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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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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.

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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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

Risk of Seizure Resulting from the First Dose of the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) Vaccine2
Children receiving first dose of MMR vaccine	Risk of seizure
Children overall	1 in 640
Siblings of children with a history of febrile seizures	1 in 250
Children with a personal history of febrile seizures	1 in 50

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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First published on October 18, 2022

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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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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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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]

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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.

Featured image is from news.harvard.edu

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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.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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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).

Featured image is from This Can’t Be Happening!

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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.

Featured image is from The Cradle

Mentre i giganti del petrolio registrano profitti record grazie ai crescenti i prezzi dell’energia e le fabbriche europee licenziano perché non riescono a pagare le bollette del gas e dell’elettricità, gli USA mandano energia all’Europa con le loro navi cariche di costoso GNL. Temendo che non ne abbiamo abbastanza, ora ci mandano un’altra enorme quantità di energia: quella delle armi nucleari. Gli Stati Uniti inviano a dicembre in Europa 100 bombe nucleari B61-12 potenziate. Esse sostituiranno quelle precedenti in Italia, Germania, Belgio, Olanda e Turchia, e saranno probabilmente schierate contro la Russia in altri paesi NATO, come Polonia e Finlandia. 

Nei suoi documenti strategici il Pentagono annuncia: “Useremo le armi nucleari per difendere gli interessi vitali degli Stati Uniti e dei loro alleati”. Ciò costituisce un cambio di strategia che avvicina ancor più il mondo alla guerra nucleare, che provocherebbe la scomparsa della specie umana dalla faccia della Terra. Che cosa farà ora la Russia?   

Lo ha chiesto Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti a Vladimir Kozin, esperto russo del Centro studi politico-militari, in una intervista realizzata a Mosca per Grandangolo sul canale TV nazionale Byoblu. 

Vladimir Kozin definisce l’attuale situazione “molto peggiore di quanto non fosse durante la Guerra Fredda, molto più letale e più pericolosa”. Denuncia il fatto che gli Stati Uniti, dopo aver stracciato il Trattato INF, stanno schierando in Europa a ridosso della Russia, oltre alle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12, missili nucleari a raggio intermedio. Kozin definisce tutto questo “una follia” avverte che, se si arriverà a una guerra nucleare,  “non ci saranno né vincitori né vinti, tutti perderanno”. Avverte quindi che “se il nostro territorio viene attaccato con armi nucleari o armi di distruzione di massa, come armi chimiche o biologiche, batteriologiche e tossiche, oltre che nucleari, risponderemo”. Alla domanda se la Russia colpirà le basi nucleari USA in Europa, risponde: “Sì, questo è certo. Se veniamo attaccati”.

Manlio Dinucci

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Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that some ultrasound contrast agents contain polyethylene glycol (PEG) and therefore shouldn’t be administered to patients with known or suspected allergies to PEG — but there are no similar warnings for adults or children who get PEG-containing COVID-19 shots or MiraLAX, an over-the-counter laxative.

On Oct. 20 — the very same day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) crooked vaccine advisory committee members voted to add COVID-19 shots to the Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule — Indonesia’s Ministry of Health took a bold step in a different direction: It banned the sale and prescription of pediatric cough syrups and other liquid medications, at least temporarily.

The ministry linked the cough syrups to kidney injuries that recently killed almost 100 Indonesian children and nearly 70 children in The Gambia in West Africa, and it voiced the suspicion that those numbers could be the tip of a much larger iceberg.

After the rash of West African deaths, the World Health Organization issued a medical product alert for four brands of cough syrup manufactured in India and imported into The Gambia through a U.S. company — warning of the products’ possibly global distribution and calling for the substandard products’ removal from circulation.

As it happens, the COVID-19 shots promoted by the CDC and the syrups prohibited by the Indonesian ministry have one glaring commonality — both contain the chemical polyethylene glycol (PEG).

Several months before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorization to Pfizer and Moderna for their PEG-containing mRNA COVID-19 shots, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) put the FDA on notice about PEG’s life-threatening anaphylactic potential — and sure enough, anaphylaxis was among the very first adverse events reported.

When the president of the American Medical Association then asked Peter Marks — director of the FDA center that oversees vaccines — about anaphylaxis, PEG and the COVID-19 shots, his non-answer was, “It’s just one of those intriguing things,” accompanied by a vague promise about “lots of work getting done.”

As it turns out, that cavalier reply has typified regulators’ response to reports of serious PEG-related adverse events for many years — whether it is COVID-19 shots or other drugs that are causing the harms, regulators are content to dilly-dally.

FDA brushes off parents’ MiraLAX concerns

The FDA similarly has brushed off tens of thousands of parents, including the 67,000-plus members of a parent Facebook group, who for decades alleged that laxatives containing a form of PEG called PEG 3350 caused dramatic neuropsychiatric symptoms in their children, ranging from seizures to psychosis.

PEG 3350 is the active ingredient in the drug MiraLAX, originally developed by Braintree Labs and now a Bayer product.

The FDA in 2006 approved the switch from prescription to over-the-counter (OTC) status for MiraLAX.

Though Braintree developed MiraLAX for short-term use in adults, the drug’s OTC availability has encouraged pediatricians to frequently recommend it for constipated children, sometimes for months or years at a time.

Even knowing that children “are likely to receive a higher dose per unit body weight than adults,” no one has ever assessed the risks to children of prolonged exposure to PEG 3350.

However, when the drug received OTC status, FDA reviewer Dr. Karen Feibus acknowledged “a theoretical concern with long term or frequent repeated use of PEG by consumers” (p. 29).

A 2012 citizen petition urged a study on pediatric safety, requesting the FDA study PEG “in any medical product that is being prescribed to children in the United States or sold by US companies for overseas use.”

With its hand forced by the petition, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2014 awarded a $325,000 grant to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to assess PEG 3350 safety in children in collaboration with the FDA — but thus far, the study has gone nowhere.

Though the NIH and FDA initially pledged that results would be available within a year, by late 2022, the study status was still shown as “recruiting” and the completion date was listed as June 2024.

In a September 2022 email to parent Mike Koehler, whose son experienced a serious neuropsychiatric reaction to MiraLAX, FDA Public Affairs Specialist Paul Richards offered more prevarication, writing, “While the FDA and CDC cannot predict how long the review of the data and information will take, we will complete our review as expeditiously as possible using a thorough and science-based approach.”

Known ‘impurities’ are anything but harmless

Manufacturers’ claims that PEGs are “biologically inert” — a claim coming under increasing challenge — is one of the key factors allowing PEG compounds to become so pervasive across multiple industries and thousands of products, including drugs, cosmetics, healthcare screening products and pesticides.

However, though companies describe PEG as “harmless,” the PEG manufacturing process is known to give rise to “degradation products” — also referred to as “impurities” — that are anything but harmless.

In the case of the fatal Indonesian cough syrups, government analysis detected the presence of three hazardous contaminants: ethylene glycol (EG), diethylene glycol (DEG) and ethylene glycol butyl ether.

Antifreeze is a more recognizable name for EG and DEG, chemicals with toxic metabolites capable of causing “extensive cellular damage to various tissues,” especially the kidneys.

Tragically, incidents in which these substances killed children have made headlines for at least a quarter-century, with medication-associated mass poisonings of children documented in countries ranging from Nigeria to Haiti to Bangladesh.

Although the NIH and FDA conceded that EG and DEG are neurotoxic for children, the FDA allows trace amounts (0.2% total by weight) of both in PEG-containing medications.

In fact, a 2011 study concluded that DEG contamination is an inevitable outcome of some manufacturing processes.

Meanwhile, parents who have studied MiraLAX believe PEG breaks down inside the gut into EG and DEG.

Retired pathologist Dr. David Bruns, credited as the first to describe poisoning by PEG in 1982, studied fatalities from acute renal failure that resulted from the use of PEG-containing burn creams on patients with severe burns.

The severely disrupted skin barrier allowed PEG to be absorbed “right into the body.” According to Bruns, something similar probably occurs in children with a damaged intestinal barrier who ingest PEG.

Additional studies on rabbits conducted by Bruns revealed some of PEG’s metabolites include toxic aldehydes, offering a likely explanation for PEG’s damaging effects on the kidneys.

Highly reactive aldehydes “can impair cellular functions and exacerbate organ injury, acute pain, and inflammation.”

Drugmakers praise ‘PEGylation,’ but ignore its downsides

In the vast landscape of PEG-containing drugs and biologics, some drugs are “PEGylated,” which refers to a specific way of attaching PEG to biomedical molecules.

When PEGylation came into vogue in the early 1990s, manufacturers were thrilled because the process impedes the kidney’s normal attempts to clear drugs and forces the body to hang on to drugs longer.

Drug researchers cheerfully refer to this as “half-life extension.”

The mRNA COVID-19 jabs’ inclusion of PEGylated fats — called lipid nanoparticles or LNPs — is specifically designed to support “prolonged circulation” of the vaccine.

Researchers writing in Nature in December 2021 argued that without the PEG-coated lipid nanoparticles, “COVID-19 mRNA vaccines would not exist,” and they enthused that the LNPs “have the ability to alter the course of history.”

Left unmentioned was the fact that PEGylation is “not without a price” — the price being a propensity to trigger adverse immune reactions “entailing severe allergic symptoms with occasionally fatal anaphylaxis.”

A 2016 study suggested that a large proportion of the U.S. population has likely been sensitized to PEG, leaving a significant subset susceptible to hypersensitivity reactions from the PEGylated vaccines.

In fact, the published literature has begun to reflect just such a scenario.

An October 2021 article in Endoscopy described three patients who experienced anaphylactic reactions to PEG-containing bowel-cleansing agents (for colonoscopy) — all three had received Moderna injections within the previous 12 to 18 days.

The researchers concluded, “The onset of a new PEG allergy shortly after COVID-19 vaccination makes a causal relationship likely” and cautioned that healthcare providers “should be aware of the possibility of a newly developed PEG allergy after COVID-19 vaccination.”

FDA issues selective PEG allergy warnings

Last year, the FDA warned consumers that some ultrasound contrast agents contain PEG “and should not be administered to patients with known or suspected allergies to PEG.”

The FDA did so in response to 11 cases of anaphylaxis and two deaths linked to the contrast agents’ use in patients with known PEG allergies.

However, for the thousands of families affected by MiraLAX, or the 10,000-plus individuals thus far reported to have experienced life-threatening or fatal anaphylaxis following COVID-19 vaccination, there have been no warnings.

Instead, it is left to countries like Indonesia to set an example for responsible regulatory behavior, not waiting for endlessly deferred studies but instead simply pulling drugs off the market when they kill children.

*

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Featured image is from CHD

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***

Look at the chart below. The chart explains everything.

It explains why Washington is so worried about China’s explosive growth. It explains why the US continues to hector China on the issues of Taiwan and the South China Sea. It explains why Washington sends congressional delegations to Taiwan in defiance of Beijing’s explicit requests.

It explains why the Pentagon continues to send US warships through the Taiwan Strait and ship massive amounts of lethal weaponry to Taipei.

It explains why Washington is creating anti-China coalitions in Asia that are aimed at encircling and provoking Beijing. It explains why the Biden administration is stepping up its trade war on China, imposing onerous economic sanctions on its businesses, and banning critical high-tech semi-conductors that are “are essential not just… for virtually every aspect of modern society, from electronic products and transport to the design and production of all manner of goods.” It explains why China has been singled-out in the US National Security Strategy (NSS) as “the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order.” It explains why Washington now regards China as its biggest and most formidable strategic adversary that must be isolated, demonized and defeated.

The chart above explains everything, not just the hostile diplomatic jabs that are designed to discredit and humiliate China, but also the openly belligerent policies that are aimed at Russia as well. People need to understand this. They need to see what is really going on so they can put events in their proper geopolitical context.

And what “context” is that?

The context of a Third World War; a war that was thoroughly-planned, instigated and (now) prosecuted by Washington and Washington’s proxies. That’s what’s really going on. The increasingly violent conflagrations we see cropping-up in Ukraine and Asia are not the result of “Russian aggression” or “evil Putin”. No. They are the actualization of a sinister geopolitical strategy to quash China’s meteoric rise and preserve America’s dominant role in the world order. Can there be any doubt about that?

No. None.

This is why we are experiencing the redivision of the world into warring blocs. This is why we are seeing the roll back of 30 years of Globalization and massive supply line disruption. And this is why Europe has been thrust headlong into frigid darkness and forced deindustrialisation.

All of these suicidal policies were concocted for one purpose and one purpose alone, to maintain America’s exalted spot in the global system. That is why all of humanity is presently embroiled in a Third World War; a war that is designed to prevent China from becoming the world’s biggest economy; a war that is designed to preserve US global primacy. Check out this excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

An October 19 Financial Times article by Edward Luce, entitled “Containing China is Biden’s explicit goal,” sounded the following alarm: “Imagine that a superpower declared war on a great power and nobody noticed. Joe Biden this month launched a full-blown economic war on China—all but committing the US to stopping its rise—and for the most part, Americans did not react.

“To be sure, there is Russia’s war on Ukraine and inflation at home to preoccupy attention. But history is likely to record Biden’s move as the moment when US-China rivalry came out of the closet.”

Moreover, last week, a top Biden administration official indicated that the US was preparing new bans on China in key hi-tech areas. Speaking at the Center for a New American Security, Alan Estevez, the under-secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, was asked if the US would ban China from accessing quantum information science, biotechnology, artificial intelligence software or advanced algorithms. Estevez admitted that this was already being actively discussed. “Will we end up doing something in those areas? If I was a betting person, I would put down money on that,” he said….

Luce concluded his Financial Times article cited above by declaring:“Will Biden’s gamble work? I’m not relishing the prospect of finding out. For better or worse, the world has just changed with a whimper not a bang. Let us hope it stays that way.”…(“Biden’s technology war against China”, World Socialist Web Site)

Once again, look at the chart. What does it tell you?

The first thing it tells you is that the hostilities we see in Ukraine (and eventually Taiwan), can be traced back to a fundamental shift in the global economy. China is growing stronger. It’s on a path to overtake the United States economy within the decade. And with growth, come certain benefits. As the world’s biggest economy, China will naturally become Asia’s regional hegemon. And, as Asia’s regional hegemon it will be able “to settle regional disputes in its own favor and to de-legitimize U.S. regional and global leadership.”

Can you see the problem here?

For nearly two decades, the US has oriented its foreign policy around a “rebalancing of forces” strategy called the “pivot to Asia”. In short, the US intends to be the dominant player in the world’s most populous and prosperous region, Asia. Can you see how China’s rise derails Washington’s plan for the future?

The United States is not going to let this happen without a fight. Washington is not going to let China muscle-it-out of the markets that it plans to dominate. That’s not going to happen. And if you think that’s going to happen, you’d better think again. The United States will go to war to avoid a scenario in which the US plays “second fiddle” to China. In fact, the foreign policy establishment has already decided that the US will engage China militarily for that very objective.

So, our thesis is simple; we think WW3 has already begun. That’s all we’re saying. The ructions we see in Ukraine are merely the first salvo in a Third World War that has already triggered an unprecedented energy crisis, massive worldwide food insecurity, a catastrophic break-down in global supply lines, widespread and out-of-control inflation, the steady reemergence of extreme nationalism, and the redivision of the world into warring blocs. What more proof do you need?

And it’s all economic. The origins of this conflict can all be traced back to the seismic changes in the global economy, the rise of China and the unavoidable decline of the United States. It is a case of one empire replacing the other. Naturally, a transition of this magnitude is going to generate tectonic changes in global distribution of power. And along with those changes will come more flashpoints, more devastation, and the looming prospect of nuclear war. And this is precisely how things are playing out.

So, how does the chart explain what is happening in Ukraine?

Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine is actually aimed at China not Russia.Russia is not a peer competitor and Russia does not have the economic wherewithal to displace the United States in the global order. NordStream, however, did pose a significant risk to the US by greatly strengthening Moscow’s economic relations with the EU and particularly with Europe’s industrial powerhouse, Germany. The Moscow-Berlin alliance—which was mutually beneficial and key to German prosperity—had to be sabotaged to prevent further economic integration that would have drawn the continents closer together into the world’s biggest free trade zone. Washington had to stop that in order to preserve its economic stranglehold on Europe and defend the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Even so, no one expected the US to blow up the pipeline itself in—what appears to be—the greatest act of industrial terrorism in history. That was truly shocking.

In essence, Washington sees Russia as an obstacle to its “pivot” plan to encircle, isolate and weaken China. But Russia is not the greatest threat to US global primacy; not even close. That designation belongs to China.

The Third World War is being waged to contain China not Russia. What the war in Ukraine suggests is that—among foreign policy elites—there is general agreement that, The road to Beijing goes through Moscow. That appears to be the consensus view. In other words, US powerbrokers want to weaken Russia in order to spread US military bases across Asia. Ultimately, the military will be called upon to enforce Washington’s economic rule over its new Asian subjects. If that day ever comes.

We think it is extremely unlikely that Washington’s ambitious plan will succeed, but we have no doubt that it will be implemented all the same. Tens of millions of people are likely to die in a desperate attempt to turn-back the clock to the fleeting ‘unipolar moment’ and the equally short-lived American Century. It is a tragedy beyond comprehension.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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

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***

Amy Kelly, COO of DailyClout, talks with Dr. Chris Flowers.

Dr. Chris Flowers is an author, academic cancer radiologist, and member of the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Project.

Ms. Kelly and Dr. Flowers discuss what may be causing cancers to occur and to escalate much more quickly post-mRNA vaccination, definitions of different types of cancers mentioned in Pfizer’s document, the dangers of lipid nanoparticles, and spike proteins and how they enter cells.

Cancers found in Pfizer document

Document description: “PFIZER CONFIDENTIAL SDTM Creation: 25MAR2021 (20:15) Source Data: adae Table Generation: 27MAR2021 (01:37) (Cutoff Date: 13MAR2021, Snapshot Date: 25MAR2021) Output File: ./nda2 unblinded/C4591001 BLA/”

Adverse Event legend code for all cancers listed below:

NEOPL – Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified

All Unique Mentions of Cancers in the Pfizer Document

1. Breast cancer/Ductal carcinoma right Breast + Invasive ductal breast carcinoma/Ductal Carcinoma Left Breast + Metastases to lymph nodes/Right Axillary Metastases
2. Breast cancer/breast cancer initial diagnosis
3. Lung cancer metastatic/Metastatic Lung cancer
4. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer
5. Brain cancer metastatic/Metastatic Brain Tumor
6. Breast cancer/left breast carcinoma
7. Papillary thyroid cancer/Suspected papillary thyroid carcinoma
8. Breast cancer/LEFT BREAST CANCER
9. Prostate cancer/Prostate cancer
10. Hepatic cancer/liver cancer
11. Prostate cancer/Prostate Cancer (Gleason 8)
12. Biliary cancer metastatic/Biliary Cancer Metastatic + Metastases to liver/Metastases to Liver
13. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell skin cancer (head)
14. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer (right breast)
15. Skin cancer/sebaceous carcinoma of skin
16. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell cancer
17. Uterine cancer/Uterine Cancer
18. Breast cancer in situ/Stage 0 Breast Cancer Right Breast
19. Prostate cancer/Prostate Cancer
20. Prostate cancer/Malignant Neoplasm of Prostate
21. Breast cancer stage II/Stage II Breast Cancer (Left)
22. Prostate cancer/Prostate Cancer
23. Gallbladder cancer stage II/Gallbladder Cancer – Stage 2
24. Pancreatic carcinoma metastatic/Metastatic pancreatic cancer
25. Prostate cancer/Prostate cancer-early stage
26. Breast cancer/Right breast cancer
27. Lobular breast carcinoma in situ/Left Lobular Breast Cancer, Stage I, Grade I
28. Bladder cancer/STAGE I Bladder Cancer
29. Prostate cancer metastatic/Prostate Cancer with mets
30. Tonsil cancer/tonsil cancer
31. Non-small cell lung cancer stage III/Nonsmall cell lung carcinoma stage 3
32. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell skin cancer (right side of nose)
33. Breast cancer/breast cancer
34. Pancreatic carcinoma/Pancreatic cancer
35. Oropharyngeal cancer recurrent/Recurrence of Oropharyngeal Cancer, Left side
36. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer
37. Basal cell carcinoma/basal cell skin cancer-left lower leg
38. Rectal cancer/Worsening of Rectal Cancer
39. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer, Right Breast
40. Adrenal gland cancer/ADRENAL ADENOCARCINOMA
41. Non-small cell lung cancer stage IV/stage IV non-small cell lung cancer
42. Prostate cancer/prostate cancer
43. Hormone receptor positive breast cancer/Malignant neoplasm of upper-outer quadrant of right breast in female, estrogen receptor positive
44. Thyroid cancer/Thyroid Cancer
45. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell skin cancer- Right ear
46. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer of Right Breast
47. Breast cancer/Right Breast Cancer
48. Bladder cancer/Bladder Cancer
49. Breast cancer stage I/Breast Cancer, Stage 1
50. Prostate cancer/Prostate adenocarcinoma
51. Gastric cancer/Signetringcellgastriccarcinoma (SRCGC)
52. Uterine cancer/Uterine Cancer
53. Squamous cell carcinoma of skin/Squamous Cell Carcinoma to cheek
54. Chronic myeloid leukaemia/chronic myelogenous leukemia
55. Haemangioma of skin/NEOPLASM OF UNCERTAIN
56. BEHAVIOR OF SKIN, LEFT EAR 2mm dark freckle or hemangioma
57. Intraductal proliferative breast lesion/ductal carcinoma in situ, right breast
58. Benign pancreatic neoplasm/Serious cystadenoma of Pancreas
59. Plasma cell myeloma/IGA Kappa Multiple Myeloma
60. Invasive ductal breast carcinoma/invasive ductal carcinoma stage 1B, left
61. Adenocarcinoma gastric/INFILTRATING, POORLY DIFFERENTIATED ADENOCARCINOMA – STOMACH
62. Malignant melanoma/Malignant Melanoma (etiology unknown)
63. Transitional cell carcinoma/Urothelial Carcinoma
64. B-cell lymphoma/B-Cell Lymphoma
65. Malignant melanoma/right forearm melanoma
66. Malignant melanoma/
67. Pigmented ephitelioid melanoma of the vagina
68. Invasive ductal breast carcinoma/Right breast invasive ductal carcinoma
69. Metastases to central nervous system/Brain metastasis
70. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma/Clear cell renal cell carcinoma
71. Adenocarcinoma pancreas/pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma
72. Intraductal proliferative breast lesion/Right Breast Ductal Carcinoma In Situ
73. Squamous cell carcinoma/Squamous Cell Carcinoma R Ankle

Female-Specific Cancers

1. Uterine cancer/Uterine Cancer
2. Uterine cancer/Uterine Cancer
3. Pigmented ephitelioid melanoma of the vagina

Male-Specific Cancers

1. Prostate cancer/Prostate cancer
2. Prostate cancer/Prostate Cancer (Gleason 8)
3. Prostate cancer/Prostate Cancer
4. Prostate cancer/Malignant Neoplasm of Prostate
5. Prostate cancer/Prostate Cancer
6. Prostate cancer/Prostate cancer-early stage
7. Prostate cancer metastatic/Prostate Cancer with mets
8. Prostate cancer/prostate cancer
9. Prostate cancer/Prostate adenocarcinoma

Non-Gender Specific Cancers

1. Breast cancer/Ductal carcinoma right Breast + Invasive ductal breast carcinoma/Ductal Carcinoma Left Breast + Metastases to lymph nodes/Right Axillary Metastases
2. Breast cancer/breast cancer initial diagnosis
3. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer
4. Breast cancer/left breast carcinoma
5. Breast cancer/LEFT BREAST CANCER
6. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer (right breast)
7. Breast cancer in situ/Stage 0 Breast Cancer Right Breast
8. Breast cancer stage II/Stage II Breast Cancer (Left)
9. Breast cancer/Right breast cancer
10. Lobular breast carcinoma in situ/Left Lobular Breast Cancer, Stage I, Grade I
11. Breast cancer/breast cancer
12. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer
13. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer, Right Breast
14. Intraductal proliferative breast lesion/ductal carcinoma in situ, right breast
15. Invasive ductal breast carcinoma/invasive ductal carcinoma stage 1B, left
16. Invasive ductal breast carcinoma/Right breast invasive ductal carcinoma
17. Intraductal proliferative breast lesion/Right Breast Ductal Carcinoma In Sit
18. Malignant melanoma/ Malignant Melanoma (etiology unknown)
19. Hormone receptor positive breast cancer/Malignant neoplasm of upper-outer quadrant of right breast in female, estrogen receptor positive
20. Breast cancer/Breast Cancer of Right Breast
21. Breast cancer/Right Breast Cancer
22. Breast cancer stage I/Breast Cancer, Stage 1
23. Lung cancer metastatic/Metastatic Lung cancer – fatal (onset 04DEC2020; death: 19JAN2021)
24. Brain cancer metastatic/Metastatic Brain Tumor
25. Papillary thyroid cancer/Suspected papillary thyroid carcinoma
26. Hepatic cancer/liver cancer
27. Biliary cancer metastatic/Biliary Cancer Metastatic + Metastases to liver/Metastases to Liver
28. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell skin cancer (head)
29. Skin cancer/sebaceous carcinoma of skin
30. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell cancer
31. Gallbladder cancer stage II/Gallbladder Cancer – Stage 2
32. Pancreatic carcinoma metastatic/Metastatic pancreatic cancer
33. Bladder cancer/STAGE I Bladder Cancer
34. Tonsil cancer/tonsil cancer
35. Non-small cell lung cancer stage III/Nonsmall cell lung carcinoma stage 3
36. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell skin cancer (right side of nose)
37. Pancreatic carcinoma/Pancreatic cancer
38. Oropharyngeal cancer recurrent/Recurrence of Oropharyngeal Cancer, Left side
39. Basal cell carcinoma/basal cell skin cancer-left lower leg
40. Rectal cancer/Worsening of Rectal Cancer
41. Adrenal gland cancer/ADRENAL ADENOCARCINOMA
42. Non-small cell lung cancer stage IV/stage IV non-small cell lung cancer
43. Thyroid cancer/Thyroid Cancer
44. Basal cell carcinoma/Basal cell skin cancer- Right ear
45. Bladder cancer/Bladder Cancer
46. Gastric cancer/Signetringcellgastriccarcinoma (SRCGC)
47. Squamous cell carcinoma of skin/Squamous Cell Carcinoma to cheek
48. Chronic myeloid leukaemia/chronic myelogenous leukemia
49. Haemangioma of skin/NEOPLASM OF UNCERTAIN
50. BEHAVIOR OF SKIN, LEFT EAR 2mm dark freckle or hemangioma
51. Benign pancreatic neoplasm/Serious cystadenoma of Pancreas
52. Plasma cell myeloma/IGA Kappa Multiple Myeloma
53. Adenocarcinoma gastric/INFILTRATING, POORLY DIFFERENTIATED ADENOCARCINOMA – STOMACH
54. Malignant melanoma/Malignant Melanoma (etiology unknown)
55. Transitional cell carcinoma/Urothelial Carcinoma
56. B-cell lymphoma/B-Cell Lymphoma
57. Malignant melanoma/right forearm melanoma
58. Malignant melanoma/
59. Metastases to central nervous system/Brain metastasis
60. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma/Clear cell renal cell carcinoma
61. Adenocarcinoma pancreas/pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma
62. Squamous cell carcinoma/Squamous Cell Carcinoma R Ankle

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Starting January 2023, Harvard University is requiring all on-campus students to be vaccinated with the bivalent COVID-19 booster. 

In September statement, Harvard warned that

“[s]tudents must be compliant with all vaccine requirements in order to register for the spring term. This includes the annual flu shot as well as the bivalent Omicron-specific COVID-19 booster.”

In an October update to the university’s COVID-19 plan, the same policy was reiterated, this time with an instructional YouTube video featuring Suzanne Spreadbury, Dean of Academic Programs.

“Because I care about your health,” Spreadbury begins, holding her hands to her heart, “I want to walk you through the process for uploading your COVID-19 vaccination documentation if you plan to be on campus this upcoming semester.”

She continues,

“If you’re coming to campus, we are so excited to see you…Here is what you need to do within seven days of registering for a course with an on-campus presence. I know it’s fast, but you can do it.”

Once uploaded documentation is reviewed by a health services professional, it will be marked “as green, compliant, or red, not compliant,” Spreadbury emphasizes.

According to the CDC, the new booster is called “bivalent” because it “protect[s] against both the original virus that causes COVID-19 and the Omicron variant BA.4 and BA.5.”

“Previous boosters are called ‘monovalent’ because they were designed to protect against the original virus that causes COVID-19. They also provide some protection against Omicron, but not as much as the updated (bivalent) boosters,” it continues.

Harvard isn’t the only university imposing strict vaccine mandates on their students.

Campus Reform began reporting on which universities were mandating booster shots in late 2021, and has continued to follow school policies on the issue of vaccinations since.

This September, for example, Campus Reform reported on Susquehanna University’s double-standard for student and employee vaccination: While returning students were mandated to take the vaccine, it was only “strongly encouraged” for employees.

Campus Reform reached out to the Harvard University Health Services, Harvard’s media relations department, and Suzanne Spreadbury for comment. The article will update accordingly.

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Ava Sherwood Erculiani is a sophomore studying Biology and Political Science at Slippery Rock University. Where she is a student Senator as well as the president and founder of the American Conservation Coalition at Slippery Rock, a conservative environmentalist group.

Featured image is from Campus Reform

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Austria’s government is looking to ban the use of new fossil fuel heaters as of next year and replace very old oil and coal heaters with climate-friendly options by 2025, Euractiv reports.

Austria, like the other EU countries, aims to cut its reliance on Russian gas as soon as possible. The government says that abandoning Russian gas should happen simultaneously with adopting renewable heat options.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Austria received around 80% of the natural gas it consumed from Russia. As of August, this high dependence on Russian gas flows had dropped to below 50%, the government said.

The ban on new fossil fuel heaters, however, would need the approval of at least two-thirds of the Austrian Parliament because the draft bill would require amendments to the constitution, Euractiv’s Nikolaus Kurmayer notes.

“The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has shown how vulnerable our energy supply is. The answer to that can only be ‘get rid of Russian gas’,” Austria’s Energy and Climate Minister Leonore Gewessler said on Wednesday.

With the Renewable Heat Act (EWG), Austria is now taking another big step on this path, Gewessler added.

Under the new act, gas heaters cannot be installed in new buildings as of 2023, the minister said, adding that by 2040, Austria would switch all heaters in the country to climate-friendly alternatives, getting rid of oil and gas boilers, and moving to use heat pumps, district heating, or pellets.

Austria will support the proposed heaters switch program by making available around $1.95 billion (2 billion euros) by 2026, the minister said.

The Renewable Heat Act (Erneuerbaren-Wärme-Gesetz, EWG) says that fossil-fuel heating such as coal, oil, and gas heating should be phased out in Austria by 2040.

Presenting the initial draft of the bill, minister Gewessler said earlier this year that heating currently accounts for around one-quarter of Austria’s gas consumption.

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Michael Kern is a newswriter and editor at Safehaven.com and Oilprice.com.

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The United Nations General Assembly has voted for the 30th year to condemn the US blockade and in support for Cuba’s resolution calling for an end to the US governments unilateral sanctions against the country which have been in place for over 60 years.

The vote was 185:2 in favour of the Cuban motion with the US and Israel voting against and Brazil and Ukraine abstaining.

Speaker after speaker addressed the UNGA to condemn the US sanctions, Cuba’s continued inclusion on the US ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism List’, and to praise the island’s internationalism.

Permanent Representative of Saint Kitts and Nevis to the United Nations, Nerys Dockery, said that as her country’s youngest and first female representative says she owes her ability to deliver her speech to Cuba. Only five months ago she was facing losing her right eye, she said, but it was saved by a Cuban optician. She asked

“what justifies Cuba, a small Caribbean nation, which has such a disproportionately positive impact on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, and whose internationalism and humanitarianism has saved, impacted and empowered so many human lives. What justifies it continuing to be burdened and limited by an outdated embargo.”

The Peruvian representative said,

“Any measure that leads to adverse humanitarian consequences on the population by any state must be suspended immediately. The blockade violates the right to life and health of all the Cuban people.”

