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The leaders and most of the news media in the U.S. seem to believe that Washington’s foreign policy over the past several decades has been a success and benefitted both the United States and the world. That assumption wasn’t really true even during the Cold War, although that confrontation eventually resulted in the peaceful demise of America’s nasty totalitarian adversary. There was plenty of collateral damage along the way, with the suffering caused by Washington’s conduct in Vietnam and Afghanistan being the most glaring examples.
The performance of U.S. leaders after the Cold War has been even worse. An array of disruptive, bloody tragedies—most notably those in the Balkans, Afghanistan (again), Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—mark Uncle Sam’s global trail of wreckage. The Biden administration’s decision to use Ukraine as a pawn in Washington’s power struggle with Russia is fast becoming the latest example.
Very few policymakers even concede that Washington’s overseas military adventures often have not turned out as planned. The news media, which is supposed to serve as the public’s watchdog, have routinely ignored or excused America’s foreign-policy disasters. Instead, when one intervention fails, they simply move on to lobby for the next crusade pushed by U.S. leaders. Consider how few news accounts now deal with the ongoing violence and chaos in places such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, even though Washington was a major contributor to all of those tragedies. Paul Poast, a scholar with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, aptly describes the conflict in Syria as America’s “forgotten war.” “That the war in Syria has become the “forgotten war,” he observes, “points to a more disturbing trend in U.S. foreign policy: The United States is so engaged in wars and interventions around the world that a conflict involving the U.S. military that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians does not even register with the American public anymore.”
Daniel Larison, in a post on his Eunomia Substack, likewise notes that the pattern in Syria has been replicated in many other places, including Somalia. Despite the extensive human suffering caused by Washington’s long war in Afghanistan, that episode is already fading in prominence now that U.S. troops are no longer in the country. Ukraine is the new center of attention, and the conflict there is portrayed in the same, simplistic, melodramatic fashion that has characterized Washington’s previous crusades.
The elites’ post-Cold War track record is not a pretty one. Even the cases touted as successes fail to stand up to scrutiny. Interventionists emphasize that NATO’s use of military force ended both Bosnia’s civil war and fighting in Kosovo. Although that can be considered a success, it is a partial one at best. Despite the passage of 27 years, Bosnia is no closer to being a viable, united country today than it was in the mid-1990s. The three antagonistic ethnic groups still refuse to cooperate, and the Serbs even periodicallythreaten to secede. By all measures, Bosnia is utterly dysfunctional, both economically and politically. Indeed, NATO’s military intervention merely may have postponed the day of reckoning.
The outcome in Kosovo was not much better. Tensions between the Serbian and Kosovar governments are sufficiently acute that NATO intends to increase its “peacekeeping” troop presence and take direct action if the situation gets worse. Belgrade still is unwilling to recognize Kosovo’s independence, a position shared by approximately half of the countries in the international system. The regime in Pristina and its NATO backers stubbornly refuse to let the predominantly Serbian northeast be governed by Belgrade, even though that concession might resolve the ongoing diplomatic impasse. As in the case of Bosnia, Kosovo remains a powder keg that could cause major problems for the United States and NATO. Yet the Balkan interventions are considered Washington’s great success story.
Matters are even worse following the U.S. crusades in other countries. The fighting between Syria’s “coalition of religions” government and the Sunni jihadists trying to unseat Bashar al-Assad continues, despite its absence in U.S.-government statements and Western news accounts. Washington also continues to support Kurdish separatists in northeastern Syria and has effective control over that area’s oil production. The country, though, may be shattered beyond repair from the years of fighting facilitated by U.S. leaders.
The turmoil in Iraq is less severe, but is still damaging the country. Political disputes and mass demonstrations against the current government regularly surface in Iraq. Pro-Iranian militias continue to play a prominent role in the country’s government, and the three-way split among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and Kurds is becoming ever more contentious. Political violence among rival factions shows no signs of subsiding, nor does public resentment against the presence of U.S. troops. Washington so lacks trust in its “ally” that officials once threatened to seize the country’s bank reserves if Iraqi leaders continued to press for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
The level of human tragedy in Libya and Yemen is horrifying. Washington and its NATO allies bear almost exclusive responsibility for the situation in Libya. U.S. and NATO air strikes played a decisive role in overthrowing Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Libya thereafter became an arena of chaos as a multitude of militias vied for power, displacing more than a million residents. There were even credible reports of open-air slave markets for immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. In the past few years, the fighting has coalesced into a contest for political dominance between a government that the United States supports and an insurgent army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hafter, who was once a CIA asset. Scheduled national elections have been postponed numerous times, and fighting continues to periodically erupt.
Washington bears less direct, but still significant, responsibility for the suffering in Yemen. The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all supported the war of aggression that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their Gulf allies have waged against the nominally Shiite Houthis. The result has been appalling suffering by civilians, including widespread disease and famine conditions.
The latest application of Washington’s meddlesome policy is in Ukraine. U.S. leaders ignored repeated Russian warnings that making Ukraine a NATO member or even an unofficial NATO military assetwould cross a line that threatened Russia’s security. When Moscow finally responded to the provocations with an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration opted to use Ukraine in a Western proxy war against Russia. The conflict has already done enormous damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure and taken thousands of lives. Worse, Washington and London appear to have sabotaged a possible peace accord between Moscow and Kiev.
The U.S. foreign-policy record over the past three decades could hardly be worse. It is crucial not to let policymakers and their media mouthpieces get away with convenient collective amnesia and imitations of Pontius Pilate. Instead, they need to be held fully accountable for their blunders and deception.
Future U.S. policymakers also need to avoid repeating the faulty performance of their predecessors. To do so, they must make three significant changes to U.S. foreign policy.
First, Washington should utterly renounce nation-building. Trying to remake alien societies by force and impose Western political, economic, and social values is the essence of folly. Even when the United States has not yet been drawn into a new war to enforce crumbling nation-building goals, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, such armed social experiments are an exercise in futility and frustration. Worse, nation-building missions frequently worsen conditions in the targeted country, and the predictable failure of U.S. objectives even can lead to Washington’s outright humiliation. The debacle in Afghanistan is a stark reminder of that danger.
Second, the United States must avoid the temptation to engage in regime-change wars. Such offensives often are a prelude to disastrous nation-building ventures. That was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Those wars not only made matters worse for the populations in the three countries, but worsened the security situation for neighboring states and even the United States. In both Iraq and Libya, U.S. actions toppled secular dictators, paving the way for chaos that strengthened the position of Islamic jihadists. Granted, the secular dictators were brutal and sometimes caused problems for the United States, but Washington’s “solution” clearly made matters worse, not better.
Third, U.S. leaders must do a much better job of distinguishing vital national interests from secondary or peripheral ones. Washington’s current policy of using Ukraine as a proxy for a war against Russia is a troubling example of the failure to make such basic distinctions. The Biden administration is risking nuclear war with Russia to assist a corrupt, authoritarian regime in a country of little importance to the United States. Until the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t even an independent country, much less a U.S. vital interest. To accept the risks the Biden administration is incurring is irresponsible and violates the U.S. government’s responsibility to the American people.
Unless these policy changes are made, it is just a matter of time until a new set of officials repeat the disastrous blunders of their predecessors. If they do, the consequences to America and the world will be equally damaging. Indeed, the Ukraine adventure reveals that the consequences could be even worse than the wreckage already wrought by Uncle Sam.
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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs.
In light of the recent events surrounding the Ukraine war and the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, we present to you two important titles from Global Research that are both available in PDF formats.
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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
“Michel Chossudovsky, in his book “The Worldwide Corona Crisis” describes in clear and concise and unabashed language the origins of this war, its conduct and its goals. No book of this kind can be infinitely comprehensive, nor should it aspire to be. But in this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight.” –Dr. Emanuel Garcia, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
“In The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Michel Chossudovsky succinctly and methodically pierces through the numerous layers of lies surrounding the “pandemic.” This meticulously researched chronicle is a must-read for anyone wanting to truly understand world events of the past two-and-a-half years.”
–David Skripac, former captain in the Canadian Air Force
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
On September 28th, the AP headlined “Record methane leak flows from damaged Baltic Sea pipelines” and reported that “Methane leaking from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines is likely to be the biggest burst of the potent greenhouse gas on record, by far. … Andrew Baxter, a chemical engineer who formerly worked in the offshore oil and gas industry, and is now at the environmental group EDF …said, ‘It’s catastrophic for the climate.’”
Imagine the tobacco producer who invests in smoke limitation programs, or the arms manufacturer who attends a conference proposing to ban weapons and seek a better future. Gautam Adani, one of India’s most ruthlessly adept billionaires, has added his name to the growing list of corporate transvestism, using ecological credentials as his camouflage for fossil fuel predation.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level. This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.
This has always been the modus operandi of the FBI (more aptly referred to as the Federal Bureau of Intimidation): muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance. Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.
With the United States emerging in the postwar period as the leading capitalist and imperialist country in the world, it was not surprising that the headquarters was eventually established in New York after its initial assembly in San Francisco. At that time, the majority of peoples and nations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean remained under the yoke of imperialism.
On Monday, powerful underwater explosions blew gaping holes in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. Gushers of gas a kilometer in diameter are rising to the surface from the blasts, which occurred in Danish waters. Tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure vital to financing Russia’s economy, and powering and heating the German and European economy, lie in ruins.
Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, is the most anti-China British leader in decades. In the Conservative leadership contest that brought her to power, candidates competed to show who could be more belligerent against Beijing.
While this may seem like a lot of money considering Washington’s failure to pass basic social and infrastructure policies for people in the United States, it’s only a fraction of the $7 billion in Afghan financial reserves the Federal Reserve Bank of New York illegally seized last year.
This Tory fundamentalist arch villain is surely not Boris, as lamentable as his politics is. In her tenure at the Home Office, Priti Patel was clearly and decisively heading for fascist status, triangulating policy to attack the most vulnerable.
As both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 both suddenly lost pressure last Monday, Swedish seismologists registered multiple explosions.The pipeline director reports unprecedented damage.Clearly this is deliberate sabotage and could only have been done by a government with submarine capability to place underwater mines.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: Record Methane Leaks in Baltic Sea: U.S. Government Likely Perpetrated Biggest-Ever Catastrophic “Global Warming Event”
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This month, the United States announced it will provide Afghanistan with $327 million in humanitarian assistance, largely funneled through federal agencies supervised by the U.S. State Department such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While this may seem like a lot of money considering Washington’s failure to pass basic social and infrastructure policies for people in the United States, it’s only a fraction of the $7 billion in Afghan financial reserves the Federal Reserve Bank of New York illegally seized last year. Moreover, as with all USAID projects, “aid” is primarily used to serve U.S. economic and political interests. Finally, these funds will not ameliorate the damage tens of millions of Afghans are forced to endure from the devastating U.S./EU-led sanctions.
The contradictions in U.S. foreign policy, coordinated by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination, continue to sharpen. The Taliban’s regressive policies toward women are still being used to justify calls for U.S.-backed regime change in Afghanistan. Many seemingly well-meaning reports from popular outlets like Reuters, AP News, New York Times, Foreign Policy and the U.S. military’s own, Stars and Stripes, continue to push imperialist propaganda, justifying continued U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
These outlets confuse the U.S. public as to who is primarily to blame for the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and erase the violent U.S. history there.
The Taliban continues to condemn the impact of the U.S.-led asset freeze and sanctions, along with a growing number of other countries, such as China and Russia. If conditions for all Afghans—including women, children and the rural poor—are to improve, it is clear the United States must end its war on Afghanistan as well as be held to account for its decades-long campaign of destruction and destabilization in the region.
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On Monday, powerful underwater explosions blew gaping holes in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. Gushers of gas a kilometer in diameter are rising to the surface from the blasts, which occurred in Danish waters. Tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure vital to financing Russia’s economy, and powering and heating the German and European economy, lie in ruins.
As the US and NATO wage war against Russia in Ukraine, this event points to the reckless military escalation underway in Europe. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the blasts were the results of “deliberate action” by unknown parties, while Swedish seismologist Bjorn Lund said, “There’s no doubt, this is not an earthquake.”
Though European media instantly accused Russia of having bombed the Nord Stream pipelines, such charges are rapidly falling apart.
Even the New York Times, normally a source of aggressive anti-Russian propaganda, refrained from blaming the bombing on Moscow. “At first glance, it seems counterintuitive that the Kremlin would damage its own multibillion-dollar assets,” it acknowledged. “While some European officials were quick to speculate about Russian involvement, American officials were more cautious, noting the lack of available evidence,” it continued, noting that Washington “and most of its European allies stopped short of naming any suspects.”
Former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, a member of several NATO think tanks who is married to prominent US foreign policy commentator Anne Applebaum, suggested openly that Washington was behind the bombing. He tweeted a picture of the gusher of natural gas with the label: “Thank you, USA.” He added, “Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine.”
Accusations of Russian involvement in the bombings lack all credibility and detract from the far more likely perpetrator: the United States. The first question that has to be asked about the Nord Stream bombing is: Cui bono? Who benefits, and who had the motive to carry it out?
Russia had no motive to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline. Russia’s Gazprom conglomerate owned half of the pipeline, alongside German, French and Dutch shareholders, and the pipeline was at the heart of Moscow’s plans to rebuild economic ties with Europe, if and when the war with NATO in Ukraine ended. It had no reason to blow up its own pipeline.
For Washington, the bombing presented two benefits. Firstly, coming amid the NATO military escalation against Russia in Ukraine, it would help fuel more anti-Russian war propaganda. Secondly, by making Europe more dependent on US natural gas imports to replace Russian gas, it corresponded to a major US aim in the Ukraine war from the outset: to bring Europe more firmly under US control. These aims have increasingly come into the open in recent years.
In 2018, bitter conflicts erupted between the Trump administration and Berlin, as Trump slapped sanctions on German car exports to America and demanded Berlin shut down Nord Stream 2.
On February 7, 2022, as he stepped up economic and military threats against the Kremlin before the Russia invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden invited German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington for talks. During a joint press conference with Scholz, Biden pledged to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. “If Russia invades,” Biden said, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"
Asked how he would do this—as the Nord Stream pipeline is jointly owned by Russia and ostensible NATO allies of the United States such as Germany, France and the Netherlands—Biden refused to answer, simply saying: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
The Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 not only paved the way for NATO to wage bloody imperialist wars from Iraq and Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It deprived NATO of its main enemy, which had helped unify the alliance, and threw Eurasia open to major US and European corporations. Tensions between the NATO imperialist powers, as they competed for the division of the spoils of the world economy, exploded.
Trump demanded that Berlin end Nord Stream 2 after it called for an EU military buildup and a defense policy independent from NATO. While then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for Germany to “fight for our own future ourselves,” French President Emmanuel Macron called for the EU to prepare to confront Russia, China or America.
EU officials rejected Trump’s calls to end Nord Stream 2. Such demands, said German lawmaker Rolf Mützenich, “affect German and European companies and represent interference in our internal affairs. The EU and Germany are apparently not allied partners for Trump, but tributary vassals…”
The US policy towards Europe recalls Leon Trotsky’s warning, nearly a century ago, that in a period of crisis “the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom.” Trotsky described US imperialism’s plans for Europe after World War I as follows:
It will slice up the markets; it will regulate the activity of the European financiers and industrialists. If we wish to give a clear and precise answer to the question of what American imperialism wants, we must say: It wants to put capitalist Europe on rations.
This concisely describes Washington’s policy today. This year, it seized upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to escalate the war with Russia and impose the cutoff of EU energy trade with Russia that it had long sought. The impact on Europe is devastating.
Millions of workers in Europe face the prospect of freezing this winter, with gas prices surging tenfold as Europe replaces cheap Russian gas transported by pipeline with US liquefied natural gas. The price hikes are further magnified as European currencies fall against the US dollar, which is rising as the US Federal Reserve increases its interest rates. European steel, chemical and other companies, the Wall Street Journal noted, “are shifting operations to the U.S., attracted by more stable energy prices and muscular government support.”
The EU imperialists have agreed to this, insofar as the war is a pretext to keep diverting billions of euros to rearmament. The German bourgeoisie in particular aims, after losing two world wars, to re-emerge as Europe’s leading military power. This month Scholz called for Germany to “become the cornerstone of conventional defence in Europe, the best-equipped force in Europe” and demanded a German seat on the UN Security Council.
While Berlin officially ended its support for Nord Stream 2 after the Russian invasion, it is raising the issue of renewed energy ties with Russia. This week, Merkel said one should never lose sight of “the day after.” She called to think about what is “sheerly unimaginable at the moment—namely, how something like relations towards and with Russia can be developed again.”
It is more credible to explain the Nord Stream attack, not as an act of economic and political suicide by Russia, but as a signal sent by Washington to its EU “allies”: “Yes, you can re-militarize, but your energy and military policy will be set on our terms.”
These conflicts make all the more clear the enormous dangers facing masses of workers and youth as NATO and Russia teeter on the edge of an all-out global conflagration.
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Imagine the tobacco producer who invests in smoke limitation programs, or the arms manufacturer who attends a conference proposing to ban weapons and seek a better future. Gautam Adani, one of India’s most ruthlessly adept billionaires, has added his name to the growing list of corporate transvestism, using ecological credentials as his camouflage for fossil fuel predation.
The central feature of Adani is having a nose for getting on the bandwagon and pushing to its front. Everyone is doing it, at least when it comes to renewable energy sources. Recently, the Adani Group, an entity specialising in power generation, real estate, commodities, and port infrastructure, promised it would invest $US70 billion in the green energy transition and associated infrastructure in what it calls “an integrated Hydrogen-based value chain”.
In terms of solar energy, the company has jostled its way up the ranks through Adani Green Energy, creating sprawling “solar parks” comprising thousands of hectares in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. The acquisition of such land has come at considerable cost to local farmers, many of whom have protested such alienation and loss of fertile land.
Image is licensed under Creative Commons
Adani’s program is relentlessly expansive, part of a suite of approaches that seems to be winning investment from such companies as the French multinational TotalEnergies, which poured in money to acquire 25% of a stake in Adani New Industries. In this, the Indian billionaire is simply pursuing what his other colleagues in the fossil fuel line are doing: pretend to go green and hope that no one notices the off-colour joke. In this enterprise, Adani hopes to make his company the world’s largest renewable energy producer by 2030 (surely the joke), which might encourage some laughter but for its seriousness.
At the Forbes Global CEO conference held in Singapore, Adani was preeningly confident, exhibiting the cocksure awareness of a crossdressing trickster. “We are already the world’s largest solar player, and we intend to do far more. Adani New Industries is the manifestation of the bet we are making in the energy transition space.” He also told his audience that the new business, additionally “to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio” would “be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares”. Boastfully, he reminded those caring to listen that this was “an area 1.4 times that of Singapore.”
In April this year, he told the India Economic Conclave that his country was “on the cusp of decades of growth that the world will want to tap into. Therefore, there can be no better defence of our interests at this time than atmanirbhar.” The Hindi word in the statement, denoting self-reliance, is instructive enough, a feature of the Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s nationalist drive.
As with most billionaires in history, success is a convenient wedding of self-aggrandisement and patriotic purpose, a case of making money and wrapping oneself in the flag. More to the point, it is a shamelessly calculating push to combine interests of another sort, notably of the environmentally appealing nature. “For India,” Adani told the audience at the IEC, “the combination of solar and wind power coupled with green hydrogen opens up unprecedented possibilities.”
Making greenwashing an essential part of its public relations, the Adani Group is globally engaged in promoting souped up ecological crossdressing. In October 2021, the London Science Museum announced a sponsorship deal with Adani at the Global Investment Summit, a lead-up event to the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow. The agreement involves the development of an exhibition space titled, “Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery”.
Dame Mary Archer, chair of the Science Museum Group, explained that the gallery would “take a truly global perspective on the world’s most urgent challenge. We face a grave threat, but the future is not predestined”. Critics were less than impressed by the Museum’s breezy refusal to consider Adani’s blotchy human rights records and treatment of indigenous communities both in India and Australia. Protests were organised at the entrance to the museum. Two trustees resigned.
Nothing, however, gets away from the core business of the Adani Group, which has close ties with the Modi government, ever keen to fashion it as a spear of influence. The renewables canard cannot hide the practical, solid elements that keep Adani big in coal mining, gas distribution and transportation.
The latter has been particularly striking, with the company winning government tenders to operate a number of airport facilities despite lacking any experience in aviation. This was a source of consternation for Kerala’s Finance Minister Thomas Isaac, whose state government was ignored in the bid for Thiruvananthapuram airport. “People of Kerala will not accept this act of brazen cronyism,” he declared in 2020.
Whether its brazen cronyism or thick-as-thieves solidarity, no one, in terms of scale and influence, has as much influence with New Delhi as Adani does. As Tim Buckley of Climate Energy Finance, a Sydney-based think tank explains, “His political power, his ability to understand the lay of the land in India, is second to none.”
The Adani Group also remains controversially, and deeply embedded in such controversial projects as the Carmichael Mine in Queensland, Australia, where it is looking, increasingly, like a relic, an echo of habitual ecological vandalism best shelved. The company made a concerted effort to suppress the findings of a university report into its lack of consultation in mining operations with Traditional Owners, who had not “given their free, prior and informed consent” to the operations. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination also expressed its concerns in 2019 that Adani’s consultations regarding the Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) “might not have been conducted in good faith”.
All this paints a picture of a company keen to cut corners and stomp on toes with ruthless disdain. For his efforts, Gautam Adani finds himself at a peg below the summit of wealth, being the second wealthiest man on the planet. Only the extra-terrestrially minded Elon Musk bars his route on the rich list’s chart. Ecological crossdressing, it would seem, pays.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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It’s only fitting that literally hours after the most clueless dwarf in capital markets history, Janet “No crisis in my lifetime” Yellen said that financial markets are functioning well, that the Bank of England literally panicked, and shocked markets by resuming unlimited QE.
“We haven’t seen liquidity problems develop in markets — we’re not seeing, to the best of my knowledge, the kind of deleveraging that could signify some financial stability risks,” Yellen said in answering reporters’ questions Tuesday on a trip to North Carolina.
Fast forward just a few hours when the the Bank of England saw quite a few “liquidity problems” when it cited “significant repricing of UK and global financial assets… This repricing has become more significant in the past day – and it is particularly affecting long-dated UK government debt.” It warned that “were dysfunction in this market to continue or worsen, there would be a material risk to UK financial stability” and used that to justify the end of QT (before it even started) and the restart of QE.
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On September 28th, the AP headlined “Record methane leak flows from damaged Baltic Sea pipelines” and reported that “Methane leaking from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines is likely to be the biggest burst of the potent greenhouse gas on record, by far. … Andrew Baxter, a chemical engineer who formerly worked in the offshore oil and gas industry, and is now at the environmental group EDF …said, ‘It’s catastrophic for the climate.’”
The article pointed out that methane “is 82.5 times more potent than carbon dioxide at absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the Earth.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin had been aiming ultimately (and maybe soon) to get the gas to Europe flowing again, and said to EU nations on September 16th,
“Just lift the sanctions on Nord Stream 2, which is 55 billion cubic metres of gas per year, just push the button and everything will get going.”
Here is what U.S. President Joe Biden had already promised about that on February 7th:
If Germany — if Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the — the border of Ukraine again — then there will be — we — there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2.We will bring an end to it.
QBut how will you — how will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?
PRESIDENT BIDEN:We will — I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.
He had promised to cause permanently the end of Nord Stream if Russia invaded, which it did on February 24th. He fulfilled on that promise on September 27th.
Radek Sikorsky, who is a Member of the European Parliament and had been Poland’s Foreign Minister and is the husband of the famous writer against Russia Anne Applebaum, and has been affiliated with Oxford University, Harvard University, and NATO, tweeted on the day of the explosions, “Thank you, USA.” He also tweeted explanations: “All Ukrainian and Baltic sea states have opposed Nordstream’s construction for 20 years. Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine.” And: “Nordstream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.”
Furthermore on September 27th, Germany’s Spiegel magazine reported that, as Reuters put it,
“The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had weeks ago warned Germany about possible attacks on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea”
On September 28th, SouthFront headlined “No Way Back for Europe” and reported:
It is reasonably suspected that the pipeline was blown up by the special services of the United States in order to finally stop the gas supplies to Germany from Russia.
On September 27, a detachment of warships led by the US amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge reported on the completion of their tasks in the area of the alleged sabotage in the Baltic Sea and headed for the North Sea.
Since the beginning of September, suspicious activity by anti-submarine helicopters of the US Navy has been observed in the area. In the last few days, reconnaissance activities of NATO aircraft have significantly intensified in the Baltic Sea area. In particular, a US Boeing E-3 Sentry reconnaissance aircraft was on constant patrol over the Baltic States, and a US Joint STARS was spotted over Germany and Poland.
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This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.
This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.
The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.
That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.
Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.
The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.
The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers – would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.
German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.
As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.
Cui bono?
Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.
Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.
It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.
NS2 had already been attacked – in the open – all along its construction. Back in February, Polish ships actively tried to prevent the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel from finishing NS2. The pipes were being laid south of – you guessed it – Bornholm.
NATO for its part has been very active on the underwater drones department. The Americans have access to long distance Norwegian underwater drones which can be modified with other designs. Alternatively, professional navy clearance divers could have been employed in the sabotage – even as tidal currents around Bornholm are a serious matter.
The Big Picture reveals the collective West in absolute panic, with Atlanticist “elites” willing to resort to anything – outrageous lies, assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, all out financial war, support to neo-Nazis – to prevent their descent into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss.
Disabling NS and NS2 represents the definitive closure of any possibility of a German-Russia deal on gas supplies, with the added benefit of relegating Germany to the lowly status of absolute US vassal.
So that brings us to the key question of which Western intel apparatus designed the sabotage. Prime candidates are of course CIA and MI6 – with Poland set up as the fall guy and Denmark playing a very dodgy part: it’s impossible that Copenhagen was not at least “briefed” on the intel.
Prescient as ever, as early as in April 2021 Russians were asking questions about the military security of Nord Stream.
The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli. Outside of the appalling mediocrity and cowardice of the current administration in Berlin, it’s clear that the BND – German intel – as well as the German Navy and informed industrialists sooner or later will do the math.
This was far from an isolated attack. On September 22 there was an attempt against Turkish Stream by Kiev saboteurs. The day before, naval drones with English language IDs were found in Crimea, suspected of being part of the plot. Add to it US helicopters overflying the future sabotage nodes weeks ago; a UK “research” vessel loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; and NATO tweeting about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage.
Show me the (gas) money
The Danish Minister of Defense met urgently with NATO’s Secretary General this Wednesday. After all the explosions happened very close to Denmark’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That may be qualified as crude kabuki at best; exactly on the same day, the European Commission (EC), NATO’s de facto political office, advanced its trademark obsession: more sanctions against Russia, including the certified-to-fail cap on oil prices.
Meanwhile, EU energy giants are bound to lose big time with the sabotage.
The roll call includes the German Wintershall Dea AG and PEG/ E.ON; the Dutch N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie; and the French ENGIE. Then there are those which financed NS2: Wintershall Dea again as well as Uniper; Austrian OMV; ENGIE again; and British-Dutch Shell. Wintershall Dea and ENGIE are both co-owners and creditors. Their fuming shareholders will want serious answers from a serious investigation.
It gets worse: there are no holds barred anymore on the Pipeline Terror front. Russia will be on red alert not only for Turk Stream but also Power of Siberia. Same for the Chinese and their maze of pipelines arriving in Xinjiang.
Whatever the methodology and the actors who were in the loop, this is payback – in advance – for the inevitable collective West defeat in Ukraine. And a crude warning to the Global South that they will do it again. Yet action always breeds reaction: from now on, “funny things” could also happen to US/UK pipelines in international waters.
The EU oligarchy is reaching an advanced process of disintegration at lightning speed. Their window of opportunity to at least attempt a role as a strategically autonomous geopolitical actor is now closed.
These EUROcrats now face a serious predicament. Once it’s clear who are the perpetrators of the sabotage in the Baltic, and once they understand all the life-changing socio-economic consequences for pan-EU citizens, the kabuki will have to stop. Including the already running, uber-ridiculous subplot that Russia blew up its own pipeline when Gazprom could simply have turned off the valves for good.
And once again, it gets worse: Gazprom is threatening to sue the Ukrainian energy company Naftofgaz for unpaid bills. That would lead to the end of Russian gas transiting Ukraine towards the EU.
As if all of that was not serious enough, Germany is contractually obligated to purchase at least 40 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year until 2030.
Just say no? They can’t: Gazprom is legally entitled to get paid even without shipping gas. That’s the spirit of a long-term contract. And it’s already happening: because of sanctions, Berlin does not get all the gas it needs but still needs to pay.
All the devils are here
Now it’s painfully clear the imperial velvet gloves are off when it comes to the vassals. EU independence: verboten. Cooperation with China: verboten. Independent trade connectivity with Asia: verboten. The only place for the EU is to be economically subjugated to the US: a tawdry remix of 1945-1955. With a perverse neoliberal twist: we will own your industrial capacity, and you will have nothing.
The sabotage of NS and NS2 is inbuilt in the imperial wet dream of breaking up the Eurasian land mass into a thousand pieces to prevent a trans-Eurasia consolidation between Germany (representing the EU), Russia and China: $50 trillion in GDP, based on purchasing power parity (PPP) compared to the US’s $20 trillion.
We must go back to Mackinder: control of the Eurasian land mass constitutes control of the world. American elites and their Trojan Horses across Europe will do whatever it takes not to give up their control.
“American elites” in this context encompass the deranged, Straussian neo-con-infested “intel community” and the Big Energy, Big Pharma and Big Finance that pays them and who profits not only from the Deep State’s Forever War approach but also wants to make a killing out of the Davos-concocted Great Reset.
The Raging Twenties started with a murder – of Gen Soleimani. Blowing up pipelines is part of the sequel. There will be a highway to hell all the way to 2030. Yet to borrow from Shakespeare, hell is definitely empty, and all the (Atlanticist) devils are here.
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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties. He’s been politically canceled from Facebook and Twitter. Follow him on Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
“In so many of the little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow democracy doesn’t exist. And one of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.”—Howard Zinn, historian
That is how the government plans to get rid of activists and dissidents who stand in its way.
This has always been the modus operandi of the FBI (more aptly referred to as the Federal Bureau of Intimidation): muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.
Back in 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.
That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s latest nationwide spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics.
In March 2021, under the pretext of carrying out an inventory of U.S. Private Vaults, FBI agents raided 1400 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, seizing “more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes.”
In April 2021, FBI agents raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, seizing 18 electronic devices. More than a year later, Giuliani has yet to be charged with any crimes.
In June 2022, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump Administration, was led out of his home in pajamas while federal law enforcement officials raided his home.
Politics aside, the message is clear: this is how the government will deal with anyone who challenges its authority.
You’re next.
Unfortunately, while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.
The government has been playing these mind games for a long time.
As Betty Medsger, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, noted in 1971, the FBI was engaged in practices that had never been reported, probably were unconstitutional, and were counter to the public’s understanding of the agency’s purpose.
The objective: target anti-government dissenters for wide-scale harassment, widespread surveillance and intimidation in order to enhance their paranoia and make them think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
Medsger, the recipient of stolen government files that provided a glimpse into the workings of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, would later learn that between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents.
As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity .”
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.
Among those most closely watched by the FBI was King, a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” All told, the FBI collected 17,000 pages of materials on King.
With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received blackmail letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.
John Lennon, a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, was another high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.
Lennon was singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.
For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.
As the New York Timesnotes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”
Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”
The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, echoed these concerns about the government’s abuses:
“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”
The report continued:
“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”
Fifty years later, we’re still having this same debate about the perils of government overreach.
For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.
The lesson to be learned is this: whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now, rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.
All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government and its henchmen today will eventually be meted out on the general populace.
At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you voted for in the last presidential election.
At that point—when you find yourself subjected to dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—remember you were warned.
These are acts of aggression by a government that is no friend to freedom.
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***
We have spent the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the UN’s founding and defining principle.
But what has not been reported in the United States is that leaders from 66 countries, mainly from the Global South, also used their General Assembly speeches to call urgently for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine through peaceful negotiations, as the UN Charter requires. We have compiled excerpts from the speeches of all 66 countries to show the breadth and depth of their appeals, and we highlight a few of them here.
African leaders echoed one of the first speakers, Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, who also spoke in his capacity as the current chairman of the African Union when he said, “We call for de-escalation and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, as well as for a negotiated solution, to avoid the catastrophic risk of a potentially global conflict.”
The 66 nations that called for peace in Ukraine make up more than a third of the countries in the world, and they represent most of the Earth’s population, including India, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil and Mexico.
While NATO and EU countries have rejected peace negotiations, and U.S. and U.K. leaders have actively undermined them, five European countries – Hungary, Malta, Portugal, San Marino and the Vatican – joined the calls for peace at the General Assembly.
The peace caucus also includes many of the small countries that have the most to lose from the failure of the UN system revealed by recent wars in Ukraine and the Greater Middle East, and who have the most to gain by strengthening the UN and enforcing the UN Charter to protect the weak and restrain the powerful.
