilling winter” across Europe.

Will the revelation of the new German-China connection ease the tension?

Time will tell. Of special importance will also be the response of other EU countries. Will they return to sovereign nation states – moving away from the imposed globalist concept?

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

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

Featured image: Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping. (Photo: Federal Government/Imo)

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To be sure there is an election coming up today in the United States and President Joe Biden has clearly taken the low road in the lead up to it by speaking before friendly audiences and repeating over and over the bromides that cause the brain to go numb. During the past week it was all about saving “American democracy” from the MAGA barbarians. And Democracy is, inevitably, tied to the Democratic Party etymologically, which, in a sense, makes it the presumed sole possessor of the right stuff when it comes to delivering freedom to all, including most recently a truly delusional pledge by Biden to “free Iran.”

The problem for the president is that Bidenspeak is being seen by some as devoid of content, choosing to skip over any discussion of the actual policies that have benefitted or harmed the American people over the past two years. That omission is convenient as many voters look around and see high inflation, a struggling economy, surging crime rates and an open border that may have produced, according to Tucker Carlson, a tidal wave of as many as five million illegal immigrants in the country. And, of course, there is also the war threatening to go nuclear over the Russian intervention in Ukraine, a conflict that threatens no American interest but which nevertheless has been elevated into a genuine saga of good versus evil through the combined efforts of the US and British governments ably assisted by the western mainstream media.

And it has become a real war, thanks to the joint UK-US bombing of one of the Nord Stream pipelines that connect Russia to northern Europe. Washington has warned repeatedly that it would take steps to shut down the pipeline, which it regards as a security threat in that it makes Europe dependent on Russia for energy, and it appears that the plucky Brits did the dirty work. Britain’s then Foreign Minister Liz Truss reportedly texted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately after the pipeline blew up, telling him “It’s done!” Neither Truss nor Blinken were apparently aware that Russian intelligence had penetrated the security on the connection and recorded the communication.

And, of course, it is all about Ukraine even if the ultimate objective by the US is to weaken Russia militarily while also removing President Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as some kind of puppet master in his control of the White House, the US Congress and the mainstream media, drawing an estimated 60 billion dollars in economic and military aid from the US Treasury and also committing Washington to support his country until it “wins” against Putin. Zelensky, whose middle name must be Svengali, reportedly was involved recently in a phone call with Biden in which the US president expressed frustration over Zelensky’s frequently repeated demands for more money and weapons. Biden vented and even shouted but Zelensky wound up with the cash, some of which will certainly go to support the Ukrainian president’s various real estate holdings in Israel and Florida.

And then there is the “dirty bomb” story making the rounds. It has two components. First is the technology of a dirty bomb itself, which is a high explosive device that is seeded with radioactive waste that is lethal and contaminates a large area when it is detonated. A dirty bomb is considered a weapon of mass destruction and its use is categorized as a war crime, much like using a chemical or biological weapon. Second, there is the false flag aspect to the tale that is circulating. The Russian government, the source of the report, is claiming that Zelensky’s government is preparing to put together and detonate a dirty bomb somewhere inside Ukraine and before blaming the development on Putin and his government. That attribution of an action falsely to a country or government that was not involved is a false flag and the intention is to create a perception that someone is breaking the rules on what is allowed even during wartime.

False flags attacks were used most recently in the western supported insurgency in Syria, most notably at the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013, where a chemical-weapons claimed attack that may have killed as many as 1700 people took place. The attack was inevitably attributed to the Syrian government by the United States but it was in fact, much more plausibly carried out by the rebels who controlled the area at that time.

So why would Zelensky detonate a dirty bomb within the area he controlled? Well, Zelensky has long sought increased and direct US and NATO involvement on his side in the fight against Russia. Being able to point to a major war crime that he would attribute to the Russians through a false flag operation might just be enough to do the trick and bring in larger scale western involvement. It is certainly something that Zelensky and his neocon advisers would consider an acceptable ruse de guerre. Given the effective neocon control over foreign policy and the media outlets in the US it would also in all likelihood involve the United States in a major war that was avoidable with devastating consequences for all parties involved.

So, if Joe Biden wants to talk about his achievements in the run-up to elections, why doesn’t he explain his reasons for enabling and expanding the war with Russia over Ukraine? That war has not only brought about a flow of billions of dollars in aid for the most corrupt country in Europe, it has also resulted in a worldwide energy crisis that has fueled inflation and disrupted trade. More to the point, it has led to a global movement to confront the United States over its presumption that it is the hegemonistic power that sets the rules for everyone else. That is also contributing to increasing rejection of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which will have an incalculable impact on the American economy and the country’s standard of living.

Has it all been worth it, Joe, to craft a narrative that ignores the real issues just so you can stay in power? The America that you and I were brought up in is sliding down into a deep dark hole, and you and your delusional neocon and neoliberal friends have been largely responsible for the descent even as you use your bully pulpit to cry about “democracy” at every opportunity.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or OUN is the most successful post-war fascist group.  During the war the OUN played a major role in helping the Germans carry out the Holocaust, which claimed 1.2 million Jewish lives.

They also attempted genocide against the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in what is today Western Ukraine. These mass murders were carried out in the most brutal manner imaginable.

Jews were beaten to death with iron bars. Poles were chopped up with axes or cut in half with saws. The OUN took a sadistic delight in humiliating their victims and torturing them to death. Russians were sometimes skinned alive.

The 2014 CIA coup in Ukraine made the OUN ideology the official ideology of the Ukrainian state. Even Ukraine’s current Jewish president Zelensky, whose family were victims of the mass murder in Ukraine, said of Stepan Bandera “He is a hero for a certain percentage of Ukrainians, and it’s normal, and it’s cool.”  Ukrainian history has been falsified to portray the OUN as heroes who battled both the Nazis and the Soviets. 

Yet it is not only in the madhouse that is post-Maidan Ukraine that the history of Ukraine has been falsified. Because of the close ties of the OUN to the American, British, German, Polish and other governments the OUN have also been able to make their twisted mythology into the accepted mainstream version of events.

The OUN were considered too valuable by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to have their wartime crimes exposed. Equally importantly the OUN became a major source for anti-Soviet propaganda, which then became mainstream history. During the Cold War academia became a major weapon in the battle between capitalism and communism.

Today nothing has changed and in the new cold war with Russia Ukraine is currently the most important battleground. Shielding Western publics from the truth about the insanity and cruelty of the Ukrainian fascists the West are supporting is the main goal of the media and academia when it comes to Ukraine.

Ukraine is only the most extreme example of the “memory wars” being waged across the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern Europe where pro-western governments seek to turn Nazi collaborators into heroes, demonize the Soviet Union, and destroy all monuments to the role the Soviet Union played in defeating fascism. I will be relying mainly on the brilliant work Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist Fascism, Genocide and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, the first critical and scholarly account of the history of the OUN. Ironically his book was released just before the start of the 2014 civil war and Ukrainian nationalists did everything they could to prevent the book from being published, waging a public campaign against the author.

In part one of this series I described the origins of Ukrainian nationalism and its transformation into a fascist movement. I explained how present day Ukraine had long been divided with Central and Eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia. Western Ukraine, which was originally part of Poland, became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Poland was dismembered in the 18th century. After World War One it became part of a reborn Poland known as the Second Republic, which had absorbed the short, lived Republic of Western Ukraine.

I traced the origins of the OUN and its terrorist campaign within Poland. The OUN engaged in assassinations, massacres, arson and other crimes. This landed the leader of the OUN’s Homeland executive Stepan Bandera in prison although his two trials made him famous. The OUN was controlled by its leaders in exile. After Stepan Bandera escaped from prison, thanks to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he tried to seize the leadership of the OUN. This led the organization to split into an OUN/M answering to Andrei Melnyk and an OUN/B answering to Bandera. During the brief two-week window after the German invasion of Poland, but prior to the Soviet invasion, the OUN massacred thousands of Jews and also murdered many of the defeated Polish army who were trying to escape or return home. The OUN leaders then headed for Western Poland.

Eastern Poland became Western Ukraine. Once the Soviets arrived they reunified Ukraine and cracked down hard on Polish nationalists as well as on the OUN.

The exiled OUN leaders in German-occupied Poland, known as the General Government, along with tens of thousands of their supporters who had fled the Soviets, were busy working closely with the Germans, who had been their sponsors for decades, to plan the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stepan Bandera and the other OUN/B leaders wrote down their plans in the months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

It was known as the “Struggles and Activities” plan. It called for the OUN/B to activate its networks to give a welcome the Nazis and form militias for elimination of Jews, Poles, and all non-Ukrainians as well as any Ukrainians who opposed the OUN. The OUN/B came up with a bunch of fascist anti-communist and anti-Semitic slogans with which to blanket the country.

The OUN/B and OUN/M were both working closely with the Abwehr, German military intelligence, who provided military training, police training, and political training. 800 OUN/B members joined special task forces who were to follow the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union and mobilize Ukrainians to support their planned Nazi puppet Government. 800 other OUN/B members joined the Nachtigall battalion, which was controlled by the Abwehr.

The OUN/B also had a network of 20,000 active members in Soviet western Ukraine along with 1.5 million supporters that could be mobilized. The OUN/B planned to declare an “independent” Ukrainian state with Stepan Bandera as its Providnyk or fascist dictator. Hitler however had other plans for Ukraine.

Hitler viewed Ukrainians as sub-human Slavs, like the Russians, who would have to be massacred or enslaved to make way for German settlers. Ukraine’s rich black soil would feed the German Reich.

Hitler thought Ukraine would be for Germany what India was for the British or America was for the U.S. who wiped out the Native Americans. The OUN did have a major Nazi ally in the form of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.   Rosenberg saw the potential of an OUN-controlled Ukraine as a valuable ally.

This was the situation on the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941.

The war would lead to the death of 27 million people in the Soviet Union. 5.2 million civilians would die in Ukraine. 2.3 Million Ukrainians would be deported to German slave labour camps.

Of Ukraine’s 2.7 million Jews 1.6 million would be killed. 700 cities and town were destroyed in Ukraine along with 28,000 villages.

The impact of the OUN on the success of the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews was dramatic.

In areas that had been long subjected to OUN propaganda in Western Ukraine local Jews had much less chance of survival. In Ternopil in Western Ukraine 97% of the Jews were killed. In contrast, in Kharkov in eastern Ukraine 91% of the Jews managed to survive.

The OUN/B had been warned in advance of the invasion date and had smuggled the “Struggles and Activities” plan into Ukraine with its blueprint for the coming genocide.

OUN activists spread out across the countryside setting up militias, and local governments. On 25 June 1941, the OUN/B tried to stage an uprising in Lvov but it was crushed by the Soviets. Sometimes the OUN/B forces would attack the retreating Red Army.

However they usually waited until after the Red Army retreated before entering an area. On 30 June 1941, the Wehrmacht entered the city including the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion whom locals greeted with flowers, calling them the Stepan Bandera battalion.

The Nachtigall battalion seized control of the radio station and began broadcasting Nazi and OUN propaganda.

That morning the Germans and the OUN discovered that the Soviet secret police the NKVD had massacred its political prisoners when the German invasion began to prevent them from collaborating with the Germans. Many were doubtless OUN members killed before they could carry out horrific crimes, like Roman Shukhevych’s brother.

This happened in a number of areas and was used by the OUN to scapegoat the Jewish population for the killings. They were falsely accused of being NKVD informants and blamed for the victims’ deaths.

This would be the pattern across western Ukraine and where there had been no recent executions those executed in the terror years earlier were dug up to enflame the masses. Thus already on 30 June 1941 small-scale massacres of the Jews of Lvov began. That night at 8 PM Yaroslav Stetsko held a ceremony in which he declared a new Ukrainian state under the leadership of Stepan Bandera.

The day would be celebrated by OUN exiles until today as a national holiday. With Stetsko were the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church in Lvov Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, clergyman and Nachtigall battalion member Ivan Hryn’okh and two officers in the German Abwehr Hans Koch and Wilhelm Ernst zu Eikern.

Metropolitan Sheptys’kyi endorsed the idea of a Ukrainian state led by Bandera but paid lip service to the idea of tolerance for minorities. His church would later be implicated in inciting genocide against both the Jews and Polish Catholics. The German Abwehr officers welcomed the celebration but warned that it was not time to declare independence and that only Hitler could decide.

Hitler had already decided against an “independent” Ukraine, which was why Stepan Bandera had been forbidden from returning to Ukraine.

According to OUN mythology and to the OUN’s western apologists Stepan Bandera was immediately sent to a concentration camp because of Stetsko’s premature declaration of independence. Actually he and Stetsko were placed in “honourable confinement” which initially meant simply that he was confined to Berlin where he could roam freely and was even allowed to carry a pistol for self-defence.

It was the later OUN/B murders of leaders of the OUN/M carried out in broad daylight that then provoked a mild German crackdown on the OUN/B. I will return to this topic later. Even when Bandera was sent to a concentration camp he was incarcerated in a special section reserved for prisoners who might prove useful later, like the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard or Stalin’s son. Bandera was given special privileges and needless to say was not treated like the other inmates in a concentration camp. He was not gassed, enslaved, shot, tortured, experimented on or starved to death. On the contrary he was allowed conjugal visits from his wife who served as his go between to the OUN.  Bandera received weekly care packages, and was not even confined to a cell.

To return to Lvov by 1 July 1941 the OUN/B and the Germans had whipped the populace up into a fury directed at the city’s Jews. An angry mob rounded up thousands of Jews and brought them to the prisons where the NKVD’s victims had been found. The Jewish men were made to move the rotting corpses while they were brutally beaten to death. Jewish women were made to wash the rotting corpses and kiss their hands before being beaten to death, often after being raped. Others were shot by German military units.

The OUN/B had formed a Ukrainian militia to conduct the executions on the day they arrived. They would soon be transformed into the Ukrainian police on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS.

They would answer to the SS but remained loyal to Stetsko. It was in their role as auxiliary police recruits that the OUN/B would play a major part in the Holocaust. It was their role to round up the victims, to enforce all the anti-Jewish laws. They often also acted as executioners. Much of the killing in Lvov was carried out by angry mobs fired up by OUN propaganda.

They loved to humiliate their victims before killing them. Women were stripped naked and often raped in the streets.

Jews were forced to clean up broken glass, with their bare hands and clean streets in front of jeering crowds, whipping them with steel cables.

Jews were forced to sing communist songs before being shot or they were forced to shout Slava Ukraini before being beaten to death.

Everywhere there were Nazi and Ukrainian flags and the walls were plastered with genocidal OUN slogans. The pogrom would last until 3 July 1941.

On 2 July, the Germans took thousands of Jews out to the forest for a mass execution.

Ukrainian peasants streamed in from the countryside with carts to carry the loot they planned to steal from their victims. Greed is often a major motivator in genocide.

At the high end it involved German corporate takeovers of Jewish-owned business, often financed by American investors.

In the Soviet Union there were no big businesses. Yet genocidal Ukrainians and other collaborators or German soldiers were able to loot their victims’ personal property.

Robbery and extortion were a constant in these Ukrainian pogroms. Always the victims were threatened into turning over their valuables then murdered anyway.

Banderites became synonymous with bandits in the view of their potential victims. Around 8,000 Jews were killed in a couple days during the first Lvov Pogrom but the Nazis and the OUN were just getting started. During the Lvov Pogrom the OUN/B also supplied a death list of Polish professors, their families and hundreds of their students. The professors were shot along with some of their family members and 100 Polish students. A month later to please the OUN/B, angry about Germany’s refusal to recognize Ukraine’s independence and the arrests of Bandera and Stetsko, the Germans gave them permission to hold a second Lvov Pogrom from 25-28 July 1941, known as the Petliura days in honour of the mass murdering Symon Petliura. Petliura was infamous for his army’s massacres of Jews during the Russian Civil War, which I discussed in Part 1.

Image: Emblem of OUN-B (Photo by Alex Tora, licensed under CC BY 3.0)

All across the countryside the same pattern was repeated. The OUN/B held Independence Day ceremonies, destroyed all communist symbols, put up Ukrainian flags and Nazi Swastikas and then launched pogroms. There were up to 140 Pogroms in Western Ukraine in July 1941 and they claimed 35,000 to 39,000 victims. The biggest pogroms besides Lvov were in Ternopil and Zolochiv. During this period the OUN/B were not merely carrying out German orders but were enthusiastically carrying out genocide in line with their own ideology.

They conducted massacres of Jews in places where there was no German presence. When the Hungarian forces forbade the OUN from carrying out a big pogrom, they defiantly carried out a little one and then complained to the Germans. Across the countryside the OUN erected triumphal arches welcoming the Nazis and praising Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler. The Nazis were greeted by adoring crowds and their invasion was blessed by the Greek Catholic clergy. OUN/B activists had the crowds sign “plenipotentiary letters” which praised Hitler and the German Army while also asking for the release of Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko.

During the early days of the German invasion, Stepan Bandera had set up his headquarters close to Ukraine and used couriers to communicate his orders to the OUN/B. He had ordered and approved of the massacres of Jews. Stetsko’s 30 June 1941 declaration of independence had angered the Germans.

Bandera did his best to repair relations with the Nazis. On 3 July 1941, Bandera attended a meeting in Cracow with the Undersecretary of State for the General Government Ernst Kundt (German occupied Poland). Bandera argued that as leader of the OUN it was the will of the people that he head Ukraine. Kundt countered that only Hitler could decide such matters. Bandera conceded that he could only create a Ukrainian state with German permission. On 5 July 1941, Bandera was sent to Berlin and placed in “Honourable Captivity”.

On 8 July 1941, someone tried to assassinate Yarsolav Stetsko and on 9 July 1941, Stetsko was arrested and escorted by the Abwehr to Berlin. On 12 July 1941 Stetsko was freed. On 14 July 1941 Bandera was freed.

They were confined to Berlin and lived together in an apartment. Bandera was allowed to carry a gun and held an ID issued by the RSHA (Heidrich’s “Homeland Security” department). These two networked with the Lithuanian fascists in exile and the Japanese ambassador. Stetsko kept busy writing his autobiography for his German handlers: writing that, while he considered Moscow his main enemy, he fully endorsed exterminating the Jews since he considered them tools of Moscow.

On 19 July 1941, Hitler decided to incorporate Eastern Galicia into the General Government.

This offended the OUN/B who wanted to rule a united Ukraine.

Now their territory was being absorbed back into German-occupied Poland.

Actually it turned out to be beneficial to the OUN/B’s interests as Ukrainians in Galicia were favoured over the Poles and Jews and they were allowed to continue to carry out Ukrainization of Polish educational institutions.

Ukrainians in East Galicia were treated like fascist allies Slovakia and Croatia.

The Nazis set up UTSK in the Ukrainian Central Committee run by Volodymyr Kubiiovych in the General Government area. Kubiiovych had been a close ally of the OUN in the 1930s and shared their ideology while being more flexible. He lobbied for the creation of a Ukrainian National Army to fight alongside the Nazis and argued that all Jewish property should be turned over to Ukrainians.

In 1943 he would get his wish with the creation of the Waffen-SS Galizia division, composed of Ukrainians. Ukrainians in the former Soviet Ukraine on the other hand were mercilessly exploited. All education beyond the 4th grade was banned. The Germans modelled their behaviour in Soviet Ukraine on American plantation owners treating Ukrainian peasants like Black slaves who could only be kept in check with whips and clubs. The main goal was to loot Ukraine’s grain. The result would be very different attitudes towards the memory of the Nazis in Western and Eastern Ukraine.

On 30 August 1941, the OUN/B assassinated the OUN/M leaders Melina Senyk and Mykola Stibors’kyi in broad daylight on the streets in Zhytomyr. This outraged the Germans and other Ukrainian nationalists. The Germans were further outraged when the OUN/B tried to blame Germany for the killings. The OUN/M provided the Germans with names and addressees of OUN/B leaders who were then arrested.

The Germans also shot some OUN/B members as looters and closed their offices in Berlin and Vienna.

They tried and failed to purge the administration and police of OUN/B members. On 13 September 1941, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested again.

Despite this both continued efforts to repair relations with the Germans. Both sent orders to the OUN/B not to resist the Germans and to continue to supply recruits for the police and the puppet government.

Even after being sent to a cushy concentration camp and even after two of his brothers died in a concentration camp, Bandera never ceased attempts at reconciliation with the Germans. Even when it became clear the Germans were losing in 1944, Bandera was more committed then ever to allying the OUN/B with the Nazis. The German purge was totally ineffective. The OUN/B was continually flooded with new recruits and continued to grow in power. The head of the Ukrainian police simply ignored orders to get rid of OUN/B members. In other words even when the Nazis turned on the OUN/B the organization continued to supply recruits for the police, which would play a major role in carrying out the holocaust. Many Ukrainian police would also go on to join the Waffen SS Galizia division. Others would later join the UPA, using their experience in mass murder to massacre Poles.

The Ukrainian police were formed from the Ukrainian militias that the OUN/B had recruited in the wake of the German invasion. They were known as the Schutzmannschaften or auxiliary police. In March 1942, despite the Nazi’s earlier crackdown, the OUN/B ordered its members to join the police en masse. The Ukrainian police answered ultimately to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, overall commander of the SS. It was ordered that they be given two hours of Nazi indoctrination every day.

In the cities the Ukrainian police assisted in raids, deportations, and shootings. They also patrolled the ghettoes. They enforced the anti-Jewish laws, forced Jews to wear identifying arm bands, created death lists by interviewing locals, rounded up the victims, guarded the prisoners, escorted them to the site of the execution and often shot the victims, especially if they were children. The Nazis had their own killing squads, the Einsatzgruppe C that also carried out many of the mass executions.

In the countryside there were few German forces or German police and the Ukrainian Police played the leading role in destroying the Jews and then spent years hunting down the survivors. The Ukrainian police often displayed the same sadistic brutality the OUN/B had shown in the Lvov pogroms.

One survivor recounted being locked in a bathhouse with dozens of victims who were forced to desecrate their holy books. Some had had their beards set aflame. The fire then spread to their clothes and they were burned alive. Others were beaten to death. Throughout it all the victims were forced to sing to entertain their Ukrainian tormentors. The Ukrainian police were used not only to terrorize Ukraine but also to terrorize Belarus, Poland, Slovakia and other areas. Particularly infamous was Battalion 201, which included Roman Shukhevych.

He would also join the Waffen-SS Galizia division and become leader of the UPA.  Shukhevych, a monster like Bandera, is now widely promoted as a “Hero of Ukraine.” In addition to carrying out mass murders of Jews, Byelorussians and Poles; Shukhevych loved to have Eastern Ukrainian’s shot for little or no reason and privately contemplated exterminating them all. Many recruits to Battalion 201 like Shukhevych had been part of the Abwehr’s Nachtigall and Roland battalions and carried out mass murders of Byelorussian civilians as part of their anti-partisan warfare in 1942.

Early in 1943 Heinrich Himmler created the Waffen-SS Galizia division, also known as the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS. It was called Galician instead of Ukrainian to pander to Hitler.

Hitler, born in Austria-Hungary, felt that since Galicia had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was probably some German blood in them. Over 80,000 Ukrainians volunteered to join the SS Galizia but only 8,000 were accepted.

It soon expanded to 14,000 men by recruiting members of the Ukrainian police.

The Ukrainian general commanding the SS Galicia was Pavlo Shandruk. The SS Galicia was established to battle the Red Army. It was also deployed to crush the Slovakian national uprising and played a major role in the destruction of Warsaw after the Warsaw uprising.

On 22 July 1944 the Waffen SS Galicia division, by then much larger, was encircled and destroyed by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army under the command of Pavel Rybalko.

They were decimated by the Soviet artillery and Katyusha rocket batteries. However the Germans were able to replace the units by recruiting more members and the SS Galicia division went on to wage dirty wars against partisans and civilians in Italy, Yugoslavia, France and Czechoslovakia. They surrendered to the British two days after the war ended and with the help of the Vatican were able to avoid deportation back to the Soviet Union by claiming to be Polish citizens.

Eventually they would end up in Britain before being resettled in Canada and America strengthening the OUN diaspora during the Cold War. Unknown to most citizens of Canada and the US there are public monuments to these Waffen SS veterans in both countries.

In 1943 at the same time that the OUN/B were joining the Waffen SS en masse, and while they were setting up the UPA to exterminate the Poles, the OUN/B was publicly distancing themselves from the Nazis and secretly trying to forge an alliance with the western allies for a future struggle with the Soviet Union. Here the considerations were the Soviet victory at Stalingrad foreboding Germany’s ultimate defeat. The more farsighted Nazis were already planning their escapes, and their deals with Western intelligence agencies. The hardliners in American and British Intelligence like Allen Dulles were already gearing up for a covert war against the Soviet Union using committed anti-communists and anti-Russians among their current fascist “enemies” (for men like Dulles they were friends and business partners).

When Poland was investigating the Pieracki assassination in the mid-1930s, it discovered that the OUN had ties to MI6 as well as the German Abwehr. When it comes to such matters the historical evidence is always a sanitized version or some sort of limited hang out. The CIA spent decades destroying incriminating records and declassifying misleading or altered records. Which is my way of saying we will never know the early history of the ties of the OUN with MI6 and the OSS and US military intelligence during the war.

The OUN/B was already trying to improve their image in the west in April 1942. At their second OUN/B conference they claimed that they would no longer take part in anti-Jewish actions. At the same conference they still condemned Jews as “a tool of Russian Bolshevik Imperialism. In addition the OUN/B did not quit the police and so continued to be a vital element in carrying out the mass murder of Jews. By 1943 the Jews had largely been eliminated in western Ukraine. The survivors were being hunted by the Ukrainian police, which was full of OUN/B members. At their third Conference from 17-21 February, the OUN/B was now claiming that it would fight both Germany and the USSR and that they were now democrats ruled by a triumvirate, led by the (war criminal) Roman Shukhevych. In July 1944 the OUN sent emissaries to attempt to make a deal with the Western allies, including Mykola Lebed, head of the OUN internal security branch or SB, known for its bloodthirsty assassinations of alleged OUN traitors. Lebed would later receive decades of backing from the CIA. In July of 1944 the OUN/B furthered their “Democratic” rebranding, creating the front group UHVR, the Supreme Liberation Council of Ukraine. It would later provide many recruits for the CIA and MI6.

A few months before the February 1943 OUN conference, the OUN started what was to become the UPA.  Contrary to myth the UPA only attacked Germans when it needed to steal arms. It made a secret deal with the German military to avoid confrontations. The UPA was formed for the purpose of exterminating the Poles and despite the OUN’s public statements that it would fight the Germans, the UPA was secretly funded by the Abwehr (German military intelligence). When the Germans retreated the Abwehr secretly turned over the Wehrmacht’s huge arms stockpiles to the UPA. Still the OUN’s two-faced strategy to win Western support would be very useful later for muddying the historical record and creating the myth that the OUN had battled both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. The UPA would later become a CIA proxy army run with the help of war criminal Reinhard Gehlen. It would wage an anti-Soviet war for five more years after the end of World War 2. Seventy years later the return of Ukrainian fascism to power via the Maidan coup would be universally celebrated as the triumph of “Democracy.”

Cover of Bandera’s OUN II Conference Resolutions which legalize the existence of Bandera’s OUN. OUN leader Andriy Melnyk denounced it as “saboteur”. April 1941 General Government (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The UPA was founded at the November 1942 OUN conference although it originally was called the UVV the Ukraine Liberation Army. The OUN/B stole the name UPA or Ukrainian Insurgent Army from a rival group of Ukrainian fascists lead by Taras Bulba-Borovets who led his own armed group in Ukraine with a similar ideology and methodology to the OUN/B. It too shared responsibility for mass murders of Jews and other Ukrainians. The OUN/B waged war on this rival group assassinating Bulba-Borovets’ wife and many of his top officers. When he went to the Germans for help they instead sent him to the same cushy concentration camp as Bandera and Stetsko. In March and April of 1943 OUN/B sent out word that its many members in the Ukrainian police should quit and join the UPA. Of 12,000 police, 5000 quit to join the UPA. Other Ukrainian police joined the Waffen-SS Galizia division. The new UPA recruits brought their experience in mass murder of Jews to the new plan for ethnic cleansing of Volhynia and Galicia of Poles. Poles were given the ultimatum leave or die. Often the threat was posted on a murdered Pole who had been unspeakably tortured and mutilated.

In February and March of 1943 the UPA began experimental massacres that claimed hundreds of lives. Whole Polish villages were wiped out. Soon Mykola Lebed ordered the complete cleansing to begin. The UPA would arrive in carts to carry away the loot and often recruited local Ukrainian peasants to join their massacres. The massacres were often carried out in the most horrific way possible with axes, pitchforks and saws. The UPA would sometimes spend hours sadistically torturing their victims to death. The aim was both to save bullets and to terrorize the Poles into fleeing. Another of their favourite methods was to attack churches with hand grenades or set them on fire when the whole town was attending. They also liked to gather all their victims up for a town hall meeting and burn them alive. The UPA would usually return again a couple days after their massacre so that they could kill all the survivors. They even slaughtered nuns who were caring for Polish orphans. On 11 July 1943, the UPA launched attacks on 96 different Polish villages in a single day killing 10,000 Poles. The UPA killed between 100,000 and 250,000 Poles during this genocidal campaign. The UPA would often pretend to be Soviet partisans and in addition to carrying out false flag attacks that could be blamed on the partisans they were probably playing their role for German intelligence, gathering information on which villages were sympathetic to the partisans.

The UPA also continued to hunt the few remaining Jews who were hiding out in the forests or in Polish villages. The UPA had learned from the Germans how to exploit their Jewish victims. Some were kept as slave labour working the farmlands of massacred Poles and then killed before they could be liberated by the Red Army. Others Jews who were doctors, dentists, nurses or tailors were conscripted into the UPA and then murdered when the Red Army was approaching. Later these facts would be spun by OUN apologists into the myth that the UPA wasn’t allied to the Nazis because it had Jewish members or that the UPA had acted to “save” the Jews. By 1944 the UPA had grown to 25,000-30,000 members. With Soviet forces advancing the UPA was now openly allied with Nazi Germany. The UPA attacks on the Jews hiding in the forests were so terrible that some Jews actually fled to German concentration camps believing their chances of survival would be better as slave labourers. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army would liberate Western Ukraine. The UPA would continue to kill Poles and increasingly began to target any Ukrainians who submitted to Soviet authority. Anyone who paid their taxes or joined a collective farm could be killed or have their home burnt down by the UPA. The UPA would become a sort of proto-Gladio, a stay-behind network behind enemy lines, created first by the Nazis and then absorbed by MI6 and the CIA. The UPA war with the Soviet Union would continue until 1950. Their network would survive into the 1960s. The UPA war was not only waged in Ukraine but also in Poland, Byelorussia, and Czechoslovakia. The story of the UPA will be continued in Part 3 of this series dealing with the Cold War.

As the war turned in favour of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany faced defeat, the Germans increasingly realized that they needed the OUN/B. The Nazis granted an OUN/B request to be allowed to meet with Stepan Bandera. The details of Bandera’s imprisonment are clouded in mystery. It is not clear when exactly he was transferred from Gestapo custody following the OUN/M murders to his cushy Sachenhausen concentration camp, where he received care packages and visits from his wife. Stetsko claimed it was in January 1942.

Bandera claimed it was in 1943. Records claim it was October 1943. On 28 September 1944, the Germans released Stepan Bandera and soon thereafter also released Stetsko, Melnyk, Bulba-Borovets and 300 more OUN/B prisoners. Melnyk had been arrested when the OUN/M tried to contact Western intelligence in 1944.

The OUN/M had had much better relations with the Nazis and was appointed to serve in the puppet government. It had supplied many recruits to the Waffen SS Galicia division.

Bandera would spend the rest of the war working with the Nazis to recruit Ukrainian support to their cause. However Bandera would refuse to merge OUN forces with the Vlasov army’s KONR- the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia- created 14 November 1944.

Bandera claimed they were “Russian Imperialists.”