Closing his speech the Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez appealed:

“Let Cuba live in peace. Cuba would be better off without the blockade. Every Cuban family would be better off without the blockade. The US would be better off without the blockade.”

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Germany has become an economic satellite of America’s New Cold War with Russia, China and the rest of Eurasia. Germany and other NATO countries have been told to impose trade and investment sanctions upon themselves that will outlast today’s proxy war in Ukraine. U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies.

President Biden has characterized this split as being between democracies and autocracies. The terminology is typical Orwellian double-speak. By “democracies” he means the U.S. and allied Western financial oligarchies. Their aim is to shift economic planning out of the hands of elected governments to Wall Street and other financial centers under U.S. control. U.S. diplomats use the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to demand privatization of the world’s infrastructure and dependency on U.S. technology, oil and food exports.

By “autocracy,” Biden means countries resisting this financialization and privatization takeover. In practice, U.S. rhetoric means promoting its own economic growth and living standards, keeping finance and banking as public utilities. What basically is a issue is whether economies will be planned by banking centers to create financial wealth – by privatizing basic infrastructure, public utilities and social services such as health care into monopolies – or by raising living standards and prosperity by keeping banking and money creation, public health, education, transportation and communications in public hands.

The country suffering the most “collateral damage” in this global fracture is Germany. As Europe’s most advanced industrial economy, Germany steel, chemicals, machinery, automotives and other consumer goods are the most highly dependent on imports of Russian gas, oil and metals from aluminum to titanium and palladium. Yet despite two Nord Stream pipelines built to provide Germany with low-priced energy, Germany has been told to cut itself off from Russian gas and de-industrialize. This means the end of its economic preeminence. The key to GDP growth in Germany, as in other countries, is energy consumption per worker.

Image is from PressTV

These anti-Russian sanctions make today’s New Cold War inherently anti-German. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said that Germany should replace low-priced Russian pipeline gas with high-priced U.S. LNG gas. To import this gas, Germany will have to spend over $5 billion quickly to build port capacity to handle LNG tankers. The effect will be to make German industry uncompetitive. Bankruptcies will spread, employment will decline, and Germany’s pro-NATO leaders will impose a chronic depression and falling living standards.

Most political theory assumes that nations will act in their own self-interest. Otherwise they are satellite countries, not in control of their own fate. Germany is subordinating its industry and living standards to the dictates of U.S. diplomacy and the self-interest of America’s oil and gas sector. It is doing this voluntarily – not because of military force but out of an ideological belief that the world economy should be run by U.S. Cold War planners.

Sometimes it is easier to understand today’s dynamics by stepping away from one’s own immediate situation to look at historical examples of the kind of political diplomacy that one sees splitting today’s world. The closest parallel that I can find is medieval Europe’s fight by the Roman papacy against German kings – the Holy Roman Emperors – in the 13^th century. That conflict split Europe along lines much like those of today. A series of popes excommunicated Frederick II and other German kings and mobilized allies to fight against Germany and its control of southern Italy and Sicily.

Western antagonism against the East was incited by the Crusades (1095-1291), just as today’s Cold War is a crusade against economies threatening U.S. dominance of the world. The medieval war against Germany was over who should control Christian Europe: the papacy, with the popes becoming worldly emperors, or secular rulers of individual kingdoms by claiming the power to morally legitimize and accept them.

Medieval Europe’s analogue to America’s New Cold War against China and Russia was the Great Schism in 1054. Demanding unipolar control over Christendom, Leo IX excommunicated the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and the entire Christian population that belonged to it. A single bishopric, Rome, cut itself off from the entire Christian world of the time, including the ancient Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem.

This break-away created a political problem for Roman diplomacy: How to hold all the Western European kingdoms under its control and claim the right for financial subsidy from them. That aim required subordinating secular kings to papal religious authority. In 1074, Gregory VII, Hildebrand, announced 27 Papal Dictates outlining the administrative strategy for Rome to lock in its power over Europe.

These papal demands are strikingly parallel to today’s U.S. diplomacy. In both cases military and worldly interests require a sublimation in the form of an ideological crusading spirit to cement the sense of solidarity that any system of imperial domination requires. The logic is timeless and universal.

The Papal Dictates were radical in two major ways. First of all, they elevated the bishop of Rome above all other bishoprics, creating the modern papacy. Clause 3 ruled that the pope alone had the power of investiture to appoint bishops or to depose or reinstate them. Reinforcing this, Clause 25 gave the right of appointing (or deposing) bishops to the pope, not to local rulers. And Clause 12 gave the pope the right to depose emperors, following Clause 9, obliging “all princes to kiss the feet of the Pope alone” in order to be deemed legitimate rulers.

Likewise today, U.S. diplomats claim the right to name who should be recognized as a nation’s head of state. In 1953 they overthrew Iran’s elected leader and replaced him with the Shah’s military dictatorship. That principle gives U.S. diplomats the right to sponsor “color revolutions” for regime-change, such as their sponsorship of Latin American military dictatorships creating client oligarchies to serve U.S. corporate and financial interests. The 2014 coup in Ukraine and selection is just the latest exercise of this U.S. right to appoint and depose leaders.

Image is from Club Orlov

More recently, U.S. diplomats have appointed Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s head of state instead of its elected president, and turned over that country’s gold reserves to him. President Biden has insisted that Russia must remove Putin and put a more pro-U.S. leader in his place. This “right” to select heads of state has been a constant in U.S. policy spanning its long history of political meddling in European political affairs since World War II.

The second radical feature of the Papal Dictates was their exclusion of all ideology and policy that diverged from papal authority. Clause 2 stated that only the Pope could be called “Universal.” Any disagreement was, by definition, heretical. Clause 17 stated that no chapter or book could be considered canonical without papal authority.

A similar demand as is being made by today’s U.S.-sponsored ideology of financialized and privatized “free markets,” meaning deregulation of government power to shape economies in interests other than those of U.S.-centered financial and corporate elites.

The demand for universality in today’s New Cold War is cloaked in the language of “democracy.” But the definition of democracy in today’s New Cold War is simply “pro-U.S.,” and specifically neoliberal privatization as the U.S.-sponsored new economic religion. This ethic is deemed to be “science,” as in the quasi-Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences. That is the modern euphemism for neoliberal Chicago-School junk economics, IMF austerity programs and tax favoritism for the wealthy.

The Papal Dictates spelt out a strategy for locking in unipolar control over secular realms. They asserted papal precedence over worldly kings, above all over Germany’s Holy Roman Emperors. Clause 26 gave popes authority to excommunicate whomever was “not at peace with the Roman Church.” That principle implied the concluding Claus 27, enabling the pope to “absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.” This encouraged the medieval version of “color revolutions” to bring about regime change.

What united countries in this solidarity was an antagonism to societies not subject to centralized papal control – the Moslem Infidels who held Jerusalem, and also the French Cathars and anyone else deemed to be a heretic. Above all there was hostility toward regions strong enough to resist papal demands for financial tribute.

Today’s counterpart to such ideological power to excommunicate heretics resisting demands for obedience and tribute would be the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF dictating economic practices and setting “conditionalities” for all member governments to follow, on pain of U.S. sanctions – the modern version of excommunication of countries not accepting U.S. suzerainty. Clause 19 of the Dictates ruled that the pope could be judged by no one – just as today, the United States refuses to subject its actions to rulings by the World Court. Likewise today, U.S. dictates via NATO and other arms (such as the IMF and World Bank) are expected to be followed by U.S. satellites without question. As Margaret Thatcher said of her neoliberal privatization that destroyed Britain’s public sector, There Is No Alternative (TINA).

My point is to emphasize the analogy with today’s U.S. sanctions against all countries not following its own diplomatic demands. Trade sanctions are a form of excommunication. They reverse the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia’s principle that made each country and its rulers independent from foreign meddling. President Biden characterizes U.S. interference as ensuring his new antithesis between “democracy” and “autocracy.” By democracy he means a client oligarchy under U.S. control, creating financial wealth by reducing living standards for labor, as opposed to mixed public/private economies aiming at promoting living standards and social solidarity.

As I have mentioned, by excommunicating the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and its Christian population, the Great Schism created the fateful religious dividing line that has split “the West” from the East for the past millennium. That split was so important that Vladimir Putin cited it as part of his September 30, 2022 speech describing today’s break away from the U.S. and NATO centered Western economies.

The 12^th and 13^th centuries saw Norman conquerors of England, France and other countries, along with German kings, protest repeatedly, be excommunicated repeatedly, yet ultimately succumb to papal demands. It took until the 16^th century for Martin Luther, Zwingli and Henry VIII finally to create a Protestant alternative to Rome, making Western Christianity multi-polar.

Why did it take so long? The answer is that the Crusades provided an organizing ideological gravity. That was the medieval analogy to today’s New Cold War between East and West. The Crusades created a spiritual focus of “moral reform” by mobilizing hatred against “the other” – the Moslem East, and increasingly Jews and European Christian dissenters from Roman control. That was the medieval analogy to today’s neoliberal “free market” doctrines of America’s financial oligarchy and its hostility to China, Russia and other nations not following that ideology. In today’s New Cold War, the West’s neoliberal ideology is mobilizing fear and hatred of “the other,” demonizing nations that follow an independent path as “autocratic regimes.” Outright racism is fostered toward entire peoples, as evident in the Russophobia and Cancel Culture currently sweeping the West.

Just as Western Christianity’s multi-polar transition required the 16^th century’s Protestant alternative, the Eurasian heartland’s break from the bank-centered NATO West must be consolidated by an alternative ideology regarding how to organize mixed public/private economies and their financial infrastructure.

Medieval churches in the West were drained of their alms and endowments to contribute Peter’s Pence and other subsidy to the papacy for the wars it was fighting against rulers who resisted papal demands. England played the role of major victim that Germany plays today. Enormous English taxes were levied ostensibly to finance the Crusades were diverted to fight Frederick II, Conrad and Manfred in Sicily. That diversion was financed by papal bankers from northern Italy (Lombards and Cahorsins), and became royal debts passed down throughout the economy. England’s barons waged a civil war against Henry II in the 1260s, ending his complicity in sacrificing the economy to papal demands.

What ended the papacy’s power over other countries was the ending of its war against the East. When the Crusaders lost Acre, the capital of Jerusalem in 1291, the papacy lost its control over Christendom. There was no more “evil” to fight, and the “good” had lost its center of gravity and coherence. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“the Fair”) seized the Church’s great military banking order’s wealth, that of the Templars in the Paris Temple. Other rulers also nationalized the Templars, and monetary systems were taken out of the hands of the Church. Without a common enemy defined and mobilized by Rome, the papacy lost its unipolar ideological power over Western Europe.

The modern equivalent to the rejection of the Templars and papal finance would be for countries to withdraw from America’s New Cold War. They would reject the dollar standard and the U.S. banking and financial system. that is happening as more and more countries see Russia and China not as adversaries but as presenting great opportunities for mutual economic advantage.

The broken promise of mutual gain between Germany and Russia

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 promised an end to the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded, Germany was reunified, and American diplomats promised an end to NATO, because a Soviet military threat no longer existed. Russian leaders indulged in the hope that, as President Putin expressed it, a new pan-European economy would be created from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Germany in particular was expected to take the lead in investing in Russia and restructuring its industry along more efficient lines. Russia would pay for this technology transfer by supplying gas and oil, along with nickel, aluminum, titanium and palladium.

There was no anticipation that NATO would be expanded to threaten a New Cold War, much less that it would back Ukraine, recognized as the most corrupt kleptocracy in Europe, into being led by extremist parties identifying themselves by German Nazi insignia.

How do we explain why the seemingly logical potential of mutual gain between Western Europe and the former Soviet economies turned into a sponsorship of oligarchic kleptocracies. The Nord Stream pipeline’s destruction capsulizes the dynamics in a nutshell. For almost a decade a constant U.S. demand has been for Germany to reject its reliance on Russian energy. These demands were opposed by Gerhardt Schroeder, Angela Merkel and German business leaders. They pointed to the obvious economic logic of mutual trade of German manufactures for Russian raw materials.

Image is from InfoBrics

The U.S. problem was how to stop Germany from approving the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Victoria Nuland, President Biden and other U.S. diplomats demonstrated that the way to do that was to incite a hatred of Russia. The New Cold War was framed as a new Crusade. That was how George W. Bush had described America’s attack on Iraq to seize its oil wells. The U.S.-sponsored 2014 coup created a puppet Ukrainian regime that has spent eight years bombing of the Russian-speaking Eastern provinces. NATO thus incited a Russian military response. The incitement was successful, and the desired Russian response was duly labeled an unprovoked atrocity. Its protection of civilians was depicted in the NATO-sponsored media as being so offensive as to deserve the trade and investment sanctions that have been imposed since February. That is what a Crusade means.

The result is that the world is splitting in two camps: the U.S.-centered NATO, and the emerging Eurasian coalition. One byproduct of this dynamic has been to leave Germany unable to pursue the economic policy of mutually advantageous trade and investment relations with Russia (and perhaps also China). German Chancellor Olaf Sholz is going to China this week to demand that it dismantle is public sector and stops subsidizing its economy, or else Germany and Europe will impose sanctions on trade with China. There is no way that China could meet this ridiculous demand, any more than the United States or any other industrial economy would stop subsidizing their own computer-chip and other key sectors.¹ The German Council on Foreign Relations is a neoliberal “libertarian” arm of NATO demanding German de-industrialization and dependency on the United States for its trade, not China, Russia or their allies. This promises to be the final nail in Germany’s economic coffin.

Another byproduct o America’s New Cold War has been to end any international plan to stem global warming. A keystone of U.S. economic diplomacy is for its oil companies and those of its NATO allies to control the world’s oil and gas supply – that is, to reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels. That is what the NATO war in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine was about. It is not as abstract as “Democracies vs. Autocracies.” It is about the U.S. ability to harm other countries by disrupting their access to energy and other basic needs.

Without the New Cold War’s “good vs. evil” narrative, U.S. sanctions will lose their raison d’etre in this U.S. attack on environmental protection, and on mutual trade between Western Europe and Russia and China. That is the context for today’s fight in Ukraine, which is to be merely the first step in the anticipated 20 year fight by the US to prevent the world from becoming multipolar. This process, will lock Germany and Europe into dependence on the U.S. supplies of LNG.

The trick is to try and convince Germany that it is dependent on the United States for its military security. What Germany really needs protection from is the U.S. war against China and Russia that is marginalizing and “Ukrainianizing” Europe.

There have been no calls by Western governments for a negotiated end to this war, because no war has been declared in Ukraine. The United States does not declare war anywhere, because that would require a Congressional declaration under the U.S. Constitution. So U.S. and NATO armies bomb, organize color revolutions, meddle in domestic politics (rendering the 1648 Westphalia agreements obsolete), and impose the sanctions that are tearing Germany and its European neighbors apart.

How can negotiations “end” a war that either has no declaration of war, and is a long-term strategy of total unipolar world domination?

The answer is that no ending can come until an alternative to the present U.S.-centered set of international institutions is replaced. That requires the creation of new institutions reflecting an alternative to the neoliberal bank-centered view that economies should be privatized with central planning by financial centers. Rosa Luxemburg characterized the choice as being between socialism and barbarism. I have sketched out the political dynamics of an alternative in my recent book, The Destiny of Civilization.

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Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics.

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One hundred years ago, in October 1922, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary blackshirts marched on the Italian capital to demand the dissolution of the government of Prime Minister Luigi Facta. The March on Rome is the foundational myth of fascist power. Through this daring act, so the story goes, the strongman Mussolini installed himself as head of the Italian government.

Yet the march itself was a farce. Mussolini’s fascist forces numbered only a few thousand and, armed mostly with sticks, were scattered and bogged down in mud and rain. They were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by government troops in the capital. And Mussolini, the “man on horseback” himself, hid in a barricaded office near the Swiss border.

Despite the obvious weakness of the fascists, the government mounted only symbolic resistance to the coup. “Everybody knew perfectly well that the troops would refuse to take any forcible action whatever against the Fascisti, with whom they were in sympathy”, the British ambassador observed. Less than 24 hours later, King Victor Emanuele appointed Mussolini prime minister. When the new dictator’s troops finally reached Rome, they entered in a victory parade.

For all the theatrics of the March on Rome, Mussolini didn’t take power against the will of the ruling class, but with its blessing. The fascists’ road to power was paved by tolerance, the outright collaboration of the police and politicians, and lavish financial backing from industrialists. The Italian ruling class welcomed Mussolini because its members viewed the fascists as a solution to several years of crisis and class struggle that had put in question their own rule.

The First World War had turned the country into a tinderbox. Nearly 6 million Italians had been drafted, 600,000 killed and 700,000 permanently disabled. Peasant conscripts returned from the fronts radicalised. Factory workers chafed against the establishment of martial law in their workplaces. The 1917 Russian Revolution provided radicalising workers with a practical example to follow: topple the capitalist system to end the barbarity of war. During the movement’s height, the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) of 1919-20, workers launched a decisive struggle to wrest control over Italy from the ruling class. At the same time, peasants seized the land and began forcing massive concessions from large landowners. Civil war seemed imminent.

The social crisis also produced the right-wing radicalisation that gave birth to fascism. Benito Mussolini, a prominent figure in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), shocked his comrades by declaring in favour of the country’s entry into the war. A meeting of PSI members drove Mussolini out, spitting on him and calling him a traitor.

In November 1914, Mussolini founded a new right-wing daily newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), with the backing of Italian industrialists and French imperialism. In these pages, his new ideas took form. Il Popolo trumpeted support for the war and hostility to all forces, such as the socialist movement, that had the potential to disrupt it. Mussolini quickly began drawing the conclusion that democracy itself was holding the country back from achieving its destiny—he would eventually describe fascism as “supreme anti-democracy”.

The movement was a new form of reactionary politics. Instead of relying on sections of the ruling class and state, Mussolini created a mass popular movement in defence of the capitalist order. Fascism’s method was political violence; its ultimate objective was, as Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky described, “to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”. Mussolini brought together different disaffected layers of society to this end: bitter war-hardened veterans, middle-class youth who revelled in political violence and the despairing long-term unemployed. The project won him support from British government agents, who sponsored the fascist movement after Mussolini explained: “I will mobilise the mutilati [disabled ex-soldiers] in Milan, and they will break the heads of any pacifists who try to hold anti-war meetings in the streets”.

In April 1919, the fascists launched their first major attack on the left, burning down the headquarters of the Socialist daily newspaper Avanti! (Forward!). Police stood aside as the fascist gang murdered three socialists. But while the workers’ and peasants’ movements were still on the offensive, and Italy was caught in “strike frenzy”, the fascists were hesitant to confront the workers’ movement in its metropolitan centres of power in the industrial north. They instead built their base in rural areas, such as the Po Valley, where landowners hired them to terrorise peasant organisations.

The wave of struggle reached its peak in September 1920, when half a million armed workers in the industrial north occupied their factories. Many workers saw this as the final struggle to expropriate their bosses and begin the construction of a socialist society. Speaking at a workers’ occupation of FIAT (the Italian Automobiles Factory of Turin), Antonio Gramsci, a revolutionary Marxist, underlined the historic nature of the events: “Social hierarchies have been smashed and historical values turned upside down”. The head of FIAT was so despondent that he offered to hand his factories over to the workers.

But the Italian Socialist Party blinked at the opportunity to lead a struggle for power. Its leadership was paralysed by divisions between revolutionaries who wanted to topple the capitalist system and reformists who wanted a share of power within it. In the end, they compromised with the bosses, extracting a few concessions and agreeing to end the occupations.

While the September factory struggles formally ended in a stalemate, the capitalists immediately sought revenge on the workers’ movement. As the French anarchist Daniel Guérin wrote, they “felt the chill of expropriation pass over them” and wasted no time re-establishing their dominance. In early 1921, unemployment rose dramatically and the strike rate plummeted. Capitalists banded together in new industrial and agricultural federations to coordinate their assault. They also started to give serious backing to the fascist movement. In spring, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti endorsed fascist candidates as part of a national bloc, helping 30 of them get elected. Large amounts of money began flowing to Mussolini’s organisation.

The fascists were carrying out an orgy of violence against the left. In six months, they ransacked 119 trades council branches, 107 cooperatives, 100 workers’ cultural centres and 28 union branches. Dozens of left-wing militants were murdered. The state rapidly ceded power to the blackshirts—as they marched through town after town, military arsenals were handed to them.

Given the profound threat that fascist violence posed to the organisations of the workers’ movement, it is remarkable that neither of the main left parties waged a consistent fight against Mussolini’s gangs.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was formed at the beginning of 1921 by activists repulsed by the Socialist Party’s repeated betrayals. The undisputed head of the PCI was Amadeo Bordiga, an energetic and charismatic revolutionary who had organised the opposition to the Socialist Party’s reformist leadership. Bordiga rightly condemned the electoral obsession of the Socialist Party, which subordinated workers’ struggle to winning seats in parliament. But he went too far, dismissing any distinction between capitalist democracy and fascist dictatorship, and systematically underplaying the threat fascists posed to democratic rights, arguing that they would be no different to any other capitalist government:

“Fascism incorporates the counter-revolutionary struggle of all the allied bourgeois forces, and, for this reason, it is by no means necessarily compelled to destroy the democratic institutions. From our Marxist point of view, this situation is by no means paradoxical, because we know that the democratic system is only a collection of deceptive guarantees, behind which the ruling class conducts its battle against the working class.”

At other times, he implied that the victory of fascist dictatorship would actually be an advance for the workers’ movement because it would destroy illusions in capitalist democracy. “So the fascists want to burn down the parliamentary circus? We’d love to see the day”, he wrote in July 1922, just months before Mussolini’s victory. “The main danger is, and remains, that everyone agrees that the apple cart isn’t overturned, and that a legal and parliamentary solution is found.” This perspective ignored the fact that democratic rights are vital for the workers’ movement. The right to form unions and political organisations, which are the basis for developing workers’ social power, was precisely what the fascists wanted to destroy.

The response of the Socialist Party, which still commanded the loyalty of most organised workers, was equally dismal. It was still divided between “maximalists” who mouthed revolutionary rhetoric, and reformist parliamentarians and union leaders. The reformists set the tone of the party’s response to fascism, arguing that the institutions of the capitalist state would defend democracy and protect the working class from fascist attacks. Reformist leader Giacomo Matteotti spoke in parliament urging passivity: “Stay home! Do not respond to provocations. Even silence, even cowardice, are sometimes heroic”.

There was, however, one popular organisation that understood the need to unite masses of people in practical resistance to the physical threat of fascism: the Arditi del Popolo (The People’s Daring Ones). This organisation arose out of associations of the war veterans, who had returned to Italy from the front deeply politically polarised. While some joined the fascists, many turned to the left, and pledged to use their military experience to obstruct the advance of the blackshirts.

In July 1921, the organisation held its first national rally in Rome. Three thousand armed Arditi led a march of 50,000 striking workers from different political and union organisations. The demonstration called for the disarming of the fascists. In August 1922, they repelled an armed attack by 20,000 fascists on the left-wing stronghold of Parma. As an Arditi leader later recalled:

“Working-class people took to the streets—as bold as the waters of a river which is bursting its banks. With their shovels, pick-axes, iron bars and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del Popolo to dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, to dig trenches, and to erect barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, young people from all parties and from no party at all were all there, united in a single iron will: resist and fight.”

Just ten weeks after his forces were defeated in Parma, however, Mussolini was in power. He later admitted that, had the tactics used by the left in Parma been replicated across the country, the success of his movement would have been thrown into question.

Despite its initial strength, the Arditi del Popolo was quickly isolated. This was primarily because the main workers’ parties disgracefully abandoned it. While many rank-and-file Communist Party members naturally understood the importance of defending democratic rights, and gravitated toward the Arditi, the party leaders around Bordiga had other ideas. They declared: “We can only deplore the fact that Communists have been in contact with the people in Rome who initiated the Arditi del Popolo, offering to work with them and follow their instructions. If such actions are repeated, the most severe measures will be taken”.

Bordiga had a sterile and sectarian approach to revolutionary politics. Rather than attempting to convince masses of workers of the necessity of revolution by fighting alongside them, he believed it was necessary to build a party of the “pure and hard” that strictly separated itself from every other institution and waited patiently for the masses to come and join it.

The PSI, on the other hand, clung to the idea that appealing to “legality” would save it, and signed a disgusting “peace pact” with Mussolini. This meant disavowing any support for the actions of the Arditi. Ultimately, the tragedy of Mussolini’s rise is not only that the working class was defeated, but that it was beaten without a real fight. There was no lack of will to confront the barbarity of the fascists, but workers were misled and disoriented by the leaders of their organisations.

The ruling class thought that it could use the fascists as a battering ram against the workers’ movement, and then incorporate them into the political system. The Liberal prime minister believed that, in power, Mussolini would behave like any other conservative politician. But Mussolini’s project radicalised as he consolidated control over the state. Political assassinations of socialists and other dissenters increased. Within three years, Mussolini had banned all political opposition, dissolved the trade unions and consolidated the world’s first fascist regime.

A century on from the March on Rome, new fascist and far-right forces are assembling. Again, the global ruling classes are showing that they are perfectly willing to deal with them as long as it’s good for business. The red carpet has been rolled out for Giorgia Meloni, a fascist Mussolini admirer, to form a new government in Italy. Far-right regimes have been normalised from India to Brazil.

The experience of Mussolini’s rise holds important lessons for socialists. Perhaps the greatest lesson, obscured by most conventional accounts of the March on Rome, is that Mussolini could have been stopped. Had the workers’ movement been united to confront the fascists, as it did in Parma, one of the darkest and most brutal chapters of European history might have been avoided.

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***

The Russian-American summit meetings have a history of calibrated foreplay. As the G20 summit in Bali on November 15-16 draws closer, the big question is still hanging in the air: Will there be a meeting between the US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the event? 

From the look of it, a meeting cannot be ruled out. It increasingly seems that the scheduling of such a meeting may even be  under discussion between Washington and Moscow.   

On Wednesday afternoon, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow that Putin had a call with Indonesian President Joko Widodo (who is hosting the G20 summit.) 

Parrying questions, Peskov cryptically added that “we are currently working on a statement” and declined to answer if Putin and Widodo had discussed the Russian president’s possible participation in the G20 summit. Instead, he simply told reporters to wait for an official statement on the phone call. 

The Russian-American meetings at the highest level are customarily announced simultaneously in the two capitals. The delay in the release of the statement that Peskov referred to can only be taken to mean that consultations are still going on. 

A readout drafted by a Kremlin official would have served the purpose in the normal course on the phone conversation between Putin and Widodo, but in this case, there has been an undue delay while a statement is still under preparation. Given the state of relations between the US and Russia, a unilateral announcement of a Biden-Putin meeting by either side is simply inconceivable. 

Then there are discernible signs that both sides are striving to lower the tensions as much as they can so as to create a “cordial” enough atmosphere. Thus, from the American side, the White House spokesman John Kirby went on record yesterday to categorically state that the US does not see any signs that Russia is making preparations to use nuclear weapons. 

From the Russian side too, it is apparent that Moscow has virtually ignored the media leaks in the US that American military personnel are on Ukrainian soil on a mission to audit the weaponry given to Kiev to fight the war with the Russian forces. The US has a record of staying put in foreign countries and Moscow is in all likelihood conscious of that. Yet, it is keeping mum. 

Again, on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Ministry issued an important statement proposing out of the blue that the atomic powers should “demonstrate in practice” their own commitment to the principle that a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought as well as “abandon dangerous attempts to infringe on each other’s vital interests, balancing on the brink of direct armed conflict and encouraging provocations with WMD, which can lead to catastrophic consequences.” 

The statement reaffirmed categorically that “Use of nuclear weapons by Russia is hypothetically allowed only in response to aggression carried out with the use of WMDs, or aggression with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is threatened.” 

Interestingly, the IAEA inspectors on a mission to Ukraine have given a clean chit to Kiev on Wednesday regrading the latter’s “undeclared nuclear activities and materials.” This followed Moscow’s recent allegation that Kiev was working on a “dirty bomb.” 

Clearly, there will be no need now for Biden and Putin to squander away their time discussing the spectre of Armageddon if they meet in Bali.

Today, again, Moscow and Kiev conducted a second major prisoner swap in under a week. 

Meanwhile, Russia has returned to the UN-brokered grain deal to facilitate the transportation of Ukraine’s produce to the world market. Of course, this followed written guarantee from Kiev that the humanitarian corridor will not be used for military purposes. Foreign Minister Lavrov, in turn, expressed appreciation that such an assurance has been held out by Kiev. 

Neither Moscow nor Washington has shown any inclination to dial up tensions over the Russian allegation regarding the involvement of British intelligence in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and the drone attack on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. 

Curiously, Washington has been somewhat indifferent washing its hands off the entire unsavoury episode involving Britain, while the Russian demarche with the UK ambassador today suggested good behaviour by the British intelligence in future and hinted at a desire to move on. Indeed, Russia is not contemplating any retaliation against the UK. 

Quite obviously, if a Biden-Putin meeting indeed takes place, the discussion will be largely devoted to the Ukraine situation. Significantly, the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration Magomedsalam Magomedov said today at a public function in Moscow that Putin’s decision to launch the special military operation in Ukraine was not an easy one but he had no other choice given existing dangers.  

That said, if a meeting between Biden and Putin were to take place, that would create a piquant situation insofar as the stated American position all along has been that the US will not discuss Ukraine with Russia without President Zelensky’s participation. 

However, on his part, Zelensky said today that Ukraine will not participate in the upcoming G20 summit if Putin also attends the event. He sounded wary of being left out. One possible way out of the labyrinth would be that Putin also meets Zelensky at Bali. Perhaps, that is precisely what the wily TV actor himself has in mind.  

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The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has voted down a Russian proposal to establish a commission to investigate claims of a joint US-Ukraine “military biological” program.

Going back to at least March, Moscow has alleged Ukrainian biolabs have been studying and stockpiling deadly pathogens like anthrax and cholera at US-sponsored labs, saying further this is a violation of the 1972 international convention on biological weapons.

At Wednesday’s security council vote, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the United States and its ally the Ukrainian government have been “through Russia’s allegations in Geneva, point by point, and debunked every single one.”

US, Britain, and France voted against Russia’s proposal – but crucially China backed it, while ten rotating council members abstained, among the 15-nation body.

“The United States does not have a biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories supported by the United States,” Thomas-Greenfield countered.

Instead of military biolabs, Washington has presented the following narrative on its program in Ukraine:

During a series of U.N. meetings prompted by the Russian allegations, the U.S. has described the non-military biological labs it has supported in Ukraine since the 1990’s, including one called the “Biological Threat Reduction Program” that was created to disassemble the former Soviet Union’s programs, to “reduce legacy threats from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons left in the Soviet Union’s successor states.”

One key facility that Russian allegations have long focused on remains the Virology Reference Laboratory in Kiev. The lab says they get regularly inspected by a World Health Organization team, and further that after the Russian invasion started, and bombs started falling, they destroyed “particularly dangerous biological strains they had in storage,” according to the lab’s director as quoted in CBS.

Russia and China have pointed out that Congressional testimony from earlier in the war by US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland was particularly damning and is confirmation that US-backed research into deadly pathogens at Ukrainian facilities was happening.

Daily reminder that yes, Victoria Nuland actually said all these things about biolabs pic.twitter.com/5Otnh90vPa

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 22, 2022

As for China, during the same month that Nuland gave her testimony (in March), Beijing demanded that the Biden administration “give a full account of its biological military activities at home and abroad and subject itself to multilateral verification.”

In response, the US has consistently rejected the allegations as a “conspiracy theory” with US officials meeting with Chinese counterparts in Rome at a previous bilateral meeting being “shocked” at the assertions.

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***

Whichever of these three courses of action they choose to go through with, there’s no denying that the strategic inertia is decisively against The Establishment’s elite echelons, who already lost their Hybrid War/Fifth Generational War (5GW) against the Pakistani people. They can either go with the flow by finally allowing the masses to democratically choose their leader, or temporarily delay this inevitability by continuing to conspire against them or even literally risking a civil conflict by directly attacking them.

State-Sponsored Threats

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was ousted through a US-orchestrated post-modern coup in early spring as punishment for his independent foreign policy, narrowly survived an assassination attempt on Thursday. He was leading his promised Long March from Lahore to Islamabad along with thousands of his supporters to demand free and fair elections as early as possible. Prior to the former premier setting off, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah threatened to “hang him upside down.”