Philip Pierre, the Prime Minister of Saint Lucia, a small island state in the Caribbean, told the General Assembly,
“Articles 2 and 33 of the UN Charter are unambiguous in binding Member States to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state and to negotiate and settle all international disputes by peaceful means.…We therefore call upon all parties involved to immediately end the conflict in Ukraine, by undertaking immediate negotiations to permanently settle all disputes in accordance with the principles of the United Nations.”
Global South leaders lamented the breakdown of the UN system, not just in the war in Ukraine but throughout decades of war and economic coercion by the United States and its allies. President Jose Ramos-Hortaof Timor-Leste directly challenged the West’s double standards, telling Western countries,
“They should pause for a moment to reflect on the glaring contrast in their response to the wars elsewhere where women and children have died by the thousands from wars and starvation. The response to our beloved Secretary-General’s cries for help in these situations have not met with equal compassion. As countries in the Global South, we see double standards. Our public opinion does not see the Ukraine war the same way it is seen in the North.”
Many leaders called urgently for an end to the war in Ukraine before it escalates into a nuclear war that would kill billions of people and end human civilization as we know it. The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, warned,
“…the war in Ukraine not only undermines the nuclear non-proliferation regime, but also presents us with the danger of nuclear devastation, either through escalation or accident. … To avoid a nuclear disaster, it is vital that there be serious engagement to find a peaceful outcome to the conflict.”
Others described the economic impacts already depriving their people of food and basic necessities, and called on all sides, including Ukraine’s Western backers, to return to the negotiating table before the war’s impacts escalate into multiple humanitarian disasters across the Global South. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh told the Assembly,
“We want the end of the Russia-Ukraine war. Due to sanctions and counter-sanctions, …the entire mankind, including women and children, is punished. Its impact does not remain confined to one country, rather it puts the lives and livelihoods of the people of all nations in greater risk, and infringes their human rights. People are deprived of food, shelter, healthcare and education. Children suffer the most in particular. Their future sinks into darkness.
My urge to the conscience of the world – stop the arms race, stop the war and sanctions. Ensure food, education, healthcare and security of the children. Establish peace.”
Turkey, Mexico and Thailand each offered their own approaches to restarting peace negotiations, whileSheikh Al-Thani, the Amir of Qatar, succinctly explained that delaying negotiations will only bring more death and suffering:
“We are fully aware of the complexities of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the international and global dimension to this crisis. However, we still call for an immediate ceasefire and a peaceful settlement, because this is ultimately what will happen regardless of how long this conflict will go on for. Perpetuating the crisis will not change this result. It will only increase the number of casualties, and it will increase the disastrous repercussions on Europe, Russia and the global economy.”
Responding to Western pressure on the Global South to actively support Ukraine’s war effort, India’s Foreign Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, claimed the moral high ground and championed diplomacy,
“As the Ukraine conflict continues to rage, we are often asked whose side we are on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there. We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles. We are on the side that calls for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way out. We are on the side of those struggling to make ends meet, even as they stare at escalating costs of food, fuel and fertilizers.
It is therefore in our collective interest to work constructively, both within the United Nations and outside, in finding an early resolution to this conflict.”
One of the most passionate and eloquent speeches was delivered by Congolese Foreign Minister Jean-Claude Gakosso, who summarized the thoughts of many, and appealed directly to Russia and Ukraine – in Russian!
“Because of the considerable risk of a nuclear disaster for the entire planet, not only those involved in this conflict but also those foreign powers who could influence events by calming them down, should all temper their zeal. They must stop fanning the flames and they must turn their backs on this type of vanity of the powerful which has so far closed the door to dialogue.
Under the auspices of the United Nations, we must all commit without delay to peace negotiations – just, sincere and equitable negotiations. After Waterloo, we know that since the Vienna Congress, all wars finish around the table of negotiation.
The world urgently needs these negotiations to prevent the current confrontations – which are already so devastating – to prevent them from going even further and pushing humanity into what could be an irredeemable cataclysm, a widespread nuclear war beyond the control of the great powers themselves – the war, about which Einstein, the great atomic theorist, said that it would be the last battle that humans would fight on Earth.
Nelson Mandela, a man of eternal forgiveness, said that peace is a long road, but it has no alternative, it has no price. In reality, the Russians and Ukrainians have no other choice but to take this path, the path of peace.
Moreover, we too should go with them, because we must throughout the world be legions working together in solidarity, and we must be able to impose the unconditional option of peace on the war lobbies.
(Next three paragraphs in Russian) Now I wish to be direct, and directly address my dear Russian and Ukrainian friends.
Too much blood has been spilled – the sacred blood of your sweet children. It’s time to stop this mass destruction. It’s time to stop this war. The entire world is watching you. It’s time to fight for life, the same way that you courageously and selflessly fought together against the Nazis during World War Two, in particular in Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin.
Think about the youth of your two countries. Think about the fate of your future generations. The time has come to fight for peace, to fight for them. Please give peace a real chance, today, before it is too late for us all. I humbly ask this of you.”
At the end of the debate on September 26, Csaba Korosi, the president of the General Assembly, acknowledged in his closing statement that ending the war in Ukraine was one of the main messages “reverberating through the Hall” at this year’s General Assembly.
You can read here Korosi’s closing statement and all the calls for peace he was referring to.
And if you want to join the “legions working together in solidarity… to impose the unconditional option of peace on the war lobbies,” as Jean-Claude Gakosso said, you can learn more at https://www.peaceinukraine.org/.
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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in October/November 2022. They are regular contributors to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate This Article button below the author’s name.
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***
Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, is the most anti-China British leader in decades. In the Conservative leadership contest that brought her to power, candidates competed to show who could be more belligerent against Beijing.
Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, must be in the running for the most anti-China British leader in a century.
Truss has done more than any other single politician to move the Conservative Party, and therefore the British government, from wanting to be a close friend of China, during the David Cameron premiership, to today where the UK is openly threatening Beijing’s economic stability and political security.
As foreign secretary in 2021, Truss convinced fellow G7 foreign ministers to include a line in their closing communique condemning China’s economic policy. Then, in a major speech this April, she threatened to crack down on China’s rise if they “don’t play by the rules”.
Britain’s Conservatives compete to be the most belligerent against Beijing
To see the significant influence that anti-China hawks now have in the UK’s domestic politics, we need look no further than the Conservative Party leadership contest, where candidates competed to see who could be the most aggressive against Beijing.
Truss’ major opponent in the race was the former chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. As chancellor, Sunak had emphasised closer economic ties with China. But it seems he feared appearing “soft” before the Conservative Party membership, and so in July, he came out as an anti-China hawk, claiming Beijing was Britain’s “number one threat”.
Sunak was not alone. Penny Mordaunt, in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to remain in the Conservative party leadership race this summer, criticized Boris Johnson for having a supposed soft touch on China. She argued Johnson had prioritized the economy over national security.
Tom Tugendhat, another failed Conservative leadership contender, who served as chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and was Truss’ pick for minister of security, warned in an interview that China allegedly poses a great danger to the British people.
NATO’s new cold war on China
The UK’s Conservative leadership race came on the heels of a NATO summit in Madrid in June, where the Western military alliance declared China to be a “strategic competitor” that poses a “systemic challenge” to “our interests, security and values.”
Britain’s shift toward hard-line anti-China policies also coincides with the same move in the United States, where the Joe Biden administration has continued Donald Trump’s campaign to counter China’s influence across the globe.
After decades of relatively stable co-operation and co-existence, Western leaders are now falling over themselves to attack China.
Yet these claims of Chinese aggression toward Europe have no real basis. In its thousands of years of history, China’s armies have never set foot on European soil, never mind marched victorious into a European capital.
The Chinese state has never colonized European cities. Looted European art does not sit in Chinese museums. Chinese people have never demanded exemption from European law, nor inserted themselves into European politics. Chinese businesses have never used the threat of Chinese naval fleets to open European markets on favourable conditions.
Certainly, China has become more assertive on the world stage in the era after the 2008 financial crash. As Beijing-based journalist Michael Schuman lays out in his book “Superpower Interrupted”, for many in China, the late 19th and 20th centuries were a period of aberration, a time when one of the world’s natural great powers was forced by colonialism, war, and internal crisis into a diminutive role.
Economic expansion since the 1980s, and the sense of perpetual crisis in the West, has allowed the Chinese leadership to reassert Beijing’s place as a potential superpower.
Yet the Western media always takes the least charitable view of any move made by Chinese leadership. Every time a Chinese fund invests in Africa, or a Chinese ship enters the South China Sea, or the Chinese government signs a security agreement with another country, Western media outlets will warn, Cassandra-like, of the impending doom of Chinese global domination.
China’s newfound assertiveness must be put in its proper geopolitical context.
For decades, the Western alliance has been at war continuously. In this same period, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on a single person.
China has just one foreign military base, in Djibouti, which is part of international anti-piracy operations. (Western governments allege that China is building another secret base in Cambodia. It is not clear if this is true, but even if it is, that means Beijing has a mere two foreign military bases.)
Even the United Kingdom, a country with a total population smaller than the membership of the Communist Party of China, dwarves Beijing in foreign base totals.
China is not involved in regime-change operations. And unlike the United States, it does not seek to assassinate foreign leaders.
While several countries on China’s borders suffer under stifling economic sanctions, which bring death and misery to untold numbers, none of these sanctions were initiated by China.
Judged by any metric, China is by far the least aggressive of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and is the only member not currently involved in a war.
China poses no threat to the West
Given these historical and contemporary geopolitical realities, there is no basis for anyone in the US or Europe to consider China a national security threat.
The United Kingdom and Europe as a whole face manifold issues, from the effects of climate change, to the energy crisis, to entrenched inequality, to an ongoing public health crisis. None of these can rightly be blamed on China building bridges in Africa or developing security arrangements in the Pacific.
What truly motivates British political leaders to feel this way can be gleaned from passing comments made by figures like Tom Tugendhat, one of the candidates in the Conservative leadership contest.
Tugendhat was the long-time chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and the co-founder of the China Research Group (CRG), a self-appointed Beijing watchdog.
In response to a question by Quartz about why he saw the rise of China as such a threat, Tugendhat responded:
The UK, by accident of history, was fundamental to the writing of the operating system of the global system from 1700 through to 1990, and the UK economy, more than almost any other, was built on the basis of it…
We therefore have a choice, which is, do we defend the system upon which our prosperity is built?
In other words, the UK’s economic prosperity still rests on the system that came out of the colonial period, and China represents a credible challenge to that colonial legacy.
The “threat” felt in Western capitals, then, is not of Chinese gunboats on the Thames, but of something much less tangible. The return of China to superpower status is not a threat so much for what Beijing will or will not do, but of what this represents for Western hegemony.
As Tugendhat put it, since the 19th century, the West – and particularly the UK and the USA – have used their status as the pre-eminent imperial powers to write a rule book of their own design.
This is often euphemistically called the “rules-based international order”, but amounts to nothing more that the fruits of centuries of colonialism.
China, with its 1.4 billion population, huge economy, and strong state, is the first credible challenge to that Western colonial framework since the end of the first cold war.
Indeed, given China’s integration into the global economy, and the parallel rise of other nations in the Global South, this may be the greatest challenge to the colonial order since the Age of Victoria.
The fear among Western policy-makers is real, but the concern is not that Europe will be dominated by China; instead, it is a fear that China’s rise means the end of European domination.
After all, the long, bloody, and exploitative history of European involvement in Asia, Africa, and much of the Americas gives the people of the Global South little reason to remain loyal to their old colonial masters, even if they try to forcibly return the gunboats to port.
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Featured image: UK Prime Minister Liz Truss meets with US President Joe Biden in New York City on September 21, 2022 (Photo credit: No 10 Downing Street)
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Beginning on September 20, the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly held its annual gathering in New York City.
This multilateral institution has its origins in 1945 after the conclusion of the second world war where tens of millions of people were killed and displaced resulting in a restructured international balance of political and economic forces.
With the United States emerging in the postwar period as the leading capitalist and imperialist country in the world, it was not surprising that the headquarters was eventually established in New York after its initial assembly in San Francisco. At that time, the majority of peoples and nations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean remained under the yoke of imperialism.
However, during the latter war years and with fury after its conclusion, the national liberation movements erupted demanding independence and freedom for the oppressed colonies and semi-colonies. Today in the third decade of the 21st century there are 193 countries recognized by the UN encompassing all of the continents and many island-nations.
Nonetheless, the media coverage of the UN General Assembly within the U.S. largely focused on the address delivered by President Joe Biden. His remarks were heavily centered on continuing the proxy war against the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
At no point during the Biden speech did he put forward any viable peace initiatives for Ukraine to end the fighting. Neither did Biden suggest a different tone towards the People’s Republic of China which has been provoked by the trips to Taiwan by leading members of the U.S. Congress in recent months.
Biden began his remarks on September 21 by denigrating Moscow and its motivations. He said in part:
“Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter — no more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor by force. Again, just today, President Putin has made overt nuclear threats against Europe and a reckless disregard for the responsibilities of the non-proliferation regime. Now Russia is calling — calling up more soldiers to join the fight. And the Kremlin is organizing a sham referenda to try to annex parts of Ukraine, an extremely significant violation of the U.N. Charter.”
Biden whose approval rating in the latest polls has him enjoying just 41% support among the electorate in the U.S. The majority of people in the country, some 84%, are concerned about the worsening economic crisis and have almost no faith in the capacity of the current administration to enact policies to stem inflation and provide adequate housing, education and other necessities of life in the near future.
The U.S. is Answered by Many Nations
Of course, Washington was the focus of the address by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the UNGA. Lavrov repudiated Biden’s accusations and pointed to a long list of atrocities which have resulted from U.S. foreign policy in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
“SERGEY V. LAVROV, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, said the United States, declaring victory in the cold war, has behaved as if it has the sacred right to act with impunity whenever and wherever it wants. Recalling the war of aggression — in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya — which claimed many hundreds of thousands of lives, he also asked: ‘What is the outcome of the adventurism of the United States in the Middle East? Has the human rights situation improved? Is the rule of law better? Has the socioeconomic situation stabilized?’… The incapacity of Western countries to negotiate and the continued war by the Kyiv regime against their own people left Moscow with no choice but to recognize the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics and start a special military operation to protect the Russian and other people in Donbas, he stressed. He also underlined the intention to remove the threat against Russian security which NATO has been consistently creating in Ukraine. For the Anglo‑Saxons, Ukraine is just an expandable material, as they are fighting against the Russian Federation.”
Several African representatives, following the consensus of the 55 member-states African Union (AU), continued to demand the expansion of the Security Council which only has five permanent members: the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China. Although the African continent has 1.4 billion people, there is no permanent presence on the Security Council while states with far less population are represented.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs Awatif El Tidjani Ahmed Koboro of Chad said to the UNGA:
“On the reform of the Security Council, the body responsible for peace and international security, Chad once again urges member states to move from rhetoric to action in order to achieve the said reform and correct the historic injustice towards the African continent, which excludes it from full and equal participation in this body.”
The Federal Republic of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state, had already gone on record demanding that two permanent seats be allocated on the UN Security Council to Africa. The general theme of many African, Caribbean, Latin American and Asian-Pacific states was that they had concerns other than those being promoted by the U.S. and other allied European governments.
Acting Prime Minister of Mali, Abdoulaye Maiga, blasted the former colonial power of France saying that the policies of Paris towards Africa were unacceptable. Maiga said to the West:
“Move on from the colonial past and hear the anger, the frustration, the rejection that is coming up from the African cities and countryside, and understand that this movement is inexorable. Your intimidations and subversive actions have only swelled the ranks of Africans concerned with preserving their dignity.”
In a speech from the leader of the Caribbean island-nation of Barbados, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, the stateswoman laid bare the inequalities related to international finance which served to perpetuate the underdevelopment of the Global South. A summary of her address said of the present conditions of the developing states:
“Mia Amor Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, urged world leaders to ‘use the power of the pen’ and impose natural disaster and pandemic clauses in developing countries’ debt, as well as remove the current barriers to accessing financial assistance from multilateral development banks…. During her speech, Ms. Mottley spoke extensively about the need to reform the ageing global financial architecture to better reflect today’s realities, for instance making it easier for climate-stricken countries to access capital. Indeed, the Bretton Woods Agreement that gave rise to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘no longer serve the purpose in the 21st century that they served in the 20th century,’ she said.”
Another Caribbean island-nation, the Republic of Cuba, was the subject of several leaders who called for the lifting of the U.S.-imposed blockade of the socialist state. This call was made by the South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor along with the President of the Republic of Namibia, Gage Geingob.
The Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguezspoke on the vast inequalities prevailing in the existing world system dominated by the western industrialized states:
“Never has humankind had this wealth of scientific and technical potential that it has now, neither has it ever had the extraordinary capacity than it does now to create wealth and well-being. However, never has the world been so unequal in terms of just how much people suffer.”
Rodrigues cited statistics indicating that some 828 million people are going to bed hungry every night and that around 50 million children suffer from stunting while joblessness will impact 207 million persons in 2022. Despite the more than sixty years of the blockade by Washington, Cuba is able to conduct international solidarity in the areas of education, healthcare and humanitarian assistance to peoples throughout the globe.
The progressive African states also called for the liberation of Palestine and the Western Sahara, where the U.S. has sponsored the continued national oppression of these peoples so deserving of self-determination and independence. In addition to the call for the recognition of the right to self determination for the oppressed, there was equal emphasis on the responsibility of the industrial states as it relates to climate change. The next UN Climate Conference (COP27) will be held in November in Egypt where African states are preparing to put forward unified positions on the current environmental crisis.
These and other features of the UNGA illustrated that the struggle for a just world in the current period remains the preoccupation of billions throughout the globe. Working and oppressed peoples within the western capitalist states must recognize the inextricable links between their own well being and that of the majority of humanity in the Global South.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez addresses UNGA 77 in NYC 2022 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
In a televised news February 7, 2022 interview the President of the United States acknowledged that the United States would act against Nord Stream if required. This statement was made 3 weeks prior to the Russian invasion.
After realizing his COVID-19 booster shot may have sent his cancer into overdrive, Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said going public with the information was the “right thing to do.”
This terrorist attack destroyed any chance of an energy-driven Russian-German rapprochement, immediately catapulted Poland into the position of being one of the continent’s most pivotal energy hubs, and thus took the Anglo-American Axis’ plans for dividing and ruling Europe to the next level.
Increasingly, it is relatively easy to put two and two together and figure out who is behind certain cui bono operations. The latest case in point is the “mysterious” Nordstream 1 and 2 massive gas leaks. As of this writing, the corporate propaganda media has not blamed Russia for the dangerous leaks, but they will probably get around to it sooner before later.
America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.
The Kremlin has limited its military operations to the areas in Ukraine where the majority Russian population was being shelled, occupied, and murdered by Ukrainian forces and which faced last February an invasion of a large Western-trained Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias intended to overthrow the two independent Donbass republics recognized by the Russian government.
Russia is a thorn in the eye of the capitalist system and the capitalist system cannot exist without war. The West has not only been opposed to the East since the Ukraine war and calls for hatred of nations. It has been fighting against it for a long time with all permissible and impermissible means. The danger of nuclear war as an “ultima ratio” (last, extreme means) or as America’s plan to win the Third World War is great.
On September 23, the Al Qaeda-occupied area in Idlib Province reported the first confirmed case of cholera in the last terrorist-controlled area in Syria. The deadly outbreak has claimed 39 lives in Syria, with thousands of suspected cases across the country.
A former Polish Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski, has attributed to the United States the sabotage of two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. “Thank you, USA,” Sikorski wrote on Twitter. Sikorski was Minister of National Defense from 2005 – 2007 and served as Deputy Minister of National Defense and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, previously.
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This letter provides lab results proving that concerns of the so-called “antivaxxers” were fully justified!
The JAMA letter is quite simple. Scientists picked 11 lactating women, who received Pfizer (6 women) or Moderna (5 women) vaccines during lactation.
After vaccination, breast milk was analyzed for the presence of mRNA nanoparticles. Not surprisingly, 7 samples were POSITIVE for the presence of mRNA.
The authors also point out that the promises of mRNA vaccines that “vaccine stays in the shoulder” were lies. The vaccine traveled to the breasts and was transferred into breast milk.
These data demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge the biodistribution of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA to mammary cells and the potential ability of tissue EVs to package the vaccine mRNA that can be transported to distant cells.
Little has been reported on lipid nanoparticle biodistribution and localization in human tissues after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.
Despite that, the authors say the following, possibly to get their letter past the JAMA censors:
The sporadic presence and trace quantities of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA detected in EBM suggest that breastfeeding after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination is safe,particularly beyond 48 hours after vaccination.
Your first reading of the above sentence might suggest that the authors said “COVID-19 mRNA vaccination is safe”. But it is ominously qualified with “particularly beyond 48 hours after vaccination”, plainly meaning that breastfeeding within 48 hours after vaccination is NOT safe.
It is sad that researchers have to say things (it is safe and effective) that contradict the plain meaning of this article (women shed mRNA nanoparticles on their infants). Our friend Modern Discontent recently posted a great guide to reading scientific papers, where he also lamented how article conclusions often contradict article data. This article is a perfect example of that, and there is plenty more of such examples in the Covid world.
This is why paying attention to what the article says, beyond platitudes, is paramount.
Wildly Differing Concentrations of mRNA make it MORE Dangerous
Look at this chart showing concentrations of mRNA in milk. The worst concentration was EIGHT TIMES the lowest concentration. This means that likely, in a larger sample of women, the disparity between highest and lowest values would be even greater.
What is the deadly concentration of mRNA that could cause the death of an infant in the Pfizer trial (see below)? Nobody knows and the FDA does not care.
The detection limit (per supplement) was 1 pg/mL. What if levels just below 1 pg/mL could be harmful? We have no idea.
Dead Infant
Confidential Pfizer documents, which the FDA wanted to hide from us for 75 years, show a case of an infant, possibly killed by mRNA nanoparticles shed by a recently vaccinated mother.
The “neonatal death” and numerous other neonatal problems in infants exposed to vaccinated mothers’ breast milk are discussed in my article above.
Remember how we were assured that “vaccines are safe for mothers”?
Turned out that not only they were NOT safe, but also that the fact-checkers and authorities outright lied about safety, since they studiously avoided collecting any data that would confirm it! They also IGNORED Pfizer’s own reports of 17 neonatal problems and wanted to hide that for 75 years.
Now we know WHAT they wanted to hide.
They could have done this simple study two years ago. But they did not even bother to conduct such a trivial check! Why?
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Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky boasted in a CBS “Face the Nation” interview which aired Sunday that Washington is providing him with a whopping $1.5 billion per month for state coffers as the country piles up a large war-time deficit.
“The United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight” against Russia the Ukrainian leader explained, but pointed out there remains “a deficit of $5 billion in our budget.” He immediately pivoted to repeating Kyiv’s longtime complaint that it’s not enough – because it’s never enough – though by and large the common American taxpayer seems oblivious amid the onslaught of constant war headlines.
Zelensky said, after revealing the astonishing $1.5 billion in aid on a monthly basis figure, “But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough to cover the civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, homes of Ukrainians. Why do we need this? We need the security in order to attract our Ukrainians to come back home.”
“If it’s safe, they will come, settle, work here and will pay taxes and then we won’t have a deficit of $5 billion in our budget. So it will be a positive for everybody,” the Ukrainian leader continued. “Because as of today the United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight- fight this war. However, if our people will come back- and they do want to come back very much, they have a lot of motivation- they will work here.”
“And then the United States will not have to continue, give us this support,” he concluded, though the way things are going it could be years before the US might “not have to continue” the nonstop aid. Zelensky appeared to be trying to present a strange “win-win” for American, though again if average US taxpayers grasped the full enormity of it, they certainly might question that narrative.
Ironically, or tiresomely, just a day after Zelensky complained “But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough”… Congress is poised to push through another $12 billion, according Reuters.
Fox’s Tucker Carlson says, This is insane!…
“Negotiators to a stop-gap spending bill in the U.S. Congress have agreed to include about $12 billion in new aid to Ukraine in response to a request from the Biden administration, a source familiar with the talks said on Monday,” Reuters detailed. “Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden asked Congress to provide $11.7 billion in new emergency military and economic aid for Ukraine.”
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It should be recalled that it was only in July that the Associated Press and NPR called attention to a hugely inconvenient fact and problem which never went away:
As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine’s suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid.
Those issues, which date back decades and were not an insignificant part of former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, had been largely pushed to the back burner in the immediate run-up to Russia’s invasion and during the first months of the conflict as the U.S. and its partners rallied to Ukraine’s defense.
But Zelenskyy’s weekend firings of his top prosecutor, intelligence chief and other senior officials have resurfaced those concerns and may have inadvertently given fresh attention to allegations of high-level corruption in Kyiv made by one outspoken U.S. lawmaker.
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After realizing his COVID-19 booster shot may have sent his cancer into overdrive, Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said going public with the information was the “right thing to do.”
Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, suspects his third dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may have sent his cancer into overdrive.
But he told The Atlantic he wants discussion of the COVID-19 vaccine to be transparent — so he went public about his suspicion that the Pfizer booster shot he received on Sept. 22, 2021, may have induced rapid progression of his angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AITL), a type of lymphoma he’d been diagnosed with before he got the booster shot.
After his diagnosis, Goldman said he rushed to get the booster shot, believing he would need it more than most people because once he started chemotherapy, his immune system would be compromised.
But after receiving the shot, Goldman’s follow-up CT scan showed something unexpected: Within only a few days, his cancer had grown so fast that cancerous points were lighting up all over his scan.
“It looked like someone had set off fireworks inside Michel’s body,” The Atlantic reported.
Goldman and his brother, Serge Goldman, a fellow scientist and head of nuclear medicine at the teaching hospital of the Université libre de Bruxelles, suspected Goldman’s COVID-19 booster shot may have triggered the rapid proliferation of cancerous growth in his body.
The initial CT scan had been “a bit disturbing,” Serge Goldman told The Atlantic, because it showed an asymmetrical cluster of cancerous nodes around Goldman’s left armpit, where Michel’s first two doses of vaccine had been delivered.
The CT scan done after Michel’s third dose showed the cancer’s asymmetry had flipped and was clustered by his right armpit, where he received the third shot.
The brothers knew it could be a mere coincidence, but they thought it was important to investigate the possibility that the vaccine might be behind the clustering — because it could mean other people with certain forms of cancer might be at risk of a COVID-19 vaccine causing their cancer to progress more rapidly.
So on Nov. 25, 2021, the brothers — who had written prior papers together — and other colleagues published a case report in which they described Michel Goldman’s experience and urged the scientific community to study the phenomenon to see if it occurred in patients diagnosed with AITL.
“Since nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines strongly activate T follicular helper cells, it is important to explore the possible impact of approved SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines on neoplasms affecting this cell type,” the authors wrote.
The brothers said the case study “suggests that vaccination with the [Pfizer-BioNTech] BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine might induce rapid progression of AITL.”
They noted, however, that it would be “premature” to extrapolate the findings from Michel Goldman’s case to other patients with the same kind of cancer and that “dedicated studies are needed.”
Going public was ‘the right thing to do’
Michel Goldman’s case study added to the scientific literature that aims to understand the relationships between mRNA vaccines and the functioning of helper T-cells.
For instance, previous researchers have noted mRNA vaccines rev up helper T-cells, which may explain why Michel Goldman’s AILT went into overdrive following his third booster shot.
“Perhaps the shots gave such a jolt to his helper T cells that they went berserk,” The Atlantic reported. “If they were prone to forming tumors, or if they were already cancerous, then overstimulation could have made the problem even worse.”
Research involving body scans of some people who get mRNA vaccines — including cancer patients — shows heightened activity in the lymph nodes near the armpit on the side where the shot was received.
In February 2018, a team of researchers at Columbia University’s Institute for Cancer Genetics published a study using mice with a pair of gene mutations — the same two mutations found in Michel Goldman’s tumor — showing that the mutations predispose T-cells to go rogue.
The study also showed that when the mice were injected with red blood cells from sheep — as an experimental stand-in for invading microbes — the mice developed the same subtype of lymphoma Michel Goldman had.
Michel Goldman previously headed a $2 billion European endeavor to accelerate the research of new medicines and in December 2020, he publicly spoke out in support of the safety of mRNA vaccines — the technology used in both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
At that time, he said the highest risk — especially for vulnerable people — is not to be vaccinated and that his main concern about mRNA vaccination was that people might use the possible side effects as an argument against getting the vaccine.
Michel Goldman doesn’t regret going public with his case, even though it presented challenging evidence regarding the safety of mRNA vaccines for individuals such as himself.
“I’m still convinced it was the right thing to do,” he told The Atlantic.
He remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are useful for the vast majority of people, but he is unsure whether he himself will get another booster dose.
“I don’t know what I will do,” he said.
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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
Featured image is from CHD
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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Global currency and bond markets are being hit by a growing storm driven by the rise of the US dollar fuelled by interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve, which could start to shake the financial system.
The turmoil reached a new level of intensity this week, sparked by the reaction of financial markets to the UK mini-budget which handed out £45 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy while increasing government debt by £72 billion.
The reaction of the markets was to send the pound down to its lowest level in history. This led to a rapid sell-off of government bonds, sharply lifting their yields, or interest rates.
It was, in effect, a savage directive to the UK government of Prime Minister Liz Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng that the handout to the wealthy had to be accompanied by deep cuts to government social spending, coupled with further suppression of wages.
Yesterday the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervened to give voice to the concerns of international finance capital, issuing what the Financial Times called a “biting attack” on the government’s plan and calling for a “re-evaluation.”
The IMF said it was “closely monitoring” developments and was “engaged with the authorities” in the UK.
“Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture,” it stated. “It is important that fiscal policy does not work at cross purposes to monetary policy.”
Like other central banks, the Bank of England (BoE) is lifting interest rates, inducing a recession, to try to clamp down on workers’ wage demands as inflation reaches its highest levels in more than four decades, now at double digit levels in the UK and threatening to go even higher. The bank is also reducing its holdings of financial assets.
But while the BoE is tightening monetary policy, the government’s handouts to the wealthy are to be financed by the creation of still more debt.
The IMF statement also showed it is focused on the development of the class struggle. “The nature of the UK measures will likely increase inequality,” it said.
The IMF is very conscious that the blatant handout of billions of pounds to the rich and super-rich, lifting inequality to new record highs, will make even more difficult the task of the trade unions in suppressing the struggle for wage increases. This struggle, now being joined by ever-wider sections of the British working class, is creating the basis for a general strike against the Tory government.
There was a near universal response from the representatives of finance capital to the UK government’s measures, insisting they had to be accompanied by cuts in government spending.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said Kwarteng was gambling with the UK’s fiscal stability to push through the tax cuts “without even a semblance of an effort to make the public finance numbers add up.”
Vivek Paul, the UK chief investment strategist for the giant global hedge fund BlackRock, said the government’s moves were “just extraordinary.” The market had delivered its verdict on the government’s fiscal plans, and it was “not a good one.”
The situation is increasingly being described as a “crisis of confidence.”
For the financial system, confidence rests on two essential components: first, a belief that its political representatives have a clear plan for the overall economy and second, they can contain the most disruptive force of all—the movement of the working class. This confidence has been battered on both fronts.
Moreover, there are fears of mounting global turbulence. This is under conditions where the crisis of the British pound is the sharpest expression of the slide in all currency values against the dollar due to ongoing hikes in US interest rates. The Japanese yen is down to its lowest level in 25 years and other currencies are falling rapidly.
Those fears are focused on the bond market where prices are falling and yields are rising at an alarming rate.
In a comment yesterday, Bloomberg columnist John Authers noted: “This isn’t at core a currency crisis, but a crisis of confidence in the bond market, which is much more dangerous. The shock to gilt yields [those on UK 10-year bonds] in the last five trading days has been epic. No shock this great and this sudden has happened before.”
So far this month, the yield on the UK 10-year government bond has risen by 1.45 percentage points, the largest ever monthly rise according to data going back to 1979. In “normal” conditions rises in the order of just 0.5 percentage points, or even less, are considered large.
Authers raised the broader implications. Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, he wrote, “everyone in the asset markets has known that there is one great risk above all others—that at some point confidence would run out and the bond market would revolt, causing a disorderly rise in yields. Then the edifice would fall.”
That day of reckoning was delayed because the central banks could always print more money when they did not have to worry about inflation. Those conditions have now changed.
“The UK appears to be the first case of a truly disorderly bond selloff, where the moves are so swift that they affect the functioning of the financial system,” Authers wrote. The whole world had to watch what was happening in Britain because it was a “test case for the confidence game that’s likely to be repeated everywhere.”
And while King Dollar reigns supreme at this point, the US is not exempt from the rising global storm.
Ralph Bostic, president of the Atlanta branch of the Fed, in comments reported by the Financial Times, said the UK situation had increased uncertainty over the trajectory of the US economy.
“The key question will be, what does this mean for ultimately weakening the European economy, which is an important consideration for how the US economy is going to perform.”
Susan Collins, the incoming president of the Boston branch of the Fed, speaking at an event on Monday, warned that a significant economic or geopolitical event could push the US economy into a recession as the central bank’s monetary policy tightens.