Instead Rosenberg set up the separate Ukrainian National Committee (UNK), which included Bandera, Melnyk, Kubiiovych and was headed by Shandruk, the general commanding the Waffen SS Galicia division on 23 February 1945. Prior to this, in December 1944, Bandera and Stetsko helped train the Abwehr Commando’s unit of Ukrainian paratroopers who were to be dropped into Lvov with one million rubles for UPA head Roman Shukhevych to continue the fight against the Soviet Union. Bandera sent the message that he would return soon, a promise he never kept. Stetsko claimed that he was still Prime Minister of Ukraine because of his earlier declaration back in 30 June 1941; the one that had unleashed a wave of OUN/B massacres.

Bandera’s next stop, after celebrating Greek Catholic Christmas with his family, was Weimar, Germany. Bandera argued that the OUN/B must give its “Full Support” to Nazi Germany until the end. He was busy recruiting for the soon to be created Ukrainian National Army (UNA). Bandera spent three weeks in Berlin. He then headed for Vienna where he was elected head of the Foreign Units of the OUN (ZCh OUN). On 5-6 February 1945, the OUN in Ukraine elected Bandera as their leader but decided he should remain in exile. On 17 March 1945, the Germans announced the creation of the Ukrainian National Army (UNA).

The Waffen SS Galicia division was rebranded the 1st division of the UNA and its commander, Shandruk, was named commander of the UNA. Meanwhile Bandera fled Vienna as the Red Army approached, escaping to Czechoslovakia and then Innsbruck in Austria. Eventually Bandera would end up under the protection of the infamous Reinhard Gehlen, the first president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the espionage service founded by the US Forces in the American occupation zone. Gehlen had been recruited by the US intelligence services because he had been responsible for occupied Eastern Europe in the Abwehr.

When German forces fled the Red Army back in the first half of 1944 over 120,000 Ukrainian collaborators and war criminals fled west with them. During the Cold War many of these escaped Ukrainian war criminals would work for Western intelligence services. Many would eventually be resettled in the US and Canada. Ukrainian fascism would live on in exile for decades. Eventually with the help of its Western sponsors it would seize power in Ukraine yet again sparking a new covert war and triggering the on-going proxy war between NATO and Russia.

For Ukraine the war would not truly end until 1950. However that is the subject for Part 3. This is only a scratch to the surface of the history of Ukraine during the war. The crimes of the Nazi Germany would require their own articles or books. The Nazis created massive machinery for genocide. However they relied on Ukrainian collaborators every step of the way. An article also needs to be written just about the German conquest of Ukraine and the Soviet liberation of Ukraine. These were huge battles between millions of men.

However the crimes of the OUN are clear. They propagandized the Ukrainians to carry out mass murder. The OUN/B created militias that carried out genocide in 1941 and again in 1943. They supplied recruits to the Ukrainian police, which played a major role in the Holocaust. They joined the Waffen SS Galicia division along with the OUN/M. They formed the UPA to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Poles.

Bandera was unable to supervise this directly but he came up with the plans before being imprisoned and after his release he worked enthusiastically for the Nazis. Bandera never admitted to the OUN/B’s crimes, let alone apologizing or condemning them. His OUN followers took an active role carrying out unspeakable atrocities. Banderite became a synonym for murderous bandits. There has been shamefully little written about the history of the OUN and much of what was written was from a pro-OUN perspective. Sadly due to the nature of academia the more relevant the story of the OUN becomes the fewer people will dare to tell it for fear of being labelled “Russian propagandists.”

After the Orange revolution of 2004 Stepan Bandera was declared a “Hero of Ukraine”. Even a postage stamp was issued commemorating him. During the 2014 Maidan coup, a huge poster of Stepan Bandera hung on the stage. Few in the west had ever heard of Stepan Bandera or the OUN back in 2014. Now in 2022 the world is on the brink of nuclear war and the global economy is collapsing all because CIA and other western intelligence agencies have been using Ukrainian fascists as proxies for nearly 80 years. In Parts 3 and 4, I intend to trace the history of the OUN and its ideological heirs through the Cold War and post-Cold War eras up to the Maidan coup and the Ukrainian civil war.

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With special thanks to T.P. Wilkinson.

Sources

My main source is Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult, an in depth history of Stepan Bandera and the OUN. It is a must read although written with the standard academic anti-Soviet bias.

I also read “Children of the Borderlands” by Lucyna Kulinska, a collection of survivors’ testimonies from the Polish victims of the UPA genocide. An English translation is available on EBay. It gives a vivid and horrifying picture of events. However it is edited from a strongly anti-Soviet perspective. Still the author should be applauded for exposing a forgotten genocide, which the strongly pro-Ukrainian Polish government is intent on covering up.

Hitler’s Shadow Nazi, War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War by Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda has a chapter on Mykola Lebed and the CIA ties to the OUN. Based on declassified U.S. intelligence files, it provides a limited hangout version of events.

Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine by Wendy Lower provides a horrifying picture of the German occupation and the complex machinery that carried out the genocide.

However it is extremely misleading whenever discussing the OUN/B, always portraying it as hostile to the Nazis. Perhaps that is because the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute funded her work. Worse still, she worked closely with the archetypical Cold War propagandist/historian Timothy Snyder, who helped her edit the book. Generally if you want to uncover an author’s shady connections look in the acknowledgments section which most people skip.

Moss Robeson on the history of the OUN

One of my favourite documentary series the Unknown War had an episode on Ukraine while it doesn’t mention the OUN/B it does describe the epic battle to liberate Ukraine

Evan Reif on the history of the OUN Part 1, Part 2

Evan Reif on the true heroes of Ukraine the Soviet Partisans

Gerald Sussman on the OUN and the CIA

I’ve done a number of articles that intersect with the story of the OUN during the Cold War

Nazis and the CIA

Operation Gladio

The World Anti-Communist League Part 1

The World Anti-Communist League Part 2

Ratline: the Vatican, The Nazis, and the CIA

Old Nazis, New Right

The Zelensky quote is from here

Featured image: An OUN-B leaflet from the World War II era. (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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***

We are living in an ever-more intense “Death Tsunami”; Dr. Sherry Tenpenny tells us.

SCROLL DOWN TO VIEW VIDEO

She says in the UK, 1 in 73 people who got the shot are already dead, according to government data. She adds, about a 1,000 people a week die, as a result of the coerced vaxx campaign.

About 900 professional athletes have already died – and the number is rapidly increasing, mostly from myocarditis, a result of the vaxxes.

When they first started with the shots in early 2021, Dr. Tenpenny says, we saw hundreds of people with electronic charges – Instagram pics with keys and other metal pieces, clinging to arms and foreheads. You may remember having seen such photos.

This is clearly the result of heavy doses of Graphene Oxide in the shots.

She suggests, they may have changed the formula of the injections, as such pics have largely disappeared – but the substance is still there.

This looks like the first lots were sort of “trial balloons”. They got away with them. Nobody stopped them.

Graphene Oxide, when exposed to hydrogen, takes on a magnetic charge. Dr. Tenpenny refers to hundreds of scientific documents testifying to this.

She reminds us that “they” want 3 to 5 billion people to be eliminated from the planet.

It’s a “slow killing”– sometimes very, very painful. Most people don’t connect the dots.

What Dr. Tenpenny says is substantially the same as expressed as a warning to the world earlier by Dr. Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer.

Dr. Tenpenny ends by recommending that anybody who is listening to this – or gets the message otherwise, should never ever take any Covid shot anymore.

Definitely NO BOOSTERS!

This cautioning also applies to simple flu shots, or combinations of flu-Covid shots – which are now being marketed. Because all these shots – “they” don’t tell you – will contain killer formulas.

See this.

Conclusion, yes, indeed, just about a year after the extremely forced shots began – mass-dying started – the death tsunami is flooding humanity, literally.

See this brief 2-minute video.

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

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

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***

The enemies of the most honest and most popular political leader in Pakistan’s history tried to assassinate him. Since they suffered major defeats in election after election, could not succeed in their repeated efforts to have him declared ineligible for election, they realized that they could not beat Khan electorally. So they tried to kill him. He and many of his party leadership were injured, and one of them, sadly, did not survive.

The assassin’s statement that he was acting alone and not influenced by anyone could have been credible if, just recently, a prominent investigative journalist, Arshad Sharif, had not been assassinated in Kenya, where he was trying to hide after numerous threats to his life by Pakistan’s establishment. Those very people who had Arshad Sharif assassinated are responsible for this cowardly assassination attempt on Khan’s life. Their action signals a clear and decisive end to their decades long corruption and looting of the country’s wealth because now every Pakistani except a very few people have united behind Khan and expressed an unshakable resolve to rid the country of the foreign-installed imported government, murderers, and mafia leeches, who have been sucking the blood of the masses for decades.

The Day of Reckoning Is Fast Approaching in Pakistan

I am still grappling with the reality of what is happening in Pakistan. It continues to unroll like scenes from a nightmare. It is shocking that whereas anyone can file an FIR (First Information Report) with police for the most trivial of reasons, Imran Khan is not being allowed that basic protection from further attempts on his life. The Supreme Court has to intervene here.

If Pakistan’s judiciary fails to do its duty and safeguard Pakistan’s constitution and the rule of law, the criminals in all branches of the government, including the traitors in the army, will be tried in the People’s Court, consisting of nearly 90% of the country’s population, in a revolution that has already been forced on Pakistan’s people by the dastardly assassination attempt on their leader, Imran Khan.

In addition, the murders of the journalist Arshad Sharif and numerous other killings of honest government officials who unveiled the mafia’s corruption will not go unpunished. The Day of Reckoning is fast approaching. Loyal Pakistanis are confident that their brethren, the overwhelming majority in all branches of the government, including the army, who are controlled by just a handful of villainous, self-seeking, and country-betraying oppressors, will get rid of them in a peaceful transfer of power to those who have the people’s mandate and trust.

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Prof. Abdul Jabbar has been teaching for more than half a century in San Francisco, California. He is a specialist in world literatures and the politics of the Muslim world.

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***

Do leading members of secret societies managing many of the levers of influence throughout history wield genuine “knowledge known only to the inner elites”… or is something else at play?

In this Canadian Patriot Review documentary produced by Jason Dahl, narrated by myself and based on the work of Cynthia Chung, you will be introduced to the ancient origins of the occult societies that penetrated the heart of America’s intelligence agencies after the murder of William McKinley in 1901.

This journey will take you into the heart of ancient occult societies that managed wars, financial and cultural policies over two millenia ago. You will learn of the underlying methodology of manipulation used to induce foolish kings and generals into self destruction during the days of the Persian Empire which continue to be used to this very day.

With this overview, you will be introduced to

1) the British roots of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry founded in 1801 by British grand strategists in South Carolina,

2) a figure named Albert Pike who led in the largest expansion of this foreign agency within the USA after Lincoln’s victory in 1865 and

3) the “seat of government” which 33rd degree FBI director J. Edgar Hoover managed in the USA during the course of eight presidencies.

This dark history is contrasted to the courageous efforts of men who devoted their lives resisting the growth of this occult agency including President Franklin Roosevelt, Senator Thomas J Walsh, Congressman Hale Boggs, Attorney General of New Orleans Jim Garrison, Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Kennedy and his brother John F Kennedy.

This documentary was based on the essay

“The Origins of America’s Secret Police” by Cynthia Chung, whose new book on the growth of 20th century fascism can be purchased here.

Watch the full movie on Rumble, Youtube, Bitchute and don’t forget to share it far and wide.

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This article was originally published on Matthew Ehret’s Insights.

Matthew Ehret the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas trilogy. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Clash of the Two Americas

Vol. 1 & 2

by Matthew Ehret

In his new two volume series The Clash of the Two Americas, Matthew Ehret introduces a new analysis of American history from the vantage point that the globally-extended supranational shadow government that managed the British Empire was never fully defeated and has acted within the USA itself since 1776 as a continuous multi-generational fifth column managing every significant event and assassination of American presidents for the next 250 years.

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***

We are now two months into the bivalent booster vaccination campaign, and interest remains more lukewarm than ever:

Family physicians are seeing less interest in vaccination against Corona, according to data from a physicians’ professional organisation. “Vaccination is our best sword in the fight against severe outcomes. It’s therefore that much more regrettable that the vaccination campaign is currently stagnating,” the national chairman of the German General Practitioners’ Association, Markus Beier, said …

Doctors no longer receive nearly as many requests for vaccination from patients as the Standing Commission on Vaccination recommends be vaccinated, Beier said. “Of course, our doctors use every opportunity in their practices to educate patients about vaccination, but the results is now rather meagre.” The truth must be told: “The run on Corona vaccinations has now slowed to a crawl.”

This is rough news especially for the vaccinators in the German Health Ministry, who rolled out their truly dismal “Ich schütze mich” (“I protect myself”) ad campaign less than a month ago – to absolutely no effect whatsoever.

Screen grab from one of the bafflingly bad Ich schütze mich ads. The student Marla explains that she’s chosen to protect herself so that she can maintain her sense of taste and smell.

As with many of the most important stories, this one has been carefully downplayed by the press. The only commentary I can find is this tepid piece in FAZ, which complains about “the aggressive counter-campaign from the ranks of the antivaxxers.” Maybe vaccine critics have changed a few minds here or there, but it’s nothing in comparison to what the vaccinators have done to their own cause. Never before in history have Germans been so rapidly and so widely exposed to a new pharmaceutical as they have to the Corona vaccines, and now that personal experience of the jabs is at an all-time high, enthusiasm could hardly be lower. This is the final repudiation of the vaccinators, and the one that matters the most.

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***

Just who are the stakeholders that are being consulted?

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The future is here.

What we all should be asking is what do they have planned for 2023 and beyond or even to 2030?

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***

Recently leaked information obtained by The Intercept has validated the fact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in illegal activities designed to censor and deny the basic human right of free speech. DHS is engaged in an operation to influence social media to remove and censor content that runs contrary to its views. Facebook even created a direct portal to allow DHS to pull down truthful information, that would be information the DHS deems false. Censorship targeted information related to the Afghanistan withdrawal, election integrity, and information related to the apparent Covid 19 bioweapon, and Covid gene therapy shots, which also appear a biological weapon unleashed on humanity.

As The Intercept points out even Tom Ridge, former head of DHS, has stated that the United States government routinely lies whether it is about the Vietnam or Iraq wars, or the origination of Covid 19. DHS coordinated with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking platforms. It is unclear of the level of interaction between DHS and other government agencies, and other private sector companies, although, based on the sudden engagement in politics and censorship by corporations, it is a safe bet that the DHS and other agencies are integrated with them.

The whole premise of government is to protect the Natural Rights of the individual. Some of these Natural Rights are codified in the Bill of Rights. Any government agency with an express purpose to undermine any of the Bill of Rights, or other obvious Natural Rights (I say obvious because we could get into levels of abstraction when conceptualizing rights) is in fact an enemy of the people. The government or its agencies can’t assault the Constitution and the Bill of Rights without becoming an enemy of the United States. When I say the United States, I mean the constellation of states that have entered into a compact and the people that those states they are designed to represent. Such actions by the DHS are literally illegal as they are a direct assault on the law and the essential purpose of government.

Many people consider treason to a betrayal of the State/Government. That is not actually necessarily the case. Let’ take a peek at a dictionary definition of treason:

1 the offense of acting to overthrow one’s government or to harm or kill its sovereign.

2 a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state.

3 the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.

Treason can be construed as betraying the legitimate authority of the government or its sovereign, which in the case of the United States is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In our republic, treason can be considered the betrayal of the rights of the people since the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect those rights.

The DHS and its private sector collaborators appear to be violating the first, second, and third definition above. This becomes clear when it is recognized that the sovereign is the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. The legitimate government is bound by the Constitution. The DHS is behaving in a treacherous way and has violated all trust and its allegiance to the legitimate Constitutionally bound government. The DHS may be engaging in treason. The actions of the DHS in censoring information related to election integrity after the fraud committed in the 2020 election would certainly appear supportive of a coup.

The scam response to 911 included the Patriot Act, a couple stupid wars, DHS, TSA, and so on. The level of government involvement in 911 is murky at best. The scam response to 911 created an authoritarian environment at the airport and the template for a police state. The level of government involvement in Covid and Covid shots is obvious. The difference is that the scam response to Covid is to make the whole country the airport.

The DHS should be disbanded immediately. It was created in a lie after 911. It is an unnecessary organization whose purpose was clearly to target American citizens at its inception. If that was not clear at the time it should be now. The DHS website states that the organization was created in the dark hours after the 911 attacks and its mission includes counterterrorism and homeland security, protecting the nation’s borders, cyber security and critical infrastructure, and preserve and uphold the nation’s prosperity and economic security.

Don’t let that dribble about prosperity and economic security get your hopes up. DHS is not going to start promoting and teaching the Austrian school of economics…..

The DHS has grossly failed in protecting and policing the borders and this is because it is largely spying on and policing American citizens and engaging in violating Free Speech rights. We’ll leave alone the Fourth Amendment here, although the DHS is clearly trampling that one too. If it was effective at counterterrorism, it would have shut down the Covid shots immediately. Instead, it has engaged in a campaign of misinformation and censorship and apparently has actually been supporting terrorism by censoring information about potential risks associated with Covid shots. In the world of the DHS, it isn’t much of a leap to interpret cybersecurity as meaning reading your emails and social media posts.

The government and any of its agencies are not capable of determining truth. Any government that conceptualizes itself as being capable of doing so is a dangerous threat. Such a position runs contrary to the First Amendment. It is often difficult to discern truth. The idea of allowing many perspectives does not denigrate truth, it allows truth to flourish. If a position actually represents the highest truth in any given context this will become more evident as other fallacious views are presented. Take the concept of a scientific hypothesis as an example. A hypothesis can’t be proven. It can only be supported or not supported by the evidence. Over time it often becomes apparent what the truth is. I say often because this is not always the case. Scientific orthodoxy can seem supported by the evidence for decades if not centuries only to be upended with new discovery.

How the hell can the DHS determine truth?

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***

The USS Rhode Island, the world’s largest nuclear submarine, left the Port of Gibraltar on Spain’s south coast last week. It was last seen entering the Mediterranean and headed south towards the Black Sea as a warning to the Kremlin.

British newspaper Daily Express said the nuclear submarine, which is also called “the rider of the apocalypse”, is under “intense protection” from the Royal Marines as it reportedly heads towards the Black Sea. The USS Rhode Island’s departure comes as fears grow over what Vladimir Putin will do after what the mainstream media is continuing to call a retreat.

🇺🇸⚔️⚡⚓ The US nuclear-powered submarine USS Rhode Island, dubbed the "rider of the apocalypse", has entered the Mediterranean Sea.
The submarine is capable of carrying 24 Trident II intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of engaging targets at ranges of up to

1/ pic.twitter.com/goAvJZsAED

— J. Malkova🇷🇺♥️ (@CanadianKitty1) November 5, 2022

Captain John Craddock, the commander of the US Navy’s Task Force, commented earlier this week:

“Rhode Island’s port visit to Gibraltar reinforces our ironclad commitment to our allies and partners in the region.”

“The US and UK share a strong history of cooperation, through exercises, operations, and cooperation activities such as this, that enhance our combined capabilities and partnership. The complexity, lethality, and tactical expertise of Rhode Island epitomizes the effectiveness and strength of the submarine force,” Craddock added.

Yesterday, the Russian President called for civilians to leave Kherson in the south of Ukraine due to the advancing counter-offensive on the occupied city. Officials and Russian commanders who had been installed by the Kremlin in the occupied region were seen fleeing as the Ukrainian counter-offensive pushed south.

Putin’s regime has repeatedly claimed Ukraine was planning to set off a dirty bomb – an explosive laced with radioactive material – which intelligence officials believe may be a precursor to a false flag operation.

The USS Rhode Island is an Ohio-class sub, and can, therefore, patrol continuously as a highly-effective tool for the NATO nuclear deterrence force and could be headed to a strategic position near the Black Sea.

It could be an obvious outward visible show of the advancement of this war, and the insistence by the United States and the United Kingdom to ignite into something bigger than it already is.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

Tomorrow is election day and polls suggest that Americans are going to overturn Democratic Party control of the House and Senate. Politicians and the media always say that this is the most important election ever, but all too often once the voting is over and the smoke has cleared, not much changes. The Washington uni-party takes over and makes sure the status quo is maintained.

It doesn’t have to be this way. An incoming Republican House and Senate, for example, could take early steps to reassure their supporters that their votes weren’t wasted on Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum in Washington. Here are three suggestions to get things off to a good start.

First, Republican Party Leadership must vow to end the massive money spigot opened by the last Congress for Ukraine. By some estimates some $60 billion dollars have been authorized for Ukraine to fight a proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia.

This would be a move strongly supported by the Republican base. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 37 percent of Republicans support sending more US aid to Ukraine. Republican firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene said recently that under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. While I am skeptical that her party leadership would support such a move, it’s clear Republican voters would.

Plus, ending this proxy war would carry with it the benefit of reducing the dangerously high possibility of global nuclear war. That’s not a bad trade-off.

Second, Republicans can signal that they will de-fund the Department of Homeland Security. At the time this monstrosity was created, I said this on the House Floor:

“The list of dangerous and unconstitutional powers granted to the new Homeland Security department is lengthy. Warrantless searches, forced vaccinations of whole communities, federal neighborhood snitch programs, federal information databases, and a sinister new ‘Information Awareness Office’ at the Pentagon that uses military intelligence to spy on domestic citizens are just a few of the troubling aspects of the new legislation.”

Unfortunately all of these things came to pass…and more. As we recently learned, the DHS has been colluding with social media companies to try and prevent Americans from being able to say or post opinions the government doesn’t want others to hear.

They promised that a Department of Homeland Security would keep us safer, but there is nothing that makes us less safe than the destruction of our Constitution.

Finally, the third task an incoming Republican House and Senate can take is maybe the easiest one: pass the Audit the Fed bill. Ten years ago the US House voted in a bipartisan manner to pass my Audit the Fed legislation only to see it stall in the Senate. With Republican control of both houses of Congress there is no reason a broadly-supported bill to open the books at the Federal Reserve cannot find its way to President Biden’s desk. We all support transparency, right?

Inflation is out of control and causing real harm to the American middle class. The Biden Administration seems determined to lead us to a potentially life-ending war with Russia. The Department of Homeland Security has turned into a weapon mobilized against the American people and our Constitution.

A Republican-controlled House and Senate can actually do something to fix these problems and thus make us more safe and more free. Will they?

*

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***

While the Arab Summit in Algeria affirmed its adherence to the so-called ‘Arab Peace Initiative’ as a final solution to the Palestinian issue, Israel’s response came quickly and resolutely with the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu and the anti-Arab religious Likud bloc.

In the 1 November legislative elections, Israelis voted in large numbers for the anti-Arab, racist, religious parties, which openly embrace a policy of killing and expelling Palestinians from all of occupied Palestine, and promote a solely Jewish-Zionist identity of the country.

The “Jewish Power” party, which won 15 seats, and is led by the two most racist figures in the short history of the Jewish state, Bezael H. Cherish and his deputy Itamar Ben Gvir, will be the backbone of Netanyahu’s coalition government.

The leader of this party, which will be the most prominent partner of the Arab monarchs who signed peace agreements with Israel, has called for killing Arabs, expelling them and wrapping the bodies of the martyrs in pigskin “in honor” of them.

Normalization the new norm

Nonetheless, it is likely that red carpets will be laid out for Ben Gvir and Netanyahu in Arab capitals, where they will enjoy Arab hospitality and drink from their gilded goblets. Indeed, there is no difference between the winning Israeli coalition and the defeated one (Lapid-Gantz).

Both converge on their mutual hostility and hatred of Arabs and Muslims. General Benny Gantz, the Israeli Minister of Defense in the previous government, used to boast that he was the Israeli who killed the largest number of Arabs – and this is true, as his government has killed 166 Palestinians since the beginning of this year.

There is a silver lining, however: This racist government will hasten Israel’s demise and lead to its inevitable end, not at the hands of the battered Arab armies, but at the hands of the Palestinian resistance and their regional allies, their missiles and drones.

There are three steps that the Netanyahu government and his extremist coalition may take upon assuming power:

First, a return to reviving the Trump-era ‘Deal of the Century,’ the annexation of the West Bank, and the deportation of most of its Palestinian residents to Jordan as an “alternative homeland.”

Second, the escalation of incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the consolidation of Jewish control over East Jerusalem, and the obliteration of its Arab and Islamic identity. The first step may be dividing it on the model of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, then demolishing it, and erecting the alleged “temple” on its ruins.

Third, the canceling or freezing of the maritime border demarcation agreement with Lebanon, similar to what happened to the Oslo Accords with Palestinians. Netanyahu announced his intent to do so openly in his election campaign.

This option appears especially likely given that extraction of gas and oil from the Karish field has already begun, while the Qana field, which was “partially” recognized as Lebanese, remains untouched, with no surveys or exploration conducted until this moment.

It is likely that the Lebanese gas fields will lay dormant for the foreseeable future. The same US mediators did not guarantee the implementation of even 1 per cent of the Oslo Accords, and they will most likely not guarantee the rights of the Lebanese people.

Renewed Palestinian armed resistance

But Netanyahu is set to assume control over a very different state of affairs, both domestically and internationally. For starters, Israel is facing an escalating internal conflict, and most importantly, a revived intifada in the form of West Bank armed resistance.

We cannot talk about West Bank resistance without discussing the phenomenon of The Lions’ Den whose political and military influence is expanding, while the Palestinian public’s embrace of the movement is growing. Not a day passes without witnessing a commando operation in various parts of the West Bank; in Nablus, Jenin and Hebron – later in Ramallah, and then in the pre-1948 occupied Palestinian territories.

Netanyahu may succeed in including one or two more Arab governments in the Abraham Accords, which was signed under his last premiership. However, such political acrobatics will have no value in light of the “awakening” of the Palestinian people and their return to armed resistance.

The returning Netanyahu will not forget the May 2021 battle of the “Sword of Jerusalem” that humiliated him, and its missiles that isolated the occupying state for more than 11 days, forcing millions of Israeli settler-colonizers into shelters and bunkers.

These missiles are still present and ready, along with hundreds of armed drones. Perhaps it is also worth reminding the incoming Israeli Prime Minister of how he ended an electoral meeting in the city of Ashdod (my ancestors’ hometown) and fled in terror from the 400 missiles launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement in retaliation for the assassination of its leader, Baha Abu al-Atta.

Just another day in the office?

The “Israel” to which Netanyahu returns is not the same Israel he left, and the world he knew when he was last in power, is not the same world today. His US supporter is mired in an unprecedented proxy war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine, where his co-religionist, Volodymyr Zelensky, has so far lost about a fifth of his country’s territory, and has plunged it into darkness and despair.

While Netanyahu is viewed as as being close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that friendship had deepened before the Ukraine war. The situation has now changed dramatically, and he will be forced to choose between Washington and Moscow in an era of multipolarity.

As for the Lions’ Den, they have effectively changed all the equations and rules of engagement in occupied Palestine – and perhaps in the Arab world as well – and within this context will actually “welcome” the hardliner Netanyahu’s return to power.

*

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***

A mere few days after the major electoral upset of the right-wing Sweden Democrats becoming the second largest party in the country, and the leader of the winning right-wing bloc, it was Italy’s turn to select as their future prime minister the leader of the “post-fascist” party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), who may be more accurately called “neo-fascist”.

The reactions of western governments, elected officials, and media have been strangely muted and accommodating when one considers that two more European Union member states, including one of its original founding members, Italy, have consecutively fallen to the far right, this time putting in power nothing less than, first, a party founded by neo-Nazis in the 1980s, and then the direct descendants of Mussolini’s fascists.

The embarrassed timidity of the reactions is understandable. The elections being perfectly democratic and legitimate, it is hard to criticise Italy’s choice without interfering directly in the internal political affairs of an ally, as EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen quickly realised.

The ‘business as usual’ spin 

Pundits, but also experts in Italian politics and academics, had for months largely diminished the notion of a “fascist threat” by pointing out that Italian neo-fascist parties had for long been incorporated into democratic parliamentary and electoral politics, or that the Brothers of Italy was actually not a fascist party but a traditionalist, conservative, populist-nationalist, or even “techno-sovereignist” one.

Commentators have worked overtime to reassure us that Brothers of Italy is not extremist but moderate, realist, and pragmatic on issues like EU relationships, the economy, and foreign policy; that there will be strong continuity with the previous Mario Draghi government; that Meloni will have her hands tied anyway by her coalition and the EU itself; and that this coalition may not even survive more than a year or two.

Major newspapers like France’s Le Monde have soothed us by reminding us of the capacity of a supposedly fundamentally “centrist” Italian system with strong counter-powers to force compromises and tame radicalism, while Meloni herself went out of her way to moderate her image, assuring the public that there was nothing to fear and that she would serve as a “uniter” who would “govern for everyone”, not just those who voted for her.

Finally, it is well known in political science that the electorate of a party does not necessarily share its ideological orientations or even know its programme.

This particular Italian vote was indeed largely a protest vote where people rooted for the “anti-system” candidate, the “outsider”, the “underdog” in order to express their profound dismay at the traditional government parties, starting with their inability to improve everyday life on bread-and-butter issues.

Meloni capitalised on that popular discontent and on her (false) outsider image. In other words, people voted for her not because she is a fascist but because she is not the establishment.

Historical fascism 

Many media outlets thus helped Meloni polish her image and present her as business as usual, often to the point of functioning as her own communications agency. Yet, her efforts to separate herself from her previous statements or Italy’s historical fascism by claiming it is a thing of the past are also not at all convincing.

Her party is in direct affiliation with the Italian Social Movement (MSI) created by Mussolini’s own ministers, regime officials, and hard-core partisans. Far from disavowing this affiliation, Meloni has always proudly touted those roots.

The tricoloured flame she chose as the logo of her party comes from the MSI movement; her headquarters in central Rome are located at the same address where the MSI set up its offices in 1946; and Meloni has campaigned with Mussolini’s own granddaughter Rachele Mussolini, herself a member of Brothers of Italy.

Her discourses on “God, Family, Country” and rhetoric on minority communities are all fully congruent and in direct continuity with those of historical fascism. Meloni is no new Mussolini, but her party represents a toxic, right-wing ideology.

This is evidenced by her support for Eric Zemmour, who is viewed by many as France’s “preacher of hate”, and the main advocate of the “Great Replacement Theory”.

Enthusiastically greeted by the entire European far right from Russia to France (and beyond), Meloni’s accession to power is just the latest evidence of a dramatic political groundswell across the whole continent: the mainstreaming of right-wing forces who not so long ago were fringe, even taboo parties, have in a mere two decades become genuine mass movements increasingly capable of reaching power.

Continuous ‘waves’

It would be a mistake to consider the latest Swedish and Italian elections as anomalies, exceptions, or aberrations. They are on the contrary in full continuity with the rise of the far-right across not just Europe and the West but throughout the world.

This is furthermore not a new trend but one that already spans decades, dating back to the pre-war fascist era of the 1930s and 1940s and even the 19th century. For example, Zemmour’s Reconquest Party found its ideological roots in writings of Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) and Action Française leader Charles Maurras’s (1868-1952) political movement.

He even named his party after Mediaeval Europe’s Reconquista moment. Books and articles about “the rise of the far-right across Europe” and ultra-nationalist populism were already filling shelves in the early 2000s, and political scientists have demonstrated that what we have here is not a rupture with the past but a series of continuous “waves”, each new one larger than the previous.

Despite this strong historical continuity, this latest phase of the far-right success presents five major novelties.

First, it consecrates the electoral victories and accession to power of parties and ideologies that postwar Europe had for decades managed to keep marginalised and excluded from the mainstream.

In countries like Poland, Hungary, Sweden, and now Italy, this last protection barrier has now yielded, and the far-right parties now control their governments. Second, despite unique contexts, the similarities are even stronger regarding their nativist and xenophobic ideology.