Defaming The Former Premier

It’s little wonder then that the most popular political figure in Pakistan, whose party continues to sweep every by-election that they’ve participated in since April, blamed Sanaullah, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and Chief of ISI’s Counter-Intelligence Major General Faisal Naseer for trying to kill him. The first already telegraphed his intentions in the prior example and others, the second has an obvious stake in stopping his opponent, and the third was evidently ordered to carry out this dirty deed.

Outside observers might wonder why the head of the country’s counter-intelligence would be tasked with this but it actually makes sense from the perspective through which The Establishment – which is Pakistani parlance for this state’s powerful military-intelligence services – regards the former premier. The weaponized information warfare narrative that its elite echelons have encouraged their media and political proxies to gaslight the public into believing over the past half-year is that he’s a “terrorist”.

After all, Imran Khan was ridiculously charged under the country’s “Anti-Terrorism Act” after announcing his intent to file court cases against those officials who he alleged had abused one of his top aides in custody. The Establishment’s elite echelons have attempted to frame the former premier as a so-called “anti-state extremist” who’s allegedly conspiring to “incite mutiny” and is “defaming” state institutions. These lies were invented simply because he’s actively seeks to reverse this spring’s regime change.

From Fake News To A Failed Assassination

To be absolutely clear, Imran Khan envisages doing this through purely peaceful and political means connected to his country’s constitutional processes, not through violence, terrorism, or disinformation. All that he and his tens of millions of patriotic supporters demand is free and fair elections as early as possible so that the Pakistani people themselves can directly decide who they want to lead them. This noble goal perfectly aligns with the purest democratic principles, yet that’s precisely why he’s a “threat”.

Those domestic collaborators who colluded with the US to overthrow the former premier know fully well how unpopular their post-modern coup is, which is why they’ve had to resort to increasingly despotic, dictatorial, and ultimately dystopian means to cling to power. Free and fair elections as early as possible would reverse the regime change against Imran Khan, after which the conspirators would likely be out of a job at best or prosecuted at worst if they don’t flee abroad first.

After having lost complete control of the country’s socio-political (soft security) dynamics as a result of the post-modern coup that they helped carry out and everything that unfolded afterwards, The Establishment’s elite echelons panicked and thus decided to eliminate Imran Khan. They could have presumably sought to cut some sort of deal with him for ensuring their early retirement with amnesty in exchange for holding free and fair elections as early as possible but probably feared the US’ reaction.

Martial Law Motives

It shouldn’t be forgotten that those who were responsible for this regime change, which includes The Establishment’s elite echelons who infamously remained “neutral” and thus “passively facilitated” it, are politically (and possibly economically) indebted to the US. Complying with the former premier’s demand without first receiving the US’ approval – which could in theory have been granted if it decided to cut its losses with early elections instead of risk Pakistan’s destabilization – might be very dangerous.

That’s not to excuse their attempt to assassinate him but simply to explain their likely thought process. In any case, the decision was made to eliminate Imran Khan once he commenced his promised Long March since The Establishment’s elite echelons expected that the only other way to stop it would be to order the use of lethal force against those thousands of peaceful protesters once they entered the capital. The resultant bloodshed would have prompted martial law and led to international isolation.

Of course, the obvious recourse would simply have been to have their political proxies organize free and fair elections as early as possible as the most responsible pressure valve, but this wasn’t ever seriously considered for the earlier mentioned reasons. Moving along, The Establishment’s elite echelons expected that the former premier would be successfully assassinated, after which his supporters would predictably riot and thus create the pretext for imposing martial law without international isolation.

In other words, the decision was already made to formally reimpose military rule over Pakistan in order to prevent free and fair elections from being held as early as possible, though The Establishment’s elite echelons needed to craft a so-called “publicly plausible” pretext first. Absent that, and especially in the event that the Long March reached the capital and thus resulted in them ordering the use of lethal force against peaceful protesters, there’d be international isolation and possibly even sanctions.

The Three Most Likely Scenarios

The “solution” was to organize the former premier’s assassination, blame it on a “lone wolf” patsy, impose martial law in response to his supporters predictably rioting afterwards, and then possibly even outlaw his party on the false basis that they’re supposedly “anti-state extremists”. This plot failed by a stroke of luck, which now places The Establishment’s elite echelon in a dilemma since they lost their only chance at manufacturing the pretext for imposing martial law without international consequences.

Their dirty game was exposed and the entire world now suspects that something foul is afoot since the sequence of events that everyone expected to transpire in the event that this assassination plot succeeded is obvious to all objective observers. Since Imran Khan survived and promised that his Long March to Islamabad will continue no matter what, The Establishment’s elite echelons are now forced into a zugzwang, which refers to a situation in chess where all possible moves are disadvantageous.

They can either finally do the politically right thing by having their proxies organize free and fair elections as early as possible (though at the expense of their self-interests as was previously explained); try to concoct another clearly manufactured pretext for imposing martial law (though this time possibly with international consequences since everyone is now aware of their intentions); or just outright “go rogue” by using lethal force against the peaceful protesters after no longer giving a damn what happens.

The Establishment’s Elite Echelons Already Lost (Even If They Don’t Know It Yet)

Whichever of these three courses of action they choose to go through with, there’s no denying that the strategic inertia is decisively against The Establishment’s elite echelons, who already lost their Hybrid War/Fifth Generational War (5GW) against the Pakistani people. They can either go with the flow by finally allowing the masses to democratically choose their leader, or temporarily delay this inevitability by continuing to conspire against them or even literally risking a civil conflict by directly attacking them.

In any case, The Establishment’s elite echelons have lost all legitimacy after their unsuccessful assassination plot against Imran Khan. The battle for hearts and minds is over after having been decisively won by the former premier and his supporters, who pushed their foreign-backed institutional opponents into the corner through their peaceful political protests and thus caused them to overreact by practically declaring war on the same 220+ million people who they’re supposed to represent.

The best-case scenario is that those among The Establishment’s elite echelons who are responsible for this egregious violation of the people’s trust, which indisputably crossed the latter’s red line, accept their defeat by allowing democracy to prevail without continuing to try to dangerously obstruct it in vain. No sincerely patriotic member of The Establishment would risk throwing Pakistan into pandemonium by continuing to conspire against its people, let alone seriously countenance waging war against them.

Concluding Thoughts

Pakistan is literally in the throes of a peaceful political revolution led by grassroots patriots who want to liberate their beloved country from the foreign yoke that’s been imposed upon it since the US-orchestrated post-modern coup. Those elite members of The Establishment who are responsible for that regime change and all that came afterwards, especially the attempted assassination of Imran Khan, need to do the right thing in order to save the same country that they dedicated their lives to serving.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

An Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) is the formal procedure for negotiating amendments to the founding treaties of the EU. Under the treaties, an IGC is called into being by the European Council and is composed of representatives of the Member States, with the European Commission, and to a lesser degree the European Parliament which as well is having participants.[i]

However, the functioning of the IGC has long been provided by a real leader of the EU which is a Franco-German axis although its strength has historically varied and its nature seems to be changing. This did not differ much in the case of the 2002 Convention on the Future of Europe, partly because it did not replace the IGC as an institution and, in fact, it took place in the shadow of the following IGC, i.e., the veto power of the Member States.

It is, therefore, no surprise that the bargaining space, i.e., the set of settlements potentially acceptable to the Convention on the Future of Europe, was bounded by the positions and bottom lines of the most powerful Member States and that the very salient issues were firmly kept under their control. Once concrete issues were put on the table, the representatives of the national Governments loyally defended their interests – as did most of the national MPs nominated by the Governments. By the autumn of 2002, they started to build coalitions and invoke their veto in the pending IGC. The other members, anticipating the IGC, adapted their behavior to this constraint.

Not only did the Member States take the lead, but at the same time, the MPs were largely ineffective. The political parties were unable to develop coherent visions and positions, except in a few specific instances, for example, related to symbolic ideological gains (ex. the “social market economy” for the socialists). But the big parties only had a superficial unity and on most issues were unable to overcome their divisions and build coalitions beyond the status quo. For most representatives, the party’s political or component identity was not the primary determinant of their positions in the Convention on the Future of Europe. They saw the role of the party’s groups as channels to exchange information rather than forums to coordinate positions.

Thus, the Convention on the Future of Europe was overall – particularly in institutional and policy issues – not radically different from the IGC and much of its end-game was dominated by the kind of hegemonic compromises that have characterized EU politics since its inception.

The Franco-German “Dual EU’s Presidency”

The Franco-German compromise was put forward by the two countries on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of their bilateral friendship (Élysée) treaty in January 2003. Shortly before presenting their joint institutional proposals, in October 2002, France and Germany replaced their Government representatives with their Foreign Ministers increasing their political weight in the Convention on the Future of Europe. Germany did not defend the rotating Presidency but sought to strengthen the power of the European Commission. Although the Franco-German compromise was not formally put on the agenda of the Convention on the Future of Europe it generated widespread opposition and immediately became a focal point for subsequent debates. The contribution included the controversial creation of what became referred to as a “Dual EU’s Presidency” with a permanent European Council, the President elected from amongst its members, and a directly elected Commission President by the EP. The permanent Chairs would also be created for Foreign Affairs, Ecofin, the Eurogroup, and Justice and Home Affairs (the JHA).

From the outset, France and Germany relied upon a number of resources that were instrumental in turning their proposal into the focal point. First and most importantly, they found a crucial ally in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (the President of France in 1974−1981) who reacted favorably calling their compromise “a positive proposal [that is] going in the right direction (…) guaranteeing the stability of EU’s institutions”. He was personally much closer to the Franco-German compromise than to the Benelux proposals and sensitive to the British position which – while supporting the permanent European Council Presidency – was initially skeptical about the election of the European Commission President.

His detractors recalled the fact that he had become the Chair of the Convention on the Future of Europe on the insistence of J. Chirac, T. Blair, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. In addition, he “created” the European Council in 1974 and would, therefore, naturally want to make it the apex of the European system. They pointed out, furthermore, that this dual presidency set-up resembled the peculiar French political system in which the President is the “leader of the nation” and the “ultimate arbitrator of the national interest”, while the Prime Minister heads the Government. Finally, they argued that his two foremost goals have been to support the claims of big countries and to weaken the European Commission. His defenders, in turn, retort that this only appeared to be the case because he tried to ensure that “his” Constitution would not be radically altered by the IGC, and therefore the most powerful Member States. Whatever the motivation, at some point before the official tabling of the draft articles on institutions, he chose to take sides and support the idea of a permanent European Council Presidency.

V. Giscard’s and the Presidium’s support were crucial because its composition, functions, procedural control, and operating style gave it the necessary legitimacy and influence to shape the outcome of the Convention on the Future of Europe. V. Giscard had ample room for maneuvering. During the first three months, the members were invited to present their views on the EU and listen to civil society associations. On this basis, V. Giscard presented what he called an issue-specific “synthesis” reducing the scope of the discussion, and set up working groups on controversial topics to study the subject in-depth. Finally, after the reports of the working groups had been discussed in plenary sessions, the Presidium presented actual draft articles to the Convention on the Future of Europe which was supposed to mirror the substance of working group reports and reactions of the plenary sessions. Members then suggested amendments leading to revised proposals by the Presidium. But, crucially, while the Convention on the Future of Europe was supposed to remain sovereign in this process, the Presidium acted as the interpreter of the dominant view and was the sole drafter of the actual text presented to the floor. V. Giscard fully exploited his formal and informal powers assuming the major directing and leadership role. As D. Allen finds, he

“monopolized reporting of the work of the Convention to both Member States and the public”, “it was usually Giscard’s or Kerr’s summary of proceedings that formed the ongoing basis for further negotiation”, and he cleverly “created controversies (…) or negotiating positions that were designed to be conceded in return for consensus on more important items”.[ii]

In fact, it was V. Giscard who determined that no voting would take place in the Convention on the Future of Europe, that a single text would be agreed upon rather than options proposed, how consensus and the majority were to be defined, and when a consensus existed. This gave him much leverage to steer the result toward his most preferred option. Crucially, as his definition of consensus rested essentially on the Member States’ population size rather than the number of the Member States, the Franco-German compromise guaranteed a dominant position in the drafting process.

Support of a permanent European Council President

The UK’s and Spain’s support of a permanent European Council President (they advocated an even stronger President than the Franco-German compromise did) was a second key resource. In addition, Italy supported a strong “Mr. Europe”.[iii] Once onboard, the countries which supported the idea of a permanent Presidency represented the largest part of the European population – as V. Giscard pointed out in various interviews. Before the plenary, he argued that the EU now comprised three categories of states:

1. The four largest ones, with a population of more than forty million inhabitants each, together, amount to 74% of the EU population.
2. Eight medium-sized countries, with a population between 8 and 16 million people each, represent 19% of the population.
3. 11 small states, together, only include 7% of the population.

Some weeks later, at the Athens European Council, he explicitly drew the consequences of this analysis: since those who reject the idea of a permanent President for the European Council only represent a quarter of the EU’s total population, they should not be allowed to prevent the formation of a consensus (which in V. Giscard’s mind seemed to mean a very large majority). With such an argument, V. Giscard contradicted the principle of equality among conventioneers he had supported so far.[iv]

It is also noteworthy that Spain was amongst the Presidium’s three Government representatives. So was Denmark, which was the only country not to join the small country camp in their defense of the rotating Presidency. In addition, it proved difficult for the small to split the big country coalition promoting the permanent Presidency. Thus, the big country camp remained strong – the only wedge appeared on the European Commission’s composition when Spain and Poland, joined quietly by some new members, started waging a “give Nice a chance” campaign towards the end. This position later explained the difficulties of the IGC and the failure of the December 2003 Brussels Summit.

A third resource on which the Franco-German axis could rely was its past reputation and legitimacy. As F. Cameron argues, the EU as a whole has usually reaped beneficial results from the Franco-German initiatives – a prominent example being the European Monetary Union (the EMU).[v] Particularly, Germany had in the past frequently defended small state interests and the legitimacy of the Franco-German compromise was enhanced as – apart from the Presidency – it contained important elements that were in line with small state suggestions. The election of the European Commission President by the European Parliament, for example, reflected Benelux’s suggestions and had broad support in the Convention on the Future of Europe. Crucially, the British position evolved in this regard. Apparently, its traditional opposition to replacing the European Commission’s President chosen by the Member States with an elected one could be traded off against the “strategic prize” of a stronger leader representing EU’s Governments on the world stage. As Peter Hain, the British Government’s representative put it to his Parliament:

“in the end, there will have to be an agreement and a necessary process of adjustment by all parties. We have, for example, been willing to look at, with certain very big safeguards, electing the Commission President through some method, provided that does not involve being hostage to a particular political faction and provided that the outcome is one that the Council can accept. So it is not something we sought and we remain deeply skeptical about it, but if, as part of the end game, getting an elected President of the Council, which is very much a priority for us, involves doing something with the Commission President with those very important safeguards that I mentioned, then that is something that we might have to adjust to”.[vi]

Moreover, a consensus had emerged on the double-hatted Foreign Affairs Minister as included in the Franco-German proposal and supported in the autumn by a narrow majority in plenary even if the precise division of tasks (in particular in terms of external representation) between the European Council’s President and the proposed European Foreign Minister in charge of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy were unclear under the Franco-German plan and remained so in the Convention on the Future of Europe’s draft treaty.

Conclusion

To sum up, the strategy on which France and Germany relied was fourfold:

1. Uniting their resources to provide direction in the Convention over the EU’s future institutional set-up.
2. Fully exploiting its positional resources such as access to and support by the Convention’s Chairman and its Presidium in order to move its proposal into the dominant position.
3. Bringing the UK and Spain on their side.
4. Inducing the smalls to make concessions on the permanent Presidency in return for an elected European Commission President and the Minister of European Foreign Affairs.

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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.

Notes

[i] Wikipedia.

[ii] D. Allen, “The Convention and the Draft Constitutional Treaty”, F. Cameron (ed.), The Future of Europe, London: Routledge, 2004.

[iii] The Guardian, January 24^th, 2003.

[iv] About the general issue of the European politics, see more in [Maria Green Cowles, Michael Smith, The State of the European Union, 2000].

[v] F. Cameron (ed.), The Future of Europe, London: Routledge, 2004, 12.

[vi] Peter Hain, Interview in the European Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, March 25^th, 2003.

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Hospitals around the U.S. are suddenly struggling to keep up with surging rates of respiratory infections among children, such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), COVID, rhinoviruses and influenza

Moderna is working on an mRNA jab for RSV, which is scheduled for release in 2023. They’re also working on a combination mRNA jab for COVID, RSV and the flu

Censored scientists and doctors have long warned that the mRNA COVID jabs are destroying people’s immune systems, and that we’re going to see an avalanche of infections as immune system failure sets in

The COVID jab causes innate immune suppression, which makes you more susceptible to all kinds of infections and chronic diseases. Suppression of Type 1 interferon signaling appears to be one of the primary mechanisms by which the shot destroys immune competence, and repeated booster shots can reliably be anticipated to amplify adverse effects

The more shots you get, the more likely you are to die from COVID. While only 34% of Canadians have received three or four doses of the COVID jab, triple and quadruple jabbed made up 81% of all COVID deaths in June 2022. Excess mortality among young children, teens and young adults is also skyrocketing

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Hospitals around the U.S. are suddenly struggling to keep up with surging rates of respiratory infections among children, such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV),¹ COVID, rhinoviruses and influenza.² Hospital staff feign confusion, saying they have no idea what’s going on.

Meanwhile, censored scientists and doctors have long warned that the mRNA COVID jabs are destroying people’s immune systems, and that we’re going to see an avalanche of infections as immune system failure sets in.

Many Hospitals at or Near Capacity

As of the third week of October 2022, several children’s hospitals in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Connecticut and Virginia reported being at or near capacity.³ To expand capacity, officials in Hartford, Connecticut, are seeking help from the National Guard and FEMA.

According to Dr. Margaret R. Moon, co-director of Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, the hospital “is experiencing a surge of patients due to an increase in cases of RSV, as well as other reasons, and many surrounding hospitals are facing the same.”⁴

RSV typically causes mild cold-like symptoms that last for a week or two. While harmless in adults, in infants the virus can cause more severe infections such as bronchiolitis (inflammation of the smaller branches of the bronchial airways) and pneumonia.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data,⁵ 58,000 children under age 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year, and the CDC’s RSV dashboard⁶ (screenshot below) does show that RSV is acting unseasonably. Could this out-of-season emergence of RSV have something to do with the fact that the Food and Drug Administration authorized the COVID shot for children under 5 in June 2022?⁷

Maybe, maybe not. It’s not a clear parallel, as RSV also rose out of season during the summer of 2021, when young children did not yet have access to the COVID shot. Parents and older siblings, however, were eligible, and there are still many open questions surrounding the issue of shedding. It’s possible that spike protein shedding from the shots were affecting younger children, suppressing their immune systems.

mRNA RSV Jab in the Works

Considering hospitalization rates for RSV are actually lower than historical seasonal highs, one also wonders whether the media’s attention on RSV might be related to the fact that Moderna is working on an mRNA jab for RSV, which is scheduled for release in 2023.⁸

They’re also working on a combination mRNA jab for COVID, RSV and the flu. Ultimately, Moderna wants to create an annual mRNA shot that covers all of the top 10 viruses that result in hospitalizations each year.⁹ If the COVID shot is any indication, such an injection could be catastrophic.

COVID Jab Causes Innate Immune Suppression

There’s now ample evidence showing the COVID jab causes innate immune suppression, which makes you more susceptible to all kinds of infection, not just COVID, as well as any number of chronic diseases.

In June 2022, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., Dr. Greg Nigh, Dr. Anthony Kyriakopoulos and Dr. Peter McCullough published a paper¹⁰ in Food and Chemical Toxicology, reviewing the mechanisms by which the shots suppress immune function and trigger disease. As noted in the abstract:¹¹

“The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent. The many alterations in the vaccine mRNA hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein. However, the immune response to the vaccine is very different from that to a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health.

Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites.

We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis.”

Suppression of Type 1 interferon signaling appears to be one of the primary mechanisms by which the shot suppresses and destroys immune competence, and repeated booster shots can reliably be anticipated to amplify any and all adverse effects.

Type 1 Interferon Suppression Is a Recipe for Ill Health

Type 1 interferon plays an important role in the immune response to viral infections, cancer and autoimmune diseases. So, the fact that we’re now seeing significant increases in all of these conditions is not surprising.

When a cell is invaded by a virus, it releases Type 1 interferon alpha and Type 1 interferon beta. They act as signaling molecules that tell the cell that it’s been infected. That, in turn, launches the immune response and gets it going early in the viral infection. It’s been shown that people who end up with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection have a compromised Type 1 interferon response. Those who get the jab have an even more suppressed response.

Importantly, the antibody response you get from the COVID shot is exponentially higher than what you get from natural infection, and the level of antibody response rises with disease severity. So, the shot basically mimics severe infection, and this is why boosters can spell disaster.

If your Type 1 interferon response is already deficient, your immune cells are not very capable at stopping the spread of a virus in your body. Hence, the more shots you get, and the more your Type 1 interferon response is impaired, the more likely you become to develop severe infections, be it COVID or any other infection. This also means that you’re more likely to die, and rising excess mortality statistics, which I’ll review in a moment, confirm this.

Type 1 interferon also keeps latent viruses like herpes and varicella (which causes shingles) viruses in check, and when your interferon pathway is suppressed, these latent viruses can also start to emerge. And, indeed, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database reveals many who have been jabbed do report these kinds of infections.

Don’t Be Fooled by ‘Reframing’ Efforts

Disturbingly, researchers and mainstream media are still pushing the idea that COVID shot side effects are a sign that the shot is working well. As reported by CNN October 24, 2022:¹²

“People who reported experiencing side effects to the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines such as fever, chills or muscle pain tended to have a greater antibody response following vaccination, according to new research.

Having such symptoms after vaccination is associated with greater antibody responses compared with having only pain or rash at the injection site or no symptoms at all, suggests the paper published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open.¹³

‘In conclusion, these findings support reframing postvaccination symptoms as signals of vaccine effectiveness and reinforce guidelines for vaccine boosters in older adults,’ the researchers … wrote in their paper.”

To be clear, feeling terrible after your COVID shot is not to be taken as evidence that the shot is providing you with protection. What you’re experiencing is akin to having severe COVID. The shot is suppressing your Type 1 interferon, and continuing with additional jabs is a recipe for ill health. It’s just that simple.

As suggested in that JAMA article, they really want to “reframe postvaccination symptoms” to stop people from reconsidering the wisdom of taking subsequent jabs, but don’t fall for it. You’re feeling terrible because your body is being harmed.

The More Shots You Get, the More Likely You’ll Die of COVID

As noted by Dr. Charles Hoffe in a September 15, 2022, interview with Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson, “The more shots you get, the more likely you will die from COVID-19.” An excerpt from the interview is included above. You can find the full interview on Bitchute.¹⁴

According to the latest data from Canada, summarized by Hoffe, 85% of Canadians have received at least two COVID shots, and in June 2022, 92% of all COVID deaths were in fully jabbed individuals. And, while only 34% of Canadians had received three or four doses, they made up 81% of all COVID deaths in the month of June.

“This is the clearest evidence that the more shots you have, the more likely you will die of COVID,” Hoffe said. “These [shots] are severely damaging the immune system. And so, the discrimination against those who have chosen to be vaxx free is absolutely absurd because those are the people who are going to survive.”

Youths Are Dying at Frightening Rates

In the video above, nurse educator John Campbell, Ph.D., reviews the latest U.K. and U.S. data on excess deaths in the young. The U.K. is now seeing 20 to 30 excess deaths per week in the age group of birth to 24.

Excess deaths are also statistically higher in the U.S. than expected. For the age group of birth to 24, cumulative all-cause excess deaths was 16,747 as of week 35. The screenshot below, from USmortality.com,¹⁵ illustrates how the cumulative excess deaths among our children, teens and young adults have skyrocketed since June 2020.

Recall the FDA authorized the first COVID shot December 11, 2020, for individuals aged 16 years and older.¹⁶ If the excess deaths from June through December were related to COVID, the shots certainly have NOT improved the situation or made youths less likely to die. Quite the contrary.

Excess deaths among all age groups follows a similar but more step-like rise.

Medical Abuse of Women and Children Is Rampant

The medical system has mistreated and abused infants for decades, forcing a number of completely useless and harmful interventions on them. Antibiotic eye treatment¹⁷ and the hepatitis B vaccine,¹⁸ both administered on the day of birth, are but two examples. The fact that U.S. child mortality ranks¹⁹ worst among the 20 wealthiest nations speaks to the effects of all this medial mistreatment and overtreatment of infants.

The U.S. also has the highest maternal death rate in the developed world,²⁰ and according to medial investigators, 84% of all these maternal deaths are preventable.²¹ Clearly, we’re doing a lot of things wrong.

CDC Takes Child Abuse to a Whole New Level

With its decision to add COVID shots to the U.S. childhood, adolescent and adult vaccine schedules,²² the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking the abuse of infants and pregnant women to a whole new level. As reported by The Defender:²³

“Commenting on [the CDC’s unanimous] vote, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of the board and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said:

‘This reckless action is final proof of the cynicism, corruption and capture of a once exemplary public health agency. ACIP members have again demonstrated that fealty to their pharma overlords eclipses any residual concerns they may harbor for child welfare or public health. This is an act of child abuse on a massive scale’ …

[A]dding the COVID-19 vaccines means 18 more shots — one per year between the ages of 6 months and 18 years — will be added to the schedule, according to Toby Rogers, Ph.D.

‘So overnight the childhood schedule would go from 54 injections (72 antigens because of combined shots like MMR) to 72 injections (90 antigens),’ Rogers said. ‘This has absolutely nothing to do with health — it’s all about profit and power’ …

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., told The Defender, ‘Given the high risk of vaccine injury for a product that provides little or no benefit to children, this represents a criminal enterprise solely to ensure a revenue stream for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers’ …

As of Oct. 7 [2022], the VAERS data for 6-month-olds to 5-year-olds who received a COVID-19 vaccine showed reports of 4,279 adverse events, including 182 cases rated as serious and 7 reported deaths. For 5- to 11-year-olds, there were 14,622 reports of adverse events, including 692 rated as serious and 29 reported deaths.”

Can Children Survive This Many mRNA Shots?

The following COVID-19 jab recommendations will go into effect in 2023:

• Age 6 months to 4 years — a two-dose primary series for Moderna, or a three-dose primary series for Pfizer, plus an annual booster
• Age 5 to 11 years — a two-dose series of either Moderna or Pfizer plus an annual booster
• Age 12 to 18 years — a two-dose series for Moderna, Novavax or Pfizer plus an annual booster

For children with moderately or severely compromised immune systems, the recommended primary series is increased from a two-dose series to a three-dose series, which is madness heaped upon insanity. I really don’t see how young children will get through their primary education alive if they have to take annual boosters on top of a primary series.

Rules Upended for Vaccine Injury Compensation

Adding insult to injury, while the COVID jab makers get a permanent liability shield through the addition of the jabs to the childhood vaccination schedule, those injured by these mRNA shots will not get compensation through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which covers nearly every other vaccine on the schedule. The Defender explains:²⁴

“Vaccine makers are not liable for injuries or deaths associated with EUA [emergency use authorized] vaccines but can be held liable for injuries caused by a fully licensed vaccine — unless that vaccine is added to the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule.

Parents of children injured by vaccines listed on the childhood schedule typically can seek compensation through the taxpayer-funded National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury claims.

However, the revisions voted on today by the committee explicitly state²⁵ (slide 24) that the newly added … COVID-19 vaccines are not covered under the VICP.

Instead, the COVID-19 vaccines added to the childhood schedule will remain covered by the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). To date, only six claims filed with the CICP have been approved for compensation.”

In closing, if you care about your children, do not allow them to be injected with these immune-destroying shots. If you’re still on the fence, please read the cited paper by Seneff, Nigh, Kyriakopoulos and McCullough,²⁶ to get an understanding of how these shots can utterly decimate your child’s health.

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Notes

¹ NPR October 24, 2022

² Axios October 21, 2022

^3, 4 DCist October 20, 2022

⁵ CDC RSV Trends

⁶ CDC RSV Interactive Dashboard, Screenshot grabbed October 26, 2022

⁷ CNN June 20, 2022

⁸ World Economic Forum, COVID-19: What’s Next? January 17, 2022, 6:25

⁹ CNBC January 10, 2022

^10, 11, 26 Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022; 164: 113008

¹² CNN October 24, 2022

¹³ JAMA Network Open October 21, 2022; 5(10): e2237908

¹⁴ Bitchute Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson September 15, 2022

¹⁵ US Mortality Weekly All-Cause Excess Deaths, Cumulative

¹⁶ Immunize.org Historical Vaccine Timeline

¹⁷ CBC March 20, 2015

¹⁸ Medical News Today March 28, 2022

¹⁹ CNN January 8, 2018

²⁰ NPR May 12, 2017

²¹ NPR October 21, 2022

²² Rumble October 20, 2022

^23, 24 The Defender October 20, 2022

²⁵ CDC ACIP Meeting October 20, 2022

Featured image is from Xavier Donat

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Russia’s ambassador insists he has evidence of UK aiding a Ukrainian drone attack on Putin’s fleet in Black Sea

Diplomat Andrei Kelin has said Britain is involved ‘too deep’ in the Ukraine War and warns of consequences

Russia said it lodged a ‘strong protest’ over Nord Stream and Black Sea attacks which it accuses UK of aiding 

Britain denies direct attacks on Russia as ‘false claims on an epic scale’ but is open about support for Ukraine

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The UK is ‘too deep’ in the Ukraine war, Russia‘s ambassador warned – while insisting that Putin will not use nuclear weapons in an attack despite a series of thinly veiled threats.

Diplomat Andrei Kelin alleges he has evidence of UK special forces’ participation in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which he claims to have passed on to his UK counterpart.

Speaking to Sky News‘ Mark Austin, Mr Kelin said:

‘We perfectly know about the participation of British specialists in [the] training, preparation and execution of violence against the Russian infrastructure and the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. We know that it has been done.’

Mr Kelin told media that the evidence will be made public ‘pretty soon’.

He said:

‘It is dangerous because it escalates the situation. It can bring us up to the line of… I won’t say “no return”, because return is always possible. But anyway, we should avoid escalation.

‘And this is a warning actually that Britain is too deep in this conflict. It means the situation is becoming more and more dangerous.’

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Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich, a mother and grandmother from Medicine Hat, explained why she got involved in the protest movement during her Nov. 3 testimony at the public inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act to end convoy protests earlier this year.

“I was growing increasingly alarmed with the mandates and the harm that I was seeing the mandates inflict,” said Lich, who got emotional several times during her testimony. “I heard from families that were living in their vehicles because they’d lost their jobs. I heard from people that had lost their jobs and lost everything. I have the tears of thousands of Canadians on my shoulder, who everyday told me that we were bringing them hope.”

Lich said she saw families torn apart due to COVID-19 policies.

“The suicides in my hometown were so numerous that they stopped reporting them,” she said. “Elderly people were dying by themselves in long-term care facilities and saying goodbye over iPads.”

Lich explained how the policies impacted herself and her family members as well. She said both herself and her husband lost their jobs due to COVID-19 policies, and her parents, who run a trucking business, could no longer cross the border.

Lich added that vaccine passports restricted many Canadians who decided against getting COVID-19 shots from entering any non-essential business, which meant she “didn’t go out.”

A protester holds a sign on Wellington St. during the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa on Feb. 12, 2022. (Noé Chartier/The Epoch Times)

She said her 94-year-old grandmother was “locked” in her apartment by herself for two years, and by the time lockdowns were lifted her grandmother “wasn’t healthy enough” to do things. She also said that her father, who lives in a small town in Saskatchewan, used to go to a local restaurant for coffee every day to see his friends, but “was asked to leave,” presumably referring to vaccine mandates that barred unvaccinated Canadians from non-essential business.

Lich said she didn’t want her children and grandchildren to live in a world like this.

“I listened to my prime minister call me a racist, and say that [people like me] shouldn’t be tolerated. I found his rhetoric to be incredibly divisive,” she said. “I’m a believer, that if you’re a leader of a country, you have to lead all of your people, even if you don’t agree with them.”

Freedom Convoy

The Freedom Convoy protest started as a demonstration against COVID-19 vaccine mandates for truckers travelling across the Canada-U.S. border. But it grew to a larger movement as people against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions joined the cause.

