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Nineteen fourteen was a terrible year, much worse than the most pessimistic imaginings at the time had forecast, and it was perhaps among the worst years in human history.

During late July and early August 1914, in Paris, Berlin, London and Saint Petersburg, crowds lined the streets during the last days of the crisis leading up to the First World War, which officially began on 28 July 1914. Some among the marchers sang patriotic songs, demonstrated in front of enemy embassies, and committed random acts of violence.

Those who had desired the conflict, and those who had dreaded it, found their tensions released with the declarations of war. Some wept to see the lamps going out across Europe heralding the imminent approach of fighting, though these were not in a majority. In all of the warring powers many of the young men especially, oblivious of the carnage lying in store for them on the battlefields, celebrated the dawning of a new world with a sense of awe. Yet it soon became clear to everyone, politicians, the public and to a lesser extent military commanders, that the nature of modern, industrialised warfare had been sorely misunderstood.

It was thought by most that the war would be decided within a few months, before Christmas 1914 even, and that no nation’s economy could handle the strain of a prolonged war. There were other fanciful beliefs that combat was to be conducted in the classical sense, with cavalry screens and wide-wheeling masses of manoeuvre. Such were the technological advances that mankind had made by the early 20th century, many decades into the industrial age, that the old-style forms of war were primarily defunct, and the new form was infinitely more deadly.

In 1915 for example, the French Army would suffer 1,624,000 casualties. By comparison in 1915 the German Army had incurred 873,200 casualties, amounting to less than 54% of French casualties; which gives an indication of the superiority of the Germans over the French, and during a period when German forces were simultaneously fighting against the massive Russian Army in the East.

That was into the future. In the early morning of 4 August 1914, the Germans invaded neutral Belgium. They attacked towards the city of Liège in eastern Belgium, located less than 25 miles from the German border. Germany’s invasion of Belgium, a lawless and aggressive action, drew much condemnation from the French and British among others. Not mentioned was that France had until 1912 been planning an attack on Belgium at the outbreak of hostilities, and only that year the French had abandoned the notion out of consideration for England’s attitude, and not out of consideration for the Belgians.

Furthermore, on 5 October 1915 France and Britain invaded neutral Greece, which was of course against the wishes of the Greeks who wanted to stay out of the war, as had the Belgians. The Anglo-French invasion of Greece was a very similar example of unlawful aggression to the German invasion of Belgium. Yet the reactions in Paris and London to the attack on Greece a year later were quite different.

Greece was not pivotal to Anglo-French war aims, whereas the German advance into Belgium, a strategically placed country which borders Germany to the west, was viewed with good reason by Berlin’s militarists as crucial to a German victory in the war. On 4 August 1914 the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, publicly acknowledged his country’s guilt in assaulting Belgium. Addressing the Reichstag (parliament) he called it “a breach of international law” and continued “The wrong – I speak openly – the wrong we hereby commit we will try to make good as soon as our military aims have been attained”.

An invasion of Belgium was formulated almost a decade prior to 1914 by the German field marshal, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, as part of his strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan. Field Marshal von Schlieffen, who died aged 79 in January 1913, had planned another illegal offensive against the neutral Netherlands, through Maastricht in the far south of the Netherlands, but Germany spared the Dutch such a fate in 1914.

The German advance into eastern Belgium, meanwhile, was continuing from its opening phase, as they assailed the country starting with 6 regular brigades and 2 cavalry divisions. The German plan was for a rapid and surprise attack (coup de main) against Liège and its fortifications, comprising largely of a dozen late 19th century forts, believed to be among the strongest on the European continent.

On 7 August, just 4 days into the offensive, a 49-year-old German commander, Major-General Erich Ludendorff, forced his way into Liège’s city centre and took the surrender of the Citadel of Liège, the city’s main fortification which had been built in the mid-13th century. This act earned Ludendorff the nickname among Germans as “The Hero of Liège”, and it set him on the path to supreme power in 1916; but at the moment, Ludendorff’s capture of the Citadel was more symbolic than strategic, as the 12 forts nearby were still intact and manned by Belgian troops.

With the Citadel neutralised the German government announced, wrongly, that Liège had fallen. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, his conscience again uneasy, tried in vain to stop the fighting in Belgium. There was little chance of that, and the Belgian garrison in Liège was defending the city with gallantry; they were inflicting considerable casualties on the enemy, who unwisely chose to attack frontally against the entrenched Belgian riflemen.

Late on 9 August 1914, day 6 of the invasion, an unusual sight appeared over the horizon. The Germans were moving towards Liège their heavy siege guns; such as the 10 metre long Big Bertha, which weighed more than 40 tons and was built in high secrecy by the Krupp steel company, one of the world’s most technically advanced armament firms.

The Big Bertha siege howitzers could reach a target from almost 6 miles way. It fired a shell containing a maximum weight of 1,785 pounds (810 kg), which ensured that Big Bertha could penetrate concrete and soil up to a depth of 40 feet. Each shell could be fired every 7 and a half minutes, or 8 an hour. By the evening of 12 August 1914, the first German siege gun was securely in place, and ready to crack the Belgian forts as a spoon breaks apart an egg. Even before the 12th of August, German infantry took by storm 2 of Liège’s 12 forts, Barchon and d’Evegnée.

The Germans began loading Big Bertha, and the barrel of the giant gun was then pointed at Fort Pontisse. A tremendous roar rang out as Big Bertha’s first shell struck Fort Pontisse, to be followed in synchronisation by more. The fort was completely destroyed by 12:30 pm the following day, 13 August. Over the next 2 days, 6 more of Liège’s forts were reduced to rubble; the last of these, Fort Loncin, was blown to smithereens after one of Big Bertha’s shells scored a direct hit against live ammunition in the fort. The remaining 2 forts surrendered to the Germans without a fight on 16 August 1914. So ended the Battle of Liège after 12 days of bloody fighting.

Shortly after its invasion of Belgium had commenced, sections of the German Army were perpetrating hysterical and brutal acts against the populace. Some Belgian villages were reduced to ashes, hostages were executed, the city of Louvain in central Belgium with its famous libraries was destroyed, priests attending to the wounded were shot out of hand, while a compassionate English nurse, Edith Cavell, was killed the following year (12 October 1915) by a German firing squad for helping prisoners to escape. In all, German soldiers were directly responsible for the deaths of an estimated 5,521 Belgian civilians and 896 French civilians.

In the early days of the war the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, wrote a letter to his Austrian counterpart Franz Joseph which ran, “My soul is torn, but everything must be put to fire and sword; men, women and children and old men must be slaughtered and not a tree or house be left standing. With these methods of terrorism, which are alone capable of affecting a people as degenerate as the French, the war will be over in two months, whereas if I admit considerations of humanity it will be prolonged for years. In spite of my repugnance I have therefore been obliged to choose the former system”.

At the front, German soldiers culpable in criminal actions justified their behaviour by claiming they had firstly been attacked by franc-tireurs, that is armed civilian, guerrilla fighters or snipers. In isolated cases there may have been a grain of truth to this but how did they, an invading army, expect to be received in neutral Belgium, with flowers and cheering on the streets? In his war memoirs written in 1919 Ludendorff, in contrast to the Kaiser, does not seem to have had a soul that is torn. Ludendorff blamed the Belgian authorities for what he admitted were the “sternest measures” taken by the Germans.

Recalling his time in Liège in the first days of the war, Ludendorff wrote, “During the night I was awakened by brisk firing, some of which was directed on our house. The franc-tireur warfare of Belgium had begun. It broke out everywhere the next day, and it was this sort of thing which aroused that intense bitterness that during those first years characterized the war on the Western front, in contrast to the feeling prevailing in the East. The Belgian Government took a grave responsibility upon itself. It had systematically organized civilian warfare… our troops cannot be blamed if they took the sternest measures to suppress it. It is true that innocent persons may have had to suffer, but the stories of ‘Belgian atrocities’ are nothing but clever, elaborate, and widely advertised legends, and the Belgian Government can alone be held responsible”.

Though Ludendorff possessed physical courage and was regarded as one of Germany’s best staff officers, he was also a ruthless soldier and an imperialist already displaying fascist tendencies; he did not shirk from violence if he felt it had to be used.

Belgian historian Sophie de Schaepdrijver wrote “the victims were accused, incorrectly, of being franc-tireurs. Most of the German rank and file genuinely believed that the locals were attacking them; this sniper delusion was sometimes countered by the commanding officers, sometimes not”.

The German attack on Belgium was broadening in scope. On 14 August 1914, before Liège had fallen, the right wing of the German invasion force was entering Belgium. Crossing the German-Belgian frontier was the German 1st Army under General Alexander von Kluck, and the German 2nd Army under General Karl von Bülow. Both von Kluck and von Bülow, each aged 68, were highly experienced officers. The two men had seen action in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

German mobilisation was completed on 13 August 1914, meaning that the Belgian Army’s defence of Liège had in total delayed Germany’s western advance for a few hours, if at all, contrary to what has often been claimed. In the first 15 days of marching through August the German 1st Army, consisting of 6 corps, met little opposition across the Belgian countryside. They advanced about 180 miles in 2 weeks of hard marching. The German 1st Army in the process captured the Belgian capital city, Brussels, on 20 August 1914.

Five days before that, on 15 August advance units of the German 3rd Army – under General Max Klemens von Hausen – had reached the Meuse river at the city of Dinant, in southern Belgium, beside the French border and 150 miles from Paris. The first attempts of the German 3rd Army, to establish a crossing over the Meuse river, were beaten back by the Belgians.

Elsewhere, the German effort was foiled of cutting off and destroying the Belgian field army on the Gette river, by preventing the Belgians from seeking refuge in the city of Antwerp, in northern Belgium. The Belgian troops had no intention of sitting on the Gette river line and being wiped out. Regardless, one Belgian division was caught napping on the Gette, and it suffered 1,600 casualties against the Germans before it could break away.

By 20 August 1914 the Belgian forces were safely in Antwerp, except for the 4th Division, which was still stationed in the city of Namur in central Belgium. Also on 20 August, after a few days of frustration, the German 3rd Army forced a crossing of the Meuse river at Dinant to the south. By 25 August, Namur further north had been captured by the Germans. Belgium’s position was desperate, and the roads through the country were wide open.

Had the Schlieffen Plan been executed as originally devised by Field Marshal von Schlieffen, with the all important German right wing “brushing the sleeve of the [English] Channel”, the Germans could have now walked unopposed into the heartland of France. Yet the Schlieffen Plan, specifically relating to the German right wing, had been weakened and the strategy altered by General Helmuth von Moltke (The Younger), who in January 1906 had succeeded von Schlieffen as Chief of the German General Staff.

Von Moltke did not possess as sharp a military brain as his predecessor; he did not perceive the Schlieffen Plan’s intricacies. To his death, von Schlieffen had stressed that the right wing of the German Army was to be “as strong as possible”, and he allotted 79 divisions to comprise of this right wing.

Von Schlieffen had designated just 9 divisions and some Landwehr (militia) forces to the German left wing, which was to occupy positions from Metz in north-eastern France to the Swiss border, around 150 miles to the south of Metz. Yet von Moltke, instead, assigned most of the new divisions that became available between 1906 and 1914 to the German left wing! The truth was that von Moltke had also lost confidence in the Schlieffen Plan, and in the back of his mind he was preparing for a longer war by cutting down on short-term risks; but as it turned out, von Moltke was significantly increasing the overall risk to Germany.

It should be mentioned, too, that von Moltke was later supporting the criminal activities of some German troops in Belgium and France. On 5 August 1914, the 66-year-old von Moltke wrote to the Austrian commander Conrad von Hötzendorf, “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal, but we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences”. A week later, in a statement of 12 August, von Moltke further justified such actions by warning Belgium and France that it was “in the nature of such things that [countermeasures] will be extraordinarily harsh and even, under some circumstances, affect the innocent”.

Returning to the Schlieffen Plan, in the East von Schlieffen had allotted 10 German divisions in which to guard East Prussia against the initial advance of the Russian Army; which would take a few weeks to materialise, due to the inevitable lengthy mobilisation process relating to the Russian Army’s large size, and the difficulty of the ground that the Russians would have to traverse across; such as their having to avoid the Masurian Lakes of central Europe and extensive marshy terrain nearby.

Von Moltke judged that the Schlieffen Plan was a great gamble, which it certainly was, but his attempts to improve it and make it less so injured rather than enhanced its prospects of success. Von Schlieffen had concluded that Germany needed a quick, decisive battle of annihilation in the West, and that this was possible only if the enemy could be outflanked and enveloped. Von Schlieffen, a student of military history, regarded Hannibal’s crushing victory over the Romans at Cannae, in the year 216 BC, as the perfect example of this type of military operation.

Von Schlieffen envisaged that the German right wing – which would consist of the bulk of the German Army – would pass through Belgium and northern France, cross the Seine river just above Rouen in the Normandy region, sweep around Paris to the west and south, and thereupon smash the French Army back against the Swiss frontier, like a hammer striking an anvil. With the French and their ally Britain knocked out of the war within the expected 6 weeks, the Germans would turn east with all of their remaining forces and overcome the Russian Army; which by then would be at Germany’s eastern boundaries. That is how von Schlieffen foresaw victory for his country in the war.

From a purely military viewpoint the Schlieffen Plan was an excellent strategy, and very bold, but not without its flaws. Germany would have fewer men than needed for the tasks at hand. The margin of time would be very small between the campaigns in the West and East. An extended delay in the West would probably be fatal for Germany’s chances in the war, as indeed proved the case. Germany’s location on the map in central Europe, flanked on either side by enemies, had always placed her in a vulnerable position in a major European war. France had the luxury of being protected on its left flank, by either the Atlantic Ocean or the English Channel.

On 16 August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), of 4 divisions and a cavalry division, had crossed the English Channel and disembarked without interference at Le Havre in northern France. On 22 August the British forces, commanded by Field Marshal John French, finally reached Mons in western Belgium, where they took up a position on the left of the French 5th Army, commanded by General Charles Lanrezac. As the British soldiers marched along the dusty roads, they sang a popular music-hall song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, named after the county of Tipperary in Ireland.

The former German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had said that if British troops ever landed on mainland Europe and attacked Germany, “I shall have the police arrest them”. Considering that Britain was a naval power, which did not then have or need a large army, Bismarck’s witty comment is understandable.

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

Christopher Hoitash, “Franc-Tireurs: French Partisans Were a Thorn in Germany’s Side”, War History Online, 4 June 2018

Erich Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, August 1914-November 1918, The Great War (Pickle Partners Publishing, 12 Apr. 2012)

Noam Chomsky, On The Backgrounds of the Pacific War, Liberation, September-October 1967, Chomsky.info

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

Sophie de Schaepdrijver, “The ‘German Atrocities’ of 1914”, The British Library, 29 January 2014

History.com editors, “This Day in History, 1914, August 05, German assault on Liège begins first battle of World War I”, History.com, Original publication date 16 November 2009, Last updated 3 August 2020

Oliver Stein, “Schlieffen, Alfred, Graf von”, 1914-1918-online International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 21 February 2017

Marc Romanych, “Big Bertha weapon”, Britannica

Dr. John Rickard, Siege of Liège, 5-16 August 1914, HistoryOfWar.org, 14 March 2001

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

In May, Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, held up a vote on a bill which sought to approve some $40 billion in aid for Ukraine. Paul wanted language inserted into the bill, without a vote, that would have an inspector general scrutinize the new spending.

“This would be the inspector general that’s been overseeing the waste in Afghanistan,” Paul said, “and has done a great job.”

While senators on both sides of the aisle bristled at Paul’s delay tactics, Christopher Tremoglie, a commentary fellow for The Washington Examiner, questioned the fact that

“[w]hile much attention has been placed on Paul holding up the aid legislation, the more important issue is why are so many senators against ensuring that billions of taxpayer dollars aren’t being misused?”

One of the senators who took umbrage over Paul’s actions was the senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer. Speaking from the floor of the Senate chamber, the senior senator from New York declared that “it is repugnant that one member of the other side, the junior senator from Kentucky, chose to make a show and obstruct Ukraine funding.”

Schumer added that Paul’s actions served to “strengthen [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s hand.”

What Schumer didn’t say was that an inspector general, mandated to oversee how U.S. taxpayer money authorized under the bill in question (the Additional Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2022, which became Public Law 117-128 on May 21), would have exposed the role that U.S. funds played to exact political revenge on the man who tried to inject a modicum of accountability into how monies appropriated by Congress are spent, namely Rand Paul.

‘Countering Disinformation’

Some three weeks after Schumer helped push the bill into law, on July 14, Andriy Shapovalov, a Ukrainian civil servant whose salary was paid for by U.S. taxpayer monies, convened a “round table” in Kiev on “countering disinformation.”

Shapovalov, in his role as the acting head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, published a list of the names of 72 people whom he accused of deliberately spreading disinformation about Ukraine. Shapovalov labelled them “information terrorists,” adding that Ukraine was preparing legislation so that such people can be prosecuted as “war criminals.”

The “round table” was organized by the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF Global Ukraine), an ostensible nonprofit organization authorized by U.S. Congress to promote “international scientific and technical collaboration.” It is supported by the U.S. State Department, some of whose officials sat in attendance.

One of the people singled out by Shapovalov as an “information terrorist” targeted for criminal prosecution as a “war criminal” was none other than Rand Paul.

To recap: Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, angered by Rand Paul daring to ask for accountability over how $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer money was going to be spent in Ukraine, accused Paul — for doing his duty as a senator — of strengthening Putin’s hand, before allowing this very money, being doled out with zero oversight, to underwrite a Ukrainian entity which, with the active support of the U.S. State Department and U.S.-funded NGOs, labels Paul an “information terrorist” and threatens the Kentucky senator with prosecution as a “war criminal.”

If this doesn’t sicken you, you’re not much of an American.

There can be little doubt that a case can be made that Public Law 117-128, in so far as it finances and facilitates ongoing violations of individual civil liberties of American citizens and constitutes an ongoing effort to intimidate lawmakers from carrying out their legislative responsibilities under the Constitution, has, through the State Department-supported, Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, created an ongoing criminal organization which is carrying out acts against U.S. citizens for which it should be held criminally and civilly liable.

Whether the Justice Department would ever bring an investigation into this criminal enterprise is doubtful. After all, Schumer was able to shut down the creation of an inspector general capable of carrying out the required investigations.

But there is more.

Diane Sare

On May 31, Diane Sare, a LaRouche candidate challenging Schumer for his Senate seat in November, filed 66,000 signatures — well over the 45,000 required by law — with the New York State Board of Elections, thereby getting her name on the ballot.

Commenting on this achievement, Sare noted that “The successful petitioning campaign constitutes a major breakthrough, given that the new requirements were designed to prevent independent and minority party candidates from being able to comply.”

Diane Sare was singled out by the Schumer-funded, State Department-supported Center for Countering Disinformation as an “information terrorist” who should be prosecuted as a “war criminal” because of her public stance challenging the narrative about the Ukraine conflict.

That’s right — Chuck Schumer helped create the organizational structures which have attacked the reputation of a challenger for his Senate seat, threatening her with political violence and more for the “crime” of challenging Schumer on the issue of Ukraine.

This is the same Chuck Schumer who advocated impeaching President Donald Trump for a phone call Schumer claimed sought to pressure Ukraine into carrying out investigations that could have been damaging to the candidacy of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. The same Chuck Schumer who once proclaimed from the Senate floor:

“I strongly disagree with those who advocate harassing folks if they don’t agree with you. No one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

I couldn’t have said it any better — what Chuck Schumer has done in using U.S. taxpayer money to attack his political opponents is un-American. One can only hope that the New York voters see it the same way come November.

It also appears to be illegal. As such, I hope that both Rand Paul and Diane Sare pursue whatever legal recourse is available to them to expose and shut down a Schumer-supported law that allows U.S. taxpayer money to underwrite a campaign targeting U.S. citizens, including serving senators and political challengers, with intimidation and more for the “crime” of exercising their First Amendment right of free speech.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

Featured image: Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2018. (AFGE, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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***

The cesspool of vaccine side effects in Germany is finally completely open. According to the Dutch news site, Blckbx, five months after a Wob request, it appears that 437,593 of the 11 million insured persons of the country’s largest Health Insurance fund, Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), had to undergo medical treatment in 2021 for Covid vaccine side effects. That is 1 in 25 and an increase of 3000 percent.

This week, TK finally provided facts and figures about the number of treatments they had to reimburse in 2021 due to (serious) side effects of covid vaccines. But unfortunately, it took a lot of struggle and effort to get answers to the Wob request.

In 2021, the massive number of 437,593 insured, or 1 in 25, received medical treatment for side effects of vaccination, reports the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK). This number is almost twice as high as all side effects reported by the German federal medical agency Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) and Lareb Germany. Furthermore, it represents an increase of 3000 percent for TK compared to 2019 and 2020.

‘As many as 1 in 500 injections is expected to cause serious side effects

The figures also suggest that the number of 1:5000 serious side effects per shot reported by the German ministry last week is, in reality, much higher. Based on the figures from Techniker Krankenkasse, as many as one in 500 injections is expected to cause a serious side effect, and 3.3 million Germans would have had to be treated by a doctor by 2021 because of side effects of the covid shots. Serious side effects include (facial) paralysis, persistent pain, nerve problems, severe skin reactions, heart attacks, strokes, heart muscle inflammation, permanent disability, and death.

In the Wob request to the TK health insurance fund, the billing figures from 2019 to 2021 were requested per quarter and per person for the reporting codes T881 – Complications after vaccination (immunization), not classified elsewhere, including rash after vaccination, T88.0 – Post-vaccination infection (immunization), including post-vaccination sepsis (immunization), U12.9 – Adverse reactions to the use of COVID-19 vaccines, unspecified and Y.59.9 – Adverse complications due to vaccines or biologically active substances.