In a comment published in the Australian Financial Review on Monday, columnist Karen Maley cited remarks by Michael Hartnett, an investment strategist at Bank of America. Hartnett warned that what Maley termed a “savage” fall in bond prices would leave investors with no choice but to liquidate “the world’s most crowded trades,” namely the US dollar, US tech stocks and private equity.
According to Maley, Hartnett pointed out that “the present market shares many of the same traits that led to the 1987 share market collapse: including a volatile geopolitical situation, abnormal US markets far outperforming the rest of the world, and a lack of international coordination.”
The only thing missing from the list, as Maley noted, was a currency crisis. That is now clearly unfolding, centring on, but by no means confined to, the British pound.
And it has a historical resonance. The crisis of the pound and the UK financial system at the end of the 1960s, was the harbinger of a dollar crisis that led in August 1971 to the decision by US President Nixon to remove the gold backing from the US currency and end the Bretton Woods monetary system established after World War II.
Much has changed since that time, but the crisis of the British pound could well be a warning of the demise of the entire system of fiat currencies, based on the US dollar, which has prevailed since the Nixon decision.
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More than 50 paid employees of global arms companies are working inside the UK’s Ministry of Defence, openDemocracy can reveal, sparking questions about conflicts of interest and national security.
They include nine staffers on long-term secondment from the UK’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, some of whom have been embedded inside the department for years.
Last year, the company made more than £4.1bn in sales from the MoD, boasting about its “strong and long-standing relationships” with the UK government. Almost all of this money was spent through contracts that were awarded without competitive tender.
The government would not say whether the secondment scheme represented a conflict of interest.
Campaigners today called on the government to come clean about lobbyists and business officials working in Westminster. The finding comes after it emerged that Liz Truss’s top aide, Mark Fullbrook, is being paid via his own lobbying firm.
Dr Michael Ofori-Mensah, head of research at Transparency International Defence and Security, said:
“Seconding industry insiders for senior Whitehall roles can provide invaluable insight, but also carries major conflict of interest risks.
“Government should do more to mitigate the risks of captured policy and procurement by establishing a comprehensive register of lobbyists and strengthening oversight of the revolving door between the public and private sector.”
Records obtained by openDemocracy show that at least four BAE officials have been based for over three years in Defence Equipment and Support, the arms-length government body that purchases military goods and services from companies like BAE.
A further six MoD staff are on secondment from Qinetiq, a huge defence technology company, while Rolls-Royce and Babcock have supplied at least two staffers each.
But other officials installed in the ministry appear to have been lost in the system, with no record of who is paying them. Responding to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the department admitted it could not identify the employers of at least 23 people currently there on secondment.
A spokesperson did not respond directly to openDemocracy’s questions about why this had happened and whether it could represent a national security risk.
Meanwhile, employees of seven arms companies including BAE, Leonardo and MBDA are currently on secondments at the Department for International Trade (DIT), documents obtained by openDemocracy show.
The DIT did not disclose what roles the staff had been seconded to work in, but confirmed they were largely concentrated in the UK Defence Security and Export directorate, which helps weapons companies sell arms abroad.
A government spokesperson told openDemocracy the secondments were part of “a long-standing arrangement designed to encourage better collaboration and improve technical expertise”. They added that all secondees work under normal civil service rules and are subject to “robust security checks”.
Dr Sam Perlo-Freeman, research coordinator at Campaign Against the Arms Trade, said the setup showed how “deeply embedded” the weapons industry is in government.
“The very department charged with regulating arms exports has representatives of the arms industry at its heart,” he said.
“The government essentially treats the industry’s interests as its own, with tragic consequences for victims of conflict and repression in Yemen and worldwide.”
BAE, Leonardo and MBDA have all exported weapons to Saudi Arabia that have subsequently been used in its war in Yemen. All three companies were named as parties to alleged Saudi war crimes in a complaint by human rights groups to the International Criminal Court.
The complaint states that aircraft, missiles and other arms supplied by the companies “contributed to the capacity” of the Saudi-led coalition, which is accused of bombing schools, hospitals and civilians.
BAE Systems alone has sold £15bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia – including Typhoon and Tornado fighter jets – since the conflict in Yemen began in 2015. Last year it brought in nearly £2.5bn in sales to the country, providing “operational capability support” for Saudi air and naval forces”.
A spokesperson for the company said that its work for Saudi Arabia “does not involve the company in military operational activity and our people are not involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties”.
She added:
“A handful of our employees are seconded to roles in government to help increase understanding of our complex industry… Seconded employees are subject to strict confidentiality and proprietary rules to prevent any possible conflict of interest.”
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This terrorist attack destroyed any chance of an energy-driven Russian-German rapprochement, immediately catapulted Poland into the position of being one of the continent’s most pivotal energy hubs, and thus took the Anglo-American Axis’ plans for dividing and ruling Europe to the next level.
The unprecedented damage done to the Nord Stream pipelines Monday night was certainly an act of sabotage exactly as Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Russia suspect, though nobody can agree on who carried out this ecological terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea. Kiev, however, predictably blamed Russia for destroying its own pipeline in a remix of its earlier conspiracy theory alleging that Russia regularly bombs the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant that’s also under its control. That ridiculous scenario can therefore reasonably be ruled out, especially since Moscow could just keep the tap turned off for technical reasons without risking getting caught sabotaging its own pipelines in NATO-controlled waters.
Copyright FT, Source: Petroleum Economist via OneWorld
Continental European countries like Poland also shouldn’t be suspected either even though that aspiring regional leader’s newly inaugurated Baltic Pipe from Norway makes it a major energy player nowadays. There’s just too much risk of serious ecological blowback to that country’s direct interests to justify carrying out such an act of terrorism just to forever cripple its only potential pipeline competitor, the two Nord Streams. That said, the attack nevertheless does indeed serve Poland’s larger interests for exactly that reason even if it most likely wasn’t behind what happened or had any advance knowledge about it, which is why suspicion should fall on its allies in the Anglo-American Axis (AAA).
Both have an interest in dividing and ruling the EU by facilitating Poland’s rise as a continental Great Power capable of eventually competing with the bloc’s de facto German leader (at least in Central & Eastern Europe [CEE]), which was explained in my mid-September analysis about how “Poland’s Hyping Up The German Threat To Central Europe To Consolidate Its Regional Influence”. In order to knock Germany out of the geopolitical and geo-economic game for good, the AAA must not only successfully trick it into committing economic suicide through its compliance with the anti-Russian sanctions, but also destroy any chance of a strategically meaningful rapprochement with Russia in the future.
Sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines accomplishes precisely that by completely disincentivizing Germany from potentially clinging to whatever energy-driven plans it might have for eventually repairing relations with Russia. With that scenario confidently discounted after Monday night’s ecological terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea, which also served the purpose of making Poland among the continent’s most pivotal energy hubs, Germany might also figure that it doesn’t have anything more to lose vis a vis Russia by possibly being the first country to send cutting-edge battle tanks to Kiev. This artificially manufactured strategic inertia would thus doom Russian-German relations for decades.
Considering these outcomes, both immediate and emerging, there’s no doubt that the AAA benefits the most from the ecological terrorist attack that was just carried out in the Baltic Sea against the two Nord Stream pipelines. They’re insulated from the consequences of the ecological disaster that they created and are thus able to advance their grand strategic goals without any cost to themselves. This terrorist attack destroyed any chance of an energy-driven Russian-German rapprochement, immediately catapulted Poland into the position of being one of the continent’s most pivotal energy hubs, and thus took their plans for dividing and ruling Europe to the next level.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
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.
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***
Increasingly, it is relatively easy to put two and two together and figure out who is behind certain cui bono operations. The latest case in point is the “mysterious” Nordstream 1 and 2 massive gas leaks.
As of this writing, the corporate propaganda media has not blamed Russia for the dangerous leaks, but they will probably get around to it sooner before later.
Meanwhile, here is blue check Radek Sikorski, a member of the European Parliament for Poland, expressing his gratitude on Twitter:
Now why would Mr. Sikorski post such a thing? Because he’s a Russian-hating neocon, a former resident fellow of the organized war crime outfit, the American Enterprise Institute. He was also the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a “nonpartisan” organization determined to push NATO right up to all exposed sides of Russia.
His wife, Anne Applebaum, is even more strident and anti-Russian. In fact, she has made a career trashing Russia. A “reformed Jew,” she was educated at the Quaker established Sidwell Friends School, described as “the Harvard of Washington’s private schools.” Sidwell has “educated” the children of notable war criminals, including Obama, Clinton, Al Gore, Nixon’s daughters, and the grandchildren of Joe Biden, no doubt to make sure their misanthropic agenda moves forward.
Applebaum has spent a large portion of her despicable career thus far serving the empire. She covered the fall of the Soviet Union for The Economist and The Independent. She was neck-deep in neoliberal propaganda operations at The Spectator as deputy editor and also political editor at the Evening Standard. She was a member of The Washington Post (think CIA, Philip Graham, and Operation Mockingbird) editorial board. As if all of that was not enough, she is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and became a George Herbert Walker Bush/Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. I wrote about Springer and his propaganda media operations in a previous post.
Ambitious and aggressive in her hatred of Russia, Applebaum is the author of numerous anti-Russian books with titles such as “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” and “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe.” She routinely wins big-name literary awards for her anti-Russian propaganda.
Considering the praise of methanol poisoning in the Baltic Sea by Applebaum’s Polish hubby—following seismic recordings of explosions near the pipelines—and the rabid hatred of Russia they both share in addition to their high and influential positions, it is fair to conclude NATO and the US are behind the explosions and release of toxic gas.
Russia, which has spent billions on the Nordstream 1 pipeline and its as of yet (and possibly never) functional sister, Nordstream 2, has zero reason to blow up its own meticulously constructed pipeline.
However, NATO and the apparatchiks at the EU have an interest in freezing Germany this winter. If they can get the German people angry enough and this antipathy spreads across Europe, we may very well see NATO directly confronting Russia on its own land, most notably the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine (following ongoing referendums to join the Russian Federation), the chance many of us will starve during a protracted nuclear winter increases ten-fold.
I’m sure Sikorski and her neocon wife have a space reserved in the bunker. I’m not sure if they were told they may have to stay down there for the rest of their lives, maybe dining on those insects pushed by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum. It is often said cockroaches will be the inheritors after a nuclear war.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Joe Biden and his handlers are building a structure to censor facts and opinions contrary to Joe’s teleprompter-read neoliberal talking points. Simply imposing censorship and arresting activists as “extremists,” minus a nasty pretense, would undoubtedly elicit outrage and politically activate pushback from an increasingly shrinking number of Americans who actually use their brains to arrive at conclusions while navigating a tidal wave of propaganda.
The FBI, essentially America’s political enforcers, are the force majeure behind this effort. Regardless, a number of members have recently stepped forward to set the record straight on what the state and its enforcers have designated as extremism and terrorism.
“Rank-and-file FBI agents are accusing the Biden administration of exaggerating the threat of White supremacists and pressuring agents to cook up domestic terrorist cases involving racist extremists,” write Kerry Picket and Jospeh Clark.
“Current and former FBI agents told The Washington Times that the perceived White supremacist threat is overblown by the administration. They said top bureau officials are pressuring FBI agents to create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as White supremacists to meet internal metrics.”
One anonymous agent pointed out that there are more people at the agency focused on “white supremacism” than there are actual white supremacists.
The truth about Biden’s White Supremacy. FBI can not find any. It is all a DEM hoax. https://t.co/M4PUbAjRHM
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”
Notice no mention of white supremacy in the above statement. That’s because white supremacy is an excuse to target other, legitimate forms of protest and opposition. It is used because most people find racism reprehensible.
On the other hand, the FBI apparently cherishes its dog whistle “racists” who are essentially agents provocateurs, most notably radio talkshow host Ted Turner.
Radio talk show host and blogger Hal Turner was an FBI trained agent provocateur, his attorney told reporters in Hartford [August 18, 2009]. The supposed white supremacist worked for the agency from 2002 until 2007. “His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest,” Michael Orozco told the Associated Press.
The article I wrote originally appeared on Infowars and Prison Planet. The above link in the byline of the repost now points to an ad for an old Alex Jones documentary. I am persona non grata at both websites and I imagine a lot of the work I did there has made it to the memory hole.
But let’s not wander off track.
As the case against Turner and the revelations of his attorney reveal, the government did not abandon its COINTELPRO tactics, as it claimed in the mid 1970s. The FBI, acting as the establishment’s political secret police, continues to undermine political movements the elite consider dangerous and a threat to their control and influence.
Recall, I wrote the above more than a decade ago, and since that time the situation has grown far worse, predictably so under the mentally compromised Joe Biden.
The FBI infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s.
“During the 1960’s, the FBI’s role was not to protect civil rights workers, but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror,” the authors of “COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story.”
Church Committee hearings and internal FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active Klan members during the period were FBI agents or informants. However, Bureau intelligence “assets” were neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964.
Bureau spies were elected to top leadership posts in at least half of all Klan units. Needless to say, the informants gained positions of organizational trust on the basis of promoting the Klan’s fascist agenda. Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist acts would only confirm the infiltrator’s loyalty and commitment.
The report, nearly impossible to find on the internet, notes the FBI established “dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than ‘blow his cover.’ One FBI agent, speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, ‘We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it.’”
In other words, the FBI was a prime motivator in racist violence, same as it has more recently worked behind the scenes to fabricate Islamic terror groups.
In the 1960s, the FBI specialized in disrupting and destroying constitutionally legal protest groups and activists. Much of the violence our “historians” now attribute to leftist radicals of the period was in fact the product of FBI interference:
Many details are now available concerning these extensive campaigns of terror and disruption, in part through right-wing paramilitary groups organized and financed by the national government, but primarily through the much more effective means of infiltration and provocation of existing groups. In particular, much of the violence that occurred on college campuses can be attributed to government provocateurs. (Emphasis added.)
Political provocation runs back to antiquity. However, it became far more effective under the Sûreté nationale, the French national police, and under the direction of the criminal Eugène François Vidocq in the early 1800s. He was appointed by Emperor Napoleon to form the Brigade de la Sûreté (“Security Brigade”) to undermine political opposition, most notably during the French Restoration (the installation of the House of Bourbon). In the 1820s, the excessively reactionary monarchy of Charles X gave a steroid boost to this secret police designed to crush all dissent. So important was this task to the monarch, he often had Vidocq pull police off regular duty to help destroy dissent.
Since that time, not much has changed beyond the addition of technology and the creation of a powerful national security state. The CIA, in particular since the outset of the so-called war on terror, has embedded itself in police departments, most notably the NYPD. The nation’s largest police department dispatched agents provocateurs in protests during the 2004 Republican Convention, while Denver police used “undercover agents” to instigate violence against police during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
The effort by the state to tar and feather legitimate protest as criminality and terrorism received a boost under the cognitively impaired 46th president. This is a Democrat organized effort (both “parties,” however, have equally engaged this illegal behavior). He embraced and adopted, for instance, the magnificent absurdity that all “extreme right-wing” behavior is motivated by racism and disgust of the pretzel logic embraced by Democrats (for instance, that humans can willy-nilly decide what gender they are, despite indisputable biology, and that folks with a lack of skin pigmentation are somehow born racist and “privileged”).
Are you fucking kidding me? If she was around in the 60s, she would have been in the cointelpro. https://t.co/IVKVWDC2L2
This insanity is not so much a political philosophy (although millions of “liberal” adherents believe it to be so) as a psychological operation to divide citizens and promote the idea we are on the verge of a “civil war,” which is nonsense.
Inventing such a scenario, and having agent provocateurs perform acts leading to one half of Americans believing the other half is seditious (and vice versa), will result in further political repression and, eventually, the trashing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights under martial law or something similar.
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***
America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.
Furthermore, America can supply its own energy.
Therefore, supply-chains are less dicey in the U.S. than in Europe. There is less and less reason now for a firm to be doing anything in Europe except selling to Europeans, who are becoming increasingly desperate to get whatever they can afford to buy, now that Russia, which had been providing the lowest-cost energy and other commodities, is being strangled out of European markets, by the sanctions. Money can move even when its owner can’t.
The European public will now be left farther and farther behind as Europe’s wealth flees — mainly to America (whose Government had created this capital-flight of Europe’s wealth).
Europe’s leaders have cooperated with America’s leaders, to cause this European decline (by joining, instead of rejecting, America’s sanctions against Russia), but Germany’s companies can also enjoy significant benefits from relocating or expanding in America. Germany’s business daily newspaper, Handlelsblatt, reported, on September 25th, “More and more German companies are expanding their locations in North America: Washington attracts German companies with cheap energy and low taxes. This applies above all to the southern states. Berlin is alarmed – and wants to take countermeasures.”
“Numerous German companies are planning to set up or expand their U.S. locations. … U.S. states such as Virginia, Georgia, and Oklahoma, show increasing interest” in offering special inducements for these firms to relocate, or to at least expand, their production in the U.S. For example, Pat Wilson, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, tells German companies that,
“Our energy costs are low, and the networks are stable. … Companies coming to Georgia [from Germany] are reducing their carbon footprint.”
Considering that one of the major reasons why Germany’s Government is squeezing-out Russia’s fuel-supplies (other than to ‘support democracy in Ukraine’, etc.) is that those Russian supplies are fossil fuels, an important benefit by which America can attract European firms (even on the basis of ‘Green’ arguments) is by advertising bigger ‘energy efficiency’ than in Europe — not necessarily in a strictly environmental sense, but definitely in the bottom-line sense, of lowered energy-costs, since America’s regulations are far less strict than in the EU.
“the U.S. Steel giant ArcelorMittal said earlier this month that it would slash by half production at a steel mill in Germany and a unit at another plant, also in Germany. The company said it had based the decision on high gas prices. … ArcelorMittal earlier this year announced it had plans to expand a Texas operation.”
In total, “As of August this year, manufacturers had added back about 1.43 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 workers above prepandemic levels.” And this is only the start of America’s re-industrialization and economic recovery, because the hemorrhaging of jobs from Europe has only just begun. These German firms are getting in on the ground floor in America, leaving Europe’s workers behind, to swim or sink on their own (the ones that can).
Also on September 26th, Thomas Fazi at unherd dot com headlined “The EU is sleepwalking into anarchy: Its sanctions are crippling the bloc’s working class”, and documented that this hollowing-out of Europe’s economies is being experienced the most by Europe’s lower economic classes, who are the least capable of dealing with it but are being abandoned by the higher-wealth group, the investors, who are sending their money abroad, like banana-republic oligarchs do, and who might easily relocate themselves there too.
For example, a major employer in northern France, Arc International glass factory, doesn’t know whether they will survive:
“Nicholas Hodler, the chief executive, surveyed the assembly line, shimmering blue with natural gas flames [gas that came from Russia and that now costs ten times as much as just a year ago]. For years, Arc had been powered by cheap energy that helped turn the company into the world’s largest producer of glass tableware. … But the impact of Russia’s abrupt cutoff of gas to Europe [forced by the sanctions] has doused the business with new risks. Energy prices have climbed so fast that Mr. Hodler has had to rewrite business forecasts six times in two months. Recently, he put a third of Arc’s 4,500 employees on partial furlough to save money. Four of the factory’s nine furnaces will be idled; the others will be switched from natural gas to diesel, a cheaper but more polluting fuel.”
The “Green” Parties throughout Europe, such as in the persons of Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, and Germany’s Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck, had led the European movement against importing Russian fuels, and could turn out to have led Europe actually to increase its carbon footprint, if the end result turns out to be to switch to more coal and diesel fuels, as they now are doing.
It could not have happened without the leaderships both in America and in Europe, who are leading the way for Europe’s economies to decline, and for America’s to boom from this — attracting more and more investors, and their investments, into America, from the U.S. regime’s vassal-nations (such as Germany and France), especially in the EU and NATO (these new banana-republics). The beneficiaries of all this are not only America’s weapons-manufacturing firms, such as Lockheed Martin, and extraction firms such as ExxonMobil, that are growing because of the plunge in Europe that’s due to Europe’s cutting itself off from the cheap energy that it had formerly enjoyed. The future is opening up again, for investors in the United States. It’s come-one, come-all, to investors from Europe, and leaving everyone else in Europe simply to sink, if they can’t get out.
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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.
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***
This Tory fundamentalist arch villain is surely not Boris, as lamentable as his politics is. In her tenure at the Home Office, Priti Patel was clearly and decisively heading for fascist status, triangulating policy to attack the most vulnerable.
A political paradox: spontaneously but according to plan, as if to repudiate the idea and ideal of rational policy making, we Brits, a multicultural tapestry borne aloft by our blood, sweat and dreams, seem to generate absolute hatred in the shrivelling heart of Home Secretary Priti Patel, hatred distilled in her cruel, reactionary policy targeted at vulnerable minorities. At an immigration raid, I remember her crowing glee as she watched the lives of a vulnerable group of people ruined, they destined to land in a Serco run carceral unit that stands juxtaposed to the spirit of goodwill in human rights law. She’s spent the whole of her entire tenure repeatedly emerging from the throne of hell with a – frankly fascist – agenda, reconstituted into palatable form for people who still watch and trust the news. Fuhrer Patel’s hate mongering we have no time for, appealing to and unleashing and pandering to the worst aspects of humanity.
There is her persecutory, dehumanising mistreatment of immigrants for a start, then she presided over deeply oppressive policing and protest legislation, a veritable clusterfuck of attacks on peaceful assembly, essentially illegalising it, a counterstrategic manoeuvre to neutralise the threat of extinction rebellion to the carbon-wed establishment. A grueling flight to Rwanda to facilities whose safety has not been determined awaits those whose cultural heritage is not deemed compatible with the mythic, illusionary “British” identity, an insincere neo-Tory attempt to exhume one nation conservatism. Rich immigrants, however, are safe from extradition. The pattern seems to be: No poverty, no ostracism. Persecution for persecutions sake.
An authentic testimony to the cruelty of Patel is the data on her on Wikileaks, a repository of information which has a reputation for 100% accuracy. The Wikileaks data confirms she is a creature incapable of pity and capable of vast terror. Tragically for the reputation of Britain on human rights, she welcomed sponsorship for the 2012 Olympics from Dow Chemical, the inventors of agent orange and white phosphorus, she tacitly endorsing the human rights atrocities they provide ammunition for. It must be this that accounts for our basis of appraising Patel, the dirty deals done through exposure to, sympathy for and allyship with corrupt corporate lobbyists.
There used to be, at one point, meaningful influence for UK voters over parliamentary representatives and public policy. Lobbyists, while some are ethical, are largely corrosive to democracy and dominate the public policy process. The register of political discourse is banal rhetoric, inscribed with duplicity. There used to be, if you remember, government and legislation with a popular mandate, Parliament as embodiment of “the will of the people” based on the electorate’s choices at the ballot box, a time before politics as high drama, a perpetual trainwreck driven by carousing mega-egos into dystopia.
The force of the UK press recently has been largely focused on scrutinising the malfeasance of Boris Johnson in his blatant, nauseating contempt for Parliament and the British public. In this atmosphere, the arguably more dangerous – if that’s possible- cabinet member, Priti Patel, has largely evaded scrutiny. A perfunctory glimpse at the data Wikileaks have on her suggests we henceforth scrutinise her more closely. The data revealed that some Labour grandees did act with due diligence and focus on the Dow deal in their quest for accountability and transparency at the time, but this signal was mistaken for mere noise and so the dodgy deal was not widely acknowledged.
As a citizen journalist it is my responsibility to document the hidden realities of power that are purposefully kept secret, to honour first amendment ethics and staunch the foundations of the fourth estate, the future of which is thwart with peril in the wake of the prosecution of Julian Assange for basic journalism. Priti Patel is only the beginning of my campaign. Until I am silenced I will continue to shine a light on corruption wherever it breeds. It starts here.
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Megan Sherman is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Dear Readers, I have explained to you that there has been no Russian defeat in Ukraine and will not be a Russian defeat.I informed you that Putin and the Kremlin are committed toone important thing that differentiates Russia from the US and that is that Russia follows international law and the US does not.This is why there has been no “Russian invasion of Ukraine” as proclaimed by Western propagandists.Kiev, the functioning of the Ukraine government, and the cities and infrastructure of western Ukraine have not been attacked.
The Kremlin has limited its military operations to the areas in Ukraine where the majority Russian population was being shelled, occupied, and murdered by Ukrainian forces and which faced last February an invasion of a large Western-trained Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias intended to overthrow the two independent Donbass republics recognized by the Russian government.The republics requested Russia’s intervention, which made the “limited military operation” legal under international law.
As my readers know, I regard the limited operation a mistake as it has drawn out the conflict and allowed the West to get deeply involved, thus promising a wider war that would likely turn nuclear.I thought and still do that Russia was emphasizing legality at the risk of nuclear war.
The Kremlin has now acted to remove the constraint of international law with the referendums in the four areas whether the inhabitants wish reunification with Russia.It is clear that the vote will be yes, and that the Duma and the Kremlin will proceed rapidly to reincorporate the former Russian territory back into Russia.
At that point Ukraine’s continuation of the war involves direct Ukrainian aggression against Russia herself.This frees the Kremlin’s hands as the war becomes Russia’s response to Ukrainian aggression.At this point it will be clear to all involved that Kiev, the Ukraine government, and the cities and infrastructure of western Ukraine no longer have immunity.In other words it becomes a real war with devastating consequences for Ukraine and possibly as well for all Western suppliers of weapons and intelligence.
Americans are not prepared for this, because all they have heard about the conflict is Russophobic propaganda and false reporting of the reality.
Larry Johnson, an honest and competent commentator, repeats this account and adds that the West lacks the capacity to produce weapons and ammunitionon the scale demanded by a full war and that the European economies are facing shutdowns as the consequent of US sanctions against Russia.The message is that the US/NATO have no means of preventing a rapid Russian conquest of Ukraine except by resort to nuclear war, in which case the Western World will cease to exist.
That we could be in this extremely dangerous position is due to the total absence in the West of an honest and independent media and of honest and competent Russian experts.Essentially, there is no intelligence in the West among those making decisions and no accurate information getting through to the Western populations.
I and a few others have made huge efforts, but we are called “conspiracy theorists,” “Russian agents/dupes,” and other names used to discredit those who actually understand the reality of the situation. The growing restraints on what can be said, or if said paid attention to, has created massive ignorance as we come to a possible fateful moment in history.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Es ist müßig zu erwähnen, dass wir in einer Welt leben, in der Gewalt, Diktatur, Mord, Totschlag, Kriege und Ungerechtigkeit an der Tagesordnung sind. Nehmen wir das Beispiel Ukraine: Es ist eine Tatsache, dass sich Russland vom Westen bedroht fühlt – mit gutem Recht. Russland ist ein Dorn im Auge des kapitalistischen Systems und das kapitalistische System kann ohne Krieg nicht existieren. Der Westen ist nicht erst seit dem Ukrainekrieg gegen den Osten eingestellt und ruft zum Völkerhass auf. Er kämpft seit langem mit allen erlaubten und unerlaubten Mitteln gegen ihn. Die Gefahr eines Atomkrieges als „ultima ratio“ (letztes, äußerstes Mittel) oder als Amerikas Plan, den Dritten Weltkrieg zu gewinnen (1), ist groß.
Menschen mit traditioneller Erziehung fallen immer wieder auf die Lockrufe der Autoritäten herein
Eigentlich leben wir seit einigen Jahrhunderten in der Zeit der Vernunft. Lange hat die Menschheit im Glauben gelebt und es hat gegolten, was der Pfarrer gesagt hat. Neue Gedanken waren nicht erlaubt, sie sind geahndet worden. Doch wie schaut die Zeit der Vernunft aus?
Die meisten Menschen sind aufgrund ihrer Erziehung nicht fähig oder willens, sich gefühlsmäßig vorzustellen, was auf die Menschheit zukommen wird. Obwohl das Geld dafür nicht da ist und Menschen hungern müssen, werden ungeheure Summen für Kriegsrüstungen ausgegeben und mörderische Kriege geführt.
Bis heute werden die Menschen von allen gesellschaftlichen Institutionen – angefangen von der Erziehung zuhause, von der Kirche und vom Staat – so erzogen, so programmiert, dass sie nicht Nein sagen könnenund alles machen, was die anderen, die Machthaber, von ihnen wollen. Das ist Programm! Das ist bewusst! Und sie werden in dieser Stimmung erhalten, damit sie immer wieder auf die Lockrufe der Autoritäten hereinfallen.
Das ging im letzten Jahrhundert so weit, dass das deutsche Volk von 100 Millionen Menschen – das Volk der Dichter und Denker – Hitler zugejubelt hat und sich in den Tod führen ließ. Alle, bis auf circa 100.000 Oppositionelle, die er umgebracht hat, sind mit ihm mitgegangen; angefangen vom Papst, von der katholischen Kirche, den anderen Kirchen, alle Gelehrten, die Philosophen und Psychologen, alle Arbeiter, alle Sozialisten.
Da sich die Erziehungsmethoden der Vergangenheit nicht grundlegend geändert haben, folgen Menschen mit traditioneller Erziehung auch einem neuen „Führer“ wie einst einem Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin oder Johnson.
Und da es keine Politik gibt ohne Psychologie und keine Erklärung der politischen Meinung und der menschlichen Belange ohne Kenntnisse der Psychologie, wird die Menschheit ohne Psychologie nicht weiterkommen.
Russland könnte heute für den Frieden wirken – Russland braucht keinen Krieg
Politisch Orientierte wissen, dass das ganz Unterfangen Hitlers gegen den Osten, gegen Russland gerichtet war. „Mein Kampf“, das war der geplante Krieg gegen Russland, und das hat Russland gewusst. Doch Russland war in arger Bedrängnis und konnte sich gegen Deutschland und Hitler nicht erwehren.
Deshalb wurde in Russland verhandelt, wie man Hitler beikommen soll. Russland war bereit, gegen Hitler zu marschieren. Doch die anderen Staaten sagten, dass sie nicht wollten. Sie haben Angst gehabt vor Russland. Russland ist dann in großer Verlegenheit gewesen, weil sie nicht gerüstet waren. Deshalb haben sie mit Hitler einen Pakt geschlossen, um sich Zeit zu verschaffen.
Wirft man heute einen Blick in die offiziellen Tageszeitungen oder sieht man sich für einige Minuten das offizielle TV-Programm an, so gewinnt man den Eindruck, dass zumindest die jüngere Generation, die noch keinen Krieg erlebt hat, keinen Respekt vor diesem größten Übel der Menschheit, diesem Massenmord hat, den wir Krieg nennen. Anders lässt sich der permanente Aufruf zum Völkerhass, die unentwegte Kriegshetze oder die zur Schau getragene Gleichgültigkeit vieler Zeitgenossen nicht erklären. Sowohl Führer als auch Geführten sind Schwachköpfe.
Heute könnte Russland für den Frieden wirken. Wegen der eigenen Ressourcen brauchen sie keinen Krieg und könnten viel bewirken. Aber es fehlen ihnen noch die Fähigkeiten: sie kennen die Psychologie noch nicht. Hätte man die Menschen während der Russischen Revolution frei gelassen, hätte man mit ihnen gesprochen und wäre das ganze System menschlicher gewesen, wäre der Zweite Weltkrieg eventuell nicht ausgebrochen (2).
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych. mit Schwerpunkt: Klinische-, Pädagogische-, Medien- sowie Individual-Psychologie). Viele Jahrzehnte unterrichtete er. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Sein Wahlspruch nach Albert Camus: Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.
Noten
Eingangs erwähntes Zitat Camus‘:
Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg 2013, S. 268
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***
It is pointless to mention that we live in a world where violence, dictatorship, murder, manslaughter, wars and injustice are the order of the day. Let’s take the example of Ukraine: it is a fact that Russia feels threatened by the West – with good reason.
Russia is a thorn in the eye of the capitalist system and the capitalist system cannot exist without war. The West has not only been opposed to the East since the Ukraine war and calls for hatred of nations. It has been fighting against it for a long time with all permissible and impermissible means. The danger of nuclear war as an “ultima ratio” (last, extreme means) or as America’s plan to win the Third World War (1) is great.
People with traditional upbringings keep falling for the lure of the authorities
Actually, we have been living in the age of reason for several centuries. For a long time, mankind lived by faith and what the priest said applied. New thoughts were not allowed, they were punished. But what does the time of reason look like?
Most people, because of their upbringing, are not able or willing to imagine emotionally what is in store for humanity. Although the money is not there and people have to starve, enormous sums are spent on war armaments and murderous wars are waged.
Until today, people are educated by all social institutions – starting with education at home, by the church and by the state – so that they cannot say no and do everything that the others, the rulers, want them to do. That is the programme! That is conscious! And they are kept in this mood so that they fall for the lure of the authorities again and again.
This went so far in the last century that the German people of 100 million – the people of poets and thinkers – cheered Hitler and allowed themselves to be led to their deaths. All but about 100,000 opposition members whom he killed went along with him; starting with the Pope, the Catholic Church, the other churches, all the scholars, the philosophers and psychologists, all the workers, all the socialists.
Since the educational methods of the past have not changed fundamentally, people with traditional education also follow a new “Führer” as they once did a Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin or Johnson.
And since there is no politics without psychology and no explanation of political opinion and human concerns without knowledge of psychology, humanity will not make any progress without psychology.