Lich said in her testimony that as the convoy travelled across Canada, many people offered them support.

“They said don’t stop until we are free. Don’t stop until the mandates are lifted,” she said.

When their GoFundMe campaign raised the first $1 million, Lich said she was “exhilarated.” She said she never expected that level of support, but with it, came responsibility that caused her overwhelming anxiety.

She told the commission—to some chuckles from the room—that her previous fundraising experience consisted of “selling chocolate-covered almonds.”

The convoy’s fundraising campaign on GoFundMe gathered over $10 million before it was shut down by the platform. The group raised the same amount of funds on GiveSendGo, but the funds were frozen by a court order.

Protesters stand on the back of a truck during the Freedom Convoy demonstrations against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other restrictions on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Jan. 29, 2022. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Lich, who was formerly part of the Maverick Party which calls for Western autonomy, says she didn’t want to be part of the movement anymore after bonding with people from different parts of Canada during the protest in Ottawa.

She said one day while in Ottawa, as she was talking with some protest organizers from Quebec through Google Translate, she realized “that they’re the same as us.”

“This division has all been a lie,” she said. “I knew that I didn’t want to see Canada divided at that point.”

Arrest

The Public Order Emergency Commission has been set up as required by law to evaluate if the use of the Emergencies Act to clear convoy protests was justified.

The act was invoked by the federal government on Feb. 14, and revoked on Feb. 23 after the protest in Ottawa was cleared.

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At this point, where Gallup Pakistan is reporting more than a 90% popularity rating for Imran Khan in the country, both the traditional mafioso-style corrupt dynastic political parties as well as significant sections of the military high command see Khan’s assassination as the only solution.

There is no doubt in people’s minds that Gen. Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff, and his highly unusual visit to Washington weeks before his retirement gives every indication that the US has also put pressure on Islamabad to get rid of the one irritant in Washington’s ‘New Cold War’ against both China and Russia, but also the Global South more generally – that irritant in Eurasia being Imran Khan.

Sadly, this may only be the first assassination attempt in a series to come. But the sense on the ground is that Khan supporters and/or those who thoroughly despise the traditional ruling civilian and military elites, those who have been out in the streets in the tens of millions for the past few weeks protesting alongside Khan, feel both intense anger and renewed vigor to carry on the struggle. 

–Junaid S. Ahmad, November 4, 2022

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Here is an excerpt from the Reuters’ report, Ousted Pakistan PM Imran Khan shot in shin in what aides call assassination attempt:

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was shot in the shin on Thursday when his anti-government protest convoy came under attack in the east of the country in what his aides said was a clear assassination attempt by his rivals.

Khan, ousted as prime minister in a parliamentary confidence vote in April, was six days into a protest procession bound for Islamabad, standing and waving to thousands of cheering supporters from the roof of a container truck, when the shots rang out.

Several in his convoy were wounded in the attack in Wazirabad, nearly 200 km (120 miles) from the capital. Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said a suspect had been arrested.

“It was a clear assassination attempt. Khan was hit but he’s stable. There was a lot of bleeding,” Fawad Chaudhry, a spokesperson for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, told Reuters.

“If the shooter had not been stopped by people there, the entire PTI leadership would have been wiped out.”

Click here to continue reading.

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No doubt, as president, one of Donald Trump’s more bold steps that thoroughly outraged the medical industrial complex was to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization (WHO). One of Trump’s reasons was due to his disgust with the WHO’s lack of competence in its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The intention to remove itself from the WHO was filed in July 2020; however WHO rules require a year for a nation’s withdrawal to become effective. Sadly, under Joe Biden, the US remains party to and a leader funder of the undemocratically elected global organization.

Earlier in 2022, the proposal for a WHO international Pandemic Treaty has raised alarms over the organization’s usurping the individual sovereignty of nations. The Treaty, which is scheduled to be finalized by May 2024, is largely a result of the WHO’s numerous inconsistencies, inadequacies and failures during the Covid-19 pandemic. If we call a spade a spade, the WHO has proven itself inept in handling any pandemic. Therefore, for the hardened globalists such Bill Gates and the leaders of the US and EU who wholly support the WHO, it makes perfect sense that the bumbling bureaucracy should be given more authority and control over global health.

The Pandemic Treaty would authorize the WHO complete control over both governments’ and civil societies’ internal preparedness over actions and policies to tackle future pandemics. During the Ukraine crisis, we frequently hear Western leaders speak about a “rules based order” in international relations. However, such rules are defined by and primarily serve the interests of those nations at the top of the food chain (i.e. the US, UK and EU).  What the Treaty offers is a new rules based order completely determined by an international organization with a horrible track record of conflicts of interests with the pharmaceutical industry and hegemonic governments and billionaires.

Image is from Dr. Rath Health Foundation

The Treaty would hold every WHO member nation accountable for following the organization’s dictates. On a global scale, all power over dictating the rules for pandemic preparedness would be centralized in the organization. If a nation fails to do so, it can face potential sanctions. The WHO would also be the final arbiter and judge over medical related misinformation that it solely believes undermines public health. As we have witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the WHO was repeatedly wrong about the benefits of face masks and lockdowns, the benefit-risk ratio of the mRNA vaccines — which are now causing more injuries and deaths than the virus — and safe and effective treatments.

No doubt with Bill Gates’ assistance and the US’s and its allies’ intelligence apparatus, the WHO will be responsible for countermeasures against social media critics.  In other words, the organization will be responsible for censorship. It would also have he authority to regulate both domestic and international travel, coordinate vaccination passports, and oversee the digitalization of populations’ health forms and documentation.  In brief, the WHO Pandemic Treaty is the harbinger of a medical dictatorship.

A uniform approach to prevention and treatment of diseases, especially a pandemic, is unquestionably attractive and desirable. This was the original intention of the emergence of “evidence based medicine” (EBM) in the mid 1990s. However, EBM has yet to be proven to be a practical goal. Worse, the rhetoric of EBM has turned into politicalized weapon to silence alternative medical views that challenge the medical authorities that control the narrative.  Consequently during the past decade the EBM theory has come under increasing criticism. Empowering the WHO to be the architect of a single, uniform global structure for administering pandemic responses is a deeply distrubing proposition. There are simply too many glaring reasons and examples for not trusting the WHO to have any control over our lives.  On this account, Donald Trump was precisely correct to remove the US’s membership.

The WHO has become the ultimate international authority for infectious diseases. Due to its widespread acceptance by the world’s national governments, it has assumed the helm to monitor regional and global infectious diseases and dictate medical intervention policies to international health agencies. The organization has become the final word to rule whether the spread of a serious pathogen is a pandemic or not. For the majority of the medical community, the media and the average person, the WHO is the front line command post for medical prevention (i.e., vaccination) and treatment.  Consequently its rulings are often regarded as the gold standard.  On matters of global health, the WHO holds dominance.

Image is from Children’s Health Defense

Prior to mass vaccination campaigns, the WHO propagated the belief that the first line of defense for curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic was lockdowns, self-isolation and distancing. Although it approved Ivermectin as a cost-effective treatment against SARS-CoV-2 infections, it disapproved hydroxychloroquine in favor of Gilead Bioscience’s and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s (NIAID) Anthony Fauci’s novel and costly drug Remdesivir.  Seemingly, much of its funding efforts had been reserved for promoting the new generation of experimental vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, the WHO was deeply allied with the US’s and UK’s national health systems, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and his Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) initiative.

Most people assume wrongly that the WHO acts independently from national and private commercial interests for the welfare of the world’s population. However, its real mission is dubious. The organization has frequently been accused of conflicts of interests with private pharmaceutical companies and mega-philanthropic organizations such as the Gates’ Foundation. It is riddled with political alliances, ideologies, and profiteering motives. Despite the WHO’s infrequent public ridicule of the pharmaceutical industry’s corruption, it is at the same time fully immersed if not actually controlled by those same forces of corruption.  For example, the WHO has stated:

“Corruption in the pharmaceutical sector occurs throughout all stages of the medicine chain, from research and development to dispensing and promotion…. A lack of transparency and accountability within the medicines chain can also contribute to unethical practices and corruption.”

However, these are similar charges that have been leveled against the WHO. An article in the National Review called the WHO “scandal plagued” with “wasteful spending, utter disregard for transparency, pervasive incompetence, and failure to adhere to even basic democratic standards.” In his book, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial, University of Amsterdam professor emeritus Dr. Stuart Blume raises the serious problem of the WHO’s most influential advisors on emergency health conditions, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic and earlier the 2009 H1N1 swine flu scare that never was, serve as consultants for the vaccine industry. During times of global emergencies and crises, the WHO confers with a separate group of advisors outside its formal sitting Strategic Advisory Group of Experts or SAGE; the names of this group’s members are not made public.

The WHO’s level of incompetence has resulted in serious misinformation about pandemics, medical risks of vaccines and other health-threatening chemicals.  For example, during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the organization reported it could not find any evidence of human transmission. However, the WHO also repeatedly kowtowed to China’s demands and unscrupulously accepted whatever statistics and statements the Chinese Communist Party health ministry provided. Responding to a petition signed by over 700,000 signatories demanding the resignation of the current WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso told the Japanese parliament that the organization “should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization” for favoring China’s policy to stall and obstruct international investigations and for lauding unsubstantiated praise on the country’s transparency and handling of the pandemic.

Writing for The Hill, University of Texas at San Antonio professor Bradley Thayer wrote, “Tedros apparently turned a blind eye to what happened in Wuhan and the rest of China and… has helped play down the severity, prevalence and scope of the Covid-19 outbreak.”

Thayer concludes, “Tedros is not fit to lead the WHO.”

He has no formal medical training as a physician or any international management experience in global health. Many others have voiced similar criticisms pointing out Tedro’s unsuitable background.  Moreover, the Director General’s conflicts of interest with China abound. Immediately before and after his tenure as the Health Minister for Ethiopia’s ruling Communist party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, China had donated an estimated $60 million to the terrorist government and its social programs. In 2017, the Washington Post noted the fundamental problem:

“[China] worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help Tedros defeat the United Kingdom candidate for the WHO job, David Nabarro. Tedros’s victory was also a victory for Beijing, whose leader Xi Jinping has made public his goal of flexing China’s muscle in the world.”

Upon assuming his new position at the WHO, Tedros left Ethiopia’s healthcare system in ruin.  As one young healthcare worker reported, there was no “bare necessities of a health care office…. Sterile gloves, paper exam gowns and covers, cotton swabs, gauze, tongue depressors, alcohol prep pads, chemical test strips, suturing equipment, syringes, stethoscopes… were non-existent. This is a fact in most health care centers in Ethiopia.”

During the more recent re-investigation of SARS-2 origins, the Chinese authorities refused to provide raw case data and created repressive conditions to curtail reliable analysis and disclosure. The WHO’s final report concluded that the virus had an animal origin and did not escape Wuhan’s high security pathogen laboratory. But there are viable reasons to discredit the report as untrustworthy at best and perhaps intentionally deceptive.

First, the entire agenda of the investigation was staged theater rather than a deep investigation to uncover empirical evidence. The team simply inspected seafood and open-air markets. Consequently, the WHO team returned empty handed and without laboratory records for a proper forensic examination. To call the entire WHO effort gross incompetence is an understatement. Based upon the evidence, a large number of professional medical voices called the entire investigation a farce.

Most problematic is the appointment of Peter Daszak on the WHO’s group to carry out the investigation. Daszak is the founding president of the shadowy non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance. With the intention to divert attention away from an escaped laboratory virus, Daszak stated on a Going Viral podcast there was no evidential reason to visit and inspect the Wuhan laboratory. According to Independent Science News, despite Daszak’s denial of a lab origin, “EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research, including virus collection, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and thus could themselves be directly implicated in the outbreak.” The research at the Wuhan lab included ‘gain of function” efforts on coronaviruses, and received funds directly approved by Anthony Fauci. Newsweek reported the NIH had given a total of $7.4 million to the Chinese lab for the research. The organization has received over $100 million from a variety of sources, including the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the NIH and undisclosed amounts from the Chinese government. Daszak himself has authored 25 studiesfunded by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, think tanks, universities, military institutions, and ministries directly connected with the Chinese Communist Party.

Vaccine Promotional Misconduct

For many years the WHO’s recommendations for certain vaccines were kept secret. Writing in a 2006 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Marc Girard uncovered “scientific incompetence, misconduct or even criminal malfeasance” over the intentional inflation of vaccines’ benefits while undermining toxicity and adverse effects. Dr. Girard testified as a medical expert before a French court in a criminal trial against the WHO after French health officials obliged the organization to launch its universal Hepatitis B vaccine campaign. The campaign resulted in the deaths of French children. Girard gained access to confidential WHO documents. He noted that the WHO’s “French figures about chronic liver diseases were simply extrapolated from the U.S. reports.” He further accused the WHO serving “merely as a screen for commercial promotion, in particular via the Viral Hepatitis Prevention Board (VHPB), which was created, sponsored, and infiltrated by the manufacturers.”

Now during the Covid-19 pandemic, as early as July 2020, the WHO approved of China’s first vaccine for emergency use, long before it had undergone proper clinical trials and much earlier than Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines’ approval.

Orchestration of Pandemic Panics

Before the current COVID-19 pandemic, there was the H1N1 swine flu scare in 2009. The WHO’s declaration of a pandemic was solely based more on fear mongering than empirical evidence.  The fabrications are believed to have originated from the WHO’s senior consultant on viral outbreaks who happens to carry the reputation of being one of the world’s leading pandemic alarmists: Dr. Albert Osterhaus, nicknamed “Dr. Flu.” At the time, Osterhaus was head of the Department of Virology at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. When the swine flu scare appeared, he was also the president of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), an organization funded by the major vaccine manufacturers including Baxter, MedImmune, Glaxo, Sanofi Pasteur and others. Osterhaus was responsible for transforming an otherwise potentially bad flu season into a global pandemic. The British Medical Journal reported that the WHO failed to report conflicts of interests within its H1N1 advisory group. The journal’s Editor-in-Chief Fiona Godlee wrote, “WHO must act now to restore its credibility, and Europe should legislate.” The former head of the prestigious Cochrane Database Collaboration’s vaccine studies, Dr. Tom Jefferson, told a Der Spiegel interviewer, “the WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies… built this machine around the impending [H1N1] pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence and careers, and entire institutions.” According to a financial forecast published by JP Morgan, the collaboration between the WHO and Osterhaus’s ESWI to orchestrate the pandemic would have profited the pharmaceutical industry up to $10 billion.

In 2010, the EU’s Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe launched an investigation into the evidence that the WHO had created “a fake pandemic” in order to financially benefit the pharmaceutical giants’ vaccine market and to strengthen the influence private drug interests have over the health organization. The Assembly’s chairperson Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg charged the WHO’s fake pandemic as “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century that resulted in “millions being needlessly vaccinated.”

Epidemic of Conflict of Interests

According to former World Bank geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig, about half of the WHO’s budget is derived from private sources — primarily pharmaceutical companies but also other corporate sectors including the telecommunication and agro-chemical industries. It also receives large donations from large philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and GAVI. Twelve years ago, Gates had committed $10 billion to the WHO; after the US, his Foundation is its second largest donor providing 10 percent of its funding.  His financial commitment aligned with his global ambition to “make this the decade of vaccines.” Koenig also believes that Tedros’s appointment was due to Gates’ influence. In fact, Tedros is a former Chair of GAVI’s Vaccine Alliance.

Vaccine Adverse Effects Monitoring System Needs Overhaul

The WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety is responsible for administering vaccine programs in poorer, developing countries. It is also responsible for gathering data on incidents of vaccine injuries. Any deaths following vaccination campaigns are ignored and ruled as coincidental. This policy is based on an erroneous assumption that if no one died during a vaccine’s clinical trials, then the vaccine should be regarded as automatically safe and unrelated to any deaths that might occur later. Consequently, the WHO’s monitoring system is seriously flawed and requires a major overhaul.

One of the more controversial incidences was the WHO’s collaboration with the Bill Gates’ GAVI campaign to launch the Pentavalent vaccine (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, HIP and Hepatitis B) in Africa and later in South and Southeast Asia. In India, health officials recorded upwards to 8,190 additional infant deaths annually following GAVI’s Pentavalent campaign.  The WHO’s response was to reclassify its adverse event reporting system to disregard “infant” deaths altogether. Dr. Jacob Puliyel, a member of India’s  National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization concluded,

“deaths and other serious adverse events following vaccination in the third world, that use WHO-AEFI classification are not recorded in any database for pharmaco-vigilance. It is as if the deaths of children in low (and middle) income countries are of no consequence.”

WHO’s Double Standards of Vaccine Safety

During the WHO’s Global Vaccine Safety Summit convened in December 2019, a scandal erupted.  Days before the summit, one of the WHO’s medical directors for vaccination, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, who is now its chief science officer, appeared in a public advertisement touting the unquestionable safety of vaccines and ridiculing parents who speak out against vaccination. She assured viewers that the WHO was in control of matters and monitored any potential adverse risks carefully. However, during the Summit, Dr. Swaminathan acknowledged vaccine health risks and stated, “We really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems.” Another Summit participant, Dr. Heidi Larson stated,

“We have a very wobbly ‘health professional frontline’ that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. When the frontline professionals are starting to question or they don’t feel like they have enough confidence about the safety to stand up to the person asking the questions. I mean most medical school curriculums, even nursing curriculums, I mean in medical school you are lucky if you have half a day on vaccines.”

Later in September 2021, the Indian Bar Association sued Dr. Swaminathan for misleading the Indian government about Ivermectin to treat SARS-2 infections. The Association accused her of leading a disinformation campaign that resulted in “mass murder.” Covid-19 deaths exploded ten-fold due to Swaminathan’s claims that the drug was ineffective.

WHO’s Depopulation Efforts with Vaccines

Without doubt, the most nefarious activity conducted by the WHO is its alleged support and distribution of vaccines to poorer developing countries that may have been intentionally designed to decrease population rates.  Back in 1989, the WHO sponsored a symposium at its Geneva headquarters on “Antifertility Vaccines and Contraceptive Vaccines.” The symposium presented proposals for vaccines that were later discovered to have been laced with the sterilizing hormones HCG and estradiol; the former prevents pregnancy and triggers spontaneous abortions and miscarriages, and the latter can turn men infertile.

In 2015, the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops reported its discovery of a polio vaccine laced with estradiol that was manufactured in India and distributed by the WHO. A year earlier, Dr. Wahome Ngare from the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association uncovered a tetanus vaccine specifically being administered to women, also distributed by the WHO, that contained the HCG hormone. All of the polio vaccine samples tested contained HCG, estrogen-related compounds, follicle stimulating and luteinizing hormones, which will damage sperm formation in the testes. Even more disturbing, this vaccine was going to be administered to children under five years of age.

This was not the first time the WHO made efforts to use vaccination campaigns for depopulation.  A decade earlier, in 2004, the WHO, UNICIF and CDC launched a vaccination campaign to immunize 74 million African children during a polio outbreak. The initiative encountered a serious obstacle. In Nigeria, laboratory tests on the WHO’s vaccine samples resulted in the presence of estrogen and other female hormones. And in the mid-1990s, a tetanus vaccine being administered to Nicaraguan and Filipino girls and women in their child-bearing years was discovered to contain HCG, which accounted for a large number of spontaneous abortions that were reported by Catholic health workers.

Illegal Vaccine Experiments

In 2014, The Economic Times of India published a report that provided details of a joint venture between the WHO and the Gates Foundation to test an experimental Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine on approximately 16,000 tribal girls between the ages of 9 and 15 unwittingly. The experiment was conducted in 2008; many of the girls, the report states, became ill and some died. This was Merck’s Gardasil vaccine.

The following year the WHO and Gates Foundation conducted a similar experiment on 14,000 girls with Glaxo’s HPV vaccine Cervarix. Again “scores of teenage girls were hospitalized.”  Investigations led by Indian health officials uncovered gross violations in India’s laws regarding medical safety. In numerous cases there was no consent and the children had no idea what they were being vaccinated for. The Indian Supreme Court has taken up a case against the duo for criminal charges.

Over the years the WHO has been engaged in many other questionable and nefarious activities. The above examples argue the case that, at least within the upper echelons of the WHO, global health does not stand in high priority.  The organization employs over 7,000 people around the world and most are dedicated to improving the lives of populations in poor and developing nations. On the other hand, the WHO’s leaders exist solely to benefit the powers of Washington, London, Bill Gates and the pharmaceutical industry by advancing their agendas.

Corruption is systemic throughout global health and national health agencies.  In a 2021 article appearing in The Lancet, Dr. Patricia Garcia wrote,

“Corruption is embedded in health systems. Throughout my life—as a researcher, public health worker, and a Minister of Health—I have been able to see entrenched dishonesty and fraud. But despite being one of the most important barriers to implementing universal health coverage around the world, corruption is rarely openly discussed.”

Bear in mind, the WHO, along with Bill Gates and his Foundation, and Anthony Fauci at the NAIAD, led the effort to get the COVID-19 vaccine administered as quickly as possible. Gates Foundation has given $1.75 billion for developing and distributing these vaccines. Can we trust the WHO’s judgment and intentions to serve global health and the well-being of the world’s citizens.

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

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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A collective of medical doctors and scientific professionals in cooperation with a Réinfo Covid Québec have sent an open letter addressed to the Quebec college of physicians, the public health director, and the Quebec association of pediatricians raising numerous concerns surrounding the mRNA injections for children.

The open letter is specifically addressed to Dr. Luc Boileau (public health director), Dr. Mauril Gaudreault (President of the Quebec college of physicians), and Dr. Marie-Claude Roy (President of the Quebec association of pediatricians) and was signed by 19 medical doctors, researchers and pharmacists.

The letter was produced in collaboration with Réinfo Covid Québec, an arm of an international collective of 4,000 doctors and 80,000 members.

The group describes itself as a collective of caregivers, doctors and citizens gathered around an idea: the need for a fair and proportionate health policy in Quebec and elsewhere in the world.

In short, the Quebec chapter of the collective aims to provide a unified voice for doctors, health care professionals, and citizens to express their concerns and views regarding the Covid-19 pandemic health measures adopted in the province and its consequences – many of which they feel aren’t being equally shared and honestly discussed by traditional media and health authorities.

Though the open letter is quite lengthy and detailed, here are some of the principal contentions held therein [Google translated from French]:

“The principles underlying this text are those found in the Civil Code of Quebec, articles 10 and 11 and of Canada as well as the code of ethics of Quebec physicians. Some fall under the Nuremberg Code.”

“The physician’s personal and unavoidable duty, enshrined in his code of ethics, and from which he cannot escape, requires him to ensure that free and informed consent is obtained from the patient.”

“Free means without threat or constraint and, in the case of an investigational pharmaceutical product, without any promotion.”

“Informed means that the patient receives truthful, factual, complete and clearly expressed information.”

“An experimental product of gene manipulation was presented as a “vaccine like any other”. This product has been presented as a “safe and effective vaccine”.

“If we seek the support of the institutions that are the Public Health Department and the College of Physicians of Quebec (CMQ), it is in order to allow parents in Quebec to make free and informed decisions; decisions which, it should be mentioned, are irreversible.”

“Complete information, which includes all the dangers of a pharmaceutical product, is an unavoidable ethical obligation. What we have found as information communicated to parents in the context of anti-covid vaccines is ethically and scientifically insufficient, hence this text, which aims to better inform them.”

“Censorship that deprives parents of information essential to informed decision-making is unacceptable.”

“This text will also be sent to the media. Journalists or “decryptors” may want to comment on this information. They are free to do so. However, we ask them to disclose their sources and their possible conflicts of interest and to demand the same from all specialists they call to speak publicly as required by the journalistic code of ethics. Nothing less than the lives and health of children in Quebec are at stake.”

“Obligation to inform, Informed consent: Before prescribing or giving a treatment or a drug, the doctor, the government or Public Health, in this case, has an ethical and legal obligation to provide the person with all the information relating to the product concerned. This is an unavoidable duty of physicians and it is also a legal obligation enshrined in the Civil Code of Quebec, articles 10 to 25. This obligation is inspired by the principle of “inviolability of the person” and his “right to the truth”.

“Freedom of choice: The person must have complete freedom to accept or refuse any pharmaceutical product without being rewarded or penalized for their choice. This is true for both adults and children.[1] As the gene vaccine against COVID-19 is an unlicensed experimental product authorized under the guise of public health emergency and which, moreover, has not been adequately tested in animals, there should be no promotion of this product, and, above all, there should be no adverse consequences for anyone who refuses. No pressure should be exerted on the person.[2] (See section 9).”

“Informed choice: no information should be hidden: For the choice to be informed, all available information (potential advantages and disadvantages, risks, uncertainties) must be provided and transmitted in understandable language. However, the highest authorities (Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC) have affirmed that the information on the gene vaccine cannot all be disclosed. In addition, the manufacturers of mRNA injections still refuse, even if their products are deployed on a global scale, to reveal the exact composition alleging that it is a trade secret. The authorities concerned, the World Health Organization, Public Health of Quebec, Health Canada, the College of Physicians of Quebec (CMQ), our governments (federal and provincial) have not required pharmaceutical companies to disclose the exact composition of their products. Consequently, it is impossible to obtain truly informed consent, which contravenes the fundamental principles of the CMQ.”

“Parent Consent and Responsibilities: Never has an experimental product been administered to human beings without full animal testing since the tragic drugs thalidomide[3] and DES[4] administered to pregnant women.”

“Children are not able to understand the information transmitted for consent to be considered truly “informed”. Thus, the parent who gives his authorization on behalf of his child must understand

1. that it is an irreversible intervention whose short and medium term consequences are unknown and often underestimated, and whose long term repercussions (including the risk of infertility) are unknown due to the absence of hindsight;

2. that he makes a decision on behalf of his child, considered incapable of deciding for himself, and that this is a long-term responsibility;

3. that this mRNA injection is a product that has never been used on a large scale in humans and is totally different from all the vaccines we have been used to. It is false to claim that this injection is a “vaccine like the others”.

“Risk/benefit balance: One must always ask whether the product has more advantages or more disadvantages (risks). We must also take into account the age and particularities of the child concerned. The studies carried out in children by the manufacturers did not meet the minimum criteria of validity (necessity, efficacy and safety). These studies are scientifically insufficient and unsatisfactory. They have nevertheless been accepted by the FDA and by Health Canada. First of all, you have to know that the vast majority of children have already acquired a natural immunity against COVID-19 and then that children are very rarely seriously affected by the disease. In addition, it is now recognized by the CDC, since August 6, 2021, that this vaccination does not prevent either contracting the disease or transmitting it.”

“The benefits of this product for our children have not been satisfactorily explained, let alone demonstrated, by Public Health or the Government of Quebec. There are therefore unproven benefits, but the risks are indisputable and sometimes irremediable, thus subjecting children to unnecessary and unjustified danger.”

“Product not tested on animals? For a drug product to be approved, it must first have been tested in animals (mice, rats, and rabbits of both sexes and pregnant animals). In the climate of urgency surrounding this pandemic and in the rush to manufacture a “vaccine”, the manufacturer considerably shortened the crucial stage of animal testing, which would have taken several years for all phases are completed. Complete studies of bio-distribution and toxicity normally required have also been neglected. The disastrous examples above of Thalidomide and DES causing fetal malformations, infertility and vaginal cancers should have prompted us to be more cautious. It is important to mention that novel, experimental and mRNA vaccines, whose risk/benefit profile is unfavorable for young people and children in good health, benefit from a marketing authorization under a decree of emergency, even though there has never been an emergency in the pediatric population.”

“Is it a “safe and effective” product? A safe product? No, since Pfizer has identified 1,291 side effects that may result from its product. The VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) which is a self-reporting system of side effects by the American population, whose data everyone can consult, mentions, as of September 16, 2022, 1,418,220 reports of side effects in all age groups, including over 31,000 fatalities and nearly 260,000 serious injuries. Moreover, it is considered, according to an analysis commissioned by the FDA, that the actual frequency should be multiplied by 10 or 100.”

“Efficient? Currently the authorities cannot explain certain official statistics including the many deaths by COVID in doubly or triply vaccinated people, sudden deaths in athletes as well as excess mortality statistics; this raises legitimate questions. Has the effectiveness of “vaccines” in healthy people really been demonstrated? [8]”

“Ethics: vaccinating children to protect adults??? The INSPQ affirms in its report intended for the Quebec government that it can be ethical to vaccinate children to protect the elderly and vulnerable. This logic of the INSPQ is all the more questionable as:

(1) It is not children who transmit COVID to the elderly, but adults who transmit it to children.

(2) “Vaccination” does not prevent either contracting the disease or transmitting it, and does so with the same intensity.”

“As a conclusion: We have attached ourselves to the obligation of truth and to the nature and extent of the information which must be transmitted to parents and which is essential for an informed decision-making concerning the inoculation of their child with an experimental product based on messenger RNA.”

“On the other hand, we believe that the Collège des médecins du Québec and the Direction de la santé publique could facilitate more informed decision-making by producing a document that is neither promotional nor propagandistic and which would include the information contained in the current.”

“In short, we, the signatories, are asking our indispensable regulatory institutions, the Direction de la santé publique and the Collège des médecins du Québec, to put science back on the agenda regarding the vaccination of children.”

“This also constitutes a formal notice in compliance with article 39 of the code of ethics of physicians concerning the reporting of a situation that endangers the population, in this case the children of Quebec. If the above is consistent, a complete and immediate ban on the vaccination of children in Quebec against COVID-19 is necessary, if only by virtue of the precautionary principle (“First, do no harm” ).”

Verifying some claims made by the group

While it would be too lengthy to verify all of the claims found in the contentions enumerated above, some are worth checking.

Firstly, the group claims that the vaccines should not be promoted since they were not fully tested on animals.

If we look at the information on the Quebec Health website, we can notice the following in the section Safety of the vaccines:

Previous versions (such as that of Oct. 29, 2021) somewhat varied and used to include a hyperlink pointing to the page that describes all the steps in the vaccine development process, including conducting preclinical studies in animals.

While it remains unclear why Quebec Health removed the link to the Vaccine development process page, the current page does state that they “have gone through all the necessary steps prior to approval” which remains disputable, given insufficient testing on animals.

As for the legality in promoting the vaccines, the group cited Section 9 of the Canadian Food and Drugs Act which states:

“9 (1) No person shall label, package, treat, process, sell or advertise any drug in a manner that is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to create an erroneous impression regarding its character, value, quantity, composition, merit or safety.”

Advertising the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine in a manner that suggests it has met “the same quality and safety standards as any other vaccine used in Canada” is highly questionable since it was not fully tested on animals, it was hurriedly released and administered under an emergency directive, and was as an experimental product of gene manipulation very different from conventional vaccines.

One of the other key contentions of the group was that the health authorities do not meet required ethical standards specifically with regards to the completeness of information communicated to parents, that they fail in their obligation to provide informed consent, and that the public health authority, the INSPQ, had asserted it an ethical justification to vaccinate children in order to protect the elderly and vulnerable.

Moreover, they stress that complete information should include the dangers and risks of the vaccine, but parents are not informed of all of these due to censorship. And consequently, it deprives them of making an informed decision.

Informed consent is a complex concept with many norms and standards to follow as well as relevant laws which are well beyond the scope of this article. Notwithstanding, the claim that the health authority advocated to the Quebec government the advantages of vaccinating children to protect more vulnerable groups is easily verifiable.

In this regard, the group makes reference to the INSPQ’s publication entitled Vaccination contre la COVID-19 chez les enfants âgés de 6 mois à 4 ans au Québec (English: Vaccination against COVID-19 in children aged 6 months to 4 years in Quebec) for the allegation. The document in question does state the following:

English translation (via Google Translate):

“9 Ethical Considerations

Vaccination of children raises certain questions ethics that have been discussed in detail in the notice for vaccination against COVID-19 of children aged 5 to 11 years(6).

Specifically for young children, remember the issues related to non-maleficence: given that the anticipated benefits of youth vaccination children are less than for other groups age, the individual risks must be low and the vaccination must have an excellent safety profile.

The possible negative impacts of vaccination against COVID-19 on the offer and acceptability of others routine vaccines should also be minimized, in order to respect the principle of non-maleficence.