The data shows that in 2021 the Techniker Krankenkasse had to reimburse 147,235 medical treatments for code U12.9 – Adverse reactions to the use of covid vaccines, unspecified – alone. All codes listed below are serious side effects requiring a doctor’s treatment.

In 2019, among the 11 million insured, 13,777 medical treatments were required due to vaccine side effects. In 2020 there were 15,044. In 2021, the number shot up to 437,593, an increase of more than 3,000 percent.

Fired Health insurance boss’ estimates confirmed again

In February (former), BKK Provita board member Andreas Schöfbeck sounded the alarm because he saw that the number of doctor visits due to the vaccines among the millions of customers of the German health insurer was no less than ten times higher than the official figures. Converted, according to Schöfbeck, no fewer than three million Germans would have had to visit a doctor as a result of vaccination.

In a telephone conversation with the WELT newspaper, which asked Schöfbeck questions about the letter he wrote to the Paul Ehrlich Institute, Schöfbeck said that at BKK, ProVita alarm bells started ringing when the health insurer’s case management increasingly came across diagnoses that indicated side effects of the covid vaccination. Therefore, he searched the shared data pool of all BKK health insurance funds for the diagnosis codes T88.0, T88.1, Y59.9, and U12.9.

The investigation found that from the beginning of the year 2021 to the middle of the third quarter, 216,695 BKK policyholders had been treated for side effects of vaccines. This number excludes 7,665 cases of complications from other vaccines. In addition, the statistics did not include patients who received more than one treatment. By comparison, up to December 31, 2021, the Paul Ehrlich Institute only registered 244,576 reports of adverse events due to corona vaccines, based on 61.4 million people vaccinated.

Schöfbeck was immediately fired for his revelations.

2.5 million doctor visits due to vaccines

At the beginning of July, German news channel WELT obtained a letter from the National Association of Physicians of Statutory Health Insurance (KBV) showing that Andreas Schöfbeck’s estimates were probably correct. The KBV letter from mid-June revealed that nearly 2.5 million citizens went to the doctor in 2021 because of the side effects of the corona vaccination.

Evidence continues to pile up

Both former health insurance fund boss Andreas Schöfbeck, the National Association of Physicians of Statutory Health Insurance (KBV), and now also the Techniker Krankenkasse figures show that the actual number of severe side effects as a result of the experimental covid injections is many times higher than was first officially assumed.

Even the health ministry in Germany has admitted that 1:5000 injections lead to hospitalization, permanent disability, or death – a very serious revelation, but probably a very conservative estimate.

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Amy Mek is an Investigative Journalist: Banned in parts of Europe, Wanted by Islamic countries, Threatened by terror groups, Hunted by left-wing media, Smeared by Hollywood elites & Fake religious leaders.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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

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***

Americans are always innocent.  They never provoke.  They never antagonize.  Their only concern is the preservation of democracy and human rights around the world.  So, they say.

During her recent visit to Taiwan, the raven-eyed Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, pledged her support for democracy on the Chinese island.  At a press conference following her meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen, she stated, “Again, our delegation came here to send an unequivocal message: “America stands with Taiwan,” no doubt in the same manner it stands with Ukraine.

The message, of course, was sent to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who, speaking with his American counterpart, Joe Biden, prior to the Pelosi visit, warned that, “Those who play with fire will perish by it.”

On the advice of the military, President Biden, who initially cautioned against the visit, tried to play down the controversial trip by asking, in essence, what’s the problem?  America’s One China policy has not changed.  So, what’s the fuss?

Democratic and Republican lawmakers, normally at each other’s throats, agreed that Pelosi should follow through with her visit.  After all, they reasoned, the Chinese Communist Party should not be able to dictate the travel plans of the Speaker of the House, illustrating once again the bipartisan nature of the politics of empire.  

Pelosi, however, did not visit Taiwan on an American Airlines flight or one sponsored by any other commercial airline, chartered airline, or private jet.  No.  She flew to the island on a U.S. Navy military transport plane, protected in the South China Sea by the aptly named USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and a flotilla of warships.  There was no provocation, according to U.S. government spokespersons, pretending innocence.

This is the same Nancy Pelosi who, as a Congresswoman, carried a banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square honoring pro-democracy demonstrators while decrying the lack of political freedom in Communist China in 1991.  The public relations stunt was repeated by Vitoria Nuland and John McCain in Kiev’s Maidan Square in support of pro-democracy protesters in Ukraine; the difference being, the United States was able to topple the Ukrainian government by using fascist shock troops in 2014, but failed to organize a color revolution by co-opting students and workers in China, whose military crushed dissidents in 1989.

The People’s Liberation Army could have shot Pelosi’s plane out of midair and ended, once and for all, the career of a venal imperialist politician who spouted anti-Chinese rhetoric for decades.  They did not do so, considering the act too brazen, unlike the United States government that routinely uses its military or its surrogates to take out enemies with the ruthlessness of Mafia hitmen.  Witness the recent killing of Al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.  Or the hanging of Saddam Hussain.  Or the torture, sodomy, and shooting of Muammar Kaddafi, captured on a cellphone video, and viewed with relish by Hillary Clinton, who commented, “We came, we saw, he died.”

In his comments extoling the extra-judicial killing of Zawahiri, Biden stated, “We make it clear again tonight that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out,” a right reserved by the American empire but forbidden to its enemies.

What China has done is commence “targeted military operations” surrounding the island of Taiwan.  These operations involve the entire Chinese military, including naval drills, long-range shooting drills, and ballistic missile launches by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).  By so doing, China has closed Taiwan’s water lanes and airspace.  It has done so before.

There have been three Taiwan Strait crises, one in 1952, another in 1954, and a third in 1995.  On all three occasions, the PLA launched military operations only to face deterrent forces deployed by the United States.  In the second crisis, PLA troops massed in the coastal province of Fujian, prompting the Americans to send warships into the Strait.  China is currently massing troops in Fujian as part of its targeted military operations in response to the Pelosi provocation.

Two questions emerge: Is the military operation a show of force or a prelude to war?  If China launches a war of reunification, what will the United States, having pledged to defend Taiwan, do?

Unlike the United States, whose leaders have their itchy fingers poised on launch codes for Hellfire, cruise, and nuclear missiles, the Chinese, whose civilization is 5,000 years old, have demonstrated a great deal of patience when it comes to Taiwan.  They can take the long view and simply wait for conditions to ripen for reunification after demonstrating their military power to crush any move toward independence by Taipei and Washington.

President Xi, who values stability, is very cautious and undoubtedly understands the consequences that a proxy-war like the one being fought by the United States against Russia in Ukraine would have on China.  The consequences of a direct war would be infinitely more profound and destructive.

But the highly emotional issue of Taiwan’s reunification should not be underestimated given China’s history of subjugation prior to the Maoist revolution in 1949, especially if U.S. provocations continue, as they most certainly will. The revolution pulled China from the clutches of imperialism and bestowed independence and dignity upon the Middle Kingdom, enabling the country to emerge as a global economic and military power, one that should not be trifled with today.

Yet, it is precisely because of China’s emergence as a world power that Pelosi stuck her finger in the eye of the Chinese Dragon in the name of defending “democracy” from “autocracy,” holding fast to the Biden doctrine of foreign interventionism.

The truth is that the United States only loves democracy when the state serves capital, particularly American capital, as it does in Taiwan and every other democratic vassal state in the empire.  These are fake democracies that serve the elites, not the people.  Autocratic governments, including monarchies such as Saudi Arabia’s, are acceptable to the United States as long as they adopt vassal status to U.S. capital.  The only type of government, democratic or autocratic, hated by the American empire is one that adopts policies of economic nationalism and does not throw its doors open to unregulated foreign (i.e., U.S. corporate and financial) penetration.

In the United States, politics is controlled by capital. In China, capital is controlled by politics.  That is what allowed the Chinese Communist Party to lift 800,000 of its people out of extreme poverty.  The United States, despite its “War on Poverty” during the 1960s, never approached such a monumental social achievement and, worse, has abandoned the Keynesian economic model that supported Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in favor of a neoliberal economics of deregulated capital accumulation.

Internationally, the Chinese practice fair trade, not free trade, a euphemism for U.S. corporate globalization and profit accumulation.  In 2013, President Xi Jinping undertook the Belt and Road Initiative, an economic and infrastructural development program that connects China to Central Asia, Europe, and Africa modeled on the ancient Silk Road trade route.  In 2017, President Xi extended the initiative to Latin America.  The idea is to set up a global corridor by land and sea for financial integration, development, and trade, supported by institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which does not involve itself in predatory lending and debt enslavement as do the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, American accusations of a “Chinese debt trap” notwithstanding.

On July 22, 2022, China and Russia announced the development of a new global reserve currency to replace the dollar, thereby undercutting financial dependence on the United States and its Treasury Department’s profligate use of sanctions to punish adversaries.  The announcement was made at a meeting of BRICS countries that included Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, who intend to develop a basket of currencies to replace the dollar reserve.

Herein lies the threat to U.S. global hegemony that explains why the United States sees itself as being involved in agreat-power competition, the latest neoconservative justification for military interventionism and confrontational behavior.

Pelosi’s visit must be analyzed within the context of Obama’s pivot to Asia.  The foreign policy initiative was announced by the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2011.  It is the brainchild of his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, that was also adopted by Trump and Biden.

Here is where the truth radically differs from propaganda.  The United States’ empire is being threatened by an economic competitor that is, in the words of its own president, “eating our lunch.”  The American response, as usual, is to apply force.  The pivot to Asia is nothing other than the hegemon, under Obama, Trump, and Biden, turning away from its destructive frenzy in the Middle East to vent its anger in the Far East, in the same way a mass murderer pivots from one victim to another to take aim during a shooting spree.

The pivot involves the United States surrounding China with an archipelago of 400 military bases that extend from Australia, to the South Pacific, to Japan, especially Okinawa, and to South Korea.  The purpose is to counter Chinese naval expansion in the South China Sea and potentially cut off maritime trade routes.  The bases also provide a launching pad for an attack on China.  Who, it must be asked, is threatening whom?

The pretext of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is not only to protect democracy from autocracy but to protect human rights. Presidents of the United States, State Department officials, Congressional representatives, including Pelosi, and corporate journalists have been particularly vocal in confronting China’s human rights abuses, especially regarding its treatment of Uyghur and Tibetan people.

Concerning the Uyghurs, China is accused of committing human rights violations against the largely Muslim ethnic minority living in Xinjiang province, including the detention of over one million people, the imprisonment of thousands, and the imposition of a mass sterilization program on Uyghur women.  China has denied persecuting the Uyghurs by mass internment.  The Chinese government has also categorically denied charges of imposing mass sterilization in the province.  Not coincidentally, the United States has been recruiting Uyghur jihadists, who were battle-hardened in its proxy-war in Syria and its occupation in Afghanistan, to fight for independence in Xinjiang, thus disrupting the Belt and Road Initiative.  China has launched a genuine anti-terror campaign to put an end to the Uyghur separatist rebellion.

Even if the charges against China are taken at face value, which they should not be given the American track record of imperial lies, who is the United States government to lecture China on the treatment of Muslims in the wake of its fraudulent “War on Terror?” The U.S. war of terror led to attacks on seven Muslim countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Iran; CIA ghost flights, extraordinary rendition, and torture programs aimed at Muslims; the kidnapping and imprisonment of insurgents, many of whom are Muslim, on a military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; FBI raids on Muslim charities and violations of the civil liberties of Muslim Americans and immigrants in the wake of 9/11; a ban on immigration from seven Muslim countries; and U.S. support for Israel’s repression of Palestinians, particularly its recent attacks on Muslim worshipers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Prior to the Chinese entry into Tibet, the country was ruled by a Buddhist theocracy that based itself on a ruthless feudal order, the foundation of which was serfdom, with all of its attendant atrocities.  The Chinese communists permitted limited self-rule in Tibet when they entered the country in 1951.  The CIA immediately began financing a Tibetan independence movement, including support for the Dalli Lama, leading to an armed uprising that was suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army in 1956/57.  The fraudulent Dalli Lama, who lived in opulence while in Tibet, has been hailed as a paragon of spiritual virtue by clueless liberals in the West, despite his history as a tool of the CIA and one of its front organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy.

The empire never rests when it comes to subverting independent states by fomenting religious, ethnic, and tribal hatred to induce separatist movements.  And yet, the Chinese people and their government are subjected to the appallingly hypocritical rhetoric uttered by Nancy Pelosi as she presumes to lecture China on the issue of human rights.

It is peculiar how Pelosi, the freedom fighter, is not concerned about the human rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, 14,000 of whom were killed by the fascist puppet government in Kiev installed by a U.S. sponsored coup in 2014.

Pelosi has no regard for the human rights of Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Yemeni, or Somali people who have suffered from U.S. invasions, occupations, bombings, drone strikes, and other forms of hideous imperial violence in the Middle East and North Africa.

Pelosi, being a regular attendee at annual AIPAC conferences, recipient of large Zionist campaign donations, and hack for the Zionist Lobby, cares not a whit about Palestinian human rights, being as she is, a rabid supporter of Israel and its violent repression in the Occupied Territories.

She does not care about the people of Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, or any other country subjected to economic boycotts, sanctions,

coup d’états, proxy-wars, death squads, and other forms of political violence and oppression imposed by the United States in Latin America.

Closer to home, despite rhetorical support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Pelosi is unconcerned about the human rights of Black Americans, who are routinely shot down in the streets of freedom’s land by police forces deployed in mass by her political ally in the White House, Joe Biden, author of Bill Clinton’s notorious crime bill.

Above all, she does not care about the people of China or Taiwan.  What she cares about is imperial domination. Pelosi and Biden have fractured the One China policy that recognizes the People’s Republic as the legitimate government of China and acknowledges the view that Taiwan is part of China, in favor of intimidation and the not-so-veiled threat of military intervention should China try to reunify Taiwan.  The U.S. posture of “strategic ambiguity” with regard to Taiwan is no longer ambiguous following Pelosi’s visit and recent statements by Biden that are designed to encourage Taiwanese independence from Beijing.

When Biden was asked during a recent news conference in Tokyo whether the United States would use military force to defend Taiwan if it were attacked, he answered, “Yes, it’s a commitment we made.”  Spokespersons at the White House and State Department tried to “walk back’’ the comment, reiterating the One China policy, but the proverbial cat was out of the bag.

Mad-dog imperialists are desperate and can only provoke war to save their declining empire, but war with China or Russia, or both, is a conflict they cannot win as it will destroy life on the planet.  Herein lies the existential danger facing humanity.

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Donald Monaco is a writer and political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York.  He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War.  He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective.  His most recent book is titled, The Politics of Empire, and is available at amazon.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Winds of War in Eurasia

By Manlio Dinucci, August 08, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s provocative visit to Taiwan is part of the U.S. escalation against China in what, in Pentagon geography, is referred to as the Indo-Pacific, i.e., the region stretching from the west coast of the United States to that of India.

U.S. Declares Monkeypox Health Emergency, FDA Offers Vaccine to Some Kids Despite No Clinical Trials

By Megan Redshaw, August 08, 2022

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday declared monkeypox a public health emergency. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it will offer monkeypox vaccines to children on a “case-by-case” basis, despite no clinical trials for kids under 18.

Going Global with NATO

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 08, 2022

Regional alliances should, for the most part, remain regional.  Areas of the globe can count on a number of such bodies and associations with varying degrees of heft: the Organization of American States; the Organisation of African Unity; and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.  Only one has decided to move beyond its natural, subscribed limits, citing security and a militant basis, for its actions.

Chris Hedges: NATO — The Most Dangerous Military Alliance on the Planet

By Chris Hedges, August 08, 2022

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Do Universities Teach Economics?

By Emanuel Pastreich, August 07, 2022

The “facts” of economics, from interest rates and deficits, to inflation and value, are presented in the textbooks as if they were natural laws, the equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics or the law of gravity. It is fabulously assumed that the student can discover the truth of economics through the mere process of calculation without any epistemological or metaphysical, let alone scientific investigation into the validity of those assumptions about the human activities defined as economics.

Russia- Zimbabwe Relations: “Remain Work-in-Progress” Interview with Brigadier General Nicholas Mike Sango

By Brigadier General Nicholas Mike Sango and Kester Kenn Klomegah, August 07, 2022

Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, and shares borders with South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. It is very rich in mineral resources and is the largest trading partner of South Africa on the continent of Africa. Russia maintains very friendly relations with Zimbabwe, thanks to ties which evolved during the struggle for independence.

It Is an Illusion to Believe That One Can Rise Against the State

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, August 07, 2022

Time and again, people succumb to the illusion that they have to take to the streets and break windows when they are wronged. Politicians of all shades are already fantasising about coming popular uprisings and civil war. This rebellion against violence “from above” is understandable because people find it hard to bear and also want to fight it off with violence.

“To Hate All Things Russian”: Russia’s Contributions to the Treasure-trove of World Civilization

By Prof. Alexandra Kostina and Prof. Valeria Z. Nollan, August 07, 2022

In his article for The Atlantic of July 24, 2022 “Don’t Blame Dostoevsky,” Mikhail Shishkin makes a false start right away.  He rationalizes hate for a nation and its culture in the first sentence: “I understand why people hate all things Russian right now.” From the outset he tells readers it is permissible to hate an entire nation if one can manufacture an “acceptable” reason for this hatred.

The Collapse of America: Distant Early Warning Signs of Uncle Sam’s Demise. Andrei Martyanov

By Michael Welch, August 07, 2022

In the previous instalment of this two part series, we painted a portrait of an American Empire that was constantly failing in its military engagements in, really, all of its pursuits, from Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya and Syria, to Venezuela, Bolivia and even the crucial flash-point now in Ukraine. In a nutshell, the U.S. has lost ground in every military venture it pursued since the turn of the century.

At the Lost and Found in the Era of “Nothingness”: When Knowledge Coincides with Ignorance and “Truth Becomes Untruth”

By Edward Curtin, August 05, 2022

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth.  This is also common sense.

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The Environmental Protection Agency reported this week that it issued so-called “emergency” approvals to spray various neonicotinoids and pyrethroids — insecticides the agency itself recognizes as “very highly toxic” to bees and aquatic insects — on more than 370,000 acres of crops across the U.S.

Emergency exemptions allow the spraying of pesticides not otherwise approved on specific crops. The approvals, made from July 2021 to June 2022, allowed for the spraying of thiamethoxam on rice paddies in Arkansas and bifenthrin on peach, apple and nectarine orchards in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

“The EPA is using this backdoor approval process to ramp up otherwise unlawful use of dangerous pesticides,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Declaring an emergency for 10 consecutive years demonstrates that EPA officials have taken the abuse of emergency exemptions to the point of absolute absurdity.”

This marks the 10th straight year that emergency exemptions for bifenthrin have been granted in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, where it would otherwise be illegal to use the potent insecticide to target the brown marmorated stinkbug on pome and stone fruit trees, which are highly attractive to bees. Bifenthrin is known to be highly toxic to bees. It is a restricted-use insecticide of the pyrethroid class that is linked to autism, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. It is a highly persistent pesticide that is considered a Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance, or PFAS.

This is also the second consecutive year that the highly toxic insecticide thiamethoxam has been approved for use on rice fields in Arkansas. The maker of thiamethoxam, Syngenta, applied for a general approval of thiamethoxam on rice and other crops in 2017. Nearly five years later the EPA has yet to approve or deny that application, indicating there are high risks that prevent the agency from granting approval through its normal processes.

The so-called emergency approval will allow the pesticide, which is incredibly toxic to aquatic invertebrates, to be sprayed on a crop that is grown in standing water throughout much of the year. Arkansas is home to 20 species of freshwater fish, mussels and crawfish listed under the Endangered Species Act that require clean freshwater habitat for their survival.

“Big Ag knows that when a pesticide can’t make it through the normal review process, it can always exploit the emergency exemption process,” said Donley. “The absurd ‘emergency’ approvals for these dangerous poisons show that the EPA often succumbs to pressure to shrug off proper consideration of what’s safe for people or wildlife.”

The EPA has routinely allowed emergency exemptions for predictable and chronic situations that occur over many consecutive years. The agency has consistently abused the authority of granting emergency exemptions, as chronicled in the Center’s report, Poisonous Process: How the EPA’s Chronic Misuse of ‘Emergency’ Pesticide Exemptions Increases Risks to Wildlife.

In 2019 the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General released a report finding that the agency’s practice of routinely granting “emergency” approval for pesticides across millions of acres does not effectively measure risks to human health or the environment.

The Center has filed a legal petition calling for EPA to limit emergency exemptions to two years as a way to prohibit some of the more egregious abuses of this process. The EPA has not taken any substantive action in response to the petition.

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Featured image is from Zero Hedge

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday declared monkeypox a public health emergency. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it will offer monkeypox vaccines to children on a “case-by-case” basis, despite no clinical trials for kids under 18.

The U.S. declared monkeypox a public health emergency to raise awareness and allow for additional funding to fight the disease’s spread, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said on Thursday.

“We’re prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus,” Becerra said.

Becerra said he also is considering a second declaration that would allow federal officials to expedite medical countermeasures — such as potential treatments and vaccines — designed to ensure drugs are safe and effective.

President Biden said in a tweet he remained “committed to our monkeypox response: ramping-up vaccine distribution, expanding testing, and educating at-risk communities.”

“That’s why today’s public health emergency declaration on the virus is critical to confronting this outbreak with the urgency it warrants,” Biden said.

The last time the U.S. declared a public health emergency was in January 2020, for COVID-19.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 7,100 cases of monkeypox have been reported in the U.S., including five cases in children.