Global Islamophobia 

Third, we are now seeing these right-wing movements coalescing, emulating each other, and finding inspiration in one another. They are increasingly establishing trans-border connections and institutionalised political alliances.

Meloni, the Polish and Hungarian governments, the United States’ GOP, the Sweden Democrats, and others, strongly support each other. In 2020, Meloni herself was elected president of the European Conservatives and Reformists, an alliance that brings together more than 40 parties.

Fourth, the far right wins even when it loses at the polls by imposing its discourse in national debates and by forcing other conservative, centrist, and sometimes even leftist parties to adopt their themes and policy proposals in their own programmes in the hope of hedging electoral losses.

That is especially true for the hostile fixation on Islam and Muslims; the policies this racism generates are now being advanced more by other parties than by the far right itself.

Fifth, this far-right, exclusionary “new Nativism” particularly targets Muslims whose lifestyle and belief system is seen as antithetical to the “national identity” of those European countries.

Islamophobia has now become one of the most prominent ideologies shared by all those parties.

The dramatic expansion of the far-right, itself a sub-set of an even larger de-democratising trend or “democratic deconsolidation” is generating a veritable Islamophobia International that is casting Muslims even more than they already are in the position of both internal and external threats, with Islam itself as the principal enemy against which society must supposedly mobilise.

In many of those countries, this positioning is actually relatively new. Yet, in a short amount of time it has already placed Muslims in the structural “outsider” position including most dramatically in their own countries of birth and citizenship.

That process is already well underway, but because of the explosion of the far-right across entire continents, anti-Muslim sentiments have intensified to generate this historically novel global Islamophobia.

*

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Dr Alain Gabon is Associate Professor of French Studies and chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, USA. He has written and lectured widely in the US, Europe and beyond on contemporary French culture, politics, literature and the arts and more recently on Islam and Muslims. His works have been published in several countries in academic journals, think tanks, and mainstream and specialized media such as Saphirnews, Milestones. Commentaries on the Islamic World, and Les Cahiers de l’Islam. His recent essay entitled “The Twin Myths of the Western ‘Jihadist Threat’ and ‘Islamic Radicalisation ‘” is available in French and English on the site of the UK Cordoba Foundation.

Featured image: Meloni speaking at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida (Photo by Vox España, CC0)

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***

The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’état is over. They won. We lost.

The wreckage of this neoliberal project is appalling: endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial-complex that bleeds the U.S. Treasury of half of all discretionary spending; deindustrialization that has turned U.S. cities into decayed ruins; the slashing and privatization of social programs, including education, utility services and health care – which saw over one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from Covid, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population; draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police, functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas; the largest prison system in the world; a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations; money-saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery; and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.

In “The United States of Amnesia,” to quote Gore Vidal, the corporate press and the ruling class create fictional feel-good personas for candidates, treat all political campaigns as if it is a day at the races and gloss over the fact that on every major issue, from trade deals to war, there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are not the lesser evil, but rather, as Glen Ford pointed out, “the more effective evil.”

Biden supported the campaign to discredit and humiliate Anita Hill to appoint Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He was one of the principal architects of the endless wars in the Middle East, calling for “taking Saddam down” five years before the invasion of Iraq. He rehabilitated the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after vowing to make the country a pariah because of the assassination of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden is a fervent supporter of Israel, calling the apartheid state “the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East” and declaring “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” His campaigns have been lavishly funded by the Israel lobby for at least two decades.

In the 1970s, he fought school busing, arguing that segregation was beneficial for Blacks.  He and South Carolina’s racist senator, Strom Thurmond, sponsored the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. Biden sponsored and aggressively pushed the 1994 crime bill, which he also helped draft, calling for its passage because “We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.” The bill expanded the death penalty for dozens of existing and new federal crimes and mandated life imprisonment for a third violent felony, also known as the “three strikes and you’re out” rule, more than doubling the nation’s prison population. The bill provided funds to add 100,000 new police officers and build new prisons, on the condition that prisoners serve their entire sentences. He pushed through the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted the federal writ of habeas corpus, abolished the rights of death row prisoners and mandated harsh federal sentencing rules.

Biden takes credit for writing the 2001 Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s ability to monitor anyone’s phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track activity on the Internet. He backed austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. He fought for NAFTA and other “free trade” deals which fueled  inequality, deindustrialization, a significant drop in wages and the offshoring of  millions of manufacturing jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in countries like Mexico, Malaysia, China or Vietnam.

He also backed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that, as Human Rights Watch writes, “eliminated key defenses against deportation and subjected many more immigrants, including legal permanent residents, to detention and deportation.”

Biden long opposed abortion, writing in a letter to a constituent: “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them. As you may know, I have consistently — on no fewer than 50 occasions — voted against federal funding of abortions.”

He was at the forefront of deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall, which contributed to the global financial meltdown, including the collapse of nearly 500 banks, in 2007 and 2008. He is a favorite of the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industry, which contributed $6.3 million to his 2020 presidential campaign, almost four times more money than they channeled to Donald Trump’s campaign. Biden and the Democrats annually increase the military budget, approving $813 billion for fiscal year 2023. He and the Democrats have provided over $60 billion in military aid and assistance to the war in Ukraine, with no end in sight. In the Senate, Biden abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter.

The decisions of politicians like Biden have a staggering human cost, not only for the poor, workers and the shrinking middle class but for millions of people in the Middle East, millions of families ripped apart by mass incarceration, millions more forced into bankruptcy by our mercenary for-profit medical system where corporations are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their frantic parents bankrupt themselves to save them, millions who became addicted to opioids and hundreds of thousands who died from them, millions denied welfare assistance, and all of us barreling toward extinction because of a refusal to curb the greed and destructive power of the fossil fuel industry, which has raked in $2.8 billion a day in profit over the last 50 years.

Biden, morally vacuous and of limited intelligence, is responsible for more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump. But the victims in our Punch-and-Judy media shows are rendered invisible. And that is why the victims despise the whole superstructure and want to tear it down.

These establishment politicians and their appointed  judges promulgated laws that permitted the top 1 percent to loot $54 trillion from the bottom 90 percent, from 1975 to 2022, at a rate of $2.5 trillion a year, according to a study by the RAND corporation. The fertile ground of our political, economic, cultural and social wreckage spawned an array of neo-fascists, con artists, racists, criminals, charlatans, conspiracy theorists, right-wing militias and demagogues that will soon take power.

Decayed societies, such as Weimar Germany or the former Yugoslavia, which I covered for The New York Times, always vomit up political deformities who express the hatred a betrayed public feel for a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberalism. The twilight of the Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires were no different.

These political deformities play the role of the Snopes clan in William Faulkner’s trilogy “The Hamlet,” “The Town” and “The Mansion.” The Snopeses wrested control in the South from a degenerate aristocratic elite. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum that hijacked the Republican Party.

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

Biden and other establishment politicians are not actually calling for democracy. They are calling for civility. They have no intention of extracting the knife thrust into our backs. They hope to paper over the rot and the pain with the decorum of the polite, measured talk they used to sell us the con of neoliberalism. The political correctness and inclusivity imposed by college-educated elites, unfortunately, has now become associated with the corporate assault, as if a woman CEO or a Black police officer is going to mitigate the exploitation and abuse. Minorities are always welcome, as they were in other species of colonialism, if they serve the dictates of the masters. This is how Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street,” became President.

Freedom for millions of enraged Americans has become the freedom to hate, the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag;” the freedom to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, women, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their Christian fascism; the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy; the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture; the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave; the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism, violence and patriarchy.

These crypto-fascists have always been part of the American landscape, but the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans, especially white Americans, has inflamed these hatreds. Voting for the architects of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism” will not make them go away; in fact, it will further discredit liberal ideas and liberal democracy. This puts liberals in a terrible bind. They have every right to fear the far right. All the dark scenarios are correct. But by backing Biden and the ruling corporate party, they ensure their political irrelevance.

The Democratic Party has spent millions funding far-right “pied piper” candidates assuming they would be easier to defeat, a tactic foolishly copied from the Clinton campaign, which secretly “elevated” Trump in the hopes that he would win the Republican nomination. They have worked to censor critics from the left and the right on social media. They claim they are the last bulwark against tyranny. None of these subterfuges will work. America will descend into a Viktor Orbán-type of authoritarianism without profound political, social and economic reform.

After the Iraq war went sour, I, as someone who publicly opposed the invasion and had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was often asked what we should do now. I answered that Iraq could no longer be put back together. It was broken. We broke it. Those who ask if we should support the Democrats as a tactic to halt our descent into tyranny are in a similar dilemma. My answer is no different. We should have walked out on the Democratic Party while we still had a chance.

*

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

Featured image: The Body Politic – by Mr. Fish

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***

A number of US troops and logistics forces have been arriving in the Syrian city of Raqqa recently, and are in the process of establishing a new military base in the area, in Hasakeh Province.

The location makes some sense, though no official announcement has been made yet. The US has an estimated 1,000 troops left in Syria, and 28 declared military sites. They are mostly in Hasakeh, so it makes sense that the new base would be there too.

The timing is particularly telling, however. Just over a week prior, the US said they had “no plans” to withdraw from Syria militarily, and the National Security Council’s John Kirby said the US presence is “solely to combat ISIS.”

There is an ISIS presence around Raqqa, mostly lingering remnant forces in and around the desert area. Those forces often end up fighting Syrian and Russian forces, and sometimes the Kurdish YPG.

The US military intervention in Syria mostly began around 2011 with support for anti-Assad rebels, though late in the Bush Administration the US had launched some attacks. It was President Obama who started the deployment of troops on an official basis in 2015 to fight ISIS but also with a close eye on regime change as a secondary goal.

The US has imposed growing sanctions against the Syrian government, again meant to harm their ability to resist the rebels and to push regime change. This has had little impact, but US officials say there is no plan to remove any of those sanctions. That’s unsurprising, as the US tends to make sanctions a permanent fact of international diplomacy.

Obama’s escalation led to US and YPG forces chasing ISIS out of most of its cities, and into the wilderness areas they presently occupy. President Trump began a pullout from Syria, though he ultimately reversed course and announced the remaining troops would stay to “take the oil.”

The remaining presence is centered on two bases, the base on the Jordanian border at al-Tanf, and a smaller base at one of the Syrian oilfields meant to facilitate a US company taking the oil. Locals say the new Raqqa base has a similar design to the smaller oilfield base.

This ends questions about the US pullout, and now it looks like re escalation is again the order of the day. Though we don’t know how many troops will be stationed in Raqqa, it looks relatively small. The troops are not invited by the Syrian government, and may find themselves at odds with Syrian forces.

This area is also in YPG territory, which normally wouldn’t be a problem since the US and Kurds are on good terms. Turkey has been fighting the Kurds and threatening bigger invasions. This could put the US into a deconfliction issue with the fellow NATO member.

Lacking any vision for what the US end to Syria involvement would look like, it has seemed the US was keeping troops in Syria just for the sake of keeping troops there. That has long risked unintended consequences, and the addition of more US troops and another base only increases that risk.

*

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Jason Ditz is senior editor of Antiwar.com.

Featured image: Syrian General Aktham at the bridge to Raqqa, one of many destroyed by US planes (Photo by Tim Anderson)

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***

Libertarian Robert Murphy emphatically emphasizes the crucial matter of the destructive nature of war as the principle issue the American electorate faces on Election Day next Tuesday. The insane madmen and women in governments who have enabled this catastrophic war of confrontation between Ukraine and Russia have us at the very brink of nuclear annihilation and destruction.  While there are dozens of extremely serious issues facing the nation to consider for this November election, this should be the ultimate litmus test, the definitive line in the sand for all candidates.

Libertarian Candidate for US Senate Robert Murphy’s Statement on War

For well over a century there have been factions within our government that have viewed the United States – and themselves – as leaders of a world empire. From the Spanish-American War to the war in Ukraine, these factions have done their best to convince us that their motives are pure, that they are acting to protect us from foreign enemies, as well as to secure the blessings of liberty for people around the world. The fact is that these acts have mostly benefited financial elites, international corporations, and the egos of neoconservative policymakers. All this while leaving behind a legacy of corruption, death, and destruction.

Nowhere is this stark reality more evidently displayed than with the recent sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Germany. These pipelines were to transport relatively cheap Russian gas to Europe, bypassing existing pipes through Poland and Ukraine. They had been shut down by Germany due to US-sponsored sanctions against Russia because of Russian military operations in Ukraine. Their destruction ensures that there’s no chance that Germany and Europe can compromise with Russia and end the sanctions.

This action will be devastating to the people and economies of Europe. They will freeze in the dark this winter. Industries will be shuttered, electricity will be rationed, cell phones and internet access will be intermittent, and people may starve in unheated homes. This amounts to an act of war by the United States against our European allies.

There can be no doubt that the Pentagon and the CIA were the prime movers in this sabotage. The technology involved to accomplish it was available on US Navy vessels recently engaged in maneuvers in the Baltic Sea. Poland and Ukraine, who gain transport fees from the pipe going through their lands, may have helped. Norway, whose pipeline was reopened the next day, may have also been involved. The only certainty is that Europe will now be dependent on US and international corporations for gas supplies, global gas prices will increase, and Americans will not be immune to these higher prices.

The price inflation we are enduring now is a direct result of generations of constant warfare paid for with borrowed money. Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives have been sacrificed for the egos of unelected Pentagon and State Department bureaucrats. Our Congress seems helpless to even question the reasons for these sacrifices for fear of seeming unpatriotic. It is well known that the US Media is owned and controlled by the Deep State. Any dissent from the war narrative is met with scorn and accusations of domestic terrorism. War propaganda is relentless.

Republicans and Democrats both, financed by billions in campaign donations, are complicit in this terrifying betrayal of the American people. As a Congressman my Republican opponent in this election, Markwayne Mullins, has continually slavishly approved the NDAA that allows the government to engage in military operations overseas without a formal declaration of war. Kendra Horn, my Democrat opponent, did the same when she was in Congress.

History has shown that warfare bankrupts nations, enriching elites while the people suffer. It is time to end the idea of American global hegemony and bring our troops home.

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***

The international crisis over the status of the Crimean Peninsula was in February-March 2014 when the peninsula became returned to the state’s territory of Russia from Ukraine. The Western Russophobic narrative immediately accused Russia of illegitimate annexation of the peninsula as well as of the occupation of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. 

However, the same narrative is not telling that Crimea became, in fact, illegally annexed by Ukraine from Russia even in 1956 by the personal decision of the Ukrainian boss of the USSR – Nikita Khrushchev (1894−1971).

At that time as of 2014, 2/3 of the Crimean population have been ethnic Russians while ethnic Ukrainians all the time were a tiny minority of the peninsula. In 1956, however, it was no organized referendum about the political destiny of Crimea different from the case in 2014 when a majority of the peninsula’s population expressed their free will to join Russia instead of the Russophobic Ukraine. A new Russophobic course of the government in Kiev as well as provoked the (Russian) people of Donbas to secede from undemocratic Ukraine which the government took an open neo-Nazi course.

In fact, the Ukrainian crisis in general came from the decision by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in December 2013 in Vilnius (Lithuania) not to support the deal to bring Ukraine closer to the EU and, of course later to NATO. Instead of the Western economic, political, and military structures he rationally and practically decided to support traditional good ties with Russia for the sake of a general benefit to all people of Ukraine. Nonetheless, a such decision sparked (by Western support) the Euromaidan protest in the Ukrainian capital Kiev – a protest which led to violent clashes with regular security forces. The protest spread out to other Ukrainian cities where in some of them like Odesa it took the form of pogroms against the local Russian speakers. The “sniper massacre” happened in Kiev when pro-Euromaidan Georgian snipers shot the civilians with the purpose to accuse the Yanukovych government of the bloodshed on the streets. According to Western sources, some 80+ people have been killed in Kiev in and around Maidan Square during the protest.

Nevertheless, it became obvious that the final aim of the Euromaidan protesters was to overthrow legally elected President V. Yanukovych and his administration in order to install a puppet pro-Western government that will seek membership of Ukraine in both the EU and NATO followed by the oppression of the Russians in East Ukraine.

President Yanukovych, therefore, was simply forced to flee from Ukraine to neighboring Russia. Soon, for the sake of both protecting Russians in Crimea and her national interests, the Russian military started with a covert military operation that was called by the Russophobic Western media the aggression of “little green men” – Russian soldiers in uniforms with all insignia removed.

However, for the pure matter of comparison, for instance, the US Army invaded the independent state of Grenada in 1983 with all US Army insignia on the soldiers’ uniforms, occupied the whole country (island), and finally changed the government which was previously democratically elected. In addition, in Grenada was living no one American except several students but in Crimea, a qualified majority of people have been ethnic Russians living there for decades and centuries.

In Crimea, in Sevastopol on the Black Sea, Russia for decades had a major naval base according to the agreement signed with Ukraine. According to Western sources, on February 27^th, 2014 the Crimean Parliament building became occupied by the Russian military “little green men” in Simferopol. On March 6^th, 2014, Crimean policymakers authorized a vote for independence from the Russophobic Ukrainian Euromaidan regime in Kiev. Ten days later (on March 16^th, 2014) was organized a referendum on which 97% of people voted for Crimea as a part of Russia (i.e., for the reunification with a motherland). The West (USA, NATO, and the EU), except official critics of Moscow in the case of the Crimean crisis, in fact, did not launch any counteracting military operation with the purpose to return Crimea under the Ukrainian administration.

The situation in 2014 concerning the international relations, truly speaking, was opposite to the case of the Crimean War in 1853−1856 when against Russian action contra the Ottoman Empire several West European countries created a coalition and launched a successful war on Russia. Obviously, during the last 170 years, the position of Russia in global politics and international relations is cardinally changed to the direction that the Russophobic West now has to fully respect Russian power and influence what they did not do even in 1999 during NATO aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). Nonetheless, since March 2014 and the reunification of Crimea with Russia, Russia actually transformed the Black Sea into the “Russian lake” that is quite visible now during the Russian special military operation in Ukraine for the matter of its denazification.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a Former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Read Part I:

Bringing People Back to Nature. Paul Thiry d’Holbach

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, November 02, 2022

Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach (1723-1789), one of the leading figures of the French encyclopaedists, in his book “System of Nature”, published in 1770, wants to lead man, who is the “work of nature, exists in it and is subject to its laws”, back to nature (1). On this, see Part I: “Men must know the truth.” (2)

Holbach’s book is still acknowledged today as one of the key works of the Enlightenment because of its radically sensualist argumentation, which attributes all knowledge to sensory perceptions alone. With it, he openly declared war on the ruling ideology and powers.

For the sensing, thinking and acting human being, Holbach’s “discoveries” from the time of the “Enlightenment” can still lead to the purification of human consciousness from individual and collective prejudices. The “enlightened mind” is capable of envisaging healthy life goals. 

Quote from Pliny as dedication

Holbach dedicated a quotation from Pliny (“Natural History”) to his book. This is presumably a quotation from the Roman historian and writer Gaius Plinius Secundus Maior (also Pliny the Elder) (23-79) from his encyclopaedic work on natural history “Naturalis historia”. This “natural history” deals with topics that today would be assigned primarily to the natural sciences. It is the oldest completely preserved systematic encyclopaedia. It comprises 37 books with a total of 2493 chapters. According to the bibliography, nearly 500 authors were involved (3): 

“Naturae rerum vis atque majestas in omnibus momentis fide caret, si quis modo partes eius, ac non totam domplectatur animo.” (The power and dignity of nature always remain incomprehensible, if one grasps only its parts and not its totality). (4)

The essence of man consists in feeling, thinking, acting, in short, in moving in a way that distinguishes him from other things with which he compares himself. 

The following is a selection of quotations from the 1st chapter “Of Nature” (5):

“Men will always err if they abandon experience for the sake of such systems as have been created by imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he cannot free himself from it, he cannot even get away from it by thinking; in vain does his spirit strive beyond the limits of the visible world, he is always forced to return to it.

(…)

Let man, therefore, cease to seek beings outside the world he inhabits, which are to provide him with a happiness which nature denies him: let him study nature, learn its laws, and contemplate its energy and the unchanging way in which it acts; let him use his discoveries for his own happiness, and tacitly submit to laws from which nothing can escape him; let him refrain from inquiring into the causes which are surrounded for him with an impenetrable veil, let him bear without grumbling the decisions of a universal power which can neither turn back nor ever deviate from the rules which its nature prescribes for it.

(…)

It is also because man has insufficiently studied nature and its laws, and has made insufficient attempts to discover its auxiliary sources and properties, that he is profoundly ignorant or takes such slow and uncertain steps to improve his lot. His indolence finds satisfaction in preferring to be led by example, by conventionality, by authority, rather than by experience, which requires action, and by reason, which requires deliberation.

Hence that aversion which men show to everything which seems to them to deviate from the rules to which they are accustomed; hence their stupid and fearful respect for everything old and for the most nonsensical institutions of their fathers; hence the fear which seizes them when the most advantageous changes or the most promising experiments are proposed to them.

For this reason we see the peoples caught in a shameful lethargy and groaning under abuses dragged along from century to century. They tremble at the very idea of what might remedy their sufferings. It is through the same inertia and lack of experience that medicine, physics, agriculture, in a word all useful sciences, make so little perceptible progress and remain so long in the fetters of authority: those who practise these sciences prefer to follow the paths marked out for them rather than to blaze new ones; (…).

(…)

In short, by renouncing, either through laziness or fear, the testimony of their senses, men have been guided in all their actions and undertakings only by imagination, by rapture, by habit, by prejudice, and especially by authority, which has known how to use the ignorance of men to deceive them. Systems created by imagination took the place of experience, reflection, reason: (…).

(…)

In this way the human race (…) has remained in a long childhood, from which it costs it so much effort to free itself. (…).

(…)

So let us rise above the mists of prejudice. (…). Let us distrust a fickle imagination, let us take experience for our guide; let us ask nature for advice; (…. ); let us go back to our senses, which we have been falsely led to regard as suspect; let us consult reason, which has been shamefully slandered and degraded; let us look attentively at the visible world, and see if it is not sufficient to enable us to judge of unknown realms of the spiritual world; perhaps we shall find that no right has been had to make a distinction between the two, and that two kingdoms have been separated without reasons, which are equally under the dominion of nature. “

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych.). He taught and trained professionals for many decades. As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education as well as an education for public spirit and peace.

Notes

(1) Holbach, P.-H.T. (1978). System der Natur oder von den Gesetzen der physischen und der moralischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main

(2) https://www.globalresearch.ca/bringing-people-back-nature-paul-thiry-dholbach/5797669 and http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=28317§css

(3) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plinius_der_Ältere and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalis_historia

(4) Holbach, P.-H.T. (1978). System der Natur oder von den Gesetzen der physischen und der moralischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main, p. 16

(5) Holbach, P.-H.T. (1978). System of nature or of the laws of the physical and moral world. Frankfurt am Main. Part I: “Of nature and its limits, Of man, Of the soul and its faculties, Of the doctrine of immortality, Of happiness”. Chapter 1: “Of Nature”, pp. 17-25

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***

During the days after former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from office, there was jubilation by the Pakistani liberal-left. But they figured out quickly that they had to go into overdrive to produce and police a narrative of what happened. But bizarrely, that narrative wasn’t being constructed for Pakistanis, but for some mysterious ‘Western Left.’

The Pakistani Left’s success was given a tremendous boost by the incredibly biased coverage this Pakistani Left wanted the Western Left to hear in a few segments of Democracy Now. Apparently, only socialist and communist party cadres who report to their politburo represent all of the people of Pakistan for Democracy Now. However, Democracy Now was so thoroughly embarrassed itself after receiving a plethora of highly critical email feedback indicting its incredibly biased and shallow coverage of some of the largest popular mobilizations in the country. It thankfully stayed away from the subject from that time onwards.

But this began a pattern. A Pakistani Left which normally is involved in or at least supportive of the most important social struggles in the country all of a sudden became obsessed with a ‘Western Left’ that may consider these mobilizations and the figure of Imran Khan as something meaningful, as an important political development that clearly entailed massive numbers of protestors against the new regime.

Sadly, the Pakistani Left seemed to prioritize how the Western Left sees Imran Khan over everything and everyone else. As Prof. Sher Ali Tareen (is this Quetta-born outstanding Pakistani scholar a part of the Western Left to?), Imranophobia was at its peak at this point.

Bewildered by how a man whose period of governance was less than desirable could mobilize millions throughout the country, the Pakistani Left – rather than trying to engage in a period replete with possibilities of bringing more radical proposals to the table – turned its attention to privileged Western Left academics and activists rather than millions of ordinary Pakistanis out in the streets.

It was rather comical how the Pakistani Left had to keep changing their script: oh, well Khan just has an urban educated base of support. Oh wait, there is huge support among the Pashtuns as well. And perhaps he also some significant support in the Punjab and in Karachi. They were trying every trick in the book to downplay mass support for Khan, and resentment for the new regime.

In fact, Pankaj Mishra’s deployment of the term resentiment seemed very appropriate in capturing the mood in the country. A profoundly angry population was tired of sitting on the sidelines as spectators to the shenanigans of the power elite of their country.

But the Pakistani Left ensured that these were footnotes to be ignored and that these popular mobilizations entailed either fascists, youthful idiots, and whatever other condescending (very of often vulgar and abusive) term you want to use for them. Massive rallies in city after city taking place, incredibly disciplined and peaceful, were taking place and the Pakistani Left’s concern was how to bury these developments, hot to veto them out of history as Chomsky often says.

The Pakistani Left, just like any other Pakistani, is correct to be critical of Khan on many fronts. But this insidious game they played to police and discipline different narratives about what’s happening in the country was Stalinism and McCarthyism at its finest.

The Obsessive Compulsive Disorder involved in their relationship with the Western Left seemed utterly outlandish. It was a colonized mind at its finest, concerned more with what the White Man thinks of you than you think of yourself and your people.

We also wondered who the heck is this ‘Western Left’ that our Pakistani leftist luminaries kept referring to. Is it the International Socialist Organization (ISO), white Antifa-type anarchists, BLM activists, the DSA, who? Or an individual here and there sitting in their basement tweeting away. Regardless, the obsession seemed farcical.

A ‘Western Left’ that is barely relevant in their own countries is now being bombarded by an equally impotent Pakistani Left to regurgitate a tight script on political developments in Pakistan: Khan is no ‘anti-imperialist hero,’ he’s a demagogue, he doesn’t really have mass support (unlike us Pakistani leftists of course), and the people you do see who are coming out are buffoons or fascists. We are the Pakistani Left, even though half of us will reside most of our lives living in the West, so we know best and the ‘Western Left’ better just shut up about anything concerning Pakistan.

That also was a comical component of this saga: the constant criticisms of expat Pakistani intellectuals and ordinary Pakistanis for not being and living in Pakistan (and therefore having warped views of Pakistan) by many Pakistani Leftist intellectuals who themselves are not working and living in Pakistan! Now that’s something to chuckle about. These Pakistani Leftist intellectuals are more or less genuine in their progressive politics, so I would rather not use the term ‘hypocrites’ for them. But in any other case, hypocrisy is the only word one can think of to describe such behavior.

Indeed, the entire saga over the past few months has been highly instructive. Instead of trying to join and engage popular mobilizations to radicalize the movement even further, fairly privileged and elite Pakistani Left intellectuals and activists, either sitting abroad or at campuses which are virtual extensions of the US embassy or the Pakistani military establishment, were fixated on one thing and one thing alone: how this amorphous, undefined, supposedly monolithic ‘Western Left’ must view Pakistan, Khan, the popular mobilizations, etc. The Pakistani Left could have cared all this time about how a Kashmiri thought of Khan, or a Palestinian, or a Pashtun – but no, the Western Left controls independent and alternative media and hence, they are a far more important audience to target. These Western Leftists are the ones that are going to turn to ‘us’ and give us global standing and legitimacy, even though that legitimacy rarely exists in Pakistan itself!

Meanwhile, elderly women, working class students, displaced persons from the ‘War on Terror’ – all a part of these mobilizations, mattered nothing to the Pakistani Left because the latter had a more important job: ensuring that the Western Left continues to anoint them as the saviors of Pakistan, and not be distracted by Khan or these millions of people rallying for change.

The saddest part is that genuine organic left movements in the Global South mostly don’t give a damn about what some mythical ‘Western Left’ thinks about them. They are busy in the struggle to shape their societies for the better. And while the Pakistani Left is usually doing incredibly laudable work and activism, since April their intellectual twitteratis have had nothing better to do than to condemn some phantom ‘Western Left’ for being bamboozled into believing that Washington or the Pakistani military may have had something to do with Khan’s ouster.

Rarely do we see genuine organic left movements in countries so obsessed not with what their own countrywomen and men think of them, or the most oppressed, but with how the ghosts of the ‘Western Left’ perceives them, and more importantly, Imran Khan.

It is sad that a much-needed Pakistani Left has abandoned genuine political criticisms, and has propelled Imranophobia (thanks SherAli Tareen) on overdrive. It is a shame that psychological envy (why can Khan mobilize tens of millions while we can only mobilize tens) has replaced meaningful political engagement within the Pakistani Left. Nevertheless, it does seem like psychoanalysis would possibly reveal more about the Khan and Khan-supporter hatred among the Pakistani Left. And that is very unfortunate when we are at a very rare but exciting moment when transformational politics can be advanced and radicalized to take on a military establishment in panic mode.

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Azhar Imran teaches law and politics at the University of Punjab, Pakistan.

Zerrish Khan is a progressive national student activist with an international relations background.

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***

A Brown University professor has requested a curious accommodation for the governing class that has abused us with impunity for two and a half years. She terms it “pandemic amnesty,” which amounts to legal and social immunity for the Public Health© social engineers who orchestrated COVID-19 lockdowns and vaxx/masking mandates.

Via The Atlantic:

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID… There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.  But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information.”

“Spring and summer 2020”?? Schools in Democrat-controlled cities remained closed well into 2021. And they would’ve remained so much longer if the Zero COVID people had their druthers.

Data became available early on that children’s risk from COVID was so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Still, schools and businesses in regions run by Democrats remained shuttered at the behest of the Public Health© technocrats who now attempt to absolve themselves of guilt.

The people who did this want “pandemic amnesty” now. Hard no pic.twitter.com/5AGg2XrMlb

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 1, 2022

The sole reason the Brown University professor is doing the mea culpa, “how-could-anyone-have-known?” routine now over the school closures — which, by the way, The Atlantic aggressively promoted — is because the data on their devastating impacts is in:

“Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best.”

The social engineers responsible for this are likely worried about the looming GOP takeover of Congress and what that might mean in terms of investigations, assuming the GOP pharma cucks aren’t sufficiently bribed.

Every facet of the Public Health© COVID narrative is crumbling in real time and they’re panicking. This is them trying to weasel their way out of accountability. That’s all this abrupt about-face is.

The vaxxes don’t work as promised to prevent transmission and new data emerges weekly on just how useless and counterproductive they are. Pfizer and Moderna rushed them through clinical testing and got them approved by captured regulatory agencies based on verifiable fraud.

The school closures were unnecessary and, in fact, as we see here, totally counterproductive.

The worldwide economic shutdown wrecked the global economy, perhaps beyond repair.

Nonetheless, just a few months ago, when the lockdown left felt invincible with the corporate media and Public Health© bureaucracy at their backs, they were enthusiastically demanding ostracization, imprisonment, and worse for the unvaccinated.

For the Unvaccinated it's Never Forgive, Never Forget and Never Again!👇👇 pic.twitter.com/O37FGsHuru

— MilkBarTV (@TheMilkBarTV) November 1, 2022

Their vicious totalitarianism requires a response from a free people, lest they similarly transgress during the next Current Thing™. They should not be permitted to skate without a reckoning.

We ought to ignore the crocodile tears shed by sociopathic technocrats because they can’t maintain their murderous narrative anymore. This is performative and not an expression of sincere remorse.

They can feel the rising popular rage. Their only recourse now is to plead for mercy — as if their misdeeds were innocent mistakes, as if they were just making the best decision possible based on the information they had at hand.