Russia could work for peace today – Russia does not need war
Politically oriented people know that Hitler’s whole enterprise was directed against the East, against Russia. “Mein Kampf”, that was the planned war against Russia, and Russia knew that. But Russia was in dire straits and could not defend itself against Germany and Hitler.
Therefore, Russia was negotiating how to deal with Hitler. Russia was ready to march against Hitler. But the other states said they did not want to. They were afraid of Russia. Russia was then in great embarrassment because they were not equipped. That’s why they made a pact with Hitler to buy themselves time.
If you take a look at the official daily newspapers today or watch the official TV programme for a few minutes, you get the impression that at least the younger generation, which has not yet experienced war, has no respect for this greatest evil of humanity, this mass murder that we call war. There is no other explanation for the permanent call for hatred of nations, the incessant warmongering or the indifference displayed by many contemporaries. Both leaders and led are fools.
Today, Russia could work for peace. Because of their own resources, they do not need war and could achieve a lot. But they still lack the skills: they do not yet know psychology. If people had been let free during the Russian Revolution, if they had been talked to and if the whole system had been more humane, the Second World War might not have broken out (2).
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych. with a focus on clinical, educational, media and individual psychology). He taught for many decades. As a retiree he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education and an education for public spirit and peace. His motto according to Albert Camus: Give when you can. And not to hate, if that is possible.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
Quote from Camus mentioned at the beginning:
Marin, Lou (ed.). Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg 2013, p. 268
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***
On September 23, the Al Qaeda-occupied area in Idlib Province reported the first confirmed case of cholera in the last terrorist-controlled area in Syria. The deadly outbreak has claimed 39 lives in Syria, with thousands of suspected cases across the country. In areas under the Ministry of Health in Damascus, 23 deaths were reported recently, 20 of them in Aleppo, and at least 253 cases.
In the northeast region of Syria controlled by the US-backed SDF, a Kurdish militia with ties to the outlawed terrorist group the PKK, are a reported 16 deaths and 2,867 cases since September 5. The US occupation forces there are controlling the main oil fields in Syria to prevent the Damascus government from using the oil to provide electricity for people’s homes, water pumping stations, and gasoline for their cars.
The cases were reported in several provinces, including Aleppo with 676 cases, Raqqa in the north with 17 cases, Latakia on the Mediterranean coast with 4 cases, Hama with 2 cases, Al Hasakeh with 38 cases, and Deir Ez Zor along the border with Iraq with 201 cases. There were two cases in Damascus, but the patients had just come from Aleppo.
This marks the first cholera outbreak since the conflict began in March of 2011, with the last outbreak recorded in 2009.
The source of the outbreak is the river
The Euphrates River runs for almost 2,800 kilometers (1,700 miles) across Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.
During the rainy winter season, and fed by spring snow melt-offs in Turkey, the river runs full entering Syria from the Turkish border and then running in a diagonal towards Iraq.
Climate change has brought steadily rising temperatures combined with drought, and during this long and very hot, dry summer the river has sunk to its lowest point. So low that ancient antiquities once buried on the river bed have been suddenly revealed, but government reports warn the river could go completely dry by 2040.
Health authorities tested the Euphrates and found the bacteria causing cholera. The river is polluted by raw sewage and oil spills from the US-occupied oil wells at Deir Ez Zor. If the river can be replenished this winter the contamination might be mitigated.
Over five million Syrians rely on the Euphrates for their drinking water, which is pumped to them without filtering or sterilization. Farmers use irrigation pipelines to pump water out of the river onto their crops. Syria is self-sufficient in ground crops, but using contaminated water to grow food is what has spread the outbreak.
Residents of the northeast who rely on the Euphrates know that it is polluted but are faced with no other choice or immediate solution.
The treatment plan and prevention
On September 19, Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the World Health Organization’s regional director, said that medications and other supplies had landed in Damascus. The second shipment arrived on September 23 to fight the cholera outbreak.
The Syrian Ministry of Health advised people to make sure they drink water coming from “a secure source” and if that is not available people should boil water, then preserve it in a clean and closed-gallon container.
Cholera is an acute diarrheal illness caused by infection of the intestine with Vibrio cholerae bacteria. People can get sick when they swallow food or water contaminated with cholera bacteria. The infection is often mild or without symptoms, but can sometimes be severe and life-threatening.
Cholera can be simply and successfully treated by immediate replacement of the fluid and salts lost through diarrhea. Patients can be treated with oral rehydration solution (ORS), a prepackaged mixture of sugar and salts that is mixed with 1 liter of water and drunk in large amounts.
Boiling is the most effective way to make water safe. If boiling, bring your water to a complete boil for at least 1 minute.
Water used as a weapon of war
On August 22, 2016, Maher Ghafari of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), reported on the water situation in Aleppo during the occupation of East Aleppo by terrorist groups including Al Qaeda which ended in December 2016. He confirmed that Aleppo gets its water from the Euphrates River which is pumped through four pipelines in a water plant, then under the control of an armed terrorist group. Water destined for the city of Aleppo is then re-pumped through three pumping stations: one then controlled by the government, and two by different armed terrorist groups.
All through the conflict in Syria, water was used as a weapon of war. Sometimes the terrorists would simply shut the water valves tight, and hold the lives of thirsty civilians hostage. At other times, the terrorists would bomb the pumps or the water station. During the war years, the water maintenance crews were prevented from staying or repairing facilities.
Today, the war is over, the terrorists have left, and the only Al Qaeda-occupied area is Idlib, but the damages to water infrastructure have never been reconstructed because of the US-EU sanctions which prohibit the importation of materials that can be used to repair or reconstruct government infrastructure.
US-EU sanctions kill Syrian civilians and prevent reconstruction
The US-NATO attack on Syria for ‘regime change’ failed, but the collective punishment of an entire nation caused most to support the Damascus government, as it was seen as the only source of basic services and stability.
According to the UN, nearly two-thirds of water treatment plants, half of the pumping stations, and one-third of water towers have been damaged by more than a decade of war.
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, a law signed by President Donald Trump, has brought starvation, darkness, plague, misery, robbery, kidnappings, and the destruction of a nation. International aid no longer reaches Syria to the extent it did previously because many charities fear being hit with penalties from the severe US sanctions.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Syrians suffered shortages of oxygen and basic medical supplies due to the crippling sanctions.
According to Hasan Ismaik, a Jordanian writer, “No Syrian children under the age of 10 have ever seen their country at peace. And if they remain starved and deprived of basic medical care in a country with no economic opportunities, they could eventually become the foot soldiers of a new terrorism outbreak in the Middle East.”
Richard N. Haass, a US foreign policy expert, wrote in 1998 “Economic Sanctions: Too Much of a Bad Thing.” He wrote that US sanctions often have no effect on the target, and Congress and the Whitehouse need to have rigorous oversight of the sanctions, which are doomed to fail if the desired results are large and require limited time.
Haass further warned that secondary sanctions, such as going after foreign nations who might send goods to Syria for rebuilding make matters worse. He prophetically added that sanctions hurt innocent civilians, which will bolster authoritarian governments and trigger large-scale emigration.
The US-EU sanctions due have humanitarian exemptions for food and medicine. However, Elizabeth Hoff, former WHO director in Damascus, said that many medical machines in Syrian hospitals lay in disrepair, needing parts from Europe or the US, but the foreign companies will not sell the parts to Syria because the paperwork surrounding the exemption is so costly and time-consuming it is not worth it.
Josep Borrell, the EU minister for foreign affairs, insists on the collective punishment of the Syrian people by saying that the EU “will not lift the sanctions imposed on Syria before the start of a political transition in the country.” Great Britain, France, and Germany have all renewed their sanctions on Syria.
The US-EU sanctions have not achieved their goals, but have added to the suffering of the Syrian people. Unless the sanctions are lifted, Syria cannot rebuild and its people will be hopelessly tied to the US-NATO plan of maintaining chaos as the status quo.
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Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Guest is Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, founder of the Klinghardt Academy in the USA, as well as founder and director of various other academies, institutes and clinics in the USA and Switzerland, among others. He is an author of a textbook on psycho-kinesiology. His research interests are psychological factors in pain disorders, heavy metal stress, autism, and treatments of chronic diseases (e.g. Lyme disease).
This session is about a study on climate change and geoengineering.
From 2017, in an article in the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, geoscientist J. Marvin Herndon made some startling assertions that would prompt climate scientists to radically change their assumptions. Among them were:
evidence for the Earth’s variable heat production,
global, non-anthropogenic climate change, and
geoengineering-induced global warming and polar melting.
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***
Since 2014, the US-led political West has invested billions into propping up the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev. This paid off exponentially, as major corporations now had a 100% free hand to tap into and plunder Ukraine’s resources. The country’s territory was always considered a breadbasket of Europe and beyondand its grain has been a target of every foreign power invading the area. This is precisely what happened this time as well, with Western corporations controlling approximately 30% of Ukraine’s arable land. The country’s massive Soviet-era industrial sector was also carved up and bought for pennies, both by foreign corporations and local oligarchs.
The brutal exploitation of Ukraine was further exacerbated after 2014 and continues unabated. However, since February 24, the political West found itself in a situation where it had to keep the unsustainable Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev afloat, at all costs. Nearly a decade of mismanagement and lack of meritocracy left the regime in a state of near complete incompetence to tackle the issues of tens of millions of Ukrainians. The political West was well aware of the uselessness of the puppets it installed, just like in any other country it hijacked or invaded, so it decided to do what it always does in such situations – throw money at the problem until it’s fixed or until it all crumbles into oblivion, as it did in Afghanistan in 2021.
According to the Kiev regime’s current frontman Zelensky himself, this is precisely what is happening in Ukraine. In a CBS “Face the Nation” interview which aired on Sunday, Zelensky stated that the US is providing the Neo-Nazi junta with a mindboggling $1.5 billion per month. He claimed the regime would be completely unable to function without these funds. “The United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight against Russia,” the Kiev regime’s official leader explained. And yet, he pointed out that “there still remains a deficit of $5 billion in our budget.” He kept parroting the same trope that this is far from enough for the Neo-Nazi junta.
After revealing the whopping $1.5 billion provided to the Neo-Nazi junta monthly, Zelensky said:
“But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough to cover the civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, homes of Ukrainians. Why do we need this? We need the security in order to attract our Ukrainians to come back home.”
“If it’s safe, they will come, settle, work here and will pay taxes and then we won’t have a deficit of $5 billion in our budget. So it will be a positive for everybody,” he continued. “Because as of today the United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight – fight this war. However, if our people will come back – and they do want to come back very much, they have a lot of motivation – they will work here.”
“And then the United States will not have to continue, give us this support,” Zelensky concluded. And yet, it seems the Kiev regime will never be in a position where the US-led political West “will not have to continue” providing such a massive and constant cash flow. And indeed, it seems it’s never enough for the Neo-Nazi junta and the corrupt oligarchs, who keep demanding more. Only a day after Zelensky complained that “it’s not even nearly enough” US Congress kept pushing with another $12 billion arrangement, according to AP.
“Negotiators to a stop-gap spending bill in the U.S. Congress have agreed to include about $12 billion in new aid to Ukraine in response to a request from the Biden administration, a source familiar with the talks said on Monday,” AP claims.
It should be noted that this arrangement isn’t that one-sided. The political West has also appropriated most of Ukraine’s gold and foreign exchange reserves. The political elites in Washington DC and Brussels have certainly not gone empty-handed as a result of this premeditated conflict. And neither have the oligarchs running the Kiev regime. It should be noted that it was only in July that the Associated Press and NPR called attention to a hugely inconvenient fact that there was no way the enormous funds being provided to the Neo-Nazi junta could be held up to scrutiny. The report states:
“As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine’s suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid.
But Zelensky’s weekend firings of his top prosecutor, intelligence chief and other senior officials have resurfaced those concerns and may have inadvertently given fresh attention to allegations of high-level corruption in Kyiv made by one outspoken U.S. lawmaker.”
What’s clear from this is that both the political elites of the collective West and the corrupt oligarchs of the Kiev regime are profiting from the “financial aid” back and forth, while regular people are suffering the consequences. All the while, the state and corporate-run propaganda machine of the political West continues trying to sell the “moral high ground” narrative that this is precisely what’s necessary to “protect the people of Ukraine,” the same people who have been pushed into a conflict with a nuclear-armed military superpower, one which they cannot hope to win in any conceivable way.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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As both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 both suddenly lost pressure last Monday, Swedish seismologists registered multiple explosions.The pipeline director reports unprecedented damage.Clearly this is deliberate sabotage and could only have been done by a government with submarine capability to place underwater mines.
Who could that be?
US Secretary of State Blinken said the pipeline damage presents a “significant opportunity” for Western Europe to abandon Russian natural gas in favor of liquified natural gas from the US.
A Polish member of the European Parliament thanked the US for putting the pipeline out of commission as now Russia will have to negotiate with Poland in order to deliver gas to Europe. See this.
When faced with Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine’s invasion of Donbass, US President Biden said:
“There will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Washington’s well trained European puppets will, of course, blame Russia for blowing up her own pipeline. See this and this.
As I have warned would be the case, the Kremlin’s dilly-dallying over Ukraine has given Washington plenty of time for more mischief and widening of the conflict.The Kremlin’s emphasis on legalisms might end in nuclear war.The only safe way for Russia to deal with the threat from Ukraine would have been a blitzkrieg attack that conquered Ukraine before the West could react.The go-slow, limited, drawn out conflict has played directly into Washington’s hands.We might all die as the result.
There is no doubt that the war has widened, and now the Kremlin is betting Ukraine and the West will not continue the war if it involves direct attacks on Russian territory, thus the referendums.
As I explained yesterday, a fateful moment of history is upon us. See this and this.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The Taliban have signed a provisional agreement with Russia to supply gasoline, diesel, gas, and wheat to Afghanistan, acting Afghan Commerce and Industry Minister Haji Nooruddin Azizi told Reuters.
The announcement marks the first major international economic deal by the Taliban with a foreign government beyond its borders since the group came to power following the US’s chaotic withdrawal from the country in August 2021.
No country, including Russia, has formally recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, although Russia is one of several countries that has maintained its embassy in the capital Kabul.
Azizi said that Russia had agreed to discount supplies to the Taliban, compared to average global commodity prices. The deal will see Moscow supply around one million tonnes of gasoline, one million tonnes of diesel, 500,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and two million tonnes of wheat annually, to the country.
The agreement will begin with a trial period for an unspecified amount of time and a final deal will be struck if both sides are satisfied with the arrangement.
No details have been provided on pricing or payment methods, but according to the Reuters report, Russia has agreed to a discount on goods delivered by road and rail.
Russia has increasingly turned East for partners as it faces isolation in the West over its invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin has purchased armed drones from Iran and is looking to deepen economic ties with Turkey.
‘National interest’
Afghanistan’s economy has been in dire straits after the US withdrew from the country and froze the Afghan Central Bank’s funds following the Taliban takeover. Foreign aid, which accounted for 95 percent of the government’s budget under the previous administration, has been cut. It is estimated that 95 percent of the population does not have enough to eat.
“Afghans are in great need,” Azizi told Reuters. “Whatever we do, we do it based on national interest and the people’s benefit.”
He added that Afghanistan was already receiving some gas and oil from Iran and Turkmenistan and had strong trade ties with Pakistan, but is looking to diversify.
“A country … shouldn’t be dependent on just one country, we should have alternative ways,” he said.
The US is also engaged in talks with the Taliban. This month Washington announced that it would release roughly half of the frozen $7bn in funds for monetary and humanitarian aid. Details of the plan are scarce and the Taliban has demanded the full amount. It’s unclear how the agreement with Russia will impact negotiations.
The agreement with Russia comes as the Taliban find themselves under increased pressure in the West, following the revelation that al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had been living in Kabul. Zawahiri was killed by a US drone strike in July.
In September, the UN’s envoy to Afghanistan, Markus Potzel, said the world was losing patience with the Taliban over the group’s refusal to allow girls’ education and the question marks over its links to al-Qaeda.
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UK participation in the Ukraine conflict is far-reaching, involving military and intelligence support, arms supplies and information warfare. But as Ukraine makes gains on the battlefield, Whitehall sees the war not only as a way to defend Kyiv but to ensure the strategic defeat of its rival, Russia – a dangerous strategy.
The Ukraine conflict is also a British one, given the extensive UK role in the war, with Whitehall supporting Kyiv to repel Russia’s brutal invasion in numerous ways outlined in this Explainer.
However, UK governments do not go to war for moral or humanitarian purposes; only for strategic gain. In Ukraine, Whitehall’s main goal is to counter Russia, a power UK governments have long wanted to put back in its box and end Moscow’s independent foreign policy, which challenges NATO’s supremacy in the whole of Europe and, to an extent, the Middle East.
Russia’s brutal invasion needs to be condemned and reversed, Ukrainian sovereignty upheld and the rights of Ukrainians defended.
But the reasons for this to Whitehall planners are not their professed high-minded claims about defending democracy or stopping Russian war crimes – the UK is perfectly happy to acquiesce in such crimes in its own current conflicts, notably Yemen.
London’s interest in democracy is nowhere to be seen when it comes to supporting various dictatorships such as in the Gulf or Egypt. And its opposition to illegal foreign occupations is put aside when it comes to its increasing military support for Israel.
The problem with Russia
Whitehall sees the Ukraine war as an opportunity. Liz Truss has gone so far to say that “we will cripple Russia’s economic development in both the short and long term” with the sanctions imposed on the country following its invasion of Ukraine in February.
Image is by Tim Hammond / No10 Downing Street, licensed under CC
She has also in effect called for regime change in Moscow, saying the UK “can never allow Russia to be in a position to undertake this aggression again… which is why we wholeheartedly support Navalny”, referring to imprisoned opposition leader Alexander Navalny.
In a sign of how Russia is firmly in the sight of British leaders, the new head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, has even told troops they need to be ready to face Russia on the battlefield.
Whitehall’s major problem with Moscow is that it “is seeking its own independent sphere of influence separate to any American-backed global order or rule book”, the then head of the British army, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, said last year.
Unacceptably to British planners, Russia elected to become a rival. Then defence secretary Michael Fallonsaid in 2017 that “Russia has chosen to become a strategic competitor of the West”.
His successor, Gavin Williamsonexpressed a similar lament, saying that “after 1990 we … believed there would be only one superpower”, referring to the US. Now, “Russia wants to assert its rights”, he complained.
This Russian independence and rivalry has contributed to the “erosion of strategic advantage” for the West which must be regained, General Sanders says. The UK wants to see Russia confined to a status of global pariah.
Whitehall is making extraordinary efforts to help Ukraine, and defeat Russia, in its war. Six main contributions can be identified.
1. Foreign fighters
There have been several reports of “retired” SAS soldiers being active in Ukraine. Whether this is correct or a Whitehall ruse is hard to establish.
Days after the invasion, a “crack team” of “retired” UK special forces soldiers were reported to have volunteered “for missions deep inside Ukraine”. They were said to be highly-trained snipers and experts in the use of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. The following month three of the soldiers were killed in a Russian airstrike.
The UK forces are believed to be directly killing Russians. One report in June claimed that a team of ex-SAS soldiers, all veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had killed up to 20 Russian generals and 15 mercenaries of the pro-Moscow Wagner Group.
As many as 3,000 Britons may be fighting in Ukraine, according to one source – a Georgian commander who said there are around 20,000 foreign soldiers in the country in total. By our count around nine Britons have been killed or captured in Ukraine, with five just released.
Some are reported to have left the British army to join the conflict. “A small number of serving British personnel have disobeyed orders and may have travelled to Ukraine to fight”, defence minister James Heappey told parliament in June.
Initially, then foreign secretary Liz Truss encouraged Britons to go to Ukraine, and many subsequently did so, including the son of a senior Conservative politician.
Ministers then backtracked and said they didn’t want Britons joining the war at all. The government now says that fighting in Ukraine may amount to an offence under UK legislation and open people up to prosecution on their return to the UK. But no-one is so far known to have been prosecuted.
2. Official boots on the ground
The UK sent special forces to Ukraine in February, weeks before the invasion, with SAS, SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and the Special Forces Support Group working in the country to train Ukrainian special forces in counter-insurgency tactics, sniping and sabotage.
Those special forces were soon instructing local troops in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv on how to use British-supplied anti-tank missiles that were delivered in late February as the invasion was beginning.
In July the Ministry of Defence said it had 97 troops in Ukraine but it has been unwilling to divulge their location.
It’s not only British soldiers but also UK arms that are killing Russians. Earlier this month defence secretary Ben Wallace told parliament that long-range weaponry supplied by the UK and other states had enabled Ukraine to strike more than 350 Russian command posts, ammunition dumps, supply depots, and “other high-value targets far back from the frontline”.
The UK’s supply of £2.3 billion in military assistance to Ukraine has included over 10,000 anti-tank missiles, hundreds of other missiles and guns, 200 armoured fighting vehicles, and three million rounds of small arms ammunition.
Precisely how the UK is spending its military aid is secret – the government has refused to give a full breakdown of its expenditure.
👀 The UK ministry of defence refuses to give a breakdown of the £2.3bn in public money it is spending on the Ukraine war.
Neither is it known how many Russian soldiers these British arms have killed, but the figure may be substantial – Wallace claims Russia has lost no less than 25,000 soldiers in Ukraine.
It is likely that UK-supplied next generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWs) have been especially devastating, and they have been credited with helping to stall Moscow’s armoured units.
The UK has essentially been coordinating the international supply of weapons into Ukraine since the invasion. British arms are being purposely provided “to go beyond” defending Ukraine to enable it to “mount offensive operations”, the UK government has said.
Indeed, defence minister James Heappey has backed Ukraine striking targets inside Russia with UK-supplied weapons. Heappey observed: “We don’t seek to tell the Ukrainians what they can and can’t be used for other than they should be used in a lawful way”.
It appears Ukraine is acting as a testing ground for new British weapons. Ukrainian troops have, for example, used Martlets, a laser-guided missile initially designed to help the Royal Navy combat swarms of small, unmanned attack boats. The Martlet is a weapon being tested by UK troops that is yet to be fully deployed by the British military.
More generally, the UK is using Ukraine “as an opportunity to showcase British-made arms”, the Independent’s Andrew Buncombe reports. Liz Truss, as foreign secretary, was unequivocal about this: she said in March that British arms for Ukraine are “a very important export for us”, and contribute to jobs and growth.
4. Military training
Britain’s military training is directly aiding Ukrainian combat operations. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are being given intensive infantry instruction, including on urban warfare and marksmanship, at an army base in England.
Training in the use of anti-tank weapons is one direct way the UK is aiding the Ukrainian military, but there are others. For example, SBS special forces instructed Ukrainian troops how to use small submarines called ‘sea scooters’ in order to help take back Snake Island, which lies 22 miles off Ukraine’s south coast in the Black Sea, from the Russians.
The UK training may also help the British military itself to fight Russians directly. In a candid comment, Baroness Goldie, a UK defence minister, recently told parliament the instruction of Ukrainians provides “a great learning opportunity, because our troops are learning what our enemy does in the latest battlefield situation and how we should deal with it”.
5. Intelligence support
Information on support to Ukraine from the UK intelligence agencies is, as ever, murky. But US reporter Tom Rogan, citing three Western intelligence sources, writes that the UK military effort is being led by MI6 and that “Ukraine’s deep battlespace effort owes especial thanks to Britain — specifically to British strike and reconnaissance special forces personnel inside Ukraine”.
The US and UK are providing satellite, electronic warfare, signals, and cyber intelligence, Rogan writes.
He adds that Ukraine’s escalating campaign is a direct extension of long-standing British special forces doctrine. This involves the deployment of very small (4, 8 or 16 person) patrols deep into enemy territory which gather targeting intelligence for commanders at the rear.
Those teams also conduct sabotage operations against targets such as logistics trains, command centres, and high-value targets such as aircraft, ammunition dumps, and fuel depots.
MI6 is known to have had contacts with Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky since well before the invasion. In October 2020 Zelensky is said to have held a secret meeting with MI6 chief Richard Moore in the UK. Zelensky told the media one of the subjects discussed related to countering disinformation and fake news.
British and US spy planes are also monitoring Russian battlefield communications by conducting regular missions on the fringes of Ukraine’s airspace, it is reported. Intelligence gathered by three RAF electronic surveillance aircraft, known as Airseekers, is fed back to Defence Intelligence in London – and, presumably, on to Ukraine.
Jeremy Fleming, head of the UK’s largest intelligence agency, GCHQ, has said the UK is “shoring up” Ukraine’s defences by supporting its cyber security, but gave no further details.
But GCHQ is certain to be playing a role in the war. It has said it supports UK troops “whenever and wherever” they are deployed.
6. Information war
Britain’s key role in the information war against Russia builds on long standing support to Ukraine. Simon Baugh, chief executive of the UK Government Communication Service – which oversees government media operations – says Britain has provided “strategic communications support” to the government in Kyiv since 2016.
This ranges “from helping to build a professional communications capability at the centre of Government, to building resilience to cyber security threats, to jointly delivering a campaign to support the shared values of our democracies”.
Before the invasion, at the start of February, Whitehall created a Government Information Cell, drawing on 35 staff from across different ministries, which seeks to counter Russian disinformation.
Baugh says this Cell works with NATO, the EU and the Five Eyes intelligence network (involving the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK) and “creates content to bolster the morale and confidence of the Ukrainian people by showing them they are not alone”.
He adds: “We are building the capability to deliver fast communication with impact, in real-time and on the basis of 24/7 monitoring, content production, response and rebuttal.”
The focus on “content production” is noteworthy. Baugh claims that the Cell does not propagate disinformation itself and that “our model is based on the UK Government using facts to expose the truth”.
This is not easy to verify, however, as the Cell’s activities are opaque. Various apparently false stories are appearing in the media about Russia, with unclear provenance. Assertions are being made by UK intelligence agencies which are also difficult or impossible to verify, such as GCHQ’S claim that Putin’s advisers were lying to him about Russia’s performance in Ukraine.
My colleague Matt Kennard recently found the UK government was spending over £80m on media projects in Eastern Europe, in countries surrounding Russia, which are often presented as fighting “Russian disinformation”.
There is a long history of the UK promoting covert information operations, including the planting of false material in media outlets.
What is clearer is that Whitehall is investing in promoting one-sided information, which can amount to a form of propaganda. In March, for example, the government announced an additional £4.1 million in “emergency funding” to the BBC World Service to support its Ukrainian and Russian language services broadcasting into both countries.
The UK’s proxy war on Russia is very high risk given Moscow’s losses on the battlefield due partly to UK military activity and arms supplies combined with Russia having the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Russia, like Nato, likely sees nuclear arms as useable weapons.
Putin may be most likely to employ nuclear missiles precisely at the point of British/Ukrainian military ‘success’, i.e., if Moscow were close to defeat, and especially if Ukraine looked like recapturing Crimea, a region Russia regards as its own territory, which it illegally annexed in 2014.
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Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.
Featured image: Defence Secretary Ben Wallace meets with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu at the Ministry of Defence, 11 February 2022. (Photo: Tim Hammond/No 10 Downing Street)
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Although the porous Iraqi-Syrian border stretches for over 600 kilometers, about half of it – in practice – is not subject to the authority of either state. Over the years, this lack of comprehensive border control has given rise to a number of security threats to both nations, not least the persistent presence of ISIS elements in border regions.
From the Iraqi side, there has been a pro-active approach in countering this low-level terrorism with the establishment of two defensive lines by the Joint Operations Command, in addition to concrete barriers and watchtowers.
Smuggling from Syria into Iraqi border towns is another salient feature of current border activities, and one which presents both a threat and an opportunity for the US-led international coalition whose forces operate on both sides of the border.
The US loots and smuggles Syria’s oil
Under the guise of this international coalition, the US army controls the borders between Iraq and Syria, specifically at the Fishkhabour-Semalka crossing, the illegal Al-Waleed crossing between Iraqi Kurdistan and US-occupied Syrian territory, and the Al-Mahmoudiyah crossing. All of these border crossings have become notorious for the illicit smuggling of Syrian crude oil into northern Iraq, with direct involvement from US military forces.
New footage of a US military convoy smuggling stolen oil out of Raqqah, Syria.
The US army has been consistently looting the country's oil and smuggling it into their Iraq bases.
Reconnaissance drones routinely hover over the skies of the region, and security is contracted out to private security firms by the US military. The employees of these companies, who travel in four-wheel drive vehicles under US air cover, are responsible for securing the transportation of Syrian oil to Iraqi territory – even though their mandate is solely to transport logistical equipment belonging to the international coalition.
When The Cradle reached the border area to investigate further, we were prevented from reaching beyond the joint control point of the Peshmerga and Asayish forces, the Kurdish military and intelligence agency forces, respectively.
This checkpoint reflects the security coordination between the Pentagon and the Ministry of Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan, and is conducted without Baghdad’s knowledge or coordination. The central Iraqi government’s lack of awareness of the situation on its borders may be summed up in what one senior Iraqi security source told The Cradle: that the US troops were there “supporting Kurdish forces as part of the Iraqi defense system to combat terrorism.”
Destination: Iraqi Kurdistan
However, tribal sources confirm that under the cover of this “security zone,” illegal crossings between Iraq and Syria are active, with dozens of tankers passing weekly in convoys transporting smuggled Syrian oil, accompanied by US warplanes or helicopters.
Shepherds in the region also corroborate these claims, and indicate that the Syrian oil is transported to the Harir military site in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI), for the benefit of the Kurdish oil company KAR Group, owned by Sheikh Baz Karim Barzanji, who is close to the family of the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Massoud Barzani.
The latter has strong relations with the new so-called “Club of Influential Countries” in Iraq, in reference to the UAE and Turkey. Barzani also maintains a strong relationship with the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria, whose members have been protecting convoys of Syrian oil tanks.
Sheikh Baz came under some scrutiny in March when one of his villas, reportedly used as a safe house by Israel’s Mossad spy agency, was struck by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) missiles, killing and injuring agents inside.
At the time, Kurdish politician Hiwa Seid Salim toldThe Cradle he suspects the reason for the Iranian attack on Sheikh Baz’s villa was due to his business activities, which Iranian security sources say includes selling Iraqi (or Syrian) oil and gas to Israel.
Sheikh Baz was one of the channels of communication between the KDP and government of Saddam Hussein on the transportation of Iraqi oil to Turkey during the economic embargo on Iraq. After the 2003 US invasion, he worked with USAID and transformed his construction contracting company – set up in the 1990s – into an oil conglomerate.
The logistics of the looting
Speaking to The Cradle, a former Iraqi diplomat points out that the theft of Syrian natural resources witnessed a significant increase when former US President Donald Trump came to power. At that time, he told Iraqi officials that “Syrian oil is a cheap price for Washington’s contribution to the fight against ISIS.”
While it is not possible to accurately determine the quantities of looted oil, Iraqi tribal sources confirm that the tanker journey takes approximately 48 hours through the main crossings, approved by the US army (Fishkhabour, Al-Waleed or Al-Yaarubiyah), in a process that only pauses for brief periods to fill their tanks.
According to these sources, there are usually no less than 70 to 100 tankers transporting Syrian oil during each journey.
Inside Syria, tanker convoys travel through areas outside the authority of the central state. The trip starts from the Syrian Al-Jazira region and passes through Al-Hasakah, where it stops for hours before continuing to one of the border outlets to procure supplies, and then proceeds to the Harir site in Erbil in the KRI.
There, the oil is emptied into other tanks that carry it to the US base at Ain al-Assad in Iraq’s Anbar province, or to Halabja province, where another US military base is located.
Map depicting the transportation of stolen Syrian oil to Iraq
The transfer of tankers from Kurdistan to the Ain al-Assad base or any other US military site must obtain prior approval from the National Operations Center. Therefore, these transfers take place under the guise of “logistical support for the international coalition forces,” according to one Iraqi security source in close contact with the US. Although Baghdad is unlikely to be completely kept in the dark about this repeated violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, it appears to have very little say in the matter.
The source tells The Cradle that the tankers’ journey through the Al-Qaim-al-Bukamal crossing would have been shorter had this crossing not been under the control of armed Iraqi factions that accuse Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi of “opening the doors” for the Americans.
The same security source points out that these factions “have not stopped calling for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, which continue their security and intelligence work inside the state under the cover of providing security and military advice to the Iraqi forces in the fight against terrorism.”
How much does the Iraqi government know?
The US military’s “advisory work” is ostensibly limited to providing Iraqi forces with some satellite images of the ISIS presence in the mountains in northern Iraq. However, this information is arguably already attainable by Iraqi authorities without US help, according to sources in the military joint operations room, the highest military and security authority in Iraq.
The Cradle attempted to reach out to officials in the Iraqi government for a comment on what is happening at Iraq’s border crossings, but there was no response.
A political source attributed this non-response to “political fragility,” whereby it has become common for decision-makers to avoid commenting on what is considered “sensitive” information. This is particularly the case at a time when Iraq is undergoing political uncertainty while very tentatively emerging from its economic crisis.
There are positive steps recently undertaken by the Iraqi authorities, including a recent meeting by the country’s border guards with Syrian army officers in Baghdad – the first of its kind since 2021 – aimed at strengthening cooperation and fortifying the border against terrorism and smuggling networks.