Moreover, from a utilitarian point of view, the principle of solidarity can make it possible to ethically justify the vaccination of young children in the context of a uncertain benefit/risk ratio at the individual level, especially if the vaccination of young children offers societal benefits (for example, if vaccination protects other people more vulnerable). It could also allow parents who identify their child at risk of developing complications as a result of an infection to SARS-CoV-2 to benefit from this strategy preventative, should it become offered or recommended.”

They key passage here is

“Moreover, from a utilitarian point of view, the principle of solidarity can make it possible to ethically justify the vaccination of young children in the context of a uncertain benefit/risk ratio at the individual level, especially if the vaccination of young children offers societal benefits (for example, if vaccination protects other people more vulnerable)”.

It is clearly stated that the health authority, the INSPQ, is indeed suggesting vaccinating children in order to protect more vulnerable groups of society.

While the group has raised many important questions surrounding the numerous and contentious issues raised in their open letter, it remains to be seen if any of the targeted health authorities will reply, as they seldom do.

The author of this article has contacted Réinfo Covid Québec to inquire as to whether they have received any response from any of the three health authorities to whom they have addressed the letter, but has not received a reply as of publication time. Should they respond, a note will be added in the comments section for this article.

At the very least, the group of doctors and health care professionals who penned this open letter have provided the public in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada with a lot to contemplate.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dan Fournier’s Writings.

Dan Fournier is a Freelance/Independent Investigative Journalist.

Featured image: A young girl receives a Covid-19 vaccination. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

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***

What did you think would happen? What was the Zionist left, which sank into a coma after the Oslo Accords, thinking? That it was possible to return to power out of a coma? Empty-handed? Without an alternative and without leadership? Solely on the basis of hatred for Netanyahu? Aside from that, it had nothing to offer.

No one should be surprised by what happened. It could not have been otherwise. It began with the occupation – pardon the annoying and clichéd mention of that – but that is where it really began, and it had to culminate in a government of racism and transfer. Fifty years of incitement against the Palestinians and scare tactics about them cannot culminate in a government of peace.

Fifty years of almost wall-to-wall Israeli support, from the Zionist left and right, for the occupation, could not end any other way than with Ben-Gvir as the popular hero. A never-ending occupation could only lead to the Benjamin Netanyahu-Itamar Ben-Gvir government. For if you’re going to have an occupation, then you need to embrace its genuine version, the one that is not the least bit abashed about it – the Ben-Gvir version.

It was simply impossible to continue with the illusions – Jewish and democratic, an enlightened occupation, a temporary occupation – and that whole tired repertoire of phrases. The time for truth had arrived, and that is what Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are going to tell us.

There is no point in pursuing a blame campaign now – Yair Lapid siphoned off Labor votes, Labor didn’t merge with Meretz, Balad didn’t go with the Joint List. These things would have amounted to temporary pain relievers for a terminal illness. Even if all that would not have happened, nothing about the overall picture would have been different: The society that has arisen here is partly religious and largely racist, with hatred of Arabs being its main fuel, and there was no one to stand against that.

What happened two days ago did not begin two days ago. Maybe Golda Meir started it, maybe Shimon Peres, but in any event, none of their successors tried to go another way to stem the tide. Did you really think that Yair Lapid, a moderate and hollow rightist, filled with good intentions, was capable of offering an alternative to Ben-Gvir? What alternative? To kill gently? To embrace Emmanuel Macron? Now Israel has decided it prefers not to be gentle when it comes to killing. The next government will at least avoid the self-preening.

For years, a rudderless left and center that lacks leadership and lacks courage has desperately attempted to grovel to and look like the right. It just had to end with Ben-Gvir and with the nationalist Shas. There was no other possible outcome.

For years, Israelis have been about the Chosen People, about the Holocaust after which anything is permitted, about the Arabs who want to throw us into the sea, about our right to the land because of the biblical stories, about the IDF as the world’s most moral army, about David versus Goliath, about Israeli Arabs as a fifth column, about the whole world being against us and that anyone who criticizes us is an antisemite. What did we think would arise out of all that? Ben-Gvir actually took his time. He could well have made his big splash a long time ago. That’s what happens when you have a Bolsonaro and no Lula facing him. That’s what happens when cries of “Death to the Arabs,” which will now be drilled at morning assembly in schools, were not met with a single cry of “Freedom for the Arabs.” That is where it began, this is where it ends.

*

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The global climate meeting called COP27 (the 27th Conference of Parties) will be held in the remote Egyptian desert resort of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt from November 6-18. Given the extremely repressive nature of the Egyptian government, this gathering will likely be different from others, where there have been large, raucous protests led by civil society groups.

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COVID-19: A Universe of Questions in a Time of Universal Deceit

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Donbass Self-Determination: Referenda and the Rights of Minorities. Analysis by UN Expert

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***

They are falling like ninepins, and the Tories have now given the weary people of Britain yet another prime minister.  And what a catch: stupendously wealthy, youthful – the youngest in two centuries – and a lawbreaker.  As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Boris Johnson, he was fined for breaches during the partygate scandal, despite telling the Commons that he had attended no illegal gatherings.

The statement released in response to the fine was ice cool, belying the fact that he had become the first Chancellor ever charged with an offence while in office.  “I understand that for figures in public office, the rules must be applied stringently in order to maintain public confidence.”  He respected “the decision that has been made and have paid the fine.”  The outcome was always likely: not paying could have landed him in an even stickier situation.

Being sly with regulations is obviously something that runs in the family.  Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, ran into some trouble earlier this year when attention was brought to her non-domiciled (non-dom) status in the UK.  She owns a jaw dropping £700 million in shares in the Indian IT giant Infosys, from which she received £11.6 million in dividend income last year.

Declaring one’s domicile to be in another country can be a fine money saver: in this case, £2.1 million a year.  But Murty wanted to be generous and gracious – at least for her husband’s political ambitions.  “I understand and appreciate the British sense of fairness and I do not wish my tax status to be a distraction for my husband or to affect my family.”

The new prime minister’s coming to power is a perfect statement of the leader estranged and continentally distant from voters, a person evidently bored by his time as a banker and keen to make a showing in parliament.  “In his technocratic aloofness,” George Eaton suggests, “Sunak resembles an IMF official poised to impose a ‘structural adjustment programme’ on a stricken developing world economy.”  The analogy is not out of place, given what Trussonomics has done to Britain in a matter of weeks.

While Sunak distanced himself from his predecessor’s loopy variant of steroid-fed Reaganomics, the inner Thatcherite’s heart continued to beat to the rhythm of nostalgia.  As Thatcher’s own Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, said of Sunak, he was “the only candidate who understands Thatcherite economics.”

He is, to illustrate the point, very much in favour of fiscal tightening and keeping public spending thin, and, like the Iron Lady he so adores, happy to tout tax rises if needed.  Thatcher, it should be remembered, raised the Value Added Tax (VAT) from 8 per cent to 15 per cent and imposed the infamous poll tax otherwise advertised as a “Community Charge”.

Sunak’s belief in redistribution is of that rather distasteful variety.  As Labour had, in his ill-chosen words of a leaked video, “shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas”, it was incumbent on the Tories to undo it.  “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserved.”  The area in question was the rather well-heeled town of Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

During Sunak’s tenure and the “levelling up” programme of Johnson, the wealthiest parts of Britain received amounts of money up to 10 times more per capita than the poorest, showing how Tories can be socialistic to the class of their own choosing.  Sajid Javid’s wealthy constituency of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire was earmarked to receive £15 million, or £148 a head.  Eight local authorities counted as some of the poorest in Britain received less than £10 a head from levelling up funds.

His economic embrace of Brexit was filled with hubristic assessments, some of this evident in a report authored for the Centre for Policy Studies in 2016.  “Brexit will provide the UK with new economic freedom, and the Government should take the opportunity to create Free ports across the nation.”  Such ports would “increase manufacturing output, create employment regionally where it is most needed, and promote trade.”

The report obsesses over the presence of 3,500 Free Trade Zones spread across the globe, with the US deserving a special mention: 250 FTZs “which employ 420,000 people and handle £750bn of merchandise.”  Airy predictions about what free ports would do to the unshackled British economy are offered, including 86,000 jobs “if they were as successful as the US Foreign Trade Zone programme.”

Such a rarefied market world says little about civic duties and citizenship.  It speaks volumes that Sunak expressed scepticism about lockdowns and has preferred to take climate change less seriously than others, even within his own party.  The issue of whether planning permission is going to be given to opening the UK’s first coal mine in a generation – in Cumbria – has been dismissed by the new PM as a “local issue”.

Sunak even had to be persuaded to change his mind attending the upcoming COP27 conference to be held in Egypt.  On Twitter, he rationalised his about face, characterised by Green MP Caroline Lucas as a “screeching U-turn” on the climate change conference: “There is no long-term prosperity without action on climate change.  There is no energy security without investing in renewables.”

The change of heart suggested a weakness to the Labour opposition.  “The prime minister,” according to the party’s climate policy spokesperson Ed Miliband, “has been shamed into going to COP27 by the torrent of disbelief that he would fail to turn up.”  The only reason for putting in an appearance was “to avoid embarrassment not to provide leadership.”  There is still much time for the markets, and everybody else, to be spooked.

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

Featured image: Sunak introducing the 2021 autumn budget (Photo by HM Treasury and The Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP, licensed under OGL 3)

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***

The global climate meeting called COP27 (the 27th Conference of Parties) will be held in the remote Egyptian desert resort of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt from November 6-18. Given the extremely repressive nature of the Egyptian government, this gathering will likely be different from others, where there have been large, raucous protests led by civil society groups.

So as tens of thousands of delegates – from world leaders to climate activists and journalists – descend on Sharm el-Sheik from all over the world, we asked Egyptian Journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous to give us his thoughts about the state of Egypt today, including the situation of political prisoners, and how he expects the Egyptian government will act with the eyes of the world upon it.

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Medea Benjamin: For those who don’t know or have forgotten, can you give us a quick overview of the nature of the present government in Egypt today?

Sharif Abdel Kouddous: The 2011 revolution against Hosni Mubarak, an uprising that was part of what has been called the Arab Spring, was very inspiring and had reverberations around the world, from the Occupy Movement in the United States to the Indignados in Spain. But that revolution was crushed in a very brutal way in 2013 by the military, led by General Abdel Fattah al Sisi–who later became president.

Right now, Egypt is ruled by a very tight and closed clique of military and intelligence officers, a circle that is completely opaque. Its decision-making process does not allow for any political participation and it does not brook any kind of dissent or opposition. It seems that the government’s answer to any problems with its citizens is to put them in prison.

There are literally tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt right now. We don’t know the exact number because there are no official statistics and this forces lawyers and the very harassed human rights groups to try to painstakingly tabulate the thousands of people who are trapped behind bars.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen Egypt build several new prisons. Just last year Sisi oversaw the opening of the Wadi al-Natrun prison complex. It’s not called a prison complex, it’s called a “rehabilitation center.” This is one of seven or eight new prisons that Sisi himself has dubbed “American-style prisons.”

These prison complexes include within them the courts and judicial buildings, so it makes a conveyor belt from the courthouse to the prison more efficient.

MB: What is the status of this massive group of political prisoners?

SAK: The majority of political prisoners in Egypt are held in what is called “pre-trial detention.” Under Egypt’s penal code, you can be held in prison for two years without ever being convicted of a crime. Nearly everyone held in pre-trial detention faces two identical charges: one is spreading false information and the other is belonging to a terrorist organization or an outlawed organization.

The prison conditions are very dire. If you get sick, you are in big trouble. There have been a lot of deaths from medical negligence, with prisoners dying in custody. Torture and other forms of abuse by security forces is widespread.

We’ve also seen the number of death sentences and executions skyrocket. Under the former President Mubarak, in his final decade in office, there was a de facto moratorium on executions. There were death sentences handed down but people were not being put to death. Now Egypt ranks third in the world in the number of executions.

MB: What about other freedoms, such as freedom of assembly and freedom of the press?

SAK: Basically, the regime sees its citizens as a nuisance or a threat. All forms of protest or public assembly are banned.

Alleged violations carry very stiff prison sentences. We’ve seen mass arrests sweeps happen whenever there’s any kind of public demonstration and we’ve also seen an unprecedented crackdown on civil society, with human rights organizations and economic justice organizations being forced to scale back their operations or basically operate underground.The people who work for them are subject to intimidation and harassment and travel bans and arrests.

We’ve also seen a massive crackdown on press freedom, a nearly complete takeover of the media landscape. Under Mubarak’s government, there was at least some opposition press, including some opposition newspapers and TV stations. But now the government very tightly controls the press through censorship and also through acquisition. The General Intelligence Services, which is the intelligence apparatus of the military, has become the largest media owner of the country. They own newspapers and TV channels. Independent media, such as the one I work for called Mada Masr, operate on the margins in a very, very hostile environment.

Egypt is the third largest jailer of journalists in the world and imprisons more journalists on charges of spreading false news than any other country in the world.

MB: Can you talk about the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who is probably Egypt’s most famous political prisoner?

SAK: Alaa has been behind bars for much of the last decade. He is in prison ostensibly for the crime of “spreading false news,” but he is really in prison for these ideas, for being an icon and a symbol of the 2011 revolution. For the regime, imprisoning him was a way to set an example for everyone else. That’s why there has been so much campaigning to get him out.

He has been in prison under very, very difficult conditions. For two years he wasn’t allowed out of his cell and didn’t even have a mattress to sleep on. He was completely deprived of everything, including books or reading materials of any kind. For the first time, he started expressing suicidal thoughts.

But on April 2 he decided to go on a hunger strike as an act of resistance against his imprisonment. He has been on a hunger strike for seven months now. He started with just water and salt, which is a kind of hunger strike that Egyptians learned from Palestinians. Then in May, he decided to go on a Gandhi-style strike and ingest 100 calories a day–which is a spoonful of honey in some tea. An average adult needs 2,000 calories a day, so it’s very meager.

But he just sent a letter to his family saying that he was going back to a full hunger strike and on November 6, on the eve of the COP meeting, he’s going to stop drinking water. This is extremely serious because the body cannot last without water for more than a few days.

So he is calling on all of us on the outside to organize, because either he will die in prison or he will be released. What he is doing is incredibly brave. He is using his body, the only thing he has agency over, to organize and to push us on the outside to do more.

MB: How do these repressed civil society leaders view the fact that Egypt is playing host to COP27?

SAK: It was very disheartening for a lot of people in Egypt who work for human rights and justice and democracy when Egypt was granted the right to host the conference. But Egyptian civil society has not called on the international community to boycott the COP meeting; they have called for the plight of political prisoners and the lack of human rights to be linked to the climate discussions and not ignored.

They want a spotlight to be placed on the thousands of political prisoners like Alaa, like Abdel Moneim Aboul Foitouh, a former presidential candidate, like Mohamed Oxygen, a blogger, like Marwa Arafa, who is an activist from Alexandria.

Unfortunately, hosting this meeting has given the government a great opportunity to remake its image. It has allowed the government to try to position itself as the voice for the Global South and the negotiator trying to unlock billions of dollars a year in climate financing from the Global North.

Of course the issue of climate reparations to the Global South is very important. It needs to be discussed and taken seriously. But how can you give climate reparations to a country like Egypt when you know the money will mostly be spent on bolstering this repressive, polluting state? As Naomi Klein said in her great article Greenwashing a Police State, the summit is going beyond greenwashing a polluting state to greenwashing a police state.

MB: So what do you think we can expect to see in Sharm el-Sheikh? Will the usual protests that happen at every COP, both inside and outside the official halls, be allowed?

SAK: I think what we are going to see in Sharm el-Sheik is a carefully managed theater. We all know the problems with the UN Climate Summits. There are a lot of negotiations and climate diplomacy, but rarely do they amount to anything concrete and binding. But they do serve as an important place for networking and convergence for different groups in the climate justice movement, an opportunity for them to come together to organize. It has also been a time for these groups to show their opposition to the inaction by those in power, with creative, vigorous protests both inside and outside the conference.

This will not be the case this year. Sharm El-Sheikh is a resort in Sinai that literally has a wall around it. It can and will be very tightly controlled. From what we understand, there is a special space that has been designated for protests that has been built out near a highway, far away from the conference center and any signs of life. So how effective will it be to hold protests there?

This is why people like Greta Thunberg are not going. Many activists have problems with the structure of the COP itself but it is even worse in Egypt where the ability to use it as a convergence space for dissent will be effectively shut down.

But more importantly, the members of Egyptian civil society, including the allies and environmental groups that are critical of the government, will not be allowed to attend. In a departure from UN rules, those groups that manage to participate will have been vetted and approved by the government and will have to be very careful about how they operate. Other Egyptians who should be there are unfortunately in prison or are subject to various forms of repression and harassment.

MB: Should foreigners also worry about the Egyptian government surveilling them?

SAK: The entire conference will be very highly surveilled. The government created this app that you can download to use as a guide for the conference. But to do that, you have to put in your full name, phone number, email address, passport number and nationality, and you have to enable location tracking. Amnesty International technology specialists have reviewed the app and flagged all these concerns about surveillance and how the app can use the camera and microphone and location data and bluetooth.

MB: What environmental issues related to Egypt will the government allow to be discussed, and what will be off limits?

SAK: Environmental issues that will be allowed are issues such as trash collection, recycling, renewable energy and climate finance, which is a big issue for Egypt and for the Global South.

Environmental issues that implicate the government and military will not be tolerated. Take the issue of coal–something the environmental community is very critical of. That will be off limits because coal imports, much of it coming from the United States, have risen over the past several years, driven by the strong demand from the cement sector. Egypt’s largest importer of coal is also the largest cement producer, and that’s the El-Arish Cement Company that was built in 2016 by none other than the Egyptian military.

We’ve seen massive amounts of cement poured into Egypt’s natural environment over the past several years. The government has built nearly 1,000 bridges and tunnels, destroying acres and acres of green space and cutting down thousands of trees. They have gone on a crazy construction spree, building a slew of new neighborhoods and cities, including a new administrative capital in the desert just outside of Cairo. But no criticism of these projects has been or will be tolerated.

Then there is dirty energy production. Egypt, Africa’s second largest gas producer, is scaling up its oil and gas production and exports, which will mean further profits for the military and intelligence sectors involved in this. These projects that are harmful to the environment but profitable for the military will be off the agenda.

The Egyptian military is entrenched in every part of the Egyptian state. Military owned enterprises produce everything from fertilizers to baby food to cement. They operate hotels; they are the largest owner of land in Egypt. So any kind of industrial pollution or environmental harm from areas such as construction, tourism, development and agribusiness will not be tolerated at COP.

MB: We have heard that the crackdown on Egyptians in anticipation of this global gathering has already begun. Is that true?

SAK: Yes, we’ve already seen an intensified crackdown and a massive arrest sweep in the run-up to the climate summit. There are arbitrary stop and searches, and random security checkpoints. They open your facebook and whatsapp and they look through it. If they find content that they find problematic, they arrest you.

Hundreds of people have been arrested, by some counts 500-600. They have been arrested from their homes, off the streets, from their workplaces.

And these searches and arrests are not restricted just to Egyptians. The other day there was an Indian climate activist, Ajit Rajagopal, was arrested shortly after setting off on an 8-day walk from Cairo to Sharm el-Sheikh as part of a global campaign to raise awareness about the climate crisis.

He was detained in Cairo, questioned for hours and held overnight. He called an Egyptian lawyer friend, who came to the police station to help him. They detained the lawyer as well, and held him overnight.

There have been calls for protests on November 11, or 11/11. Do you think people in Egypt will come out on the streets?

It is unclear where these protest calls started but I think it was started by people outside Egypt. I would be surprised if people come out on the streets given the level of repression we’ve been seeing these days but you never know.

The security apparatus was very surprised in September 2019 when a former military contractor turned whistleblower exposed videos showing army corruption. These videos went viral. The whistleblower called for protests but he was outside Egypt in self-imposed exile in Spain.

There were some protests, not very big but significant. And what was the government response? Massive arrests, the most massive sweep since Sisi came to power with over 4,000 people detained. They arrested all kinds of people–everyone who had been arrested before and a lot of other people. With that kind of repression, it’s hard to say if mobilizing people to go to the streets is the right thing to do.

The government is also particularly paranoid because the economic situation is so bad. The Egyptian currency has lost 30 percent of its value since the beginning of the year, precipitated by a variety of factors, including the war in Ukraine, since Egypt was getting so much of its wheat from Ukraine. Inflation is out of control. People are getting poorer and poorer. So that, combined with these calls for protests, have prompted the preemptive crackdown.

So I don’t know if people will defy the government and go out into the streets. But I gave up trying to predict anything in Egypt a long time ago. You just never know what is going to happen.

*

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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

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***

The global systemic transition within which the New Cold War is being waged played a major role in catalyzing the Ethiopian Conflict due to the Golden Billion’s self-interested geostrategic reasons in provoking what could have been the greatest African tragedy since the Congo Wars. All of Africa is expected to become a similar proxy battleground in this struggle over the direction of that aforesaid transition, but the example of Ethiopia’s victory might help avert some of the worst upcoming crises.

The Ethiopian Conflict finally ended with a peace agreement on 2 November between the Government of Ethiopia (GOE) and the TPLF, which had been fighting one another for almost exactly two years up until that point. Everything that transpired across that time taught the world some very important things that can hopefully be put to use for preemptively averting or decisively reacting to future such conflicts. Here are the twelve most important lessons to be learned from the Ethiopian Conflict:

1. Deeply Embedded Elite Become Embittered Whenever Their Privileges Are Threatened

The TPLF had deeply embedded itself into the very fabric of the post-Civil War Ethiopian state and thus became embittered when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmedattempted to reduce their privileges as part of his far-reaching reforms. He envisaged restoring meritocracy in order to give his multimillennial nation’s historically diverse people true equality within their federal system, yet this was vehemently opposed by the former ruling party, so much so that they decided to go to war to protect their privileges.

2. Ethnic Federalism Can Be Exploited For Separatist Ends

The Ethiopian Constitution’s clause enshrining the right to secession for every nation, nationality, and people was included in the law of the land partly for the purpose of emphasizing the voluntary unity of these diverse elements, each of which could leave if their rights weren’t respected. The TPLF exploited this clause together with the federal system’s creation of the Tigray Region to promote their self-interested separatist cause, which was illegitimate since the Tigrayans’ rights weren’t ever threatened.

3. Information Warfare Fuels The Flames Of Ethno-Separatism

The only way in which the TPLF stood any chance of “justifying” their self-interested separatist cause to the same Tigrayans who they claimed to represent was to manipulate their perceptions through information warfare aimed at making them fear that their rights were at risk of being threatened. To that end, they also relied on their extensive network of foreign civil society, media, and state supporters, each of which had ulterior motives for contributing to this campaign.

4. External Actors Exploit Domestic Tensions To Promote Their Interests In The New Cold War

The US-led West’s Golden Billion saw an irresistible opportunity to exploit the TPLF’s self-interested separatist cause for the purpose of promoting their interests in the New Cold War. In the Ethiopian context, they sought to punish that country for its policy of principled neutrality in refusing to take their side over China’s, which at that time was their top opponent in the jointly BRICS– and SCO-led Global South prior to the latestphase of the Ukrainian Conflict that made Russia their number one enemy.

5. Humanitarian Imperialism Is The Latest Form Of Hybrid Warfare

The weaponization of humanitarian issues – whether objectively existing, completely fabricated, or a combination thereof – for advancing political goals at another country’s expense via economic (sanctions) and/or military (“Responsibility to Protect”) means/threats can be described as humanitarian imperialism. This latest form of Hybrid Warfare came to characterize the Ethiopian Conflict more than anything else and will thus be studied very closely by scholars across the coming years.

6. Grassroots Movements Organically Rise To Confront Fake News & Neo-Imperialism

Activists at home and abroad organically came together to create the #NoMore grassroots movement in response to the fake news that was spewed to facilitate the neo-imperialist agenda of those foreign forces meddling in the Ethiopian Conflict. Their common anti-imperialist cause is inclusive enough to involve anyone in the world with similar principles, which thus resulted in revitalizing these hitherto dormant movements and therefore bringing hope other oppressed people across the Global South.

7. Existential Threats Posed By Foreign Divide-And-Rule Plots Can Strengthen National Unity

Identity-driven tensions predate the Ethiopian Conflict, but their exacerbation and subsequent exploitation by foreign forces served to bring Ethiopia’s diverse people closer together than ever before. This unexpected outcome was due to the #NoMore movement making everyone aware of how their preexisting problems were being manipulated to threaten their state’s existence. That prompted all previously feuding but sincerely patriotic forces to unite in defending their beloved country.

8. Strong Synergy Between Civil Society & The Security Services Preserves Domestic Stability

The only reason that Ethiopia remained domestically stable outside of its conflict-afflicted regions is because of the strong synergy between civil society and the security services, without which this historically diverse country would certainly have been “Balkanized” by now. People of all identities from all walks of life rallied behind the ENDF as their shield for protecting the existence of the Ethiopian state that all sincerely patriotic forces have a stake in preserving.

9. National Crises Provide Clarity About A Country’s True Friends & Foes

Ethiopia discovered who its friends and foes truly were during the last two years of its national crisis. Those Western states that previously claimed to support democracy and human rights ended up being the ones violating Ethiopia’s national model of democracy and its people’s human rights by proxy, while states across the Global South like Russia, China, Iran, and Turkiye united in supporting their victimized peer. Reconciliation with the first category is possible, but no one will ever forget what happened.

10. Well-Intended Regional Mediation Efforts Can Lead To Unexpected Breakthroughs

The African Union-mediated peace process that culminated in South Africa led to unexpected breakthroughs precisely because those involved in it had positive intentions instead of ulterior motives like those Western countries that sought to meddle in these talks. “African Solutions to African Problems” is now more than just a slogan since it just achieved its most important deliverable, peace in Ethiopia, which will in turn provide a practical framework for resolving other African crises.

11. Difficult Compromises Are Required For Peace, Stability, and Unity

The 12-point joint statement released by the GOE and the TPLF contains what can objectively be described as some difficult compromises by both parties on sensitive issues involving administrative, informational, judicial, political, and security affairs. These were required though in order to achieve peace, return stability to the country, and thus preserve national unity. It’s impossible to please everyone on both sides, yet they should all appreciate the difficult decisions made for the greater good.

12. The Ethiopian Conflict Is A Lesson For All Of Africa

Ethiopia’s victory over the neo-imperialist forces that waged their Hybrid War of Terror against it as punishment for this country’s pragmatic policy of principled neutrality in the New Cold War will inspire other African states to follow its lead instead of deterring them like its defeat would have done. Furthermore, those disgruntled domestic forces similar in spirit to the TPLF will be deterred from destabilizing their country in collusion with foreign forces instead of being inspired had the TPLF won.

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The global systemic transition within which the New Cold War is being waged played a major role in catalyzing the Ethiopian Conflict due to the Golden Billion’s self-interested geostrategic reasons in provoking what could have been the greatest African tragedy since the Congo Wars. All of Africa is expected to become a similar proxy battleground in this struggle over the direction of that aforesaid transition, but the example of Ethiopia’s victory might help avert some of the worst upcoming crises.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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After over two decades of keeping Serbia in a semi-colonial state, the European Union seems to finally admit that it sees the Southeast European country precisely as such – a semi-colony. For approximately 20 years, Brussels played the carrot and stick cards with Belgrade, forcing it to renounce important segments of its sovereignty in return for access to EU funds and markets.

The neoliberal economic framework that the EU insisted on devastated the country’s hybrid market socialist economy and ruined domestic economic power, paving the way for the dominance of foreign investors and turning the country into yet another source of cheap labor for Western corporate interests. However, even while implementing such policies, disastrous for any country’s economic (or any other form of) sovereignty, it created an image of growth.

And yet, the waning economic power of Brussels, resulting primarily from its suicidal subservience to Washington DC’s Barbarossa-like push against Russia, is starting to affect the “carrot” portion of the EU’s policy toward Serbia. Frustrated by the country’s refusal to conform with the political West’s clinically Russophobic frenzy, the bureaucratic empire is now resorting to using the “stick”. With little to nothing left to offer, the EU is now threatening to scale back the benefits it gave Serbia in the last two decades to punish the country for its non-compliance in regards to the bloc’s anti-Russian sanctions and policies. To make matters worse, Brussels insists that Belgrade should still continue renouncing parts of its sovereignty while the EU is rolling back the apparent benefits it previously gave in return.

What does Serbia get from all this? A geopolitically worthless shoulder tap that will not help the country in any conceivable way. On the contrary, it may very well ruin its centuries-old relationship with Russia, a country exerting no pressure on Serbia while helping it preserve what’s left of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. For the political West, now effectively operating under a “you’re either with us or against us” foreign policy framework, Serbia’s neutrality is seen as nothing short of hostile. Belgrade is forced to beg to stay neutral in the Ukraine crisis, but to no avail, it seems. Anything less than full compliance is unacceptable to the imperialist power pole. To show just how much, the EU now considers Serbia’s membership ambitions effectively dead, as the negotiations to join the bloc have become a mere formality, having been stalled for years.

Brussels now thinks Serbia should not be conditioned by the termination of accession negotiations, since “joining the EU is as realistic as going to Mars,” as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it. The analogy is quite indicative of how the bloc sees Serbia’s future and should serve as an eye-opener in Belgrade. Coupled with recent allegations that Serbia is “trying to destabilize the EU at the behest of Russia”, it’s clear that despite how much sovereignty it renounces, how far it’s ready to go against its national interests, the country will never be good enough to join the bloc. The question remains then, what’s the point? Why would Serbia even want to join the EU? It seems the Serbian populace is well aware of this and it’s not so keen on joining either.

The EU now realizes that stopping membership negotiations would effectively mean nothing to the Serbian people. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung thinks that “the warnings about the possible freezing of accession negotiations are a blunt sword against Belgrade,” as the negotiations have been stagnant for years. “Their termination would not leave an impression on the Serbian population, which is critical of the EU anyway. In addition, even among the advocates of the EU in Belgrade, almost no one believes that joining the EU is realistic. Equally, Serbia could be threatened with a ban on access to Mars,” the report states.

However, it’s a different story when it comes to abolishing visa-free travel for Serbian citizens, a topic first mentioned by the European Commissioner for Internal Affairs Ylva Johansson. “It would greatly affect the Serbian economy, as well as the predominantly urban population that travels, as well as the authorities. It is the most lethal weapon in Brussels’ arsenal,” the German paper commented. “If visas were introduced again, that sense of isolation would be like a nightmare again, which first ended when the visas were abolished in 2009. Anger due to a return to the dark times would certainly be directed against the Serbian government,” the report adds.

The previously veiled threats by Brussels seem to have become quite direct at this point, since the EU isn’t just planning to get the “carrot” out of the equation (it effectively did already), but will also not hesitate using the “stick” now. What’s more, the move is openly aimed against Serbia’s political stability, as the EU expects to cause widespread discontent which, in turn, would result in exerting additional pressure on the Serbian government. Belgrade certainly could comply and start distancing itself from Moscow. It might even feign this while coordinating with Russia by implementing policies that would affect quite literally nothing.

For instance, it could impose sanctions on Russian sea shipping (Serbia is landlocked) or ban access to Russian airline companies, which can’t reach Serbia anyway, as the country is surrounded by EU members which already did that. But the question remains, where does it stop? Will the political West ever be content enough to stop blackmailing and threatening the country? It might be politically unwise for the Serbian government to answer that (rhetorical) question, but it certainly isn’t for the Serbian people.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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First published on October 28, 2021

 

Read Part I:

History of World War II: 80 Years Ago, The Battle of Moscow

By Shane Quinn, October 21, 2021

 

As the Battle of Moscow began eight decades ago on 2 October 1941, the weeks directly preceding and following this date did not seem to augur well for the Soviet Army. Kiev, the USSR’s third largest city, fell two weeks before on 19 September to a vast German pincers movement, and the Red Army lost a staggering 665,000 troops in the process.

Titled Operation Typhoon, the German plan for the capture of Moscow called for a two-stage battle. In the first phase German Army Group Centre, comprising of almost two million men (1), would execute a three-pronged attack; with the German 9th Army and Panzer Group 3 advancing to the north between the towns of Vyazma and Rzhev, both 140 miles west of Moscow.

The German 4th Army, and Panzer Group 4, would drive forward along the Roslavl-Moscow road in the centre; and Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Group 2, now called the 2nd Panzer Army, would attack to the south between Bryansk and Orel to the city of Tula, 110 miles southward of Moscow. Operation Typhoon’s second phase envisaged the final advance on the Russian capital, conducted by two armoured encircling thrusts from the north-west and the south-east.