Their narrative is belied by the fact that millions, perhaps billions, of free-thinking people worldwide with fewer information resources and professional credentials than the elites did not cave to the orchestrated manipulation, fearmongering, and cajoling.

If the COVIDians could have managed to keep the hysteria going strong, further suppress dissent, and sustain the lockdowns/vaxx mandates indefinitely, the US would more closely resemble “Zero COVID” China than it currently does.

Justin Trudeau: "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime." pic.twitter.com/Vxwn2DhpgZ

— Harrison Faulkner (@Harry__Faulkner) April 11, 2022

Unless examples are made – including hardcore prosecutions – there is no substantial disincentive to engage in the same malfeasance in the future.

The corporate state will introduce a series of new permanent emergencies in the coming months and years. And, when it does, if it doesn’t pay any price this go-’round, the Brown University professor who now requests clemency will be back at it. And so will all of her colleagues in the managerial class.

You can put that pandemic amnesty where the sun don’t shine. pic.twitter.com/NGIaMvLb5L

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) November 1, 2022

Nothing short of Nuremberg II will suffice. If the GOP won’t do it when the party assumes Congressional power in 2023, it’s up to the people to force their hand.

pic.twitter.com/APqEh3Ht5G

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) October 31, 2022

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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.

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

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***

“For soldiers … coming home is more lethal than being in combat.” ― Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston

The U.S. government is still waging war on America’s military veterans.

Especially veterans who exercise their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.

Consider: we raise our young people on a steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on the idea that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and committed to defending their freedoms at home, we often treat them like criminals merely for exercising those rights they risked their lives to defend.

As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the government even has a name for its war on America’s veterans: Operation Vigilant Eagle.

This Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program tracks military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and characterizes them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Coupled with the DHS’ dual reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” which broadly define extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Yet the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is taking aim at individuals trained in military warfare.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that the DHS has gone extremely quiet about Operation Vigilant Eagle.

Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire.

And the government’s efforts to target military veterans whose views may be perceived as “anti-government” make clear that something is afoot.

In recent years, military servicemen and women have found themselves increasingly targeted for surveillance, censorship, threatened with incarceration or involuntary commitment, labeled as extremists and/or mentally ill, and stripped of their Second Amendment rights.

In light of the government’s efforts to lay the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data and predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability coupled with a military background.

Incredibly, as part of a proposal introduced under the Trump Administration, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

These tactics are not really new.

Many times throughout history in totalitarian regimes, such governments have declared dissidents mentally ill and unfit for society as a means of rendering them disempowering them.

For example, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally through the use of electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures.

This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by declaring them mentally ill and locking them up in psychiatric wards for extended periods of time is a common practice in present-day China.

What is particularly unnerving, however, is how this practice of eliminating or undermining potential critics, including military veterans, is happening with increasing frequency in the United States.

Remember, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) opened the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists—technically, anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government qualifies.

It doesn’t take much anymore to be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the government’s dictates.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, communities are being mapped and residents assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about a person’s potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether they’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

The case of Brandon Raub is a prime example of Operation Vigilant Eagle in action.

Raub, a 26-year-old decorated Marine, actually found himself interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for standing by his views, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys. Within days of Raub being seized and forcibly held in a VA psych ward, news reports started surfacing of other veterans having similar experiences.

“Oppositional defiance disorder” (ODD) is another diagnosis being used against veterans who challenge the status quo. As journalist Anthony Martin explains, an ODD diagnosis

“denotes that the person exhibits ‘symptoms’ such as the questioning of authority, the refusal to follow directions, stubbornness, the unwillingness to go along with the crowd, and the practice of disobeying or ignoring orders. Persons may also receive such a label if they are considered free thinkers, nonconformists, or individuals who are suspicious of large, centralized government… At one time the accepted protocol among mental health professionals was to reserve the diagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder for children or adolescents who exhibited uncontrollable defiance toward their parents and teachers.”

That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) these veterans is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these veterans are being declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

If it were just being classified as “anti-government,” that would be one thing.

Unfortunately, anyone with a military background and training is also now being viewed as a heightened security threat by police who are trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

Feeding this perception of veterans as ticking time bombs in need of intervention, the Justice Department launched a pilot program in 2012 aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

The result?

Police encounters with military veterans often escalate very quickly into an explosive and deadly situation, especially when SWAT teams are involved.

For example, Jose Guerena, a Marine who served in two tours in Iraq, was killed after an Arizona SWAT team kicked open the door of his home during a mistaken drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told his wife and child to hide in a closet, grabbed a gun and waited in the hallway to confront the intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The SWAT officers, however, not as restrained, fired 70 rounds of ammunition at Guerena—23 of those bullets made contact. Apart from his military background, Guerena had had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

John Edward Chesney, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran, was killed by a SWAT team allegedly responding to a call that the Army veteran was standing in his San Diego apartment window waving what looked like a semi-automatic rifle. SWAT officers locked down Chesney’s street, took up positions around his home, and fired 12 rounds into Chesney’s apartment window. It turned out that the gun Chesney reportedly pointed at police from three stories up was a “realistic-looking mock assault rifle.”

Ramon Hooks’ encounter with a Houston SWAT team did not end as tragically, but it very easily could have. Hooks, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran, was using an air rifle gun for target practice outside when a Homeland Security Agent, allegedly house shopping in the area, reported him as an active shooter. It wasn’t long before the quiet neighborhood was transformed into a war zone, with dozens of cop cars, an armored vehicle and heavily armed police. Hooks was arrested, his air rifle pellets and toy gun confiscated, and charges filed against him for “criminal mischief.”

Given the government’s increasing view of veterans as potential domestic terrorists, it makes one think twice about government programs encouraging veterans to include a veterans designation on their drivers’ licenses and ID cards.

Hailed by politicians as a way to “make it easier for military veterans to access discounts from retailers, restaurants, hotels and vendors across the state,” it will also make it that much easier for the government to identify and target veterans who dare to challenge the status quo.

Remember: no one is spared in a police state.

Eventually, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we all suffer the same fate.

It stands to reason that if the government can’t be bothered to abide by its constitutional mandate to respect the citizenry’s rights—whether it’s the right to be free from government surveillance and censorship, the right to due process and fair hearings, the right to be free from roadside strip searches and militarized police, or the right to peacefully assemble and protest and exercise our right to free speech—then why should anyone expect the government to treat our nation’s veterans with respect and dignity?

Certainly, veterans have enough physical and psychological war wounds to overcome without adding the government to the mix. Although the U.S. boasts more than 20 million veterans who have served in World War II through the present day, large numbers of veterans are impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, suicide, and marital stress, homeless, subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration offices.

At least 60,000 veterans died by suicide between 2008 and 2017.

On average, 6,000 veterans kill themselves every year. However, a recent study suggests that the rate of suicide among veterans may be more than double what federal officials report annually.

The plight of veterans today—and their treatment at the hands of the U.S. government—remains America’s badge of shame.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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***

Annually, each year, since 2005, the U.S. Government has been one of only from 1 to 3 Governments to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against an annual statement by the General Assembly against racism and other forms of bigotry — an annual Resolution condemning it, and expressing a commitment to doing everything possible to reduce bigoted acts. For the first time ever, on November 4th, America was joined not only by one or two voting against it, but 55 nations, and almost all gave as reasons that Russia was for it and has invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is the only country that has almost always been joining America in opposing such resolutions; and many countries now vote against the resolution because Ukraine always does, and thus vote in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia — condemn the resolution because Russia supports it.

This year’s Resolution particularly offended America and its allies because “Nazism” is mentioned and condemned specifically in it.

No specific nation is ever mentioned in such resolutions.

The U.N. makes its documents and voting records as difficult as possible for the public to find, but, after many hours I have been able to find the following records regarding the 4 November 2022 resolution and vote.

The Resolution was completed in draft on 29 September 2022, and here it is (though the U.N. tends to change URLs in order to make documents unfindable, and also this and many other documents at the U.N. are designed so as not to be copyable into web archiving services; so, this document might soon become unfindable: see this.)

I made the first copy of it at the main web archive, and that archived image is very different, not the document itself. This is typical for the U.N. But, anyway, if you can see it, then at least you will be able to know the Resolution’s text.

The U.N. likewise makes its voting records as difficult as possible for journalists to be able to report the specific votes of specific nations — the U.N. provides photo-images (such as in this case) of the nation-by-nation vote so that journalists will need to type everything out character-by-character instead of do copy-pastes, and journalists on rapid deadlines won’t typically retype an entire document. I have done it in this case, and here that is:

See this.

Item 66(a) draft resolution A/C.3/77/L.5

Combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and …

DATE: 4 November 2022

IN FAVOR (105): Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dem. PR [N.] Korea, Djirbouti, El Salvador, Equatorial Gunea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao PDR, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Solomon Islands, S. Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Surinam, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Trinidad, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, UAR, United Rep. Tanza, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

AGAINST (52): Albania, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kiribati, Latvia, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, N. Macedonia, Norway, Papua, Poland, Portugal, Rep. Moldova, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, UK, U.S.

ABSTAIN (15): Antigua, Congo, Dominican Rep., Ecuador, Egypt, Mexico, Myanmar, Palau, Panama, Rep. of Korea, Samoa, Serbia, Switzerland, Tonga, Turkiye

ABSENT: Afghanistan, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Comoros, D.R. Congo, Dominica, Eswatini, Gambia, Grenada, Iran, Morocco, St. Lucia, Sao Tome, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, S. Sudan, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Venezuela

Here is the U.S.’s explanation of its vote against the document.

Here is Austria’s.

Since Austria backs the EU’s statement on this, here is that statement from the EU.

The U.S. Government seems to be having remarkable success making even nazism fashionable among its allies.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

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

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***

It must be excruciatingly difficult having to decide whether to put some of one’s hundreds-of-billions of dollars, along with potential future profit, at risk to affirm one’s previous public declaration of support for the freedom of speech principle. That is the dilemma that Musk has before him.

Musk finds Twitter threatened with an advertiser boycott. As I previously alluded to, the boycotters of free speech on Twitter could well find themselves boycotted by free-speech supporters. Two can play the boycott game. Musk seems to realize that now. He warned of a “thermonuclear name & shame” reprisal against boycotting advertisers.

Musk has expressed willingness to fight the “activist groups pressuring advertisers” and their compliant advertisers who are “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

But has Musk provided a free speech forum for all Twitter users? Yours truly, a small-fry free-speech, anti-racism, anti-war, anti-disinformation sporadic user of Twitter have been banished without notice or reason for several months now. I assume it is for my progressivist principles that are not shared by Democrats working in the Twitter space (e.g., support for Palestinian rights, support for Indigenous rights, support for all human rights, etc).

But changes are afoot at Twitter. Musk has cut the Twitter workforce in half. This is unfortunate for the ordinary workers just trying to earn an honest living; but, as far as cleaning out the anti-free-speech riff raff at Twitter, it might signal an opening for free-speech advocates.

Alas, Musk seems to think free speech shouldn’t be “free.” Twitter Blue will only be available to those who can afford the monthly $8 fee.

Donald Trump (a personality equally reprehensible to Joe Biden) has, as far as I know, not been invited for reinstatement to Twitter. I dislike most of Trump’s ideological views, but I support his right to express them honestly.

Then there is the case of Scott Ritter, an American patriot who comes across as a fierce critic of US imperialism. For his anti-imperialist views, he found himself banned from Twitter. After the takeover of Twitter by Musk, Ritter set up a new Twitter account and sent out a tweet, stating that Ukraine was behind the massacre at Bucha, as a challenge to Musk. Ritter, a former marine intelligence officer, found himself promptly banned from Twitter again.

Ritter quoted The Who: “Won’t get fooled again. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

It is the early days of Twitter under Musk. Nonetheless, if Musk truly is a free speech devotee, truly is a man of principle, then he will use his Twitter ownership for the promotion of respectful free speech.

I submit that Musk might best demonstrate this by setting in motion a twitter storm pushing for the release of Julian Assange, a heroic free-speech advocate and a principled supporter of the public’s right to know.

Assange has suffered at the hands of corrupt American power abetted by its minions for which he should never have been targeted or persecuted. Conversely, he should be celebrated for his actions which include exposing US war crimes in Iraq. If there is any justice in empire, then Assange must be released, exonerated of all wrongdoing, fairly recompensed, and regarded with all due respect for his sacrifice to humanity — as should all those brave souls who spoke out about the crimes of empire and find themselves languishing under unjust circumstances.

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

According to the New York Times those naughty Russians are at it again. Today’s online lead story entitled “Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms” with the subtitle “Researchers have identified a series of Russian information operations to influence American elections and, perhaps, erode support for Ukraine” marks a new low in what the Gray Lady, self-designated as one of America’s “newspapers of record,” prefers to call “journalism.”

The author of the piece, clearly somewhat biased over Russia and Putin, is one “Steven Lee Myers [who] covers misinformation for The Times. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.”

Here is what it is all about:

“The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda.”

Per the Times,

“The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.”

Well, one might object that Ukraine’s president is indeed a figure tailor-made for ridicule as he used to play a piano with his penis, but that is perhaps a secondary issue.

The more significant theme is that people who oppose the Ukraine war, for any number of reasons, and, particularly if they are conservatives, are becoming trolls for Russia in part due to the disinformation efforts and are being influenced by way of discussion fora like Gab.

The targets “are generally US conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims” according to one of the cybersecurity experts consulted by the author. The Times links Berka, who might indeed be a made-up identity “posing as an outraged American,” to the secretive Russian Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg which it claims was involved in interfering in both the 2016 and 2020 US elections.

The Times also cites another site that it links to Russia, electiontruth.net

“For its contact information, electiontruth.net lists a cafe inside a converted gas station in Cotter, Ark., a town of 900 people on a bend in the White River. The cafe has closed, however… No one at Election Truth responded to a request for comment submitted through the site.”

One might object that neither Berka nor election.truth would appear to be a major disinformation effort sponsored by a foreign government intended to bring down the Republic. Nevertheless, the article clearly adheres to the view that anyone objecting to the continuing war in Ukraine is a Russian dupe.

It cites Liz Cheney, who has called the few Republicans who want to cut funding for the war as “the Putin wing of the Republican Party,” and Myers observes that the disinformation unfortunately echoes “a theme that has gained some traction among Republican lawmakers and voters who have questioned the delivery of weapons and other military assistance.”

Another “expert” cited in the article, one Edward P. Perez, a board member with the OSET Institute, a self-described “nonpartisan election security organization,” called the Russian efforts “manufactured chaos” in the country’s body politic – in part because the divisions in American society are already such fertile soil for disinformation. “Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them.”

So, there is the main point of the piece. Americans who oppose the involvement of the United States in the war against Russia are little more than “domestic actors” who are peddling disinformation provided by the Kremlin. Given that this article appeared two days before national elections, the intent is clear. The Russians are, per the Times, generating disinformation about Ukraine and Americans who go along with the lies are being manipulated. Moscow is again interfering in a US national election! Vote for the Democratic candidates as they will be the ones that can be relied upon to keep the war going! Three cheers for Joe Biden!

*

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org,address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Ukrainian Front Lines Are Still Inflamed By Heavy Battles. The Ukrainian military clearly does not refuse plans to attack the towns of Svatovo and Kremennaya in the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russian forces continue to push them back far from the strategically important road between the two towns.

Ukrainian units continue daily attempts to attack Chervonopopovka but fail. At the same time, the Russian military went on the offensive a few kilometers to the north, near Makeevka. Ukrainians attempted to advance north of Svatovo in the area of Novoselovskoe while Russians launched a counteroffensive on Ukrainian positions south of Kremennaya near Belogorovka. Neither of the warring sides has claimed success so far.

The Russian offensive in the area of Soledar continues. Fighting is ongoing near Verkhnekamenskoye and Spornoe.

In the area of Bakhmut, Russians continue the mop up operation in the industrial area on the eastern outskirts, while approaching the city from the southern direction. Fighting for control of Opytnoe is ongoing. The tactical task of the Wagner group which is storming the city is to push the Ukrainian troops to the right bank of the Bakhmutka River. They are yet to achieve this goal.

The Somalia battalion of the DPR has claimed some successes on the outskirts of Avdeevka. They managed to take control of some Ukrainian positions, destroying about 20 servicemen of the Ukrainian Army.

In the Ugledar region, the Ukrainian military attempted to stop the Russian offensive and attacked Russian positions near Nikolskoe and Ravnopolye. They did not manage to take control of new territories but distracted the Russian military from the ongoing battle for control of the village of Pavlovka located on the southern outskirts of Ugledar. The Russian goal is to secure the control of the road and push the Ukrainian Army to the northern bank of the Kashlygach River.

In the Kherson region, the front lines remained unchanged. Ukrainian forces continue their attempts to break through Russian defenses but fail and suffer heavy losses. The evacuation of civilians on the left bank of the Dnieper River continues. On November 3, the Russian flag was taken out of the of the city administration building in Kherson. The local authorities suppose that the Russian forces may leave their positions and cross the river to reinforce their defensive lines along the Dnieper. In turn, the Ukrainian military remains cautious, afraid that Russian claims are only an information campaign aimed at luring the Ukrainian army into trap.

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Video: Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipelines? “The Russians Did It”

By Matt Orfalea and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 08, 2022

Carefully documented video below on “Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipeline”. And who was that foreign state actor? EU politicians and the Western media in chorus place the blame on Russia. “The Russians Did It…”

A Lost Small Town. Running Errands in the Wake of Emotional Violence, USA

By Dr. Naomi Wolf, November 08, 2022

I forgive this employee for having to follow a script that must have been set out by the town, for all the small businesses to follow, in some bizarre, coercive methodology, as this out-of-the-blue, un-American and inappropriate question was posed all at once somehow, in store after store, in my little town, in the nearby towns, even in New York City, during a certain moment in the bad year of 2021.

‘Too Many Unknown Factors’: California Lawmakers Object to Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes

By Julia Conley, November 08, 2022

As environmental advocates call on regulators to “lead with sound science” regarding the proposed release of thousands of genetically engineered mosquitoes on a weekly basis in central California, eight Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded that officials reject the proposal without an in-depth review of its potential impacts.

Global Alarm as Netanyahu to Form Israel’s Most Right-Wing Government Ever

By Jessica Corbett, November 08, 2022

People around the world have expressed concerns about Israelis empowering indicted former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form the nation’s most far-right government in history since Israel held its fifth election in less than four years on Tuesday.

Europe May See Forced De-Industrialization as Result of Energy Crisis

By Irina Slav, November 07, 2022

The European Union has been quietly celebrating a consistent decline in gas and electricity consumption this year amid record-breaking prices, a cutoff of much of the Russian gas supply, and a liquidity crisis in the energy market.

Tyranny Looms as Digital IDs and Currencies Roll Out Around the World

By Andreas Wailzer, November 07, 2022

By now, you probably know about the plans for digital IDs and digital currencies. But how far along are these plans exactly in various places around the world? What steps are being undertaken right now? Why are digital “identities” so problematic? And what are possible solutions? We will explore these questions in this article.

Twitter Censorship: EU Warns Elon Musk Not to Restore Free Speech Protections After Calls from Clinton and Other Democratic Leaders

By Jonathan Turley, November 07, 2022

The EU has responded aggressively to warn Musk not to allow greater free speech or face crippling fines and even potential criminal enforcement. After years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.

The Government Is Still Waging War on America’s Military Veterans

By John Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, November 07, 2022

Consider: we raise our young people on a steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on the idea that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and committed to defending their freedoms at home, we often treat them like criminals merely for exercising those rights they risked their lives to defend.

US Nuclear Forces Chief Says ‘the Big One Is Coming’

By Dave DeCamp, November 07, 2022

The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come.

Know Your Child’s Seizure Risk from the MMR Vaccine

By Physicians for Informed Consent, November 07, 2022

There is a five-fold higher risk of seizures from the MMR vaccine than seizures from measles infection, and a significant portion of MMR-vaccine seizures may cause permanent harm. For example, a Danish study of 1.54 million people, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2007, examined the association between febrile seizures and epilepsy, a chronic brain disorder that leads to recurring seizures.

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***

I live in a picture-perfect region — the Hudson Valley, memorialized by painters and poets; a patchwork of autumn reds and yellows, majestic hillsides, storied waterfalls, and little homesteads dotted picturesquely on the slopes of sleepy hamlets.

Towns in our area look like Norman Rockwell paintings: there is Main Street, Millerton, with its white 19th century church steeple, its famous Irving Farm cafe with the excellent curated coffee beans, its charming antiques mall, its popular pizzeria.

When you drive to Millerton, it looks like you are driving into the heart of archetypal America; everything that Woody Guthrie songs memorialize, everything of which American soldiers dreamt when they were far away — everything decent and pure, is to be found in Hudson Valley towns.

It sure looks that way, anyway.

But these days, I am obliged to maintain a fervent inner monologue, just so I can pleasantly go about my business in the local hardware store, in the local florist, in the post office.

Because an emotional massacre has taken place in these little towns. And now we are expected to act as if — this never happened at all.

But psychically, emotionally, there is blood flowing in the streets; and bodies are stacked up, invisible, in front of the candy stores, the high end wine stores, the pretty memorials to the World War Two dead; outside the farmers’ market on Saturdays, outside the tapas bars.

So my quiet internal mantra, is: I forgive you.

I forgive you, Millerton movie theatre. Your owner, who was interviewed just before the pandemic, saying lovely things in a local paper about how the revamped theatre would enhance the local community, posted a sign in 2021 saying that only vaccinated people could enter. You needed to really look for the fine print to see that you could walk through those doors, if unvaccinated, but only with a PCR test.

I forgive the young ladies who worked behind the popcorn counter, for telling me that I could not enter further. That I could not sit down, with other human beings in my community, to watch a film alongside of them.

I forgive the young ticket taker for telling me that I had to go back outside, onto the sidewalk. I could not even stand in the lobby.

I forgive these young people who just wanted jobs, and who had to discriminate in the most heinous and scarring way — scarring to me, and to them too no doubt — just to keep their jobs. I forgive them. I forgive them for the mortifying scene they had to cause.

I forgive the movie theatre owner for shouting at me defensively when I questioned this policy.

I forgive the elderly couple nearby in the lobby; the woman who started shrieking at me alarmingly that she was glad of the policy and did not want me anywhere near her. I forgive her. I forgive her silent, embarrassed husband for his silence.

I forgive the employee of the Millerton flower shop who demanded, “Are you vaccinated?” when I walked in – when I just wanted some nice-looking flowers, some artificial olive branches, perhaps, like those I had seen in a decorating magazine, to arrange in a vase in my study.

I forgive this employee for having to follow a script that must have been set out by the town, for all the small businesses to follow, in some bizarre, coercive methodology, as this out-of-the-blue, un-American and inappropriate question was posed all at once somehow, in store after store, in my little town, in the nearby towns, even in New York City, during a certain moment in the bad year of 2021.

I forgive these store owners for stripping me of a great benefit of a free society — the great gift of liberty, of America — that right to be dreamy, to have some privacy, and to be preoccupied with one’s own thoughts.

I forgive this employee for intruding on my privacy in a way that was startling, ill-mannered, and entirely beside the point, given the fact that she was simply selling flowers and I was simply trying to buy them.

I forgive her for the way this demand made my adrenaline levels jump, as they do when things are unstable around you; in 2021, you could not tell which stores would confront you, or when, with that urgent, bullying question — when you happened to wander in, just wanting some toothpaste, or a slice of pizza, or to look at some antiques.

Not — expecting an inquisition.

I forgive this flower shop employee for presenting me with this startling question that each time made me, with my clinically diagnosed PTSD from a very old trauma, feel ambushed, violated and humiliated. Surely this sense of ambush was felt by trauma survivors everywhere.

Are you vaccinated?

Are you? Vaccinated?

Are you vaccinated?

Are you naked? Are you helpless?

Are you mine? My possession?

The viral clip of the Pfizer marketing rep, admitting to the European Parliament that the mRNA vaccines never stopped transmission, should make every single one of these moments, into a source of deep embarrassment and self-criticism for all those people — all of them —- who inflicted these violations of privacy on others, or who excluded in any way, their neighbors and fellow countrymen and women. They did so, it is clear now to all, on the basis of arrant nonsense.

But meanwhile, I forgive them. I have to. Because otherwise the rage and sorrow would exhaust me to death.

I forgive my neighbor who froze when I hugged her.

I forgive my other neighbor, who told me that she was making homemade soup and fresh bread, and that I could join her to have some, if I was vaccinated. If I was unvaccinated, however, she explained, someday she might consent to walk outside with me.

I forgive the monitor — what else could one call him — surely appointed by the local Board of Health, who told me that I could not go inside a church at an adorable outdoor town festival at the tiny mountain hamlet of Mt Washington, to see an exhibit, because I was unmasked. I forgive him for the steely look in his eyes as he remained unmoved when I explained that had a serious neurological condition, and thus could not wear a mask. I forgive the nervous lady at the table full of trinkets, who had apparently ratted us out to the Board of Health representative, when we were simply browsing outdoors, surrounded by fresh air, on a peaceful June day, our faces uncovered, at her table.

I forgive them for making a miserable scene about all of this in front of my then-ten-year-old stepson. The unmasked and unvaccinated are eternally accused of having made scenes, but the scenes were made, really, by the actions of those who were coercing and conforming.

I forgive them for driving us to leave the festival. I forgive their manifesting a pathetic and indefensible lesson in servility, and in submission to things that made no sense, to an impressionable American child.

I forgive the teller at my local bank for throwing a paper napkin at me to cover my face, when I explained respectfully and gently, from twenty feet away from her, why I did not wear a mask.

I forgive the staff at the Walker Hotel, in lower Manhattan, for warning me that they would call the manager, who no doubt would then call law enforcement, if I sat at the Blue Bottle Coffee lunch counter with my unvaccinated self.

I forgive my loved ones for keeping us from the Thanksgiving table.

I forgive one of my best friends for her having left the country without having said goodbye to me; the reason was that she was “disappointed” in me for my stance on masks and vaccines. No matter that this was entirely my risk, my body, my decision, my life. Her “disappointment” led her to assume the burden of censuring me for something that had nothing to do with her. I forgive her, though my heart broke.

I forgive the friend whose daughter had a baby, and who would not let me indoors to see the child.

I forgive the friend who said he did not sit indoors with unvaccinated people.

I forgive the family members who pressed my loved one to get one more booster – thus leading directly to her sustaining heart damage.

I forgive them, because my soul instructs me that I must.

But I cannot forget.

Are we supposed to just pick up again, as if emotional limbs were not crushed, as if emotional hearts and guts were not pierced, as if with sharp objects? And that, again and again?

As if there has been no savagery, no massacre here?

All those people — now that athletes are dropping dead, now that their own loved ones are sickening and hospitalized, now that the “transmission” is known to be a lie and the vaccines’ “efficacy” itself is known to be a lie – are they — sorry? Are they reflecting upon themselves, on their actions, on their consciences; on their immortal souls; on what they have done to others; on their part in this shameful melodrama in American and world history – a time that now can never be erased?

I don’t hear it. I don’t hear any apologies.

I don’t see signs on the Millerton movie theatre saying, “Dear Customers. We are so sorry we treated many of you as if we were all living under Jim Crow laws. We did so for no reason at all.

There is no excuse, of course, for such discrimination, then or now. Please forgive us.”

Nothing. Have you seen anything like this? I haven’t. Not one conversation. Not one sign. Not one article. “My friend, I was a beast. How can you forgive me? I behaved so badly.” Have you heard that? No, nothing.

Instead people are reacting to the fact of their awfulness, of their profound wrongness, of their foolishness, of their ignorance and credulity, like sneaky, guilty dogs. They are sidling up.

In the city, they are quietly adding one to the guest list. In the country, they are stopping their cars in the sunny autumn air to have a little chat.

They are calling up just to say hi — after two and a half years.

Two and a half years of brutal, ignorant ostracism.

I can and must forgive all those I enumerated. But it is harder to forgive – others.

That personal, internal forgiveness of deluded individuals, or of coerced small business owners, which is my own internal labor – work I do daily between myself and my God, just so that I won’t turn to stone with my burden of rage and fury – has nothing to do, of course, with the wrongdoers’ need on their side of the relationship, truly to self-examine and truly to repent; and it certainly does not forestall or avert the grave and terrible accounting of crimes, and the enactment of true justice, for the leaders and spokespeople and institutions who committed evil, that is now utterly necessary.

Without accountability, and truth and reconciliation commissions, and terrible, commensurate levels of justice served to suit the crimes committed, as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Germany have all learned to their cost, there is nothing at all to ensure that the exact same crimes won’t be committed again. And that process of investigation, accountability, trials and sentencing, when one half of a nation abused the other systematically, is painful and severe and takes years to reach its conclusion.

(And yes, I added this clarifying paragraph in response to Dr Emily Oster’s ignorant, self-deluding and dangerous plea in The Atlantic for “amnesty”, an essay written after this one was published. Let there be no misunderstanding. “Amnesty” for crimes of this severity and scale is not an option. There was no group hug after the liberation of Auschwitz).

It is hard to forgive the high school in Chatham, that forced a teenager to be mRNA vaccinated against her wishes, in order to play basketball, and thus hope for a college scholarship. The officials must be held accountable.

It is hard to forgive the doctors, the hospitals, the pediatricians, who knew and knew and knew. And bowed their heads, and plunged the needles into the arms of innocents, and committed evil. The doctors who today say, of the horrific side effects brought about by their own hands, their own collusion — “We are baffled. We have no idea.”

When did Western doctors, before 2020, ever have no idea?

The doctors and hospitals and medical organizations must be held accountable.

It is hard to forgive the Mayor of New York City, who drove the brave First Responders who did not wish to submit to a dangerous experiment, to have no income with which to feed their families. He and other political leaders must be held accountable.

It is hard to forgive the Ivy League universities, who took the money and forced all the members of their communities to submit to a deadly or dangerous experimental injection — one that will damage the fertility of who knows how many young men and women; one that will kill who knows how many community members.

They took the money and there is blood on their hands. Have you, parents of college age children, received a letter of apology? “We are so sorry we forced your son/your daughter to submit to an experimental injection that can harm him or her, that may cripple your daughter with bleeding every single month of her childbearing years, and that may lead your son to drop dead on the track field. And one that, it turns out, has nothing to do with transmission. We can’t apologize enough. (But the money — it was just such a lot.) Really sorry. Won’t do it again, rest assured.”

Did you get that letter, America’s parents?

The deans and trustees who took the money and ‘mandated’ our kids, must be held accountable.

It is almost impossible to forgive the churches, the synagogues, who took the money and stayed closed. Or who took the money, and then locked their doors at High Holy Day Services against the unvaccinated. To this day. (Hi there, Hevreh Synagogue of the Southern Berkshires. Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. Good Yom Tov.)

“Please note that we require proof of vaccination upon entry for all  High Holy Day Services. Please bring a copy with you. Masks are optional and encouraged for all who are comfortable wearing them.”

The rabbis and priests and ministers who took the money and practiced unlawful discrimination, and abandoned their spiritual calling, must be held accountable.

These are great, great sins.

But meanwhile, you have errands to run. You have books to return to the library and flowers to pick up from the florist perhaps – you have to go to the kids’ soccer game, you have to go to the movie theatre; the hardware store. Back to church. Back to synagogue.

You have to pick up your life again.

You have to step around the bodies decomposing invisibly in the charming streets of our nation. You have to pick up again as if we were not annihilated in spirit. Or, you have to pick up again if you were the abuser.

Will you apologize, if you did wrong?

Will you forgive, if you were wronged?

Can this nation, which fell so far short of its true identity and its founders’ intention, ever, ever heal?

Can we heal — we ourselves?

Forgiveness on an internal level — of coerced or deluded individuals — may help us or heal us as private individuals.

But only the gravest of reckonings, the truth pursued to its limit in every single case, investigations and trials launched according to the beautiful rule of our law, and somber justice then served to leaders, spokespeople (hey, Dr Oster) — and institutions — will ever allow us to heal, or even move safely forward together— as a nation.