Yet Baghdad’s failure to confront and clamp down on the illegal transportation of stolen Syrian oil into Iraq further cements – and confirms – the perception of a number of Iraqi factions that the government of Mustafa al-Kadhimi is a mere puppet in American hands.
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A former Polish Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski, has attributed to the United States the sabotage of two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. “Thank you, USA,” Sikorski wrote on Twitter. Sikorski was Minister of National Defense from 2005 – 2007 and served as Deputy Minister of National Defense and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, previously. He is currently an elected member of the European parliament.
Nord Stream 1 and 2 lie on the bed of the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 2 was finished last year but Germany never opened it because Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
Poland’s Secretary of State, Stanisław Żaryn, denounced Sikorki’s claim on Twitter as “Russian #propaganda,” calling it “a smear campaign against Poland, the US, and Ukraine, accusing the West of aggression against #NS1 and #NS2. Authenticating the Russian lies at this particular moment jeopardizes the security of Poland. What an act of gross irresponsibility!”
Russian #propaganda instantly launched a smear campaign against Poland, the US and Ukraine, accusing the West of aggression against #NS1 and #NS2.
Authenticating the Russian lies at this particular moment jeopardizes the security of Poland. What an act of gross irresponsibility! pic.twitter.com/S9YJKRCv9B
But it’s not out of the realm of the possible that the U.S. is indeed behind the attack. President Joe Biden promised on February 7 to prevent Nord Stream 2 from becoming operational if Russia invaded Ukraine. “If Russia invades,” said Biden, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”
Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"
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They say more research needs to be done on what is known as “original antigenic sin,” aka “immune imprinting,” which refers to how your immune system responds to repeated introductions of the COVID variants.
The areas expressed a clear intention of joining Russia and are now being subjected to reprisals by the Neo-Nazi junta. These war crimes are hardly unexpected, as the Russian-speaking people living in eastern, southeastern, southern and southwestern areas of Ukraine have often been referred to as “Untermensch” (or “subhuman”) by the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi clique which hijacked Ukraine in 2014.
As Israel was launching a deadly assault on Gaza, killing thousands of civilians and displacing more than 100,000 people, many of America’s top TV, music and film producers were organizing to protect the apartheid state’s reputation from widespread international condemnation.
The order by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas-Austin Division follows a series of lawsuits filed by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), an Austin-based nonprofit “focused on the scientific integrity of vaccines and [the] pharmaceutical industry.”
In his speech Putin begins the preparation of the Russian people for the hard reality.Putin doesn’t like the hard reality and did his best to avoid it by ignoring provocations and insults until it became impossible because, as Putin says,“the West has crossed every line.”
Did the CIA lie, cheat and betray its friends and business partners in ways that even Donald Trump might envy? A rapidly unfolding intelligence scandal indicates that the answer is yes. The dark world of cyber-age espionage is on full display in the unfolding scandal involving the CIA and Crypto AG, the encryption company based in Zug, Switzerland.
World War III has already begun. You simply aren’t being told this because your government and dishonest media outlets are dedicated to keeping you in the dark. After all, they want to use the remaining time to stockpile food, ammunition, medical supplies and precious metals for themselves, and this can only be accomplished by withholding the truth about the situation for as long as possible.
An aerospace industry conference took on more of a tent revival feel on Wednesday when an Air Force general took the stage and sought to fire the audience up about the existential threat he said China posed to the American way of life and the urgent work needed to defeat it.
The Chicago Tribune uses this singular victory in the 7 month Russian offensive as foreshadowing a possible Ukrainian victory in the war. But the Trib omitted that the 1,000 square miles recaptured represents just 2% of the near one fifth of Ukraine under Russian control. At a 2% success rate, that would require 49 more offensives to oust Russia.
The stunning victory of a far-right coalition in Italy’s parliamentary election on Sunday is largely seen from the distinct prospect of Giorgia Melonibecoming the country’s next prime minister, whose hardline views on immigration and the preservation of the “Christian family” are rooted in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party founded after World War II by the nostalgic former members of Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship.
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Scientists warn repeated COVID boosters may result in lowered immunity through a process known as “original antigenic sin” or “immune imprinting”
Original antigenic sin describes how your first exposure to a virus shapes the outcome of subsequent exposures to antigenically related strains. The end result is that you become increasingly prone to symptomatic infections
Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm that people who got two or three COVID jabs are MORE likely to get ill with COVID six to eight months after the last dose than had they gotten none
Health authorities are potentially worsening matters further by pushing people to simultaneously get the updated bivalent COVID booster and a quadrivalent flu vaccine this fall
The COVID jab and the flu vaccine are the No. 1 and No. 2 most dangerous injections respectively, based on adverse event reports and payouts from the U.S. Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Both are also capable of shedding, and both can make you more prone to infection as their protection wears off
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COVID-19 has been going on for nearly three years, and with a whole new set of untested COVID boosters being rolled out, some scientists are taking a step back, cautioning that there still are unanswered questions about how the shots work.
They say more research needs to be done on what is known as “original antigenic sin,” aka “immune imprinting,” which refers to how your immune system responds to repeated introductions of the COVID variants.
Understanding Original Antigenic Sin
The following description of original antigenic sin was published in a January 2019 Journal of Immunology paper titled “Original Antigenic Sin: How First Exposure Shapes Lifelong Anti–Influenza Virus Immune Responses”:1
“The term ‘original antigenic sin’ (OAS) was first used in the 1960s to describe how one’s first exposure to influenza virus shapes the outcome of subsequent exposures to antigenically related strains. In the decades that have passed, OAS-like responses have been shown to play an integral role in both protection from and susceptibility to infections.
OAS may also have an important deterministic role in the differential efficacy of influenza vaccine responses observed for various age cohorts across seasons …
OAS describes the phenomenon whereby the development of immunity against pathogens/Ags is shaped by the first exposure to a related pathogen/Ag … subsequent infections with similar influenza virus strains preferentially boost the Ab response against the original strain …
The critical role of primary exposure in shaping the composition of the Ab repertoire was not only observed in humans after influenza virus infections; this phenomenon was also observed in animal models and in the context of other infectious agents.
For example, additional serum absorption experiments in ferrets infected in succession with three different influenza virus strains demonstrated that nearly all of the host Abs after the infection series were reactive against the first strain, only a fraction of serum Abs could be absorbed by the secondary virus, and fewer yet by the tertiary virus.”
Simplified Example
Here’s a layman’s summary to illustrate this phenomenon as simply as possible, within the context of COVID:
Exposed to the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain, your humoral immune system is programmed to produce antibodies against that specific virus. Similarly, if you got the jab, your body will produce antibodies against the viral spike protein formulated into that shot.
Exposed to the Delta strain, your immune system responds first by boosting production of the original antibodies, while antibodies specific against Delta are produced in a far lower amount as it takes time for your body to respond to the new strain.
Exposed to an Omicron variant, your immune system again responds by boosting the original antibodies, while antibodies against Omicron are produced in even lower amounts than those against Delta.
As a result of this process, with each exposure to a new variant, the original antibodies get “back-boosted.” So, over time, those antibodies come to predominate.
The process is (at least theoretically) the same for all vaccinations. Each booster dose back-boosts or strengthens the original antibodies, making them more and more predominant. The problem is that they may not be effective at neutralizing newer strains (depending on the amount of mutation), thus rendering you more and more prone to symptomatic infection.
Frequent Boosting May Backfire
As reported by ABC News:2
“Some experts say they are concerned that frequent boosting with the original version of the vaccine may have inadvertently exacerbated immune imprinting. At this point in the pandemic, some adults have received four or more doses of the same vaccine …
[Some] scientists worry about a potential backfire, with frequent boosting handcuffing the body’s natural immune system and leaving it exposed to radically different variants that might emerge in the future.
‘Where this matters is if you keep giving booster doses with [original] strain, and continue to lock people into that original response. It makes it harder for them to respond then to essentially a completely different virus,’ says Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Philadelphia …
The timing of vaccines may also need to be taken into account, as the nation moves from original doses to updated boosters.
‘It is true that the best boosts typically are the ones that are given infrequently, that immunologically, if you boost too much and too frequently, then you often have a lower immune response at the end,’ said [director of the center for virology and vaccine research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dr. Dan] Barouch.”
Data Confirm Negative Efficacy After Second Dose
In the video above, Dr. Meryl Nass reviews official data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which confirm that people who got two or three COVID jabs are MORE likely to get ill with COVID six to eight months after the last dose than had they gotten none.
Should You Double Up on COVID Booster and Flu Shot?
Our reckless health authorities are potentially worsening matters further by pushing people to simultaneously get the updated bivalent COVID booster and a seasonal flu vaccine this fall.
Early in September 2022, White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci urged Americans to “Get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you are eligible,” and White House COVID coordinator Ashish Jha, September 6, stated, “I really believe this is why God gave us two arms, one for the flu shot and the other one for the COVID shot” — a statement that will live on in infamy as one of the most ridiculous comments from a public health official ever uttered.3
One problem, although hardly the most important one, is that it’s still far too early for a flu shot. As noted by STAT News:4
“The protection generated by influenza vaccines erodes pretty quickly over the course of a flu season. A vaccine dose given in early September may offer limited protection if the flu season doesn’t peak until February or even March, as it did during the unusually late 2021-2022 season.
‘If you start now, I am not a big fan of it,’ Florian Krammer, an influenza expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, told STAT. ‘I understand why this is promoted, but from an immunological point of view it doesn’t make much sense.’”
STAT cites research showing the effectiveness of the flu shot wanes by about 18% for every 28 days’ post-vaccination. What it doesn’t mention is the fact that the flu shot historically has had an effectiveness well below 50% to start with. The 2018/2019 flu vaccines, for example, which outperformed the 2017/2018 vaccines, had an adjusted effectiveness rating of:5
29% for all ages
49% for children aged 6 months through 8 years
6% for children ages 9 through 17
25% for adults between the ages of 18 and 49
12% for those over 50
This May Become the ‘Dark Winter’ Biden Warned About
Ever since the rollout of the COVID shots, there have been suspicions that some kind of shedding is happening between the jabbed and the unjabbed.6 With mass flu vaccination, the possibility of transmission is further exacerbated, and there’s no telling what kind of viral mutations the combination of a bivalent COVID jab and a quadrivalent flu shot might produce.
A study7 published January 18, 2018, in the journal PNAS showed that people who receive the seasonal flu shot and then contract influenza excrete infectious influenza viruses through their breath.
What’s more, those vaccinated two seasons in a row had a greater viral load of shedding influenza A viruses. According to the authors, “We observed 6.3 times more aerosol shedding among cases with vaccination in the current and previous season compared with having no vaccination in those two seasons.”
This study also highlighted the possibility that annual flu vaccination might lead to reduced protection against influenza over time, and that each vaccination can make you progressively more prone to getting sick. That, again, is the original antigenic sin phenomenon discussed above.
Now, combine the possibility of antigenic sin for COVID with the antigenic sin for influenza, and what might we end up with? Who knows? Research8 has also shown that priming your immune system with influenza vaccine can make you more susceptible to bacterial infections as well, and what are face masks loaded with? Bacteria.
Taken together, we could well be facing the “dark winter” president Biden warned would befall the unvaccinated last year. But it’ll be those with COVID booster and quadrivalent flu shots who will suffer the most. The rest of us will hopefully avoid problems provided we keep our immune systems strong.
Both Shots Are Associated With Serious Side Effects
On top of the antigenic sin possibility for both the COVID jab and the flu vaccine, there’s the possibility of suffering serious side effects from either or both of these shots. Before the advent of the COVID jab, injury following influenza vaccination was the most compensated claim in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).
Between January 1, 2006, and December 31, 2019, a total of 5,407 injury claims for flu vaccine were filed, 4,614 of which were compensated.9 Based on VICP injury filings and awards, the flu vaccine was the riskiest vaccine out there. The COVID jab, however, blew the flu shot out of the water within the first few weeks of use.
“This fall, they’re telling people to line up for the two riskiest and deadliest injections out there. Media are stating that getting the flu shot and the COVID jab at the same time is ‘safe.’ Yet there are absolutely NO data to support such a claim.”
As of September 2, 2022, just 21 months into the COVID jabs existence, 1,400,350 post-jab injuries have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).10 That’s more than half of all VAERS reports collected for all vaccines since its inception 32 years ago.
So, this fall, they’re telling people to line up for the two riskiest and deadliest injections out there. In my view, this is reckless beyond belief, and I would caution against this strategy. Disturbingly, media are stating that getting the flu shot and the COVID jab at the same time is “safe.”11 Yet there are absolutely NO data to support such a claim. It’s pure assumption.
Vaccine Journal Warns of Serious Side Effects
The fact that the COVID jabs can cause serious side effects is evident by VAERS data alone, but studies reanalyzing original trial data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are also starting to emerge that confirm the riskiness of these shots.
Most recently, a study12 13 in the journal Vaccine concluded the Pfizer and Moderna COVID jabs are associated with a 16% “excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest” over placebo baseline, on average. As detailed in that paper:14
“In 2020, prior to COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the Brighton Collaboration created a priority list, endorsed by the World Health Organization, of potential adverse events relevant to COVID-19 vaccines. We adapted the Brighton Collaboration list to evaluate serious adverse events of special interest observed in mRNA COVID-19 vaccine trials.
Methods: Secondary analysis of serious adverse events reported in the placebo-controlled, phase III randomized clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in adults … focusing analysis on Brighton Collaboration adverse events of special interest.
Results: Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 10.1 and 15.1 per 10,000 vaccinated … respectively. Combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated …
The Pfizer trial exhibited a 36 % higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group; risk difference 18.0 per 10,000 vaccinated … The Moderna trial exhibited a 6 % higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group: risk difference 7.1 per 10,000 …
The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.”
Researchers Call for Release of Patient Data
In an open letter addressed to the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna published in The BMJ,15 the authors of this Vaccine paper call for the release of all clinical data, including individual participant data, so that a more thorough reanalysis can be made:
“The effort to prepare these datasets is minimal, and no potentially identifying data is needed … Today (Aug 31), our study of serious adverse events in the Pfizer and Moderna phase 3 COVID-19 vaccine trials was published in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine.
The results showed the Pfizer and Moderna both exhibited an absolute risk increase of serious adverse events of special interest (combined, 1 per 800 vaccinated), raising concerns that mRNA vaccines are associated with more harm than initially estimated at the time of emergency authorization.
We acknowledge that our estimates are only approximations because the original data remain sequestered. For example, we could not stratify by age, which would help clarify the populations in which benefits outweigh harms.
A more definitive determination of the actual harms and benefits requires individual participant data (IPD) that remain unavailable to research investigators … COVID-19 vaccines are now among the most widely disseminated medicines in the history of the world.
Yet, results from the pivotal clinical trials cannot be verified by independent analysts. The public has a legitimate right to an impartial analysis of these data …
Transparency, reproducibility, and replication are cornerstones of high-quality science. The time is overdue for Pfizer and Moderna to allow independent scientists and physicians to see the original data and to replicate the analyses.”
COVID Jabs Linked to Excess Deaths
The COVID shots also appear to be responsible for the rapid increase in excess deaths around the world. As reported September 8, 2022, by The Defender,16 the COVID jabs are causing injuries on a scale we’ve never seen before in medical history.
Yet governments around the world are turning a blind eye. Most medical researchers also avoid these data like the plague, for fear of getting defunded. Two university professors in Germany, however, have bucked that trend.
Psychologist Christof Kuhbandner and Matthias Reitzner, a statistician, analyzed excess mortality data from the German Federal Statistical Office (Bundesamt für Statistik) for 2020 through August 2022.17 18
By applying actuarial analysis to the all-cause mortality data — i.e., by estimating the number of all-cause deaths during these years had there been no pandemic, and then comparing that to the observed all-cause deaths — they found the death toll in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, was actually close to the expected number.
In 2021, however, the observed number of deaths were “two empirical standard deviations above the expected number.” What’s more, the increase in mortality only started to accumulate after April that year. A similar pattern was also observed for stillbirths, which rose by 11% in the second quarter of 2021.
The figure below illustrates the differences in excess mortality between 2020, the year of the virus, and 2021, the year of the COVID jabs.19 20 Looking at the age groups, we see something very odd. In 2021, excess mortality was highest among 15- to 79-year-olds, yet COVID infection primarily killed the elderly, 70 to 79 years of age, in 2020.
Mortality in age groups 15 to 29, and 50 to 59, during the pandemic, pre-jab, was actually below average, and excess mortality among children was well below average. Yet in 2021, excess mortality went up for all age groups, not just the elderly. This strongly suggests the COVID virus was not a primary contributor, but rather the experimental injections.
Kuhbandner and Reitzner further notes there were spikes in excess mortality in April and May and again in September, November and December 2021. The April/May spike coincides with the COVID shot rollout in Germany, and the increases in the fall correlate with booster campaigns.
The following graph21 22 illustrates how tightly connected the excess mortality numbers are with the rise and fall in COVID shots administered.
In my view, there’s simply no doubt the COVID jabs are causing more harm than good, and combining a reformulated and never tested bivalent COVID booster with a quadrivalent flu shot could potentially be disastrous.
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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
On Wednesday, September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the people of Russia and made several important announcements.
The areas expressed a clear intention of joining Russia and are now being subjected to reprisals by the Neo-Nazi junta. These war crimes are hardly unexpected, as the Russian-speaking people living in eastern, southeastern, southern and southwestern areas of Ukraine have often been referred to as “Untermensch” (or “subhuman”) by the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi clique which hijacked Ukraine in 2014.
All of this has either severely disrupted or completely halted any significant economic activity in these areas, in addition to the fact that other civil services are operating under wartime conditions or aren’t operating at all. In this way, the Kiev regime has shown that it doesn’t only consider the people of Donbass hostile, but even those living in other regions it lost control of, be it the Kherson, Zaporozhye or Kharkov regions.
The Russian air defense units deployed in all of the aforementioned areas have been shooting down dozens of missiles fired by the Kiev regime forces daily, which is preventing the number of casualties from being exponentially higher. Still, the attacks continue and are not only limited to shelling, but also include terrorist attacks and other forms of subversion aimed at disrupting the lives of the locals.
To prevent all this, the local administrations of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as the Zaporozhye (currently operating in the city of Melitopol) and Kherson regions decided to hold referendums on joining the Russian Federation. The votes will be cast from September 23 to 27. The Kiev regime has already started its intimidation campaign, targeting civilians and sending death squads to assassinate anyone it considers connected to organizing the referendums. At least a dozen people from the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions’ civil administrations have already been killed in this way. However, this is highly unlikely to change the outcome of the vote, especially now when Russia’s patience has all but run out.
Securing these areas, driving out the Kiev regime forces further away and preventing artillery and terrorist attacks is the priority which also requires far more troops than the ones already deployed in these regions. Thus, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced low-level mobilization which will include hundreds of thousands of fresh troops. According to various reports from the Russian Ministry of Defense, up to 300,000 additional troops will be mobilized and most likely sent to the four areas to maintain security and assist Russian units which are already there. According to Russian sources, new troops will include reservists with previous military experience. This low-level mobilization pool represents just over 1% of Russia’s full mobilization capacity.
It is still unclear how and where exactly the Russian military would deploy these additional forces, but it’s safe to assume that certain counteroffensive actions will be necessary to drive out the Kiev regime forces from the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye, as well as from the occupied parts of the DNR. These actions are most likely the priority in order to stop the near-constant heavy shelling, as well as to prevent the Kiev regime forces from terrorizing the “noncompliant” locals in the areas they still control. In addition, it should also prevent or at least disrupt the actions of the aforementioned death squads operating in the areas which have already been liberated.
According to the local administration of the Zaporozhye region, late last night, an explosion occurred near the central market in Melitopol. The detonation occurred in a clothing store, injuring at least three people. Similar attacks on civilian infrastructure and local residents are being reported in both former Ukrainian regions in addition to the regular shelling of the DNR. Apart from preventing the further senseless slaughter of civilians, Russia will need to secure the aforementioned areas to allow the locals to finally start living normal lives. To accomplish this, other goals of the special military operation will need to be met and they include areas far beyond the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as there are tens of millions of other people still living under the jackboot of the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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***
As Israel was launching a deadly assault on Gaza, killing thousands of civilians and displacing more than 100,000 people, many of America’s top TV, music and film producers were organizing to protect the apartheid state’s reputation from widespread international condemnation.
Together, the Sony Archive – a cache of emails published by Wikileaks – prove that influential entertainment magnates attempted to whitewash Israeli crimes and present the situation as defending itself from an impending “genocide”, liaised with Israeli military and government officials in order to coordinate their message, attempted to cancel those who spoke out against the injustice, and put financial and social pressure on institutions who hosted artists criticizing the apartheid government’s actions.
As Israel Attacks, Hollywood Plays Defense
“[Israel’s message] Must be repeated ad infinitum until the people get it,” wrote Hollywood lawyer and producer Glenn D. Feig, in an email chain to many of Tinsel Town’s most influential executives. This was in response to the unprovoked 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza, one of the bloodiest chapters in over half a century of occupation.
Named “Operation Protective Edge”, the Israeli military engaged in seven weeks of near-constant bombing of the densely populated coastal strip. According to the United Nations, over 2,000 people were killed – a quarter of them children. 18,000 houses were destroyed, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless.
The Israeli military deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, knocking out Gaza’s only power plant and shutting down its water treatment plants, leading to economic, social and ecological devastation in an area Human Rights Watch has labeled the world’s largest “open air prison”.
Many in Hollywood expressed deep concern. “We must make sure that never happens again”, insisted producer Ron Rotholz. Rotholz, however, was not referring to the death and destruction Israel imposed on Gaza, but to the fact that many of the entertainment world’s biggest stars, including celebrity power couple, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, had condemned Israel’s actions, labeling them tantamount to “genocide.”
“Change must start from the top down. It should be unheard of and unacceptable for any Academy Award-winning actor to call the legitimate armed defense of one’s territory…genocide” he continued, worrying that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – a worldwide campaign to put economic pressure on Israel in an attempt to push it to meet its obligations under international law – was gaining steam in the world of the arts. Israel’s legitimacy rests upon political and military support from the U.S. Therefore, maintaining support among the American public is crucial to the long term viability of its settler colonial project.
Rotholz then attempted to organize a silent, worldwide pressure campaign on arts venues and organizations, including the Motion Picture Academy in Hollywood and the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals, to stamp out BDS, writing,
What we can do is urge the leaders of major film, TV and theater organisations, festivals, markets and potentially the heads of media corporations to issue official statements condemning any form of cultural or economic boycotts against Israel.”
Others agreed that they had to develop a “game plan” for opposing BDS.
Of course, when influential producers, festivals and heads of media corporations release statements condemning a certain position or practice, this is, in effect, a threat: stop taking these positions or suffer the professional consequences.
Loach on the Brain
The Sony emails also reveal a near obsession with British filmmaker and social activist Ken Loach. The celebrated director’s film, “Jimmy’s Hall” had recently been nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in the wake of Israel’s assault on Gaza, he had publicly called for a cultural and sporting boycott of the apartheid state.
This outraged many in Hollywood. Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of Relativity Media, a film producing company responsible for financing more than 200 movies, demanded that not only Loach, but the whole Cannes Film Festival be cancelled. “The studios and networks alike must join together and boycott cannes,” he wrote. “If we don’t we are sending a message that another holocaust is fine with Hollywood as long as it is business as usual,” he added, framing the Israeli attack on a near-defenseless civilian population as a Palestinian genocide of Israelis.
Others agreed. Ben Silverman, former co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios and producer of shows such as “The Office”, “The Biggest Loser” and Ugly Betty” said that the industry should “boycott the boycotters”. Rotholz, meanwhile, wrote to the head of the Cannes Film Festival, demanding that he take action against Loach for his comments. “There is no place for [Loach’s intolerant and hateful remarks] in the global world of film and filmmakers”, he insisted.
Others came up with another way of countering Loach. “How about we all club together and make a documentary about the rise of new anti-Semitism in Europe,” suggested British film producer Cassian Elwes, adding,
I would be willing to contribute and put time into it if others here would do the same. Between all of us I’m sure we could figure out a way to distribute it and get it into places like Cannes so we could have a response to guys like Loach. Perhaps we try to use it to rally support from film communities in Europe to help us distribute it there”.
“I love it,” replied publishing oligarch Jason Binn, “And I will promote it in a major way to all 3.2 million magazine subscribers across all on and offline platforms. I can even leverage Gilt’s 9 million members,” he added, referring to the shopping and lifestyle website he managed.
“Me too,” said Amy Pascal, the Co-Chairperson of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Meanwhile, Mark Canton, producer of movies such as “Get Carter”, “Immortals” and “300” busied himself drumming up more Hollywood support for the idea. “Adding Carmi Zlotnik to this growing list”, he replied, referencing the TV executive.
This whole correspondence was from an email chain of dozens of high-powered entertainment figures entitled “Happy New Year. Too bad Germany is now a no travel zone for Jews,” which ludicrously claimed that the European country had become a Muslim-controlled Islamic theocracy.
“It is horrible. But in the end, it is no surprise, because apologists for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians will go to any length to prevent the people opposing them,” Mr. Loach said, when asked for comment by MintPress. “We shouldn’t underestimate the hatred of those who cannot tolerate the idea that Palestinians have human rights, that Palestine is a state; and they have their country,” he added.
Shutting Down Free Expression
The pro-Israel group in Hollywood also put serious pressure on American institutions to crack down on support for Palestinian human rights. Silverman revealed that he had written to Peter Gelb, the general manager of the New York Metropolitan Opera, in an effort to shut down a performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer”, an opera that tells the story of the 1985 hijacking of an airliner by the Palestine Liberation Front. “I suggest though that we each call him on Monday at his office at the Met and your point about the Met’s donors’ leverage is important,” he advised the other entertainment oligarchs, thereby shining a light on how the powerful move in secret to silence speech they do not approve of, and how they use their financial clout to coerce and strong-arm others into toeing their line. A lot of pressure was necessary, because, as Silverman explained, “as members of the artistic community it is very hard to be pro free speech only some of the time and not all of the time.”
Ultimately, the performance did go ahead, but not without a large and coordinated protest both inside and outside the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, as individuals attempted to shut down the performance, claiming it was “antisemitic.”
Liaising with the IDF
The email conversations of many of Hollywood’s most influential individuals show that they believe they are on the verge of a worldwide extermination of Jews, and that Israel – and themselves – are the only things standing in the way of this impending fate. As Kavanaugh wrote, “It’s our job to keep another Holocaust from happening. Many of you may think that can’t happen, that is extreme…[but] If you pull newspapers from pre Holocaust it seems eerily close to our world today.”
It is imperative that leading figures in the LA/NY film, tv, media, digital and theater communities who support a strong and potent Jewish state develop a strategy for liasing with colleagues in London and Europe and also with the creative communities here and in Europe to promote and explain the Israeli cause.”
The Sony Archive emails also show that, not only were Tinsel Town’s top brass coordinating strategies to silence critics of Israel, but that they were also closely liaising with the Israeli government and its military.
Producer George Perez, for example, messaged his colleagues in the chain email to introduce them to an IDF colonel, stating (emphasis added),
Everyone please use this “reply all” list from here on. I have included Kobi Marom a retired commander in the Israeli army. Kobi was kind enough to give my family and I a jeep tour of the Golan Heights during our June trip to Israel. He also took us to visit an army base on the border of Israel and Syria, an area which has been in the news lately. Hard to imagine that the “kids” that we met at the base are most likely engaged in combat with our enemies.”
Seeing as the large majority of those who died were Palestinian civilians, it is unclear whether he considers all Palestinians or just Hamas as enemies of Hollywood. Perez also noted that “Kobi works closely with the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) who are in need of donations,” and advised that Hollywood needed to “dig deep to help in the constant struggle for the survival of Israel.”
The group also attempted to recruit Israeli-American movie star Natalie Portman into their ranks. But the Academy Award-winning actress appeared more concerned that her personal details were being shared. “How did I get on this list? Also Ryan Seacrest?” she replied, before directly addressing Kavanaugh, writing,
[C]an you please remove me from this email list? you should not be copying me publicly so that 20 people i don’t know have my personal info. i will have to change my email address now. thank you”.
While Portman’s open contempt for the group of rabidly pro-Israel producers is notable, more so was Kavanaugh’s response, which revealed how close the connection between the Israeli state and Hollywood is. Kavanaugh wrote back,
Sorry. You are right Jews being slaughtered for their beliefs and Cannes members calling for the boycott of anything Israel or Jewish is much much less important than your email address being shared with 20 of our peers who are trying to make a difference. my deepest apologies…I had lunch yesterday with Israel consulate general who brought J street up to me. He was so perplexed confused and concerned when he heard you supported them that he begged me to connect you two.”
Thus, the leaked emails prove beyond any doubt that both the Israeli government and the IDF liaise with some of the most powerful people in the entertainment world in order to push forward a pro-Israel message and stamp out any deviance from that line.
Hip Hoppers for Apartheid
While their efforts at recruiting Portman fell flat, one star who responded enthusiastically was hip hop mega producer Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records and the brother of Joseph “Rev.Run” Simmons, one third of Run DMC. Simmons has recently been the subject of controversy, after 20 women have come forward, charging him with rape or other sexual misconduct.
The emails reveal that promoting engagement with Israel within the African-American community is one of Simmons’ primary interests. When asked if he had any ideas how to improve Israel’s image, he said, “Simple messaging from non Jews specifically from Muslims promoting peace and Israel’s right to exist…We have resources and the desire to win rather than lose the hearts of young Muslims and Jews.”
We have hundreds of collaboration programs between Imams Rabbis and their congregations We have many respected imams who would join former chief rabbi metzker (spelling) rabbi Schneier and non Jews in promoting the Saudi peace plan”.
“Through this campaign we will be helping Israel,” he concluded.
Turning the Tide
Despite the best efforts of Simmons and others, however, American public opinion has, in recent years, begun to turn against Israel. Young Americans, in particular, are more likely to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people and support an independent Palestinian state.
Much of this has to do with the rise of social media and a new generation of activists breaking through the barriers to highlight injustices being carried out by their government. Today, Americans are more likely to see first-hand, unvarnished accounts of Israeli brutality on social media platforms. As veteran political scientist Noam Chomsky explained to MintPress last year, “The veil of intense propaganda [is] being lifted slowly, [and] crucial U.S. participation in Israeli crimes is also coming more clearly into view. With committed activism, that could have salutary effects.”
Nevertheless, U.S. government support for Israel continues to rise. Between 2019 and 2028, it is scheduled to send nearly $40 billion in aid, almost all of it military, meaning that American taxpayer funds are contributing to Palestinian oppression and displacement.
Loach was even more upbeat on the issue, telling us that those who stand in the way of justice will be judged poorly by history, stating,
The denial of human rights of the Palestinians is one of the great crimes [of the modern era] and Palestinian rights is one of the great causes of last century and this century. We should all support the Palestinians. If you have any care for human rights, there is no question: the Palestinians have to be supported. And these people who oppose them, in the end, will fade away. Because history will show this was a terrible crime. Palestinians suffered ethnic cleansing of their homeland. We have to support the Palestinians, full stop.”
Those people, however, have no intention of “fading away”, and continue to organize on behalf of the Israeli government. Thanks to the leaked documents, those who care about Palestinian self-determination have a clearer understanding of how they operate.
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As the pressure builds and the first closures begin, Germany is entering an economic recession, and there are everyday renewed cracks in the political edifice. Minister President of Saxony Michael Kretschmer (CDU) – no fringe political figure – recently remarked that Germany “cannot do without Russian gas” and acknowledged that EU sanctions are to blame for the shortage, but he stopped short of demanding that Nord Stream 2 be opened; instead, he hopes for a return to Russian gas after the Ukraine war has ended.
Other experts, while downplaying the risk of uncontrolled outages, have raised the possibility load-shedding as well, confirming that these are very real contingency plans and that we’re being prepared for them. The stated concern is invariably that local or regional gas shortages will cause the widespread activation of electrical heaters and overwhelm the grid, though how exactly this could be anticipated far enough in advanced for scheduled outages is unclear to me.
And that’s it. There are no plans from the government, beyond doubtful price-tinkering, regulatory schemes and targeted financial assistance. If you look at those news outlets most guilty of Corona hysteria, like the state-funded Tagesschau or the Süddeutsche Zeitung, you find extremely muted reporting on the crisis. Instead, hyperventilation about Ukraine continues to dominate headlines; pieces on the energy apocalypse are either misleading items like this one, hailing a dip in gas prices, or trivial write-upsabout whether cities should cancel their Christmas lighting this year.
UPDATE:The Danish Maritime Authority reports a drop in pressure in the undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline, with gas bubbles appearing near the Baltic island of Bornholm, the site of the apparent rupture. The pipe had been filled with gas following its completion in November 2021, but Chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to certify its operation, and so it has remained out of service. Many conspiracy theories are possible here, in what will very likely turn out to be an act of sabotage.
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***
A federal court in Texas is giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until Friday to release the first batch of data on adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination collected by the agency via itsV-safe app.
The order by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas-Austin Division follows a series of lawsuits filed by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), an Austin-based nonprofit “focused on the scientific integrity of vaccines and [the] pharmaceutical industry.”
According to ICAN, the court order requires the CDC to release the first batch of 19 months’ worth of data collected from millions of participants who reported adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination via the V-safe app between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 31, 2022.