Symptoms of monkeypox infection are usually mild and include fever, rash and swollen lymph nodes, and occasionally intense headache, back pain, muscle aches, lack of energy and skin eruptions that can cause painful lesions, scabs or crusts.

The virus is rarely fatal and no deaths have been reported in the U.S.

Monkeypox primarily is spread through skin-to-skin contact during sex and affects mostly gay and bisexual men, public health officials say, although the virus can affect anyone.

According to the CDC, about 98% of monkeypox patients who provided demographic information to clinics identified as men who have sex with men.

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We repost this article, that was originally published on LewRockwell.com in 2006, in commemoration of the 77th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing.

Every year during the first two weeks of August the mass news media and many politicians at the national level trot out the “patriotic” political myth that the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945 caused them to surrender, and thereby saved the lives of anywhere from five hundred thousand to one million American soldiers, who did not have to invade the islands. Opinion polls over the last fifty years show that American citizens overwhelmingly (between 80 and 90%) believe this false history which, of course, makes them feel better about killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians (mostly women and children) and saving American lives to accomplish the ending of the war.

The best book, in my opinion, to explode this myth is The Decision to Use the Bomb by Gar Alperovitz, because it not only explains the real reasons the bombs were dropped, but also gives a detailed history of how and why the myth was created that this slaughter of innocent civilians was justified, and therefore morally acceptable. The essential problem starts with President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender, which was reluctantly adopted by Churchill and Stalin, and which President Truman decided to adopt when he succeeded Roosevelt in April of 1945. Hanson Baldwin was the principal writer for The New York Times who covered World War II and he wrote an important book immediately after the war entitled Great Mistakes of the War. Baldwin concludes that the unconditional surrender policy “. . . was perhaps the biggest political mistake of the war . . . . Unconditional surrender was an open invitation to unconditional resistance; it discouraged opposition to Hitler, probably lengthened the war, costs us lives, and helped to lead to the present aborted peace.”

The stark fact is that the Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the Emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the Emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial after the war. This fact became known to President Truman as early as May of 1945. The Japanese monarchy was one of the oldest in all of history dating back to 660 B.C. The Japanese religion added the belief that all the Emperors were the direct descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The reigning Emperor Hirohito was the 124th in the direct line of descent. After the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9 of 1945, and their surrender soon thereafter, the Japanese were allowed to keep their Emperor on the throne and he was not subjected to any war crimes trial. The Emperor, Hirohito, came on the throne in 1926 and continued in his position until his death in 1989. Since President Truman, in effect, accepted the conditional surrender offered by the Japanese as early as May of 1945, the question is posed, “Why then were the bombs dropped?”

The author Alperovitz gives us the answer in great detail which can only be summarized here, but he states, “We have noted a series of Japanese peace feelers in Switzerland which OSS Chief William Donovan reported to Truman in May and June [1945]. These suggested, even at this point, that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender might well be the only serious obstacle to peace. At the center of the explorations, as we also saw, was Allen Dulles, chief of OSS operations in Switzerland (and subsequently Director of the CIA). In his 1966 book The Secret Surrender, Dulles recalled that u2018On July 20, 1945, under instructions from Washington, I went to the Potsdam Conference and reported there to Secretary [of War] Stimson on what I had learned from Tokyo — they desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and their constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people.'” It is documented by Alperovitz that Stimson reported this directly to Truman. Alperovitz further points out in detail the documentary proof that every top presidential civilian and military advisor, with the exception of James Byrnes, along with Prime Minister Churchill and his top British military leadership, urged Truman to revise the unconditional surrender policy so as to allow the Japanese to surrender and keep their Emperor. All this advice was given to Truman prior to the Potsdam Proclamation which occurred on July 26, 1945. This proclamation made a final demand upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or suffer drastic consequences.

Another startling fact about the military connection to the dropping of the bomb is the lack of knowledge on the part of General MacArthur about the existence of the bomb and whether it was to be dropped. Alperovitz states “MacArthur knew nothing about advance planning for the atomic bomb’s use until almost the last minute. Nor was he personally in the chain of command in this connection; the order came straight from Washington. Indeed, the War Department waited until five days before the bombing of Hiroshima even to notify MacArthur — the commanding general of the U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific — of the existence of the atomic bomb.”

Alperovitz makes it very clear that the main person Truman was listening to while he ignored all of this civilian and military advice, was James Byrnes, the man who virtually controlled Truman at the beginning of his administration. Byrnes was one of the most experienced political figures in Washington, having served for over thirty years in both the House and the Senate. He had also served as a United States Supreme Court Justice, and at the request of President Roosevelt, he resigned that position and accepted the role in the Roosevelt administration of managing the domestic economy. Byrnes went to the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt and then was given the responsibility to get Congress and the American people to accept the agreements made at Yalta.

When Truman became a senator in 1935, Byrnes immediately became his friend and mentor and remained close to Truman until Truman became president. Truman never forgot this and immediately called on Byrnes to be his number-two man in the new administration. Byrnes had expected to be named the vice presidential candidate to replace Wallace and had been disappointed when Truman had been named, yet he and Truman remained very close. Byrnes had also been very close to Roosevelt, while Truman was kept in the dark by Roosevelt most of the time he served as vice president. Truman asked Byrnes immediately, in April, to become his Secretary of State but they delayed the official appointment until July 3, 1945, so as not to offend the incumbent. Byrnes had also accepted a position on the interim committee which had control over the policy regarding the atom bomb, and therefore, in April, 1945 became Truman’s main foreign policy advisor, and especially the advisor on the use of the atomic bomb. It was Byrnes who encouraged Truman to postpone the Potsdam Conference and his meeting with Stalin until they could know, at the conference, if the atomic bomb was successfully tested. While at the Potsdam Conference the experiments proved successful and Truman advised Stalin that a new massively destructive weapon was now available to America, which Byrnes hoped would make Stalin back off from any excessive demands or activity in the post-war period.

Truman secretly gave the orders on July 25, 1945 that the bombs would be dropped in August while he was to be in route back to America. On July 26, he issued the Potsdam Proclamation, or ultimatum, to Japan to surrender, leaving in place the unconditional surrender policy, thereby causing both Truman and Byrnes to believe that the terms would not be accepted by Japan.

The conclusion drawn unmistakably from the evidence presented, is that Byrnes is the man who convinced Truman to keep the unconditional surrender policy and not accept Japan’s surrender so that the bombs could actually be dropped thereby demonstrating to the Russians that America had a new forceful leader in place, a “new sheriff in Dodge” who, unlike Roosevelt, was going to be tough with the Russians on foreign policy and that the Russians needed to “back off” during what would become known as the “Cold War.” A secondary reason was that Congress would now be told about why they had made the secret appropriation to a Manhattan Project and the huge expenditure would be justified by showing that not only did the bombs work but that they would bring the war to an end, make the Russians back off and enable America to become the most powerful military force in the world.

If the surrender by the Japanese had been accepted between May and the end of July of 1945 and the Emperor had been left in place, as in fact he was after the bombing, this would have kept Russia out of the war. Russia agreed at Yalta to come into the Japanese war three months after Germany surrendered. In fact, Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 and Russia announced on August 8, (exactly three months thereafter) that it was abandoning its neutrality policy with Japan and entering the war. Russia’s entry into the war for six days allowed them to gain tremendous power and influence in China, Korea, and other key areas of Asia. The Japanese were deathly afraid of Communism and if the Potsdam Proclamation had indicated that America would accept the conditional surrender allowing the Emperor to remain in place and informed the Japanese that Russia would enter the war if they did not surrender, then this would surely have assured a quick Japanese surrender.

The second question that Alperovitz answers in the last half of the book is how and why the Hiroshima myth was created. The story of the myth begins with the person of James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University, who was a prominent scientist, having initially made his mark as a chemist working on poison gas during World War I. During World War II, he was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee from the summer of 1941 until the end of the war and he was one of the central figures overseeing the Manhattan Project. Conant became concerned about his future academic career, as well as his positions in private industry, because various people began to speak out concerning why the bombs were dropped. On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publically quoted extensively as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out . . . .” He further stated, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it.” Albert Einstein, one of the world’s foremost scientists, who was also an important person connected with the development of the atomic bomb, responded and his words were headlined in The New York Times “Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb.” The story reported that Einstein stated that “A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb.” In Einstein’s judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political — diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision.

Probably the person closest to Truman, from the military standpoint, was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, and there was much talk that he also deplored the use of the bomb and had strongly advised Truman not to use it, but advised rather to revise the unconditional surrender policy so that the Japanese could surrender and keep the Emperor. Leahy’s views were later reported by Hanson Baldwin in an interview that Leahy “thought the business of recognizing the continuation of the Emperor was a detail which should have been solved easily.” Leahy’s secretary, Dorothy Ringquist, reported that Leahy told her on the day the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, “Dorothy, we will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children.” Another important naval voice, the commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945, had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. Also, the opinion of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was reported to have said in a press conference on September 22, 1945, that “The Admiral took the opportunity of adding his voice to those insisting that Japan had been defeated before the atomic bombing and Russia’s entry into the war.” In a subsequent speech at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945, Admiral Nimitz stated “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” It was learned also that on or about July 20, 1945, General Eisenhower had urged Truman, in a personal visit, not to use the atomic bomb. Eisenhower’s assessment was “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing . . . to use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime.” Eisenhower also stated that it wasn’t necessary for Truman to “succumb” to Byrnes.

James Conant came to the conclusion that some important person in the administration must go public to show that the dropping of the bombs was a military necessity, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, so he approached Harvey Bundy and his son, McGeorge Bundy. It was agreed by them that the most important person to create this myth was Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. It was decided that Stimson would write a long article to be widely circulated in a prominent national magazine. This article was revised repeatedly by McGeorge Bundy and Conant before it was published in Harper’s magazine in February of 1947. The long article became the subject of a front-page article and editorial in The New York Times and in the editorial it was stated “There can be no doubt that the president and Mr. Stimson are right when they mention that the bomb caused the Japanese to surrender.” Later, in 1959, President Truman specifically endorsed this conclusion, including the idea that it saved the lives of a million American soldiers. This myth has been renewed annually by the news media and various political leaders ever since.

It is very pertinent that, in the memoirs of Henry Stimson entitled On Active Service in Peace and War, he states, “Unfortunately, I have lived long enough to know that history is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.”

To bring this matter more into focus from the human tragedy standpoint, I recommend the reading of a book entitled Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6, September 30, 1945, by Michiko Hachiya. He was a survivor of Hiroshima and kept a daily diary about the women, children and old men that he treated on a daily basis in the hospital. The doctor was badly injured himself but recovered enough to help others and his account of the personal tragedies of innocent civilians who were either badly burned or died as a result of the bombing puts the moral issue into a clear perspective for all of us to consider.

Now that we live in the nuclear age and there are enough nuclear weapons spread around the world to destroy civilization, we need to face the fact that America is the only country to have used this awful weapon and that it was unnecessary to have done so. If Americans would come to recognize the truth, rather than the myth, it might cause such a moral revolt that we would take the lead throughout the world in realizing that wars in the future may well become nuclear, and therefore all wars must be avoided at almost any cost. Hopefully, our knowledge of science has not outrun our ability to exercise prudent and humane moral and political judgment to the extent that we are destined for extermination.

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Regional alliances should, for the most part, remain regional.  Areas of the globe can count on a number of such bodies and associations with varying degrees of heft: the Organization of American States; the Organisation of African Unity; and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.  Only one has decided to move beyond its natural, subscribed limits, citing security and a militant basis, for its actions.

On April 27, the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, prime ministerial contender, made her claim that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization needed to be globalised.  Her Mansion House speech at the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet was one of those unusually frank disclosures that abandons pretence revealing, in its place, a disturbing reality.

After making it clear that NATO’s “open door policy” was “sacrosanct”, Truss also saw security in global terms, another way of promoting a broader commitment to international mischief.  She rejected “the false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security.  In the modern world we need both.”  A “global NATO” was needed.  “By that I don’t mean extending the membership to those from other regions.  I mean that NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats.”

The Truss vision is a simple one, marked by nations “free” and “assertive and in the ascendant.  Where freedom and democracy are strengthened through a network of economic and security partnerships.”  A “Network of Liberty” would be required to protect such a world, one that would essentially bypass the UN Security Council and institutions that “have been bent out of shape so far” in enabling rather than containing “aggression”.

This extraordinary, aggressive embrace of neoconservative bullishness, one that trashes international institutions rather than strengthening them, was on show again in Spain.  At NATO’s summit, Truss reiterated her view that the alliance should take “a global outlook protecting Indo-Pacific as well as Euro-Atlantic security”.

The Truss position suggested less a remaking than a return to traditional, thuggish politics dressed up as objective, enduring rules.  Free trade, that great oxymoron of governments, is seen as “fair”, which requires “playing by the rules.”  The makers of those rules are never mentioned.  But she finds room to be critical of powers “naïve about the geopolitical power of economics”, a remarkable suggestion coming from a nation responsible for the illegal export of opium to China in the nineteenth century and promoters of unequal treaties.  “We are showing,” he boasted, “that economic access is no longer a given.  It has to be earned.”

The Global NATO theme is not sparklingly novel, even if the Ukraine War has given impetus to its promotion and selling.  The post-Cold War period left the alliance floundering.  The great Satan – the Soviet Union – has ceased to exist, undercutting its raison d’être.  New terrain, and theatres, were needed to flex muscle and show purpose.

The Kosovo intervention in 1999, evangelised as a human rights security operation against genocidal Serbian forces, put the world on notice where alliance members might be going.  NATO was again involved in enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya as the country was ushered to imminent, post-Qaddafi collapse.  When the International Security Force (ISAF) completed its ill-fated mission in Afghanistan in 2015, NATO was again on the scene.

In the organisation’s Strategic Concept document released at the end of June, the Euro-Atlantic dimension, certainly regarding the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s role, comes in for special mention. But room, and disapproval, is also made for China.  “The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.”

A number of “political, economic and military tools” had been used to increase Beijing’s “global footprint and project power”, all done in a manner distinctly not transparent.  The security of allies had been challenged by “malicious hybrid and cyber operations”, along with “confrontational rhetoric and disinformation”.  Of deep concern was the deepening relationship between Moscow and Beijing, “and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order” which ran “counter to our values and interests.”

The alliance’s recent self-inflation has led to curious developments.  Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been pushing Canberra ever closer towards NATO, a process that has been ongoing for some years.  At the alliance’s public forum in Madrid, Albanese used China’s “economic coercion” against Australia as a noisy platform while decrying Beijing’s encroachments into areas that had been the playground, and in some cases plaything, of Western powers.  “Just as Russia seeks to recreate a Russian or Soviet empire, the Chinese government is seeking friends, whether it be […] through economic support to build up alliances to undermine what has historically been the Western alliance in places like the Indo-Pacific.”

At a press conference held at Madrid’s Torrejon Air Base, the Australian prime minister felt certain that “NATO members know that China is more forward leaning in our region.”  Beijing had levelled sanctions not only against Canberra but had proven to “be more aggressive in its stance in the world”.

Australian pundits on the security circuit are warmed by the visit, seeing a chance to point NATO’s interest in the direction of China’s ambition in the Indo-Pacific.  Just as Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad described Washington’s Cold War involvement in Western Europe as an empire by invitation, NATO, or some bit of it, is being envisaged as an invitee in regions far beyond its traditional scope.  None of this will do much to encourage the prospects for stability while leaving every chance for further conflict.

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

Featured image is from Al Mayadeen English

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s provocative visit to Taiwan is part of the U.S. escalation against China in what, in Pentagon geography, is referred to as the Indo-Pacific, i.e., the region stretching from the west coast of the United States to that of India. Here RIMPAC, the world’s largest naval exercise under U.S. command, is underway, with naval and air forces from 26 countries participating. It is directed against what the Pentagon calls “Chinese aggression,” accusing Beijing of preparing against Taiwan a military operation similar to that conducted by Russia in Ukraine. In this way, Washington is fueling, after the one in Ukraine, other hotbeds of war to hinder and break the Great Eurasian Partnership, which, proposed by President Putin in 2015, is being implemented with a series of projects of which the New Silk Road, promoted by China, is the backbone.

The International North-South Transport Corridor connects Russia to India and other Asian countries via Azerbaijan and Iran, along a much shorter, and therefore cheaper, route than the Atlantic and Mediterranean routes. US and EU sanctions against Russian oil and gas exports are thus thwarted. Another project underway is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which opens access to the Arabian Sea to Chinese exports, and could extend to Afghanistan, a country the US and NATO have tried in vain to control through a costly and bloody 20-year war.

The growing economic integration of Eurasia, which encourages negotiated conflict resolution and intercultural dialogue, contributes concretely and substantially to the transition from the unipolar to the multipolar world, which the U.S. and other major powers in the West are trying hard to prevent.

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This article was originally published on byoblu.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Facebook Page

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First published on July 13, 2022.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp andchemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.

It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.

NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.

“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”

On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”

This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.

One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.

Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.

China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive  8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year.  By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.

If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.

Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.

NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.

China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.

The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.

NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.

The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval ships through the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.

The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.

The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.

The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”

The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.

“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”

The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.

At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.

“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.

The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.

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

Featured image: Original illustration by Mr. Fish

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First published in the Korea Times on November 29, 2017.

Almost all of my undergraduate students take courses in economics and I greatly envy them for it. Sadly, I never had a chance to study economics as an undergraduate and do not consider myself to be qualified in the field.

So, in my ignorance, I started asking them questions related to economic phenomena during my classes on Korean and East Asian history.

But I discovered a remarkable fact about the study of economics in Korea when I made my questions to my students more specific about the impact of economics on politics and society: I found out that I had read more about economics than most of my students who had taken years of economics classes in college.

When I asked them about the fundamentals of economic theory, I discovered that in the course of their classes in “economics” they had not read any of the major works of Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Marx, John Keynes, or even contemporary critics like Thomas Piketty.

I was truly astonished. I, a mere literature professor, had read at least some of the major works of all of those theoreticians. One student then explained to me that economics textbooks did include short passages introducing the major theories of economics.

But the vast majority of the economics classes consist of employing advanced mathematics to solve given problem sets without a consideration of the nature of economics.

The “facts” of economics, from interest rates and deficits, to inflation and value, are presented in the textbooks as if they were natural laws, the equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics or the law of gravity. It is fabulously assumed that the student can discover the truth of economics through the mere process of calculation without any epistemological or metaphysical, let alone scientific investigation into the validity of those assumptions about the human activities defined as economics.

At that point in the conversation with my students, I regained my confidence. After all, extremely convincing arguments have been advanced by numerous thinkers that there are “laws” in economics only in the most limited sense and that the entire concept of an economy is so culturally specific, and so impacted by politics and practice that economics as a field is as much a science as is literature or art history.

I think that the most critical part of any economics course must be an introduction to the underlying philosophical and historical principles of the study of economics: how men have historically conceived of society, the state, money and commerce and how those factors interact with each other to produce what we call the “economy.”

Part of that process should include a consideration of how vastly different the concept of “economy” can be from one expert to another, or historical period to another.

It is also critical that the study of economics contain substantial consideration of the ethical implications of financial and commercial activities. Economics is not a value-neutral field like the study of quasars, but is rather akin to politics: an all too human enterprise that demands ethical judgment about its function and its results.

This focus on the ethics of economics is not my idiosyncratic perspective. From Thomas Aquinas in the West to Mencius in the East, the ethical element of economics and politics has long been considered to be essential. I do not know exactly how the study of economics came to be seen as something that did not demand the careful consideration of moral philosophy.

In any case, Korea faces tremendous economic challenges today that cannot be addressed with what our students are learning in these economics classes focused on mathematics. Whether we are talking about the collapse of the global trade system, which is considered essential to Korean economic development, into isolationist and nationalist spheres, or we are considering the accelerating gap between the rich and the poor, the next generation will face serious problems that involve cultural and political issues. They have no hope of solving these problems with mathematical equations.

I fear that teaching economics as if it were a form of calculus will do the next generation a terrible disservice if we think even for a moment about the complex issues that they will face in the future.

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This was originally published on Korea Times on November 29, 2017.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Flickr

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***

Immer wieder erliegen Menschen der Illusion, dass sie auf die Straße gehen und Fensterscheiben einschlagen müssen, wenn ihnen Unrecht geschieht. Politiker aller Schattierungen fabulieren bereits von kommenden Volksaufständen und vom Bürgerkrieg. Dieses Aufbegehren gegen die Gewalt „von oben“ ist verständlich, weil Menschen sie nur schwer ertragen und sie ebenfalls mit Gewalt abwehren wollen. Hundert und mehr Jahre Geschichte haben jedoch gezeigt, dass der verspielt, der so dumm ist zu glauben, dass er gegen den Staat aufkommen kann. Der Staat ist gut gerüstet.

Eine pazifistische Welt kann nur durch eine tiefgreifende Änderung der sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse entstehen. Um dies zu erreichen, muss die Menschheit aber einen anderen Weg wählen als den der Gewalt. Bereits zu Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs schrieb Albert Camus in sein Tagebuch: „Treiben Sie niemanden zum Aufruhr. Man muss mit dem Blut und der Freiheit der anderen schonend umgehen.“ Er empfiehlt, die Mitmenschen umfassend aufzuklären und als erstes Gebot Selbstbeherrschung zu lernen (1).

Toleranz ist jedoch nicht gleichbedeutend mit Nachgeben. Sie ist eine Tugend, die Frieden ermöglicht. Hinzu kommt die Aufklärung und die Erziehung, eine gewaltige Aufgabe, die viel Zeit und Geduld benötigt: Die Menschen müssen sich selbst, ihre Natur, ihre Reaktionsweisen und die der anderen kennen lernen und damit zu „Antriebsriemen“ der Veränderung der Welt werden (2). Die Jugend braucht humane und mutige Vorbilder, um die Welt einmal in eine andere Bahn lenken zu können.