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Judicial Watch Sues for Records on COVID Vaccine Safety Studies

Why is the Biden administration hiding information about the safety of the vaccine it is so aggressively pushing on everyone?

We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for records on COVID-19 vaccine safety studies (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:22-cv-03153)).

We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (a component of HHS) inadequately responded to a June 1, 2022, FOIA request for:

• All safety studies, data, reports, and analyses produced by the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) relating to the safety of ‘vaccines’ and/or gene therapies to treat and/or prevent SARS-CoV-2 and/or COVID-19 made by Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Janssen.
• All emails sent to and from the following DMID officials relating to the safety of ‘vaccines’ and/or gene therapies to treat and/or prevent SARSCoV-2 and/or COVID-19 made by Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Janssen:

1. 1. The Director of DMID
   2. The head of the Office of Genomics & Advanced Technologies
   3. The head of the Office of International Research in Infectious Diseases
   4. The head of the Office of Regulatory Affairs
   5. The head of the Office of Clinical Research Affairs
   6. The head of the Clinical Trials Management Section
   7. The head of the Virology Branch
   8. The head of the Respiratory Diseases Branch
   9. The head of the Influenza, SARS, and Other Viral Respiratory Diseases Section

On May 3, 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a paper titled “Safety and Immunogenicity of a Third Dose of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine – An Interim Analysis” that “evaluated early safety and immunogenicity after a third mRNA vaccination in adults who received the mRNA-1273 primary series in the Phase 1 trial approximately 9 to 10 months earlier.”

Contributors to that study include three affiliates of the DMID: Mamodikoe Makhene (DMID medical officer), Wendy Buchanan (DMID Clinical Project Manager) and Paul Roberts (DMID Chief Respiratory Pathogens Clinical Research).

The Biden administration is playing shell games with documents on the COVID vaccine. The arrogant cover-up of COVID vaccine safety information further undermines public confidence in these already controversial drugs.

Through previous FOIA activity, we uncovered a substantial amount of information about COVID-19 issues:

• In October, we uncovered FDA records regarding the COVID booster vaccines through a FOIA lawsuit for records of communication from the former director and deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause. On September 13, 2021, Gruber and Krause were among a group of resigning doctors who agreed that, “Available evidence doesn’t yet indicate a need for COVID-19 vaccine booster shots among the general population …”
• In July 2022, NIH records revealed an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The records also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials were concerned about “gain-of-function” research in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016. The Fauci agency was also concerned about EcoHealth Alliance’s lack of compliance with reporting rules and use of gain-of-function research in the NIH-funded research involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
• FDA records showed top officials being pressured by companies and the Biden administration to impose timelines on approval for the booster shots “that make no sense”
• HHS records revealed that from 2014 to 2019, $826,277 was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research by the NIAID.
• NIAID records showed that it gave nine China-related grants to EcoHealth Alliance to research coronavirus emergence in bats and was the NIH’s top issuer of grants to the Wuhan lab itself. The records also included an email from the vice director of the Wuhan Lab asking an NIH official for help finding disinfectants for decontamination of airtight suits and indoor surfaces.
• HHS records included an “urgent for Dr. Fauci ” email chain, citing ties between the Wuhan lab and the taxpayer funded EcoHealth Alliance. The government emails also reported that the foundation of U.S. billionaire Bill Gates worked closely with the Chinese government to pave the way for Chinese-produced medications to be sold outside China and help “raise China’s voice of governance by placing representatives from China on important international counsels as high-level commitment from China.”
• HHS records included a grant application for research involving the coronavirus that appears to describe “gain-of-function” research involving RNA extractions from bats, experiments on viruses, attempts to develop a chimeric virus and efforts to genetically manipulate the full-length bat SARSr-CoV WIV1 strain molecular clone.
• HHS records showed the State Department and NIAID knew immediately in January 2020 that China was withholding COVID data, which was hindering risk assessment and response by public health officials.
• University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) records show the former director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), James W. Le Ducwarned Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of potential investigations into the COVID issue by Congress.
• HHS records regarding biodistribution studies and related data for the COVID-19 vaccines show a key component of the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), were found outside the injection site, mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals, eight to 48 hours after injection.
• Records from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) reveal safety lapses and violations at U.S. biosafety laboratories that conduct research on dangerous agents and toxins.
• HHS records include emails between National Institutes of Health (NIH) then-Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), about hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19.
• HHS records show that NIH officials tailored confidentiality forms to China’s terms and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased, “strictly confidential” COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020.
• Fauci emails include his approval of a press release supportive of China’s response to the 2019 novel coronavirus.

Despite all of this work, Judicial Watch is just getting started! I’ll keep you updated as more lawsuits are filed and more information comes in!

Dozens on Terrorist Watchlist Among Record 2.4 million Migrants Caught in 2022

Among the millions pouring across our southern border are some of the worst of the worst: violent gang members and potential terrorists. Our Corruption Chronicles blog paints the disturbing picture.

Besides shattering a U.S. record for apprehending nearly 2.4 million illegal immigrants along the Mexican border in fiscal year 2022, Border Patrol agents arrested hundreds of gang members—mostly from the famously violent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)—and dozens of people on the national terrorist watchlist. Federal agents also confiscated thousands of pounds of drugs, mainly methamphetamine, according to government figures released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just days ago. The startling year-end (fiscal years run from October to September) stats depict a chaotic Mexican border region rife with lawlessness that is inevitably seeping north.

It is serious enough that the number of migrants arrested in 2022 increased significantly over 2021, which at the time seemed like a crisis at 1.73 million. The Biden administration’s open border policies inspired a last-minute surge of 227,547 illegal aliens in September alone, the figures show. The overwhelming majority of those caught were single adults with the rest of the family units and unaccompanied minors. The Del Rio Border Patrol sector in Texas saw the most traffic with 480,930 illegal alien encounters, an increase of 85% over 2021. The Rio Grande Valley sector, also in Texas, came in second with 468,124 encounters. Other busy stations include Yuma in Arizona (310,094), El Paso (307,884) and Tucson (251,984).

As if the record-breaking figures were not disturbing enough, violent gangbangers, terrorists and drugs also crossed the border. The feds arrested 751 gang members compared to 348 in 2021. Nearly half—312—of those apprehended in 2022 belong to the MS-13, a feared street gang of mostly Central American illegal immigrants that has spread throughout the U.S. and is renowned for drug distribution, murder, rape, robbery, home invasions, kidnappings, vandalism and other violent crimes. The Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) says criminal street gangs like the MS-13 are responsible for the majority of violent crimes in the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs. More than 145 members of Paisas, a prison gang of inmates from Mexico, were also apprehended crossing the border in 2022 and 146 from the 18th Street gang, a Los Angeles-based tribe known for recruiting youths.

In addition to all this, nearly 100 people on the U.S. government’s terrorist watchlist were apprehended at the Mexican border, the year-end figures reveal. That is a huge increase over 2021, when only 16 suspected terrorists were caught. The 98 people busted this year appear on a government database called Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS) that contains sensitive information on known or suspected terrorists as well as individuals who represent a potential threat to the U.S., including known affiliates of individuals on the watchlist, according to CBP. The agency claims in the year-end stats that encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist at U.S. borders is very “uncommon.” Judicial Watch has long reported on the increasing number of Muslim migrants—including from terrorist nations—entering the U.S. through the Mexican border. This includes a growing population from Bangladesh, a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), getting caught by federal agents along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Last year a Bangladeshi man based in Mexico was sentenced to 46 months in prison for operating an “international human smuggling conspiracy” during a period in which the U.S. saw a spike in migrants from terrorist nations entering the country through the famously porous southern border. The smuggler, 41-year-old Mohamad Milon Hossain, lived in Tapachula in the southeast Mexican state of Chiapas bordering Guatemala. The smuggling operation run by Hossain is part of a broader crisis involving a growing demographic of illegal aliens from terrorist nations entering the U.S. through the Mexican border. The government classifies them as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) and they are flowing north via Latin America in huge numbers, thanks to established Transitional Criminal Organizations (TCO) that facilitate travel along drug and migrant smuggling routes. Tens of thousands of SIAs—from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—entered Panama and Colombia in recent years. Nearly all the SIA migrants were headed to the United States and most came from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, and India.

DHS Slammed for Failing to Counter Terrorism, Manage Explosive Devices

It should come as no surprise that the massive federal agency created to protect the homeland (including our border) is a bureaucratic disaster. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has the details.

Two decades after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created to protect the U.S. from another 9/11, the agency faces serious management and performance challenges that prevent it from fulfilling its critical mission, according to a federal audit that says DHS must improve how it identifies domestic terrorism threats and better manage its efforts to counter homemade explosive devices. DHS also got slammed for one of its biggest lapses, failing to secure the southern border. “Migrant surges require a whole-of-government approach,” according to the report issued days ago by the DHS Inspector General. However, a coordinated response did not occur because DHS failed to conduct multi-component planning between Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Furthermore, the surges in immigration exposed technology challenges which impede CBP and ICE personnel from tracking migrants from apprehension to release or transfer, the probe found. “Technology deficiencies also meant that data was not consistently documented in DHS’ systems of record, which can delay DHS from uniting children with families and sponsors, or cause migrants to remain in DHS custody longer than legally allowed,” the watchdog writes in its report. Investigators also trash the way DHS managed the sudden influx of Ukrainian and Afghan citizens. Specifically, screening, vetting, and inspecting all evacuees after the Biden administration withdrew American troops from Afghanistan was a “challenge,” the report reveals, adding that the watchdog continues to evaluate CBP’s access to critical data necessary to fully vet individuals trying to enter the U.S.

The report delves into other areas such as DHS’ cybersecurity weaknesses and the famously corrupt Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the 20,000-employee conglomerate created by former President Jimmy Carter’s executive order in 1979. FEMA operates under DHS and lists helping people before, during and after disasters as its mission. The agency has been involved in a multitude of scandals surrounding pervasive fraud in its COVID-19 relief programs. DHS and FEMA need to analyze systemic weaknesses across the spectrum of disaster-related funding and services, the IG writes, adding that the agencies must make overarching improvements in risk assessment, controls, policies, systems and applications, resources, training, and data. “As of July 31, 2022, OIG had received more than 7,500 complaints and initiated more than 300 investigations related to COVID-19, including allegations that fraud networks have secured pandemic-related benefits,” the new report states. Fraud and corruption is so rampant in the government’s massive COVID-19 cash giveaway that the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to “enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud.”

This probe did not dig deeply into the pandemic fraud cases but offered enough information to convey the problem. Attached to the 17-page audit is a document issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the “leadership team across all DHS components” listing the agency’s 12 priorities for 2022. They include advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) in the workforce and to protect the privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights of the communities served as well to ensure DHS reflects the diversity of the communities it serves. Another priority is securing the nation’s borders by giving the agency’s workforce the tools to interdict irregular migration and illicit flows of drugs, weapons, and other contraband. Record-breaking illegal immigration in fiscal year 2022 proves that it never materialized. DHS also made it a priority to build a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system and to implement lawful pathways as alternatives to irregular migration and enhanced policies to administer the nation’s laws and uphold our values as a nation of immigrants expeditiously and fairly. The rest of the priorities include preparing the nation to respond and recover from disasters and combat the climate crisis, increasing cybersecurity and combatting all forms of terrorism.

After getting blasted by auditors, DHS struck back claiming in a lengthy letter that the report is “misleading” and accusing its watchdog of being “inaccurate, contextually incomplete and confusing.”

Until next week…

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In the wake of fresh revelations that The Department of Homeland Security has been working relentlessly to shut down speech it deems to be ‘dangerous’ or ‘disinformation,’ Senator Rand Paul has promised to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for government agencies and private big tech to secretly collude on such enterprises.

Appearing on Fox News, Paul said of the Democratic Party,

“You know, for all the talk of democracy, it seems to be that they’re undermining the very basic principles of our constitutional republic.”

“Freedom of speech was listed in the first amendment because it was one of the most important rights that our Founders thought should be protected. But having the government collude with Big Tech to censor speech is something that goes against every grain of everything that anyone has ever spoken about as far as freedom of speech,” Paul urged.

The Senator continued,

“So when we get back in session, I’m going to introduce legislation that will forbid the government from colluding with private companies to censor speech.”

Paul further explained that

“this is a tricky situation because many people believe that the First Amendment doesn’t allow us to regulate the speech of private companies. But without question, we can regulate the government, and we can prevent and forbid the government from colluding with private tech on speech.”

“I think we should also preclude them and prohibit them from gathering up our data,” Paul further asserted, adding “we can’t really tell people on the Internet they can’t collect our data, you know, for sales and for marketing. But we can tell the government they can’t collect that data, because I don’t want the government profiling every citizen.”

“That goes against everything that we all believe in as far as the foundation of our constitutional republic,” The Senator proclaimed.

Paul further charged that Democrats “actually want to emulate China,” noting that

“They would weld your doors shut if they could.”

“This is the party of authoritarianism. The impulse to authoritarianism came with COVID. But the impulse to gather our information actually probably started with the Patriot act, all the way back to 2001. There was this impulse — we must be safe, we must be protected from terrorists,” Paul explained.

Referring to his father former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, The Senator noted “my dad warned — he warned early on that this kind of going after terrorists would ultimately be used on us.”

“When they finally came and used the Patriot Act on Donald Trump, that was when we knew this wasn’t about terrorism, it was about suppressing dissent from people they disagree with,” Paul stated.

As we highlighted yesterday, ‘fact checking’ isn’t the real principle driving the Biden regime’s drive to censor, as they continue to pump out their own disinformation on social media.

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The US Defense Department finally released the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) last Thursday (October 27). It reveals a shocking naïveté about how the real world works by ignoring two basic defense principles: the “security dilemma” and the “fallacy of the last move.” For example, the NPR describes US nuclear modernization plans as a necessary response to Russia’s and China’s activities and ignores the logical and inevitable response of both countries to US plans. By building new military capabilities to try to increase US security, Russia and China will likely feel threatened and respond by taking steps that will undermine US security. No one can have the last move. And on it goes.

A wise defense planner would consider the likely response of its adversaries—and seek to not undermine their nuclear security as well—for the hard-nosed reason that doing so is in the security interest of the United States.

Moreover, the NPR’s statement that there is an “urgent need to sustain and strengthen deterrence” is absurd, as if deterrence was some type of delicate flower that needed constant care and feeding to stay alive. The notion that the willingness of any country to launch nuclear weapons at the United States or its allies would depend on any specific aspect of the US arsenal is equally absurd.

In addition to these broader issues, the NPR includes several important revelations.

Using nuclear weapons. First, the good news. Obama’s 2010 NPR declared “the US will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and are in compliance with their non-proliferation obligations.” (This declaration holds in the face of conventional, chemical, or biological attacks.)

For the remaining four nations—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—the United States reserved the option to use nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks, but only “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners in a narrow range of contingencies.”

Both the Trump and Biden NPRs repeat these declarations word-for-word. It appears that Obama’s policy has become firmly embedded in US nuclear policy.

Reducing the hedge. Second, some other (maybe) good news. The new NPR states: “Hedging against an uncertain future is no longer a stated role for nuclear weapons.”

The United States has long maintained a stockpile of stored weapons roughly equal in size to the deployed arsenal for two reasons: to replace one type of weapon with another type should an unexpected technical problem arise, and to allow a rapid increase in deployed weapons by adding more warheads to US missiles, which can accommodate far more weapons than are deployed. No US administration has taken either of these steps.

This statement seems to make good on the pledge in Obama’s NPR which stated that “By modernizing our aging nuclear weapons-supporting facilities and investing in human capital, we can substantially reduce the number of stockpiled nuclear weapons we retain as a hedge against technical or geopolitical surprise.” Over the past decade, the United States has made those investments and should now be able to essentially eliminate the roughly 2,000 weapons in its hedge stockpile.

Yet, the statement has odd and unclear wording. Does it mean the Pentagon will continue to hedge, but not state it publicly? Is this indicative of Pentagon foot-dragging—in which case it won’t happen without the insistence of Biden and future presidents and a Congressional requirement with corresponding budget constraints? Biden did not insist on a sole authority policy, so it is unlikely he will insist on reducing the hedge.

Now for the bad news.

Reliance on nuclear weapons and a “sole purpose” policy. The NPR takes a substantial step back from Obama’s objective of “reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US security strategy.”

In contrast, Biden’s NPR states that the United States is “taking steps to advance the goal of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons.” Moreover, moving in this direction will require that several (quite substantial) “security, political and technology conditions evolve in ways that allow [the United States] to do so.” Clearly, reducing reliance is no longer on the Pentagon’s agenda. (Ironically, the NPR states that Russia and China “have demonstrated little interest in reducing their reliance on nuclear weapons.”)

An essential element of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons is a “sole purpose” policy in which the only purpose of US nuclear weapons is to deter the use of such weapons against itself and its allies and partners and, if necessary, respond.

Obama’s NPR stated the US goal was to adopt a sole-purpose policy and, during the 2021 presidential campaign, Biden pledged he would adopt do so if elected. However, his NPR does not include this policy and, far worse, it rejects a sole-purpose policy now and far into the future, stating that it “would result in an unacceptable level of risk” and that “for the foreseeable future US nuclear weapons will continue to provide unique deterrence effects.” These “unique deterrence effects” refer to the belief that nuclear weapons are uniquely capable of deterring and responding to some non-nuclear threats.

Arms control with Russia and China. Biden’s NPR states that the United States is committed to putting “diplomacy first” and is placing renewed emphasis on arms control. At the top of the list is a follow-on to the New START agreement, which expires in 2026. However, when the agreement was extended in 2021, Russia made clear that it would not make further cuts in its strategic arsenal unless the United States accepted constraints on its missile defenses. China certainly has similar concerns. Until the United States is willing to limit its defenses against long-range missiles, nuclear arms control will be at a dead end.

This was the logic underlying the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that strictly limited US and Soviet defenses against long-range missiles: Without such limits, both countries would simply build more weapons to overwhelm these defenses. The United States withdrew from the treaty in 2002 and now the chickens have come home to roost. The increased capacity of the Aegis sea-based missile defense system could result in a significant expansion of US defenses against long-range missiles—a clear concern to Russia and China.

New nuclear weapon types. The new NPR has completely abandoned Obama’s nominal pledge “to not develop new nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, Obama’s NPR left a large loophole—that the weapons labs exploited. Nuclear weapon designers began working on new designs, arguing their new supercomputers allow them to do so without the need for explosive testing.

The original purpose of these supercomputers was to allow US weapons laboratories to better maintain the warheads in the current arsenal after the United States stopped nuclear explosive testing in 1992 in preparation for negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). (The United States signed the CTBT in 1996 although it has yet to ratify it.) US plans to design and build new nuclear weapons completely undermine the explicit purpose of the CTBT to prevent such “vertical proliferation.” Moreover, even if the weapons laboratories are confident in these new designs, it opens the door to future calls for renewed explosive testing which would be an international disaster, and almost certainly lead to the resumption of testing by other nations.

Yet, Biden has doubled down on new weapons.

The NPR calls for reestablishing the capabilities and infrastructure to return to full-scope nuclear weapons production, which will allow “regular and timely incorporation of advanced technologies to improve safety, security and reliability.” In other words, new warheads will be designed, produced, and dismantled on a regular cycle. This is a return to the Cold War practice of continuously building new types of warheads.

This NPR is a repudiation of Obama’s pledge to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” It is shocking that President Biden signed off on this document.

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Lisbeth Gronlund is a research affiliate with the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

Featured image: President Joe Biden delivers remarks to Department of Defense personnel at the Pentagon on February 10, 2021. (DoD/Lisa Ferdinando)

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As environmental advocates call on regulators to “lead with sound science” regarding the proposed release of thousands of genetically engineered mosquitoes on a weekly basis in central California, eight Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded that officials reject the proposal without an in-depth review of its potential impacts.

Biotech company Oxitec aims to make California the second state—after Florida—to have an experimental release of its genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes, and has applied for a permit to conduct research with its product at 48 test sites in Tulare County. The experimental release would target the mosquito species Aedes aegypti and aim to reduce its population in Tulare County.

According to the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), which can approve or deny the research authorization, between 5,000 and 30,000 GE mosquitoes would be released on a weekly basis at each site and the permit would be effective through April 30, 2024.

While Oxitec has previously highlighted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that such releases don’t adversely affect humans or the environment, the California lawmakers said in a letter to the DPR that a review of the proposal by the EPA is not sufficient.

“Significant scientific research is still needed to understand the potential public health and environmental concerns associated with the release of this novel insect prior to any approval,” wrote the legislators. “It is our understanding that while the U.S. EPA did approve the GE mosquitoes to be released in California, the agency did not conduct a thorough scientific review of the impacts of this insect on public health or the environment. California must require more and better information prior to any approval.”

The lawmakers suggested the DPR conduct a public review of data from Florida regarding the state’s experimental release of GE mosquitoes, hold public meetings where community members can express concerns and hear from independent experts, and establish an independent scientific advisory panel to review Oxitec’s proposal.

“Before we permit the use of genetically engineered mosquitoes, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation should provide for clear rules and a review of public health and environmental risks of releasing the insects in a public process,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman, who represents Glendale. “There are too many unknown factors when it comes to how it could affect our biodiversity in the long run, including how this might influence populations of birds, bats, fish species, and other insects.”

Rebecca Spector, West Coast director at the Center for Food Safety, applauded the legislators for “taking action to protect public health and the environment from the unknown impacts of GE mosquitoes.”

“They rightfully are asking DPR to conduct a more comprehensive review and public meetings for residents that will be impacted, before approving this permit,” said Spector.

Angel Garcia, a Tulare County resident who is co-director of Californians for Pesticide Reform, called the push to conduct the experiment “an environmental justice issue.”

“Tulare County residents are already impacted by some of the worst pollution problems, and climate change has already exacerbated environmental destruction, economic and social inequity,” said Garcia. “People have not consented to being part of this open-air biopesticide experiment.”

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***

People around the world have expressed concerns about Israelis empowering indicted former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form the nation’s most far-right government in history since Israel held its fifth election in less than four years on Tuesday.

“If you are shocked and horrified by this growing, emboldened Israeli fascist movement, ask yourself how you’ll commit to opposing Jewish supremacist ideology, policies, and institutions in days and years ahead,” Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the American Jewish group IfNotNow, tweeted late Wednesday. “Fighting fascism, authoritarianism, and racism everywhere is our only hope.”

The results were confirmed Thursday. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, secured 32 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, followed by outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid with 24 seats. The bloc breakdown, as Haaretz reported, is 64 seats for the Netanyahu camp and 51 for the current coalition.

“The election’s biggest surprise is the resounding success of the radical right-wing Religious Zionism coalition,” Mitchell Plitnick, president of ReThinking Foreign Policy, wrote Wednesday for Responsible Statecraft, stressing that party leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir will have “enormous influence in the coalition politics of the next Israeli government.”

The far-right alliance, which won 14 seats, “was put together from several smaller lists, including Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Power’), Noam, which fights for conservative ‘family values,’ the National Union-Tekuma and Jewish Home,” Middle East Eye explained.

Jewish Power (let that name sink in) Ben Gvir has a conviction record of incitement & support for terrorism. Israel’s occupation army considered him so extreme, unhinged, & violent that they wouldn’t let him enlist.
Congratulate Israel on its next minister of public security! https://t.co/VHzu7A7wcw pic.twitter.com/kuA4HMPvXS

— Ariel Gold אריאל ✡️☮️🕊 (@ArielElyseGold) November 3, 2022

The other parties that won some of the 120 seats were: National Unity Party (12), Shas (11), United Torah Judaism (7), Yisrael Beitenu (6), Hadash-Ta’al (5), the United Arab List (5), and Labor (4). Haaretz noted that “left-wing party Meretz was just a few thousand votes short of making it into the next Knesset, ending a three-decade-long era of political representation.”

Netanyahu—who has been charged with accepting bribes, breach of trust, and fraud but denied any wrongdoing—will soon have four weeks to form a government.

The Associated Press highlighted that Netanyahu will have to work with Smotrich, “a West Bank settler who has made anti-Arab remarks” and aspires to lead Israel’s Defense Ministry, and Ben-Gvir, “a disciple of a racist anti-Arab rabbi,” Meir Kahane.

Meet Itamar Ben-Gvir, "the David Duke of Israel," who is on course to join Israel's new coalition government & makes Marjorie Taylor Green look like a woke leftist.

My take on the Israeli elections, U.S. parallels, & Israel's own turn towards neo-fascism:pic.twitter.com/rfVmsAjDln

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) November 3, 2022

As the AP detailed:

Ben-Gvir says he wants to end Palestinian autonomy in parts of the West Bank and until recently hung a photo in his home of Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli who killed 29 Palestinians in a West Bank shooting attack in 1994. Ben-Gvir, who seeks to deport Arab legislators, says he wants to be put in charge of the national police force.

Religious Zionism has promised to enact changes to Israeli law that could make Netanyahu’s legal woes disappear and, along with other nationalist allies, they want to weaken the independence of the judiciary and concentrate more power in the hands of lawmakers.

“Netanyahu has never led a coalition with such ideological cohesion,” Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C., tweeted of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, warning of a “stable, unified, right-wing religious nationalist government” that will pursue an “extra racist agenda.”

Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member for Hadash, told The New York Times: “These are difficult days… This isn’t the ordinary, classic right that we know. This is a change—in which a racist, violent right-wing threatens to turn into fascism.”

IfNotNow said in a series of tweets Wednesday that “as Jews, we’re repulsed by the results of the Israeli election. But we’re not surprised. We need to recognize how we got here. The victory for Kahanists is the product of an apartheid regime that suppresses the rights of Palestinians on both sides of the green line.”

“Itamar Ben-Gvir and other Kahanists only became the third largest party in Israel with the support of Jewish-Israeli leaders across the political spectrum who prefer empowering Jewish ultranationalists and fascists to partnering with Palestinians,” the group continued. “Those right-wing leaders confirmed what we already know: For them, Jewish power means trampling on freedom and equality to uphold a system of supremacy and exclusion.”

We are standing alongside our Palestinian partners, demanding equity, fairness, justice, and freedom for Jews and Palestinians.

And we’re working alongside those who are resisting authoritarians, fascists and ethnonationalists around the world.

5/6

— IfNotNow🔥 (@IfNotNowOrg) November 2, 2022

The U.S. group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) declared that “Israeli elections make clear the truth that Palestinians have always known: The Israeli state isn’t just founded on Jewish supremacy, it depends on it.”

Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, said that “with today’s rise of the racist ‘Jewish Power’ party, the quiet part of Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians has never been louder. To date, the world was mostly silent in the face of this 21st century reality of apartheid.”

“No one should be allowed to continue pretending that the ugly reverberations of Israel’s decadeslong subjugation, disenfranchisement, and oppression of Palestinians hasn’t reached their ears,” he argued. “Global silence was, and remains, complicity. It underwrote today’s political outcome. That silence must now—ever so belatedly—be replaced with action, effective consequences, and accountability.”

Some observers specifically focused on the United States, a key ally that provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid each year.

“The inclusion of far-right Jewish supremacists in Israel’s governing coalition will add to the ongoing narrative shift that is making it increasingly difficult for folks to continue to make excuses for Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Al Jazeera.

Yes, truly inspiring to see record numbers of Israelis turn out to the polls to show support for violent Jewish supremacists, all while 5 million + Palestinians who will continue being oppressed were held under lockdown on election day.

We <3 democracy. 🤡 pic.twitter.com/CD9FDORGZP

— Jewish Voice for Peace Action (@JvpAction) November 2, 2022

Beth Miller, political director at JVP Action, told Al Jazeera that the election results serve as a “moment of exposure” for Israel’s “Jewish supremacist” policy as well as an “escalation” in an already unjust system of “apartheid,” a term increasingly used by human rights advocates.

“Israel shouldn’t be separated from the rise of far-right authoritarianism and fascism across the globe,” Miller said. “At the same time, the U.S. has a long-standing history of always turning its head the other way whenever the Israeli government is carrying out systemic human rights violations.”

“Now, what that means is that we’re in a moment of reckoning here in the U.S.,” she added.

In his piece for Responsible Statecraft, Mitchell made the case that “the power and influence Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other far-right figures will inevitably wield” in the new government “should provoke a reassessment in Washington’s approach to diplomacy with Israel, particularly regarding the Palestinians.”

However, Mitchell also expressed skepticism that President Joe Biden—who on Wednesday night delivered an impassioned speech about rising authoritarianism in the United States, just days before the midterm elections—will make any major changes to the U.S. relationship with Israel:

Indeed, U.S. inaction has only made conditions for progress worse. It has effectively allowed the issue of Palestinian rights, let alone prospects for a resolution of the conflict, to be swept from view. Even Palestinian citizens of Israel, who hoped for progress last year when, for the first time in Israeli history, a party that represented some of their community was part of the governing coalition, now find themselves in a very dangerous position with openly racist parties in control of their government. Millions more Palestinians under occupation were, of course, denied the vote and must now prepare themselves for more assaults by settlers and Israeli soldiers.

This is not a time to hope things get better. The Biden administration must make it clear to Israel that all Palestinians are entitled to basic human rights. The Israeli right has long made a point of “standing up” to its patron in Washington. This new government is certain to lean heavily on that idea. It will be crucial for Biden to stand up against that, though his track record offers little hope that he will.

In an early signal of the Biden administration’s position, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, Ned Price, told reporters Wednesday that “we hope that all Israeli government officials will continue to share the values of an open, democratic society including tolerance and respect for all in civil society, particularly for minority groups.”

After the election results were confirmed Thursday, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, tweeted that during a “good call” with Netanyahu, “I congratulated him on his victory and told him I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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First published by GR on October 16, 2022

***

Sometimes top military warriors tell US war presidents the painful truth.

That happened yesterday when retired admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, urged President Biden to begin negotiations to end America’s newest endless war.

And a peculiar endless war it is….America squandering its desperately needed treasure so Ukraine can squander its economy, infrastructure and precious blood on a war it can’t win short of America nuking Russia.

President Biden is doing precisely the opposite: funneling endless billions to keep the war going while dismissing negotiations out of hand.

Mullen didn’t mince words, telling Biden to “back off” scaremongering words of nuclear Armageddon and quickly bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table. He called Biden’s remarks as being “at the top of the language scale” and he wasn’t being complementary.

Mullen was channeling those of us in the peace community when he said “As is typical in any war, it’s gotta end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

Biden’s war conduct has been worse than simply poo-pooing negotiations. He directly undermined a potential 15 point peace agreement in March brokered by Turkey that could have ended the war in its first month.

Turkey, bless em, will try again tomorrow when their President Erdogan will meet with Russian President Putin to discuss Turkey brokering a new round of peace talks.

That should be encouraging. But it’s likely to go nowhere when America, in its lust to degrade, weaken, Russia, keeps Ukraine President Zelensky’s hopeless dreams of victory alive.

Biden and the US war party still view perpetual war as the wealth of the state. More likely it’s the death of the state. This time it may include all of us.

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Featured image: United States Navy Admiral Michael G. Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Photo by United States Department of Defense, licensed under the Public Domain)

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On Sunday 30 November 2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – or Lula for short, of the left-wing Workers Party – was elected with a razor thin margin as the new President of Brazil. He “won” the election with 50.83% of the votes against his opponent’s 49.17% (NYT 31 October 2022), the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil’s right-wing Liberal Party. He is Brazil’s 38^th President, in office since 1 January 2019.

Lula has previously served two terms as President, from 2003-2010. The President Elect is to be inaugurated on 1 January 2023 as the 39^th President. Lula is slated to be the first Brazilian President to serve three terms.

The winning-margin could hardly be slimmer. One could dare say, it’s within the regular margin of error of such elections. Under normal circumstances, a recount might be of the order. Most likely Washington would not allow it, because the US needs a “left-wing” President, as they have “allowed”, or manipulated, in the latest wave of elections, throughout Latin America.