In all, the CDC will be required to release more than 137 million health V-safe entries.
The CDC describes V-safe as a smartphone app that “provides personalized and confidential check-ins via text messages and web surveys,” enabling users to “quickly and easily share with CDC how you, or your dependent, feel after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.”
According to the CDC, “This information helps CDC monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in near real time,” adding that the purpose of the V-safe app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting.”
Public will ‘see for themselves the actual self-reported data’
The data collected via the V-safe app is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” with only the CDC having “access to the individualized survey data.”
Oracle’s access is limited to “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.”
This distinction led to the main thrust of ICAN’s lawsuits against the CDC. ICAN argued that “based on the CDC’s own documentation, the data submitted to V-safe is already available in deidentified form (with no personal health information) and could be immediately released to the public.”
ICAN submitted three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the deidentified data collected via V-safe, “in the same form in which Oracle can currently access it.”
However, ICAN said, the CDC “had apparently not read its own documentation regarding V-safe” and refused ICAN’s requests, claiming “information in the app is not deidentified.”
Even when ICAN clarified its FOIA request to specifically ask for “all data deidentified after [emphasis original] it was submitted to the V-safe app,” the CDC “administratively closed this request stating it was duplicative of the original request.”
ICAN responded by suing the CDC in federal court in December 2021, via its attorney, Aaron Siri, for the release of this data.
Following a new FOIA request by ICAN in April 2022, for the release of “all data submitted to V-safe since January 1, 2020,” and the CDC’s subsequent refusal, ICAN filed a second lawsuit in May 2022.
ICAN said these successive refusals on the part of the CDC came “despite the CDC’s ability to immediately release this deidentified data pursuant to its own protocol,” based on the claim that “the information in the app is not deidentified.”
ICAN commented on the significance of the ruling, stating in a press release:
“This is a huge win for ICAN and for the American public, who will finally start to be able to see for themselves the actual self-reported nationwide data about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.”
Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, called the ruling an “absolutely huge development.”
“This is an absolutely huge development and I’ll be waiting with anticipation as the V-safe data are released.
“With CDC’s reluctance to release this information, one can only imagine that it will not reflect well on the whole COVID-19 vaccination program, especially given irregularities seen with VAERS [the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reporting and the shifting narrative of the CDC regarding COVID-19 guidance.”
Hooker has faced similar obstacles to those encountered by ICAN when requesting data from the CDC. He said he “submitted a FOIA for the V-safe pregnancy data early in the process and was denied.”
“I’m glad that Aaron [Siri] and ICAN stuck with it,” Hooker said. “I can only think of the lives that could have been spared if the CDC would have been forthcoming with this information in the first place.”
The data collected via the V-safe app is distinct from the data submitted to VAERS. ICAN described the distinction:
“The FDA and CDC have admitted their existing safety monitoring program, VAERS, was incapable of determining causation and therefore unreliable.
“The CDC has therefore deployed a new safety monitoring system for COVID-19 vaccines called V-safe, and now claims that these ‘vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.’”
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
Featured image is from CHD
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Comments Off on Revealing Covid Vaxx Lies: US Federal Court Orders CDC to Release 137 Million Entries of COVID Vaccine Adverse Events Collected Via V-safe App
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***
Introduction by Paul Craig Roberts
The Western media is a collection of liars in a propaganda ministry, and its so-called “Russian experts” are for the most part Russophobes operating on grants from the US military/security complex.
Consequently, Westerners have no valid understanding of the conflict in Ukraine, how it arose, and how the West’s involvement together with extraordinary provocations, has created in the Russian leadership the conviction that the goal of the West is to destroy Russia.
As this conviction hardens, the Russian leadership is abandoning hope of peaceful coexistence with the Western world and is preparing for war.
In his speech Putin begins the preparation of the Russian people for the hard reality.Putin doesn’t like the hard reality and did his best to avoid it by ignoring provocations and insults until it became impossible because, as Putin says,“the West has crossed every line.”
The West, of course, is Washington.The rest of the Western world reports to Washington as I learned from a US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. “How,” I asked him, “do we get the other countries to do what we want?”“Money,” he replied. “You mean foreign aid?”“No, we give the leaders bagfuls of money.They report to us.We own them.”
This means that there are no independent Western voices in Britain, Germany, France or elsewhere to moderate Washington’s drive for world hegemony.There is no one to say, “do you know what you are doing?”
There is no one to warn Washington that the US is pushing Russia too hard.There is no one to warn us against believing our own propaganda. Consequently, Washington has pushed the Russian leadership out of the accommodation mode into the prepare for conflict mode.
This clearly demonstrates how dangerous is the neoconservatives’ unilateralism.There is no one to talk back to Washington but Washington’s chosen enemies, whose words, if reported at all, are always reported out of context following the propaganda line that it is Russia and China, never Washington, who is the threat and cause of conflict.
I recommend you read the translation of Putin’s address to the Russian Nation.Possibly Tass or the office of the Russian President will provide a better translation, but his one is sufficient to see how the Russian leadership views a situation that has been misreported by Western presstitutes in a fashion that supports the West’s propaganda picture of Russia’s evil intent.
The fact of the matter is that the problem is Washington’s evil intent.
Military historians understand that once mobilization starts, war follows.Putin is trying to avoid this irreversible course by ordering a limited, not full mobilization, which he hopes, together with the self-determination under the UN Charter of the four liberated areas to be reunited with the Russian Federation, will convince the West that the war cannot continue unless the West supports military attacks directly on Russian territory.
I have been writing for 8 years that Washington, despite its arrogance, will not go so far as to initiate war with a superior Russian military force.This was true in 2014.I hope it is still true today.
You will not hear Putin’s closing words to the Russian nation from the West’s presstitutes.Putin puts the idiot West on notice that the West’s survival is unlikely unless Washington gives up its demand for hegemony:
“It is in our historical tradition, in the fate of our people, to stop those who are striving for world domination, who threaten to dismember and enslave our Motherland, our Fatherland. We will do it now, and so it will be.”
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
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Putin’s address to the Russian people
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Friends,
The topic of my speech is the situation in the Donbas and the course of a special military operation to liberate it from the neo-Nazi regime, which seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as a result of an armed coup d’état.
I appeal today to you, to all citizens of our country, to people of different generations, age and nationality, to the people of our great Motherland, to all those who are united by the great historical Russia, to the soldiers and officers, volunteers who are now fighting on the front line, are on combat duty, to our brothers and sisters – residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, other areas liberated from the neo-Nazi regime.
Video
We will talk about the necessary, urgent steps to protect the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Russia, about supporting the desire and will of our compatriots to determine their own future and about the aggressive policy of a part of the Western elites, who are trying with all their might to maintain their dominance, and for this they are trying to block and suppress any sovereign independent centers of development in order to continue to rudely impose their will on other countries and peoples. impose their pseudo-values.
The goal of this West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are already directly saying that in 1991 they were able to split the Soviet Union, and now the time has come for Russia itself, that it must disintegrate into many deadly warring regions and regions.
And they have been hatching such plans for a long time. They encouraged gangs of international terrorists in the Caucasus, promoted NATO’s offensive infrastructure close to our borders. They have made total Russophobia their weapons, including for decades purposefully cultivating hatred of Russia, primarily in Ukraine, to which they were preparing the fate of an anti-Russian bridgehead, and turned the Ukrainian people themselves into cannon fodder and pushed them to war with our country, unleashing it, this war, back in 2014, using armed forces against the civilian population, organizing genocide. blockade, terror against people who refused to recognize the power that arose in Ukraine as a result of a coup d’état.
And after the current Kiev regime actually publicly abandoned a peaceful solution to the problem of Donbass and, moreover, declared its claims to nuclear weapons, it became absolutely clear that a new, next, as it was before twice, large-scale offensive in the Donbas is inevitable. And then, just as inevitably, there would be an attack on Russia’s Crimea – on Russia.
In this regard, the decision on a pre-emptive military operation was absolutely necessary and the only possible one. Its main goals – the liberation of the entire territory of Donbass – have been and remain unchanged.
The Lugansk People’s Republic has already been almost completely cleansed of neo-Nazis. Fighting in the Donetsk People’s Republic continues. Here, in eight years, the Kiev occupation regime has created a deeply layered line of long-term fortifications. Their assault in the forehead would have resulted in heavy losses, so our units, as well as the military units of the Donbass republics, act systematically, competently, use equipment, protect personnel and step by step liberate the Donetsk land, clear cities and towns from neo-Nazis, provide assistance to people whom the Kiev regime has turned into hostages, into a human shield.
As you know, professional servicemen serving under a contract take part in a special military operation. Together with them, volunteer formations also fight shoulder to shoulder: people of different nationalities, professions, ages are real patriots. At the call of their hearts, they stood up to defend Russia and Donbass.
In this regard, I have already instructed the Government and the Defence Ministry to determine in full and as soon as possible the legal status of volunteers, as well as fighters of units of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. It should be the same as that of career servicemen of the Russian army, including material, medical support, social guarantees. Particular attention should be paid to the organization of supplying volunteer formations and detachments of the people’s militia of Donbass with equipment and equipment.
In the course of solving the main tasks of protecting Donbass, our troops, based on the plans and decisions of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff on the general strategy of action, liberated significant territories of Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, as well as a number of other areas, from neo-Nazis. As a result, a long line of combat contact was formed, which is over a thousand kilometers.
What do I want to say publicly for the first time today? Already after the start of the special military operation, including the talks in Istanbul, representatives of Kiev reacted to our proposals very positively, and these proposals primarily concerned ensuring Russia’s security and our interests. But it is obvious that the peace solution did not suit the West, therefore, after reaching certain compromises, Kiev was actually given a direct instruction to disrupt all agreements.
Ukraine began to be pumped even more with weapons. The Kiev regime has unleashed new gangs of foreign mercenaries and nationalists, military units trained according to NATO standards and under the de facto command of Western advisers.
At the same time, the regime of repression throughout Ukraine against its own citizens, established immediately after the armed coup of 2014, was strengthened in the most severe way. The policy of intimidation, terror and violence is taking on increasingly massive, terrible and barbaric forms.
I want to emphasize that we know that the majority of people living in the territories liberated from neo-Nazis, and these are primarily the historical lands of Novorossiya, do not want to be under the yoke of the neo-Nazi regime. In Zaporozhye, Kherson region, Lugansk and Donetsk have seen and see the atrocities committed by neo-Nazis in the occupied areas of the Kharkiv region. The heirs of the Banderites and Nazi punishers kill people, torture them, throw them in prisons, settle scores, massacre and torture civilians.
More than seven and a half million people lived in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions before the outbreak of hostilities. Many of them were forced to become refugees, to leave their homes. And those who remain – about five million people – are now subjected to constant artillery and rocket fire from neo-Nazi militants. They hit hospitals and schools, arrange terrorist acts against civilians.
We cannot, do not have any moral right to give the people close to us to the torment of the executioners, we cannot but respond to their sincere desire to determine their own destiny. The parliaments of the people’s republics of Donbass, as well as the military-civil administrations of Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, decided to hold referendums on the future of these territories and appealed to us, to Russia, with a request to support such a step.
I would like to emphasise that we will do everything we can to ensure safe conditions for holding referendums and so that people can express their will. And we will support the decision on our future, which will be made by the majority of residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions.
Dear friends!
Today, our Armed Forces, as I have already said, operate on the line of combat contact, which exceeds a thousand kilometers, resist not only neo-Nazi formations, but in fact the entire military machine of the collective West.
In this situation, I consider it necessary to make the following decision – it is fully adequate to the threats we face – namely, to protect our Motherland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity, to ensure the security of our people and people in the liberated territories, I consider it necessary to support the proposal of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff to conduct partial mobilization in the Russian Federation.
Let me repeat that we are talking about partial mobilization, that is, only citizens who are currently in the reserve, and above all those who served in the Armed Forces, have certain military specialties and relevant experience, will be subject to conscription for military service.
Those called up for military service before being sent to the units will necessarily undergo additional military training, taking into account the experience of a special military operation.
The decree on partial mobilization has been signed.
In accordance with the legislation, the chambers of the Federal Assembly – the Federation Council and the State Duma – will be officially informed about this by letters today.
Mobilization measures will begin today, from September 21. I instruct the heads of the regions to provide all the necessary assistance to the work of military commissariats.
I would like to emphasise that Russian citizens called up for military service upon mobilization will receive the status, payments and all social guarantees of servicemen undergoing military service under contract.
I would like to add that the Executive Order on Partial Mobilization also provides for additional measures to implement the state defence order. The heads of defence industry enterprises are directly responsible for solving the tasks of increasing the production of weapons and military equipment and deploying additional production facilities. In turn, all issues of material, resource and financial support of defense enterprises should be resolved by the Government immediately.
Dear friends!
In its aggressive anti-Russian policy, the West has crossed every line. We constantly hear threats against our country, our people. Some irresponsible politicians in the West are talking about plans to organize the supply of long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine – systems that will allow strikes on Crimea and other regions of Russia.
Such terrorist strikes, including those using Western weapons, are already being carried out on border settlements in the Belgorod and Kursk regions. In real time, using modern systems, aircraft, ships, satellites, strategic drones, NATO carries out reconnaissance throughout the south of Russia.
Washington, London and Brussels are directly pushing Kiev to transfer military operations to our territory. Without hiding their intention any longer, they say that Russia must be defeated at all costs on the battlefield leading to the loss of all Russian sovereignty, the complete plundering of our country, and the destruction of Russian political, economic, and cultural existence.
Nuclear blackmail is also used. We are talking not only about the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which threatens an atomic catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.
For those who allow themselves such statements regarding Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and in some components – more modern than those of NATO countries. And when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we certainly will use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.
Russian citizens can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured, I stress this again, by all the means available to us. And those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the same can happen to them.
It is in our historical tradition, in the fate of our people, to stop those who are striving for world domination, who threaten to dismember and enslave our Motherland, our Fatherland. We will do it now, and so it will be.
I believe in your support.
The History of the Liberated Russian Regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye
This article gives the history of the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions, which are currently voting in an exercise of self-determination whether to be reunited with Russia.The regions have been Russian since the time of Catherine the Great in the 1700s.These are regions where the population has suffered greatly at the hands of Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
Source: en.kremlin.ru
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***
September 12, 2022, President Biden signed the “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy”
Specified in that order is the development of genetic engineering technologies and techniques “to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers,” as well as genetic technologies to “unlock the power of biological data” using “computing tools and artificial intelligence”
This executive order establishes a fast-tracked pipeline of mRNA shots and other gene therapies that will further the transhumanist agenda to create augmented humans and bring us into a post-human world
Drug makers have clearly expected this free-for-all as they have loads of mRNA candidates in their pipelines. September 14, 2022, Pfizer initiated a Phase 3 study that will test a quadrivalent mRNA-based flu shot on 25,000 American adults
Moderna began its Phase 3 mRNA flu jab trial in early June 2022. Ultimately, Moderna wants to create an annual mRNA shot that covers all of the top 10 viruses that result in hospitalizations each year
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September 12, 2022, President Biden signed the “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”1
Specified in that order is the development of genetic engineering technologies and techniques “to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers,” as well as genetic technologies to “unlock the power of biological data” using “computing tools and artificial intelligence.”
Additionally, “obstacles for commercialization” will be reduced “so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.” What we have here is, in a nutshell, the creation of a fast-tracked mRNA pipeline.
When, in June 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quietly implemented a “Future Framework” scheme2 to deliver reformulated COVID boosters without additional testing, I predicted that this “no testing required” formula would spread beyond COVID shots. And, according to this executive order, that’s exactly what’s about to happen.
In early September 2022, the FDA also put out medically false and misleading COVID booster campaign messages that prove we’ve officially entered the era of transhumanism:
“It’s time to install that update! #UpdateYourAntibodies with a new #COVID19 booster.”3“Don’t be shocked! You can now #RechargeYourImmunity with an updated #COVID19 booster.”4
Is This the Death Knell to Allopathic Medicine?
Historically, gene therapies have had to jump through extra hoops, which is why so few exist on the market. As of 2021, there were 20 gene therapies commercially available.5 The world’s first gene therapy trial didn’t begin until 1990, so this is still a very new field.
The entire gene therapy field actually collapsed overnight in 1999, when a teenage trial participant died from side effects. An FDA investigation concluded research had moved too fast and that safety “had not been put first.”6 Progress, thanks to increased caution, slowed from there on.
Such caution is now being thrown to the wind, and it’s not difficult to predict there will be disastrous ramifications. Millions will die from poorly tested gene therapies and, eventually, medical research and allopathic medicine will both cease to exist, as survivors vow to have nothing to do with that murderous cabal ever again.
The only way they might be able to keep going is if they are in control of people’s brain function and/or able to force drugs under threat of death, or worse — neither of which is impossible at this point, shockingly enough. In the meantime, we’re looking at a cornucopia of mRNA shots coming our way.
mRNA Flu Shots Are in the Works
Not surprisingly, mRNA flu shots are in the works.7 While we probably won’t see mRNA flu shots during the 2022/2023 winter season, there’s every reason to expect they’ll be rolled out next year.
September 14, 2022, Pfizer initiated a Phase 3 study, which will test a quadrivalent mRNA-based flu shot on 25,000 American adults.8 Pfizer is also exploring mRNA technology that uses self-amplifying RNA (saRNA), for potential use in the future.9
Moderna began its Phase 3 mRNA flu jab trial in early June 2022.10 It’s also working on mRNA shots for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and cytomegalovirus (CMV), which is in the herpes family, as well as a SARS-CoV-2-influenza combination shot. Ultimately, Moderna wants to create an annual mRNA shot that covers all of the top 10 viruses that result in hospitalizations each year.11
Its current flu jab candidate, mRNA-1010, encodes for the hemagglutinin (HA) glycoproteins of four different influenza strains, including influenza A/H1N1, A/H3N2, influenza B/Yamagata and B/Victoria. According to Moderna:12
“HA is a major influenza surface glycoprotein that is considered an important target to generate broad protection against influenza and is the primary target of currently available influenza vaccines.”
The Transhumanist Agenda
Over the past three years, I’ve written several articles exploring the transhumanist agenda, which all these mRNA shots and genetic technologies are part and parcel of. Basically, the goal of the transhumanist movement is to transcend biology through technology, and to meld human biology with technology and artificial intelligence.
In September 2020, I posted a video with Dr. Carrie Madej (above), in which she suggested we were standing at the crossroads of transhumanism, thanks to the fast approaching release of mRNA COVID-19 shots.
“One reason why it’s important to know whether synthetic RNA creates permanent changes in the genome is because synthetic genes are patented. If they cause permanent changes, humans will contain patented genes, and that brings up very serious questions, seeing how patents have owners, and owners have patent rights.”
Since these shots are designed to manipulate your biology, they have the potential to also alter the biology of the entire human race. Nearly two years later, we still don’t know the extent to which they might be doing that, yet more fast-tracked and untested gene therapies are on the way.
One reason why it’s important to know for certain whether synthetic RNA ends up creating permanent changes in the genome is because synthetic genes are patented. If they cause permanent changes, humans will contain patented genes, and that brings up very serious questions, seeing how patents have owners, and owners have patent rights.
US Defense Department Aims to Create Human Cyborgs
The hydrogel used to preserve the mRNA can also contain nanobots to create a bioelectric interface capable of connecting to a smartphone or other interface. Novel technologies that measure biological data, such as blood sugar, are based on this. Such technologies will, of course, have immediate ramifications for our privacy.
Who will collect and have access to all this data? Who will be responsible for protecting it? How will it be used? Also, if your cellphone can receive information from your body, what information can your body receive from it, or other sources? Could transmissions affect your mood? Your behavior? Your physical function? Your thoughts or memories?
So far, it doesn’t appear as though the COVID shots have these kinds of capabilities built in, but we do know for a fact that militaries around the world are exploring and working toward such capabilities. In fact, it’s an arms race in its own right.
In his September 14, 2022, Substack article,13 “Human Cyborgs Are Just the Beginning,” Dr. Robert Malone reviewed several of those plans. Certain report titles alone tell the story, such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Biotechnologies for Health and Human Performance Council’s report,14 “Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD.” It doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, does it? According to the assessment abstract:
“The primary objective of this effort was to forecast and evaluate the military implications of machines that are physically integrated with the human body to augment and enhance human performance over the next 30 years.
This report summarizes this assessment and findings; identifies four potential military-use cases for new technologies in this area; and assesses their impact upon the DOD organizational structure, warfighter doctrine and tactics, and interoperability with U.S. allies and civil society.”
Human augmentation technologies deemed technically feasible by 2050 at the latest include ocular enhancements to improve sight and situational awareness, optogenetic bodysuit to restore or improve muscular strength and control, auditory enhancements, and neural enhancement of the brain for two-way data transfers and brain-to-brain communication.
Changing What It Means To Be Human
In “The Plan to Turn You Into a Genetically Edited Cyborg,” I covered another shockingly dystopian report by the U.K. Ministry of Defense and the German Bundeswehr Office for Defense Planning, published in May 2021.
That report, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic Implications Project,”15 reviews the scientific goals of the U.K. and German defense ministries, and they basically mirror that of the U.S. DOD. On page 12 of the report, the concept of the human body as a platform is described, and how various parts of the human platform can be augmented. For example:
Physical performance such as strength, dexterity, speed and endurance can be enhanced, as well as physical senses. One example given is gene editing for enhanced sight
Psychological performance such as cognition, emotion and motivation can be influenced to activate and direct desired behavior. Examples of cognitive augmentation include improving memory, attention, alertness, creativity, understanding, decision-making, intelligence and vigilance
Social performance — “The ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team” — can be influenced. Communication skills, collaboration and trust are also included here
They list several different ways to influence the physical, psychological and social performance of the “human platform,” including genetics (germ line and somatic modification), synthetic biology, invasive (internal) and noninvasive (external) brain interfaces, passive and powered exoskeletons, drugs and nano technology, neurostimulation, augmented reality technologies such as external holograms or glasses with built-in artificial intelligence, and sensory augmentation technologies such as external sensors or implants.
As noted in this report, “Human augmentation has the potential to … change the meaning of what it means to be a human.” This is precisely what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has stated is the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution.16
WEF has been at the center of global affairs for more than 40 years, and if you take the time to dive into WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution material, you realize that it’s all about transhumanism. It’s about the merger of man and machine.
This is a dystopian future that WEF and its global allies are actively trying to implement, whether humanity at large agrees with it or not. Importantly, the “Human Augmentation” report readily admits that human augmentation can “directly enhance behavior.”
And, if you think these reports are just brain fodder for geeks in uniforms, think again. The U.K. Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) is currently, right now, accepting proposals for human augmentation technologies such as those listed above.17 Grants of 70,000 euros ($74,000), will be given to proposals that can provide proof of concept.
We’re Already Being Programmed to Accept Transhumanism
Both the DOD’s “Cyborg Soldier” report and the British/German “Human Augmentation” reports discuss the fact that human augmentation will inevitably widen already existing disparities, inequalities and inequities, and therefore, “efforts should be undertaken to reverse negative cultural narratives of enhancement technologies.”18
In other words, don’t let people come to the conclusion that human cyborgs are a bad idea, because at worst that might prevent their development, and at best, it’ll pitch regular people against the augmented elite, making their efforts to rule the plebs more difficult.
As noted by Malone, “Once again, we are being played before we even know what the playing field looks like.”19
Disturbingly, considering how nontransparent governments have been so far, it’s not inconceivable that technologies capable of influencing thoughts and behaviors would be used on populations without informing anyone, which makes the list of potential risks one takes with each new mRNA injection even longer than it already is.
But we don’t need to be genetically reengineered or have nanobots introduced into our brains to be at risk of outside manipulation. That’s already happening through noninvasive means.
Control Capabilities Go Far Beyond Orwell’s ‘1984’ Vision
In a November 2019 interview with CNN,20 history professor Yuval Noah Harari, a Klaus Schwab disciple, stated that humans are already “hackable,” meaning the technology exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and this knowledge can be used for both good and ill.
According to Harari, the available capabilities already go far beyond Orwell’s “1984” authoritarian vision, and it’s only going to become more powerful from here.
He predicted that algorithms will increasingly be used to make decisions that historically have been made by humans, either yourself or someone else, including whether or not you’ll be hired for a particular job, whether you’ll be granted a loan, what scholastic curriculum you will follow and even whom you will marry.
To learn more about the larger issues of transhumanism and the race to merge man with machine and artificial intelligence, check out the Truthstream Media video below.
For example, there are even ongoing attempts to upload the human mind into the cloud, ultimately creating a form of “digital hive mind” where everyone communicates via “Wi-Fi telepathy.” This, despite the fact we still do not fully understand what “the mind” actually is, or where it’s located.
Final Thoughts
I don’t know what it will take to prevent the dystopian post-human world envisioned by Schwab and his technocratic minions, but I suspect education would be a cornerstone of such an endeavor. In order for there to be a resistance, enough people need to be aware of what the plan is, and where we’re actually being led with all these novel therapies and inventions.
In the shorter term, it’s crucial to realize that the fast-tracking of “genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers” means they’re going to cut corners. Loads of them.
Testing is basically going to be done on the population at large, just as they’ve done with the COVID jabs. The results of such experimentation are relatively predictable. People will be seriously injured and many will die. So, think long and hard before you agree to take any of these forthcoming gene therapies.
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***
Hindus on one side, Muslims on the other. Police officers wielding batons keep the two sides apart.
Close by, cars are being smashed. One is overturned and its driver beaten up. Local residents trapped in their houses, afraid to go out. Masked and hooded men march through the streets.
This wasn’t a scene in India, a country notoriously prone to outbursts of brutal communal violence. It happened last Saturday night in the British city of Leicester. For locals, it felt close to civil war.
Nothing like this has happened before in Britain’s most multicultural city. In recent months, though, something has changed. Hindu nationalism has come to Britain.
In India, hatred against religious minorities, especially the country’s 200 million Muslims, is growing. It is fuelled by Hindutva, a common term for the Hindu nationalism propagated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organisation. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received his political education in the RSS. The ruling party, the BJP, was established in 1951 as its political wing.
Whereas Hinduism is a great and ancient religious tradition, the RSS is modern to its core, modelled on 20th-century European fascism. One of its most influential ideologues, Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar, admired the Nazis and compared Indian Muslims to Jews in Germany.
Growing tension
Today the Hindutva vision – to forge India into a Hindu, rather than religiously plural, nation – is closer than ever to being realised.
In India, this has meant death, terror and destruction, much of it involving attacks on Muslims. But the RSS’s influence is no longer confined to India. It is active in Britain. In Leicester, tensions have been growing amid a series of anti-Muslim attacks.
In May, 30 men attacked a Muslim teenager with bats and poles in the street after asking him whether he was Muslim. One of his arms was broken and he was hospitalised. An unprovoked religious attack, routine in Modi’s India but till now unusual in Britain.
Then, on 28 August, violence escalated. After India defeated Pakistan in a cricket match, a mob chanting “Death to Pakistan” took to the streets of Leicester. The mob attacked a Sikh bystander and a police officer.
In a horrific incident a few nights later, several men stormed through a Hindu majority area, attacking people and property. One man was videoed with a knife in hand, while another pulled a religious flag off a Hindu house.
Around the same time, a 20-year-old Muslim man was confronted late at night by a group of men. They asked if he was Muslim. When he said yes, they attacked him.
The threat escalated once more last Saturday. Around 200 Hindu men, most of them masked and hooded, marched through a Muslim-majority area in East Leicester. As they marched, they shouted “Jai Shri Ram”. This innocuous-sounding Hindu religious statement, meaning “Hail Lord Ram!”, has become synonymous with Hindutva violence in India.
Riots continue in Leicester, England. Hindu far right groups shouting ‘Jai Sri Ram’ and attacking Muslims on the streets. pic.twitter.com/97fTIBsBiX
Across the sub-continent lynch mobs have forced Muslims to repeat “Jai Shri Ram”. The crowds that tore down a 16th-century mosque brick by brick in Ayodhya chanted the slogan. Some Hindutva protesters in Leicester, chanting “Jai Shri Ram”, assaulted Muslim bystanders. Local Muslim men confronted the Hindutva protesters. Police kept the groups apart.
More Muslims gradually arrived and at sunset dozens prostrated themselves in prayer in congregation in the middle of Uppingham Road.
A dangerous phenomenon
As night set in violence broke out – from both sides. Muslims attacked one Hindutva marcher in his car, pushing it over onto its side.
A masked man climbed onto a Hindu temple and took down its flag. On Melton Road, as two lines of police officers stood between Hindutva and Muslim protestors, some members of the Hindutva mob threw glass bottles towards the Muslims. “I saw the whole road blocked,” a witness told Middle East Eye. “The police had batons and dogs. They weren’t letting anyone through. I saw police officers scattered throughout the surrounding streets.”
Eventually, police managed to disperse the crowds, but more violence erupted the following evening. Hindus spray-painted the outer wall of a mosque, while Muslims removed a temple flag and set it on fire. Masked men of both groups roamed the streets, before being dispersed by police.
Most press reporting so far suggests that both sides of the conflict are equally to blame, as Faisal Hanif has noted for Middle East Eye. It must be stressed that the picture is confused, and there have been horrifying Muslim assaults on Hindus. But the ugly events of this summer cannot be explained without taking into account the rise of the Hindutva movement in Britain.
This dangerous phenomenon of great importance has so far been almost entirely ignored in the press. But not by India itself. In a dangerous intervention, the High Commission of India in London has painted violence in Leicester as a purely Muslim phenomenon.
An inflammatory press release on Monday stated: “We strongly condemn the violence perpetrated against the Indian Community in Leicester and vandalization of premises and symbols of Hindu religion.”
This is sinister.
Who is Indian?
By only condemning attacks on Hindus, it turns a blind eye to the violence against Muslims. The Indian High Commission is unforgivably taking sides in a religious conflict in a foreign country.
It’s standard practice from Modi’s government to favour Hindus and ignore anti-Muslim violence back home in India – thus allowing fanatical militants to terrorise minorities with impunity. Yet there is an even more disturbing element to the High Commission of India’s press release: it refers to “violence perpetrated against the Indian community”.
In fact, as the Indian High Commission must have known, the clashes were largely between people with an Indian background.
The majority of Leicester’s Muslims are Indian, with many tracing their origins to Gujarat, the site of the 2002 massacre in which Modi, then chief minister of Gujaraat, was implicated. The statement, therefore, suggests that the High Commission recognises Indian Hindus but not Indian Muslims as part of the “Indian community”.
This in itself is a terrifying manifestation of Hindutva ideology, which paints India as a fundamentally Hindu country assaulted by foreign Muslim invasions, so that Indian Muslims today are themselves not a real part of the nation.
MEE approached the Indian High Commission for a comment, but there was no response until this column went to print.
It’s deeply worrying that the Indian High Commission should breach all diplomatic protocol by echoing the ugly language of religious militants back in India. Many Hindus in Leicester reject the Indian High Commission analysis.
We spoke to a young Hindu woman who fears for the safety of her local area. Speaking on condition of anonymity, this is what she told us: “My grandma goes to the Mandir [temple] daily so I don’t feel good about that. Mob mentality is terrifying,” she said.
“This was something that always scared me about the rise of the BJP in India – how that’s going to impact the diaspora. It’s so sad to see – growing up here it’s always been largely peaceful between all communities. This is horrific.”
Shamingly it has suited British politicians to turn a blind eye to the rise of the Hindutva movement in the UK. Cynical electoral politics may be the reason.
Strategic silence
In recent years, the Conservative Party has entered into an unspoken electoral alliance with India’s ruling BJP.
It is often forgotten that Modi was banned from entering Britain after the 2002 massacre of over 1,000 Muslims in Gujarat. But in 2014 Modi was elected as prime minister, and since then the British government has embraced him wholeheartedly.
In April former prime minister Boris Johnson visited India, where he announced new investment deals in technology and posed in photos with Modi. No mention of the murderous attacks on Muslims on the rise throughout the country.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States considers India the second most likely country to experience mass killings in 2022. Yet, the British government maintains a strategic silence on the matter.
In fact, the Conservatives seem determined to suck up to Modi’s BJP. In May a delegation of Indian opposition politicians were received at a reception in the British parliament. Conservative MPs were noticeably absent, according to a report in the Guardian.
Former Home Secretary Priti Patel is an open admirer of Modi, praising his “dynamic leadership” when she was in government. In 2014, she went to the extraordinary lengths of writing a letter of congratulations to HSS-UK, the overseas wing of the RSS, for their event entitled “RSS: A Vision in Action – a new Dawn”. Patel told its members they “should be very proud of what they have achieved for Britain’s Hindu community.”
The Conservative Party has seen potential for electoral gain in collaborating with the ruling BJP, which responds in kind. In the 2019 general election, the general-secretary of the National Council of Hindu Temples, which has links with the BJP, was suspended after revelations that he had been personally urging people to vote Conservative on social media.
In the same year, the president of the Hindu Forum of Britain was videoed telling an audience that she would ban Labour politicians from Hindu functions. A group called Overseas Friends of BJP UK, meanwhile, invited 300 Indians to a meeting with Conservative candidate Dr Anwara Ali and Conservative MP Bob Blackman.