The weather and terrain suited the Wehrmacht, for the time being. In the first three weeks of October 1941, the Germans captured another 663,000 Soviet soldiers and destroyed 1,200 tanks. Including casualties and prisoners taken, total Red Army losses in the opening stage of October amounted to a million troops (2). In a four week period from 19 September 1941, the Soviets had altogether lost more than 1.6 million men.

Even these terrible reverses did not prove insurmountable to a state whose populace, in 1941, amounted to around 193 million (3), as opposed to a population in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe of about 110 million.

On 15 October 1941, Joseph Stalin ordered the majority of Soviet government officials to leave Moscow. They relocated 560 miles further east to the city of Kuibyshev on the Volga river. This indicates that the Soviet leadership was not confident that Moscow could be held. Stalin gloomily informed Harry Hopkins, president Franklin Roosevelt’s personal emissary, that if Moscow was lost “all of Russia west of the Volga would have to be abandoned” (4). Nevertheless, Stalin remained in Moscow, believing that his continued presence there would maintain morale and prevent widespread unrest among Muscovites, clearly the correct decision.

While the Wehrmacht closed on Moscow, the Red Army’s resistance appeared to be weakening. On 19 October 1941 the Germans took the abandoned town of Mozhaysk, 65 miles west of Moscow. The following day, Stalin declared martial law as the capital was placed under full military control.

Red Army ski troops in Moscow. Still from documentary Moscow Strikes Back, 1942 (Licensed under CC0)

On 23 October 1941 the Germans crossed the Narva river, and were only 40 miles from Moscow (5). During the next day, however, the famous Russian rainfall (rasputitsa) arrived almost providentially. The Germans were expecting rains to come but the ferocity of it was a shock to them. The unpaved roads and paths quickly turned into rivers of thick, congealed mud. This meant that no wheeled vehicle could move for consecutive days, and the larger panzers advanced at a snail’s pace. The wider-tracked Russian T-34 tanks were more suited to such conditions.

British scholar Evan Mawdsley wrote,

“The defence of Moscow was certainly helped by changes in the weather” and “Unlike the Germans, the Russians had a working railway system behind their front line. Soviet planes were operating from prepared airfields, while the Luftwaffe now had to make do with improvised muddy landing strips”. (6)

By 24 October 1941 as the rains came, the German invasion was four months old (17 weeks) and in serious difficulty. Adolf Hitler had previously expected to conquer the Soviet Union in less than half of that time (8 weeks). When France collapsed the Nazi leader told his military advisers Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl that “a campaign against Russia would be child’s play” (7). Field Marshal Keitel, often accused of being a lackey, disagreed and he was opposed to attacking the USSR.

The German High Command (OKH) predicted in mid-December 1940 that “the Soviet Union would be defeated in a campaign not exceeding 8-10 weeks”. Such views were strongly shared by the American and British authorities. Why did these predictions prove so wrong?

We can get to the heart of the matter, by briefly examining German blunders regarding grand strategy and, with it, the most important reason: Hitler’s directive of 21 August 1941, that led to a crucial six week postponement in the march on Moscow (21 August-2 October). This came against the wishes of the Wehrmacht’s leadership, who desperately wanted the advance towards Moscow to continue. By the last week of August, Army Group Centre was 185 miles from Moscow, not a great distance by any means. (8)

The capital city was the USSR’s most important metropolis, its power centre and communications line (9). Had it fallen in the autumn of 1941, the repercussions would most probably have been fatal for the Soviets.

English historian Andrew Roberts observed, “Moscow was the nodal point of Russia’s north–south transport hub, was the administrative and political capital, was vital for Russian morale and was an important industrial centre in its own right” (10). As a transportation and administrative hub, Moscow performed a central role in the Red Army’s ability to supply other parts of its front. On 21 August 1941 at his Wolfsschanze headquarters in the East Prussian forests, Hitler put aside one critical objective (Moscow), and substituted it with five targets of lesser importance.

Hitler expounded that they would instead pursue “the capture of the Crimea” and “the industrial and coal mining area of the Donets” along with “the cutting off of Russian oil supplies from the Caucasus” and “the investment of Leningrad and the linking up with the Finns”. When on 22 August Hitler’s orders were forwarded to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commanding Army Group Centre and a very experienced officer, he telephoned General Franz Halder and said it was “unfortunate, above all because it placed the attack to the east in question… I want to smash the enemy army and the bulk of this army is opposite my front!” (11)

Von Bock, a monarchist who did not like the Nazis, continued that diverting forces away from the attack on Moscow “will jeopardize the execution of the main operation, namely the destruction of the Russian armed forces before winter”. Halder, a key planner in Operation Barbarossa’s original design, agreed with him. Two days later on 24 August 1941 von Bock reiterated, “They apparently do not wish to exploit under any circumstances the opportunity decisively to defeat the Russians before winter!” (12)

One can note the normally dour von Bock’s use of exclamation marks, as he believes the chance for victory has been taken away from him. Insult was added to injury, as von Bock was compelled to release four of his five panzer corps, and three infantry corps, for the southward and northwards assaults on the Ukraine and Leningrad. Halder felt that Hitler’s directive of 21 August “was decisive to the outcome of this campaign”. (13)

For reasons of megalomania, Hitler had overruled his military commanders on a pivotal military issue. American historians Samuel W. Mitcham and Gene Mueller summarised that Hitler’s 21 August directive “was one of the greatest mistakes of the war” (14). It came on top of the opening strategic errors of 22 June 1941, when the Wehrmacht attacked all of the western USSR simultaneously, ultimately weakening the Nazi blow. Fortunately, the Third Reich’s leadership was strategically inept.

In late August 1941, the German Armed Forces High Command (OKW) were contemplating that the war in the east would drag on until 1942 (15). An early knockout strike had not materialised, and the Soviet Army was fighting with tenacity; while the Russians possessed military hardware of a high standard, like the Katyusha rocket launcher (Stalin’s Organ) and the T-34 tank, which came as a real surprise to the Germans. (16)

An OKW memorandum from 27 August ran, “if it proves impossible to realise this objective completely [the USSR’s destruction] during 1941, the continuation of the eastern campaign has top priority for 1942” (17). Hitler approved the memo, which suggests that he was starting to think the invasion may not be successfully concluded in 1941. Hitler certainly believed this by November of that year.

The Soviet cause was given a major lift when, on 10 October 1941, Stalin officially granted General Georgy Zhukov the leadership over the majority of Red Army divisions (the Western Front and Reserve Front) for the capital’s defence. The 44-year-old Zhukov was an extremely able, energetic, self-confident and ruthless commander, just the sort of man that was needed.

Zhukov pursued a policy of initiating incessant counterattacks, and then withdrawing at the final moment. These tactics succeeded in wearing down the belated German march on Moscow (18). More than any other soldier in the war, Zhukov would play a leading part in the Nazis’ demise. Andrei Gromyko, a prominent Soviet diplomat, wrote that Zhukov was “the jewel in the crown of the Soviet people’s greatest victory”. (19)

At the beginning of November 1941 victory was not yet assured, for the rains disappeared and frost set in. The ground had hardened enough for the panzers to begin rolling again. These colder temperatures were uncomfortable for the German troops, who incredibly were still not supplied with sufficient winter clothing, but the temperature hovered around zero for now and was not unbearable.

In preceding weeks, the Kremlin received intelligence reports from their spy in Tokyo, Dr. Richard Sorge, and also from Soviet agencies, which stated that Imperial Japan was not preparing an immediate attack on the eastern USSR. This time Stalin believed the intelligence accounts and, in the first fortnight of November 1941, he transferred 21 fresh divisions from Siberia and Central Asia to the Moscow front. (20)

The Germans had no such reserve of men to call upon. On the night of 11 November 1941, the temperature dropped suddenly to minus 20 degrees Celsius. Frostbite cases were becoming common among German soldiers, but the Wehrmacht resumed advancing from 15 November. A week later, on 22 November the medieval town of Klin fell, 52 miles north-west of Moscow. (21)

The following day, Panzer Group 4 took Solnechnogorsk, 38 miles from Moscow. On 27 November the 7th Panzer Division established a bridgehead across the Moscow-Volga Canal. Also during 27 November, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich captured the town of Istra, just 31 miles west of Moscow.

German professor Jörg Ganzenmüller wrote that Hitler now formulated “a special order”, which was sent to SS major Otto Skorzeny of the Das Reich division. Hitler demanded that Skorzeny and his men occupy the locks of the reservoir on the Moscow-Volga canal, and then open the locks so as to “drown” Moscow by turning it into a massive artificial lake (22). These orders were obviously never carried out, due to Skorzeny’s unit being unable to advance much further.

In late November 1941, it was apparent that the German offensive would likely fail. As of 26 November, the Germans had lost 743,112 men on the Eastern front (23). This number does not include frostbite casualties and other soldiers absent due to illness.

Because of ongoing Russian resistance and their fresh resources – which in both cases had been much greater than the Germans anticipated – General Guderian’s panzers had failed to reach the city of Tula, just over 100 miles south of Moscow. Panzer Group 3, which captured the line of the Moscow-Volga Canal on 28 November, could attack no further; and while a division from Panzer Group 4 had proceeded to within 18 miles of Moscow, continued progress for them proved impossible.

On 2 December 1941, a motorcycle reconnaissance unit of the 2nd Panzer Division reached the suburb of Khimki, five miles from Moscow and nine miles from the Kremlin. Isolated, it did not remain for long in this forward position (24). That was as close as the Germans ever got to the spires of Moscow.

On the night of 4 December, the temperature plummeted again to minus 31 degrees Celsius. Twenty four hours later, it sank to minus 36 degrees (25). It was clear that Operation Barbarossa had failed and worse was in store for the Germans. If they could not accomplish the USSR’s overthrow in 1941, they could hardly expect to do so in a weaker condition in 1942.

The writing was on the wall on 5 December 1941, as the Soviet Army counterattacked the static and precariously positioned Germans, by striking Panzer Group 3 near the Moscow-Volga Canal, along with the German 9th Army at the city of Kalinin. The next day, 6 December, General Zhukov’s divisions launched an assault on the 2nd Panzer Army south of Moscow, with both sides suffering serious losses. Yet Zhukov prevailed by forcing the 2nd Panzer Army to retreat over 50 miles.

Field Marshal von Bock, irate at these setbacks, wrote in his diary, “Last August, the road to Moscow was open; we could have entered the Bolshevik capital in triumph and in summery weather. The high military leadership of the Fatherland made a terrible mistake, when it forced my Army Group to adopt a position of defence last August. Now all of us are paying for that mistake”. (26)

In winter weather, the Soviets were a superior fighting force in comparison to the enemy. Soviet divisions were better equipped and had much more experience of adverse conditions. Stalin said shortly after the Red Army subdued Finland in March 1940, “It is not true that the army’s fighting capacity decreases in wintertime. All the Russian Army’s major victories were won in wintertime… We are a northern country”. (27)

With the Soviets continually counterattacking, one must give the Germans substantial credit for managing somehow to avoid a total collapse, which is what had befallen Napoleon’s army in Russia in late 1812. Hitler refused to allow a general retreat, as he ordered on 16 December 1941 that each German soldier display “fanatical resistance”.

By the end of December 1941, the Russians had advanced 100 to 150 miles across a broad front (28). The Red Army did not achieve a truly decisive breakthrough and the fighting would continue into 1942, and indeed well beyond that.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree and he writes primarily on foreign affairs and historical subjects. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Hodder Arnold, 23 Feb. 2007) p. 97

2 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (Yale University Press; 1st Edition, 14 Nov. 2006) p. 107

3 S. P. Turin, Some Observations on the Population of Soviet Russia at the Census of January 17th, 1939, published by Wiley for the Royal Statistical Society, p. 1 of 3, Jstor

4 Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars (Random House Value Publishing, 2nd edition, 3 April 1985) p. 399

5 Ibid., p. 400

6 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, pp. 108-109

7 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Penguin, 1st edition, 25 Oct. 2001) Chapter 7, Zenith of Power

8 Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., Gene Mueller, Hitler’s Commanders: Officers of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine and the Waffen-SS (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2nd Edition, 15 Oct. 2012) p. 37

9 Goodspeed, The German Wars, p. 395

10 Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Harper, 17 May 2011) p. 168

11 Ibid., p. 169

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 168

14 Mitcham, Mueller, Hitler’s Commanders, p. 37

15 Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, “Hitler’s Failed Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. The ‘Battle of Moscow’, Turning Point of World War II”, Global Research, 12 December 2018

16 Ibid.

17 Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, Chapter 9, Showdown

18 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (Icon Books, 2 May 2013) p. 138

19 Andrei Gromyko, Memories: From Stalin to Gorbachev (Arrow Books Limited, 1 Jan. 1989) p. 216

20 Goodspeed, The German Wars, p. 400

21 Richard Kirchubel, Peter Dennis (Illustrator), Operation Barbarossa (3): Army Group Center (Osprey Publishing, Illustrated edition, 21 Aug. 2007) p. 85 

22 Jörg Ganzenmüller, “Hunger as a weapon”, Zeit Online, 24 May 2011

23 Goodspeed, The German Wars, p. 401

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Jonathan Trigg, Death on the Don: The Destruction of Germany’s Allies in the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 (Spellmount, 1 Jan. 2014) Chapter 4, The death of the Ostheer, Winter 1941-42

27 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, pp. 107-108

28 Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov, p. 145

Featured image: Barricades in a Moscow street, October 1941 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The days following Lula’s victory are being marked by protests across Brazil. People took to the streets to express disapproval against the election of the leftist candidate and demand intervention by the military. Boycotts to the national economy are being operated by groups linked to agribusiness, such as truck drivers involved in the transport of agricultural goods. Bolsonaro’s supporters believe the elections were manipulated and expect the process to be entirely annulled.

Political tensions in Brazil are increasing day by day. The reaction of Bolsonaro voters quickly escaped the control of the authorities. Truck drivers began to occupy the country’s key highways, preventing the supply of large cities. Then, the main capitals began to have their streets filled with crowds wearing shirts with the colors of the Brazilian flag, who, singing the national anthem and making patriotic salutes, demand that Lula’s election be revoked.

On November 2, the situation began to get even more tense. Due to the fact that it is a national holiday, an even greater number of people attended the protests. The focus became the concentration of masses in front of the main military units of the country. Protesters are calling for intervention by the armed forces to reverse the election result or take control over the government.

In fact, the demonstrations were favored by Bolsonaro’s inertia in the face of his defeat. The incumbent president ignored the Brazilian tradition according to which the defeated presidential candidate must call the winner immediately after the announcement of the result, to congratulate him. Bolsonaro not only remained silent for two days, but he also went public on November 1 to say that he would not congratulate Lula, which further exacerbated political polarization among voters.

Faced with the pro-Bolsonaro escalation and the absence of effective actions by the authorities to regain control over the multitudes, social life began to be affected. The main universities in the country suspended their activities, as well as several institutions located in rural areas, which are the most affected by the occupation of roads promoted by truck drivers. In response, social movements linked to Lula’s Party, such as the MTST (an organization of homeless workers), began a call for their militants to “liberate” the roads, acting as true parallel militias.

Mutual violence began to take on worrying contours after an attack by a pro-Lula driver in the city of Mirassol, São Paulo state. The motorist intentionally drove his car running over at least sixteen pro-Bolsonaro protesters, injuring even women and children. Other acts of violence have been reported in many regions, pointing to a pre-civil conflict scenario in Brazil.

Due to the chaos, Brazil took the news around the world, becoming a trending topic on social networks. Unsubstantiated rumors about possible military moves to annul the elections or operate a coup d’état began to circulate on the internet, generating even more collective anxiety and friction among Brazilian citizens. Bolsonaro went public again on November 2 to ask truck drivers to liberate the roads, in order to guarantee supply to the cities. However, he stressed the importance of continuing the protests peacefully.

Indeed, the problem of political polarization in Brazil is not something new. Experts have commented on this topic for a long time and warned of serious consequences if social pacification is not achieved quickly. During the electoral campaign there were several episodes of explicit violence, including murders, on both sides. This type of scenario intensifies the ideological tendencies of the population and prevents any kind of rational analysis of the country’s political status quo.

In fact, for decades Brazil has had its domestic arena dominated by wings that correspond to the interests of foreign elites. On the one hand, liberal conservatives, pro-Republicans and radical Zionists; on the other, progressives, environmentalists and pro-Democrats. Bolsonaro represents the first group – not by chance, having received support from Trump and Netanyahu in 2018 -, while Lula represents the second one – which is why he is now endorsed by the EU, Soros-backed NGOs, and Biden’s administration.

Both sides serve external interests and do not present concrete proposals for Brazil. Polarization, in this sense, serves precisely to keep the people ideologically inflamed and prevent candidates with projects focused on national development, and not on external alignment, from gaining popularity.

Regardless of what happens with the protests, the polarization will not end now. Certainly, the disruptive hatred among Brazilian voters will continue to intensify in the coming years, as will the popular yearning for the end of regular institutions and for a coup d’état. The Brazilian military seems committed to democracy and ignores calls for intervention made by the rightists. However, if the crisis of legitimacy reaches a point of no return and leads Brazil to absolute chaos, it is possible that a more interventionist political thought will actually begin to penetrate the military circles in the near future.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

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A runoff election which pitted the right-wing and neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro against former Workers’ Party President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has resulted in a narrow victory which illustrates the sharp political divisions in the South American state of the Republic of Brazil.

Lula won the election with just over one percent of the vote while people throughout entire Latin America region, North America and the world paid close attention to the campaign.

Source: Abayomi Azikiwe

The president-elect is a former metal worker and trade unionist. He was a co-founder of the Workers’ Party that grew out of the mass movement which arose against the military dictatorship in Brazil during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Prior to being elected as president in 2002, Lula had been a candidate for head-of-state on several occasions while serving in the capacity as a member of parliament. He was re-elected in 2006 and served out his term.

During his tenure in office, Lula ushered in a series of reforms which were aimed at ending extreme poverty inside the country. These measures provided direct monetary assistance to low-income households while increasing the number of young people attending schools and receiving vaccinations against preventable childhood diseases.

After serving his second term, he was succeeded by his chief of staff Dilma Rousseff. Lula remained active in politics giving lectures inside and outside of the country. When President Rousseff attempted to make Lula her chief of staff in 2016, the appointment was blocked by the Brazil Supreme Court under the guise of a so-called “clean slate act.”

The following year in 2017, after being charged with corruption, he was convicted of a series of crimes which many felt were politically motivated. He exhausted his appeal in 2018 and was sentenced to serve ten years in prison.  The federal judge in the case, Sergio Moro, would later be appointed as Minister of Justice and Public Security in Jair Bolsonaro’s government.

During 2016, President Rousseff in her second term of office was impeached by the Brazilian Senate on charges of alleged corruption related to the social welfare programs designed to aid the impoverished and to empower African and Indigenous peoples. These developments were a reflection of the political struggles carried out by the right-wing against the Workers’ Party.

Lula was eventually released from prison after serving over a year-and-a-half behind bars. His conviction had been overturned by the Brazilian Supreme Court.

Right-wing Calls for a Military Coup Against Lula

In response to the declaration of victory by the Electoral Commission, hundreds of truck drivers and thousands of pedestrians staged demonstrations in support of Bolsonaro, a former army officer prior to entering electoral politics. In a similar fashion to the November 2020 elections in the U.S. when defeated President Donald Trump had spent months fostering unsubstantiated claims of “voter fraud”, Bolsonaro, an ally of the former Republican president, had questioned the viability of the electoral system in Brazil.

Brazil right-wing truckers block roads to protest Lula victory (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Bolsonaro’s supporters during their protest actions blocked major roads and thoroughfares calling for the Brazilian military to stage a coup in order to prevent Lula from taking office. The right-wing protesters echoed allegations that the elections were rigged and that only a right-wing putsch led by the armed forces could prevent the installation of the new president.

According to a report on the aftermath of the results being made public, Reuters press agency emphasized that:

“Bolsonaro’s supporters in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro led festive rallies on Wednesday (Nov. 2), carrying Brazil’s yellow-and-green flag draped over their shoulders, blowing horns and chanting anti-Lula slogans. ‘We hope the army will intervene in this situation, we know that those elections were fraudulent,’ said Reinaldo da Silva, 65, a retired government worker at a rally at the entrance to a Sao Paulo army barracks. ‘I came today because I want Brazil to be free, socialism does not work with the Brazilian nation.’ Similar rallies were held in 24 of Brazil’s 26 states, as well as the capital Brasilia, according to Brazilian online media portal G1. In response to a request for comment, Brazil’s defense ministry said peaceful demonstrations were part of free expression under Brazilian law, adding that ‘the Defense Ministry is guided by the Federal Constitution.’ Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has cultivated strong ties to the military since his 2018 election, winning over the political sympathies of some of the top brass.”

Bolsonaro on November 1 held a press conference two days after the results had been announced. Although there was much anticipation surrounding his remarks, the outgoing president refused to concede defeat while praising his supporters throughout the country.

Nonetheless, there were indications that members of his administration had authorized a transfer of power to the incoming Lula administration. There were reports that the Supreme Court refused to meet with Bolsonaro in the immediate aftermath of the run-off elections in late October.

A Long-Protracted Struggle for Democracy and Representative Government

Brazil is one of the most populated countries in the world with more than 216 million people living in urban and rural areas. The Amazon forests extend through large swaths of territory inside the country which have become a major source of political debates between the indigenous communities, environmentalists and the Bolsonaro administration.

Lula is scheduled to be inaugurated on January 1, 2023 as the 39th president for Brazil, a country which has undergone profound shifts in its historical development over the centuries. The indigenous people of Brazil were conquered beginning in the 16th century by the Portuguese colonialists, opening the path for the kidnapping and importation of millions of Africans as enslaved persons.

Even after the country gained independence from Lisbon in the early 19th century, African enslavement did not officially end until 1888, some 13 years after the Civil War in the United States. Since the time of independence and the collapse of the slave system, the country has remained sharply divided along lines of race and class.

The 1964 military coup against an elected government in Brazil was backed by the U.S. under the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. A similar situation occurred in the Dominican Republic in 1965 when the U.S. deployed troops to the country based upon the false notion that communist groupings were attempting to take control of the state which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Republic of Haiti, where the Pentagon has intervened on numerous occasions over the last century or more.

During the early months of 1965 as well, the Johnson administration ordered hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into South Vietnam utilizing the now discredited “domino theory”, which suggested that if a national liberation movement with a socialist orientation took power in one geo-political region it would represent a threat to Washington and Wall Street as the communists would continue to spread their doctrine and social system to other areas.

Today there is a renewed cold war with the ongoing blockade against the Republic of Cuba and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The U.S. was behind the overthrow of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia in 2019. Successive administrations whether Democratic or Republican remain staunchly against genuine national liberation movements and socialist construction throughout Latin America and the world.

Progressive and anti-imperialist forces in the western imperialist states must uphold the right of South American, Caribbean and Central American peoples to self-determination and non-capitalist development. The working class and nationally oppressed in the U.S. should be the natural allies of the revolutionary forces in Latin America and throughout the world.

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

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This outstanding documentary is in German.

We hope to publish a version with English subtitles shortly.

***

Eine umfangreiche im Original spanische Dokumentation über die gesamte andauernde “Pandemiesituation” . Von den Machern aus thebigreset.com/W Studio , in Zusammenarbeit mit El Investigador.org und OVALmedia. Diese Doku lief in einigen ausgewählten spanischen Kinos.

In diesem großen Machwerk kommen viele Experten aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen zu Wort. Ob es ein Nobelpreisträger für Medizin ist, Mathematiker oder Analysten, alle kommen auf dasselbe Ergebnis, dass die angebliche Pandemie, nicht mehr als ein Täuschungsmanöver war, für ganz andere politische Interessen.

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***

It’s becoming ever more clear that the major, most influential health authorities around the world are now blatantly lying to the public, given the current status of scientific and medical information.

Why do I say this?

The answer is simple: because the most influential health authorities are communicating to the public, both in words and in actions, the view that covid-19 ‘vaccines’ are “safe and effective” when the totality of available evidence suggests otherwise.

Let me explain.

Shouting from the webpage of what is the world’s largest ‘health system’, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), is the following statement, in bold text, declaring the safety and effectiveness of covid-19 ‘vaccines’.

The following screengrab was taken today:

Screen grab from here [accessed 27 Oct 2022]. Red oval highlight added for emphasis.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), like so many others, parrots the same information, using bold text for emphasis in the new, lockstep tradition.

The following screen grab was also taken today:

Screen grab [accessed 27 Oct 2022] Red oval highlight added for emphasis.

It is widely acknowledged that the proportion of proven cases of injury from covid-19 vaccines is currently very small compared with the total number of doses administered. But this metric is not sufficient to declare a product as safe. After all, society seems quite happy to deem a children’s toy unsafe even if there is just a theoretical risk of injury – let alone a demonstrated one that has led to death or permanent injury.

The Oxford Dictionary tells us that a product that is safe is one that is “free from hurt or damage”. The Cambridge Dictionary offers a similar meaning: “not in danger or likely to be harmed.”  Obviously there are some harms that are inevitable and would be readily accepted by most who were being offered an injectable medicine, even saline. These minor harms include common reactions caused by the breach of the skin by the hypodermic needle or even the risk of fainting from “needle phobia”. Then there are nocebo responses that might include headache or fatigue.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. What’s much more relevant is the rapidly building evidence base that shows substantial differences in severe reactions between injecting a placebo and the real thing. Sadly and to confuse the wider picture – quite probably deliberately – some of the clinical trials have not been conducted with saline controls, but rather with other vaccines or with mixtures of adjuvants.

This aside, let’s look at two pieces of relatively recent evidence from available data that any court would likely find hard to ignore, that demonstrate the covid-19 ‘vaccines’ should not and cannot be regarded as safe based on clear-cut differences between treatment and placebo arm results.

Study 1: Haas et al, JAMA (January 2022)

The first is a comprehensive meta-analysis of 12 clinical trials published in January this year in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study was led by Julia Haas from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and among the 8 author-strong team was senior author, Ted Kaptchuk, from Harvard Medical School. This is not a marginalised journal, nor a marginalised or discredited authorship.

The findings show a clear and pronounced, statistically significant elevation in severity and number of adverse events in those receiving the covid-19 vaccines (mRNA, adenoviral vector and protein subunit types), compared with those receiving controls – especially after the second of two doses included in the trials. That’s it – it should be GAME OVER for any claim that the covid-19 vaccines are “safe”.

A second study in a major high-impact journal should make it not just GAME OVER but a SLAM DUNK. Turns out there is at least one. In fact there are many more; I have simply been selective in providing two composite studies (meta-analyses) that in turn include many other studies.

Study 2: Fraiman et al, Vaccine (September 2022)

The authorship of the second study I’ve selected is equally star studded, including leading researchers from UCLA, Stanford and the University of Maryland, the latter including as its senior (last) author, Peter Doshi, also a senior editor at The BMJ. What these authors did was painfully tease apart available data from the phase 3 trials that Pfizer and Moderna used to gain their emergency use authorisations (EAUs).

The authors found a consistent trend for significantly greater risks for serious adverse events in the covid ‘vaccine’ arms compared with placebos, the risk ratios being between 1.36 and 1.57 times greater in the ‘vaccine’ arms for those adverse events defined as being of “special interest”. These include criteria developed specifically for covid-19 vaccines by the Brighton Collaboration, and have been agreed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The common clotting and heart health issues we see around us today were actually concealed in the the data reviewed by the likes of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) at time the EUAs were issued. They were just ignored by the regulators. That includes the coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries and the myocarditis/pericarditis issues that all jumped off the journal pages.

Joseph Fraiman and colleagues, the authors of the study, had difficulty getting to the bottom of the data in these trials given that both Pfizer and Moderna kept protocols secret and failed to make public individual participant data. They decided to publish the letter they sent to Albert Bourla and Stéphane Bancel, the respective CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna, in a Rapid Response to The BMJ in August, raising their concerns over non-transparency. We drew attention to this major problem in 2020, here and here.

Damning stuff – yet not even a squeak from the vaccine confidence brigade. Punch in (as I just have) ‘Doshi’ in the search bar of the Vaccine Confidence Project and you’ll find zero hits. Then follow this by plugging in ‘Offit’, as in Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, also a long-term vaccine protagonist, albeit one who has been voicing caution over covid-19 vaccines to healthy youngsters. You’ll find multiple pages of hits when you use Offit’s name. Have they not worked out that it’s this kind of illogic and imbalance that adds to our lack of confidence?

What was concealed from view in the Phase 3 trials, is the disturbing picture of the spectrum of neurological injurythat we are now witnessing from real world, population-wide roll-out that appear to be linked to covid-19 vaccines, albeit not commonly, but predictably uncommonly. Then there are suggestions of increasing cancer incidence, this inevitably clouded by cancer cases among those who didn’t receive standard care during the lockdowns as well as emerging evidence of natural killer and T cell exhaustion following repeat covid-19 ‘vaccination’.

Even more challenging will be deconstruction of the long-term complications caused by this new technology that will inevitably be delayed in time post-vaccination and become ever more difficult to unwrap as people get exposed to more shots while the virus continues to circulate and infect people. High on the watch list are fertility, autoimmune conditions and the smorgasbord of chronic, degenerative diseases associated with ageing populations, especially in industrialised countries.

Are COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ unavoidably unsafe?

US courts established some 40 years ago (e.g. here and here) that traditional vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”. The precedent set the scene for vaccine makers to seek indemnity from governments, which would then make the vaccine makers immune from prosecution in the event of no-fault (i.e. non-negligent) injury. Compensation would then be available in cases where causation of vaccine injury could be proven. That was the theory.

Those of us who have been aware of these issues for many years know just how difficult it is to prove causation. But those who know it even better are the vaccine injured themselves as they often spend years, at huge personal cost, attempting to work their way on behalf of loved ones through the compensation schemes in different countries. More often than not they’re spat out of the process and left to contend with life-changing injuries without any state support.

Disturbingly, given that so many of us have now been exposed to the virus, it’s also easy for authorities to try disguising covid ‘vaccine’ harms under the general heading of ‘long covid’. In the UK alone, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that as of 3 September 2022, 2.3 million people are “living in private households who are experiencing self-reported long COVID symptoms”.

Aside from the issue of conflating ‘vaccine’ and virus induced harms, the current data reported even by official sources are pointing to an emerging problem of an unprecedented scale. Official data associated with covid-19 shots in the USA, as reported by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), as summarised on OpenVAERS.com, currently reveals:

• 59,127 permanently disabled
• 34,492 life threatening injuries
• 31,569 deaths
• 53,302 reported cases of myocarditis/pericarditis
• 180,915 hospitalisations

Let’s get some perspective on these figures using another very commonly and widely utilised technology: the motor car. The number of people who died in the USA from motor vehicle accidents, 40,698 in 2018, is in the same order as the VAERS figure for covid-19 vaccines. However, the VAERS figure is widely considered to be an underestimate of the real figure, with Pantazatos and Seligmann (2021) suggesting the reported number of adverse events might just represent 5% of the total.

But even if we stick to the official numbers, how can we consider covid ‘vaccines’ to be safe? We, as in society generally, do not consider motor vehicles to be intrinsically safe. They are intrinsically, or unavoidably, unsafe. That’s why society has seen fit to instigate a bunch of processes that aim to make them safer, from the design of the vehicles, to the licensing of drivers, to the creation of safer cars and roads, and of course the creation of laws, supported by human and robotic enforcement, that attempt to ensure safer (but not entirely safe) driving and road use.

The shots on the other hand are administered by people who say the products they are administering are safe, with no hint that they might lead to death or permanent injury, despite this being a real, albeit it low probability, consequence. There is no admittance that the manufacturers, like car manufacturers, should be pressured into making safer covid vaccines. It seems we’re meant to blindly accept what they’ve produced at breakneck speed – and just lump it (that means accepting and paying for injuries, given we, the taxpayers, fund the government indemnity programs).

It’s not just the relentless use of the word “safe” by authorities and so-called ‘health systems’ – it’s also their actions.

Right up there has to be the fact that they are deemed safe enough to administer to our most vulnerable, including babies as young as 6 months and pregnant women. Which pregnant woman or new mother gets to sign a consent form that asks her to accept possible harms or future fertility impacts on her unborn child or baby? None, it seems.