What most people may not have realized yet, is that left and right in the traditional sense, do no longer exist. They have been overruled by “Globalism and Anti-Globalism”. The left, throughout the world has been hijacked by the neoliberal globalist complex, making us believe that the Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030 are kind of a socialist concept in which eventually all will be “equal”. As equal as in “you will own nothing but be happy”.

Therefore Washington is inclined to favor a “left” / globalist candidate over a right-wing or conservative nationalist.

Mr. Bolsonaro may be right-wing, having adopted many unpopular policies, like “privatizing” junks of the Amazon area, as well as some of the precious water resources, under- and above ground, treasured by the Amazon Region. But he is a nationalist, not a globalist at all.

What made President Bolsonaro popular among large segments of the population are his poverty alleviation efforts. For one, he continued supporting the Bolsa Familia Program (BFP), created under Lula in 2003, to help poor families out of poverty.

The BFP family allowance program provides monthly subsidies to qualifying low-income people. The BFP is largely responsible for nearly 60 percent of poverty reduction over the past two decades. Under Bolsonaro, BFP was also expanding access of the poor to education and health services.

Realizing how covid – which Bolsonaro always looked at with skepticism – increased destitution among the Brazilian poor and transferred basic resources of low-income people through bankruptcies and joblessness from the poor upwards, putting even more people into poverty, Bolsonaro hastily designed a new social agenda, Auxílio Brasil, eventually to replace BFP.

Auxílio Brasil, initially designed as a modest pandemic bonus for the poor, was beefed-up by Bolsonaro to make more of a difference. While focusing particularly at people hit hard by covid’s economic disaster, it also continues as a BFP-like poverty alleviation program. This clear- and foresight of better economic equilibrium in the Brazilian population, has earned Bolsonaro considerable support from especially the young and destitute, and from countless favela-dwellers.

According to a World Bank report, out of the 22 million people lifted out of poverty across Latin America by pandemic-related government transfers in 2020, 77 percent of them were in Brazil. See this.

Compare that to less generous pandemic assistance offered under leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, where 3.8 million more people fell into poverty during the pandemic.

Bolsonaro’s popularity, in fact, shot through the roof, as the poor backed him in record numbers.

When Brazil’s election results emerged, the incumbent Bolsonaro kept quiet. He did not concede, not congratulate Lula. He simply didn’t respond. In a later public announcement, on 31 October, Bolsonaro briefly said that he intends to honor the Constitution and the process of transfer of power may begin. As of this day, however, Bolsonaro has not conceded – or congratulated Lula for his victory. In other words, he has not really accepted defeat (yet?).

By publicly accepting the transfer of power, but not openly accepting defeat, Bolsonaro may quietly be nudging his many followers, many of them young people; poor people, whom the poverty alleviation programs he supported helped; victims of the international covid narrative – to protest his narrow defeat. It is well known that Bolsonaro has often questioned the Brazilian election system and may believe foul play was involved.

What will happen during the next two months in terms of social unrest – or not – until presidential power is transferred on 1 January 2023 to Lula – and maybe beyond – is anybody’s guess.

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Lula’s History

As Lula is poised to take over his third term Presidency, also a first in Brazilian history, a look into Lula’s history may be of the order.

In the run-up to the 2002 Brazil elections, with Lula a favored candidate, his leftist stance led especially western media to compare him to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, whose reputation as a consequential and convinced socialist was meant to discredit Lula before the elections. To no avail.

Later as President, Lula nominated Henrique Meirelles of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, a prominent market-oriented economist, as head of the Brazilian Central Bank. Mr. Meirelles was a former CEO of the Bank FleetBoston.

Through BankBoston, other than Bank of America, the foremost bank in New England, headquartered in Boston, Lula gained almost unlimited access to Wall Street banking. He entered into agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), following all the Fund’s mostly restrictive conditionalities.

The IMF hailed Lula as a perfect leader, whom other Latin American governments could take as an example for good financial management. In his first term, Brazil’s Central Bank, budget, and debt management was basically run by the IMF and Wall Street. By 2008, after decades with the largest foreign debt among emerging economies, Brazil became a net creditor for the first time. Banks made record profits under Lula’s government.

In his second term, Lula became the undisputed master of popular affection, as the first president to bring a modest well-being to many people. Wall Street, the World Bank and IMF loved him. They would do anything to help him succeed, because Lula’s success, meant increasing access to Brazil’s enormous treasures of natural resources, minerals, water and the richest biodiversity on earth.

The 2008 crash of Wall Street, was an economic blow for the US and Europe, but Brazil continued to enjoy financial good health. The Lula administration’s economic policies helped to significantly raise living standards. According to the Washington Post, the percentage of Brazilians belonging to the middle class rose from 50% to 73% of the population. More than 20 million people rose out of extreme poverty. Under Lula, Brazil became the world’s eighth-largest economy.

In 2016, Lula was investigated for alleged involvement in two cases in the infamous corruption case, “Operation Car Wash”. The criminal investigation uncovered corruption between the State-owned oil and petrol company, Petrobrás, several construction companies, and various Brazilian politicians, to obtain secret campaign funds. The investigation was conducted under former Federal Criminal Court Judge Sergio Moro.

In 2017, Lula was found guilty and sentenced to 9 years imprisonment. Another three years were added in 2018 by the Federal Court. Lula started serving his sentence in April 2018, while his appeals were pending.

It was never clear whether Lula was really involved in the corruption scandal, judge Moro accused him of. The judge had at one point his own ambitions for the presidency, but eventually joined Bolsonaro’s cabinet in 2019.

In 2021, the Federal Supreme Court crushed Lula’s sentence, ruling that former judge Moro had no jurisdiction to investigate and try the cases. Lula was liberated and ready to become a prime candidate for the 2022 Presidential elections.

It is not clear yet, how Lula will rule Brazil in his third Presidential Term. How he will deal with the Amazon Region – a huge area of biodiversity that impacts on way more than just Brazil. In a recent CNN interview question on whether he would agree that the patrimony of the Amazon was a world patrimony and should therefore be managed by the UN, Lula replied without hesitation that he agrees transferring the Amazon area to a UN protectorate organization (the reference has since been removed from internet.)

That is clearly an admission to globalism, especially knowing – or he should know – that the UN has long ceased to be the independent world body that it was created to be, working for peace, equality and the protection of Mother Earth and Human Rights.

Hélas, the UN in the past 20 to 30 years, has gently drifted under the control of the West, with Washington’s leadership, towards doing the bidding of the G7, of the Corporate Digital, Financial and Military Complex.

Brazilians who voted for Bolsonaro – about half the population – definitely want a sovereign, autonomous Brazil. They reject the western imposed globalism. The vast majority of those who voted for Lula, think likewise: A sovereign Brazil, master of her own resources. They haven’t realized yet, that under pressure from Washington and its western allies, the left has turned into a clan of neoliberal globalists.

It’s never too late to resist that Big Capital-driven trend.

Time will tell, whether Lula will keep his promise to be the President of ALL Brazil – and the once-upon-a-time during his first presidential-term commitment, to protect the Amazon Region as a sovereign Brazilian patrimony – for the long-term survival of Mother Earth.

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

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

Featured image is from teleSUR

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First published on November 1, 2022

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“La Classe Politique“: High Treason

America is no longer “An Ally” of the EU. Quite the opposite. The insidious role of the US in carrying out acts of sabotage against the EU is amply documented. Beyond doubt.

Meanwhile corrupt EU politicians are not only blaming Russia, they  are setting the stage for the destruction of the European Union on behalf of Washington. 

They are “Sleeping with the Enemy” to the Detriment of  the People of Europe.

Treason constitutes an act of betrayal by European politicians in high office on behalf of a foreign power, which through various means is actively and deliberately triggering economic and social chaos in both Western and Eastern Europe.

The U.S. is not an ally of the EU. Quite the opposite. Washington is waging war against Europe, with the support of  corrupt government officials in high office. It’s an act of treason.

The media is also complicit i.e. in sustaining a flow of lies. The unspoken objective is to provide a human face to these acts of treason.

Treason at the highest levels of government. 

What is required is “Regime Change” throughout the European Union as well criminal prosecutions directed against corrupt politicians.

Michel Chossudovsky, November 1, 2022

See the following:

U.S. Act of War against the European Union: President Biden Ordered the Terror Attack against Nord Stream. High Treason against the People of EuropeBy Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 21, 2022

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Since posting, it would appear that the video is no longer available

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Transcript of Video

There are many hot-button topics in the midterm elections that are in some way linked to the Covid response. The economy. Education. Government censorship and control.

Today, we confront one of the thorniest issues to arise from the pandemic: the massive loss of credibility in our top public health agencies.

President Joe Biden (July 30):

Hey folks, Joe Biden here. Tested positive this morning

When President Biden caught Covid for the second time

President Biden: I am feeling fine, everything is good.

He won a place in an unlucky trifecta.

Biden, top Covid adviser Anthony Fauci, and the head of vaccine-maker Pfizer had all insisted the vaccines would prevent Covid. Among them, they now count at least 14 shots — and 6 bouts with Coronavirus. Living symbols of the lapses, confusion, and government misinformation that mark America’s long Covid nightmare.

President Biden (January 4):

So, there’s no excuse — no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated. This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

In the beginning, Americans put their full faith in public health officials.

Dr. Anthony Fauci (March 2020, CNN):

That’s no time to pull back. That’s when you need to hunker down, nail down, mitigate, mitigate, mitigate. Get the people taken care of. That’s what you’ve got to concentrate on.

But “15 days to slow the spread” turned into an ordeal with unthinkable costs still being paid. Economic fallout, destroyed education, shuttered businesses, lost jobs, and Covid ravaged the country all the same.

Too often, the public watched as their top experts seem to be the last to admit the obvious. Multiple cringeworthy moments and false claims were provided by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky (March 29, 2021, MSNBC):

Our data from the CDC today suggests you know that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.

Just this past week, after a reported five Covid vaccinations, CDC announced Walensky’s second bout with Covid in a 9-day period.

In one of public health’s most urgent moments — after trillions of tax dollars and decades spent preparing — CDC became a punchline.

Sharyl: The idea that the premier health agency in the world didn’t know what to do when a pandemic broke out and put out wrong information so often, that’s really been harmful.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I completely agree.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. He helped lead thousands of scientists early on in endorsing a different approach: instead of shutdowns, isolate those at most risk, and let others lead normal lives.

Emails later revealed top public health officials conspired to smear Bhattacharya and his colleagues for veering from the narrative. The head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, wrote Fauci of the need for “a quick and devastating published take down” of Bhattacharya’s ideas.

Bhattacharya: It just reeks of scientific incompetence or the manipulation of science in order to get their desired policy ends. Probably the most egregious is this denial of natural immunity. Places like the CDC have argued that there is no proof or evidence of essentially protection against future Covid exposure after you’re Covid-recovered. No natural immunity. And so, by denying this fact about the immunity, people in the real world are not dumb. And they say, “Well, why are they saying this false thing to me? What else are they saying to me that’s false?”

Congressman Tom Massie exposed another shocking example of false information coming from CDC, as we reported last year. Massie caught top CDC leaders and scientists claiming that original studies showed people who’d had Covid would still benefit from getting vaccinated. That wasn’t true.

In phone calls Massie recorded, CDC officials promised they’d fix their disinformation. Instead, they continued to spread the false claims here, in a seminar aimed at medical professionals.

Dr. Sara Oliver (CDC video): “…Data from both clinical trials suggests that people with prior infection are still likely to benefit from vaccination.”

Over the summer, keenly aware of the widening credibility gap, Walensky conducted her own review of CDC’s Covid response. She concluded her agency had failed miserably in its biggest moment.

Walensky (August 10, CBS News): We made some pretty public mistakes, and we need to own them.

Walensky found that to move forward, CDC must align incentives with public health action and impact, improve internal coordination, implement new governance with an emphasis on the core capabilities and accountability at all levels, and upskill and train toward a response-capable agency.

Still, the inside review fell far short of the top-to-bottom makeover envisioned by critics and even by one of CDC’s longtime supporters.

Lawrence Gostin: I’m really worried about CDC’s credibility.

Lawrence Gostin heads up the World Health Organization’s Center on Global Health Law.

Gostin: CDC does need an overhaul.

Sharyl: I’m a little surprised to hear you agree with some of CDC’s harshest critics in that an overhaul is needed.

Gostin: Yeah. I mean, it’s always better to have suggestions for reform from a close and dear friend. And I am as close and as dear a friend to CDC as anybody could be. Everybody knows things have to change, and they do.

Sharyl: What could they have done to not end up in a place where they lack so much public trust today?

Gostin: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard. I mean, I know so many of the public health leaders at CDC, and I’m very good friends with Tony Fauci. But nobody escaped unscathed. And there were times when the agency just literally misstepped. It misfired.

Sharyl: When you say CDC could use an overhaul, what would you envision, something realistic?

Gostin: What I want to see is, you know, the best public health minds in the country doing an independent, open report — a retrospective on CDC’s performance during COVID, and what it needs to do now.

Right now, with no CDC overhaul or outside review underway, politicians are threatening to step in.

House Republican leader Steve Scalise says the public’s loss of confidence extends well beyond the CDC to the FDA and other government agencies that had a role in the problematic Covid response.

Sharyl: How can this credibility gap that’s developed be fixed? And is there anything that members of Congress — particularly if Republicans regain control in November — is there anything that can be done about it?

Rep. Steve Scalise: Well, we’re going to be ready to go day one. And if we’re in the majority, we will have hearings to get those facts out, but then go and restore the credibility of those agencies by taking away that power to just unilaterally control people’s lives and get back to the science — what used to be their main focus, that got thrown out the window when people politicized it because they wanted to use government to control people.

Sharyl: Looking ahead, let’s say there’s another pandemic or big public health emergency with the federal agencies in the same state as they’re in today. Where do you think that leaves us?

Bhattacharya: I think we’re in a very, very bad state. We have to reform each of these agencies pretty fundamentally. We’re going to need to have a very honest look at the problems in this pandemic, almost like a 9/11 style commission.

Gostin says President Biden is in the driver’s seat.

Gostin: In terms of having an independent, scientific public health inquiry on lessons learned from Covid and overhauling the CDC, he can do that. He’s the head of federal agencies in the United States. He could do it, and he should do it. And he should do all he can to make the CDC a really robust and shining agency, just like that shining agency on a hill that CDC used to be. We need to get back there.

Sharyl (on-camera): CDC declined our interview requests. The agency’s record budget request for next year includes $25 billion for a new adult vaccination program, $28 billion more for pandemic preparedness, which had already been funded by the trillions prior to Covid.

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See second feature (with video) and videos beneath that.

In 2011 then Secretary of State Clinton was simultaneously engineering violent, mainly military, coups in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen as well as Ivory Coast. (Against the governments of Nouri al-Maliki, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Ali Abdullah Saleh and Laurent Gbagbo, respectively.) By 2011 only five African nations had not been pulled into U.S. Africa Command’s orbit: Ivory Coast, Libya, Eritrea, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In that year Clinton secured 40% of those for the Pentagon.

U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa
October 21, 2022

Army.mil

Planning underway for ALFS 23 in Cote d’Ivoire

ABIDJAN, Côte d’Ivoire – Military planners for U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa (SETAF-AF), visited several sites in Cote d’Ivoire Sep 26-30, 2022 for the African Land Forces Summit (ALFS) initial planning event. The planning event is part of ongoing preparation for ALFS 23 scheduled for May, 2023.

ALFS is a weeklong event that hosts leaders from more than forty African countries for training and partnership building with U.S. Army leaders. Last year ALFS took place at Ft. Benning, Georgia. ALFS 23 marks the return of ALFS to Africa for first time since 2020.

***

International military engagements branch chief for SETAF-AF, Lt. Col. Robert Miller, is serving as the lead planner for ALFS 23. Miller said that the event is the second of four planning meetings in Cote d’Ivoire that will take place in preparation for the summit. The first visit, the Pre-deployment Site Survey, took place in May.

“Planning engagement events is challenging and rewarding,” said Miller. “From my past experience, I know that all the hard work and the times spent organizing a well-run event allows our senior leaders the time and space to have the strategic discussions necessary to build and maintain our partnerships in Africa.”

ALFS is hosted annually by SETAF-AF in order to bring together military leaders from the U.S. and Africa to discuss capabilities, build partnerships through face-to-face interaction, and discuss issues the partner forces are facing on the African continent.

=====

BBC
April 11, 2011

Hillary Clinton welcomes detention of Laurent Gbagbo

Features video

Ivory Coast politician Laurent Gbagbo has surrendered after a military assault on his residence in Abidjan and has been put under UN guard.

In Washington US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed his detention saying the transition sent “a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and around the world.”

====

At the same time as the coup in Ivory Coast Clinton was engineering “regime change” in Libya with the assistance of NATO’s air war against the nation and its people, culminating in:

“We came, we saw, he died.”

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• European industries including ferroalloys, fertilizer plants and specialty chemicals are shutting down as a result of the ongoing energy crisis.
• Certain industries may not come back, even if the energy crisis eases.
• An increasingly tight regulatory environment is another reason for de-industrialization in Europe.

The European Union has been quietly celebrating a consistent decline in gas and electricity consumption this year amid record-breaking prices, a cutoff of much of the Russian gas supply, and a liquidity crisis in the energy market.

Yet the cause for celebration is dubious: businesses are not just curbing their energy use and continuing on a business-as-usual basis. They are shutting down factories, downsizing, or relocating. Europe may well be on the way to deindustrialization.

That the European Union is heading for a recession is now quite clear to anyone watching the indicators. The latest there—eurozone manufacturing activity—fell to the lowest since May 2020.

The October reading for S&P Global’s PMI also signaled a looming recession, falling on the month and being the fourth monthly reading below 50—an indication of an economic contraction.

In perhaps worse news, however, German conglomerate BASF said last month it would permanently downside in its home country and expand in China. The announcement served as a blow to a government trying to juggle energy shortages with climate goals without extending the lives of nuclear power plants.

“The European chemical market has been growing only weakly for about a decade [and] the significant increase in natural gas and power prices over the course of this year is putting pressure on chemical value chains,” said BASF’s chief executive, Martin Brudermueller, as quoted by the FT, in late October.

Yet it is worth noting that the energy crisis was not the only reason for BASF’s plans to shrink its presence at home and grow abroad. Increasingly tighter EU regulation was also a factor behind this decision, Brudermueller said.

Other industries also seem to have problems with new EU regulations. The trade body for the steel and aluminum industries, which have also suffered significantly from the energy cost inflation, recently proposed that the EU takes a gradual approach with its new Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism, also known as the import carbon tax.

The CBAM was conceived as a way of leveling the playing field for European industrial businesses subjected to strict emission regulation that makes its production costlier compared to the production of countries with laxer emission standards.

Yet it would also make important feedstock for the European steel and aluminum industries costlier, too, adding to the pain these industries are already feeling because they are also among the most energy-intensive ones.

A tenth of Europe’s crude steel production capacity has already been idled, according to estimates from Jefferies. All zinc smelters have curbed production, and some have shut down. Half of the primary aluminum production has shut down as well. And in fertilizers, 70 percent of factories have been idled because of the energy shortage.

Chemical plants are also curbing their activities, ferroalloy furnaces are going cold, and plastics and ceramics manufacturing is shrinking as well.

Some of these businesses might choose to eventually relocate to a place with cheaper and more widely available sources of energy, contributing to the deindustrialization process in Europe. As for the best candidate for this relocation, according to some observers, it is the United States, with its abundant gas reserves, rising production, and friendly investment climate.

Meanwhile, one thing has become crystal clear: reduced energy consumption in Europe’s industrial sectors is really no cause for celebration. If anything, it is a cause for concern and urgent action on the part of decision makers.

The gas price cap the EU agreed on recently might help a little, but since it is tied to lower consumption, it is not really a solution for businesses looking to stay in business. It is a life support system.

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We have been discussing how Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton called on foreign companies to pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter.

The EU has responded aggressively to warn Musk not to allow greater free speech or face crippling fines and even potential criminal enforcement. After years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) declared Musk’s pledge to restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She has promised that “there are going to be rules” to block such changes. She is not alone. Former President Obama has declared “regulation has to be part of the answer” to disinformation.

For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently repeated this call for global censorship at the United Nations to the applause of diplomats and media alike.

EU censors have assured Democratic leaders that they will not allow free speech to break out on Twitter regardless of the wishes of its owner and customers.

One of the most anti-free speech figures in the West, EU’s Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has been raising the alarm that Twitter users might be able to read uncensored material or hear unauthorized views.

Breton himself threatened that Twitter must “fly by [the European Union’s] rules” in censoring views deemed misleading or harmful by EU bureaucrats. Breton has been moving publicly to warn Musk not to try to reintroduce protections that go beyond the tolerance of the EU for free speech. Musk is planning to meet with the EU censors and has conceded that he may not be able resist such mandatory censorship rules.

The hope of leaders like Clinton is the anti-free speech measure recently passed by EU countries, the Digital Services Act. The DSA contains mandatory “disinformation” rules for censoring “harmful” thoughts or views.

Breton has made no secret that he views free speech as a danger coming from the United States that needs to be walled off from the Internet. He previously declared that, with the DSA, the EU is now able to prevent the Internet from again becoming a place for largely unregulated free speech, which he referred to as the “Wild West” period of the Internet.

It is a telling reference because the EU views free speech itself as an existential danger. They reject the notion of free speech as its own protection where good speech can overcome bad speech. That is viewed as the “Wild West.”

Many of us are far more fearful of global censors than some whack job spewing hateful thoughts from his basement. That is why I have described myself as an Internet Originalist:

The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.

If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlords monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.

The danger of the rising levels of censorship is far greater than the dangers of such absurd claims of the law or science — or in this case both. What we can do is to maximize the free discourse and expression on the Internet to allow free speech itself to be the ultimate disinfectant of disinformation.

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The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of US Strategic command. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”

Richard’s warning came after the US released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which reaffirms that the US doctrine allows for the first use of nuclear weapons. The review says that the purpose of the US nuclear arsenal is to “deter strategic attacks, assure allies and partners, and achieve US objectives if deterrence fails.”

The NPR says the US “would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its Allies or partners.”

The NPR was released with the 2022 National Defense Strategy that names China as the “most comprehensive and serious challenge” to the US and describes Russia as an “acute threat.” The document, as with the previous 2018 National Defense Strategy, makes clear that the US military is preparing for future conflicts with both China and Russia.

As the head of STRATCOM, Richard had previously warned that the risk of nuclear war with Russia and China is a “real possibility.” He said last year that the US military must “shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’ and act to meet and deter that reality.”

The Nuclear Posture Review calls for the modernization of the nuclear triad, which could cost up to $1.5 trillion, and keeping tensions high with Russia and China helps justify the massive price tag. Richard said last week that the US needs to put more resources into competing with China’s military.

Congress is looking to spend big on arming Taiwan, with a plan to give the island $10 billion in military aid included in the Senate’s version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. While done in the name of deterrence, China’s actions and rhetoric make it clear that more US support for Taiwan will make war in the region more likely.

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Every year, about 5,700 U.S. children suffer seizures from the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.¹ This finding is derived from results of the most statistically powered safety study ever to measure the association between MMR vaccination and febrile seizures. Published in JAMA in 2004, the study² evaluated more than half a million children, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, from a Danish population that is relied upon globally to examine vaccine safety.

The results show that seizures from the MMR vaccine occur in about 1 in 640 children up to two weeks following MMR-vaccine administration. Applying this risk of seizures to the 3.64 million U.S. children vaccinated with a first dose of MMR every year³ results in about 5,700 annual MMR-vaccine seizures.

Febrile Seizures and Epilepsy

There is a five-fold higher risk of seizures from the MMR vaccine than seizures from measles infection,⁴ and a significant portion of MMR-vaccine seizures may cause permanent harm. For example, a Danish study of 1.54 million people, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2007,⁵ examined the association between febrile seizures and epilepsy, a chronic brain disorder that leads to recurring seizures. The study found that 5% of febrile seizures may result in epilepsy. Consequently, about 300 MMR-vaccine seizures (5% of 5,700) may lead to epilepsy annually.¹

The risk of seizure increases in siblings of children with a history of febrile seizures and in children with a personal history of febrile seizures, to 1 in 250 and 1 in 50, respectively.²

In the U.S., measles is generally a benign, short-term viral infection; 99.99% of measles cases experience full recovery.⁶ Thus far, the MMR vaccine has not been proven to be safer than measles.⁴ It’s important for physicians and parents to objectively weigh the risks of measles vs. the risks and limitations of the MMR vaccine, so families can make informed, evidence-based vaccination decisions.

Summary of Key Facts and Figures

5,700 U.S. children experience MMR-vaccine seizures each year.

5% of febrile-seizure cases may develop epilepsy, a chronic brain disorder.

Of the U.S. children who experience MMR-vaccine seizures, 300 cases may result in epilepsy annually.

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First published on October 18, 2022

***

What if we were really at the point where the arrow indicates on the bar-code cartoon below? Or, it could be much worse, we could already be just a tiny little speck on the all-encroaching and dominating QR code.

The QR code is everywhere. In some places you can’t even open a toilet door without using a QR code, first downloaded on your smart phone.

There is hardly a restaurant – anywhere in the western world – where its menus are not loaded onto a QR code. Screw those who do not have a smart phone, or do not want to use their smart phone to be invaded by QR codes.

See this for a more ample description of the dangers of the QR code.

*

In some cases, when you are lucky, a restaurant may offer you as a “temporary feature”, a printed menu, or the waiter is kind enough to use his own smartphone to show you the choices of meals.

It’s the “smartphonization” of humanity. It is also the stultification, or dumbing-down of our minds, and eventually our intelligence. It is likely the smartphone was invented to eventually deaden the brains of society. Because human beings tend to go for comfort, for the ways of least resistance. The smartphone offers all that. Once we have it, we get hooked.

About 20-30 years ago, we still lived happy with the fix phone at home, with the phone booth at the street corner. We were not missing anything. What would eventually become a smartphone, was gradually introduced as a portable telephone. First, they were the size of a brick, then they became smaller and smaller, so, they would fit in our breast pocket, or in a lady’s purse; no problem. A real convenience.

In the course of the last two decades, smartphones became slimmer and slimmer; their screens became larger and larger, progressively resembling a small computer. They started having the features of a computer, were connectable to internet – internet became universally available, not only in restaurants and shops, but in the streets and even in the forests. Everywhere, or almost.

The cell phone could be synchronized with your computer at home. Bingo! You were connected walking and crossing the streets, taking a nap – or kissing your partner. Pretty invasive. Don’t you think?

But never mind – it’s fantastic! You have access to your internet account anytime, everywhere, you are “connected” even in your sleep.

You are walking across the street, not watching out for traffic dangers, but deeply lost in the profoundness of the screen of your little smart phone – succumbing to a drug-like habit that has caused already myriads of accidents, some deadly.

Not too long ago, when we were traveling to foreign or new places, we had a map to orient ourselves. No longer. The Global Positioning System (GPS) tells you just about everywhere your geographic position on earth. And it’s now on your smartphone. Younger generations have totally lost – or never knew – the skills of reading a map.

And older people, loving the comfort of being told where to go will increasingly lose their intellectual capacity of map-reading, becoming further dependent and enslaved to the digital world.

An exaggeration? Just think about it, next time you need to orient yourself in a foreign city – and you have the choice between a map and asking your smartphone.

You will see, the choice is easy. Why? No need to use our brain cells. There is the smartphone and GPS.

Our brains are being primed for robotization – or more adequately said, “transhumanism”, a term already used by Klaus Schwab in an interview with Swiss French TV in 2016. According to Mr. Schwab, by 2025 we should all have reached that level of “transhumanism” – that is, if we survive that long.

Under normal circumstances, I would have referred to this two-minute video clip of the interview.

But it has been “suspended”, or better – censured away. See for yourself, what world we have become (unfortunately, the video has already been deleted).

Like with everything, connect the dots. What most people do not realize is that the convenience of letting an electronic, digital “brain” do our work, dumbs us down. It routes our brain into a digital world. Our capacity to think independently will increasingly disappear, as we hand our brain-power over to digitization, algorithms – and eventually to robots which gradually have full reign over our brain capacity. Its convenient.

The connected dots show you, it’s a strategy.

Communicating by letter writing is gone. Even e-mails are no longer IN. Too banal.

There is now an entire complex of IT-digital corporations controlling your personal data. They work hand in hand with the gigantic financial complex which, controlled by BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet, boast some US$ 25 – 30 trillion worth of assets. They have majority shareholdings in every means of production and every service industry in the western world. May this serve as an example:

The IT-complex offers you “Facebook”, connecting you with the entire world, or with any number of admirers you choose. It’s a means to show them WHO you are, often with the most intimate details – if you so desire. With photos and personal stories. It’s all about Me-Me-Me.

The IT complex loves it. Their algorithms build your profile from which you won’t be able to escape. Ever. Even if one day you decide to quit Facebook. You are registered for good. You are their property.

Your data will be stored, and if they so wish, used against you, until death will part you from this digital tyranny – and probably beyond.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn and whatever they are called — follow the same principle. Once you are with them, you are owned by them.

Your personal communications are gone, the touch of warmth, talking to a friend, a loved one is gone. If s/he wants to know about you, there are the social media. It’s like the mass-media. Only much more intimate, personal and revealing to the IT-monsters that control the social media and through them control you. They know you better than you know yourself.

You are “profiled”, so to speak.

By being profiled, your mind can be guided into a certain direction – for example with fashion clothing, or fashion-behavior, eating habits.

If Bill Gates has his ways, algorithmic designed propaganda may soon get a hold of you, and indoctrinate your brain, maybe while you sleep as a “transhuman”, that you LOVE the taste of grilled insects.

I’m not kidding. In Europe, there are already entire broadcasts dedicated at how to prepare insects as a culinary delight. After all, the Japanese, Chinese and other peoples of this globe eat insects and enjoy them.

*

For mind manipulation, diversity is complex. Black-and-white thinkers are welcome, as they are easier to control.

Take car colors. For the last twenty some years you could find on western roads almost exclusively cars of black and white – and shades in between. Real colors, like red, blue and yellow, are rare.

Coincidence? Remember there ain’t no coincidences in today’s world. It’s all planned. A car dealer once told me, “I can get you a red car, but I have to order it, and it may take several months to deliver.” Then he went on explaining the reason. The globalist matrix loves black-and-white thinkers.

It’s the Great Reset – and the build-up to it – directing the human mind towards a one-way thinking, or a One World Order – OWO. In case an OWO will not happen – which is likely and hoped for – you still got a multi-polar world, trained in uniform thinking.

We are not far from it – right or fake, but you’ll have an answer. Anything we don’t know right away, just ask Google… and you will get a response – right or fake – that spares you from thinking and form looking further.

Google is your counterpart of the “directed” answers… all uniform, a black-and-white picture, like fashion, like car colors. You may not know it, but you – or we – are already primed.

So, no problem. Soon, we are all going to be lined up – to think in lockstep.

Next stage is a simultaneous gentle phasing in of 5G-led and oriented mind-control.

You may not even notice. As you have been gradually and quietly, but steadily prepared for it.

You are about to transit from a human to a “transhuman” – compliments Klaus Schwab’s (WEF), 4^th Industrial Revolution, and of KS’s top adviser, the Israeli Yuval Noah Hariri (books: “Homo Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”).

Yes, him, the one who has already decided that most of us will be useless eaters. If we don’t stop it NOW, he may be right. Because, with the onset of the 4^th Industrial Revolution, we enter the realm of Full Digitization of Everything. Our daily chores can be done by algorithms, or robots.

The vaxxes you got, especially the highly electromagnetic graphene oxide-type, has you prepared for quick reactions from 5G irradiated algorithmic signals – telling you how to think, what to do, how to react to “adverse interference” from your fellow citizens, those who have not yet gone through the transhumanization process.

Those who survive, the next ten years – the UN Agenda 2030 or the Great Reset – may become willing, joyful slaves – owning nothing but with an eternal smile of utter happiness.