Blackman has a record of Islamophobic views, is known for retweeting anti-Muslim social media posts by the former leader of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson (he later apologised citing an “error” over the tweet), and sharing a platform with the far-right commentator Katie Hopkins. In 2018 he hosted Hindu nationalist leader Tapan Ghosh in Parliament. Ghosh has called on the UN to “control the Muslim birth rate world over”.
This may help explain why, at the time of writing, there has been no statement on the violence from British Home Secretary Suella Braverman – and little substantial coverage of the story in Britain’s notoriously Islamophobic mainstream press.
It’s time for Britain’s ruling Conservatives to stop ingratiating themselves with Modi – and wake up to his link to far-right communal politics, not just in India but in Britain too.
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Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
Imran Mulla studies History at Cambridge University.
Featured image: In Leicester, tensions have been growing amid a series of anti-Muslim attacks in recent months (Video screen grab via MEE)
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***
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech. Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale.
Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation:
But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms. To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?
This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.
We recognized the threats that the old weapons created. We came together as communities to minimize these threats. We created international rules, norms and expectations. We never saw that as a threat to our individual liberties – rather, it was a preservation of them. The same must apply now as we take on these new challenges.
Ardern noted how extremists use speech to spread lies without noting that non-extremists use the same free speech to counter such views. To answer her question on “how do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists” is that you convince people using the same free speech. Instead, Ardern appears to want to silence those who have doubts.
While referring to a global censorship coalition as a “light-touch approach to disinformation,” Ardern revealed how sweeping such a system would likely be. She defended the need for such global censorship on having to combat those who question climate change and the need to stop “hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology.”
“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?”
That is the same rationale used by authoritarian countries like China, Iran, and Russia to censor dissidents, minority groups, and political rivals. What is “hateful” and “dangerous” is a fluid concept that government have historically used to silence critics or dissenters.
Ardern is the smiling face of the new generation of censors. At least the old generation of censors like the Iranians do not pretend to support free speech and openly admit that they are crushing dissent. The point is that we need to be equally on guard when censorship is pushed from the left with the best of motivations and the worst of means.
As the great civil libertarian Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
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***
23 September 2022 marks the start of the referendum on integration into the Russian Federation in the Donbass (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics), Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Voting conditions in each region vary depending on the security situation.
On this Friday morning, I join a group of four women who are part of their district’s electoral commission at around 8.30 am. Despite the cold and the pouring rain, they are going door-to-door for 12 hours to allow their fellow citizens to vote for the referendum on integration with the Russian Federation, without leaving their homes.
Equipped with a paper list of voters, ballot papers and a portable sealed ballot box, the four women have four days to visit as many voters as possible. The aim is to minimise the number of voters who will have to go to the polling stations on 27 September 2022 to make their wishes known in the referendum on the integration of the DPR into the Russian Federation.
Because of the daily shelling by the Ukrainian army against the residential areas of Donetsk, Gorlovka and Makeyevka, it would be extremely dangerous if long queues formed in front of the polling stations.
So it is the members of the electoral commissions, volunteers, who take the risk in place of the voters, going from house to house, from building to building, to get people to vote in their homes. And on the first day of this referendum on integration into the Russian Federation, the weather does not make things easy.
But despite the risk of bombing, the rain, the mud and their soaked shoes, the four women I accompany continue their duty, and knock on every door. The procedure is almost the same as in a polling station. The voter shows his passport, his identity is checked, he signs opposite his name in the list, fills in his ballot paper and puts it in the sealed ballot box. In the absence of a polling booth and a suitable place (some people vote on their doorstep), the women I accompany simply look away as the person ticks the box that corresponds to their choice.
See the report filmed on site, with French subtitles:
Other teams, like the one followed by Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, use a binder as a mini voting booth.
The sealed ballot box will only be opened in the evening, once it has been deposited at the district polling station, thus respecting the procedures aimed at ensuring the reliability of the vote. For those who could not (or did not want to) vote at home, the polling stations will be open on 27 September 2022.
In the DPR, the vote is monitored by 129 foreign observers from Italy, France, Russia, Venezuela, Romania, Togo and South Africa. And no less than 542 journalists from DPR, Russia, the UK, China, France, Italy, Portugal, Venezuela and Qatar are covering the event.
In the Kherson region, the security situation allows the referendum on integration into the Russian Federation to be held in polling stations, as can be seen in the images by Patrick Lancaster.
For my part, it comes as no surprise that all the voters I visited this morning are voting for integration into the Russian Federation, and doing so in an ostensible manner. As one of the women who voted today said: “We are for Russia, we want nothing else”.
Another explained her vote for integration in this referendum as “Russia is those who have not betrayed us, those who help us, those who respect our choice, help us and support us”.
It is clear that the recent bombings of the Ukrainian army against civilians did not discourage people from voting. On the contrary, they have strengthened the will of the Donetsk inhabitants to choose integration with the Russian Federation in this referendum.
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***
I received a great questions from a German reader who also happens to be a journalist. He asked, “What would be a way and what would be the practical implications if Europe in general and Germany in particular were to break with the US in order to find a European peace and economic framework including Russia? ”
The craven sycophancy demonstrated by Germany, France and the United Kingdom in their passionate embrace of America’s confrontation with Russia is now on life support. Despite continued bombastic threats to keep arming Ukraine until Russia collapses, economic reality is hitting the Europeans like an icy cold shower from a fire hose. Rapid inflation, particularly in the energy sector, is forcing factories and businesses to shutter operations. The de-industrialization of Europe, especially Germany and the UK, has started. German steel plants are closing, German bakeries are trying to figure out how to pay soaring utility bills while still making bread and pretzels and German toilet-paper manufacturer Hakle GmbH has applied for insolvency proceedings in self-administration. If you don’t have a bidet or a bucket full of sand, toilet paper is an essential item. The inflationary spiral may lead to the day where it is cheaper to wipe your ass with a 100 Euro note than three sheets of Hakle.
So, the economic situation in each of the countries is going to create enormous domestic pressure for the respective European governments, which currently are cheer-leading Ukraine and cursing Russia, to rethink their policies. The Russia/Ukraine war already has created significant fissures among EU members, with Hungary refusing to impose further sanctions on Russia. Cold, hungry voters will become increasingly outraged at sending millions of dollars to Ukraine while deprivation multiples from Berlin to London.
Europe’s rift with Russia is huge and Russia is not in a mood to forgive the insults hurled at all things Russian, theft of Russian financial resources and Europe’s facilitation of terrorist attacks on the soon to be new Russian citizens from the oblasts of Kherson, Zaporhyzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia holds the critical trump card–it can turn on the flow of gas and oil essential to rekindle manufacturing and home heating in Europe. But I do not think Russia will do so without a quid pro quo. What could that be?
How about Europe breaking with NATO? Or, more simply put, the break up of NATO. Up to this point Europe has embraced the delusion that Russia cannot function economically without a European market. The last six months of Russia’s Special Military Operation have proven that the opposite is true–without Russia’s key resources Europe is a dead economy walking naked into a frozen winter.
Europe’s two largest trading partners are China and the United States. Europe runs a trade deficit with China. If China demands payment in dollars, rather Euros, then the inflationary pressure on Europe will escalate. Why? Because the value of the U.S. dollar has soared relative to the Euro and British pound sterling. They will have to spend more Euros to buy dollars, which means the trade deficit with China is likely to worsen.
The situation with the United States is the opposite. The United States has run a deficit with Europe who, in turn, has enjoyed a surplus. That surplus will go away or, at a minimum, shrink dramatically. Germany’s ability to export products to the United States will weaken because of the price of the dollar and because European factories will close or cut back on production.
Barring a miracle turnaround–i.e, inflation disappears and the energy crisis dissipates–the situation in Europe will become more dire. The history of these kinds of economic upheaval is littered with the corpses of politicians that insisted on pushing policies that hurt their voters. Germany’s Weimar Republic’s failure paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler to power. I am not suggesting a new Hitler is waiting in the wings, but I do believe that the power now wielded by the Greens across Europe will be curtailed or even snuffed out.
The United States is facing its own looming economic disaster. The collapse of the stock market–now down over 20% since the first of the year–is likely to continue. Notwithstanding the Biden administration’s strident insistence that there is no recession, the signs of recession are mounting, especially in the housing market. But the worsening economic picture is not yet sufficient to generate the necessary political pressure among the propagandized American electorate to back away from sending billions to Ukraine. A major shock of stagflation or a collapse of the Ukrainian army, however, could change that calculus.
The United States and Europe are playing a high stakes poker game with Russia. They’ve bet all their chips that Ukraine will either defeat Russia or force Russia to the bargaining table and that Putin, with hat in hand, will crawl on his belly before the western masters and beg for relief. That is insane. But there are many politicians and pundits inhabiting the dark corners of Washington who keenly believe this fantasy.
Russia does not play poker. Russia plays chess and plays it well. Russia’s burgeoning trade and military relations with China, Iran, India and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Brazil is making Putin’s position stronger, not weaker. The eventual collapse of Ukraine as a result of a wrecked economy and/or battlefield defeats, will be more than a black eye for NATO and, by extension, Europe. It would likely destroy the raison d’etre for NATO. That in turn will lay the foundation for a rapprochement with Russia sans the United States.
The age of the United States’ Colossus is nearing its end. Uncle Sam will no longer have a pack of yipping European Yorkshires, Poodles and Dachshunds on a leash. I think we are on the threshold of a new multi-polar international order that will finally shatter the legacy of European colonialism and American imperialism. As Garland Nixon has wisely noted, “General Winter is on the march.”
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***
Did the CIA lie, cheat and betray its friends and business partners in ways that even Donald Trump might envy? A rapidly unfolding intelligence scandal indicates that the answer is yes.
The dark world of cyber-age espionage is on full display in the unfolding scandal involving the CIA and Crypto AG, the encryption company based in Zug, Switzerland.
The BND sold its share in Crypto to the CIA in 1993. Crypto AG, which also collaborated closely with the National Security Agency, was liquidated in 2018.[1]
Crypto AG sold encryption machines to more than 100 governments seeking protection for diplomatic communications and other sensitive records.
scramble messages and code them and then decode them at the other end so that governments can’t listen to what you’re saying to your diplomats or to your military or to your spies. It’s designed to protect the secrecy of countries communications.
Little did Crypto AG’s customers know that the encryption company they hired to safeguard their sensitive records secretly downloaded them to the CIA and BND.
The CIA history of the Crypto operation called it “the intelligence coup” of the 20th century. The Agency boasted,
foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany to have their most secret communications read by at least two…foreign countries.
According to the CIA history, “Crypto machines supplied roughly 40 percent of all the foreign communications U.S. code breakers processed for intelligence.”[2]
As the Crypto AG scandal unfolded, Swiss public broadcaster SRF revealed that Omnisec, a second Swiss encryption company, also shared the secrets of its government clients with the CIA and the BND.
SRF reported that, “like Crypto, Omnisec had sold manipulated equipment to foreign governments and armies.”
SRF added, “An investigation by the Swiss Parliament…concluded…that Switzerland’s own intelligence service had benefitted from the information gathered by its foreign counterparts through the encryption firm.” Omnisec, one of Crypto AG’s biggest competitors, also sold “manipulated” encryption devices to UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank.[3]
Meanwhile, CovertAction Magazine has obtained new evidence in the PROMIS software affair, a related cyber-espionage scandal during the Reagan administration.
The new evidence involves a secret U.S. plan to distribute PROMIS databases, with “a back door,” to collect intelligence in the Middle East in the mid-1980s.
Modified copies of the database enabled the CIA to download the secrets countries stored on PROMIS.
A letter dated May 14, 1985, from Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds to U.S. Attorney William F. Weld in Boston, outlines a covert plan to distribute PROMIS databases with “a special retrieval unit” in the Middle East.
Letter from Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds to U.S. Attorney William F. Weld in Boston, outlining covert plan to distribute adapted PROMIS databases with “a special retrieval unit” [read: back door] for use in secret U.S. intelligence operations. [Source: Jack Colhoun]
Reynolds wrote,
“As agreed, Messrs. Manucher Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi, and [Assistant Secretary for Defense] Richard Armitage will broker the transaction of Promise [sic] software to Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz for resales and general distribution or as gifts on his region.”
Reynolds insisted,
“Promise [sic] must have a soft arrival. No paper work, customs, or delay.” He added importantly, “It must be equipped with the special retrieval unit. As before, you must walk the financial experts through the Credit Suisse into National Commerce Bank.”[4]
Ghorbanifar, an Iranian, and Khashoggi, a Saudi, were arms dealers. Mahfouz, a Saudi financier, represented the National Commerce Bank.[5]
Unlike Crypto AG or Omnisec, Inslaw, Inc., which developed PROMIS software in the early 1980s, was not owned by the CIA and the BND. Inslaw, which was privately owned, claimed that senior officials in the Reagan administration conspired with the Department of Justice to acquire PROMIS illegally by driving the company into bankruptcy. Inslaw also asserted that modified PROMIS was used in secret U.S. intelligence operations.
“The Inslaw Affair,” a September 1992 investigative report by the House Judiciary Committee, found the small Washington, D. C., software firm’s claims credible.
The Judiciary Committee report stated,
“There appears to be strong evidence, as indicated by the findings in two Federal court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice ‘acted willfully and fraudulently’ and ‘took, converted and stole’ Inslaw’s Enhanced PROMIS by ‘trickery, fraud and deceit.’” Further, the report stated, “It appears that these actions against Inslaw were implemented…under the direction of high-level Justice Department officials.”[6]
There has not been a full official accounting of the PROMIS affair. But the May 1985 letter from Assistant Attorney General Reynolds to U.S. Attorney Weld on PROMIS is a good place to start.
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Jack Colhoun is an independent historian of the Cold War (University of Wisconsin, Madison, BA, 1968; York University , PhD, 1976), an investigative reporter and professional archival researcher. Colhoun has written widely on U.S. foreign policy and covert intelligence operations. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Toronto Star, The Nation, The Progressive, National Catholic Reporter, Covert Action Quarterlyand CovertAction Magazine. Colhoun can be reached at: [email protected].
Notes
[1] Greg Miller, “The Intelligence Coup of the Century,” Washington Post, February 20, 2020; Greg Miller interview, “Fresh Air,” National Public Radio, March 20, 2020; for background on Crypto AG, see Wayne Madsen, “Crypto AG: The NSA’s Trojan Whore?” CovertAction Magazine, Winter 1998.
[2] Greg Miller interview, National Public Radio, March 20, 2020; Greg Miller, “Swiss Report: CIA’s Ownership of Crypto Jeopardized Neutrality,” Washington Post, November 11, 2020.
[3] “Report Claims CIA Controlled Second Swiss Encryption Firm,” Agence France-Presse, November 27, 2020; “Second Swiss Firm Allegedly Sold Corrupted Encryption Spying Devices,” Swiss Public Television SWI, November 26, 2020.
[4] Letter from Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds to U.S. Attorney William F. Weld, Boston, May 14, 1985.
[5] Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 37, 134-36; Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 172, 328, 348, 352.
[6] “The Inslaw Affair,” An Investigative Report of the House Judiciary Committee, September 10, 1992, 4-6.
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***
An aerospace industry conference took on more of a tent revival feel on Wednesday when an Air Force general took the stage and sought to fire the audience up about the existential threat he said China posed to the American way of life and the urgent work needed to defeat it.
“I’m untethered as of now,” said Gen. Mike Minihan, the head of Air Mobility Command, in his keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland. “I do have something to say. I can’t see the clock, I’m going to go ‘till I go. I’m finally that rank.”
The general’s speech was titled ‘The Mobility Manifesto,’ and he turned up the volume as high as the title implies.
“I’m gonna speak not speech!” he said. “Means it’s going to come out a little wobbly at times, maybe stutter, I might get some spittle going … Means that I’m Irish! You’ve certainly already heard that when I talk about things that I love I get emotional! And you’ll hear the passion in my voice.”
As Minihan laid out, the U.S. military is currently not ready “to fight and win inside the first island chain” in the Pacific against the Chinese military in a potential conflict. This is a problem because “your kids grow up subservient to a rules-based order that benefits only one country if we lose this,” he said.
“There is no access to the global commons. There is no ‘free and open.’ There is no rules-based order. So the stakes are incredibly high,” he continued.
The Air, Space & Cyber Conference is the biggest of the year for the Air and Space Forces, filled with star-studded generals, titans of the aerospace industry, and thousands of service members from both the U.S. and from foreign militaries around the world. This year’s event was the largest ever, with 16,000 registrants and standing room only at several of the speaker panels.
Minihan is far from the first speaker at a service-wide conference to warn about the threat of China and the urgency to face it. In fact, the message was so persistent at the 2021 edition of the conference that one reporter made it into a meme. But the general’s passionate tone and one-liners stood out amid the scripted deliveries of most of the other keynote speeches.
“Lethality matters most,” he said. “When you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger,” Minihan said.
That kind of language would not be unusual coming from other commanders like the former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a retired Marine general whose famous quotes include “There are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot,” and “If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.” But, Minihan is not a former Marine rifle company commander like Mattis was. He’s a C-130 transport plane pilot who now commands the Air Force’s C-17 and C-5 cargo jet fleet, plus C-130s, KC-135, KC-10, KC-46, and other refueling and transport aircraft.
“Why is the mobility guy talking about lethality?” Minihan asked in his manifesto. In answer, he reminded the audience that the Air Force has a kill count which could make even Mattis balk.
“This is who we are. We are lethal. Do not apologize for it!” the general said, after listing distinguished Air Force commanders like Gen. Curtis LeMay and Brig. Gen. Robin Olds, who had no scruples against killing the enemy.
“The pile of our nation’s enemy dead, the pile that is the biggest, is in front of the United States Air Force,” he said. “This is why we mutinied! In 1947,” the year the Air Force separated from the Army as the result of an act of Congress.
Considering the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, where a fight with China would most likely occur, the U.S. military likely would not be successful if Air Mobility Command can’t get troops, ammunition, and equipment to the fight fast enough.
“There is too much water and too much distance for anyone else to do it relevantly, at pace, at speed, at scale,” Minihan said. “Everybody’s role is critical, but Air Mobility Command is the maneuver for the joint force. If we don’t have our act together, nobody wins. Nobody’s lethal. Nobody’s in position.”
Minihan is no stranger to making bold statements. In January, the general tweeted a photo of a mental health appointment on his calendar along with the words “Warrior heart. No stigma.” Though many military commanders encourage their subordinates to seek mental health, few open up about their own struggles or efforts to seek help, let alone share their own personal calendar.
“Mental health is simply health,” he told Task & Purpose at the time. “There can be no stigma in my headquarters, command, or family.”
Minihan also earned kudos on social media when his official service photo circulated on Reddit last October, shortly after taking the helm of Air Mobility Command. Though most four-star generals sport a chestful of colorful ribbons on their uniforms in their official service photo, Minihan’s bore only three, all of which were unit-based rather than individual awards.
“Gen. Minihan’s decision to wear these three ribbons is in accordance with AFI 36-2903 guidance to wear ‘all or some’ [ribbons], and the some he selected aligns with his team-focused leadership approach,” Lindsey Wilkinson, the deputy director of public affairs for Air Mobility Command, told Task & Purpose at the time.
Airmen say the general backs up his gestures with words and actions. One airman who worked in aircraft maintenance at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas and as a flight engineer at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas when Minihan was there, told Task & Purpose that the officer “was always approachable, you never felt like you had to be on edge around him.”
Minihan “always truly made you feel as if you were the only person that mattered at that moment when the two of you spoke,” said the airman, who stayed anonymous because they were not authorized to speak with the press.
Image: U.S. Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan, left, Air Mobility Command commander, and Capt. Madeline Slagley, 62nd Maintenance Squadron officer in charge, FaceTime Slagley’s family at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, July 7, 2022. Minihan coined Slagley as a star performer during his visit to JBLM. (Senior Airman Callie Norton/U.S. Air Force)
On Wednesday, the general seemed intent on motivating his people and the larger Air Force to move faster in order to protect themselves in the event of a conflict with China. The U.S. is currently not ready to win in the first island chain in the Pacific, but it can be by August 2023 if everyone moves fast enough, he argued.
“They are tailor-making an air force to kill you,” Minihan said, about China. “Not you, hypothetically, you! Look in the mirror. You!”
Other Americans have faced similar odds in the past. The general referenced World War II commanders like Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, Adm. Raymond Spruance and Gen. Ira Eaker, each of whom faced a “quality, quantity, tailor-made force to kill him.” Those commanders prevailed, and so too can today’s U.S. troops if they “generate your courage. Aim the pointy end at the scary place, and execute,” Minihan repeated three times.
It would also help if Air Mobility Command can address four gaps in its capabilities that the general is concerned about: command and control, navigation, maneuvering under fire, and tempo. To bridge those gaps, Minihan urged his troops to get creative. For example, his troops could fly a KC-46 refueling tanker with just one pilot so that other pilots can fly other jets; or stick 16,000 pounds of gas under the wings of a C-130J so it can fly to a forward-deployed fuel bladder where a fighter can use the gas to fill up.
“I don’t think fighter pilots are the only ones that have the birthright to fly an airplane solo,” Minihan said. “In order to generate the tempo required to win, it’s not hard to imagine” a pilot and refueling boom operator sleeping on the bunk of a tanker jet while another pilot and boom operator pulls a shift flying the plane and refueling friendly aircraft.
“I’d rather test that out now than try to figure that out when the shooting’s going on,” he said.
Lt. Gen. Michael Minihan, center, pilots a C-130J Super Hercules over Central Arkansas, Sept. 17, 2021. A command pilot with more than 3,400 flight hours, Minihan completed his senior officer course on the C-130J during a recent visit to LRAFB. Minihan was promoted to the rank of General prior to assuming command of Air Mobility Command on Oct. 5, 2021. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jayden Ford)
But that kind of creativity needs to happen now, the general said, not down the road.
“Nobody is going to care what our plans are for five to 10 years if we lose tomorrow,” he said. “Our toys, our training, our desires are meaningless unless we maneuver them to unfair advantage and unrepentant lethality.”
That was likely why the general chose to be so forceful and passionate in his delivery on Wednesday, and why he chose to call his speech a manifesto.
“I’m not equating the mobility manifesto to things like ‘I have a dream’ or ‘The Declaration of Independence,’” he said. “But I do have intentions, and I do have an opinion, and I do have an objective.”
The general does not have much time to share it, he said.
“We are not ready to fight and win inside the first island chain but we WILL BE in a year,” Minihan said. “‘Well sir, that’s a lot to do in a short time.’ Yeah, no shit.”
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David covers the Air Force, Space Force and anything Star Wars-related. He joined Task & Purpose in 2019, after covering local news in Maine and FDA policy in Washington D.C. David loves hearing the stories of individual airmen and their families and sharing the human side of America’s most tech-heavy military branch. Contact the author here.
Featured image: Gen. Mike Minihan, Air Mobility Command commander, speaks to Team Dover Airmen during an all call at Dover AFB, Delaware, May 5, 2022. (Senior Airman Faith Schaefer/U.S. Air Force).
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***
US regulators on Friday said they would withdraw all remaining portions of the interim registration review decision for the weed killer glyphosate.
The move comes after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion saying the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had violated the law in its assessment of glyphosate, which is the world’s most widely used weed killer and the active ingredient in Roundup and numerous other herbicide products.
The court found that EPA had ignored important studies in its human health safety assessment of the chemical and had also violated the Endangered Species Act. The EPA’s withdrawal comes before an October 1 deadline under which the agency was supposed to have completed its assessment. EPA had asked the court to extend its deadline but the court denied the request.
In its June 17 opinion, the 9th circuit said the agency’s 2020 assessment of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, was flawed in many ways. The federal appeals court ruled that EPA failed to follow established guidelines for determining cancer risk, ignored important studies, and discounted expert advice from a scientific advisory panel. The EPA applied “inconsistent reasoning” in finding that the chemical does not pose “any reasonable risk to man or the environment,” the panel determined.
The court vacated the human health portion of the EPA’s glyphosate assessment and said the agency needed to apply “further consideration” to evidence. The 9th Circuit also said the agency violated the Endangered Species Act in its assessment.
“EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same,” the EPA said in a statement announcing its withdrawal of the glyphosate decision. “In accordance with the court’s decision, the Agency intends to revisit and better explain its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate and to consider whether to do so for other aspects of its human health analysis.”
For the ecological portion of its review, EPA said it intends to consider what risk mitigation measures may be necessary based on the Endangered Species Act consultation for glyphosate and will prepare an analysis of how the weed killer affects monarch butterfly habitat.
EPA said that pesticide products containing glyphosate will not be affected by the withdrawal decision.
Monsanto owner Bayer AG has been seeking to put an end to thousands of lawsuits filed by U.S. Roundup users who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma and allege their exposure to the weed killer is to blame for their cancers. Monsanto introduced glyphosate weed killers in 1974 and pushed the chemical to such widespread use that it is considered the world’s most widely used herbicide.
Bayer denies there is any cancer connection to glyphosate and Roundup, and has repeatedly cited the EPA’s assurances of glyphosate safety as a key part of its litigation defense. The company has also said that the backing of the EPA and similar support from other regulators in other countries is more valid than a 2015 assessment by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which found that glyphosate was “probably” carcinogenic to humans.
The IARC finding was based on a review of years of independent, peer-reviewed, published scientific studies. The reviews by the EPA and other regulators focused more heavily on unpublished and non peer-reviewed studies submitted to regulators by Monsanto and other companies involved in making and selling the chemical.
Human health advocates have long been frustrated by what they see as EPA’s flagrant disregard for substantial evidence of a cancer risk, seen in human and animal studies. Internal Monsanto documents, obtained through Roundup litigation discovery and Freedom of Information Act requests, have demonstrated the company deployed multiple strategies to manipulate scientific literature and regulators, including the EPA.
Moreover, the internal corporate documents show Monsanto has long been aware of research showing a connection between the weed killer and cancer, but has sought to bury such research and/or attack and censor scientists who insist there is evidence of a cancer risk.
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***
California seems to fancy itself a bellwether for the rest of the country. Not content to ban all gasoline-powered cars by 2035, California’s Air Resources Board upped the ante last week by decreeing that no new natural gas space and waters heaters were to be sold after 2030, and also “proposed that all big rig trucks must go electric [!]”
A close friend farms over 10,000 acres of corn in the Midwest. The property is spread out over three counties. His operation is a “partnership farm” with John Deere… He recently received a phone call from his John Deere representative, and they want the farm to go to electric tractors and combines in 2023. He currently has 5 diesel combines that cost $900,000 each that are traded-in every 3 years. Also, over 10 really BIG tractors. JD wants him to go all electric soon. He said: “Ok, I have some questions. How do I charge these combines when they are 3 counties away from the shop in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere? How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the weather is coming in? How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to the shop 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?” There was dead silence on the other end of the phone…
Hey, let’s convert freight rail and ocean container shipping from diesel to electric!
Kent Moss’ recent AT blog laid out the hidden truths behind electric cars, including the massive amount of mining required to manufacture the batteries, which must be replaced every 3-5 years, and which cannot be recycled:
To manufacture each E.V. auto battery, the following material must be processed: 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, suppliers must dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.
As a rule of thumb, each pound of ore for metals, or brine for lithium, yields @ 1/1000th of a pound of cobalt, lithium, nickel, etc. Surely electrifying the world’s transportation would entail an unsustainable amount of rapacious mining. Even if that were not the case, this country will not blanket the landscape with the unending expanses of windmills and solar panels which would be required to electrically power all these grandiose schemes.
Once the phase-out of the internal combustion engine is too far underway to be easily reversed, we will inevitably be told that we must learn to live with less — fewer cars, boats, ATVs, appliances, snowmobiles, heat, AC, lawns, food, water — you name it. The only rational conclusion is that the goal is not to get us into electric cars, but to get us out of our own cars as much as possible, and into public transportation, bicycles, scooters, walking shoes, and high-density urban housing. Don’t worry, our elite betters will be okay, and as the Great Reset boys like to say, you will owe nothing, own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy, so shut up and pay your taxes!
Electric cars can be fun and exciting, with instantaneous torque and slick designs. However, in the long run we all will fare better if we refuse to buy electric vehicles. We can seriously disrupt these electric lunatic woke plans by not going along with them.
Refusing to cooperate also means not voting Democrat. All Democrats up and down the line are backbencher drones who dare not utter a peep of disapproval as they vote for, or at least acquiesce to, every egregious policy demanded by Pelosi, Schumer, Biden and his host of Obama handlers.
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***
As early as the end of April, Russia’s view of the war may already have begun evolving from seeing it as a regional war to seeing it as a wider war with the US and NATO. At that time, the voracious provision of weapons combined with training and real-time intelligence on targeting led Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to say that “NATO, in essence, is engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy. War means war.” On May 7, the speaker of the Russian Duma drew a similar conclusion. “The US is taking part in the military operations in Ukraine. Today, Washington is basically coordinating and engineering military operations, thus directly participating in the military actions against our country.”
That conclusion has likely been reinforced by Russia’s witnessing of “US military personnel” being “directly involved . . . in critical line functions” in the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive. On September 10, the New York Times reported that the decision by senior Ukrainian officials to increase “intelligence sharing with their American counterparts over the summer as they began to plan the counteroffensive . . . allowed the United States to provide better and more relevant information about Russian weaknesses, according to American officials.” US officials “stepped up feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines.”
The US increased its assistance to Ukraine beyond the high levels it had already achieved to the point that “Americans had ‘constantly’ discussed with Kyiv ways that Ukraine could blunt the Russian advance in the country’s east.” US chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley “regularly discussed intelligence and military support” with senior Ukrainian military leaders while US defense attaché, Brigadier General Garrick Harmon, “began having daily sessions with Ukraine’s top officers.”
On September 1, CNN reported that the US went so far as to engage in “war-gaming” with Ukraine. The New York Times has confirmed that report and added that the war games suggested that a broader offensive ordered by Zalensky would fail. “’We did do some modeling and some tabletop exercises,’ Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s policy chief, said in a telephone interview. ‘That set of exercises suggested that certain avenues for a counteroffensive were likely to be more successful than others. We provided that advice, and then the Ukrainians internalized that and made their own decision.’” New war games conducted by the US, UK and Ukraine tested and settled on the more limited counteroffensive.
The escalation in US involvement may have led Russia to conclude “that it is now in a direct war with the US, that this is now an American war.” Gilbert Doctorow has also reported that Russia may be signaling that they have reached the conclusion that they are “now fighting NATO, not just Ukraine, and it was time to escalate to all out war.” On September 21, Putin said that Russia is fighting “the entire Western military machine.”
But the Russian view has evolved, not only to see the US as directly involved in the war, but to see the US and its allies as directly involved in preventing a negotiated end to the war.
In negotiations held in March 2022 in Istanbul, Ukraine appeared ready to accept Russia’s settlement and a negotiated settlement seemed possible. Then Kiev changed its mind and turned its back on the proposal. According to Dmitry Tremin, Research Professor at the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Russian International Affairs Council, “Moscow has always suspected that this U-turn, as on previous occasions, was the result of US behind-the-scenes influence, often aided by the British and other allies.”
Moscow’s suspicion has now likely been solidified by three events. Right after the promising Istanbul meeting, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed to Kiev to correct Zelensky, telling him that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” He told Zelensky that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, the West was not.” On August 24, in his dying days as prime minister, he repeated that call, saying that now was not the time to promote a “flimsy plan for negotiation” with Russia.
A frustrating month after the Istanbul meeting, in an April 21 interview, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey did not think the war would last long after the talks. But it did, and Cavusoglu charged that
“There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue.” He said that “following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that…there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia get weaker.”
Cavusoglu’s insistence that a settlement was within reach seems to have been confirmed by a September Foreign Affairs article by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. In the article, Hill and Stent say that “According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
In a September 21 address, Putin said that he “would like to make public for the first time” that “After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kiev representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals. These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kiev was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.”
The conjunction of increasingly direct US involvement in the war and increasing evidence that the US is preventing a negotiated end to the war, seems now to have led Russia to the conclusion that Ukraine and the West will never agree to a diplomatic settlement that is acceptable to Russia.
That conclusion entails the realization that Russia will never receive guarantees either that there will be no Ukraine in NATO or that there will be no NATO in Ukraine. Following the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russia has now likely realized the reality of NATO in Ukraine.
And that crystallizes Ukraine as a security threat to Russia. Even if Ukraine never joins NATO, NATO has taken up house in Ukraine.
In the early stages of the war, Ukraine and Russia were both open to a diplomatic settlement that would create an independent Donbass with a neutral Ukraine outside NATO and NATO outside Ukraine. With the US and NATO contributing more advanced long-range weaponry, training and intelligence to a war that they are becoming increasingly directly involved in while increasingly preventing a negotiated cessation to the hostilities, Russia likely no longer sees that as a possibility. The “fundamental problem” that Russia now sees, according to Dmitri Tremin, is “Russia having to live side-by-side with a state that will constantly seek revenge and will be used by the United States, which arms and directs it, in its effort to threaten and weaken Russia.”
The problem, then, has become a much bigger problem. Russia no longer sees the war as a regional war with Ukraine with a reachable diplomatic solution, but as a wider war being fought in Ukraine with the US and NATO with a diplomatic solution having been prohibited.