The effectiveness claim used in the mantra “safe and effective” is also dubious. But it’s tougher to argue against given the health authorities could say, as they have done, that they have elsewhere qualified what they mean. This would include suggesting that effectiveness is measured only over short durations such as 6 months or less, and it now refers to the protection against severe disease and death, not to the ability of the product to stop transmission from human to human (the usual intended purpose of vaccines). Accordingly, let’s not open this can of worms right now.

Cracks in the narrative

Amidst the bleak background of covid ‘vaccine’-induced harms is some light; light that’s breaking through the cracks in the narrative. The sands are now definitely shifting, with increasing numbers who were previously steadfast advocates of the unquestionable safety of covid-19 ‘vaccines’ doing U-turns. That’s mainly a function of the available science and the fact so many have either directly experienced adverse effects or know people close to them who have.

I sense that the authorities as well as the media and tech companies that are trying to control the message and side line dissent through censorship and manipulation of messaging using behavioural science, have underestimated the power of experience.

Let me give you a four important areas where these cracks are appearing.

The first is the science – and I’ve given you earlier in this article examples of two big studies in big journals by authors from big name institutions. That’s a far cry from early-mid 2021 when these signals could only be found in studies on preprint servers and occasionally in minor journals.

For good measure, an article in Science – one of the most influential scientific journals in the world – caught my eye when it was published some 10 days ago. It’s not a study but it’s an insight piece that provides a perspective on the elevated risk of myocarditis following covid-19 vaccination based on widely published data (i.e. it will inevitably underestimate risks). Included in the article are quotes from mainstream experts, including Paul Offit, who do not recommend boosters to children or healthy people under 65.

Also, the notion of previously undescribed post-vaccination syndrome linked specifically to covid-19 vaccines, asexplained by Josef Finsterer from the Neurology and Neurophysiology Center in Vienna, Austria, is entering the mainstream medical community. Mainstream doctors often won’t have any idea of how to treat it having no pre-set pathway established by their health systems. But they’ve often seen too many cases that have been temporally associated with vaccination to continue to deny what they are observing.

The second area where cracks are appearing are among politicians. Take the latest All Party Parliamentary Group (AAPG) on Covid-19 Vaccine Damage that we have reported on separately today. And a stunning change in view is that of Danielle Smith, the 19th premier of Alberta, Canada, who only took office on 11 October.

Responding to a question from a journalist at Rebel News, Ms Smith replied, “I’m deeply sorry for anyone who was inappropriately subjected to discrimination as a result of their vaccination status. I am deeply sorry for any government employee who was fired from their job because of their vaccine status. I’d welcome them back if they wanted to come back.”

That’s a full 360 degree turnaround on premier Smith’s predecessor. You can see her full response at a press conference here.

A government data leak in Australia reported yesterday by Sky News Australia revealed the Australian government is budgeting for an 80-fold increase in covid-19 vaccine injury payments, to nearly $77 million for 2023. That will be mana to some politicians, no doubt.

A fourth area is the recognition of a corrupt or broken system by mainstream players. Take what America’s top litigator for vaccine injury cases has said about the prospects for covid-19 vaccine injury claims. In June 2021, Maglio told Reuters, not some local rag or even the Epoch Times, that “…the current system for handling COVID-related claims is different [from previous systems] – and not in a good way.”

There’s a statement on the website of Maglio’s law firm, Maglio Christopher & Toale, that is likely deeply disheartening to many victims of covid-19 ‘vaccine’ injury, “We have concluded that there is nothing our attorneys can do to help you in filing a claim in the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program”.

When both the top law firm dealing with the US ‘vaccine court’ and Reuters agree there is a ‘black hole’ for covid-19 vaccine injury claims, to use Reuters’ own words, that means the main players, not just those dishevelled conspiracy theorist types, recognise the system has been manipulated to work against the public interest. More to the point, to favour a protected class – the people who profit from making these new ‘vaccine’ technologies that are being trialled on humans as if they were experimental guinea pigs. While making it ever harder for those injured to be compensated for the damage that can be guaranteed to occur.

As disgusting as that is, it’s also just the stuff that causes people to say, you know what; I’m going to stop buying into the stuff those health authorities are feeding us, including the fact they’re claiming that covid-19 vaccines are safe. They wonder why we distrust governments and why politics in many countries has become something of a circus.

Last word – let’s go legal, but we need your support

Our sense is that the data are now more than strong enough to challenge the safety claims health authorities continue to make. I’ve discussed a limited number of studies in this article – but there is a battery of other data that could be brought to bear to further support the case against the misleading and deceitful safety claim made by health authorities.

Let’s remind ourselves that it has been the European requirement, supported by the European people and Parliament, to mandate the labelling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that has largely stopped GMO’s entering the human food chain in Europe. That contrasts with the US, where some 80% of processed foods sold by retailers are estimated to contain GMOs.

I’d argue that it’s the continued pronouncement by health authorities that covid-19 vaccines are safe that causes so many to continue to roll up their sleeves, in the mistaken belief that what they’re told must be true.

Preventing health authorities from doing this could save many lives going forward. We have been talking with various players in the UK and USA about a joint action either side of the Atlantic that aims to challenge this.

The only thing in the way of progressing this legal initiative is funding. We would dearly like to speak to anyone who might be able to provide significant funding towards a consortium of lawyers and scientists of which we are part, to take on this challenge. The first stage will be to identify the most appropriate, top-tier barristers, before going on to work with them to map out the grounds of challenge and gain an opinion.  We’re targeting an initial fundraise of £10,000 to achieve this first step.

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Rob Verkerk PhD, founder, executive & scientific director, ANH-Intl

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“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – Attributed to George Orwell but unsourced

As we approach the third year of the ‘Covid Crisis’, the once unassailable Covid Story – reported and repeated by politicians, public health mandarins and all mainstream media – has been replaced by contradictions and inconsistencies.

The original Covid Story narrated by health ‘experts’ and government officials told of a particularly virulent pathogen which besieged the planet in 2020 and spread like wildfire– terrorizing, infecting, and killing people en masse.

It was the story of a “pandemic level event” in which people were told to stay indoors, entire sectors of society were forced to shut down and humans were told to do everything possible to avoid contact with one another.

It was a story of closed down schools, closed down businesses, closed down churches and soon-to-be overwhelmed hospitals.

In later chapters the Covid Story morphed from ironclad truths, “Follow the science”, to ever changing definitions, “The science evolves.” Countless aspects of the “official” narrative changed overnight. Gradually the tale became fraught with pages of questionable statistics and ever shifting storylines.

What was one to make of all of these contradictions and ministerial mutations?

Did today’s story make sense with yesterday’s? Will tomorrow’s make sense with today’s?

Soon the only certainty within the Covid narrative became its uncertainty– the moment the Covid story “you thought you knew” was on solid footing the sands shifted yet again.

Attempting to make sense of the Covid conundrum soon required navigating a complex labyrinth of deceits, manipulations, obfuscations and concealments. Separating fact from fiction became more challenging each day.

While most persisted with the media storyline and government edicts, some began to take notice of the numerous anomalies and started asking questions.

The most glaring question was simply: “Why was no one allowed to ask questions?” Once this Pandora’s Box opened, a stream of questions came tumbling out.

Why wasn’t the media asking any questions? How were they all operating in lockstep?

Were we alerted to this “pandemic-level event” by our direct observations and experiences?

Were we surrounded by sick people, in our homes, neighborhoods and workplaces who were succumbing to a quick-spreading and dangerous virus?

If we were truly in a pandemic of biblical proportions would there be so much discussion of the epidemiological minutiae?

Bit by bit as most of the accepted narrative began to unravel, questioning the “official story” became more than a revolutionary act it became an obligation.

If you have to be persuaded, reminded, pressured, lied to, incentivized, coerced, bullied, socially shamed, guilt-tripped, threatened, punished and criminalized. If all of this is considered necessary to gain your compliance — you can be absolutely certain that what is being promoted is not in your best interest. Ian Watson

To sell the Covid Story a mass marketing campaign rife with its own nomenclature was launched. The constant drumbeat of the Covid battle cry became inescapable resembling  military grade propaganda rather than public health messaging.

• Were these Covid watch words and rallying cries intended to serve public health or were they designed merely to be obeyed? Where did these ideas and phrases come from? 
• Why did the media and government relentlessly stoke public fear and anxiety?
• Why were millions spent on behavioral management teams?
• How did the phrase “the new normal” emerge within the first weeks of the pandemic?
• Was sustained psychological manipulation utilized to create fear and coerce the public?
• Were Covid symptoms genuinely unique or were we being conditioned to believe there was a new disease?
• Were statistics about Covid deaths being manipulated to create the perception of a crisis?
• Were lockdowns about protection or social control?
• Did lockdowns reduce deaths or cause increasedmortality?
• Was there ever any evidence for ”asymptomatic spread”  or was this overstated to frighten the public?
• How did we go from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to permanent emergency “laws?

Hospitals and doctors are getting rich off a sickened mass population. — Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue 

One of the earliest Covid Campaign methods used to alert the public to the coming storm of dire illness centered on the belief that hospitals were going to be overwhelmed by a cascade of the Covid infected.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve” became a national rallying cry. The public was flooded with stories of overflowing hospital corridors and swamped ICU’s. Makeshift hospitals were swiftly constructed to take in the excess casualties. The unquestioning media amplified these stories creating a climate of widespread panic and hysteria.

Was any of this true?

• Were US hospitals really overwhelmed? What does the data say?
• Were NYC hospitals overwhelmed in Spring 2020?
• Was Elmhurst hospital, the ‘epicenter of the epicenter’, overflowing in Spring 2020?
• Were ICUs flooded with patients?
• Were US hospitals busier in 2020 than they were in 2019?
• Are hospitals regularly overrun during cold and flu season?

Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule. —Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Educational Research

As the pandemic picked up speed, the “Covid death toll” became a daily marker hammered home by media bullhorns and mortality scoreboards.

Ghastly tales of the “first wave” of Covid fatalities were plastered all over media channels in lockstep. Harrowing tales of overflowing morgues and refrigerated trucks filled with Covid cadavers saturated the evening news. While a simpler explanation for these trucks was readily available, a compliant and complicit media plugged its ears and continued to manufacture mass hysteria.

Again all questions that might sow seeds of skepticism were kept away from public discussion.

But was this advertised death march verifiable or was this yet another feature of the Covid fear campaign?

• Were Covid death counts and death certificatesaccurate or were Covid deaths artificially inflated?
• What was the average age of Covid deaths and how did that compare with normal life expectancy?
• What percentage of Covid deaths were from people who already had multiple comorbidities?
• Were the photos of coffins from Bergamo, Italy, in March 2020, used to terrify the world, authentic?
• Why did CNN report that a 7-year-old Georgia boy died from Covid when he drowned in a bathtub after a seizure.
• How many Covid deaths due to “intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events” were placed in the CDC COVID death count?
• Why were 14,369 injury deaths, 1,265 deaths due to falls,  drowning deaths and suicides listed in the Covid-19 death count?
• Why did the CDC change recording methods exclusively for Covid deaths and did this inflateCovid fatality numbers?

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. —Carl Sagan

As the purported wreckage of the “first wave” subsided and the body count failed to add up to the predicted totals, the narrative abruptly shifted.

“The Covid Death” was replaced by “The Covid Case” as the main vector of fear. What defined a “Covid Case” generally seemed up for grabs. “Case” definitions ranged from anyone “suspected of having Covid” to those who were ‘positive’ as established through PCR testing.

Nowhere in the media could one find an inquiring reporter who would question what it meant to be a “probable case.” Even as the PCR became a regular feature of daily life never was the soundness of its usage as a diagnostic tool examined by any mainstream source.

Were these case counts and the methods used situated on solid scientific ground?

• Was Covid-19 a novel virus?
• How did the peer-review process of the critical publication about the Covid PCR tests only take one day? 
• Were Covid PCR test results accurate?
• Were Covid case counts and diagnoses accurate?
• Were PCR tests used deceptively to invent Covid “cases?”
• Why was the definition of a Covid “case” altered?

Big Pharma needs sick people to prosper. Patients, not healthy people, are their customers. If everybody was cured of a particular illness or disease, pharmaceutical companies would lose 100% of their profits on the products they sell for that ailment. What all this means is because modern medicine is so heavily intertwined with the financial profits culture, it’s a sickness industry more than it is a health industry. —James Morcan 

Once it was firmly established in the public’s mind that a pathogenic menace was lurking just outside their door a non-stop barrage of messaging, gaslighting and coercion kicked in from all angles.

The entire world was repeatedly informed that the only salvation for the human species was a genetically engineered experimental medical product concocted at “Warp Speed” by giant Pharmaceutical companies. This and only this medication could save humanity from catastrophe.

Like many other facets of the Covid Story, the tale of Big Pharma and their magical potions unraveled upon further scrutiny. Multiple questions arose:

• If Big Pharma is truly in the business of public health what is their historical record towards safeguarding public health?
• What is Pfizer’s previous track record of fraud and corruption?
• Has Big Pharma captured the FDA and the political and regulatory processes?
• Does Big Pharma control the CDC?
• Does Big Pharma influence clinical trials?
• Were Pfizer’s clinical trials for Covid vaccinesproperly run  trials?
• Why did the FDA try to conceal Covid vaccine trial data for 75 years? What did the trial data reveal?
• Why has the FDA refused to make its vaccine safety monitoring public?
• How did the CDC decide the Pfizer clinical trials proved a ‘safe and effective’ vaccine?

I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole. —Malcolm X

When the mass rollout of the experimental Covid vaccines was launched, a compulsory campaign silencing all voices who dare question the vaccine imperative was set in motion. Even so, some voices of apprehension slipped through the cracks. Many of these voices were some of the most renowned medical practitioners in their field.

Why were their voices not allowed into the mainstream conversations?

• Why were thousands of dissenting physicians censored and silenced?
• Why were doctors who spoke out about early treatment vilified and censored?
• Were the Covid vaccines necessary, effective or safe?
• Would the Covid Vaccines stop hospitalizations or deaths?
• Was evidence of harm and serious adverse eventsfrom the clinical trials covered up?
• Why did the media maintain silence about potential dangers of the Covid vaccine?
• Were people given proper informed consent for the Covid vaccines?
• What did multiple studies as early as 2020 say about the Covid vaccines and microvascular injury?
• Why weren’t independent scientists allowed to examine the mRNA vaccine vials?
• Was there a connection between heart inflammation and the Covid vaccines?
• Why were kids targeted for vaccination when it was known they were at zero risk from the disease in question?
• Were there doctors calling for a halt to the Covid vaccine program?

Ultimately a comprehensive and complete reckoning with the ‘Covid Story’ is not possible without a thorough examination of the policies which unfolded in hospitals and nursing homes and the catastrophic consequences.

While hospital workers were feted as heroes, reports began to leak out hinting that what actually occurred inside these medical institutions was contrary to the sustained media narrative. As more stories surfaced, suspicions escalated that this too was part of the Covid mythology.

Questions concerning treatments in hospitals and nursing homes emerged and allegations about monied interests materialized.

• Were hospitals incentivized to manufacture Covid patients?
• What were the Covid hospital treatment protocols?
• Were hospitals incentivized to put Covid patients onventilators and to use Remdesivir?
• Did these incentives and protocols endanger people?

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In the early chapters of the Covid Story, perhaps no other storyline trapped our imaginations and pulled on our heartstrings quite like the “Saving Grandma” shibboleth. We were told that “Covid-19” targeted the old and the sick and multiple reports from across the globe revealed a consistent pattern of how ghastly situations in long-term care facilities unfolded.

As more information on this piece of the sordid Covid puzzle surfaced more questions came to light.

Did thousands of elderly die because of Covid or was the management of their end-of-life treatment withdrawn actively putting them in a situation that ensured their death?

• What did they mean when they said “taking care of the elderly?”
• How did they “take care of the elderly in Canada?” In the UK? In France? In Maryland? In Massachusetts? In Washington DC? In Mississippi? In NewYork? In New Jersey? In Minnesota? In Indiana? In Louisiana? In Michigan? In Rhode Island?
• Were conditions for high death rates at Care Homes created on purpose?

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. —C.S. Lewis 

All intricate stories require a cast of characters and the Covid Chronicle was no different. Neil Ferguson and Christian Drosten played significant supporting roles behind the scenes while others, like Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, took center stage. As we moved through the Covid narrative we “came to know” these personalities through the portraits painted by a uniformly deferential media.

Were these images of our Covid cast of characters accurate depictions? How much about them did we really know?

• What did Neil Ferguson’s original computer models predict about Covid deaths and what was his well documented track record?
• How did his calamitous and inaccurate predictions play such a central role in determining government policy?
• Who is Christian Drosten and how did he develop the now famous Covid PCR test? 
• Who is The Real Anthony Fauci?
• What role did Anthony Fauci play in the HIV/AIDS crisis?
• Given that Bill Gates has no medical training, why did he play such a central role in determining government policy?
• How did Bill Gates  know in 2019  that vaccines would be “one of the best buys” in 2020?
• How did Bill Gates use medical investments to turn $10 billion into $200 billion?
• Why did the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invest $55 million in the shares of BioNTech in August of 2019?

They failed to see that globalisation was merely a tactic to prise power from nation states towards international conglomerates. Once the power was siphoned from the people and democratic control was circumvented, the ability to assert global governance without any democratic restraint was available. —James Tunney

Finally, to understand the totality of the Covid Story it’s necessary to understand how the public health industry is inextricably linked to global financial markets and operates based on the demands of those financial conglomerates. Manufactured pandemics are now considered one of the biggest investment opportunities to increase the wealth of billionaires and consolidate their power.

The medical industry is no longer a system whose primary focus is to serve the health and well-being of the public. It is a system whose primary function is as a financial instrument for investors. The present-day policies that define the medical industry are designed to serve socioeconomic and political agendas which benefit these same financial elites.

Was the entire ‘Covid Crisis’ a genuine health emergency or was it an agenda rooted in fear to enrich the pockets of Big Pharma and their monied investors.

Here again the mainstream media remain dutifully silent, refusing to ask the most basic of questions:

• Who owns Big Pharma?
• Is it a coincidence that the Covid Public Health Emergency created over 500 new billionaires and coincided with one of the largest upwards transfers of wealth in human history?
• Why were Big Banks being bailed out during the Covid era while small businesses were being pushed out?
• How did workers around the world lose $3.7 trillion in the pandemic while billionaires around the world gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemic?
• Is it possible to “follow the science” if the science iscontrolled by money?
• What did the Head of the IMF say about the fate of the world’s economy and vaccines?
• What is the “Great Reset?”
• What is the Great Reset?
• What are Central Bank Digital Currencies?

After a deeper dive into the Covid Hall of Mirrors one wonders if even a single strand of the story withstands scrutiny. Three years on and the wreckage from the fusillade of Covid policies continue to pile up. With every passing day more holes appear in the official narrative and more admissions come to light as officials scurry to avoid accountability.

As the dust settles in the aftermath of the Covid carnage we are left asking one final question:

“Was the entirety of the Covid Story a lie?”

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Michael Bryant is a freelance journalist/activist and researcher who presently focuses primarily on issues surrounding health freedom. His work has appeared on HealthFreedomDefense.org

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The world’s largest nickel miner, Indonesia, is considering the idea of forming a cartel to manage the supply of nickel and some other key battery metals, similar to what OPEC does for oil.  As demand for battery metals such as nickel, lithium, copper, and cobalt is expected to soar in the coming decades to meet the surge in battery demand for electric vehicles and energy storage, the idea that some resource-rich countries would take advantage of their mineral deposits and look to control part of the future market doesn’t sound outrageous. 

“I do see the merit of creating Opec to manage the governance of oil trade to ensure predictability for potential investors and consumers,” Indonesia’s Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia told the Financial Times in an interview published this week.

“Indonesia is studying the possibility to form a similar governance structure with regard to the minerals we have, including nickel, cobalt and manganese,” Lahadalia added.

Indonesia has not yet contacted other nickel-producing countries to discuss the idea of a cartel, the investment ministry told FT, adding it was still working on a governance structure of a future alliance that it could propose to other producers.

Easier Said Than Done 

Yet, replicating an OPEC-like cartel for the so-called energy transition metals is easier said than done. Unlike the oil resources of OPEC’s producers, the mining operations in Indonesia and other major nickel producers are controlled by various private companies or Chinese entities. Moreover, the biggest producers and holders of nickel deposits are a diverse group of countries with very different political and market conditions and unlikely to have common ground and interests in forming a cartel. Apart from Indonesia, producers of nickel include Russia, Canada, Australia, and the United States, although the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of resources or output compared to Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, or Australia.

Indonesia and Australia hold the world’s largest nickel reserves, each with around 21 million tons, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Indonesia, however, is the top nickel producer, followed by the Philippines and Russia.

But Russia accounts for almost 20% of the global supply of Class 1 nickel, which is the grade needed for batteries, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Nickel is found primarily in two types of deposits – sulphide and laterite. Sulphide deposits – mainly located in Russia, Canada, and Australia – typically contain higher-grade nickel which is more easily processed into Class 1 battery-grade nickel. Indonesia, as well as the Philippines, have the laterite deposits of nickel, which is lower-grade and requires additional energy-intensive processing to become battery-grade nickel, the IEA said in a July 2022 report, Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries.

“Although Indonesia produces around 40% of total nickel, little of this is currently used in the EV battery supply chain. The largest Class 1 battery grade nickel producers are Russia, Canada and Australia,” the IEA said.

Indonesia aims to develop its downstream nickel industry and banned exports of nickel ore in 2020. This move prompted an EU complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against Indonesia’s decision to ban exports of raw materials used in the production of stainless steel.

Imagine what reaction an Indonesia-led cartel for battery metals would receive in the EU, the U.S., Canada, and Australia, for example.

The Indonesian ban has also prompted Chinese firms to invest in Indonesia’s nickel supply chain. Chinese companies have invested and committed some $30 billion in the Indonesian nickel supply chain, with Tsingshan’s investments in the Morowali and Weda Bay industrial parks being the most prominent examples, the IEA said in a report on the role of critical minerals in the energy transition.

Unlike OPEC producers, it’s not one state-owned entity in Indonesia that controls the production of nickel. Tsingshan of China and Brazil’s Vale are major producers of nickel in Indonesia.

Moreover, a unit of China’s battery giant CATL signed earlier this year a $6 billion agreement with Indonesian firms to cooperate on the Indonesia EV Battery Integration Project, which includes nickel mining and processing, EV battery materials, EV battery manufacturing, and battery recycling.

Environmental Concerns

Indonesia and its policies will be pivotal for the quality and quantity challenges in nickel supply, according to the IEA.

Most of the nickel production growth in the coming years is set to come from the regions with vast amounts of laterite resources, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, according to the IEA. These resources need more energy and emission-intensive processed to produce battery-grade nickel. High Pressure Acid Leach (HPAL) is gaining traction as a way to produce Class 1 products from laterite resources, and several such projects are being developed in Indonesia. But such projects have track records of large cost overruns and delays and require additional costs for acid production facilities.

There are also concerns about the environmental impact of HPAL as it often uses coal or oil-fired boilers for heat, thus emitting up to three times more greenhouse gas emissions than production from sulphide deposits, the IEA says.

Due to concerns over the environmental impact of the nickel industry in Indonesia, dozens of U.S. and Indonesian environmental organizations sent in July an open letter to Elon Musk and the shareholders of Tesla, urging them to “Terminate Tesla’s planned investment plan in Indonesia’s nickel industry due to potentially devastating impacts on the environment and the lives of Indonesian people.”

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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. 

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***

The vast majority of countries on Earth voted in the United Nations General Assembly to condemn the Israeli apartheid regime for having nuclear weapons, in flagrant violation of international law.

Israel is the only country in West Asia that has nukes. Tel Aviv has not officially acknowledged its possession of the planet-destroying weapons, but experts estimate it has at least 90 nuclear warheads, and perhaps hundreds.

On October 28, a staggering 152 countries (79% of all UN member states) adopted a resolution that called on Israel to give up its atomic bombs, join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to supervise its nuclear facilities.

Just five countries voted against the measure: the United States and Canada, the small island nations of Palau and Micronesia, and apartheid Israel itself.

Another 24 countries abstained, mostly members of the European Union, NATO allies, and India.

The October 28, 2022 UN General Assembly vote telling Israel to get rid of its illegal nuclear weapons

The resolution, document A/C.1/77/L.2, was titled “The risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.”

It demands that Israel abide by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and put “all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.”

The document likewise says Israel must commit “not to develop, produce, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, to renounce possession of nuclear weapons and to place all its unsafeguarded nuclear facilities under fullscope Agency safeguards as an important confidence-building measure among all States of the region and as a step towards enhancing peace and security.”

The resolution had been introduced by Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt (on behalf of the Arab League), Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and the UN-recognized state of Palestine.

It was adopted in the 25th plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly’s First Committee, which is focused on disarmament and international security.

Back in 2019, the United States and apartheid Israel were the only countries on Earth that voted against UN General Assembly draft resolutions calling for establishing a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, preventing an arms race in outer space, and ending Washington’s illegal six-decade blockade of Cuba.

Important breakthroughs have arrived at the UN seeking to prevent an arms race in outer space and create a nuclear weapons-free Middle East. There are just two main obstacles: the US and #Israel.@WomenMarch4Paz @Blacks4Peacehttps://t.co/BZbNaauNPn

— Popular Resistance (@PopResistance) November 13, 2019

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

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***

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting video that describes How Russian Crude Avoids Sanctions and Ends Up in the US.

With an upfront ad, that is a free WSJ video link.

The Lukoil Connection

Image composite from WSJ video

Sanction Avoidance Process 

• US sanctions are on crude oil, not refined products.
• Lukoil, Russia’s second largest oil and gas company was not sanctioned by the US.
• Lukoil’s refinery in Sicily is the second largest in Italy and fifth largest in Europe.
• A Lukoil refinery in Italy once processed crude from multiple countries. Now it inputs are 93 percent from Russia.
• After refining, the country of origin is Italy, not Russia. This is due to longstanding practice of changing the country of origin to where oil is refined.
• The refined product then makes its way Exxon and Lukoil plants in New Jersey and Texas.
• Lukoil still has a gas station presence in the US and it distributes products to eleven states.

Lukoil Stations in 11 US States

Note: Most of the 230 Lukoil gas stations in the US are owned by individual American franchisees, not the oil giant itself.

Understanding the Process

• The US has sanction exclusions for oil “substantially transformed into a foreign-made product.”
• US refiners cannot process Russian crude, but Italian refiners can, then distribute the product here.
• In return, US can send its refined products to the EU, completing the round trip!

Lukoil is 6th largest refiner in Europe. It went from processing 30% Russian oil to 93%. That’s a pretty big sieve even if amounts to US are small.

Conveniently timed for the US election, European bans on Lukoil do not come into play until December 5.

Unless the EU backs down, this could lead to another surge in the price of gasoline in December.

Meanwhile, In eleven US states, people are filling up their tanks in part with Russian oil products via the above convoluted means.

The US Treasury department refused to comment on this process. Gee, I wonder why.

Biden says this is all Putin’s fault, while traipsing the globe begging Saudi Arabia and Venezuela for more oil.

Finally, after Biden told both OPEC and the US oil industry of its intent to kill the industry, the president now threatens both the US and Saudi produces with tax hikes and unspecified consequences.

For discussion, please see Biden Threatens Saudi Arabia With Unspecified Consequences for Slashing Oil Production

Consequences

“There will be consequences,” says president Biden. “It’s time to rethink our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

Yeah, there will be consequences.

The one on the immediate horizon is an election blowout on Tuesday, November 8.

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The Guardian has obtained documents marked “official sensitive,” which show the government has “war-gamed” emergency plans for power blackouts lasting up to a week. 

Documents are not for public consumption, warn a “reasonable worst-case scenario” power blackout would roil all segments of the economy. Transport, food, water supply, communications, and energy would grind to a halt.

In such a scenario, the government will provide citizens with food, water, and shelter if power blackouts last more than several days.

Earlier this week, UK’s Met Office published a three-month outlook for winter. Despite warm weather today, temperatures are expected to be colder than average as the heating season begins shortly:

“The likelihood of a colder three-month period overall is slightly greater than normal,” the forecasts said.

Preparing for the inevitable crisis has already begun. Whitehall officials’ secret plan, dubbed “Programme Yarrow,” has held a number of exercises with government departments and councils across the country in recent weeks to stress test collaboration efforts.

We first caught wind of increasing power blackout risks across the UK in early October when the British National Grid warned there might not be enough natural gas and electric imports from other parts of Europe later in the cold season.

“We’re heading into winter in an unprecedented situation. Even during the cold war, the Soviet Union kept the gas flowing so it’s very unpredictable,” said one senior industry source.

The Guardian said government insiders have admitted to planning exercises and preparing for the inevitable as an energy crisis is unavoidable this winter.

“All governments do contingency planning for worst-case scenarios but the truth is that we are vulnerable as a country as a direct consequence of a decade of failed Conservative energy policy.

“Banning onshore wind, slashing investment in energy efficiency, stalling nuclear and closing gas storage have led to higher bills and reliance on gas imports, leaving us more exposed to the impact of Putin’s use of energy as a geopolitical weapon,” Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, said.

Last month, The Guardian revealed secret scripts prepared for BBC news anchors to read on air if rolling blackouts strike the country. The purpose of the talking points is to calm the public during a “major loss of power” event.

Only analog FM radio stations will broadcast messages to the population during a national emergency because power grid failures would cripple communication networks.

One source made it clear that Brits aren’t supposed to know about Programme Yarrow:

“The government doesn’t want any publicity on Yarrow, as they don’t want it to be seen as linked to Ukraine, energy supply and the cost of living. But we need to think about how we can help people in advance. The fact they’re talking about it now means they have a real concern it could happen.”

The good news so far is that weather has been on the warm side across the UK for October but is set to slide from here as the heating season begins.

How many cold snaps will it take for the UK to stumble into a situation where it might have to ration power?

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During the Second World War, the Canadian government appealed for Canadians to buy war bonds to fight fascism in Europe. This came only after Hitler came into conflict with Britain before the Soviet Union, with Canada’s government previously being an enthusiastic supporter of fascism in the 1930s. Canada would almost instantly go back to working with fascists after the end of World War II, importing many from Europe. In 2022, the Canadian government has once again reintroduced war bonds, this time for a Nazi-infested Ukrainian government used by NATO to wages a proxy war against Russia.

Appeals for war bonds during the Second World War manifested through calls for Canadians to buy “Victory loans” funding Canada’s war effort. From 1941 to 1945, there were nine victory loans with total cash sales totaling almost $12 billion. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that “about 52% of these bonds were bought by corporations and the rest by individuals.”

On October 28 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to raise further money for Ukraine as the eight year NATO-led proxy war against Russia rages on. This plan involves Canada selling a government backed 5-year bond for Ukraine, NATO’s primary means used to target Russia. Canada calls it a “Ukrainian Sovereignty Bond”. Trudeau’s plan would also in turn make Canada the first country to provide war bonds to Ukraine.

This time around, the war bonds are meant to help the Ukrainian government “continue operations”, while targets of this money would include “providing essential services to Ukrainians, like pensions, and purchasing fuel before winter.” The Canada Files reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to ask: “Can you guarantee that none of the funds raised from these bonds will go to the Ukrainian military or police?” We have not received a response. Regardless, a Canadian government bond has been created to support a Nazi-infested government in Ukraine.

In a meeting with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Trudeau discussed how Canadians can now “go to major banks to purchase their sovereignty bonds which will mature after five years with interest”. These bonds will support the government of Ukraine in fighting NATO’s proxy war against Russia and allow it to continue further operations targeting the Russian Special Military Operation in the Donbass.

In addition to a war bonds for the Ukrainian government, the Canadian government also announced a new round of sanctions targeting various senior Russian officials. These senior Russian officials were tied to the Russian energy sector, including Gazprom and its subsidiaries. Furthermore, Canada plans to impose even further sanctions on Russian justice and security sectors building off of the sanctions for Gazprom. Canada’s announcement of these sanctions signifies further commitment to NATO’s strategy of economically strangling Russia by isolating Russia from the global market. This is to be carried regardless of the effectiveness of these sanctions or the imminent consequences for Europe as the winter commences.