*

This may indeed happen, if we stay impassive, imbibed by our oh-so wonderful comfort, the 24/7 media-streamed comfort. We know something is not quite right – but we choose not to see it. It’s called Cognitive Dissonance. It’s a psychological affliction that affects people wo are scared – and especially those who do not want to see reality – and who are afraid to act against this monstruous imposition.

We are exposed to an outright lawless tyranny that might be upon us, sooner than we think, even in our most nightmarish dreams.

It’s not too late.

We can wake up.

In fact we have to wake up. For the sake of our children. We owe it to our children, to the future generations. The evil cult must be muted, made useless – its strength, whatever it is, the power over everything exerted with money, lots and lots of money – trillions and trillions and more trillions of current dollars or their equivalent, appropriated with the laws made by a corrupt Cult-owned Matrix System.

So much so, that under the present societal structure of greed and mind-control, where God is Money – we are all going to be doomed.

But that shall not happen.

We have to and will resist the enslavement of digitization.

Even if we have to construct a parallel society.

Starting modestly, with means that make us free and with a mindset of Peace and Happiness.

The European Nordic countries in particular and the west in general, are drastically advanced in digitization of money. If not stopped, it is leading us towards a “Digital Central Bank Currency” (DCBC) that can be turned on and off – and expire at the rulers’ will.

Yet, there are ever more institutions and shops, not yet a majority, but a modest and positive beginning, that do not take any kind of digital or electronic money, no credit cards – only cash.

A new consciousness. It will evolve dynamically – dialectically – according to our societal will power and collective strength. We can and will do it.

It is in our common and shared interest – and power – to exit this tyrannical Digital Matrix and to create a NEW society.

And remember – if not for us, then for our children.

We – the present survivors – owe it to them.

*

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

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

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***

Documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal plans by a cell of British military-intelligence figures to organize and train a covert Ukrainian “partisan” army with explicit instructions to attack Russian targets in Crimea.

On October 28th, a Ukrainian drone attack damaged the Russian Black Sea fleet’s flagship vessel in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Moscow immediately blamed Britain for assisting and orchestrating the strike, as well as blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines – the worst acts of industrial sabotage in recent memory.

The British Ministry of Defense issued a blustery denial in response, branding the accusations “false claims of an epic scale.” Whoever was behind those specific attacks, suspicions of a British hidden hand in the destruction are not unfounded. The Grayzone has obtained leaked documents detailing British military-intelligence operatives inking an agreement with the Security Service of Ukraine’s Odessa branch, to create and train a secret Ukrainian partisan terror army.

Their plans called for the secret army to conduct sabotage and reconnaissance operations targeting Crimea on behalf of the Ukrainian Security Service (SSU) – precisely the kind of attacks witnessed in past weeks.

As The Grazyone previously reported, the same coterie of military-intelligence operatives was responsible for drawing up plans to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge. That goal was fulfilled on October 8th in the form of a suicide truck bomb attack, temporarily disabling the sole connecting point between mainland Russia and Crimea, and triggering a major escalation in Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

These blueprints were produced by a military veteran named Hugh Ward, at the request of Chris Donnelly, a British military-intelligence operative best known for hatching the covert, Foreign Office-funded Integrity Initiative information warfare program.

The plans were circulated throughout Donnelly’s private transnational network of military officials, lawmakers and intelligence officials. Such high-level connections underline that he is far from a passive observer in this conflict. He has used his position and contacts to secure the resources necessary to train up the secret saboteur battalion in order to attack Russian targets in Crimea. This wrecking strategy is certain to escalate the war, and undercut any momentum toward negotiation.

Branded “support for maritime raiding operations,” the planned assault on Crimea aims to “degrade” Russia’s ability to blockade Kiev, “erode” Moscow’s “warfighting capability”, and isolate Russian land and maritime forces in Crimea by “denying resupply by sea and overland via Kerch.”

The documents obtained by The Grayzone show that these plans are conducted in close coordination with the Odessa-SSU, while a politically influential Ukrainian oligarch was tapped to fund the malign endeavor.

Since a Western-backed coup toppled Ukraine’s elected government in 2014,Donnelly has worked tirelessly to foment proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Private memos authored by Donnelly and obtained by The Grayzone this October reveal his lust for escalation has only intensified since the Russian military invaded Ukraine in February.

In a September 21st letter to his inner circle, Donnelly fretted that the Biden administration was not wholly committed to total war with Russia. Citing public statements by officials in Washington hoping for a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, Donnelly declared (see below): “This US position must be challenged, firmly and at once.”

In a separate communique, Donnelly blasted Biden as “so unwise as to beggar belief” for warning the Ukraine conflict could lead to “armageddon.”

While The Grayzone cannot verify that the Ukrainian attacks on Crimea are the direct handiwork of Donnelly’s team, recent events closely mirror the strategies and tactics outlined in the documents this outlet has obtained. What’s more, the attacks have helped achieve the escalatory objectives pursued by both Donnelly and the British government, which successfully scuttled negotiations between Kiev and Moscow this April.

Ukrainian “partisans” trained to “shoot, move, communicate, survive”

According to the documents reviewed by The Grayzone, a private UK military company named Prevail Partners has been contracted to recruit and train the secret Ukrainian partisan fighters. Prevail was founded by special forces veterans, including former Royal Marine Brigadier and Special Boat Service commander Justin Hedges.

The company is headquartered not far from RM Hamworthy, an elite British military training centre, replete with grounds resembling city streets and an “improvised explosive device lane” to trial combat scenarios.

The program’s genesis was the product of covert lobbying conducted over the course of several months by Donnelly, an MI6 veteran named Guy Spindler, and Audrius Butkevičius, a former Lithuanian Defense Minister with longstanding ties to the Ukrainian security, military and intelligence apparatus.

Several obstacles appeared as the Prevail team launched its effort to form the secret army. First, Ukrainian officials expressed reluctance to rustle up the sizable sums demanded by Donnelly’s team, especially while Western states were pumping billions into the war effort. British officials were also skittish about farming out training services to private contractors, perhaps out of fear they would be caught in the act or even prosecuted for engaging in such provocative activity.

Within Donnelly’s clique, concerns were also raised about Prevail’s initial proposal. Alex Finnen, a member of the British Army’s Specialist Group Military Intelligence spy cell and the Foreign Office’s shadowy Russia Unit, commented in a late March email that Prevail’s offering was “very expensive for what it is,” with a forecast cost of $600,000 per partisan fighter per year – an indication the company was “in a sellers market.”

“I suspect that they have taken the first figure they thought of and then doubled it. So, there needs to be more discussion as to how and what these people are going to do,” Finnen cautioned. “Partisans live in and amongst the people. That suggests that you need people from across Ukraine, in small teams to take part as Prevail suggest  ‘oblast by oblast’.  How are they going to achieve this?”

After some maneuvering, a provisional agreement was drawn up on April 18th between Prevail and its implementing partner, a self-described “London-based crisis management company” named Thomas in Winslow. According to the contract, Prevail would conduct a “capacity assessment” of the Odessa-SSU’s operations, “then of other major regional SSUs and finally of the Security Services of all Ukraine,” free-of-charge.

Although this round was on the house, the assessment would ultimately be leveraged to justify a major investment in the partisan program.

This objective was clearly emphasized in a Prevail appraisal of a battalion of the Ukrainian Army’s 24th Brigade “being mobilised for deployment to the frontline.” The memo was authored by Justin Hedges after a visit he paid to a military training base in the western city of Yavoriv, near the Polish border, in late May. Hedges was accompanied to the base by British military intelligence veteran Darren Liddle and two Ukrainian special forces operatives.

The invitation to attend “did not emanate” from the Ukrainian General Staff, but “at a regional level” – a reference to the Odessa-SSU. Over the course of 36 hours at the Yavoriv base, Hedges and company observed a portion of what he described as an “inadequate” 12-day training session given to conscripts aged between 20 – 58, none of whom had prior military experience, and who would eventually be sent to Popasna, “where the Russians are currently breaking through [Ukrainian] lines.”

Hedges noted a “very low number of instructors; no set syllabus and doctrine; no in-unit experience; no planning training” on the course, with “unsound tactics being taught by inexperienced foreign trainers,” leaving the battalion “not prepared for what they face.”

He appraised that many of those present “know that when they deploy to the frontline…it will be carnage,” particularly given the previous battalion to receive the same 12-day training “suffered 60 killed within the first 3 days.”

“[This leads] to arguably unsustainable casualty rates. In my view, unsustainable from a human capital and therefore political perspective over the long-term,” Hedges complained. “This problem cannot be left unaddressed any longer; the training gap must be closed now otherwise unsustainable casualty rates, owing to inadequacy of training, may become politically decisive by forcing Zelensky to concede ground to Putin.”

By contrast, he described Prevail instructors as “all qualified and experienced” with “combat experience,” and posited Yavoriv as “suitable and secure with appropriate discipline and tradecraft.” In other words, we can help, and you need us urgently.

As an email earlier that May from Spindler to Donnelly revealed, plans were already in the works to use the base to school 40-strong groups of partisans every four weeks over six months on how to “shoot, move, communicate, survive,” along with living in the woods, and “surviving.” Trainees “with aptitude” were to be identified and tutored in “specialist modules.”

As the plan developed, the training ground at Yavoriv was transferred to undisclosed sites in Greece and Poland.

Until now, the secret British partisan program has never been mentioned by the mainstream media. And as this report makes clear, significant efforts were undertaken by all actors involved to keep the initiative concealed from public view.

Hedges, the special forces veteran, considered government funding “essential to place this programme on a very firm footing.” He imagined that sponsorship could come from Britain, the US, Ukraine, “or even from the Baltics/Nordic countries.” If “separation of government funding from the activity” was necessary, finance could be “provided by flowing ‘donations’ through Prevail’s established NGO, Rhizome Insights Ltd,” a front that serves as the company’s “current route for funding equipment and training,” and therefore allows it to remain hidden from public view.

“This is how Prevail is receiving donations from NGOs/private individuals to fund equipment and low levels of other support at this time,” Hedges explained, noting that Prevail was also discussing financing with the office of Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, one of the wealthiest oligarchs in Ukraine and the owner of the country’s Channel 24 news network.

Donnelly takes aim at Biden for warning of nuclear “armageddon”

Chris Donnelly’s efforts at escalating the Russia-Ukraine conflict have not gone unnoticed by British officials. As recently as October 8th this year, he was enthusiastically invited by Brigadier Julian Buczacki of the British Army’s elite 1st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade to serve as key advisor to London’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Nick Carter, and David Williams, London’s principal civilian guide on defense matters.

In an email that afternoon, mere hours after the Kerch Bridge bombing, Buczacki noted he had recently been “deep in the maelstrom of crisis work” – and “on that subject,” he had recommended that Donnelly serve as “counsel of the wise” to Carter and Williams on the grounds that they would benefit from an expert in “deterrence/escalation and all that.”

“It would be pretty soon given context…I will shortly be stepping up to be ACDS [Assistant Chief of Defence Staff Military Strategy] (not yet public),” Buczacki concluded.

Donnelly promptly responded that he would be “delighted” to take up such a pivotal role in Britain’s prosecution of the proxy war. “Short notice” was “no problem,” he wrote, attaching his official British government security clearance, and two recent commentaries on the conflict in Ukraine he had circulated to his network.

The content of his commentaries makes clear Donnelly views the untold billions in weapons shipments flowing to Ukraine by Biden’s decree as insufficient, and that he worries that Biden might soon appease Putin by authorizing negotiations.

President Joseph Biden generated international headlines when he commented during a fundraiser at the home of James Murdoch, the son of right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, that Putin is ​​“not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” and there was a very real prospect the conflict in Ukraine could “end up with Armageddon.”

In his October 8th email exchange with Brigadier Julian Buczacki, Donnelly complained that the US president’s “off-the-cuff remarks” were “so unwise as to beggar belief.”

“I’m not sure what the opposite word to ‘deterrence’ is, but Biden is actively doing that, alas,” Donnelly lamented. He argued that Putin’s threats of nuclear warfare should be considered a bluff aimed at weakening the West’s will to escalate until total victory is achieved.

Evidently, from his perspective, something had to be done to prevent Washington from authorizing a negotiated solution that would satisfy any of Russia’s terms.

A ‘human bomb’ strikes Kerch Bridge

On May 25th, Guy Spindler emailed Donnelly to report that he had spoken “a couple of times” to Butkevičius, the former Lithuanian Defense Minister. He commented that Butkevičius had “done an excellent job of unpicking Ukrainian hesitation over training support, and has now caused Prevail’s name to be fed” into the British government and its Embassy in Kiev – and therefore the Foreign Office and MI6 – “as a potential supplier.”

Spindler judged Hedges to “be feeling positive,” as British defense ministers were “reportedly no longer in principle against private sector training solutions.” The only things left to do were secure official approval for some kind of guerilla-style operations, and “ensure that our contributions” – including those of Butkevičius – were “properly compensated.”

The MI6 journeyman added that he had “very partial sight” of Hugh Ward’s “various plans” – a reference to “support for maritime raiding operations,” inviting Donnelly to “play me in as you will.” It seems the blueprint’s assorted sabotage plots are so secretive and sensitive, even senior British intelligence officials charged with overseeing the operations aren’t fully party to their details.

The Grayzone previously exposed Ward’s blueprint for attacking the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland. According to those plans, cruise missiles, specially trained scuba teams, or underwater drones would destroy the bridge’s concrete pillars, as Ward saw them as the “weakest part” of the structure.

Though Ukraine’s SBU security services ultimately opted for a truck bomb attack, a commemorative postage stamp issued by Kiev within mere hours of the bombing depicted two explosions at precisely the points suggested by Ward. The speed with which the stamp became available strongly implies it was prepared well in advance of the attack.

Prevail fleshed out plans for alternative strategies as well. A presentation produced by the company – entitled “Kerch Bridge information pack” – proposed blowing up a vessel carrying ammonium nitrate under a portion of the bridge overlaying a shipping lane.

Prevail’s model for this attack was the August 2020 Beirut blast, in which a massive and mysteriously detonated explosion destroyed the Lebanese capital city’s port, exacting significant damage throughout surrounding neighborhoods. The private military firm approvingly noted the 552 tons of ammonium nitrate that exploded in Beirut “produced a 140m wide crater and an earthquake of a 3.3 magnitude on a Richter scale,” a quantity “much less than the 2,754 tonnes” that purportedly arrived in Crimea on a Russian-leased cargo ship in 2013.

It is unclear why the truck bombing scenario was ultimately chosen – perhaps because it provided a degree of plausible deniability to those behind the attack. Ukrainian officials, after initially celebrating the incident, are now claiming it was a Russian false flag operation.

Furthermore, in late August Russia beefed up protective measures in and around Crimea, such as moving an S-300 missile defense system to the peninsula, which may have necessitated an alternate course of action than the one originally chosen.

The bombing of the Kerch Bridge involved a vehicle packed with explosives and transported from Odessa, Ukraine to Crimea, via Bulgaria, Georgia, and Armenia, using different drivers at separate stages of the journey. The last driver was allegedly unaware of their suicide mission.

If British agents had indeed orchestrated the attack on the Kerch Bridge, they likely drew on past operations that bore eery similarities. In 2006, an NGO known as British Irish Rights Watch published testimony by anonymous former British intelligence informants revealing that MI6 had spearheaded a false flag terror strategy known as the “human bomb” in Northern Ireland.

Civilians were strapped into explosive-packed vehicles, then coerced to drive into military checkpoints, inflicting incendiary attacks on targets that killed soldiers and civilians alike. The wave of bombing strikes inflamed local tensions, and provided justification for draconian British state repression of the province’s Catholic population.

“It is known that at least two security force agents were involved in these bombings and allegations have been made that the human bomb strategy was the brainchild of British intelligence [emphasis added],” British Irish Rights Watch stated in an accompanying report.

Given the contents of the leaked material reviewed by The Grayzone, it is striking that the explosives used to target the Kerch Bridge originated in Odessa. Located just across the Black Sea from Crimea, this city hosted the SSU unit that served as the basis for Donnelly and Prevail’s secret terror army.

Russian officials have long stated that they consider Crimea to be Russian territory, and that any attack on it would cross a bright red line and elicit an escalatory response. When Donnelly and his team outlined plans to establish a secret Ukrainian “partisan” army, it seems this was precisely what they set out to do.

*

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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone

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

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***

“This really is a fight where all of us must support Ukraine because Ukraine is fighting for our values!”

0000000000000000000000000 – Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Minister of Finance (October 28, 2022)

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Click to download the audio (MP3 format) 

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) held its twenty-seventh Triennial Congress in downtown Winnipeg from October 28-30. [1]

Two of the star speakers on hand were Canadian federal government ministers Chrystia Freeland and Anita Anand. These politicians were particularly active on the Russia-Ukraine war and in answering and addressing the question of how Canada can support Ukraine.

The Ministers in question, apparently in solidarity with just about every politician in the House of Commons, favoured more military aid.

Canada announced in February that it was providing $600 million in military assistance to the troubled country. There was also talk about Canadian Armed Forces supplying training and capacity building under Operation UNIFIER, which was launched in 2015 and was recently expanded until 2025. [2]

Continual bantering in major media coverage about the “illegal” and “unprovoked” attack by Russia has some individuals comparing Putin to Adolf Hitler!

Rarely if ever do they mention NATO moving closer to the Russian border – a direct breach of the contract between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in 1990.

They ignore the evidence of a coup orchestrated by the U.S. in February of 2014 and the previous talks between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt indicating they (not the people) would choose the next Prime Minister of Ukraine.

Also ignored is the rise in Neo-Nazis including inside the military under the changed government, the killings of as many as 14,000 people in the Donbass region over the previous eight years, and the announcement by President Zelenskiy that Ukraine may pursue nuclear weapons to counter Russia.

While this program and Global Research does not approve of the methods taken by Russia in Ukraine (just as we did not approve of the actions by the United States in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc) the Global Research News Hour finds it necessary to present more of the facts and context of the fight before the bloody conflict escalates into the horrific.

In our first half hour, we hear from George Eliason, an American journalist resident in Luhansk, who relays to us his observations of what has happened there on the ground for the last eight years, the projections of the referenda on rejoining the Russian Federation being a sham, and the hidden history of the fascist like formations taking charge of power in Kyiv.

In our second half hour, we hear speaking clips from Ministers Freeland and Anand at the recent Ukrainian Canadian Congress. We also hear from Glenn Michalchuk, a peace activist in Winnipeg, who was protesting alongside others against the government’s championing war in Ukraine instead of aiding in the brokering of a peace agreement to end the war.

George Eliason is an American journalist based in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT, the BBC, and Press-TV. His articles have been published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews, the Saker, RT, and Global Research among others.

Chrystia Freeland is the Minister of Finance of the Trudaeu government. Her ancestry stems from Ukraine.

Anita Anand is currently Minister of Defence.

Glenn Michalchuk is chair of Peace Alliance Winnipeg and the president of the Winnipeg branch of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 367)

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Click to download the audio (MP3 format) 

Transcript of George Eliason. October 19, 2022

Global Research: Looking around your community, what kind of a reaction did you see towards the joining referendum to Russia recently?

George Eliason: Around the community, I actually went to the referendum for five towns. Everybody has been looking forward to this for a long time. And it’s, for them, it’s like coming home. And you have to understand that a hundred years ago, this was Russia. These were Russian people, most of Ukraine was Russia filled with Russian people. It was Lenin that created the Ukrainian state. And it took until the ‘30s and ‘40s for people to get used to being called “Ukrainian.” Right now is the first time in the last almost nine years, people have a reason to feel safer because they’ve been under attack that long. So, all the way around, people are really happy about it.

GR: What did you say to buttress the argument that people could speak freely, and weren’t voting as if they had Russian guns to their heads?

GE:(Laugh) Well, it’s just like the 2019 election for the President in both republics. People came out en masse to vote, even under shelling. And they did that this time. Back then, the – gosh, the turnout was like 97 percent. I was – I monitored the election back then. Right now, you couldn’t keep people from voting. They were taking the ballots to people’s homes, because Ukraine was trying to attack people in voting centres. They actually shot down over 100 missiles, 100 high bomb missiles, plus rockets, et cetera during the referendum. They needed the military at those places in case there was an attack from terrorists or otherwise. So, everybody looked at it as positive. Nobody here is scared of the military, and all these guys were local. They used – well, in LNR they used the LNR Army. In DNR they used the DNR Army to do that, and it was strictly protective. From what I saw this time again, they didn’t harass anybody, they didn’t actually talk to anybody. They were just protecting – standing guard, making sure no one did anything, you know, try to hurt anybody. That was it. There was nothing threatening about them.

GR: During the eight-year offensive is there an example of an incident that sticks out in people’s minds either undermining Russia or Ukraine in the Donbass?

GE: I went to three mass grave uncoverings and it was the saddest thing to see. You see the remains of people dug up that were killed eight years ago. And in some cases they were stacked on top of each other, and then one of the layers was a small child. I went to three of these. And this was all Ukraine’s doing, attacking and shelling civilians. It’s not one or two, it’s many. Ukraine, during this whole time, they haven’t attacked the army as much, they’ve been attacking apartment complexes; places where people gather; markets during busy days when people will be shopping. And these are open-air markets like a bazaar, think of it like a farmer’s market or a flea market: people walking around. That’s what Kyiv’s been attacking. If you want to look at an example of what Kyiv’s done that’s been in the news, look at Bucha. Now, you see pictures upon pictures of these people that were shot down. And right next to them is Russian humanitarian aid packages. Why would the Russian Army give people humanitarian aid packages, shoot them, and then leave the evidence that they were dealing with them? And these are people that had white arm bands on, you know, which means they’re neutral, they don’t want to be bothered. You know, you wave the white flag it means “I surrender,” or “I’m not fighting.” Kyiv, it was specifically Ukraine’s Azov Battalion that did that. In Donbas, the atrocities have just been mounting over the years. If you look at the Kramatorsk train station, Ukraine says, “Well, Russia did a missle attack there.” Well, they found a section of one of the missiles that had the serial numbers on it, and it came directly out of Ukraine stock piles. They have serial numbers from – missiles from different cities and they’re almost consecutive in numbers, they came out of Ukrainian stock piles. These are known inventories. And so, they’ve been doing this and blaming it on Russia, blaming it on Donetsk, blaming it on on Luhansk. And quite frankly, it’s a shame, it’s part of the information war that they’re getting away with it. It doesn’t get any more complicated than that.

GR: From your vantage point is there any evidence available to the crowds that the Ukraine forces are contributing to some if not all war crimes in the form of false flags?

GE:If you’re looking at shelling or rockets, the impact rate would show the direction they’re coming from. It’s very easy to figure it out. And where these groups are on a map, that’s known because that’s just military stuff, okay? They need to know. You know, let’s say at Kramatorsk, they fire the missile from 20 miles. Well, they have the direction because of impact. All right? So, they know the specific direction the rocket came from. And you take that line out, it’s just geometry to the next firing position. Whoever is there is the person or group that did it. Mariupol, they did this during the rocket attack there. Everybody was saying that Donetsk attacked Mariupol. It was a Russian section of the city that got attacked. It was people that supported Donetsk and wanted to get Azov Battalion to leave. Well, the actual attack was filmed on security cameras and apartment buildings. It showed the definite direction, you could see them coming in. And the angle of the dangle, the firing line, actually came from the Ukrainian position. It was, what, probably close to well, I’d say 120 degrees away from the nearest DNR position if I remember correctly. This is just what they do.

GR: You spoke of how, for Kyiv, this would not be a short-term endeavor, but one that is intended to play out over a long period of time. Could you explain that?

GE: Kyiv doesn’t plan on winning the war. Now, imagine going into a war knowing you’re going to lose it, and you’re okay with that, you’re good with that. The reason why is they want this to be a generational war. Kyiv is using this as a way to cleanse all ethnic Russians out of Ukraine. The way they look at it, now as I said, 100 years ago all of Ukraine all the way over to West Ukraine – what was called Galicia – were Russians. So, they’re looking at 1) ethnicity, 2) the big one is: Do you honour your grandparents that the Germans killed in World War II, or fought against the Germans? They want those people people gone. Kyiv is following Galician lines and Galician politics. They want to be free to honour the Waffen-SS Galician – what is it, the First Grenadier or Fourteenth Grenadier SS-Galician. They don’t want Soviet soliders or Soviet battalions or anything that glorifies the Soviet Union to exist. And so, all these people have to be rooted out. Right now, they’re conscripting them and throwing them against the wall on the front lines, no training: ‘Here’s a gun, 10 bullets’ — you know — ‘go get killed.’ They’re actually calling out the population this way. It’s just sick. But it’s happening, and it’s happening now. This consequence, over time, now they lose the war, then begin a guerilla war. You have three year olds right now that are being brought up to hate anything Russian. So, they grow up. It is in the best political interest of the country if they want to stay nationalist, to go into the next generation fighting because there wont’ be any people with Russian heritage or claim a Russian heritage left in the country. It will be totally free to be nationalist. They’re actually cosmopolitan fascists politically. And they want every mind, they don’t care if there’s 50 people left in Ukraine, at least they’re all Ukrainian fascists. And that’s the goal, make it – the whole country like-minded. No diversity. So, for them, it’s worthwhile.

GR: When it comes to the attacks on your region, Luhansk and the other – Donbass, what is the indication to the fascists or the Nazis that are the driving force behind that ideology?

GE: Okay, if I —

GR: (inaudible) —

GE: — understood the question right, you’re asking: ‘What’s the indication that there are fascists running this?’ That was the question?

GR: Yeah. Yes.

GE: Okay, if we go back to pre-1991, the government of Ukraine was in the diaspora, it was a government of Ukrainian in exile. Now, when the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine pulled out of it. They had to recognize Ukraine. They really didn’t want to, but the United States did. This government was the second generation from World War II. They were OUN Melnyk, that was what the government was. They called Kravchuk, they said, ‘Look, we’ll give you the symbols of state, the power of state. We’ll back you. We’ll be your lobby in the US and around the world. But you’re going to sign a contract that this will be a nationalist state based on the government of Symon Petliura, 1917, 1918.’ Kravchuk agreed, he’s from Galician stock. So, they signed a contract that the government would be a nationalist government. Every leader in Kyiv signs on to this nationalism. Now, the first – going up to the Orange Revolution – the diaspora really wasn’t happy because all these people were doing was grabbing money. They privatized everything and they were taking over everything and becoming very rich, but not developing a nationalist country. Well, they started building up: the diaspora leaders took over the kid’s groups. And this goes into what I mean about a 20-year war: from the Orange Revolution-forward to Maidan, they took over the kid’s groups and they raised up these groups to be nationalist, real nationalists. Like, 1930s nationalists. When they were ready for Maidan, they unleashed them on the world. That was that diaspora. One of them, her name is Slava Stetsko, she was – her husband was actually the guy that declared Ukraine a sovereign country in 1941 in Lviv, right after he had two pogroms, killed a bunch of Jews. And Adolf Hitler said, “No.” His wife became one of the leaders of the brand new Ukraine in 1991. Her bodyguard is a guy you might be familiar with. He was the leader of Pravyi Sektor, Dmytro Yarosh. He learned his politics directly from a World War II monster. And you have to bear in mind that this woman and the leaders around her were responsible for over 11 million murders during World War II. And in an interview, she had said she never lost a night of sleep over anything. Maidan happened. It was those people that took over. If you look at the UCCA, the Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America, and the UWC, Ukrainian World Congress in Canada, they have over 20 million people in a diaspora, and they support it very healthily. Just one business that was geared toward freeing Ukraine is worth over $110,000,000.00. That was in 2014. So, they set all this up to pump money in to do just this, and set up 1930s nationalism in 2014 going forward. Ukrainians never had the option to be asked about this, because they wouldn’t have chosen it. Native Ukrainians rejected this outright, but these guys had the guns; they had the tanks; they had the military. Donbass was the only group of people that really stood up to it on their own all this time.

GR: Thanks George, I’ve appreciated talking to you. Thanks for discussing these issues with us!

GE: It’s great talking to you, too.

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Notes:

1. https://congress.ucc.ca/
2. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/campaigns/canadian-military-support-to-ukraine.html
4. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/17/war-in-europe-the-rise-of-raw-propaganda/

Today November 7, 2022 marks the 105th anniversary of the October Revolution, November 7, 1917. Below the incisive article by Max Parry

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There is a deceitful and ahistorical myth that frequently resurfaces in right-wing circles seeking to discredit socialism with lies about the Russian Revolution. No matter how many times it has been invalidated as fabrication, the reactionary mythos endures.

As might be expected, the author is referring to the preposterous claim that American capitalists — or “Wall Street bankers” — secretly financed one of the most epochal political revolutions in world history which overthrew the Romanov dynasty and ended the Russian Empire, leading to the establishment of the Soviet Union.

One would be hard pressed to find anyone on the political left who has not encountered this mendacious propaganda which has a few variations depending on how far to the right its adherent lands on the political spectrum, but it usually shares the same core set of evidence-free claims.

Leaving aside whether or not the absurd premise makes any sense politically, what can be acknowledged is that at the heart of these false assertions are tiny elements of truth that have been distorted and overstated to the point of deception. Any research into this allegation inevitably leads one to its most popularly cited source, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by British-American conservative academic, Antony C. Sutton.

The primary argument deduced by Sutton is that “Wall Street” indirectly funded the Bolsheviks via the Swedish financier Olof Aschberg, a prominent banker and communist sympathizer who supported a variety of left-wing causes throughout his life, including later the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War. During WWI, Aschberg was a banker in neutral Sweden before expanding his business into Germany where he then transferred sums to aid the Bolsheviks in Russia. However, the links that Sutton makes between Aschberg and “Wall Street” are contradictory and tenuous at best.

While it is evident that Aschberg visited New York in 1916 to convince a group of private American businessmen that the wartime financial opportunities in Russia would continue to flourish after its conclusion, by Sutton’s own admission he was in the United States on behalf of the Tsarist government to negotiate a $50 million loan for the imperial Russian Ministry of Finance. Sutton then debunks his own claim by alleging that Aschberg simultaneously siphoned money “from the German government” to the Russian revolutionaries just as he was acting as an agent in place of Nicholas II’s finance minister, Pyotr Bark.

If that is the case, then the socialist Aschberg likely defrauded a partnership of American private bankers into inadvertently lending financial support to the Bolsheviks, at the very time he was employed as a representative for the Russian monarchy. It should be noted that this deal occurred during America’s neutrality in the war at the time, as the U.S. would not enter the conflict until the following year and Aschberg is known to have gotten into trouble with the Allies. Apparently, Sutton could not discern that these Yankee capitalists were being duped by the “Bolshevik Banker” and instead assigned conscious intent to their money passing through the Swede financier to the communist revolution.

Even if true, the conduit of funds from Aschberg’s Nya Banken would have constituted a minuscule portion compared with the primary subsidies for the Bolsheviks which came via the fortunes they seized from wealthy merchants, landed nobility, and senior members of the Russian Orthodox Church, not to mention the ruling class of the Tsar and his family who amassed incalculable riches going back hundreds of years. After the Russian Civil War, Aschberg founded the USSR’s first foreign trade bank, Roskombank, as one of the inaugural decrees of the Soviet government was the nationalization of the financial industry where the assets of private bankers were confiscated by the state. Thereafter, banking in the USSR functioned solely for the purpose of sponsoring foreign trade and the rapid industrialization of the agrarian country into a modern global superpower. If any American bankers were fooled by Aschberg into funding a Marxist revolution, they sealed their own fate.

Sutton’s accusation that the German state sponsored the Bolsheviks first came from the Alexander Kerensky-led Provisional Government which took power following the abdication of Nicholas II in the February Revolution. The short-lived interim government based its claims on telegraphic cables which purportedly showed payments between Berlin and the revolutionaries which was then used as evidence to smear Vladimir Lenin as a “German agent.”

Historians have since debated the authenticity of the telegrams, but if Germany did divert funds toward the Bolsheviks, it was only because the revolutionary opposition to Russian participation in the imperialist war was an opening to undermine its enemy.