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Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
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***
The Trib’s editorial: ‘Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeds’ is positively ecstatic about the Ukraine counteroffensive retaking their Kharkiv Region.
The Chicago Tribune uses this singular victory in the 7 month Russian offensive as foreshadowing a possible Ukrainian victory in the war. But the Trib omitted that the 1,000 square miles recaptured represents just 2% of the near one fifth of Ukraine under Russian control. At a 2% success rate, that would require 49 more offensives to oust Russia.
But the real issue isn’t who’s winning in the moment. It’s how to stop a war with no military end in sight, and the specter of nuclear confrontation looming. That is only possible with a negotiated settlement that provides cover for both sides to accept a truce and peace treaty.
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The Trib has consistently failed to support any negotiations, promoting instead billions more in US weaponry to prolong the killing for months, if not a year or more. Omitted from any Trib analysis is the tentative March agreement brokered by NATO member Turkey that could have ended the war within the first 2 months. Omitted also is how the UK sent PM Boris Johnson and the US sent Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Kiev to demand Ukraine president Zelensky pass on the possible deal. Why? The West needs to weaken Russia. That’s why this is a US, Russia proxy war.
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The Trib needs to part company with its government determined to spend hundreds of billions, possibly even a trillion or more, to win the proxy war against Russia it’s been provoking for the past 8 years. If the Trib commented on the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago like they are now about the Russo Ukraine war, we’d likely not be around to debate this critical matter of life and death.
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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***
The stunning victory of a far-right coalition in Italy’s parliamentary election on Sunday is largely seen from the distinct prospect of Giorgia Meloni becoming the country’s next prime minister, whose hardline views on immigration and the preservation of the “Christian family” are rooted in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party founded after World War II by the nostalgic former members of Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship.
Meloni insists that she isn’t a fascist herself, yet her party’s flag includes the symbol of the old pro-Fascist party— the tricolor flame. Two of Mussolini’s descendants, his granddaughter Rachele and his great-grandson Caio Giulio Cesare, have run under the banner of the party Meloni leads, Brothers of Italy. Meloni insists she isn’t a fascist herself, but her take on Mussolini is: “Everything he did, he did for Italy.”
All this makes the meteoric rise of this politician with a working class background a combustible mix at a juncture when the future of European politics itself seems dark and uncertain, reeling under the economic crisis.
Without doubt, Leon Trotsky’s critique of fascism is the best in the Marxist literature in the 1930s on the subject. Trotsky was the first Marxist theorist to get to the core of the destructive delirium that surrounds fascist phenomenon. Trotsky’s famous passage on the rise of fascism helps understand what is happening.
Trotsky wrote: “The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement.”
The three pillars of Meloni’s politics are zero-tolerance for illegal immigration, extreme social conservatism and, until recently, belligerent Euro-scepticism. Guardian newspaper wrote: “From Italy to Sweden, Hungary to France, the far right is once again a force to be reckoned with. Its hostility towards immigrants encourages xenophobes everywhere, including in India.”
In European politics, Italy traditionally played the role of an eager junior partner to the heavyweights that drive decision-making, France and Germany. That is almost certain to change under Meloni. The “known unknown” is as to which route she goes down — a populist such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, intent on exerting ever more control; a pugilist such as Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki; or, a more familiar conservative voice such as Liz Truss? Or, even something entirely different?
Any whichever way she goes, it matters like hell, because Italy is one of the world’s most wealthy and influential nations — a G7 member and the third biggest economy in the European Union (EU), and a NATO power. That is why the outcome of Sunday’s vote was watched nervously in European capitals and on financial markets. Simply put, the Brothers of Italy, does not inspire confidence that Rome will reclaim its role as a steady European partner — although the manifesto of the incoming centre-right coalition sought to reassure EU neighbours and NATO partners.
Indeed, Meloni may have to temper — initially, at least — as Italy is the largest beneficiary of NextGenerationEU funds and its economic difficulties are best handled with the EU’s helping hand. That said, there is an important distinction to be made when Maloni’s coalition speaks of “national interest.” Traditionally, Italian leaders pursued national interest by being friends with countries with similar values and interests. Thus, pro-Europeanism and Atlanticism became unquestioned tenets of Italian policy.
But when Meloni uses the term “national interest”, it has an altogether different connotation linked to the fascist idea of an ethnic concept of nationhood, of glorifying the Roman Empire — somewhat similar to what is happening in India or Turkey today.
It will come as no surprise if Meloni puts the European Commission bureaucrats in their place and clips the EU’s wings. She candidly said recently, “What will happen is that the gravy train will come to an end.” It is not only that she thinks Brussels is useless, but is also hostile. Citing the EU’s attempts to punish Poland and Hungary for democratic backsliding, she said, “We are facing the most powerful and violent attack against governments of sovereign nations opposing the dictatorship of politically correct ideology.”
Significantly, Meloni is not alone on this path. Apart from closeness to Hungary’s nationalist leader Viktor Orban, she also happens to be the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a pan-European umbrella party that includes Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party as well as increasingly influential parties in countries like Spain and Sweden. Meloni may have the means to tip the balance in the European Parliament in 2024 and influence the allocation of top jobs, including whether to give European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen another term.
Suffice to say, Italy may not anymore be a docile camp follower of France and Germany, but Meloni may have a gang of her own with conservative, authoritarian figures. It will almost certainly mean the weakening of ties with the likes of Presidents Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron. Meloni’s approach to the US veers toward the Trumpian right
The million dollar question is where the new Italian government is going stand on the Ukraine question. Brothers of Italy has been critics of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. But its coalition partner the Lega party retains strong links to Moscow, and Meloni will heavily rely on its support. Lega’s leader Matteo Salvini has called for a rethink of EU sanctions against Russia. Salvini draws his voter support heavily from business owners, who have expressed fears that Italy’s economy could be too heavily hit by repercussions from Western sanctions against Russia.
Besides, Meloni will also have to reckon with another of her coalition partners, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is still the showman of Italian politics and a close friend of President Putin. Berlusconi’s support to the right-wing coalition is indispensable to ensure it has a majority of seats, and as such the controversial ex-premier could still exert significant influence. Meloni’s party has no experience in government, so she will need full support from Berlusconi and Salvini. Suffice to say, in this new matrix, at the very least, Italy’s support for Ukraine could weaken.
What often goes unnoticed is that Moscow has historically had extensive personal relationships with Italian politicians. It goes back to the 1960s when Italy was home to the largest communist party in Europe. Like in Germany, governments of all stripes in Rome continued to promote economic and energy ties with Russia. From such a perspective, the shift in Italian politics is tectonic, coinciding with the transformation of the war in Ukraine from a slow burning grind to a full-fledged war. It comes amidst stirrings that the EU itself may be going through a profound rethink, as foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s latest remarks with accent on “diplomatic efforts” would suggest.
Italian elections in the past have often triggered similar trends elsewhere in Europe. Mussolini’s rise in 1920s came ahead of the Nazis in Germany. In a dramatic shift, right-wing nationalists just won in Sweden. The risk to Europe may well not be Giorgia Meloni herself, but how her influence spreads. As a veteran German commentator put it, this is also where “the biggest danger lies — That the EU tries to push her around or isolate her, and that she will resist, with the Italian electorate on her side.”
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Featured image: Meloni speaking at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida (Photo by Vox España, licensed under CC0)
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Sunday was an historic election day for Italy. A conservative alliance with a populist flair absolutely trounced the technocrats who had been running the country into the ground for the past several years.
The previous prime minister, former Goldman Sachs banker Mario Draghi, implemented one of the most restrictive – and inhuman – Covid shutdowns, which, along with supporting economically suicidal sanctions against Russia, have left Italy an economic basket case.
Replacing the bland banker will likely be Giorgia Meloni from the right-wing Sons of Italy party. Meloni will be a first for Italy: the first female prime minister. But don’t expect the Left to celebrate it: her name cannot be mentioned in the mainstream media without reference to Mussolini.
Ironically, the democratic victory of Meloni and the rest of the Italian right likely owes a great deal of gratitude to one of Europe’s most undemocratic and anti-democratic leaders: European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen.
On the eve of the Italian elections, the unelected von der Leyen warned Italians that if they voted for the “wrong” parties they would be punished. Asked about the surge of the political opposition in Italy on the eve of the elections, she warned Italian voters, “we will see the result of the vote in Italy. If things go in a difficult direction — and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland — we have the tools.”
In other words, her message to Italian voters was “yes you can vote, but if you vote in a way I do not approve of, you will be punished.”
Italians rushed to vote in a way she did not approve of. It will be interesting to see what happens.
How does any of this relate to the United States as the US moves closer to the midterm elections? Americans have also been given warnings by the political elites that they dare not vote for the “wrong” candidates or parties.
On September 1st, President Biden issued a warning similar to that of Europe’s von der Leyen. In one of the most bizarre speeches in political history, Biden warned that Trump supporters “…are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”
He spoke on a frightening, red-lit stage with US Marines serving as props on either side of him. This was no “Checkers” speech with Nixon speaking wistfully about his cocker spaniel. No, it was a declaration of war against half of the country.
A few weeks ago Sweden threw its left-wing government out and Sunday the Italians did the same. While the political differences in Europe seem more cosmetic than substantive – for example Italy’s presumptive new prime minister supports weapons to Ukraine just like her predecessor – there is still a strong feeling of popular revolt against political elites in the air.
That doesn’t mean things will easily go our way, as there is no automatic libertarian surge. But we must study hard and take advantage of every single opportunity. People are sick of the elites? That means they are likely open to the concepts of non-interventionism and sound money. Let’s help educate them!
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Featured image: Electoral posters in Cascina, Tuscany (Photo by Alexmar983, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) from nukes destroying the earth in the Cold War days of the US-Soviet arms race has been replaced today by insanely mad neocon DC puppets promoting US “Nuclear Primacy,” or the West’s first strike advantage, plunging humanity headlong into an “end of the world” danger zone risking impending nuclear holocaust.
The reaction from certain figures outside Japan left an impression of distorted admiration. There was Hillary Clinton’s cloying tribute about Abe being “a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if women are left behind.”
With another unelected Prime Minister continuing the Conservative Party’s forty-year destruction of the British family – sans the rich- and hyperinflation looming above a long predicted economic depression, let us examine the day’s headline on the ascent of Liz Truss.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II and the inheritance of the British throne by her eldest son Charles, can either be viewed as a significant event holding the possibility of positive change, or the further manifestation of a beguiling and deceptive show of imperial/colonial self importance.
Lebanon and Israel are attempting to reach a deal on their shared maritime borders which could solve the financial, social, and political problems that Lebanon has been facing which almost brought the small nation on the Mediterranean Sea to ‘failed-state’ status.
According to a gaggle of academics at the University of Calgary, all news reports and opinions contrary to the pretzel twisted narratives of the state on the situation in the Ukraine are nothing less than Russian propaganda and “foreign interference.”
We are all familiar with the Enlightenment (late 1600s to early 1800s), not least because we studied it in our history books in school. We also learned that before the Enlightenment – which brought about the gradual re-introduction of science into society – there were the medieval universities of philosophy, known as Scholasticism, that dominated education in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. What we don’t hear much about is the transition between the two, how science came to dominate thinking, who was involved, and what was there before.
New York police officers have scored a big win in their fight against the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate that cost some their jobs, with a New York Supreme Court judge ruling that the mandate—as it applies to members of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA)—is “invalid” and that fired cops must be given back their jobs.
How can we judge the ultimate effectiveness of oversight and reforms? Well, the CIA plotted to assassinate my friend, American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, in 1972, yet nearly fifty years of “reforms” did little to inhibit them from recently sketching out another political murder targeting Julian Assange. Putting that in perspective, you probably own shoes older than the CIA’s most recent plot to murder a dissident… or rather the most recent plot that we know of.
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From the summary of the 2015 published book entitled Ukraine: ZBIG’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated:
Ukraine: ZBIG’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated speaks to the historical and geostrategic moves by the West to control the Eurasian landmass: the broken promises and treaties, the geostrategic missteps and, finally, how Grand Chessboard fundamentalism actually catalyzed Russia’s re-emergence as a global power, shifted geostrategic power eastward and, proverbially, snatched defeat from the jaws of a U.S./NATO victory.
Seven years later based on today’s grand chessboard stage, the above scenario imminently appears to be a done deal in the making. With a Friday September 23rd headline claiming World War III is already here from Mike Adams of naturalnews,com, the first two sentences of his article assert:
World War III has already begun. You simply aren’t being told this because your government and dishonest media outlets are dedicated to keeping you in the dark.
Though some may construe this narrative as sensationalized click bait, sadly it does appear World War III is upon us.
With the hectic tempo of doomsday events unfolding this past week in combination with the hyped-up social media buzz of cryptic dire predictions for September 24th that include the “death of America,” now that it’s come and gone, though thankfully nothing so cataclysmic as 9/11 has occurred, arguably the world does appear to be on the verge of earthshaking calamity.
More news breaking stories out of China on Friday September 23rd are reporting that a 50-mile long (80km) military convoy is headed into the Chinese capital Beijing, along with all air and rail travel shut down.
Unconfirmed rumors of a coup overthrowing Xi Jinping now on house arrest are flooding Chinese social media, speculating that members of the CCP old guard have seized control and that an attack on Taiwan is next. on Saturday September 24th, 2022 Newsweek ran a story stating that unsubstantiated reports indicate that the People’s Liberation China Army commanding General Li Qiaoming has replaced Ji Jinping.
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) from nukes destroying the earth in the Cold War days of the US-Soviet arms race has been replaced today by insanely mad neocon DC puppets promoting US “Nuclear Primacy,” or the West’s first strike advantage, plunging humanity headlong into an “end of the world” danger zone risking impending nuclear holocaust.
And now we’ve entered the age of hypersonic technology where missiles can travel five times the speed of sound, the West currently in a game of playing catch-up to both Russia and China. Numerous military analysts project the West will lose World War III against the East.
As of June 30, 2022, CNN reports that based on its latest early phase hypersonic testing, the US is floundering to develop a full range of hypersonic warfare that can compete against Russia. Meanwhile, announced on Friday September 23rd, 20022, the Pentagon just awarded a near $1 billion contract to Raytheon-Northrop to build Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missiles for the US Air Force scheduled for delivery in 2027. The problem is, humans are likely to be extinct wiped out in the upcoming world war.
Currently at the precipice of World War III disaster, by malific design our enemy bloodlines have set into motion the West versus the East wartime operations raging in a European and Pacific theater, ignited from fast expanding Ukraine to greater Europe all the way to Pacific Asia’s Taiwan. The globalist plan appears imminent to deploy Eastern powers of Russia, China and Iran to intentionally destroy an already weakened West, currently in freefall decline by design. Luciferians’ road to perdition is sacrificing the Western bloc of nations on today’s two front chopping block. This bleak endgame scenario is further backed by government sourced data on deagel.com, projecting the US population by 2025 to be 65 million people, a colossal culling of over 80% from its current population of 332 million.
The US/NATO has nearly depleted its own weapons stockpile, sent to the Kiev regime where at least 70% ends up sold on Ukraine’s notorious black market. With the West’s arsenal nearly emptied, plus the US fighting force severely weakened by COVID bioweapon mandates, the West has been rendered virtually defenseless in a world war against the combined forces of Russia and China on two fronts, leaving its only viable option nuclear, as in Israel’s Samson Option. If that’s the case, we all lose. This dangerous endgame is the elites’ last stand.
On the 15th of September, less than a week prior to Putin’s nuclear war warning on Wednesday September 21st, a Business Insiderarticle was published entitled “Moscow Could Be Pushed to ‘Nuclear Escalation’ if the US Overreacts to Russia’s Disastrous Invasion of Ukraine, New Report Warns.”
On Tuesday September 20th, CNN, the news network that relishes bringing you bad news that’s almost all lies, reported:
US and Canadian warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday following weekend remarks from President Joe Biden that the US would defend Taiwan in the event it is attacked by China.
On last week’s episode of 60 Minutes, Biden was asked point blank if the US would defend Taiwan if attacked by China. He emphatically repeated his prior commitment to defend Taiwan, even sending US troops, something he stops short of in Ukraine.
The feebleminded president also claims in the same breath that the US still maintains its “one China policy.” Biden’s created an ambivalent mess, inviting upheaval in every corner of the globe that feeds right into the elites’ agenda, minimizing the chance of a peaceful, negotiated settlement between the two Chinese nations, similar to the divide and rule elements keeping the two Koreas apart. Puppets dance to the tune of their puppetmasters every time.
Willfully violating others’ airspace, territorial limits and breeching hostile nations’ national security are invariably prewar indicators accompanied by warmongering rhetoric by world puppet leaders, combined with saber-rattling show-of-force muscle-flexing always to heighten global tensions and conflict. On the one hand, these violations are childish games of intimidation with “my gun’s bigger than yours” taunt, specifically executed to piss off the enemy to escalate conditions to the next level. On the other hand, they’re also a surefire marker and precursor prior to igniting the next major war.
Already this month and next we’re seeing an influx of yet another predictable prewar marker – multiple large-scale joint military exercises. Recently more are ongoing than ever before. Currently China and Russia’s navies are participating in sea operations together.
China is also now immersed in a joint exercise with India, while next month India has scheduled high altitude warfare training with the US Army near the hotly disputed India-China border. Another US-India joint mountainous exercise in late August enflamed the Chinese to no end, but India is attempting to walk the fine line straddling neutrality with both the East and West.
Earlier this month, while immersed in Ukraine, Russia led the Vostok-2022 exercises in northeast Asia involving 50,000 troops belonging to the military forces of China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Syria. For the first time, China deployed forces from all its branches in a single, multinational joint operation with a half dozen other nations. Not to be outdone, not far away at the exact same time, the US and South Korea engaged in wargaming joint maneuvers using artillery, tanks and attack aircraft. This of course enflames North Korea which has always been aligned with Russia and China.
Meanwhile, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un understandably reacts with agitation, as the once on-the-table Korean reunification plan is cast further aside each time the US and South Korea stage another show of force. Kim Jong-un recently said he will never give up his nuclear weapons and missiles as long as the US is deemed such a major threat to his nation’s survival. The East-West divisions have grown exponentially since just a few years ago when Trump managed to stabilize frictions with both Russia and North Korea. Whenever US relations sour toward nations, it motivates them in self-defense to strengthen mutual ties. But then the City of London-Vatican controllers have always historically used the United States as their world bully battering ram, warring against other nations 93% of its time in existence.
On Tuesday September 20th it was announced that four referendums in both the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics to decide on whether to be part of Russia would proceed from September 23-27th.
Assuming the people of Kherson, Donetsk, Lugansk and Zaporozhye choose to rejoin Russia, in the future this would render any attacks on these areas as direct attacks against Russia proper. Though this is a major step in the right direction toward finally establishing political stability in the Donbas region, it has come at an enormous, belated cost.
If it had also been simultaneously conducted more than 8 years ago when Crimea opted for annexation in 2014, perhaps millions of lives would have been spared. This confirms that, as a minimum, Putin’s restraint constitutes a huge lapse of judgment.
In any event, the referendum is a huge, decisive positive step. Paolo Raffone, director of the CIPI Foundation, a Brussels-based geopolitical think tank, weighs in:
Once the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions are integrated in the Russian Federation, the game is over. In fact, the US president has repeatedly said that his country is not at war with Russia and that he does not want to commit US troops on the ground to fight Russia nor he wants to use non-conventional weapons. Due to the domestic problems in the US, it would be difficult to reverse such an approach at least until the presidential elections in 2024.
Meanwhile, Biden’s foreign policy “expert,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken took to Twitter to express his disapproval of Putin’s referendum announcement:
Any Russian sham ‘referenda’ in Ukraine would be illegitimate and an affront to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity…
The amount of never-ending hubris and sheer hypocrisy coming out of the filthy mouths of these sorry-ass puppet losers is incredible. The US government as a forever pawn of the planetary controllers, has centuries of historically violating in the most violent, wicked and brutal ways every single principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the rest of the world, with the US overthrowing or militarily invading 75 nations while killing 30 million humans just since World War II. Yet Blinken self-righteously preaches and condemns Russia for protecting its national security. Washington DC’s total disregard for the sanctity of life and “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of all other nations is epic in the annals of shame.
Putin’s television address to his nation this week was delayed by a day, taking place on Wednesday the 21st, announcing his partial mobilization, calling up 300,000 reservists for immediate active military duty. This enormous sized military force definitely exceeds what is required to take down Ukraine, and it cannot be done overnight. This then suggests that it’s not just about fighting in Ukraine but preparing to engage in a much larger war in Europe with the West. This expansion of Russian combat forces is the first-time any troop mobilization has ever occurred in Russia since World War II, adding another grave reminder of what is looming on our horizon as inevitable and seemingly unavoidable.
A September 21stzerohedge.com article pointedly states:
In July 2010, the International Court of Justice issued an “Advisory Opinion” on Kosovo (previously part of Serbia) in which it determined a few important points of international law. Namely:
Unilateral declarations of independence are not illegal under international law.
People’s right to self-determination supersedes territorial integrity.
Washington DC considers itself to be above all international law, still deluding itself as the world’s only superpower living in unipolar fantasyland, hypocritically insisting that its own fabricated “rules based global order” should supersede all international rule of law, which automatically exempts the US from complying with international rule of law. Yet should any other nation violate the US’ arbitrary “rules based global order” yet remain in compliance with international rule of law the rest of the world follows, then all hell rains down as if the DC policymakers are God. The old semantics game and twisted moral principle of “laws for thee, rules for me.”
The Russia-China led coalition quickly gaining global consensus is rudely waking up these magalomanical morons propped up as the West’s puppet leaders. They mindlessly parrot each other reading from the same globalist script. Case in point, at a recent NATO military conference, Estonia’sDefense Minister Martin Herem actually uttered these words:
Collectively we must deny Russia the possibility to change today’s ‘rules-based’ international order.
… where the Western puppet masters and their scripted minions get to arbitrarily make up the rules as they go along. Again, they are all living in a delusional world of literal AI hive-minded insanity, mechanically robotically mouthing these same fantastical lies. These useful idiot tools will soon be discarded by their puppetmasters or meet their unwelcome fate at a military tribunal, sentencing the whole lot of them to execution for treason, including judgment day for their masters as well, after incriminating evidence on them is gathered from Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
Just to affirm how “free” this phony democracy called Ukraine is, legislation to criminalize any citizen in Ukraine including the Donbas that applies for a Russian passport or votes in the upcoming referendums this weekend will be allegedly jailed for up to five years. That’s how tyrannical and desperate Kiev has become as it continues in actuality to lose the war. If it was winning, as the Mockingbird Western media now all insists [again], it would not in desperation resort to these extreme threats of overkill punishment for citizens simply exercising their right to self-determine their own fate through a democratic vote. Dictatorships run by weak autocratic puppets must play its heavy-handed punitive card if it hopes to survive even a little longer but their days are growing shorter.
Rumors this week have emerged that the Governor of the Rothschild affiliated Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, has tendered her resignation to President Putin.
Shortly after Putin’s Ukraine intervention began, a Bloomberg article revealed that Nabiullina as head of Russia’s Central Bank attempted to quit after nine years in March 2022, but Putin allegedly forced her to stay on for the last six months. Conjecture that she has adversely been impacted by the US led economic sanctions freezing Russia’s $630 billion foreign assets may have played a factor. In any event, with her banking fate still unknown, overall the West’s leftist media considers the brooch-wearing 58-year old their darling for her monetary skills keeping afloat the Russian economy in spite of its ceaseless sanctions since 2014, all the while labeled a rare “liberal” amidst the demonized Putin regime. This week’s resignation speculation recurred after surfacing in March, and a condition of her purported staying on with Putin was that no military mobilization be implemented.
As recently as 2021, Vladimir Putin made a video (see below) appearance at the World Economic Forum where after Klaus Schwab’s introduction of the Russian president, Putin opened his Davos speech mentioning he and Schwab go way back to 1992, apparently maintaining a 30-year friendship all the while. Shortly after making Schwab’s acquaintance, Klaus’ mentor Henry Kissinger also began his apparent longstanding friendship with Putin, confirmed by Kissinger’s right-hand man Steve Pieczenik boasting that he and his boss in 1999 chose Putin to replace the alcoholic Boris Yeltsin as Russian leader. By association, rubbing elbows with infamously notorious Rothschild agents implicates Rothschild affiliated Russian Central Banker Elvira Nabiullina as well as Putin.
Meanwhile, right after Putin spoke to the nation on Wednesday, according to the Western press, flights from Moscow to Yerevan and Istanbul were reportedly sold out. Countries where visas for Russians are not required – Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, and Serbia, were all suddenly high demand destinations of citizens trying to flee Russia, according to Reuters. As a result, within hours the Moscow government ordered all its airlines to immediately stop selling tickets to men aged 18 to 65.
Just to give you an understanding how news services covering the exact same event completely diverge based on particular biases, the onetime Rothschild owned news service Reuters frames its anti-Putin headline “Putin escalates Ukraine war, issues nuclear threat to West,” while the far more neutral Arab news service Al Arabiya states, “Putin signs decree on mobilization, says West wants to destroy Russia.” Both carry completely different accounts of the same event. Putin is quoted in The Guardian:
To those who allow themselves such statements regarding Russia, I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for separate components and more modern than those of NATO countries and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal – this is not a bluff, [adding, Russia had] lots of weapons to reply.
The Russian leader justifies mobilization in response to “the dangers posed by the West,” which “wants to destroy our country.” Clearly from his perspective, Putin is operating with sound moral judgment in self-defense of his nation. Yet from the West’s deceptive point of view, he is always portrayed as the “mad Russian,” most dangerous dictator and bloodthirsty aggressor in this world since Adolph Hitler.
Putin’s Wednesday morning speech articulated an accurate description of some of the typical nefarious activities currently being perpetrated by the West:
Western elites are doing their utmost to preserve their domination and with this aim in view are trying to block and suppress any sovereign and independent development centers in order to continue to aggressively force their will and pseudo-values on other countries and nations.
Again, Putin often makes rational sense. Yet the inverse Luciferian world we’re living in flips everything, so that what is truth is called deception and the lies get passed off as truth. In mainstream corporate Western media, this is 100% true.
Immediately following the Putin speech, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was even more direct:
I cannot but emphasize the fact that today we are at war not so much with Ukraine and the Ukrainian army as with the collective West. At this point we are really at war with the collective West, with NATO, or vice versa – with NATO and with the collective West.
So there it is, NATO versus Russia and Russia versus NATO. For seven months straight, daily Western propaganda slanders Russia as the “unprovoked invader” of Ukraine, when all historical facts clearly prove that the West for over three decades has illegally broken every promise and formal agreement ever made, while refusing for even one minute to respect Russia’s repeated requests to accept its sovereign fundamental right to protect its own national security, even right up to February 24th special operation, while nonstop the West has aggressively provoked tensions and forced Russia to intervene in order to save ethnic Russians, de-Nazify and demilitarize Ukraine from continuing its 8 year ethnic purge in the Donbas, ever since the US illegally overthrew the Kiev government back in 2014.
As if all these latest developments aren’t alarming enough, the US and NATO are working overtime this extremely busy week ratcheting up what seems inevitable at this point – World War III.
On Tuesday September 13th, a group of former prime ministers and foreign ministers from NATO countries released their The KYIV Security Compact, which is a signed pact pledging NATO support for Ukraine, in effect, declaring it a de facto NATO member that puppet Zelensky zealously signed off on already.
These warmongering NATO hawks are led by its chairman former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, former UK Foreign Secretary William J. Hague and former ministers from France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, acting as a formal delegation on behalf of NATO clearly taking the Ukraine conflict to another level entirely – from a US/NATO proxy war to a US/NATO direct hot war against Russia, for all intents and purposes, evoking Article 5 of the NATO Charter to directly engage in combative world war against Russia, opening up officially the far wider global war gravely risking nuclear annihilation. This is why Putin is mobilizing 300,000 more soldiers on active duty, because all along US/NATO have been warring against Russia using Ukraine as its incendiary device to ignite World War III.
So, for decades the West has been consistently the only side itching for nuclear war, and seemingly now in response, Putin has been forced to defend his nation and people against destruction. But of course, if Vlad the Bad is merely a controlled opposition Kissinger actor working covertly still with the Rothschild City of London cabal, then it’s all just grand chessboard theater, each playing their scripted role, which it might well be, and with Chinese troops reportedly now on the ground fighting alongside the Russian army, there you have it, a preplanned staged East versus West World War III showdown already playing out right before our eyes.
According to a report dated last Sunday, September 18th, former member of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Hal Turner analyzed and released photos and a brief video sent to him by anonymous intel sources. They clearly show at least one small convoy of Humvees and troop personnel transport vehicles that belong to the PRC captured on film entering Ukraine from the Russian border. Though this evidence is scant in scope and no claims of a large on-the-ground Chinese military presence in Ukraine can be made, nonetheless it does send a clear brazenly sober, alarming message that:
China has just announced to the whole world that it is now militarily standing with Russia, inside Ukraine.
This strongly indicates that the military Russian incursion is opening up into a much wider international conflict between the two largest Eastern global nuclear powers and the US/NATO forces. Moreover, head of the Chinese legislature, Li Zhanshu, met with Putin in mid-September as well as with Duma leaders, and Li Zhanshu told the Duma:
We see that the United States and its NATO allies are expanding their presence near the Russian borders, seriously threatening national security and the lives of Russian citizens… We fully understand the necessity of all the measures taken by Russia aimed at protecting its key interests… We are providing our assistance.
Every single day, Luciferian controllers move us closer and closer to nuclear World War Armageddon. This disturbing development preceded last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Eurasia, where Putin met with Xi Jinping to further discuss how China can “provide assistance,” now with the breaking knowledge that Xi has militarily sent a contingent of his People’s Republic of China’s forces already to the Ukraine warfront. While forces of the East get ready for world war in Ukraine against the West, renewing and strengthening their multipolar strategic military partnership to full advantage, their sights are clearly set on taking on the West in an upcoming world war, the inevitable Eastern warfront in Taiwan awaits in all likelihood to be ignited within the next few weeks or months.
Putin returned home to Moscow after last week’s big summit, displaying a renewed confidence having apparently accomplished what he wanted, in exchange for assurance that his war in Ukraine would soon end “as soon as possible,” made public when India’s prime minister Narendra Modi assertively confronted Putin. Russia appears to have received unanimous support from China’s Xi, India’s Modi, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi and even new Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
While Putin announced his mobilization this week, back in China at a Beijing hosted defense conference, Xi also carried the war drum theme home in his statement quoted in Xinhua News:
It is imperative to conscientiously summarize and apply successful experience in reforms, to master new situations and [understand] the requirements of the tasks, to focus on preparing for wars, and to have the courage to explore and innovate. [Boldface for emphasis]
Shit appears to literally be hitting the fan now. After over a half year of virtually nonstop shelling at the ZaporozhyeNuclear Power Plant by insane Ukraine neo-Nazis, they finally did it. Now it seems we could be on our way to another Fukushima disaster as the plant’s cooling system was allegedly damaged and compromised. A water pipe to the cooling system was hit by an alleged US rocket system missile launcher fired by Ukraine based on a larger sized shelling fragment discovered at the scene. The implications are devastating. Tass News Agency posted the news on Wednesday September 21st. It really does appear that major catastrophic events are now happening and that recent dire predictions for September 24th and 25th might be more than just speculation.
Other than Modi’s lone voice remarking last Friday in dialogue with Putin, “Now is not the time for war,” absolutely no other world leader is even talking peace or exploring any possibility of a nonviolent resolution to all these mounting geopolitical tensions and crises spinning out of control on our planet. This seething ready to explode atmosphere reflects the entire world bracing for the epic shitstorm of monumental biblical proportions erupting just as the elites’ reset implodes economies around the globe. It’s looking very dark as the crimes of the ages expose the genocidal elites plunging us into world war.
There are only a couple Western national leaders who are lone voices in the wilderness abyss, namely from Hungary and Serbia, as the only leaders possessing the courage amidst pressure to toe the line and lie, committing actions that only harm their citizens. Serbian president Aleksandar Vucicjust stated:
I assume that we’re leaving the phase of the special military operation and approaching a major armed conflict, and now the question becomes where is the line,and whether after a certain time – maybe a month or two, even – we will enter a great world conflict not seen since the Second World War.
Rutgers University published its research findings last month that if a nuclear war broke out between Russia and the United States, within two years two-thirds of the planet, that’s 5 billion people, would be dead. Yet is this dystopian shockwave of harsh unthinkable reality that humanity is now facing in any way actually going to alter or change the imminent probability of it manifesting as our tragic fate?
The Russian geopolitical strategist and ultra-nationalist Aleksandr Dugin, whose journalist daughter was tragically assassinated last month, recently commented on the ominously dark developments in recent days fast descending upon today’s earth:
We are on the brink of World War III, which the West is compulsively pushing for. And this is no longer a fear or expectation, it is a fact. Russia is at war with the collective West, with NATO and its allies (though not with all of them)… Yet, the threat of a third world war is getting closer and closer. Whether it will come to the use of nuclear weapons is an open question. But the probability of a nuclear Armageddon grows by the day.
As actress Betty Davis said in her 1950 film classic “All About Eve”:
Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
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Joachim Hagopianis a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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