Ohne Zwang und Gewalt – in absoluter Freiwilligkeit

Nur indem sich die Menschen zusammensetzen und überlegen, wie sie die anstehenden sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Probleme gemeinsam lösen können, wird die Menschheit weiterkommen und die Welt genesen. Auf freiwilliger Basis assoziieren sie gerne. Bereits das Kind kooperiert, wenn es nicht gezwungen wird. Zwang und Gewalt ersticken das natürliche Bedürfnis zur Mitarbeit. Dem Konzept der Freiheit muss dann jenes der Gewaltlosigkeit folgen.

Wieso sollten erwachsene Menschen nicht in der Lage sein, ohne Zwangsmaßnahmen wie genverändernde Impfungen oder freiheitsraubende Isolierung mit dem Problem eines Virus zurechtzukommen? Auch können sie mit überlegen, wie zwischenstaatliche Probleme ohne einen verheerenden Krieg gelöst werden können. Auf keinen Fall sollte die Lösung von Menschheitsproblemen an Politiker delegiert werden! (3)

Ein politisches Beispiel für unangebrachte Zwangsmaßnahmen war die russische Revolution. Dort haben die Bolschewiki das zaristische Prinzip der Gewalt, der Unterdrückung und des Zwanges angewandt, anstatt den humanistischen Weg zu wählen und die Menschen anzusprechen und frei zu lassen. Vielleicht hätte so der Zweite Weltkrieg verhindert werden können.

Toleranz ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit Nachgeben

Diese bedeutende Aussage schrieb Albert Camus in seinen Tagebuchaufzeichnungen von 1939 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe zu (4). Aber wie auch immer: Vom 25. Oktober bis 16. November 1995 wurde auf der 28. Generalkonferenz der Mitgliedstaaten der UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) eine „Erklärung von Prinzipien der Toleranz“ verabschiedet, aus der im Folgenden nur auszugweise zitiert werden kann. In der Präambel schreiben die Staaten der UNESCO:

„Entschlossen, alle positiven Schritte zu unternehmen, die notwendig sind, um den Gedanken der Toleranz in unseren Gesellschaften zu verbreiten – denn Toleranz ist nicht nur ein hochgeschätztes Prinzip, sondern eine notwendige Voraussetzung für den Frieden und für die wirtschaftliche und soziale Entwicklung aller Völker – erklären wir“:

• „Toleranz bedeutet Respekt, Akzeptanz und Anerkennung der Kulturen unserer Welt.“
• „Toleranz ist eine Tugend, die den Frieden ermöglicht, und trägt dazu bei, den Kult des Krieges durch eine Kultur des Friedens zu überwinden.“
• „Toleranz ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit Nachgeben, Herablassung und Nachsicht.“
• „In Übereinstimmung mit der Achtung der Menschenrechte bedeutet praktizierte Toleranz weder das Tolerieren sozialen Unrechts noch die Aufgabe oder Schwächung der eigenen Überzeugungen.“
• „Toleranz auf der Ebene staatlichen Handelns erfordert Gerechtigkeit und Unparteilichkeit in der Gesetzgebung, bei der Anwendung der Gesetze sowie in Justiz und Verwaltung.“
• „In der heutigen Welt ist Toleranz wichtiger als jemals zuvor.“
• „Toleranz ist notwendig zwischen einzelnen wie in Familie und Gemeinschaft.“
• „Bildung ist das wirksamste Mittel gegen Intoleranz.“
• „Erziehung zur Toleranz gehört zu den vordringlichsten Bildungszielen.“
• „Wir verpflichten uns zur Förderung von Toleranz und Gewaltlosigkeit durch Programme und Institutionen in den Bereichen Bildung, Wissenschaft, Kultur und Kommunikation.“ (5)

Camus: „Treiben Sie niemanden zum Aufruhr!“ 

Zu Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs schreibt Camus in einem Brief an einen Verzweifelten:

„Sie haben eine Aufgabe, zweifeln Sie nicht daran. Jeder Mensch besitzt einen mehr oder weniger großen Einflussbereich. Er verdankt ihn seinen Mängeln ebenso sehr wie seinen Vorzügen. Aber wie dem auch sei, er ist vorhanden und er kann unmittelbar genutzt werden. Treiben Sie niemanden zum Aufruhr. Man muss mit dem Blut und der Freiheit der anderen schonend umgehen. Aber Sie können zehn, zwanzig, dreißig Menschen davon überzeugen, dass dieser Krieg weder unabwendbar war noch ist, dass noch nicht alle Mittel versucht worden sind, ihm Einhalt zu gebieten, dass man es sagen, es wenn möglich schreiben, es wenn nötig hinausschreien muss! Diese zehn oder dreißig Menschen werden es zehn anderen weitersagen, die es ihrerseits weiterverbreiten. Wenn die Trägheit Sie zurückhält, nun gut, so fangen Sie mit anderen von vorne an.“ (6)

Die Jugend braucht humane und mutige Vorbilder 

Um die Welt einmal in eine andere Bahn lenken zu können, braucht die Jugend humane und mutige Vorbilder. Das können zum einen die Eltern und Großeltern, zum anderen die Lehrkräfte sein. Doch zunächst müssen sich die Menschen selbst erkennen. Sie müssen sich ihrer Natur und ihrer psychischen Reaktionsweisen bewusst werden – und in einem nächsten Schritt auch die anderen Menschen erkennen (7).

Dieses Wissen können sich die Menschen in der Regel nicht einfach durch simple Lernprozesse aneignen. Um ihre gefühlsmäßige Einstellung zu ändern, sollten sie eine therapeutische Beziehung zu einem Psychotherapeuten, der ein wirklicher „Menschenkenner“ ist, eingehen. Durch eine Vertrauensbeziehung erlebt der einzelne Mensch Annahme und Mitgefühl. Die ermöglicht ihm, kränkende Erlebnisse aufzuarbeiten. Dadurch erlangt das Individuum eine verständnisvolle Sicht seiner selbst und seiner Mitmenschen.

Ein gestärkter und sich seiner selbst bewusster Erwachsener (ob Mutter, Vater oder Lehrkraft) ist dann ein geeignetes Vorbild für die zu ihm aufblickende Jugend. Ausgestattet mit einem gesunden Menschenverstand bringt er den Mut auf, sich seines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen, denkt für alle anderen mit, weil er keine Angst vor seinen Mitmenschen hat, sondern mit ihnen kommuniziert und kooperiert. Er unterwirft sich auch nicht gehorsam irgendeiner angeblichen Autorität, sondern bleibt sich und seiner Ethik treu. Er bekennt sich offen zur Gewaltlosigkeit, zum Frieden, zur Freiwilligkeit und zum Geist der Verantwortlichkeit in Familie und Gesellschaft und sieht im Gemeinsinn ein erstrebenswertes Ziel für alle Menschen.

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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, bildete bei der BAYER-AG in Leverkusen Hochschulabsolventen fort, gründete in Köln zusammen mit Kollegen eine Modellschule für ehemalige Schulversager und leitete sie. An der Bayerischen Akademie für Lehrerfortbildung und Personalführung war er als Instituts-Rektor für die Ausbildung von Beratungslehrkräften für alle Schularten zuständig. Am Ende seiner Berufslaufbahn war er Staatlicher Schulberater für die Landeshauptstadt München. Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

Noten 

(1) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg, S. 268 und 273

(2) https://www.globalresearch.ca/wer-die-welt-andern-will-muss-den-menschen-andern/5788261

(3) https://www.globalresearch.ca/die-losung-der-menschheitsprobleme-nicht-an-politiker-delegieren/5748759/

(4) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg, S. 268

(5) https://www.verbraucherschutzstelle.de/prinzipien_der_toleranz.htm/

(6) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg, S. 273

(7) https://www.globalresearch.ca/wer-die-welt-andern-will-muss-den-menschen-andern/5788261

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***

Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, and shares borders with South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. It is very rich in mineral resources and is the largest trading partner of South Africa on the continent of Africa. Russia maintains very friendly relations with Zimbabwe, thanks to ties which evolved during the struggle for independence. Since then, Russia has had a very strong mutual sympathy with and friendly feelings toward the southern African people, government and the country.

Brigadier General Nicholas Mike Sango, Zimbabwean ambassador to the Russian Federation, has held his position since July 2015. He previously held various high-level posts such as military adviser in Zimbabwe’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and as international instructor in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Below Kester Kenn Klomegah conducted this exclusive interview with him to assess and guage the current climate of relations between Russia and Zimbabwe specifically and Africa generally. The following are excerpts (summarized text) from the long-ranging interview.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah: As you are about to leave [your position of ambassador], what would you say generally and concisely about Russia’s policy towards Africa?

Brigadier General Nicholas Mike Sango: Russia’s policy towards Africa has over the last few years evolved in a positive way. The watershed Russia-Africa Summit of 2019 reset Russia’s Soviet-era relations with Africa. Africa fully understands that the transition from the Soviet Union to the present-day Russian Federation was a process and that today Russia is now in a position to influence events at the global scale. Even that being the case, her institutions and organs, be they political or economic are equally in a transitional mode as they adapt to the Federal policy posture and the emerging realities of the present geo-political environment. Africa in return has responded overwhelmingly to the call by its presence in its fullness at the 2019 Sochi Summit.

KKK: Do you feel there are still a number of important tasks which you have not fulfilled or accomplished as Zimbabwean Ambassador to the Russian Federation?

BGNMS: Zimbabwe government’s engagement with the Russian Federation is historically rooted in new state’s contribution towards Zimbabwe attaining her freedom and nationhood in 1980. This is the foundation of the two countries relations and has a bearing  on two countries  interactions and cooperation. Relations between the two countries have remained stead-fast with collaborations at political and economic spares hallmarked by Russia’s involvement as early as 2014 in the commissioning of the Darwendale Platinum Project followed by ALROSA, the diamond giant setting its footprints on the territory of Zimbabwe.

The President of the Republic of Zimbabwe visited Moscow in 2019. Since then, there have been reciprocal visits by ministers and parliamentarians. In early June 2022, the Chairperson of the Federation Council visited Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s military have participated in Army Games over the years and will do in 2022 ARMY GAMES. Further to these mentioned above, Russia has continued to support human resource development through its government scholarship programmes as well as training other arms of government.  Zimbabwe recently hosted the Russia-Zimbabwe Intergovernmental Commission where new cooperative milestones were signed.

Zimbabwe’s foreign policy is anchored on engagement and re-engagement. As Ambassador to the Russian Federation, my focus as per direction of the Zimbabwean President was to promote business-to-business engagement and attract Russian investment in Zimbabwe. While the Darwendale Platinum Project and ALROSA’s entry into the Zimbabwe market, we have not seen other big businesses following the two.

The volume of trade between Zimbabwe and Russia could be better. Perhaps, as an Embassy, we have not made a strong case for importers to look in Zimbabwe’s direction. Or, our own trade and investment institutions have not fully appreciated the potential of the Russian market. The concern by Russian importers regarding the logistical cost of bringing goods from landlocked countries in the far southern hemisphere is appreciated. This, however, would not inhibit the importation of non-perishable products.

As mentioned earlier on, businesses are still in transitional mode and it is the hope that the emerging world order will in time persuade business to look at Africa through the lenses to see the vast opportunities and benefits beckoning. On the other hand, having established the Russian-Zimbabwe Business Council, it was hoped that businesses of the two countries could speak to each other, appreciate the strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities open. Although the benefits are yet to be seen, this remains work-in-progress.

KKK: Has the experience, including all your interactions, changed your initial thoughts when you first arrived to this ambassadorial post in 2015?

BGNMS: Interestingly, my views and perceptions about Russia before and during my stay in the beautiful country has always been grounded in the history and our nation’s journey to nationhood, independence and sovereignty. As a product of the revolutionary struggle and from my government’s direction and policy, Russia was and will always be an ally regardless of the changing temperatures and geo-political environment.

KKK: What would you frankly say about Russia’s policy pitfalls in Africa? And what would you suggest especially about steps to take in regaining part of the Soviet-era level of engagement (this time without ideological considerations) with Africa?

BGNMS: There are several issues that could strengthen the relationship. One important direction is economic cooperation. African diplomats have consistently been persuading Russia’s businesses to take advantage of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) as an opportunity for Russian business to establish footprints in the continent. This view has not found favor with them and, it is hoped over time it will.

Russia’s policy on Africa has been clearly pronounced and is consistent with Africa’s position. Challenges arise from implementation of that forward-looking policy as summarized:

• The government has not pronounced incentives for business to set sights and venture into Africa. Russian businesses, in general, view Africa as too risky for their investment. They need a prompt from government.
• Soviet Union’s African legacy was assisting colonized countries attain independence. Russia as a country needs to set footprints into the continent by exporting its competitive advantages in engineering and technological advancement to bridge the gap that is retarding Africa’s industrialization and development.
• There are too many initiatives by too many quasi-state institutions promoting economic cooperation with Africa saying the same things in different ways but doing nothing tangible. “Too many cooks spoil the booth.”
• In discussing cooperative mechanisms, it is important to understand what Africa’s needs and its desired destination is. In fact, the Africa Agenda 2063 is Africa’s roadmap. As such the economic cooperation agenda and initiatives must of necessity speak to and focus within the parameters of the AU Agenda 2063.

KKK: And finally about the emerging new world order as propagated by China and Russia?

BGNMS: Africa in general refused to condemn Russia for her “special military operation” in Ukraine at the United Nations General Assembly and that shook the Western Powers. The reason is very simple. Speaking as a Zimbabwean, our nation has been bullied, subjected to unilateral coercive measures that have been visited upon us and other poor countries without recourse to the international systems governing good order, human rights and due process. There is one more historical fact – Africa is no longer a colony, of any nation and refuses to be viewed as secondary states. It is for the above reasons that Africa welcomes multilateralism and the demise of hegemonism perpetuated by so called “big brothers” – be it social, cultural, ideological or economic. Africa rejects this western perception of Africa.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

Featured image is from the author

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***

Originally published November 26, 2021.

“It took Russia twenty years to return to being a normal state with a vibrant economy, powerful armed forces and self-respect, but Russians still had a nation, even in those horrifying times of the 1990s so-called “liberal” experiment.

“The United States doesn’t have a nation anymore. Not even close, and if the magnificence and power, through visual representation, of the nation’s cathedrals are any indication, the United States has become as a tasteless boxy post-modernist mega-church preaching prosperity gospel. It is fake, it always was, and it cannot stop disintegration.”

– Andrei Martyanov, from Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse   [1]

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In the previous instalment of this two part series, we painted a portrait of an American Empire that was constantly failing in its military engagements in, really, all of its pursuits, from Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya and Syria, to Venezuela, Bolivia and even the crucial flash-point now in Ukraine. In a nutshell, the U.S. has lost ground in every military venture it pursued since the turn of the century.

But a closer look inside the Union itself reveals multiple difficulties plaguing the world’s one remaining Superpower on several fronts.

According to the Survey of Mothers with Young Children, 40.1% of the mothers with children 12 and younger reported household food insecurity since the on-set of COVID-19. That’s up 170 percent over food insecurity numbers in 2018! [2]

In the 1960s, manufacturing made up 25% of the U.S. gross domestic product. That number shrunk to 11% today. Five million American manufacturing jobs have left the country since the turn of the century. [3]

In oil and natural gas production, the U.S. is at the equivalent of 2,303 million tonnes of oil equivalent versus 2,684 million tonnes for China. And in terms of the production of electricity from oil, hydro, nuclear and all other sources, the U.S. is producing 4,385 TWh versus 7,482 TWh for China! [4][5]

In 2019, the U.S. produced 10.8 million vehicles. Compare that to the 25.7 million produced by China! And in 2015, the U.S. was 90% dependent on China for its laptops and videogames with TV. [6][7]

Plus the United States has run up a debt just shy of 29 trillion dollars – WAY higher than its regular production in the manufacturing sector (2.158 trillion) and its provision in services (13.1 trillion)![8][9]

These daunting statistics are mentioned in the book Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse written by military analyst Andrei Martyanov. It has been described as part 3 of a trilogy of books on the fading dominance of the mighty turned frail American eagle. As Pepe Escobar put it in a recent book review:

“Martyanov, in meticulous detail, analyzes the imperial decline thematically – with chapters on Consumption, Geoeconomics, Energy, Losing the Arms Race, among others, composing a devastating indictment especially of toxic D.C. lobbies and the prevailing political mediocrity across the Beltway. What is laid bare for the reader is the complex interplay of forces that are driving the political, ideological, economic, cultural and military American chaos.” [10]

This simple nearly 240 page read lays out how the U.S. got where it is today, and also lays out why it is so fundamentally incapable of recovering given the current state of education, media, and the band of incompetents prevailing within its elites. We got in touch with Martyanov this week and benefited from his unique understanding in this special edition of the Global Research News Hour!

Andrei Martyavnov served as an officer on the ships and staff position of Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. In mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he currently works as Laboratory Director in a commercial aerospace group. He is a blogger on the US Naval Institute Blog and at Reminiscence of the Future. He is author of Losing Military Supremacy, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, and earlier this year, Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse. He is based near Seattle Washington.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 334)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

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Notes:

1. Andrei Martyanov (2021), P. 235, “Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse”‘, Clarity Press Inc.
2. Lauren Bauer, “The COVID-19 crisis has already left too many children hungry in America,” Brookings Institution, Up Front, May 6, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the- covid-19-crisis-has-already-left-too-many-children-hungry-in-america/
3. Pat Buchanan, “Stress Test of a Failing Superpower,” UNZ Review, July 24, 2020, https://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/stress-test-of-a-failing-superpower/
4. Total energy production, 2019, Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2020, https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-production.html
5. “Electricity production, 2019,” Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2020, https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-energy-production-statistics.html
6. OICA, 2019 Production Statistics, https://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2019-statistics/
7. Caroline Freund, “How Dependent Are US Consumers on Imports from China?” Peterson Institute for International Economics, June 7, 2016, https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-investment-policy-watch/how-depenent-are-us-consumers-imports-china
8. “United States GDP From Manufacturing, 2005-2020 Data,” Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com//united-states//gdp-from-manufacturing
9. “United States GDP From Private Services Producing Industries,” Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-from-services
10. https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/05/22/the-disintegrated-states-of-america/#more-239977  

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***

Time and again, people succumb to the illusion that they have to take to the streets and break windows when they are wronged. Politicians of all shades are already fantasising about coming popular uprisings and civil war. This rebellion against violence “from above” is understandable because people find it hard to bear and also want to fight it off with violence. However, a hundred and more years of history have shown that he who is so stupid as to believe that he can raise against the state will gamble away. The state is well equipped.

A pacifist world can only come about through a profound change in social and economic conditions. But to achieve this, humanity must choose a path other than that of violence. Already at the beginning of the Second World War, Albert Camus wrote in his diary: “Do not drive anyone to riot. One must be gentle with the blood and freedom of others.” He recommends educating one’s fellow human beings comprehensively and learning self-control as the first commandment (1).

Tolerance, however, is not synonymous with yielding. It is a virtue that makes peace possible. In addition, there is enlightenment and education, a formidable task that requires much time and patience: People must learn about themselves, their nature, their ways of reacting and those of others, and thus become “drive belts” of change in the world (2). Young people need humane and courageous role models to be able to steer the world on a different course for once.

Without coercion and violence – in absolute voluntariness

Only by people getting together and thinking about how they can solve the upcoming social and economic problems together will humanity progress and the world recover. On a voluntary basis, they like to associate. Even the child cooperates if it is not forced. Coercion and force stifle the natural need to cooperate. The concept of freedom must then be followed by that of non-violence.

Why shouldn’t adults be able to deal with the problem of a virus without coercive measures such as gene-altering vaccinations or freedom-stealing isolation? They can also help think through how interstate problems can be solved without a devastating war. Under no circumstances should the solution of humanity’s problems be delegated to politicians! (3)

A political example of inappropriate coercion was the Russian Revolution. There, the Bolsheviks used the tsarist principle of violence, oppression and coercion instead of choosing the humanist path and addressing the people and letting them go free. Perhaps the Second World War could have been prevented in this way.

Tolerance is not synonymous with giving in

Albert Camus attributed this significant statement to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his 1939 diary entries (4). However, from 25 October to 16 November 1995, the 28th General Conference of the member states of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) adopted a “Declaration of Principles of Tolerance”, extracts of which can be quoted below. In the preamble, the UNESCO states write:

“Determined to take all positive steps necessary to spread the idea of tolerance in our societies – for tolerance is not only a highly valued principle, but a necessary condition for peace and for the economic and social development of all peoples – we declare”:

– “Tolerance means respect, acceptance and recognition of the cultures of our world.”

– “Tolerance is a virtue that makes peace possible and contributes to overcoming the cult of war through a culture of peace.”

– “Tolerance is not synonymous with yielding, condescension and indulgence.”

– “In accordance with respect for human rights, practised tolerance does not mean tolerating social injustice or abandoning or weakening one’s convictions.”

– “Tolerance at the level of state action requires justice and impartiality in legislation, in the application of laws, and in the judiciary and administration.”

– “In today’s world, tolerance is more important than ever before.”

– “Tolerance is necessary between individuals as well as in families and communities.”

– “Education is the most effective means against intolerance.”

– “Education for tolerance is one of the most urgent educational goals.”

– “We commit ourselves to the promotion of tolerance and non-violence through programmes and institutions in the fields of education, science, culture and communication.” (5)

Camus: “Drive no one to riot!”