For this reason in April 1917, German intelligence permitted Lenin’s return to Russia from exile in Switzerland via train through Germany, Sweden and Finland in an arrangement made by the Social Democrat Alexander Parvus.

However, this meddling was no different than similar interference by the British and French governments who also attempted to influence Russia’s affairs. In fact, it was reportedly the French who intercepted the dispatches given to the Provisional Government showing the supposed transactions between Germany and the Bolsheviks.

If any Bolshevik was truly an agent of a foreign government, that distinction would belong to Leon Trotsky who was not admitted to the majority faction of the Russian socialist movement until September 1917 after previously siding with the Menshevik wing during the initial party split before straddling the fence for years as a self-described “non-factional social democrat.”

If the truth should be told, Trotsky was never a dedicated Bolshevik and his opportunism proved useful to the interests of Western imperialism, namely the British who suspiciously ordered Canadian authorities to release him from internment in Nova Scotia that April. Why the British would free a revolutionary to return to Russia and presumably withdraw another Allied nation from the war might seem puzzling, except Trotsky’s advocation of “neither war nor peace” was an opportunity to obstruct Lenin’s efforts to make a separate cease-fire with Germany and accept the Central Powers terms. This would have consequences five months after the October Revolution during the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where Trotsky led the negotiations as Foreign Minister and nearly sabotaged the peace talks by disrupting them with his unauthorized tactics.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Max may be reached at [email protected]

Featured image is from the author

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***

Updated on November 8, 2022, 07:13AM UTC.

Pakistan Looks for a Navigational Change

Pakistan’s trajectory of current affairs unfolds multiple crises of critical nature for its freedom, security and future-making.  Wherever the military comes into power, it destroys the culture of positive thinking, morals and hope for change.  Imran Khan alleges assassination attempt by the current “imported regime of the few” on his life while leading a Freedom March to Islamabad. Masses across Pakistan reacted against this evil act of subversion of people’s rights to decide their own future in a democratic system.

The Generals and their accomplice Sharifs and Bhuttos lack legitimacy to govern the country. They are part of the problems, not solutions. Most have criminal records, no political integrity and honesty and perhaps no other nation will embrace them as political figures.

The planned political chaos is intended to drive the nation towards further catastrophic ends and imposition of martial law and coming of an age of great uncertainty and beyond predicting no return to democracy.  All indicators point out to unwarranted intervention by the US-led policy to subdue the rights of people and support a military regime in Pakistan aligned to its foreign policy and anti-China and anti-Russia scenarios.

Most dreadful tragedies have infallibly resulted in victimizing the masses.  Today, the nation is crippled with catastrophic events of floods, insecurity and socio-economic and political exploitation. Pakistani ruling elite and the Generals are not open to reason and accountability. They cannot realize the imperatives of hopes and expectations of new generation of educated and morally and intellectually competent people.

Future belongs to the new generation of educated people, not to the naive and obsolete Generals. They view “power” and “Pakistan” as their own property. The authoritarian leaders played with its destiny and future without being questioned. They are the wrong people, with wrong thinking doing the wrong things. If there was any fair system of accountability, some of the Generals and accomplice politicians could well have faced firing squads for their crimes against the nation. Pakistan has a history of five major military –led coups which ended up in defeat and loss of East Pakistan. Are the Generals waiting for another mishap of formative history? Please see “British Colonialism and How India and Pakistan Lost Freedom.” Global Research and Uncommon Thought Journal: 1/01/22.

Junaid Ahmed and Ben Norton (“Video: Pakistan Coup Regime Bans Imran Khan, Dissidents Killed, as US Eyes China Ties, Israel Normalization” Global Research 10/27/22), try to elaborate how the US intervention could undermine Pakistan’s national interests. Under a false pretext, Khan was banned to participate in any future national elections. The Election Commission has no legal justification for such an unconstitutional verdict.

Imran Khan, a former cricketer and a former PM is the victim of the established institutionalized political corruption in Pakistan. He made a new beginning of “Teherk-e-Insafe” PTI (Movement for Justice), party to create his own space for a moral and intellectual spirited movement for political change. Not so, the challenge comes from the known thugs, indicted criminals and conspirators who had dominated the national politics for more than 50 years.

To change an ill-informed and sadistic political culture, Pakistani masses were eagerly looking for a new age educated person to realize the hope for a peaceful and progressive Pakistan. Imran Khan was abruptly dismissed as the PM by a bogus and unconstitutional assembly secretly arranged by the Generals in alliance with the US paid agents to ensure political chaos and instability.

This could serve the US-India Strategic interests to control and manage Pakistan by eliminating its nuclear arsenals and making the nation a slave to the foreign Masters and IMF unpayable debts. This is not what people of Pakistan are looking for to surrender their freedom, security and sovereignty.  Ironically, Pakistani Generals have a history of selling their national interests and having been paid by the US to fight in Afghanistan and allowed the US to use its bases for military operations. The USAID buys and enslaves people and nations leading to dysfunctional governance of the few.

American foreign policy makers view the Pakistani politicians-Generals as beggars, bootlickers who will perform all kind of superficial acts to please the Master – the one who calls them an ally when needed but will stab Pakistanis when they become a liability. Disillusioned and disconnected with its roots, Pakistan continues to move forward – not towards planned political change, normalcy and progress – but towards tragic events fomenting planned deaths of the citizenry, destruction of the social, economic and political infrastructures, incapacitated and broken lifelines and ultimately to become a battle ground for mindless ethnic and regional divides and national collapse. Andrew Gavin Marshall “Imperial Eye on Pakistan- Pakistan in Pieces, Part 1 (Global Research: 5/28/2011), states that “in December of 2000, the CIA released a report of global trends to the year 2015, which stated that by 2015, “The war in Afghanistan is inherently related to the situation in Pakistan……….Pakistan will be more fractious, isolated, and dependent on international financial assistance.” It was noted that the US-led war in Afghanistan was ultimately aimed at denuclearization of Pakistan.

Could Khan Change the Neo-Colonial dominated Political Culture?

Comparatively. Imran Khan had four years of uncorrupted politics. He did not kill anybody nor robbed any bank s and was keen to have legal accountability for the stolen wealth and killings by Sharif brothers, Bhuttos, and Zardari and others. But political governance was infested with corrupt figures of the past.  According to the Pakistani media, there are 632 top civil servants with dual nationalities. Khan was unable to devise an Action Plan to reform a highly systematic culture of corruption. He needed people of new age education and intelligence to workout creative strategies for political change. That simply did not happen and he was hurriedly ousted by a political –military conspiracy. Imran Khan has the perception and vision for a new Pakistan but he needs people of new and educated generation to plan for a new beginning. Khan and his PTI supporter allege the few Generals and Shabaz Sharif involved in his assassination plan.

Khan’s accusations and past experience could help to identify the in-house evil mongers. Analyzing the videos of his attack, it was a well-planned targeted attack on a national leader for political purposes. While political cynicism is endemic, Pakistani masses view Imran Khan with great deal of optimism and integrity and hope for a new beginning, free of political corruption paving opportunities for sustainable change. If there is an established fair legal system of justice, there should be an independent inquiry to the allegations and those responsible must be held accountable for their heinous crimes. This author has shared specific remedial plan for the current problems: please view “Pakistan in Search of Freedom and Security”, Uncommon Thought Journal and Global Research: 10/20/22.

Western strategic analysts claim Pakistan to be a ‘failing state’ as it is run by dubious political-military elite. The current Pakistani leaders exhibit deafening silence to respond to public demands as they have no legitimacy and political integrity. Tyranny is always powerless and transitory. Often when sadistic politicians cannot solve one set of problems, they come up with other naïve ideas to create more critical problems to distract the masses. The assassination attempt on Khan’s life could be a diversion in that context. Pakistan at the outset reflects a dead-ended moral and intellectual political culture. What is the solution to the morally and intellectually sickening political culture of Pakistani politics? In view of the obvious failure of the current regime under Shabaz Sharif, the conscientious people and organized political establishments should initiate action to set up a new Government of National Unity replacing Shabaz Sharif with a non-partisan, intelligent and honest leadership. It is hard to imagine a non-existent and unrepresentative National Assembly as is to act against Sharif, only to reaffirm its irrelevance and incompetence being a stooge of the rulers and unable to provide workable democratic option for change – when facts of life warrant a change.  The responsible institutions if any must respond to facilitate change to safeguard the national interests, freedom and integrity of the country. If the Generals and Sharif have any sense of history, reasoning, and accountability, they should immediately announce a date for new national elections and safeguard the country from further destabilization and coming of a dark and unsustainable future.

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Lambert Academic Publications, Germany, 12/2019.

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***

According to MiddleEastMonitor, a leading Israeli newspaper said that Israel “is now closing in on a right-wing, religious and authoritarian revolution” aimed at destroying democracy.  The recent Israeli elections have brought Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party back to power, but with the ultra-right wing religious party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir as an allied partner.

Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state.  It has democratic institutions, such as elections to the Knesset, but has been officially labeled by the UN and human rights organizations as an apartheid state.

Zionism is Israel’s national ideology. Zionists believe Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion.

Palestinian territory, encompassing the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967 according to the UN and the western world.

UN General Assembly passed a resolution labeling Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination” in 1975, though it was repealed 16 years later.

The question for liberal western democracies is, “Can democracy, sectarianism, and apartheid policies co-exist?”

Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Dr. Mamoun Farhat of Ramallah to understand what may lay ahead for the West Bank and the Palestinian people in light of the new ultra-far right government.  He holds a PhD in international law and works for Palestinian human rights.

Steven Sahiounie (SS):  It appears that Benjamin Netanyahu will be the next prime Minister. He has aligned with an extremist far right party. What do you think that will mean for the Palestinians?

Dr. Mamoun Farhat (MF):  After assuming the premiership for 12 years, which is the longest in Israel’s history, and leaving the government headquarters, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the premiership again.

If this indicates anything, it indicates internal and external crises experienced by the political system in Israel, which led to the rise of the extreme right, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of Kahane’s students, the founder of the racist Shas movement calling for the extermination of the Palestinians.

It is certain that Ben-Gvir will receive the security portfolio, which means an escalation in the security situation in the Palestinian territories, the escalation in the first place and the commission of more crimes against Palestinian civilians, or at the level of incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which worsens the situation in the absence of a political horizon and the tendency of Israeli society towards right-wing extremist.

SS:   We are seeing an increase in the Palestinian resistance operations in the West Bank. In your opinion, are we approaching a third intifada?

MF:  In my opinion, we are facing a new, different state of struggle that is distinguished from the first intifada, which adhered to only peaceful forms of struggle, such as throwing stones, raising flags, writing slogans, and ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords, and occupation forces in Palestinian cities.

Undoubtedly, the new struggle situation is witnessing a diversity of struggle forms.

This situation came after a blockage in the political horizon that lasted for nearly thirty years, in addition to the extensive violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.

However, we cannot be certain that we are facing a third intifada because this is linked to material support on the one hand and regional and international political support on the other.

SS:  Recently “Israel” and Lebanon signed an agreement concerning offshore energy resources. Do you think that Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist allies will cancel this agreement?

MF:  It is known that international agreements are bound by states, not governments, and therefore the claim to cancel the border demarcation agreement with the Lebanese side is nothing more than electoral propaganda. Therefore, changing the Israeli government does not mean canceling the maritime border demarcation agreement between Lebanon and the Israeli occupation, but rather an Israeli obligation in accordance with international law, and most importantly, the Israeli interest forces Israel to abide by this agreement.

SS:  Algeria brokered an agreement between Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian groups, which brought them together. In your opinion, will this bring about a unity government for the Palestinians?

MF:  Palestinian-Palestinian agreement in Algeria will not change anything from the Palestinian situation, for a number of considerations, the first of which is that this agreement is not the first, as it was preceded by many agreements that did not succeed. For both parties, the subordination of the Palestinian political decision depends on external interests, and the fourth is the geographical dimension and the role of the Israeli occupation in promoting that.

SS:   The Arab League has recently met in Algeria, and Algeria has always been a strong supporter of Palestinian rights. In your opinion, will this meeting advance the Palestinian cause?

MF:  I do not think so, because the Arab summit meetings and its decisions are just ink on paper. They live in divisions in light of the collapse of the Arab regimes and their cracks as a result of internal conflicts and the collapse of the economic situation in them, and every Arab regime is preoccupied with its internal problems, which negatively affects the mother issue, the Palestinian issue.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

Featured image: Dr. Mamoun Farhat from Ramallah (Source: Mideast Discourse)

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***

With his inimitable flair for economic analysis steeped in historical depth, Professor Michael Hudson’s latest essay,  originally written for a German audience, presents a stunning parallel between the Crusades and the current “rules-based international order” imposed by the Hegemon.

Professor Hudson details how the Papacy in Rome managed to lock up unipolar control over secular realms (rings a bell?) when the game was all about Papal precedence over kings, above all the German Holy Roman Emperors. As we know, half in jest, the Empire was not exactly Holy, nor German (perhaps a little Roman), and not even an Empire.

A clause in the Papal Dictates provided the Pope with the authority to excommunicate whomever was “not at peace with the Roman Church.” Hudson sharply notes how US sanctions are the modern equivalent of excommunication.

Arguably there are Top Two dates in the whole process.

The first one would be the Third Ecumenical Council of 435: this is when only Rome (italics mine) was attributed universal authority (italics mine). Alexandria and Antioch, for instance, were limited to regional authority within the Roman Empire.

The other top date is 1054 – when Rome and Constantinople split for good. That is, the Roman Catholic Church split from Orthodoxy, which leads us to Russia, and Moscow as The Third Rome – and the centuries-old animosity of “the West” against Russia.

A State of Martial Law

Professor Hudson then delves on the trip by “Liver Sausage” Chancellor Scholz’s delegation to China this week to “demand that it dismantle its public sector and stops subsidizing its economy, or else Germany and Europe will impose sanctions on trade with China.”

Well, in fact this happens to be just childish wishful thinking, expressed by the German Council on Foreign Relations in a piece published on the Financial Times (the Japanese-owned platform in the City of London). The Council, as correctly described by Hudson, is “the neoliberal ‘libertarian’ arm of NATO demanding German de-industrialization and dependency” on the US.

So the FT, predictably, is printing NATO wet dreams.

Context is essential. German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in a keynote speech at Bellevue Castle, has all but admitted that Berlin is broke: “An era of headwinds is beginning for Germany – difficult, difficult years are coming for us. Germany is in the deepest crisis since reunification.”

Yet schizophrenia, once again, reigns supreme, as Steinmeier, after a ridiculous stunt in Kiev – complete with posing as a unwitting actor huddled in a bunker – announced an extra handout: two more MARS multiple rocket launchers and four Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers to be delivered to the Ukrainians.

So even if the “world” economy – actually the EU – is so fragilized that member-states cannot help Kiev anymore without harming their own populations, and the EU is on the verge of a catastrophic energy crisis, fighting for “our values” in Country 404 trumps it all.

The Big Picture context is also key. Andrea Zhok, Professor of Ethical Philosophy at the University of Milan, has taken Giorgio Agamben’s “State of Exception” concept to new heights.

Zhok proposes that the zombified collective West is now completely subjugated to a “State of Martial Law” – where a Forever War ethos is the ultimate priority for rarified global elites.

Every other variable – from trans-humanism to depopulation and even cancel culture – is subordinated to the State of Martial Law, and is basically inessential. The only thing that matters is exercising absolute, raw control.

Berlin-Moscow-Beijing

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China.

According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger.

This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams.

Cue to the now notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Little Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley).

According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.”

Another source provided the cherry on the cake: “Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.”

Moscow knows very well what the imperial aim is when it comes to the EU reduced to the role of totally dominated – and deindustrialized – vassal, exercising zero sovereignty. The back channels after all are not lying in tatters on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Additionally, China has not provided any hint that its massive trade with Germany and the EU is about to vanish.

Scholz himself, one day before his caravan hit Beijing, stressed to Chinese media that Germany has no intention of decoupling from China, and there’s nothing to justify “the calls by some to isolate China.”

In parallel, Xi Jinping and the new Politburo are very much aware of the Kremlin position,reiterated again and again: we always remain open for negotiations, as long as Washington finally decides to talk about the end of unlimited NATO expansion drenched in Russophobia.

So to negotiate means the Empire signing on the dotted line of the document it has received from Moscow on December 1^st, 2021, focused on “indivisibility of security”. Otherwise there’s nothing to negotiate.

And when we have Pentagon lobbyist Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin advising the Ukrainians on the record to advance on Kherson, it’s even more crystal clear there’s nothing to negotiate.

So could this all be the foundation stone of the Berlin-Moscow-Beijing trans-Eurasia geopolitical/geoeconomic corridor? That will mean Bye Bye Empire. Once again: it ain’t over till the fat lady goes Gotterdammerung.

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This article was originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation.

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. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The U.S. Government tries to hide how obscenely top-end the nation’s wealth-distribution is; but one remarkably clear presentation of it (the U.S. private-wealth distribution)  was the web-page from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that presented an “Overview” of “Distribution of Wealth” starting in “1989:Q3” and extending up till “2021:Q2”. (It will be presented even more clearly here, using their reported data.)

The following shows breakdowns of the wealth-quintiles — percentages of the wealth held by the nation’s households, all the way from the top fifth to the bottom fifth — in the “US$ Trillions” for each fifth — during the latter quarter (the “2021:Q2”), as is shown on that web-page:

• Top 5th =Top 20% total $94.68T ($36.23T for top 1% + $58.45T for all of the next 19%)
• 2nd 5th =Top 40%-Top 20%: $20.68T
• 3rd 5th = Top 60%-Top 40%: $9.62T
• 4th 5th = Top 80%-Top 60%: $5.41T
• 5th 5th = Too 100%-Top 80%: $3.69T
• 100% = $94.68T + $20.68T + $9.62T + $5.41T + $3.69T = $134.08T total.

Therefore: Top 20% = 70.6% of all wealth.

• Top 40% = 86.0% of all wealth.
• Top 60% = 93.2% of all wealth.
• Top 80% = 97.2% of all wealth.
• Top 100% = 100% of all wealth.
• Additionally shown was the top 1%:
• Top 1% (“99-100%”): $36.23T
• Top 20% less that top 1%: $58.45T
• So: the top 1% (the wealthiest 5% of the wealthiest 20%) held 38.3% of all the top fifth’s $94.68T.
• Top 1% =  27% of all wealth.
• (Bottom 1% wasn’t shown.)
• Bottom 20% = 2.8% of all wealth.
• Bottom 40% = 6.8%
• Bottom 60% = 14.0%
• Bottom 80% = 29.4%

Virtually all people who have the discretionary cash to be able to donate significantly to the politicians they favor are in the top fifth — the people who have 70.6% of all wealth. They dominate the nation’s political money. Almost all of the virtually bribes that fill political campaign-chests in America come from the richest 20% of Americans — and the top 1% contain all of the ‘king-makers.” And if you’re in the bottom 80% of wealth-holders in the U.S., you’re not represented, at all, in the U.S. Government.

The top 1% have vastly more, than rest of the top 20%, available to them to donate to their favored politicians, because these people — the top-one-percenters — hold the corporate board seats, and select the corporate executives who hire the congressional lobbyists to entertain and reward and hire the crucial congress-members so as to serve their corporations, and serve those top one-percenters who control all of those corporations. Included in these corporations are the ones that control all of the major, and most of the minor, news-media and that thereby shape the ‘knowledge’ and thus the views that most of the voters (in each Party) hold.

America has around a thousand billionaires, and they have control over so much discretionary cash as to be able to get Congress to not pass any bill that these super-rich oppose, and to pass many of the legislative bills that those super-rich want to become law. So, almost all of the thousand-or-so individuals who control the U.S. Government are billionaires. They especially control international corporations. Those few people dominate both Parties.

But they do it very much behind-the-scenes. In previous centuries, aristocrats were publicly known, by formal titles; but in today’s ‘democracies’, they are, instead, as hidden as they can be. They don’t want the public to know that the Government represents only them, because, otherwise, the Government’s saying that this or that foreign ‘dictatorship’ that poses no real threat to the national security of one’s own country, should be regime-changed, would have the citizens wonder, instead, “Isn’t it our nation’s regime that should be regime-changed first?” Any look at the ‘news’-media will make clear that they DON’T want THAT question to be in anybody’s mind. The message is instead always to regime-change the foreign leaders whom one’s own nation’s billionaires WANT to be regime-changed. That’s the way to get the public to be willing to fund (via their own taxes) the ‘Defense’ Department. Isn’t it un-‘patriotic’ to want to slash the spending on ‘defense’? Where did THAT idea come from?

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

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

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***

Tech entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of the Covid Early Treatment Foundation, Steve Kirsch, talks about his article titled “Evidence of Harm” and subtitled “A Short Collection of Key Evidence Showing Covid Vaccines are Not Safe and Effective, Not Even Close. They are the Most Deadly Vaccines We’ve Ever Produced.”

Kirsch also talks about how government public health agencies, including the CDC and the FDA, as well as The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, studiously avoid looking at data showing how dangerous covid vaccines are.

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This video was originally published on The Whistleblower Newsroom.

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Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store

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***

While the oil giants are making record profits thanks to energy prices rising, and European factories are firing because they can’t pay their gas and electricity bills, the US is sending energy to Europe with their ships loaded with expensive LNG. 

Fearing that we do have not enough, now they are sending us another huge amount of energy: nuclear weapons. The United States will send 100 upgraded B61-12 nuclear bombs to Europe in December.

They will replace the previous ones in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Turkey, and will likely be deployed against Russia in other NATO countries, such as Poland and Finland.

In its strategic documents, the Pentagon announces:

“We will use nuclear weapons to defend the vital interests of the United States and its allies.”

This constitutes a change of strategy that brings the world even closer to a nuclear war, which would cause the disappearance of the human species from the face of the Earth.

What will Russia do now?

Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti asked Vladimir Kozin, a Political-Military Studies Center Russian expert, in an interview that took place in Moscow for Grandangolo on the national channel Byoblu TV.

Vladimir Kozin calls the current situation “much worse than it was during the Cold War, much more lethal and more dangerous“. He denounces the fact that the United States, after tearing up the INF Treaty, is deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe close to Russia in addition to the new B61-12 nuclear bombs.

Kozin calls all this “madness“, he warns that, if it comes to a nuclear war,

“there will be no winners or losers, everyone will lose“.

He, therefore, warns that

“if our territory is attacked with nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical or biological, bacteriological and toxic, as well as nuclear weapons, we will respond“.

He was asked whether Russia will hit US nuclear bases in Europe, and he replies:

“Yes, that’s for sure. If we are attacked.”

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This article was originally published on byoblu.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

This report dates back to the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Kiev Coup d’état, which consisted in an act of war by US-NATO directed against Ukraine, leading to the formation of a full-fledged Neo-Nazi government in Ukraine. 

First published on March 13, 2014 in the wake of US sponsored coup d’Etat

Author’s Note:

This was my assessment more than 8 years ago: The 2014 US sponsored Coup d’Etat was a preamble towards  a US-NATO war against Russia

“The World is at a dangerous crossroads: The structures and composition of this proxy government installed by the West do not favor dialogue with the Russian government and military.

A scenario of military escalation leading to confrontation of Russia and NATO is a distinct possibility”.

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.

Violence and bloodshed continues to rock Ukraine as factions compete in the power vacuum of last month’s coup in Kiev.

As the country struggles to find its way forward, however, it finds itself in the crosshairs of a US-NATO war agenda that has been unfolding for years.

This is the GRTV Feature Interview with our special guest, Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

“We are not dealing with a transitional government in which Neo-Nazi elements integrate the fringe of the coalition, formally led by the Fatherland party.”

Moreover, this is the first full-fledged Neo-Nazi government in Europe in the post World War II period.

This US-NATO sponsored Coup d’etat –which has led to the formation of a coalition government integrated by Neo-Nazis– is an Act of Warfare against Ukraine.

“We have to ask ourselves: Are the architects of this Neo-Nazi government, the people who conspired to install a Nazi regime in Ukraine, are they Neo-Nazis or Neoliberals?

They claim to be Neoliberals. They are acting in support of a neoliberal economic policy agenda” (Michel Chossudovsky, March 2014)

“Washington has chosen to spearhead Neo-Nazis into positions of authority. Under a “regime of indirect rule”, however,  they take their orders on crucial military and foreign policy issues –including the deployment of troops directed against the Russian federation– from the US State Department, the Pentagon and NATO.

The World is at a dangerous crossroads: The structures and composition of this proxy government installed by the West do not favor dialogue with the Russian government and military.

A scenario of military escalation leading to confrontation of Russia and NATO is a distinct possibility.

The Ukraine’s National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU) which is controlled by Neo-Nazis plays a central role in military affairs. In the confrontation with Moscow, decisions taken by the RNBOU headed by Neo-Nazi  Andrij Parubiy and his brown Shirt deputy Dmytro Yarosh (below) –in consultation with Washington and Brussels– could potentially have devastating consequences. ” (Michel Chossudovsky, March 2, 2014)

 Dmytro Yarosh speech at Euromaidan (Centre)

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First published on November 3, 2022

***

So, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan picks up the phone and calls his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin: let’s talk about the “grain deal.” Putin, cool, calm and collected, explains the facts to the Sultan:

First, the reason why Russia withdrew from the export grain deal.

Second, how Moscow seeks a serious investigation into the – terrorist – attack on the Black Sea fleet, which for all practical purposes seems to have violated the deal.

And third, how Kiev must guarantee it will uphold the deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN.

Only then would Russia consider coming back to the table.

And then – today, 2 November – the coup de theatre: Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) announces the country is back to the Black Sea grain deal, after receiving the necessary written guarantees from Kiev.

The MoD, quite diplomatically, praised the “efforts” of both Turkey and the UN: Kiev is committed not to use the “Maritime Humanitarian Corridor” for combat operations, and only in accordance with the provisions of the Black Sea Initiative.

Moscow said the guarantees are sufficient “for the time being.” Implying that can always change.

All rise to the Sultan’s persuasion

Erdogan must have been extremely persuasive with Kiev. Before the phone call to Putin, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) had already explained that the attack on the Black Sea Fleet was conducted by 9 aerial drones and 7 naval drones, plus an American RQ-4B Global Hawk observation drone lurking in the sky over neutral waters.

The attack happened under the cover of civilian ships and targeted Russian vessels that escorted the grain corridor in the perimeter of their responsibility, as well as the infrastructure of the Russian base in Sevastopol.

The MoD explicitly designated British experts deployed in the Ochakov base in the Nikolaev region as the designers of this military operation.

At the UN Security Council, Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzya declared himself “surprised” that the UN leadership “failed not only to condemn, but even to express concern over the terrorist attacks.”

After stating that the Brit-organized Kiev operation on the Black Sea Fleet “put an end to the humanitarian dimension of the Istanbul agreements,” Nebenzya also clarified:

“It is our understanding that the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine agreed on under UN supervision on 22 July, must not be implemented without Russia, and so we do not view the decisions that were made without our involvement as binding.”

This means, in practice, that Moscow “cannot allow for unimpeded passage of vessels without our inspection.” The crucial question is how and where these inspections will be carried out – as Russia has warned the UN that it will definitely inspect dry cargo ships in the Black Sea.

The UN, for its part, tried at best to put on a brave face, believing Russia’s suspension is “temporary” and looking forward to welcoming “its highly professional team” back to the Joint Coordination Center.

According to humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths, the UN also proclaims to be “ready to address concerns.” And that has to be soon, because the deal reaches its 120-day extension point on November 19.

Well, “addressing concerns” is not exactly the case. Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia Dmitry Polyansky said that at the UN Security Council meeting western nations simply could not deny their involvement in the Sevastopol attack; instead, they simply blamed Russia.

All the way to Odessa

Prior to the phone call with Erdogan, Putin had already pointed out that “34 percent of the grain exported under the deal goes to Turkey, 35 percent to EU countries and only 3-4 percent to the poorest countries. Is this what we did everything for?”

That’s correct. For instance, 1.8 million tons of grain went to Spain; 1.3 million tons to Turkey; and 0.86 million tons to Italy. By contrast, only 0,067 tons went to “starving” Yemen and 0,04 tons to “starving” Afghanistan.

Putin made it very clear that Moscow was not withdrawing from the grain deal but had only suspended its participation.

And as a further gesture of good will, Moscow announced it would willingly ship 500,000 tons of grain to poorer nations for free, in an effort to replace the integral amount that Ukraine should have been able to export.

All this time, Erdogan skillfully maneuvered to convey the impression he was occupying the higher ground: even if Russia behaves in an “indecisive” manner, as he defined it, we will continue to pursue the grain deal.

So, it seems like Moscow was being tested – by the UN and by Ankara, which happens to be the main beneficiary of the grain deal and is clearly profiting from this economic corridor. Ships continue to depart from Odessa to Turkish ports – mainly Istanbul – without Moscow’s agreement. It was expected they would be “filtered” by Russia when coming back to Odessa.

The immediate Russian means of pressure was unleashed in no time: preventing Odessa from becoming a terrorist infrastructure node. This means constant visits by cruise missiles.

Well, the Russians have already “visited” the Ochakov base occupied by Kiev and the British experts. Ochakov – between Nikolaev and Odessa – was built way back in 2017, with key American input.

The British units that were involved in the sabotage of the Nord Streams – according to Moscow – are the same ones that planned the Sevastopol operation. Ochakov is constantly spied upon and sometimes hit out of positions that the Russians have cleared last month only 8 km to the south, on the extremity of the Kinburn peninsula. And yet the base has not been totally destroyed.

To reinforce the “message,” the real response to the attack on Sevastopol has been this week’s relentless “visits” of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure; if maintained, virtually the whole of Ukraine will soon be plunged into darkness.

Closing down the Black Sea

The attack on Sevastopol may have been the catalyst leading to a Russian move to close down the Black Sea – with Odessa converted into an absolutely priority for the Russian Army. There are serious rumblings across Russia on why Russophone Odessa had not been the object of pinpointed targeting before.

Top infrastructure for Ukrainian Special Forces and British advisers is based in Odessa and Nikolaev. Now there’s no question these will be destroyed.

Even with the grain deal in theory back on track, it is hopeless to expect Kiev to abide by any agreements. After all, every major decision is taken either by Washington or by the Brits at NATO. Just like bombing the Crimea Bridge, and then the Nord Streams, attacking the Black Sea Fleet was designed as a serious provocation.

The brilliant designers though seem to have IQs lower than refrigerator temperatures: every Russian response always plunges Ukraine deeper down an inescapable – and now literally black – hole.

The grain deal seemed to be a sort of win-win. Kiev would not contaminate Black Sea ports again after they were demined. Turkey turned into a grain transport hub for the poorest nations (actually that’s not what happened: the main beneficiary was the EU). And sanctions on Russia were eased on the export of agricultural products and fertilizers.

This was, in principle, a boost for Russian exports. In the end, it did not work out because many players were worried about possible secondary sanctions.

It is important to remember that the Black Sea grain deal is actually two deals: Kiev signed a deal with Turkey and the UN, and Russia signed a separate deal with Turkey.

The corridor for the grain carriers is only 2 km wide. Minesweepers move in parallel along the corridor. Ships are inspected by Ankara. So the Kiev-Ankara-UN deal remains in place. It has nothing to do with Russia – which in this case does not escort and/or inspect the cargoes.

What changes with Russia “suspending” its own deal with Ankara and the UN, is that from now on, Moscow can proceed anyway it deems fit to neutralize terrorist threats and even invade and take over Ukrainian ports: that will not represent a violation of the deal with Ankara and the UN.

So in this respect, it is a game-changer.

Seems like Erdogan fully understood the stakes, and told Kiev in no uncertain terms to behave. There’s no guarantee, though, that western powers won’t come up with another Black Sea provocation. Which means that sooner or later – perhaps by the Spring of 2023 – General Armageddon will have to come up with the goods. That translates as advancing all the way to Odessa.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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