A Very Canadian history of working with Ukrainian Nazi Collaborators

Canada’s preparation of war bonds for the Nazi-Infested Ukrainian government is yet another instance of Canada’s collaboration with pro-fascist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora in establishing an anti-Russian foreign policy. This collaboration with fascist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora goes back to the end of the Second World War. Following the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, Canada provided refuge to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators fleeing the Soviet Union. These Nazi collaborators belong to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, specifically the OUN-B faction of the movement. The OUN-B, headed by Stephan Bandera, sought to create an ‘ethnically pure’ Ukraine, purged of all Jews, Russians, and Poles. During the Second World War, they enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate both Communists along with Ukraine’s Jewish, Polish, and Slavic populations. Some members of the OUN collaborated with the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier division. The 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier division was responsible for the massacre of more than 1,000 Polish civilians in Huta Peniatska in 1944.

These fascist groups would find a new home in Canada as anti-Communism became an integral part of Canadian foreign policy in the Cold War. According to investigative historian Peter Vronsky, US-financed groups such as the Canadian Christian Council for the Resettlement of Refugees lobbied the Canadian government to take in former SS collaborators in the war against Communism.

The Canadian government would admit more than 2,000 members of the Galician Waffen SS Division in order to crush the left wing of the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora. In many cases, simply showing an SS tattoo to officials was enough to be admitted in Canada. These Nazi collaborators worked with the Canadian government and Canadian corporations to suppress leftist movements in Canada. The RCMP paid suspected war criminals such as Radislav Grujicic to provide intelligence reports on left-wing immigrants. Canadian mining companies such as INCO would use Ukrainian Nazi collaborators to purge unions of leftist militants.

The Ukrainian Nazi collaborators settling in Canada would set up various organizations to spread their ideology. These organizations included the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) and the League of Ukranian Canadians (LUC), both of which glorify Nazi collaborators such as Bandera and his right-hand man, Yaroslav Stetsko. The UCC would even go as far to consider Bandera one of Ukraine’s national heroes. In addition to setting up organizations promoting Ukrainian ultranationalism, the ultranationalist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora wouldalso erect memorials to various Nazi collaborators. These memorials include a monument commemorating the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division in Oakville, as well as a statue of Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton.

Trudeau continues Canada’s history anti-Russia collaboration with Ukrainian Ultranationalists

The Canadian government’s collaboration with the Ukrainian-Canadian far right would continue under Justin Trudeau. As prime minister, Trudeau would appoint Ukrainian ultranationalist Chrystia Freeland as foreign minister and later as deputy prime minister and minister of finance. Freeland was the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who ran a Nazi propaganda newspaper in Ukraine. Freeland has both defended the US-instigated Maidan coup and whitewashed her grandfather’s willing complicity in the Holocaust, along with his efforts to spread far-right ideas within the Canadian Ukrainian diaspora.

In addition to the appointment of Freeland, the Trudeau government both permitted the sale of light arms to Ukraine and continued Operation UNIFIER. Operation UNIFIER was the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission providing military training for the Neo Nazi-infiltrated Ukrainian army as they waged war on the Russian population of Ukraine. While Operation UNIFIER was started under the Harper government, it would be extended twice by the Trudeau government. The first extension of Operation UNIFIER occurred in March 2019, when it was extended to March 2022, and the second extension occurred in January of 2022, when the mission was extended to March of 2025. As tensions worsened between Russia and Ukraine, the Trudeau government prepared the further expansion of sanctions in February of 2022 targeting Russia.

With the commencing of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, the Canadian government would push for immediate escalation of the conflict. On March 3, 2022 the Canadian government would place sanctions on Russian companies Rosneft and Gazprom. This would be followed by the removal of Russia and Belarus from favored nation status, thereby imposing a mandatory 35 per cent tariff on all imports from the two countries. In addition to increasing sanctions, Canada would provide artillery and light armored vehicles for Ukraine. On April 7, 2022, the Canadian parliament would also echo trumped-up claims from the Ukrainian government that Russian actions in Ukraine constituted an act of genocide.

Canada’s attempts to escalate the Ukrainian conflict drives world closer to Nuclear War

The Canadian government’s decision to provide war bonds for Ukraine is yet another indication of its willingness to work with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in fermenting an anti-Russia foreign policy. For decades since they were offered refuge in Canada, pro-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian diaspora have worked with the Canadian government and Canadian corporations against first the Canadian left and the USSR, and now the Russian government. In the years following the Maidan coup, Canada has escalated tensions further with both sanctions on Russia and military support for Ukraine both before and after the Russian Special Military operation.

As the NATO-instigated proxy war in Ukraine against Russia drives the world closer to nuclear war, an anti-imperialist movement in Canada is needed more than ever to oppose further escalation of the war in Ukraine by the Canadian government.

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Daniel Xie is a firm anti-imperialist, who writes about the need for an anti-imperialist and independent Canadian foreign policy. He serves as the Associate Editor of The Canada Files.

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***

On October 29, Moscow suspended its adherence to the July agreement allowing both Ukraine and Russia to freely export their grain and other agricultural products, including fertiliser. Moscow justified its stand by saying the move is in retaliation for Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian fleet based at the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Consequently, Russia said it cannot guarantee the safety of commercial shipping carrying grain from the Black Sea ports to Turkey and beyond. The deal is set to be renewed on November 19.

Although the UN and Turkey have pledged to continue shipping Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea ports, a few well-aimed armed drones or missiles would put a stop to commercial voyages. Ukraine will be the main loser as the sale of grain provides urgently needed hard currency while grain prices are certain to rise across the globe.

Following Russia’s suspension, Reuters cited Singapore traders who said, “Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of wheat booked for delivery to Africa and the Middle East are at risk following Russia’s withdrawal, while Ukrainian corn exports to Europe will get knocked low.” Chicago wheat futures jumped a few points for fear that supplies will be tight.

Before Russia’s suspension, the UN trade and development organisation had reported that 8 million metric tonnes of Ukrainian grain were exported under the deal. “The UN-led initiative has helped to stabillise and subsequently lower global food prices and move precious grain from one of the world’s breadbaskets to the tables of those in need,” the UN claimed despite what has actually happened.

Russia has expressed dissatisfaction with the UN-brokered deal because the primary beneficiaries have not been poor countries dependent on wheat, barley and corn from Ukraine. Indeed, The Financial Times cited UN data which “shows that [under the deal] rich countries received more than half of the shipment volumes, led by Spain [due to drought]. Middle-income countries including Turkey and China accounted for about a quarter of the total, while lower and lower-middle income countries such as Egypt and Ethiopia received just over a fifth”.

Therefore, 80 per cent of the exports under the UN deal have not gone to reduce hunger in poor countries but to replace shortages in Europe and other moderately wealthy countries and bring down prices in these countries.

Al Jazeera has revealed just how dramatic the shift direction of grain exports has been under the July deal. During 2021-early 2022 Turkey was the largest importer of Russian and Ukrainian wheat; Egypt which was usually first, came second, followed by Bangladesh. Next in line were Nigeria, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Senegal, Vietnam, Indonesia, Tunisia, Thailand, Morocco, the Philippines, the UAE, South Korea, Spain and Israel. Turkey and the last five countries on this list are not afflicted by widespread hunger.

The true reason for Russia’s suspension, which was predicted before the attack on its fleet, was discriminatory implementation of the deal. Shortly after the deal was agreed, the volume of Ukrainian grain exports was about 50 per cent of pre-war levels and climbing. However, the same was not true for Russian grain exports which fell by 22 per cent in July and August.

Sanctions are responsible. While sanctions are not meant to hinder the delivery by targeted countries of essential food and medicine, bankers and insurance companies are reluctant to do business with Russia, ship owners do not want their vessels to carry Russian cargoes and port handlers boycott Russian arrivals. This is true also for Russian exports of potassium fertilisers, which have fallen by 25-30 per cent this year.

Since Russian exports are being shunned and Moscow demonised while a huge hullabaloo is being made over potential cuts in Ukrainian grain exports, Moscow is all too clearly not keen on maintaining the deal. Nevertheless, Russia did not stop a dozen grain laden ships setting sail from Ukrainian ports on Monday, the first day after Russia’s withdrawal.

Russia may also be frustrated by the spin the world media has adopted. Newspapers and broadcasters have argued that the absence of Ukrainian grain alone is a major disaster for the poor and a driver of inflation. This has been refuted by the UN data cited by the Financial Times and is pure propaganda.

Russia is the world’s top exporter of wheat, followed by the US, Canada and France. Ukraine comes fifth. Russia exports 37.3 million tonnes (18 per cent of the world’s wheat supply) compared with 18 million exported by Ukraine (7 per cent). Together they export 25 per cent of global wheat supplies.

The imposition on countries other than Russia of sanctions on both exports and imports have had the same material and political impact as on Russia. For example, Washington provides a waiver to permit heavily sanctioned Iran, which exports natural gas and machinery to Iraq. On Iranian imports, companies producing food, medicine and other essential goods, which are meant to be exempt from sanctions, do not sell to Tehran because they fear US secondary sanctions. Banks, shipping companies, insurers and potential investors shun Iran. As a result, Iranians have been subjected for decades to collective punishment which is illegal under international humanitarian law.

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***

In the wake of the controversies and heated debate generated in the wake of the referenda held last September in the regions of  Donbass, it became necessary to get some clarity on the legal issues surrounding this event.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Dr. Alfred de Zayas served as the first UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council (2012-18). He worked with the United Nations from 1981 to 2003 as a senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee, and the Chief of Petitions.

Arnaud Develay: What is your analysis of the predicament facing Russian-speaking minorities living in the Donbass regions in the wake of the events of the Maidan? Could the actions of the Ukrainian government these past eight years be constitutive of an attempt to commit genocide on these populations?

Alfred de Zayas: The Russian population in Donbass certainly had reason to feel threatened in the light of the virulence of the anti-Russian rhetoric by the leaders of the Maidan coup and the anti-Russian legislation adopted by the putsch-Parliament.

The level of hatred expressed by politicians and media certainly constituted “hate speech” and violated article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits both propaganda for war and incitement to hatred and discrimination.

The shelling of population centers in Donbas 2014-2022 entailed war crimes and crimes against humanity, but did not amount to genocide for purposes of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

While Art. 2 of 1948 of the Genocide Convention has 5 categories, it does not include cultural genocide. It is wiser to avoid hyperbole. War crimes and crimes against humanity under articles 7 and 8 of the Statute of Rome are bad enough.

The right to speak one’s language is protected in articles 2 and 27 of the ICCPR. It is also protected in articles 2 and 15 of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and numerous UN resolutions. Moreover, it constitutes a legitimate exercise of the right of freedom of expression under article 19 ICCPR.

Ukraine is certainly in violation of articles 19 and 27 ICCPR.

Moreover, Ukraine is in violation of common article 1 of the ICCPR and ICESCR, which stipulates the right of self-determination of ALL peoples, necessarily including the Russian populations of Crimea and Donbas.  Art. 1 reads as follows:

“1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.
3. The States Parties to the present Covenant, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Arnaud Develay: Did the Russian Federation act in the spirit of the UN Charter as it sought to engage in diplomacy rather than succumb to the calls of those advocating for immediate military intervention as early as 2014-15?

Alfred de Zayas: The Russian Federation spent three decades articulating its political will to pursue international cooperation and friendly relations with all countries, as envisaged in General Assembly Resolution 2625. It made valid overtures and concrete proposals for cooperation and building a joint European house based on sovereign equality and comprehensive national security. It is a great loss for all of humanity that Gorbachev’s peace initiatives were not taken up by the US and NATO and that promises made in 1989-91 by US Secretary of State James Baker and others were not kept. The one chance to agree on nuclear disarmament as foreseen in article 6 of the Non Proliferation Treaty, the one chance to implement conventional disarmament and  reorient the world toward development and peace, was thrown away by President Bill Clinton when he approved the eastern expansion of NATO, a grave breach of trust, a needless provocation, and a violation of article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits not only the use of force, but also the threat of the use of force.

After the Maidan coup d’état and the Ukrainian bombardment of the Donbas, the Russian Federation spent 8 years trying to solve the dispute by peaceful means as required under art. 2(3) of the UN Charter. The Minsk agreements were valid and moderate and would have led to durable peace, if implemented by Ukraine. The continued shelling of Donbass by Ukraine, as documented by OSCE[1], constituted repeated violations by Ukraine of Art. 2(4) of the Charter.  It is the ultima irratio to wage war on a hapless civilian population to prevent the exercise of their right of self-determination.  All Russian attempts at peaceful negotiation in the context of OSCE and the Normandy Format were ignored. As late as December 2021 Russia put on the table the drafts of two treaties that would have been the basis of a fruitful dialogue pursuant to article 2(3) of the UN Charter. Again the US and NATO rejected these peaceful overtures.

Arnaud Develay: How does the argument of self-determination behind the recent referenda reconcile itself with the outcome in the case of Catalonia?

Alfred de Zayas: Art. 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is clear – ALL peoples have the right of self determination – not only formerly colonial peoples.  This includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Croatia, Kosovo.  It also includes the Catalans, the Crimeans, the Donbass population, the peoples of Nagorno Karabakh, Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia.  Rights holders of self-determination are PEOPLES – duty-bearers are States, which do NOT have a prerogative to grant or deny self-determination.  Of course self-determination is not co-terminous with secession.  According to the doctrine of internal self-determination, a people has a right to exercise it through internal self-determination in the form of autonomous status (as envisaged in the Minsk agreements). Ideally self-determination should be preceded by reliable referenda, organized and monitored by the United Nations, as was the case in Timor Leste, Sudan and Ethiopia/Eritrea.  The UN failed the Ukrainian and Russian peoples when it failed to organize referenda in 1991, when Ukraine unilaterally seceded from the Soviet Union, or at the latest following the unconstitutional coup d’état against the democratically elected President of Ukraine Victor Yanukovych.

Arnaud Develay: Did the ICJ open a pandora box with its 2010 decision bearing on the legality of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence?

Alfred de Zayas: I would NOT call it a Pandora’s box at all. It represents a reaffirmation of Article 1 ICCPR. In the post-UN Charter age, decolonization of Africa and Asia was mandated – self-determination being one of the pillars of the UN Charter, and incorporated in numerous Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions.  The gradual exercise of self-government was foreseen in Chapter XI of the Charter.  The ICJ advisory opinion[2] is very clear in stating that the principle of territorial integrity is only for external use and cannot be invoked to deny the people’s right of self-determination.  See para. 80.  The advisory opinion did create an international law precedent, as did the de facto and de jure emergence of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, etc. by virtue of unilateral declarations of independence at the expense of the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Arnaud Develay: What should be the criteria retained to evaluate whether the right of self-determination should overcome the territorial and administrative integrity/cohesion of an already established State?

Alfred de Zayas:  Neither right is absolute.  Both are important international law principles that can and do coexist in the context of the one “rules based international order” we know – the UN Charter.  Some international lawyers have invented the concept of “remedial secession”, which I reject as an artificial “doctrine”, because it is impossible to set an objective threshold.

A better approach is to apply the over-arching principle of sustainable peace, which is at the heart of the UN Charter.  It is NOT the exercise of self-determination that causes wars, but the unjust denial thereof.  Indeed, the denial of self-determination has led to armed conflict in countless cases since 1945.  It is the function of the UN and the Security Council to prevent threats to and breaches of the peace for purposes of article 39 UN Charter. Hence, it is the function of the UN to ensure the realization of the right of self-determination as a conflict-prevention strategy.[3]

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Arnaud Develay is an international lawyer. He participated to the defense of former President Saddam Hussein along with Former US Attorney General Ramsey CLARK; he has documented the illegal sanction regime imposed on Syria while living in Damascus in the wake of the Caesar Act and is now based in Moscow.

Notes

[1] https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine/512683. Alfred de Zayas, Countering Mainstream Narratives, Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2022, p. 80.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/22/prolonging-war-is-a-crime-against-peace-and-a-crime-against-humanity/

[2] https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/141/141-20100722-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf

[3] See chapters 3 and 5 of A. de Zayas, “Building a Just World Order”, Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2021.

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***

How may one describe the nature of those psychopaths who have deviously and with supreme cleverness engineered a global genocide in the guise of a global pandemic, and who have so befuddled and seduced the masses that their acts of evil have been welcomed as acts of greater good?

How many more people will have to die from an unnecessary inoculation? How many more people will come down with the illness which this inoculation was supposed to prevent?

How many more people will sacrifice their precious and unalienable rights under the illusion of saving their skins?

How many more people will follow the Siren song of convenience into the lair of Total Surveillance?

How many more people will be convinced that online ‘meetings’ are just as good as gathering in the flesh?

How many more doctors who have dared to criticize the Covidians will have their licences taken away by corrupt medical boards under the aegis of a shadowy private entity in the pay of Big Pharma? How many more people will lose their jobs, how many more will have bank accounts frozen if they chirp up against those who are taking away their livelihoods?

And so it goes, on and on.

Just this week I learned about a fifteen year-old girl who had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor – these things happen of course from time to time.

And last weekend I saw two young kayakers in Wellington harbour pulled from a race by medics for reasons unknown but which looked to my eye as exertional, which is a bit unusual perhaps in gung-ho outdoorsy New Zealand.  I am certain all three people had been jabbed. My local dentist tells me that he has run out of sympathy cards for family members of patients in his practice who have died over the past six months.

These are, however, anecdotal asides.

There is plenty of real hard honest-to-goodness evidence that people are dying in greater numbers overall,  that the adverse event rate for the Covid inoculation has surpassed all vaccines in history, that ordinary people are poorer and less free while a globalist faction enriches itself beyond imagination. Waiting in the wings are a phoney Climate Crisis and an ‘even more lethal’ pandemic to be used as pretexts for the efficient and virtually total enslavement of the masses.

What kind of people would do this? Are the powerbrokers bloodless keyboard apparatchiks motivated by abstract transhumanist dreams of immortality, or are they full-blooded psychopaths who lust for the pleasures of murder and who thirst to transgress the greatest taboos?

Criminals, psychopaths, mass-murderers – they have punctuated human history throughout.

But I believe that the development of digital technology has created a hybrid monster. Digitization creates distance, it removes one from personal interaction, it allows wide-scale measures to be set into action with an ever greater ease of detachment. At the same time those who appropriate these digital measures in their quest for omnipotence and immortality are also driven by passions, and the union of sexual and destructive drives becomes an elixir that is nonpareil.

This may perhaps make it easier to understand how a Bill Gates or an Anthony Fauci or a Klaus Schwab (and those behind them) may be convulsed with the desire to thrust a phallic needle into the body of every human being on Earth. Make no mistake, they are full-blooded psychopaths, even if their blood runs cold or hot as the occasion demands.

And against such psychopathy there is only one path: not to let the fear of death trump all.

Without freedom everything we regard as quintessentially valuable in human life will be lost. Physical death is a blessing to a human being who has been enslaved to the point where all but the most basic needs of survival are met.  These past three years, consumed as they have been by all things Covid, have laid bare the best and worst of us, and have thrown into starkest relief the crux upon which our battle for the future rests.

Laboring under the perceived shadow of death, billions allowed themselves to be locked down and away;

billions allowed their critical faculties to dissolve and forget everything once accepted as rational about the nature of illness;

billions allowed themselves to forego every sensible precaution about a novel medical intervention – the so-called vaccine – for the promise of protection; and, perhaps most ominously, these billions participated in the imposition of an apartheid system that separated human beings by inoculation status.

It is high time for us to recognize that only when we are unafraid will we be victorious.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted to use the Emergencies Act (EA) to stop the Freedom Convoy days before he invoked the extreme measures, secret notes reveal.

The Public Order Emergency Commission hearings into Trudeau’s unprecedented use of the EA began October 13 and are expected to last six weeks while hearing from at least 65 witnesses, including Trudeau and many in his cabinet.

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, confidential minutes from cabinet meetings show Trudeau had set up “the conversation to discuss two possible tracks” that were “1) actions that could be taken under existing authorities and 2) the process of invoking the Emergencies Act.”

The minutes are dated February 10 and come from an Incident Response Group cabinet meeting that lasted about two hours. At the meeting were 45 people, including Attorney General David Lametti and Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Brenda Lucki.

Before the EA was enacted, however, top members of Trudeau’s cabinet such as Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said that extreme emergency measures were not needed, noting that Canada’s Highway Traffic Act was enough to deal with the Freedom Convoy.

Indeed, Trudeau noted February 11 that the police should use “step by step measures to put an end to it.”

Despite this, Trudeau put in place the EA on February 14 to stop the Freedom Convoy.

As per Blacklock’s Reporter, the first time the use of the EA was mentioned in a known document came in a 10-page confidential cabinet meeting minutes that were marked “secret.”

More revealing is that the minutes show that Trudeau was told as many as 95% of protesters were looking to go home because they had tired of the then-three-week-long protest.

Cabinet minutes claim that the lead negotiator from the Ontario Provincial Police said as many as 80% of protesters had weak connections to the Freedom Convoy’s cause.

“The negotiator suggested the leaders of the protest could potentially be encouraged to leave and denounce the blockade in exchange for a commitment to register their message with the government,” the minutes noted.

The minutes also show that “other disincentives” were discussed, but details of those were censored.

The Freedom Convoy gathered in Ottawa to call for an end to all COVID mandates and resulted in some provincial governments, such as Alberta, ultimately dropping vaccine passport programs in place.

During the Freedom Convoy protests, Trudeau said those opposing his measures were of a “small, fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views.”

While Trudeau ultimately revoked the EA on February 23, many Canadians who supported the Freedom Convoy were targeted by the federal government and even had bank accounts frozen without a court order. Federal police physically removed protesters as well.

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***

The Atlantic 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.

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” writes Brown Professor Emily Oster – a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned.

“Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward,” she continues.

Except, they weren’t “in the dark” about Covid.  There were numerous sources pointing out the actual science that ran contrary to the mandate claims, and they were deliberately silenced by a vast media campaign.  Evidence suggests that media platforms worked in tandem with Big Tech, the CDC and the Biden Administration.  It was not a simple matter of overreaction, there was collusion to remove all counter-information.  

Nice try, Emily.

As the Daily Sceptic‘s Michael P. Senger puts it: “There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say, “We didn’t know any better at the time!”Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and cancelling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.”

And look at that ratio:

In one epic Twitter thread, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) excoriates Oster’s entire premise;

Hey—sorry you lost your job b/c of the vax that doesn’t work and your grandmother died alone and you couldn’t have a funeral and your brother’s business was needlessly destroyed and your kids have weird heart problems—but let’s just admit we were all wrong and call a truce, eh?

It’s too bad we shut the entire economy down & took on tyrannical powers that have never been used before in this country—looking back, you should have been able to go to church and use public parks while we let people riot in the streets—but it was a confusing time for everyone.

Hey I’m sorry we scared the hell out of you & lied for years & persecuted & censored anyone who disagreed but there was an election going on & we really wanted to beat Donald Trump so it was important to radically politicize the science even if it destroyed your children’s lives.

OK, yes we said unvaccinated people should die & not get healthcare while never questioning Big Pharma once but we are compassionate people which is why even though we shut down the entire economy we also bankrupted the nation & caused inflation. You’re welcome! Let’s be friends.

As QTR’s Fringe Finance notes, Oster’s plea for the decency that her ilk failed to offer up to most Americans during the throws of the pandemic comes at a point where the Covid narrative has been all but lost by the Democrats and the mainstream media.

There have been several recent large wins for the unvaccinated who had the constitution and backbone to stand up for themselves throughout a year of being constantly berated and ferociously scorned as second class citizens.

A majority of the media and Democrats had demanded that these people be removed from society and generally subject to scorn and ridicule. Now, in a moment that many of us knew would eventually be coming, apologies are being made around the world for how the unvaccinated were treated.

As Fox News wrote last week:

“The premier of Alberta, Canada, said she is working on a plan to pardon residents who were fined or arrested over breaking coronavirus protocols, and apologized to unvaccinated Canadians who faced ‘discrimination.’“

In New York, a Supreme Court judge recently reinstated all employees who were fired from their jobs for being unvaccinated:

The court found Monday that “being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting COVID-19.” New York City Mayor Eric Adams claimed earlier this year that his administration would not rehire employees who had been fired over their vaccination status.

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The problem was not people’s ignorance of the facts, it was the organized antagonism and censorship against anyone presenting data that was contradictory to the mandate agenda. This is setting aside proclamations like those from the LA Times, which argued that mocking the deaths of “anti-vaxxers” might be necessary and justified.  After two years of this type of arrogant nonsense it’s hard to imagine people will be willing to pretend as if all is well.

The active effort to shut down any opposing data is the root crime, though, and no, it can never be forgotten or forgiven.

People are livid…

They were tossing terminally Ill people off of organ transplant lists and now call for mercy https://t.co/yRBRo5POVW

— F. Billy McMorris (@FBillMcMorris) November 1, 2022

Arizona Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) wants investigations.

.@KariLake: "I want to have a commission to investigate Covid and how it was handled in this state. And hand up any civil, or criminal charges that need to be made. Because we're not just got to forget what happened when our lives were turned upside down." pic.twitter.com/mzsFZn6Nv6

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) October 31, 2022

This is where I spent the last 7 months with my mother before she died alone on December 3rd, 2020. You murderous hypocrites have nothing but my undying contempt. Rot in Hell. pic.twitter.com/ZcZ9qoaDwZ

— Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale) October 31, 2022

Resharing this. Because "let's forgive", right? Nope.pic.twitter.com/XVTLErPNd2

— Dr. Sydney Watson (@SydneyLWatson) October 31, 2022

As QTR further notes, many Americans whipped themselves up into such a terrified hypnotic frenzy that they found themselves clinging to big government to impose their will, advocating for the same draconian and fascist-sounding policies they always claim to be fighting against.

For example, Ramussen reported in January 2022 that Democratic voters supported the following Covid policy ideas (my annotations in bold, Rasmussen in normal text):

• Fines for the unvaccinated: Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
• House arrest: Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
• Imprisonment for questioning the vaccine: Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.
• Forced quarantine: Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
• Stripping people of their children: Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.

Emily Oster: let's just forget this happened. pic.twitter.com/fL8BhvQTVp

— John Haar (@john_at_swan) October 31, 2022

Unsurprisingly, American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, who ‘flunked the pandemic‘ by pushing for school shutdowns as long as she possibly could before parents revolted, is a big fan of amnesty.

"I've decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works" pic.twitter.com/pNXoHk1d39

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) October 31, 2022

One cannot help but notice that the timing of the Atlantic’s appeal for passive forgetfulness coincides with the swiftly approaching midterm elections, in which polls suggest a much greater chance of a conservative upset than Democrats previously expected.  Though the Atlantic doesn’t admit it, there is a growing political backlash to the last two years of meaningless lockdowns and mandates, and Democrats were instrumental in the implementation of both.  A large swath of the population sees one party as the cause of much of their covid era strife.

Perhaps the mainstream media is suddenly realizing that they may have to face some payback for their covid zealotry?  “We didn’t know! We were just following orders!”  It all sounds rather familiar.

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Organized crime is on the rise in Finland, and there’s a high demand for weapons. Criminal networks have already established weapon smuggling routes between Finland and Poland.

Europol, the European police cooperation organization, is reported to have warned in the summer that armed criminal groups could soon start smuggling weapons from Ukraine to EU member states.

According to Christer Ahlgren, superintendent of the Organized Crime Intelligence Unit of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi, KRP), Europol’s prediction has already become a reality in Finland:

“We are seeing signs that these weapons are already in Finland, (…) and we have already seen signs that weapons delivered to Ukraine have been found in Finland,” Ahlgren says.

The Finnish law enforcement official said this mostly means handguns and heavier weapons used by the military, such as machine guns. However, they know from their foreign colleagues that there is also great demand for explosive grenades and military drones, and “in other parts of Europe, we have also found anti-tank missiles from Ukraine.”

There are fears that the Javelin anti-tank missile could also make its way into the hands of Europe’s criminals. The missile was one of the keys to the Ukrainians’ successful defense in the early stages of the war, and the U.S. and Britain have been supplying Ukraine with countless quantities of this easy-to-handle weapon, which is highly effective against tanks. The missile reportedly appeared on the dark web for sale this summer, but there is no documented case of it being used in any attack outside of Ukraine.

Rifles, handguns and other weapons from Ukraine are not only landing in Finland, but have also turned up in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands

The smuggling routes are set

Ahlgren says that “the routes, processes and connections for the illegal smuggling of weapons from Ukraine to Finland are already in place.” The arms are mostly transported via the country’s international ports, which are considerably less protected than airports, and the smugglers are criminal gangs, such as the big international motorcycle gangs. One of them, Bandidos MC Ahlgren, which is also active in Finland, has branches in all major Ukrainian cities.

Yle reported on Sunday that Europol is already expecting criminal gangs to set up arms depots near Ukraine’s borders; it also knows of Ukrainian refugees who have paid for transportation to the border with weapons rather than money.

According to Ahlgren, the amount of weapons in question is much greater than during the Yugoslav war, when gangs in Sweden stockpiled weapons. Now, as a result of illegal migration, “we have clans based on blood ties and ethnicity that are engaged in criminal activity.”

Ahlgren said he believes that while supplying weapons to Ukraine is the right thing to do, it has consequences.

“Ukraine has received a tremendous amount of arms, and that’s a good thing, but we will be dealing with these weapons for decades, and we are paying the price here,” he said. “The decision-makers have forgotten that the war in Ukraine has also increased the workload of the police.”

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Featured image: A Ukrainian soldier holding a Javelin missile system. (Image via the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine)

Arterial Shower of Blood Clots for “Neon Deion”

By Dr. Peter McCullough and John Leake, November 02, 2022

When a blood clot lets loose on the arterial side of the circulation and lands in a vascular bed servicing an organ, a process called ischemia sets where the organ or a region of tissue is deprived of oxygen and vital nutrients.  There is very little time before injury and then often permanent damage occurs.  This is best exemplified by an embolic stroke.

Sharing Russia’s Multipolar Interest: Through “Youth Education” in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Kester Kenn Klomegah, November 03, 2022

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin continues lambasting the United States and its Western and European allies, wholeheartedly predicted the end of the unipolar system and bristled at the idea of creating a new global order that might change living standards of impoverished millions around the world.

Necropolitics of the End Times

By Konrad Rękas, November 03, 2022

During the pandemic we observed direct racial-sanitary segregation in the developed Western countries and now racist attitude is the base for biopolitics implemented within the geopolitical confrontation manifested in form of the energy crisis and war in Ukraine.

Laundering with Immunity: The Control Framework

By Corey Lynn, November 03, 2022

A band of criminals got together a century ago and decided they were going to own the world, hold all of the power, create and hoard all of the money, and keep everyone on a constant spin cycle to fool them.

Former CIA Boss Petraeus Demands US Forces Enter the Fight in Ukraine

By Kurt Nimmo, November 03, 2022

If this editorial by retired Col. Douglas Macgregor doesn’t scare the hell out of you, I don’t know what will. Macgregor cites an interview with former Gen. David Petraeus by France’s L’Express weekly. During the interview, Petraeus, the former director of the CIA, said it is time for the USG to directly confront Russia on the ground in Ukraine to prevent the fall of Zelenskyy and his government.

No Pain, No Grain: Putin’s Black Sea Comeback

By Pepe Escobar, November 03, 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.

The Bond Vigilantes Get Busy

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, November 03, 2022

While the levels of schadenfreude will be going through the roof given the unfolding farce in British politics, the resignation of Liz Truss as UK Prime Minister was troubling in one vital respect.  True, her juvenile salad understanding of economics, which involved spending billions on tax cuts and energy subsidies, was lamentable.  To cope with the beast of aggressive inflation, she was advocating a policy that would feed it.

Progressive Caucus Reversal Shows U.S. Congress Allows No Antiwar Voice

By Sara Flounders, November 03, 2022

The cynicism of “Congressional Progressive Caucus” Democrats was exposed in their humiliating retraction this week of a letter sent to President Joe Biden calling on him to engage in direct diplomacy with the Russian government.

Ukraine on Fire: The Real Story. Full Documentary by Oliver Stone (Original English Version)

By Oliver Stone, November 03, 2022

Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Massacre helped oust President Yanukovych with Russia painted as the perpetrator.  Oliver Stone interviews Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yanukovych and others exposing the role the U.S. played in destabilizing the region.

Bringing People Back to Nature. Paul Thiry d’Holbach

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, November 02, 2022

While people in the Middle Ages still lived in a magical world in which natural processes were apparently subject to supernatural powers, a decisive change in European life and thought began with the dawn of the modern age: people became aware of themselves and began to recognise and shape their position in the world as a whole.