At the beginning of the Second World War, Camus writes in a letter to a desperate man:

“You have a task, do not doubt it. Every man possesses a sphere of influence, more or less. He owes it as much to his defects as to his merits. But be that as it may, it is there and it can be used immediately. Do not drive anyone to riot. You have to be sparing with the blood and freedom of others. But you can convince ten, twenty, thirty people that this war was neither inevitable nor is it, that all means have not yet been tried to stop it, that it must be said, written if possible, shouted out if necessary! These ten or thirty people will spread the word to ten others, who will in turn spread it. If inertia holds you back, well, start all over again with others.” (6)

Youth need humane and courageous role models

In order to be able to steer the world in a different direction, young people need humane and courageous role models. These can be parents and grandparents on the one hand, and teachers on the other. But first people have to recognise themselves. They have to become aware of their nature and their psychological reaction patterns – and in a next step also recognise other people (7).

As a rule, people cannot simply acquire this knowledge through simple learning processes. To change their emotional attitude, they should enter into a therapeutic relationship with a psychotherapist who is a real “judge of character”. Through a relationship of trust, the individual experiences acceptance and compassion. This enables him to work through offending experiences. Through this, the individual gains an understanding view of himself and his fellow human beings.

A strengthened and self-aware adult (whether mother, father or teacher) is then a suitable role model for the youth looking up to him. Equipped with common sense, he musters the courage to use his own mind, thinks for everyone else because he is not afraid of his fellow human beings but communicates and cooperates with them. He also does not obediently submit to any alleged authority, but remains true to himself and his ethics. He openly professes non-violence, peace, voluntarism and the spirit of responsibility in family and society and sees public spirit as a desirable goal for all people.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych. with focus on clinical, educational, media and individual psychology). He taught for many decades, trained university graduates at BAYER AG in Leverkusen, and founded and ran a model school for former school failures in Cologne together with colleagues. At the Bavarian Academy for Teacher Training and Personnel Management, he was the institute director responsible for training guidance counsellors for all types of schools. At the end of his professional career, he was a state school counsellor for the state capital Munich. As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg, pp. 268 and 273

(2) https://www.globalresearch.ca/wer-die-welt-andern-will-muss-den-menschen-andern/5788261

(3) https://www.globalresearch.ca/die-losung-der-menschheitsprobleme-nicht-an-politiker-delegieren/5748759/

(4) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg, p. 268

(5) https://www.verbraucherschutzstelle.de/prinzipien_der_toleranz.htm/

(6) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg, p. 273

(7) https://www.globalresearch.ca/wer-die-welt-andern-will-muss-den-menschen-andern/5788261

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In his article for The Atlantic of July 24, 2022 “Don’t Blame Dostoevsky,” Mikhail Shishkin makes a false start right away.[i]  He rationalizes hate for a nation and its culture in the first sentence: “I understand why people hate all things Russian right now.” From the outset he tells readers it is permissible to hate an entire nation if one can manufacture an “acceptable” reason for this hatred.  Thus “people” can go ahead and hate; Mr. Shishkin has just given the world a license.  Such an attitude is clearly allowed in the West, for Russia and things Russian are not protected from hate speech.[ii]  Regardless of how one views the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it does not justify dismissing things Russian or hating Russians; ideological convictions do not give individuals the right to denigrate a nation’s culture or demean its people.

Screenshot from The Atlantic

Russia’s contributions to the treasure-trove of world civilization are too numerous and superlative to mention here. It is not necessary to enumerate them. To eliminate Russian literature from university curricula, as was recently attempted in Milan, would negatively impact those students’ world cultural literacy.  The European examples of Russia hatred and slavish following of anti-Russia sanctions abound.[iii] As recent diplomatic blunders have demonstrated, such as UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s ignorance of basic geography (surely a desideratum for her job?), international education and cultural literacy matter beyond the humanities.  Among the characteristics of Russian literature that make it so powerful and affecting are its deeply humane and penetrating content, a fullness of respect for the absolute value of each human being, and acknowledgment of the mystery of human nature.  Readers from all walks of life return to it again and again, enriching their interpersonal communications and ability to empathize with others.

Mr. Shishkin notes that “people” hate all things Russian.  Which people?  During the period leading up to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, 2014-2022, when Ukrainians of the Donbas were being terrorized by their own government, Russia hatred was carefully curated by the United Kingdom, the EU, and the U.S. with its Five Eyes allies (adding Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to the mix).  However, this does not represent the whole world.  In fact, it captures only a small part of it.  The Global South, most of Asia, and the Middle East enjoy at least cordial and even warm cultural and economic relations with Russia—for the Soviet Union / Russia was not an invader and colonizer of those lands.

Within the span of only a few pages, Mr. Shishkin simultaneously argues that Russian literature is (when it fights the state) and is not a weapon (has not enabled current atrocities)–but let us make allowances, for critics of Russia do suffer from circular logic and double standards. Otherwise, they would be penning essays that begin with, “I understand why people hate all things American (British, Saudi Arabian, German) right now.”  But are those critics aware that, despite the fact that the U.S. imposed severe sanctions on Russia after the 2014 reunification of Crimea with the peninsula’s historic homeland, Russia did not express hatred for things American?  During the 2018 FIFA World Cup held in various cities in Russia, in St. Petersburg on July 4 Russian professional musicians performed “The Star Spangled Banner” on Nevsky Prospect to honor the American national holiday.  We were there.

Fair-minded and well-educated persons in the humanities and sciences all over the world do not hate Russian culture or Russians.  Despite the fact that Germany was at war with Russia between 1914-1918, the composer-pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff refused to vilify the German nation.[iv]  The Soviet Union was able to mend ties with Germany after World War II, despite the atrocities committed against Soviet citizens and the Red Army during the war.

The author seems to position himself as an expert, a Russian writer, one who continues “the humanist tradition of the intelligentsia” that has for ages battled “a Russian population stuck in a mentality from the Middle Ages,” “a pyramid of slaves” beaten into obedience. Who could possibly have empathy for such a people?!  Only Russian writers who, according to Mr. Shishkin, have resisted unacceptable tsars for the sake of those silent barbarians.  It is a fact that several generations of Western historians built their narratives based on the suppositions of their cultural peers and a dearth of availability of authentic materials in Soviet archives.  Now that many Russian archives are open to researchers both Russian and international, the genuine historical record is available—which is producing major rehistoricizing and lively discussion of such maligned or caricatured figures as Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the mystic Grigory Rasputin, and Pyotr Nikolaevich Wrangel, to name only a few.

In addition to conflating all of Russian literature into only the dissenting pieces, Mr. Shishkin reduces Russian history to an endless, joyless gulag devoid of any achievements or enjoyment.  Even a cursory review of Russian history problematizes such a sweeping statement.  Between the eighteenth century of Catherine II’s reign (1762-1796) and the early twentieth century when Russia, as other European countries, was evolving into a constitutional monarchy, the Russian social and cultural landscapes were a complex tapestry of existence in which people’s lives were ordered by well-established patterns.  The lives of peasants, intellectuals, and nobility were far from perfect, but there were many achievements and satisfactions therein.  Deep-rooted past traditions have been restored to Russia, such as the democratic Cossack stanitsas (villages) in the Caucasus, and the Feast Days of the Russian Orthodox Church (a foundational feature of Russian culture), at the same time as new highways and airports continue to appear to link major cities.  It is not by accident that the elegant and moving stories and novels of the Village Prose writers such as Valentin Rasputin, Vladimir Soloukhin, Vasily Belov, and others sought to correct—because of their own experiences and memories of growing up as peasants—erroneous and negatively biased assumptions about the Russian common people.  They were there.

Mr. Shishkin’s article does not manifest empathy for average Russians. Contempt for Russians is evident in the epithets he chooses for them (“a pyramid of slaves worshiping the supreme khan,” Russia is “a slave empire,” “slaves give birth to a dictatorship,” “Russian population stuck in a mentality of the Middle Ages,” “fascists, murderers”), and his pointed phrases deprive the Russian people of agency (they are “forced to sing patriotic songs,” “forced to endure and suffer,” “the state has been hammering the Russkiy mir [Russian World] view into people’s brains”). Russians–the barbarians that they are, stuck in the Middle Ages–need liberation and guidance, in Mr. Shishkin’s opinion. But it is a historical fact that the “Russkiy mir view,” as the author puts it, originated in the essential features of Russian culture itself.  These cannot be “hammered in,” for they were organically formed across the centuries by the people themselves.  As all sovereign countries, Russia should be measured by its own yardstick, not by norms and values artificially imposed on it by the West.

According to Mr. Shishkin, Russians (damn slaves!) put trust in their tsars, but their true salvation comes from so-considered enlightened writers.[v]  He divorces Russian culture from the nation; thus everyday people exist outside of “culture”; the nebulous intelligentsia represents the only beacon and carrier of any culture worth knowing. “The civilizational gap that still exists in Russia between the humanist tradition of the intelligentsia and a Russian population stuck in a mentality from the Middle Ages can be bridged only by culture—and the regime today will do everything it can to prevent that” [emphasis original].  Such a sensational generalization implying that the Russian government prevents the development and flourishing of literature, music, and the visual arts (both in traditional high culture and the folk arts) is just not true.  Anyone who has spent time in Russia can easily refute this claim.  It is the people themselves and Russia’s high-quality educational system in general and in the arts in particular—for many, the envy of the world—that are creating the works that will join the pantheon of Russia’s literary and cultural monuments.[vi]  Perhaps there exists an “imaginary Russia” that the author envisions, because it is not the Russia we know.

The author reduces Russian people–the very inspiration, part and parcel of Russian literature and culture–to an obedient clueless horde, a quiet servile crowd that rejects freedom for safety and bread. They are weak, they are slaves. Who will save them? According to Mr. Shishkin, the few elect, enlightened, and cultured, the ones who know the “truth,” the poets (the humanists!)–the new Grand Inquisitors, indulging the weakness of poor uncritical blockheads and promising them light and freedom if they rise against the authority of the rulers the enlightened writers living abroad deem intolerable.

Curiously, Mr. Shishkin references Herzen and Chernyshevsky, not mentioning that their famous novels inspired the Russian revolutionaries who brought about bloodshed worse than many military conflicts and which in turn led to Stalin’s purges and terror that Mr. Shishkin decries.  Since the probability that readers of The Atlantic have read What is to Be Done? and Who is to Blame? is pretty slim, an omission of key details of those novels would not be noticed.

This is not the only key fact the author omits. He fails to point out that Boris Yeltsin, the darling of the West of the 1990s, is as despised as the leaders whom he does mention. He does not speak of the complexity of the relationship between Russian poets/writers and the State, which was never simplistically black and white, nor does he disclose that none of the poets/writers he mentions ever felt contempt for the Russian people so categorically.

Does Mr. Shishkin have an awareness that he is rationalizing hatred and justifying Russophobia? Given the disdain, disrespect, and patronizing of Russians that permeate his essay, perhaps the real objective of the writing is not a defense of Russian literature and culture, but rather a feeble attempt not to be “canceled” along with them?  If so, there are better ways to affirm one’s participation in and defense of a well-established literary tradition.

We recommend that all journalists and writers wishing to attain a profound understanding of Russian literature re-read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1881), in particular the section titled “Exhortations of Elder Zosima.”  The Elder in the tradition of Orthodox wisdom advises each person to [in a paraphrase] “walk round yourself every day and look at yourself; see how you appear to others”—and by extension, consider how you look to God.  Regardless of whether or not one follows a faith tradition, surely a universal truth involves not hating the Other.  The Russian woman gave bread to the German prisoner-of-war.

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Alexandra G. Kostina, Ph.D., is a Russian linguistics and literature professor and cultural analyst. Born in Novgorod, Russia and currently residing in the U.S., Prof. Kostina travels widely internationally for her research in linguistics, media bias, and Russian literature. She has taught courses on Dostoevsky and includes his thought as well as that of contemporary Russian writers in her research.

Valeria Z. Nollan, Ph.D., is a Russian language and literature professor, poet, and musician. Born in Hamburg, Germany of Russian parents displaced by World War II, Prof. Nollan has made twenty-six extended research trips to Russia and Europe between 1985-2022. She has published or edited eight books and many articles on Russian literature and culture; has given poetry readings in Russia, Europe, and the U.S.; and has performed Russian music at various venues. Her poetry collection Holocaust of the Noble Beasts (Seattle, WA: Goldfish Press, 2020) engages issues of worldwide animal welfare, art, and music.

Notes  

[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russian-literature-books-ukraine-war-dostoyevsky-nabokov/670928/.

[ii] See, for example, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria, by Swiss journalist and politician Guy Mettan (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2017); and The American Mission and the “Evil” Empire: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881, by David S. Fogelsong (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007).

[iii] “German minister speaks out against boycott of Russian culture,” RT, July 3, 2022, https://www.rt.com/russia/558277-german-minister-boycott-culture/.

[iv] See my forthcoming biography Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul (Lexington Books / Rowman and Littlefield, November 2022)—VZN.

[v] See The Rebirth of Russian Democracy, by Nicolai N. Petro (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), which traces the longstanding undercurrents of democracy within Russia’s political systems.

[vi] See https://www.currentschoolnews.com/education-news/best-educational-system-in-the-world/.

Featured image: Dostoevsky in 1872, portrait by Vasily Perov (Licensed under the public domain)

First published by Global Research on December 14, 2018, of relevance to unfolding events

At first glance, it reads like the script for a Hollywood catastrophe movie. And yet it’s one of the scenarios that is actually being considered in the official 2018 report by the Commission, tasked by the United States Congress with studying the national defense strategy –

“In 2019, on the basis of fake news announcing atrocities committed against Russian citizens in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Russia invades these countries. While US and NATO forces prepare to respond, Russia declares that an attack against its forces in these countries would be viewed as an attack on Russia itself, and considers a nuclear riposte. Russian submarines attack transatlantic optical fibre cables, and Russian hackers cut the electrical networks in the USA, while Russian military forces destroy US military and commercial satellites. The major cities of the United States are paralysed, since the Internet and cell-phones are rendered inoperative”.

The bipartisan Committee, composed of six Republicans and six Democrats, are looking at a similar scenario in Asia – in 2024, China stages a surprise attack and occupies Taiwan, and the United States are unable to intervene in a cost-effective manner, because Chinese military capacities have continued to grow, while those of the USA have stagnated due to insufficient military spending.

“These scenarios – explains the Commission – exemplify the fact that the security and the well-being of the United States are in greater danger than they have been for the last few decades”. Since the Second World War, “the United States have guided the construction of a world of unusual prosperity, freedom and security. This development, from which it has benefited enormously, has been made possible by the unequalled military might of the United States”.

For the moment, however, their military power – “the backbone of world influence and the national security of the USA” – has eroded to a dangerous level. This is due to the fact that “concurrent authoritarian forces – especially China and Russia – are in the process of seeking regional hegemony and the means with which to project their power on an international scale”.

This would be a tragedy of unimaginable dimensions, but perhaps terrible – warns the Commission – if the United States should allow their own national interests to be compromised by a lack of the will to make “hard choices and the necessary investments”. They therefore propose an ulterior increase of US military spending (which today is already equivalent to a quarter of the federal budget) of between 3 and 5 % annually – particularly to increase the deployment of US forces (submarines, strategic bombers, long-range missiles) in the Indo-Pacific region, where “four or five of our adversaries are active – China, North Korea, Russia and terrorist groups, (the fifth being Iran)”.

The strategic vision which emerges from the Congressional report – even more worrying when we note that the Commission is composed of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats – leaves no room for doubt. The United States – which, since 1945, has provoked wars causing between 20 and 30 million deaths (plus the hundreds of millions caused by the indirect effects of these wars) to “guide the construction of a world of unusual prosperity, freedom and security, from which it has benefitted enormously” is now preparing to do anything necessary to maintain its “unequalled military power” upon which their empire is founded, but which is now beginning to crumble with the emergence of a multipolar world.

For this purpose, the Congressional Commission is examining scenarios of aggression against the United States, which are no more than the mirror image of their own aggressive strategy, which runs the risk of dragging the world into catastrophe.

Source: PandoraTV

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Translated by Pete Kimberley

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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A small Canadian hospital lost three young doctors within a three-day period, right after a 4th COVID vax mandate was issued for healthcare workers. Trillium Health Partners in Ontario, Canada sent out three memos to their staff just three days apart – mourning the loss of three beloved doctors. The memos did not reveal the cause of these sudden and unexpected deaths, as the hospital continues to push out its 4th COVID vax mandate on healthcare workers.

Hospital CEOs, board members and administrators should be ashamed of themselves for not standing up for the innocent lives who have been lost to the COVID vaccines and all those who have been injured and killed by inhumane and deadly protocols. Hospital systems continue to facilitate needless medical experiments that perpetuate global genocide. These spineless administrators continue to persecute fellow healthcare workers who won’t comply with these deadly and destructive medical experiments. Healthcare workers are literally killing themselves off in cult-like fashion. With each booster, they must prove their allegiance to this cult of vaccination. Booster after booster, they destroy themselves from the inside out.

Small hospital mourns the unexpected loss of three young beloved doctors

The first memo mourns the loss of Dr. Lorne Segall, an otolaryngologist who served as the Division Head of Otolaryngology from 2016 to 2017. Joined Trillium health partners in 2007 and served as an Otolaryngologist at Credit Valley Hospital. He passed away on July 17, 2022 and leaves behind a wife and three children.

The second memo mourns the loss of Dr. Stephen McKenzie, a neurologist at Mississauga hospital. Dr. McKenzie contributed to undergraduate and postgraduate medical education at Trillium Health Partners and at the University of Toronto. He spent much of his time caring for multiple sclerosis patients. He passed away on July 18, 2022.

The third memo mourns the loss of Dr Jakub Sawicki, a member of the Surgical Assisting team at Trillium Health Partners. In 2013, he completed training at the Credit Valley Family Medicine Teaching Unit and began work at Trillium in 2014. He specialized in pain management and became Medical Director of pain medicine clinics within the region, while teaching family medicine residents. He passed away on July 20, 2022.

The cowardice of physicians around the world is daunting

The sudden and unexpected passing of three young medical professionals three days apart should raise alarms throughout the hospital system and throughout Canada, yet Trillium Health Partners will continue to ignore the obvious issue at hand, while pushing out another round of coercive medical malfeasance in their blind worship to “vaccination.”

The most recent government statistics out of Canada (from June 9 to June 19) show that the vaccinated account for 92 percent of covid-19 deaths. In that time period, there were 4,954 covid-19 deaths throughout Canada, and the vaccinated accounted for 3,796 of those deaths. With each additional booster, the percentage of deaths linearly increases. There were 135 deaths for people who took one vaccine, 1,174 deaths for people who took two vaccines, and 2,487 deaths for people who took three vaccines.

To make matters worse, the quadruple vaccinated are driving the majority of the new cases in 2022. Out of the 20,842 COVID-19 cases reported during the same period, the quadruple vaccinated accounted for 13,987 of them. The vaccinated account for 93 percent of the total case count. Not only is the vaccine not working to stop the spread of covid-19, but it is also the driving factor behind new variants that predominantly kill the vaccinated.

The 1,377 COVID-19 hospitalizations during the same time period were also predominantly in the vaccinated population. Approximately 85 percent of hospitalizations are coming from the vaccinated and it’s the quadruple vaccinated (65 percent) who are driving the majority of these hospitalizations.

The Trudeau dictatorship is still requiring these so-called vaccines in order for people to enter the country, and the government continues to pursue discriminatory policies to coerce more people into taking compounding clot shots. In most cases, hospital CEOs and administrators are too afraid to report the truth and stand up for their coworkers, patients and families. As they bow to medical tyranny at each and every turn, they will continue to unexpectedly die at the hands of tyrants.

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First published on February 15, 2021

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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists emerged after World War II as a voice for peace by some of the scientists who developed the then ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Now, its mission has drifted into being an echo chamber for the US imperial project urging President Biden to take even more destabilizing actions against Russia.

Dropping the A-bombs

By the time that the scientists at the top-secret Manhattan Project had developed the atomic bomb and the US military had worked out the logistics for deploying it, World War II was for all intents and purposes over. By early May 1945, Germany had unconditionally surrendered; in large part due to the efforts of the Red Army defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, but at the horrific cost of 27,000,000 Soviet lives. The Japanese too had been defeated militarily and had agreed to “unconditional surrender” with the one caveat that Emperor Hirohito be spared.

So, the world’s emerging hegemon had a problem. It had the ultimate weapon to impose its policy of world domination (i.e., today’s official US national security doctrine of global “full spectrum dominance”). But what good is this ultimate weapon if it is a secret? And, even if known, would the world believe that the US has the will to unleash such a destructive force?

President Truman had the solution – nuke Japan. All the military targets in Japan had been destroyed, but an even stronger message of the US’s determination to enforce imperial hegemony was made by annihilating the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The Japanese promptly surrendered, offering up the life of their emperor. The US accepted, but did not execute the emperor, who was more useful alive than dead. Besides, the leniency gesture reinforced the message that the US would capriciously bomb at will. Even when President Obama visited Hiroshima in 2016, he pointedly offered “no apology” for the destruction his country had wrought.

Dawn of the Cold War

The quick Japanese surrender in August 1945 had another cause, which many modern historians consider more overriding than the US bombs. The Soviets, engaged with their western front, had remained neutral in the war with Japan, but had promised the Allies to join the war effort against Japan once the Germans were defeated. At the same time the US dropped the bombs, the USSR declared war with Japan causing Tokyo to capitulate.

The dropping of the atomic bombs was the first salvo of the Cold War, signifying the end of the US wartime alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union. Truman’s rush to nuke Japan had the dual advantage of making known his “hammer” over the Kremlin as well as denying the USSR time to advance east and have a seat in the surrender agreement with Japan. The Soviets had not developed atomic weapons on the assumption – which proved to be essentially correct – that World War II would be over before they could be deployed to defeat the Axis powers.

In the immediate post-war period, the Soviets and their allies were existentially threatened by the unambiguous intention of the US and its allies to destroy them. As a defensive measure, the Soviet Union had no choice but to develop a deterrent nuclear force, testing its first atomic bomb in 1949.

Although the Soviets pledged to use their nuclear arsenal only in defense and renounced “first strike,” the US didn’t. Soon the Cold War arms race threatened the planet with destruction. The emergent construct of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was a fragile arrangement for the future of humanity.

Emergence of the Bulletin by scientists for peace

Voices of peace arose from the very inventers of the atomic bomb. Immediately after the destructive power of the atom was rained on Japan and even before the Soviet Union developed their deterrent force, former Manhattan Project scientists Eugene Rabinowitch and Hyman Goldsmith founded the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, subsequently renamed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Other notables associated with the Bulletin were nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, Soviet space scientist Anatoli Blagonravov, Jewish-German émigré and developer of quantum mechanics Max Born, physicist “father of the atomic bomb” turned anti-nuclear proliferation activist J. Robert Oppenheimer, British polymath peace activist Bertrand Russell, Soviet physicist Nikolay Semyonov, and Albert Einstein.

The Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock, unveiled in 1947, was set at seven minutes to midnight. The clock was intended as an educational tool to serve “as a vivid symbol of these multiplying perils, its hands showing how close to extinction we are.”

The Pugwash Conferences, an effort at peace in the early part of the Cold War, were an outgrowth of the Bulletin in its formative years in the 1950s.

Mission drift at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Today, the risk of nuclear annihilation, not to mention global warming and other threats, has never been greater, according to the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock. But the Bulletin has morphed from an advocate for peace and against other threats to humanity to something else.

From an organization run by scientists, the current governing board of the Bulletin has hardly a scientist in sight. Its president and CEO is Rachel Bronson, a political scientist who came out of the US security establishment NGO world, including the Council on Foreign Relations (Wall Street’s think tank) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (ranked the top military think tank in the world). Its chair, David Kuhlman, is a corporate consultant specializing in helping “clients identify pathways to profitable growth.” Its secretary, Steve Ramsey, formerly worked for defense contractor General Electric. Former Secretary of State and accused war criminal Madeleine Albright does promotionals for the Bulletin.

The Bulletin maintains a liberal façade and still publishes articles that contribute to peace and environmentalism. In that way, its role in collusion with the US imperial project is insidious, because the patina of peace is used to legitimize its mission drift.

Fanning the flames of anti-Chinese sentiment, the Bulletin promotes the conspiracy theory that the Chinese artificially developed COVID-19, featuring journalist Nicholas Wade’s “How COVID-19’s origins were obscured, by the East and the West.” However, scientific evidence points to natural origins of the virus. Anti-Russian sentiment is promoted with journalist Matt Field’s “Russian media spreading disinformation about US bioweapons as troops mass near Ukraine.” Where are the scientists advocating for peace?

The Bulletin covers the Ukraine crisis

Another case in point of its devolution is the article “How to mix sanctions and diplomacy to avert disaster in Ukraine,” published in the Bulletin on February 1. The article advocates for sanctions that would “severely and quickly devastate Russia’s powerful energy export sector.” Echoing Washington’s talking points, the article couches its recommendations as responding to Russian aggression but actually proposes nothing to de-escalate the conflict.

It is beyond ironic that an organization that purports to be warning against the dangers of nuclear holocaust is making a full-throated defense of an even more aggressive posture by one of the world’s leading nuclear powers.

Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist’s Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds to midnight, and they are trying to push it closer to Armageddon.

The view of the Bulletin’s Ukraine article is that the current crisis is Putin’s “own making.” In contrast, the article explains that the US has diplomatically “initiated” talks with Russia. There is no mention of the forward deployment of US troops or sending lethal aid to Ukraine. There is no recognition of aggressive actions by NATO such as stationing assault ABM missile systems in Romania and possibly Poland. Off limits is allusion to the US shredding the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Hidden from sight in the aforementioned article and another published the same day on “How the demise of an arms control treaty foreshadowed Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” is the US-orchestrated Ukraine coup in 2014 that installed an anti-Russian regime there. The latter article’s meticulously detailed history of the region notes “Moscow invaded and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea,” but not the coup that precipitated it.

Reasonable peace proposals

There is not a word in these articles of how some of the Russian initiatives might prevent hostilities and make the region more secure with a reduced likelihood of war. And certainly, there is none of the following reasonable peace proposals:

• Russia and the US shall not use the territory of other countries to prepare or conduct attacks against the other.
• Neither party shall deploy short- or intermediate-range missiles abroad or in areas where these weapons could reach targets inside the other’s territory.
• Neither party shall deploy nuclear weapons abroad, and any such weapons already deployed must be returned.
• Both parties shall eliminate any infrastructure for deploying nuclear weapons outside their own territories.
• Neither party shall conduct military exercises with scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons.
• Neither party shall train military or civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons.

The above peace measures are what in fact Russia proposed, but are considered “non-starters” by the US and presumably by the Bulletin.

Citing the Atlantic Council, the US-based think tank for NATO, the Bulletin explains that the sanctions that they are advocating would cause the Russian economy to “experience significant chaos.” These sanctions that the Bulletin calls for are a form of warfare just as deadly as dropping bombs. Sanctions kill! Instead of supporting peaceful measures to reduce tensions in the Ukraine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has become a cheerleader for Washington.

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Roger D. Harris is with the human rights group Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1985, and is on the SanctionsKill coalition.

Featured image is from Doomsday Clock

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First published on July 21, 2022

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A record heatwave is hitting Europe, mostly Southern Europe and the British Island. Temperatures are reaching more than 40 degrees C. London measured an all-time record of more than 41 degrees C.

The heatwave, with ever-increasing temps, has been hitting Europe for several weeks now, and there seems to be no end in sight yet. Massive forest and brush fires are hitting particularly Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece – but also other parts of Europe.

According to news reports, more than a thousand people have already died in relation to the heat, most of them in Southern Europe. Precise statistics are apparently not available. Is this really possible? Or could it ALSO be deaths caused by the toxic and poisonous covid vaxxes?

The heat plus the fires is not only destroying human lives – and massive livestock! – and properties, but also vital crops through drought and now the fires. Food crops are ”vital” in a time when the mass media narrative 24/7 brainwashing the public at large with the woes of the Russian aggression on Ukraine, that is causing energy and food shortages in the west, particularly in Europe for most countries, and in the Global South.

This is the narrative we are hearing. This is the narrative most people still believe. And now, the food that could save us from famine, is being destroyed by extreme heat, drought and fires.

Are these fires the result of the heat, or could they be caused by an intentional and planned arson? At this juncture there is no evidence to that effect.

And as if it was a bad coincidence, in parallel with the heat wave, the Dutch Government under the leadership of Mark Rutte, a scholar of Klaus Schwab’s Academy for Young Global Leaders, under close surveillance of the WEF and its “Green Agenda” (coinciding with the US and the UN Green Agenda), is imposing on its farmers an up to 30% reduction of farmland and cattle farms – under the pretext that the cattle’s manure releasing these horrible climate change gases, Ammonia (NH₃), Carbon Dioxide (CO₂), Methane (CH₄), and Hydrogen Sulfide (H₂S), will help accelerate “Climate Change”.

How ridiculous, criminally ridiculous, can it get and worse, if people believe it and play along. What started in the Netherlands, may soon come to a country near you.

Some 30% of farmers would not only lose their livelihoods, but are mandated to give up their land to the government for a pittance, so that the Government could use this prime farmland for “Green” purposes. Who knows, maybe Bill Gates will lease or buy it to produce insects and bugs for his new “green” insect burgers – and other disgusting replacements of one of humanity’s main and oldest staple food.

And, are we powerless against these monster powers?

For weeks hundreds of thousands of Dutch farmers and their supporters are taking to the streets and blocking highways to and from major Dutch cities, as well as main distribution arteries between Holland and Germany and within the Netherlands, disrupting food and other supply chain distribution schemes.

The Dutch farmers rebellion is now getting enforcement from Germany and Switzerland. They are marching with a “Wanted List” on placards of some of those considered as responsible for the crimes committed over the past two and a half years; crimes dictated by the Great Reset and the omni-powerful Financial Cult that manages the WEF. See this.

click image below to view

Do you remember just about a year ago, most of Germany was devastated by record storms and rainfalls? Some 200 people died, according to official records. The full extent of the devastation may never be known.

Infrastructure repairs are still ongoing. Authorities are extremely slow in fixing the damage.

By the same token, the North-East of the US has experienced an extremely cold winter 2021 / 2022 season, also causing hundreds of deaths. The cold weather strain is blamed on a weaker than usual ”Polar Vortex”.  What is a Polar Vortex?

This is what google has to says:

“[A Polar Vortex] is a very large, long-lived, rotating low-pressure system located near the north or south pole, especially in winter.”

As an example, they add:

“Earlier in the year [late 2021 / early 2022], a weather phenomenon known as a polar vortex chilled North America to record low temperatures”. See this.

Aren’t these extreme climate occurrences not rather unusual? – And this especially under the merciless narrative of Global Climate Change cum Global Warming. Man-made Climate Change, mind you.

The climate changes constantly; has been changing over the past 4.5 billion years of Mother Earth’s existence. Nothing that lives is stagnant.

If you look closer, these strange occurrences serve several agendas at once. The Climate Change Agenda, actively and carefully prepared for at least 30 years, since the Rio Earth Summit – but in reality, it was already hinted at in the early Club of Rome conferences and reflected in CoR’s most important book, “Reshaping the International Order” [1976].

Climate Change, indoctrinated into human brains for the last 30 years, since the “Earth Summit” of Rio in June 1992, also called UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), has become the new key word for “every bad deed” humans commit.

It’s based on human guilt, and manipulates human guilt and benefits from human guilt, a cultural-religious inheritance dating back to the Old Testament. And it works. It’s one of the factors contributing to what particularly we, westerners are suffering under, “cognitive dissonance”. Our brain doesn’t want to accept, that we may have been lied to and believed all our lives in lies. According to psychologists, cognitive dissonance is one of the most difficult human afflictions to overcome.

Some of us can easily deal with the shock of sudden reality hitting. Because if we don’t – and that is what the Evil Cult is counting on – we are indeed doomed, falling more and more into the abyss created by “them” from where to escape it will be ever-more difficult, eventually impossible.

Today, we still have some time. Less and less, with every day we let go by without fierce opposition. We are about a quarter through Agenda 2030, target date for implementation of everything – meaning, full enslavement, owning nothing and being happy – if they attain the goals of their agenda.

Since there are signs of people waking up – “they” being the WEF and its handlers – are planning to advance the agenda’s main targets to 2025 / 2026. Hence, the rush to get the WHO “Pandemic Treaty” pushed through the WHO General Assembly, even before the earlier target date of effectiveness, in 2024. For more on the “Pandemic Treaty”, see below.

Climate, like everything that lives, has never been stagnant, always moves, alters, mutates and grows in different directions, with or without human presence. That’s part of the mystery of the all-comprehensive and all-powerful universe, in which we are an invisible minute speck — or not even. The key influential body for our little solar system and for our Mother Earth’s climate is the sun.

For example, according to (real) scientific research, there were at least two “Snowball Earth” occurrences: one around 717 million and another some 645 million years ago. During these phases there were practically no solar surface movements, flares, explosions – to heat up Mother Earth. See this.

Any thinking-human – and indeed there are thousands of scientists to prove it but many are silenced – will conclude (and have proof) that we are being lied to again, that we are being drawn into a multi-trillion-dollar business, the so-called Green Agenda, by the neocons and the financial giants who control them, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street et al. All with the objective to take full control of our planet’s resources and humanity.

We are indeed living in a very crooked world. Waking up to this reality and sitting down with ourselves, families and friends to separate the wheat from the chaff, is indeed a challenge, but we MUST face it. It’s our only chance to survive – recognizing the truth over the lies.

Unfortunately, many scientists who deserve that attribute and who dare speaking-up are silenced, either censured or otherwise.

The groundwork for the 1992 Rio Conference, the “Earth Summit” – and for much of what is going on today – was and is the Club of Rome’s Report of 1976, Reshaping the International Order.

This controversial book was formulated by a group of some twenty “experts” from developed as well as developing countries. It is arguably also one of the base documents for the WEF Great Reset, and certainly was at the base of UN Agenda 2030. Incidentally, the Club of Rome was also an initiative of the Rockefeller Clan.

Over the past 60 years or so, weather modification science has advanced by leaps and bounds from the US Air Force’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP (image below) in the 1990s, to the weather modification technologies by the Pentagon’s think tank, DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Science Insider has learned that DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea of changing weather patterns, or Climate Change.

DARPA uses the military to developing weather cum climate geoengineering techniques. See this.

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The WHO Pandemic Treaty

What is being played out now, the disruption and outright destruction of food production, as well as the implementation of a harsh climate agenda, is real. And it fits perfectly the agenda of the Great Reset.

Simultaneously, it also serves to deviating attention from an ever-greater tyranny being prepared: The WHO “Pandemic Treaty”. Although being initiated at the behest of President Biden behind curtains already since December 2021, it “flared-up” and made it briefly to the mainstream, only in mid-April 2022.

If this diabolical “Pandemic Treaty” passes a two thirds majority of the WHO Health Assembly (total 194 member states), it will become international law by which the WHO may override and overrule every country’s sovereign health regulation, and dictate heath policy in every country. Apparently it is possible and likely, that the two-thirds law is quietly and silently being amended to a simple majority.

Under the Treaty WHO could, for example, declare the common flu as a pandemic and request absolute vaxx-mandates. With a forced vaxx-mandate – similar to what the world experienced in the last 18 months (since December 2020) – “infected people”, tested with the same flawed and fraudulent PCR test, could be injected with deadly toxins. Just like under the pretext of Covid-19..

As per Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer VP and Chief Science Officer , these “vaccines” side-effects, all studied and planned, will continue to weaken humans’  immune system, being the cause for all kinds of deadly diseases – cancers, kidney and liver ailments, heart failures, and so on, maybe two to three years down the road, when nobody can legally trace these diseases or deaths back to the vaxxes.

We must wake up to these hidden atrocities being carried out at present under the umbrella of a planned (?)  extreme heatwave, ravaging Central and Eastern Europe and the Global South.

Only we, the People, can stop them, in solidarity and in Peace.

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

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

Featured image: A thermometer showing 39 °C (102 °F) on a street in Valladolid on 15 June. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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

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In a speech in the European Parliament earlier this month, German MP Christine Anderson described the coercion of people into taking COVID vaccines as the “biggest crime ever committed on humanity.”

“This vaccine campaign will go down as the biggest scandal in medical history,” Anderson declared, adding “moreover, it will be known as the biggest crime ever committed on humanity.”

Yup and I meant every word if it! https://t.co/Pk4QS7eM2V

— Christine Anderson (@AndersonAfDMdEP) July 25, 2022

The MEP was addressing mass flight cancellations and staff shortages in airports and on planes, asserting that while it is claimed the situation stems from companies not hiring back enough staff after the pandemic, the real reason is that pilots and other staff have refused to get vaccinated.

Anderson further warned that “unscrupulous globalist elites” have used the pandemic for their own ends, asking “What in God’s name have they done with this?”

Addressing “each and every elected representative of people in every western democracy,” Anderson asked “What have you done?”

“You didn’t do your job, and do not tell me you didn’t know,” Anderson further asserted, adding “it is your job to protect the people that you were elected by.”

She continued,

“There is so much coming to light, all of the adverse side effects, numerous studies now available, on foetal disfigurements… genetic defects of babies born to women who got vaccinated.”

“What in the hell is going on here?” Anderson urged, vowing “We will do all we can to make sure this is brought to light and ensure the rights of the people to be protected.”

Watch:

Watch the full 1hr 30min event here:

Anderson previously made headlines for slamming the “political elite” for imposing vaccines and vaccine passports using “extortion and manipulation”.

Anderson stated that

“In the entire history of mankind there has never been a political elite sincerely concerned about the wellbeing of regular people. What makes any of us think that it is different now?”

Must Watch Very Powerful.

“In the entire history of mankind there has never been a political elite sincerely concerned about the wellbeing of regular people. What makes any of us think that it is different now. – Christine Anderson European Parliament.” pic.twitter.com/oSVYzg81p5

— Sikh For Truth (@SikhForTruth) October 29, 2021

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Featured image is a screenshot from one of the videos above

Remember:

Hiroshima, August 6, 1945

Nagasaki, August 9, 1945

Timely historical analysis: This article was first published in June 2019

The extent of devastation inflicted upon Japan by the American military during World War II is not broadly known, even today. In reprisal for the attack over Pearl Harbor, which killed almost 2,500 Americans, US aircraft first began unloading bombs on Japan during the afternoon of 18 April 1942 – attacking the capital Tokyo, and also five other major cities, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe and Yokosuka.

Participating in this opening incursion over Japanese territory, known as the “Doolittle Raid”, were a modest 16 US B-25 medium bombers which killed about 50 Japanese, while meting out minor overall damage. Yet the air strikes represented an embarrassment for Tokyo’s leaders, and they further dealt a sharp psychological blow on the Japanese mindset. To rub salt into wounds, not one of America’s B-25 aircraft was shot down. It was a sign of things to come.

As months elapsed into years, the destruction increased many times over. By 15 June 1945, 66 Japanese cities had been annihilated by the US Army Air Force, through firebombing attacks primarily unleashed by the new B-29 four-engine heavy bombers.

The number of Japanese metropolitan areas destroyed here was the exact figure that the Pentagon compiled when finalizing plans, in mid-September 1945, to eviscerate the Soviet Union. Indeed, 66 Soviet cities were earmarked to be wiped out – with 204 atomic bombs – less than two weeks after Japanese representatives signed surrender terms on 2 September 1945, finally closing out World War II.

Regarding atomic attack proposals against the Japanese Empire, General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, revealed in 1954 that,

“In the original plans for the invasion of Japan, we wanted nine atomic bombs for three attacks”.

Just prior to Hiroshima the Pentagon had less than half a dozen A-bombs, however.

Photograph of a mock-up of the Little Boy nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945. This was the first photograph of the Little Boy bomb casing to ever be released by the U.S. government (it was declassified in 1960). (Source: Public Domain)

The world’s first nuclear attack was unleashed at 8.15am local time in Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, as a 15 kiloton bomb hurtled through the air when released from a B-29 aircraft. After falling for 44 seconds, the “Little Boy” atomic weapon detonated directly over Shima Hospital in Hiroshima’s city centre, instantly turning into ashes all of its doctors, nurses and patients. In the surrounding landscape, dozens of further hospitals, schools and historical buildings were razed to the ground.

Tens of thousands were killed immediately as ground temperatures momentarily soared from between 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius. Of those people situated within two kilometres of the bomb detonation point, 112,000 would be dead within a year (10 August 1946).

Further thousands were also killed from radiation poisoning and severe burns, among those present in the hundreds of metres beyond the two kilometre radius mark. The majority of the dead and dying were civilians, men too old or sick to serve in the armed forces, along with large numbers of women and children.

Hiroshima’s vital arms and manufacturing complexes, scattered along the city’s periphery, were completely undamaged. These plants accounted for 74% of her total industrial output. Unscathed too was Hiroshima’s crucial port and military embarkation point on the Ota Delta. Almost 95% of Hiroshima’s factory workers were unhurt following the explosion.

On hearing of the atomic blast a few hours afterwards, president Harry Truman heralded it as “the greatest thing in history” and “an overwhelming success”.

Three days later, 9 August, Nagasaki was attacked at 11.02am local time with a more sophisticated 21 kiloton bomb – which was released over the city’s educational, cultural and religious heartland. As with Hiroshima, the Nagasaki bombing left unharmed most of the city’s war-making industries.

A mockup of the Fat Man nuclear device. (Source: Public Domain)

This “Fat Man” bomb killed further tens of thousands; including many hundreds of schoolchildren, along with destroying the city’s main hospitals, cathedrals, temples and schools. Medical facilities in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated, adding significantly to the death tolls.

Echoing Washington’s support for atomic assaults were the Western media, almost without exception. Of 595 newspaper editorials written regarding the nuclear explosions from early August until late December 1945, less than 2% opposed the attacks which would kill more than 200,000 people.

The press also firmly supported the firestorming of both German and Japanese cities, in actuality they had “demanded more bombing of civilian targets”, even criticizing air strikes over military and industrial zones. For example, New York’s Time magazine praised the annihilation of Tokyo, which left around 100,000 dead, as “a dream come true… properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves”.

Elsewhere, although Japan’s hard-line militarists proposed fighting to the last man, their political leaders were compelled to announce surrender on 15 August 1945, when threatened with further atomic attacks. General Leslie Groves, directing America’s A-bomb project, informed General Marshall on 10 August 1945 that another Nagasaki-type plutonium weapon would be “on the target” and available for use “after 24 August 1945”.

The USSR’s declaration of war on Japan during the evening of 8 August 1945 also influenced Tokyo’s capitulation; with the Red Army, in the following days, cutting through Japan’s elite armies across Manchuria like a hot knife through butter. Another factor was the American guarantee, relayed on 11 August 1945, that Emperor Hirohito – a God-like entity in Japan – could continue in his role following the surrender, though he would have no real power.

Just after the first atomic attack Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, Hisatsune Sakomizu, estimated that his country could hold out for another two months at most: to October 1945. Japan had long been beaten in the air, as too at sea, while her imports of crude oil, rubber and iron ore ceased to exist. Japanese forces were driven from Burma and throughout the Pacific territories.

In addition, according to high ranking figures like Admirals Chester Nimitz (Pacific Fleet Commander) and William Leahy (Truman’s Chief of Staff), the ongoing, crippling blockade of Japan by sea, coupled with conventional air attacks, would induce their surrender within weeks, making any US land invasion or atomic bombings unnecessary. The A-bombs were in reality dropped as a warning signal to the Soviet Union, America’s new and long-term enemy as highlighted by General Groves in March 1944.

Through non-nuclear bombing, the destruction of dozens of Japan’s metropolitan areas was overseen by Major General Curtis LeMay, who implemented increasingly murderous tactics. It should be remembered, however, that Japan’s army apparatus was particularly sadistic and brutal, committing atrocities predating World War II.

Yet it was Japanese civilians which bore the brunt of America’s military might. On 30 May 1945, LeMay openly boasted at a press conference that US air strikes had killed a million Japanese or more.

By the summer of 1945, over nine million of Japan’s citizens were left homeless, most fleeing to green areas. Just prior to the atomic explosions, 969 Japanese hospitals had also been destroyed by American airplanes.

Almost four years previously, Japan’s seemingly “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on the US naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – as president Franklin D. Roosevelt described it – was based on what were in fact well-grounded fears. For five months preceding Japan’s raid on 7 December 1941, Washington had been moving her B-17 heavy bombers in growing numbers to US bases in the Pacific, such as at Pearl Harbor, and also to Clark Air Base and Del Monte Airfield in the Philippines.

From mid-1941, half of America’s big bombers were shifted from the Atlantic domain towards eastern horizons, something that Japanese strategists were only too aware of.

The reasoning behind this military build up had been outlined in late 1940, by America’s famed pre-war planner and Air Force General, Claire Chennault, who outlined how the B-17s would “burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu”. President Roosevelt was “simply delighted” when hearing of this plan.

Notwithstanding Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, America would have shortly entered the war regardless – and in opposition to Tokyo – as both states by 1941 were already major rivals with incompatible ambitions in the great Asian and Pacific regions. On 15 November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor, General Marshall told reporters in an “off-the-record briefing” that American aircraft would “set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians”.

A year before, on 19 December 1940, Roosevelt approved $25 million in military aid to China, Japan’s traditional nemesis, including the gift of aircraft. Twenty-five million dollars in 1940 equates to nearly half a billion dollars today. On 11 March 1941, America’s president signed into law the Lend-Lease Act, a program providing further materiel to the Chinese – and also to other nations like Britain, the Soviet Union and France, all of which were far from benevolent towards Imperial Japan.

For many months, Roosevelt had placed sanctions and an embargo on Japan, such as in response to Tokyo’s September 1940 occupation of Northern French Indochina, which harmed US interests in the vicinity.

On 26 July 1941 Roosevelt froze the entirety of Japanese assets in America, a drastic policy which amounted to a declaration of economic war on Japan, over four months before Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s action stripped Japan of a staggering 90% of its oil imports, along with eradicating 75% of her foreign trade.

Within days, the Japanese were forced to dip into their scant oil reserves, which on their current course would be used up by January 1943, unless her armies embarked upon further invasions.

In equal enemy numbers, there were few who could live with the ferocity of the Japanese soldier, who gained notoriety for his cruelty. Tokyo’s war planners turned their hungry gaze to yet more tantalizing conquests, lining up the resource-rich states of Burma, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), each of which would be conquered during the first half of 1942.

As the war advanced and tables slowly turned, the Western allies’ terror bombing of civilian areas – not only ranking as war crimes – also stood as a dismal failure in its bid to bring the conflict to swift conclusion. These morally bereft strategies, of which nobody was made accountable, actually prolonged World War II. The long-held idea that blood-drenched air raids would smash the people’s morale, forcing them to revolt against their leaders, was pure fantasy.

In the summer of 1945, Japanese civilians were more interested in laying their hands upon foodstuffs, with the nation gradually starving due to America’s naval blockade. What’s more, any attempt at rebellion would promptly be eliminated by Japan’s military police, the dreaded Kenpeitai.

Western leaders failed to discern the lessons of Germany’s early 1940s Blitz of Britain, which served to strengthen the British public’s morale, not weaken it. This reality soon became clear to Wehrmacht hierarchy; but not so it seems to leaders like Winston Churchill, who was advocating the senseless obliteration of medieval cities like Dresden as late as February 1945.

Targeting women and children with bombs left the German and Japanese war machines largely unmolested. The Nazis’ armaments minister, Albert Speer, was at times left dumbfounded by Allied air tactics over Germany, which often avoided the Reich’s industrial areas.

Across 1944 Speer, much to Hitler’s delight and amazement, actually oversaw an increase in both German aircraft and panzer production, which made possible such attacks as the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944.

The realities behind air bombing escaped the attention of others like LeMay, and his English counterpart Arthur “Bomber” Harris. After it was all over, Harris admitted in his memoirs that the stratagem underlying assaults over urban locations “proved to be wholly unsound”; and that the Allied leaders should have earlier directed their pilots more frequently towards bombardment of factories, communication signals and transportation lines, which would have finished off Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan before 1945.

While LeMay was speaking about the mass deaths of Japanese, which also destroyed more than 3.5 million homes, he did not mention that in mid-1945 much of Japan’s infrastructure still lay untouched; such as the country’s crucially important coal ferry between Hokkaido and Honshu while, incredibly, the rail network remained intact through to August 1945; as too did several industrial zones which LeMay’s B-29s roamed obliviously past.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945.

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

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“Nothing is more real than nothing.” –Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Those who are never lost are forever lost.  Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth.  This is also common sense.

Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost.  And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.

It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”

He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels.  His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing.  He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.

Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days.  There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount.  For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers.  Each can only be understood within its place and time.  We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed.  It is unique.  And it is uniquely dangerous.

Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. –  it is a daily electronic digital  barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair.  Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.”  These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended.  Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found.  The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there.  They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”

Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit.  They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records.  It is an old trick.  Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.

What’s up?  Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.

Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing.  The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract.  C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:

The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media.  Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions.  Tranquilized by trivia.

Our current situation has been long in coming.  Back in the early 1960s, there was a  highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time.  Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution.  They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.

Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.”  He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania.  McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating  with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.”  He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us.  He gave life to things while taking it from persons.  He wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technologywith the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]

Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.

By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years.  His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture.  They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people.  By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale.  In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens.  “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen.  He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’ “

Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.

While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages.  The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy.  This is so far from the truth.  A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping.  Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.

I recently won a very high-tech looking electric toothbrush at the dentist.  When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror.  The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush.  Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!

While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract.  It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied.  Real but unreal.  Known but unknown.  And that’s how it goes.  It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers.  To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether.  It is a country of lost children.

You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.  The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; U.S. forces in Syria and U.S. support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.  The list is endless.  All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world.  Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.

Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.”  Yet losers also exit empty-handed.  Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things.  Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss.  It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society.  Too many possessions and too much information.  Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes.  There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed.  One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.

Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house.  The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord.  I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc.  An overwhelming scene to behold.  And why did they do this?  Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”  But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I.  A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.

We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.

I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists.  To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us.  Rilke said:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.

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

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

Featured image: First edition of The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926 by Scribner’s, with dust jacket illustrated by Cleonike Damianakes. The Hellenistic jacket design “breathed sex yet also evoked classical Greece”. (Licensed under the public domain)

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

To order his book, click the cover page.

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

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

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

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The fact that only 1% of Americans regard Russia as the US’ “most important problem” shows just how out of touch the Mainstream Media is with their targeted audience’s interests. That in turn adds credence to the speculation that they’re being ordered by their government to wage this unprecedented information warfare campaign against Russia despite it only being popular with a fringe minority.

The Mainstream Media (MSM) has been waging an unprecedented information warfare campaign against Russia for nearly half a year already, yet Gallup’s latest poll shows that literally only 1% of Americans consider it to be the US’ “most important problem” despite their government already sending Kiev tens of billions of dollars in their name as part of its proxy war against that Eurasian Great Power. This confirms that those Americans who obsess over Russia are a fringe minority.

Screenshot from Gallup

The polling company also noted in their report that the 1% of those who consider Russia to be their country’s “most important problem” is a steep drop from March when 9% of them shared that opinion. This suggests that Americans were most powerfully influenced at the onset of the MSM’s anti-Russian information warfare campaign but have since grown numb to it, with domestic issues like inflation, dysfunctional leadership, and abortion being regarded as much more important by them nowadays.

That’s bad news for the warmongers in Washington who wrongly assumed that their targeted audience could continue seeing Russia as their country’s “most important problem” well into the summer. What seems to have happened is that their MSM proxies overplayed their hand and have thus dealt irreparable damage to their information warfare operations after 99% of Americans no longer really care all that much about the Ukrainian Conflict.

Absent a major provocation aimed at artificially manufacturing another false narrative fearmongering about Russia, it might very well end up being the case that this trend is irreversible. Simply put, the MSM shared too many claims about Russia too fast to the point that most people started tuning out after realizing that everything they were being told about what a threat it supposedly was to their country never ended up panning out.

Russia never attacked NATO, World War III didn’t break out, and no fearmongered nuclear apocalypse ever happened unlike what the MSM warned was about to happen. The Ukrainian Conflict remains contained and Americans quickly realized that they have much more important things to worry about like inflation, which nobody seriously blames Russia for. “Putin’s price hike” that Biden never tires of talking about hasn’t caught on and is widely mocked as intellectually insulting propaganda.

There’s probably nothing that the US Government can do to make its people care anymore since most probably wouldn’t bite the bait even if their intelligence services engineered a major provocation like was earlier predicted. This suggests that the Democrats can’t realistically campaign on the Biden Administration’s support of Kiev since 99% of voters don’t think that it addressed their country’s “most important problem”. To the contrary, a growing number consider it to be a money laundering operation.

The fact that only 1% of Americans regard Russia as the US’ “most important problem” also shows just how out of touch the MSM is with their targeted audience’s interests. That in turn adds credence to the speculation that they’re being ordered by their government to wage this unprecedented information warfare campaign against Russia despite it only being popular with a fringe minority. Building upon this observation, it can be concluded that American media isn’t as “independent” as it claims to be.

With a view to the future, it’s unlikely that the MSM’s obsessive smears against Russia will end anytime soon even though 99% of Americans don’t consider it their country’s “most important problem”. That’s because the US Government wants to falsely signal to its transatlantic vassals that their own people supposedly haven’t lost interest in this proxy war in the hopes that this lie will convince their leaders not to waver in their support of Kiev like American officials worry is already in the process of happening.

Like the author noted last week, “The Zelenskys’ Vogue Photoshoot Exposed What A Charade The Ukrainian Conflict Has Become” while Gallup’s latest poll just confirmed that observation with statistical facts that nobody can deny since that company is regarded as the world’s most reputable in its field. This “politically inconvenient” development proves what a failure the MSM’s US Government-managed information warfare campaign against Russia has been.

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

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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***

Ukraine fired missiles containing petal mines in Donetsk. They littered the streets, parks, everywhere — they’re small-sized, neutral in color, they’re easy to miss.

Careful, look down as you walk through the streets of Donetsk.

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Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

She is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an information war as bitter as the ground fighting has erupted, and Meta (Facebook’s official name) announced it had partnered with nine organizations to help it sort fact from fiction for Ukrainian, Russian and other Eastern European users. These nine organizations are: StopFake, VoxCheck, Fact Check Georgia, Demagog, Myth Detector, Lead Stories, Patikrinta 15min, Re:Baltica and Delfi.

“To reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users, we partner with independent third-party fact-checkers globally,” the Silicon Valley giant wrote, adding, “Facebook’s independent third-party fact-checkers are all certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). The IFCN, a subsidiary of the journalism research organization Poynter Institute, is dedicated to bringing together fact-checkers worldwide.”

The problem with this? At least five of the nine organizations are directly in the pay of the United States government, a major belligerent in the conflict. The Poynter Institute is also funded by the NED. Furthermore, many of the other fact-checking organizations also have deep connections with other NATO powers, including direct funding.

StopFake

Perhaps the most well-known and notorious of the nine groups is StopFake. Established in 2014, StopFake is funded by NATO’s Atlantic Council, by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Embassy in Ukraine and the Czech Foreign Ministry. It has also received money from the U.S. via the National Endowment for Democracy, although that fact is far from trumpeted by either party.

One potential reason for this was alluded to in a 2016 article reprinted by StopFake itself. As the article notes, “in the case of StopFake.org when opponents want to insult the project, they immediately invoke National Endowment for Democracy donor support as evidence of U.S. government and CIA involvement.”

In the wake of the Russian invasion, the NED pulled all public records of their Ukraine projects from the internet. Nevertheless, incomplete archived copies of those records confirm a financial relationship between the groups.

StopFake was explicitly set up as a partisan organization. As a glowing report on them from the International Journalists’ Network notes, the majority of StopFake’s fact-checks are on stories from Russian media, and the motivation for its creation was “Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea and a campaign to portray Ukraine as a fascist state where anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia thrived.”

While it is indeed incorrect to label Ukraine a fascist state, the country clearly has one of the strongest far-right movements anywhere in Europe. And unfortunately, StopFake itself is far from an apolitical bystander in that rise. Multiple established Western media outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on StopFake’s ties to white power or Nazi groups. When local journalist Ekaterina Sergatskova exposed these links, death threats from far-right figures forced her to flee her home.

Indeed, according to some, one of StopFake’s primary functions appears to be to promote the far-right. A long exposé by Lev Golinkin in The Nation cataloged what it called StopFake’s history of “aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.”

Surely StopFake’s most famous former host is Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz was briefly head of President Biden’s newly formed Disinformation Governance Board before public uproar caused her to resign. Dubbed the “Ministry of Truth”, both the board and Jankowicz generated strong opposition. Yet few mentioned the fact that, while at StopFake, Jankowicz herself had, on camera, enthusiastically extolled the virtues of multiple fascist paramilitaries.

In a 2017 TV segment about the Aidar, Dnipro-1 and Azov Battalions, Jankowicz presented the groups as heroic volunteers deafening Ukraine from “further Russian separatist encroachment.” As she stated,

The volunteer movement in Ukraine extends far beyond military service. Volunteer groups are active in supporting Ukraine’s military with food, clothing, medicine, and post-battle rehabilitation, as well as working actively with the nearly two million internal refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine.”

This framing jars with multiple reports from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, who claim that the Aidar Battalion is guilty of a litany of abuses, “including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.” Amnesty also accuses Aidar and Dnipro-1 of “Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

Azov, meanwhile, is the most infamous organization of the lot. The group’s insignia is directly lifted from the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division, a unit responsible for carrying out some of the worst crimes of Hitler’s holocaust. The Azov Battalion also dip their bullets in pig fat before battle as a calculated hate crime, attempting to block Jewish or Muslim enemies from a better afterlife. Andriy Biletsky, the group’s founder, said in 2010 that he believes Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen” – the word Hitler used to describe Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and other peoples he designated for extermination.

In February, Facebook announced that it was changing its rules on hate speech to allow praise and promotion of the Azov Battalion. Was this on StopFake’s recommendation? MintPress asked Meta/Facebook for comment on their fact checking partner’s ties to far right groups and if StopFake had influenced their decision to allow pro-Nazi content on their platform, but did not receive a reply.

As Golinkin noted in his article for The Nation, StopFake has also defended C14, another fascist paramilitary, describing it merely as a “community organization”, citing C14’s own denial of its pogroms against Roma people as “evidence” of its innocence. This designation clashes even with the U.S. State Department, which classifies C14 as a “nationalist hate group.” The “14” in its name refers to the “14 words” white supremacist slogan.

Nazi fact-checking, brought to you by the National Endowment for Democracy https://t.co/RYbiRGHJxZ pic.twitter.com/9Lawg0yWN8

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 6, 2018

StopFake has made a number of controversial claims, including that the rise in anti-semitism in Ukraine is “fake” – even going so far as to brand well-established outlets like NBC News and Al-Jazeera as printing fake news about the Azov Battalion’s role in this. In an article entitled “Russia as Evil: False Historical Parallels. Some peculiarities of Russian Political Culture,” it also insisted that Hitler’s concentration camps were modeled on Russian ones set up by Vladimir Lenin. In reality, the German government pioneered the use of concentration camps during their genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples between 1904 and 1908 in Namibia. The British and Spanish were also early adopters.

In addition, StopFake has close links with The Kyiv Post, a Ukrainian outlet directly funded and trained by the National Endowment for Democracy. Since 2016, the Post has published 191 StopFake reports.

Who is the need?

Why receiving funding from the National Endowment for Democracy should immediately raise suspicions of any organization is because the NED was explicitly established by the Reagan administration as a front group for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Although it is funded by Washington and staffed by state officials, it is technically a private company and therefore not subject to the same legal regulations and public scrutiny as state institutions.

The CIA has used the NED to carry out many of its more controversial operations. In recent years, it has trained and funneled money to the leaders of the Hong Kong protesters to keep the insurrection alive, fomented a nationwide campaign of demonstrations in Cuba, and helped attempts to topple the government of Venezuela. Perhaps most importantly for this story, however, the NED was also involved in the 2014 coup that removed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych from power. Regime change is, in short, one of its primary functions.

The NED does this by establishing, funding, supporting and training all manner of political, economic and social groups in target countries. According to its 2019 annual report, Ukraine is the NED’s “top priority”. The agency has (officially) spent over $22 million in Ukraine since 2014.

In their more candid moments, NED leaders are explicit about the organization’s role. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, NED president from 1984 to 2021 said, explaining why his organization was set up. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.

Vox

VoxCheck

VoxCheck receives substantial monetary assistance from the U.S. government through both the NED and the U.S. Embassy. It is also funded by the Dutch and German governments. Incomplete NED records show VoxCheck receives substantial yearly grants and has accepted around $250,000 in total.

That sort of money goes an extremely long way in Ukraine, which is by quite some way the poorest nation in Europe. The country’s GNI per capita of $3,500 per year is well below that of even Russia, which stands at $10,700. One $15,000 NED grant given to a Ukrainian media foundation, for instance, was enough to pay for over 100 articles to be written.

Despite its funding, Western media portray VoxCheck extremely positively. The Washington Post, for example, describes them as “a small group of independent fact-checkers.” In common parlance, the word “independent” is usually reserved for any media group not owned or funded by governments (as if that is the only type of dependence). But even at this extremely low bar, VoxCheck falls.

An NED document shows a 2020 grant given to VoxUkraine

In the article, the Washington Post describes VoxCheck’s fact-checking process, which largely consists of “sourcing credible news sources – such as a BBC article,” and then labeling Russian claims as false on this basis. In other words, the official state mouthpiece of the British government – one that was instrumental in promoting the lies which led to the invasions of Iraq and Libya – is considered sacrosanct.

What comes across in the Post’s glowing exposé is that VoxCheck staff have few pretensions about being neutral and see themselves as digital foot soldiers in a crusade against Russia. As one employee said, the mission is to “prevent someone from falling into Russian lies and manipulation.” Indeed, one of the staff quit his job to volunteer for the Ukrainian Army. Other VoxCheck employees revealed that they felt guilty for not doing so themselves and only contributing virtually to the fight.

Of course, Russia has lied constantly during this war; the entire invasion was based on a lie. Throughout the winter, Russian officials consistently repeated that they had no intention of invading Ukraine. Russian media, meanwhile, claimed that President Zelensky had fled the country in the wake of the invasion. But in war, all sides lie. And when a fact-checking operation constantly critiques only one side and stays largely quiet about the other, it has clearly taken a side in the conflict and is therefore acting in a partisan fashion. People interested in thinking critically should be scrutinizing claims made by all sides.

Fact Check Georgia

Fact Check Georgia describes itself as “an independent and non-partisan website which offers readers researched, verified and evidence-based information.” Yet it is bankrolled by a litany of dubious organizations, including the NED and the U.S. Embassy, the German Marshall Fund, the Dutch government and the European Endowment for Democracy, a European government-funded “private” organization explicitly modeled on the NED.

Fact Check Georgia’s “About Us” section reveals just how independent the fact checking organization really is

Fact Check Georgia’s independence is potentially undermined by the fact that at the bottom of every page of its website, it displays the crests of both the NED and the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. This is accompanied by the disclaimer, “The views and opinions expressed on this website belong to Factcheck.ge and are not the views and opinions of project support organizations” – a sentence that would not be necessary to attach if an organization was truly independent.

Furthermore, some of its staff have notable backgrounds. The first person listed on Fact Check Georgia’s “our team” section was formerly the Deputy Minister of Defense for Georgia – a country that fought a war against Russia in 2008.

Myth Detector

Another Georgia-based company, Myth Detector, was funded by the U.S. Embassy to the tune of €42,000 in financial year 2021. German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle contributed €41,000. Also donating €41,000 last year, according to Myth Detector’s financial report, is a group called “Zinc.” This is quite possibly the Zinc Network, a shadowy intelligence firm that conducts information warfare operations on behalf of the U.K. and U.S. governments.

Demagog

Not only is the U.S. Embassy in Poland funding Demagog, it is also carrying out training in how to think. Demagog’s website notes that the embassy established a “fact-checking academy” on “how to deal with false information.” “Thanks to the [embassy] cooperation,” it notes, “classes were conducted for students and teachers on fake news, reliable sources of information and fact-checking.”

Alongside the U.S. government, Demagog also receives money from Polish government, European Union and European Economic Area organizations.

Together, these five organizations’ operations are all directly bankrolled by Washington. However, many of the other fact-checking groups Facebook pays to serve as content police on their platform have similarly close connections to Western state power. Indeed, the only one of the nine that appears relatively free from direct government collaboration is self-funded outlet Lead Stories.

Patikrinta 15min

Lithuanian outlet Patikrinta 15min insist that they are an independent, non-partisan group. As their “About” section states: “Sponsors of Patikrinta 15min cannot be political parties, politicians, state organizations or companies or organizations related to politicians.” They do, however, accept funding from the Poynter Institute, the journalism group that owns U.S. fact-checking organization Politifact. Since 2016, the Poynter Institute has sought for and received at least seven grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, totaling well over half a million dollars.

Notably, some of these grants are clearly a way of funneling cash to Eastern European fact-checking groups. As one NED grant summary for $78,000 notes, the goal of the money is to “promote the use of fact-checking websites as an effective accountability tool in Central and Eastern Europe, and strengthen the global fact-checking community.” The NED goes on to note that Poynter will bring over 70 journalists to a training summit and afterward continue to “train” “mentor,” “support,” and help them and their organizations with “capacity building.”

One of several grants given to the ostensibly neutral Poynter Institute by the US State Dept’s NED

A cynic might conclude that the NED was simply trying to launder its money through Poynter. MintPress asked Patikrinta 15min to confirm or deny whether they were one of the Eastern European groups mentioned in the NED filings but has not received a response.

Like other groups, Patikrinta 15min’s non-partisan veneer frequently slips. This can be seen in headlines such as “Russian cynicism knows no bounds” and the fact that they frequently defend Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion.

Like StopFake, n 15min has argued that Azov’s use of the Waffen SS symbol is coincidental. It also presented Azov as an apolitical organization and has used quotes from Azov founder Andriy Biletsky – possibly the world’s most infamous living neo-Nazi – as “proof” that charges against it are Russian disinformation.

Re:Baltica

While there is no evidence that Re:Baltica has a financial relationship with the United States government, the lion’s share of its funding still comes from the West. As they note on their website, around two-thirds of their funding comes “from the institutions based in EU/NATO countries.” They also list “the Kingdom of the Netherlands” as one of their “friends” – i.e., donors.

Re:Baltica is generously funded by western govt’s and NGOs, including George Soro’s Open Society Foundation

Delfi

Delfi is a major web portal in Eastern Europe and the Baltic. The company does not disclose if it receives foreign funding. It does, undeniably, however, have a close relationship with the NED. In 2015, Delfi interviewed Christopher Walker, a senior NED manager about the best way they could counter Russian propaganda. Two years later, NED President Gershman addressed the Lithuanian parliament, revealing that his organization had,

[W]orked with Lithuania in countering Russian efforts to subvert and destroy democracy in Lithuania, in Europe, and in Russia itself. We have supported the work of the Lithuania-based Delfi and the East European Studies Center in monitoring, documenting, and combatting Russian disinformation in Lithuania and the Baltic states.”

Later that year, Delfi teamed up with the NED to hold the 1st Vilnius Young Leaders Meeting, whereby handpicked young activists were invited to rub shoulders with journalists and spooks from across Europe and the United States, in the hope of building up a Western-friendly force in civil society.

A chart showing the leadership structure of the EXPOSE network published as part of the Integrity Initiative Leak 7

Delfi, Re:Baltica and StopFake were all identified as proposed members of a “counter”-propaganda network hoping to be established by the EXPOSE Network. EXPOSE was allegedly a secret U.K.-government funded initiative that would have brought together journalists and state operatives in an alliance to shape public discourse in a manner more conducive to the priorities of Western governments.

As EXPOSE wrote, “An opportunity exists to upskill civil society organizations around Europe, enhancing their existing activities and unleashing their potential” to be the next generation of activists in the fight against Kremlin disinformation.”

“Coordinat[ing] their activities,” wrote EXPOSE, “represents a unique opportunity” for the British government in their fight against Russia. Unfortunately, they lamented, StopFake’s “monomaniacal fixation” on Russia had hurt its credibility.

Remarkably, EXPOSE also wrote that, “Another barrier to combating disinformation is the fact that certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true” – an admission that underlines that, to many governments and media outlets, “disinformation” is rapidly coming to simply mean “information we disagree with.”

The names of those individuals listed as potential employees of this network are a who’s who of state-linked operatives, including the Zinc Network, multiple individuals from NED-funded investigative journalism website Bellingcat and Ben Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson who is now head of global intelligence for Facebook.

Facebook’s Cyber War

Nimmo is only one of a great many former state agents now working in the higher echelons of Facebook, however. Last month, MintPress published a study revealing that the Silicon Valley giant has hired dozens of ex-CIA personnel into influential positions within the company, especially in security, content moderation and trust and safety.

Given how influential Facebook is as a media and communications giant, this sort of relationship constitutes a national security issue to every other country in the world. And this is not a hypothetical threat either. In November, Nimmo led a team that effectively attempted to swing the Nicaraguan elections away from the ruling Sandinista party and towards the U.S.-backed candidate. In the days leading up to the election, Facebook deleted hundreds of accounts and pages of pro-Sandinista media.

This action underlines the fact that Facebook is not an international company existing only in the ether, but an American operation bound by American laws. And increasingly, it is moving closer to the U.S. government itself.

Who will guard the guardians?

Fake news abounds online, and we as a society are wholly unprepared to counter it. A study conducted by Stanford University found that the vast majority of people – even the digitally savvy youth – were unable to tell factual reporting from obvious falsehoods online. Many will fall for Russian propaganda. Russian media is indeed pumping out misleading information constantly. But so are NATO countries. And if the fact-checkers who have volunteered to sort truth from fiction for us relentlessly attack Russia but are quiet on their own side’s spin, many more will fall for Western propaganda.

The implicit outlook of many of these fact-checking groups is that “only Russia lies.” This is the position of a partisan organization, one that cares little about truth and more about imposing control over the means of communication. And this is all being done in the name of keeping us safe.

Who is fact-checking the fact-checkers? Unfortunately, it is up to small, independent media outlets to do so. However, MintPress has faced constant suppression for doing so, being blocked from communicating with our 400,000+ Facebook followers, suppressed algorithmically by the Silicon Valley giants, and being removed from financial transaction services like PayPal.

The solution is to teach and develop critical media literacy. All media outlets have biases and agendas. It is up to the individual to learn these and constantly scrutinize and evaluate everything they read. However, governments do not want their populations thinking critically; they want their message to be dominant, one reason why the NED has been quietly bankrolling so many fact-checking organizations to do its work for it.

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Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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Guests are Robert Cibis (Founder and owner of OVALmedia), Nathalie Signorini (Managing director of OVALmedia Rome) and Bianca Laura Granato (Italian politician, “CAL”, Constitution/ Environment/Work).

This session talks about the coordinated and unannounced removal of all OVALmedia channels in different languages from Youtube and the media channel’s case in the Italian Senate, where OVALmedia was openly compared to Wikileaks.

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Dear Editor in Chief,

Once a fierce and proud Democrat, I see that Democrats have become more corrupt than Republicans ever were.

The sheer fact that the Biden administration and all of Biden’s followers are globalists — meaning, doing gradually away with sovereign rights in the US and in countries around the world towards a One World Order — shows that Democrats have abandoned their principles of social justice and sold their soul to the enemy (globalists are literally enemies of humanity).

And so did Senator Kyrsten Sinema. She held out against a fraudulent tax package – yes fraudulent, because the entire climate change narrative is a multi-multi-trillion dollar scam, has been brewing since the seventies, with the various “declarations” of the Club of Rome, and was finally set into an active forward drive at the first Climate Conference in Rio in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit’.

By today, the entire world is indoctrinated by a monster lie, except for a few scientists who have not abandoned their principles and resisted coercing – and a few World Bank insiders, who saw the fraud evolving from the very beginning.

Now another Democrat has fallen for money.

It’s a shame.

Where are we going?

Peter Koenig

 

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

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

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I feel for American basketball player Brittney Griner. Did she break the law? Yes, she did, and she pled guilty at trial. But a sentence of nine years — to be spent in what the New York Times calls a “penal colony” — for bringing hashish into Russia for self-treatment (assuming this is true) seems overly harsh. But the law can be an ass. If humans have sovereignty over their own bodies, then it is just plain wrong to be hassled for what one chooses to consume.

On the other hand, Griner should be accorded the same treatment from the Russian justice system as any Russian would be accorded. If this has been the case, then it can be argued that justice was meted out without favoritism in the Russian system.

Still, if it was a packing error, then Griner is paying a high price for a mistake that on its face would cause no harm to any other person.

US president Joe Biden called the sentence “unacceptable” and said he will do all he can to bring Griner back to the United States. When a country considers that one of its citizens is a victim of injustice abroad, then a country should agitate on behalf of its citizen.

A prisoner swap with Russia has already been broached by the US, so Griner may be back stateside before long.

Julian Assange: A Victim of Injustice

There is a current case, however, that speaks to notions of justice in western countries. Biden apparently considers the American legal pursuit of Assange — an Australian citizen whose acts (i.e., journalism) were committed outside the US — as acceptable. The US claim to extraterritoriality is well known to China and Meng Wanzhou.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been languishing in some form of incarceration for over 20 years, and he now faces potential imprisonment for the rest of his life if extradited and found guilty of espionage in the US. People who are clued in realize these charges are as phony as the sexual crimes alleged and dropped against him by Sweden. Assange’s actual “crime” is exposing the crimes of the US; especially revelatory was the Collateral Murder video where US troops in an Apache helicopter gleefully gunned down Iraqi citizens on a street in Baghdad. The murderers remain scot-free. For exposing war crimes, Assange and Bradley Manning have been punished.

Is Australia concerned about justice for its citizens? Assange has hardly received an iota of Australian government concern or assistance compared to that Griner has received from the US. Assange has also received scant support from the Australian monopoly media. In fact, Australian government leaders and media have usually criticized Assange or distanced themselves from him.

What if China were switched with the US and found itself faced with what Assange is accused of by the US? What would be the situation then?

Assange, who has not been overly kind to China, has, nonetheless, received support from China. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said,

“All eyes are on Assange’s human rights conditions and what may become of him. Let us hope and believe that at the end of the day, fairness and justice will prevail. Hegemony and abuse of might will certainly not last forever.”

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

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As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.

What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear. Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19th and early 20th century.

Clausewitz popularized the axiom that war is an extension of national interests – mainly economic. The United States views its economic interest to lie in seeking to spread its neoliberal ideology globally. The evangelistic aim is to financialize and privatize economies by shifting planning away from national governments to a cosmopolitan financial sector. There would be little need for politics in such a world. Economic planning would shift from political capitals to financial centers, from Washington to Wall Street, with satellites in the City of London, the Paris Bourse, Frankfurt and Tokyo. Board meetings for the new oligarchy would be held at Davos’s World Economic Forum. Hitherto public infrastructure services would be privatized and priced high enough to include profits (and indeed, monopoly rents), debt financing and management fees rather than being publicly subsidized. Debt service and rent would become the major overhead costs for families, industry and governments.

The U.S. drive to retain its unipolar power to impose “America First” financial, trade and military policies on the world involves an inherent hostility toward all countries seeking to follow their own national interests. Having less and less to offer in the form of mutual economic gains, U.S. policy makes threats of sanctions and covert meddling in foreign politics. The U.S. dream envisions a Chinese version of Boris Yeltsin replacing the nation’s Communist Party leadership and selling off its public domain to the highest bidder – presumably after a monetary crisis wipes out domestic purchasing power much as occurred in post-Soviet Russia, leaving the international financial community as buyers.

Russia and President Putin cannot be forgiven for having fought back against the Harvard Boys’ “reforms.” That is why U.S. officials planned how to create Russian economic disruption to (they hope) orchestrate a “color revolution” to recapture Russia for the world’s neoliberal camp. That is the character of the “democracy” and “free markets” being juxtaposed to the “autocracy” of state-subsidized growth. As Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov explained in a press conference on July 20, 2022 regarding Ukraine’s violent coup in 2014, U.S. and other Western officials define military coups as democratic if they are sponsored by the United States in the hope of promoting neoliberal policies.

Do you remember how events developed after the coup? The putschists spat in the face of Germany, France and Poland that were the guarantors of the agreement with Viktor Yanukovych. It was trampled underfoot the next morning. These European countries didn’t make a peep – they reconciled themselves to this. A couple of years ago I asked the Germans and French what they thought about the coup. What was it all about if they didn’t demand that the putschists fulfil the agreements? They replied: “This is the cost of the democratic process.” I am not kidding. Amazing – these were adults holding the post of foreign ministers.

This Doublethink vocabulary reflects how far mainstream ideology has evolved from Rosa Luxemburg’s description a century ago of the civilizational choice being posed: barbarism or socialism.

The contradictory U.S. and European interests and burdens of the war in Ukraine

To return to Clausewitz’s view of war as an extension of national policy, U.S. national interests are diverging sharply from those of its NATO satellites. America’s military-industrial complex, oil and agriculture sectors are benefiting, while European industrial interests are suffering. That is especially the case in Germany and Italy as a result of their governments blocking North Stream 2 gas imports and other Russian raw materials.

The interruption of world energy, food and minerals supply chains and the resulting price inflation (providing an umbrella for monopoly rents by non-Russian suppliers) has imposed enormous economic strains on U.S. allies in Europe and the Global South. Yet the U.S. economy is benefiting from this, or at least specific sectors of the U.S. economy are benefiting. As Sergey Lavrov, pointed out in his above-cited press conference: “The European economy is impacted more than anything else. The stats show that 40 percent of the damage caused by sanctions is borne by the EU whereas the damage to the United States is less than 1 percent.” The dollar’s exchange rate has soared against the euro, which has plunged to parity with the dollar and looks set to fall further down toward the $0.80 that it was a generation ago. U.S. dominance over Europe is further strengthened by the trade sanctions against Russian oil and gas. The U.S. is an LNG exporter, U.S. companies control the world oil trade, and U.S. firms are the world’s major grain marketers and exporters now that Russia is excluded from many foreign markets.

A revival of European military spending – for offense, not defense

U.S. arms-makers are looking forward to making profits off arms sales to Western Europe, which has almost literally disarmed itself by sending its tanks and howitzers, ammunition and missiles to Ukraine. U.S. politicians support a bellicose foreign policy to promote arms factories that employ labor in their voting districts. And the neocons who dominate the State Department and CIA see the war as a means of asserting American dominance over the world economy, starting with its own NATO partners.
The problem with this view is that although America’s military-industrial, oil and agricultural monopolies are benefitting, the rest of the U.S. economy is being squeezed by the inflationary pressures resulting from boycotting Russian gas, grain and other raw-materials exports, and the enormous rise in the military budget will be used as an excuse to cut back social spending programs. That also is a problem for Eurozone members. They have promised NATO to raise their military spending to the stipulated 2 percent of their GDP, and the Americans are urging much higher levels to upgrade to the most recent array of weaponry. All but forgotten is the Peace Dividend that was promised in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved the Warsaw Pact alliance, expecting that NATO likewise would have little reason to exist.

Russia has no discernable economic interest in mounting a new occupation of Central Europe. That would offer no gain to Russia, as its leaders realized when they dissolved the old Soviet Union. In fact, no industrial country in today’s world can afford to field an infantry to occupy an enemy. All that NATO can do is bomb from a distance. It can destroy, but not occupy. The United States found that out in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. And just as the assassination Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo (now Bosnia-Herzegovina) triggered World War I in 1914, NATO’s bombing of adjoining Serbia may be viewed as throwing down the gauntlet to turn Cold War 2 into a veritable World War III. That marked the point at which NATO became an offensive alliance, not a defensive one.

How does this reflect European interests? Why should Europe re-arm, if the only effect is to make it a target of retaliation in the event of further attacks on Russia? What does Europe have to gain in becoming a larger customer for America’s military-industrial complex? Diverting spending to rebuild an offensive army – that can never be used without triggering an atomic response that would wipe out Europe – will limit the social spending needed to cope with today’s Covid problems and economic recession.

The only lasting leverage a nation can offer in today’s world is trade and technology transfer. Europe has more of this to offer than the United States. Yet the only opposition to renewed military spending is coming from right-wing parties and the German Linke party. Europe’s Social Democratic, Socialist and Labour parties share American neoliberal ideology.

Sanctions against Russian gas makes coal “the fuel of the future”

The carbon footprint of bombing, arms manufacturing and military bases is strikingly absent from today’s discussion about global warming and the need to cut back on carbon emissions. The German party that calls itself Green is leading the campaign for sanctions against importing Russian oil and gas, which electric utilities are replacing with Polish coal and even German lignite.

Coal is becoming the “fuel of the future.” Its price also is soaring in the United States, benefitting American coal companies.
In contrast to the Paris Club agreements to reduce carbon emissions, the United States has neither the political capability nor the intention to join the conservation effort. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Executive Branch has no authority to issue nation-wide energy rules; only individual states can do that, unless Congress passes a national law to cut back on fossil fuels.

That seems unlikely in view of the fact that becoming head of a Democratic Senate and Congressional committee requires being a leader in raising campaign contributions for the party. Joe Manchin, a coal-company billionaire, leads all senators in campaign support from the oil and coal industries, enabling him to win his party’s auction for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee chairmanship and block any seriously restrictive environmental legislation.

Next to oil, agriculture is a major contributor to the U.S. balance of payments. Blocking Russian grain and fertilizer shipping threatens to create a Global South food crisis as well as a European crisis as gas is unavailable to make domestic fertilizer. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of grain and also of fertilizer, and its exports of these products have been exempted from NATO sanctions. But Russian shipping was blocked by Ukraine placing mines in the sea lanes through the Black Sea to close off access to Odessa’s harbor, hoping that the world would blame the world’s imminent grain and energy crisis on Russia instead of the US/NATO trade sanctions imposed on Russia. At his July 20, 2022 press conference Sergey Lavrov showed the hypocrisy of the public relations attempt to distort matters:

For many months, they told us that Russia was to blame for the food crisis because the sanctions don’t cover food and fertiliser. Therefore, Russia doesn’t need to find ways to avoid the sanctions and so it should trade because nobody stands in its way. It took us a lot of time to explain to them that, although food and fertiliser are not subject to sanctions, the first and second packages of Western restrictions affected freight costs, insurance premiums, permissions for Russian ships carrying these goods to dock at foreign ports and those for foreign ships taking on the same consignments at Russian harbours. They are openly lying to us that this is not true, and that it is up to Russia alone. This is foul play.

Black Sea grain transport has begun to resume, but NATO countries have blocked payments to Russia in dollars, euros or currencies of other countries in the U.S. orbit. Food-deficit countries that cannot afford to pay distress-level food prices face drastic shortages, which will be exacerbated when they are compelled to pay their foreign debts denominated in the appreciating U.S. dollar. The looming fuel and food crisis promises to drive a new wave of immigrants to Europe seeking survival. Europe already has been flooded with refugees from NATO’s bombing and backing of jihadist attacks on Libya and Near Eastern oil-producing countries. This year’s proxy war in Ukraine and imposition of anti-Russian sanctions is a perfect illustration of Henry Kissinger’s quip: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Blowback from the US/NATO miscalculations

America’s international diplomacy aims to dictate financial, trade and military policies that will lock other countries into dollar debt and trade dependency by preventing them from developing alternatives. If this fails, America seeks to isolate the recalcitrants from the U.S.-centered Western sphere.

America’s foreign diplomacy no longer is based on offering mutual gain. Such could be claimed in the aftermath of World War II when the United States was in a position to offer loans, foreign-aid and military protection against occupation – as well as manufactures to rebuild war-torn economies – to governments in exchange for their accepting trade and monetary policies favorable to American exporters and investors. But today there is only the belligerent diplomacy of threatening to hurt nations whose socialist governments reject America’s neoliberal drive to privatize and sell off their natural resources and public infrastructure.

The first aim is to prevent Russia and China from helping each other. This is the old imperial divide-and-conquer strategy. Minimizing Russia’s ability to support China would pave the way for the United States and NATO Europe to impose new trade sanctions on China, and to send jihadists to its western Xinjiang Uighur region. The aim is to bleed Russia’s armaments inventory, kill enough of its soldiers, and create enough Russian shortages and suffering to not only weaken its ability to help China, but to spur its population to support a regime change, an American-sponsored “color revolution.” The dream is to promote a Yeltsin-like leader friendly to the neoliberal “therapy” that dismantled Russia’s economy in the 1990s.

Amazing as it may seem, U.S. strategists did not anticipate the obvious response by countries finding themselves together in the crosshairs of US/NATO military and economic threats. On July 19, 2022, the presidents of Russia and Iran met to announce their cooperation in the face of the sanctions war against them. That followed Russia’s earlier meeting with India’s Prime Minister Modi. In what has been characterized as “shooting itself in its own foot,” U.S. diplomacy is driving Russia, China, India and Iran together, and indeed to reach out to Argentina and other countries to join the BRICS-plus bank to protect themselves.

The U.S. itself is ending the Dollar Standard of international finance

The Trump Administration took a major step to drive countries out of the dollar orbit in November 2018, by confiscating nearly $2 billion of Venezuela’s official gold stock held in London. The Bank of England put these reserves at the disposal of Juan Guaidó, the marginal right-wing politician selected by the United States to replace Venezuela’s elected president as head of state. This was defined as being democratic, because the regime change promised to introduce the neoliberal “free market” that is deemed to be the essence of America’s definition of democracy for today’s world.

Image on the right: The Bank of England has refused to return 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold. (BoE)

This gold theft actually was not the first such confiscation. On November 14, 1979, the Carter Administration paralyzed Iran’s bank deposits in New York after the Shah was overthrown. This act blocked Iran from paying its scheduled foreign debt service, forcing it into default. That was viewed as an exceptional one-time action as far as all other financial markets were concerned. But now that the United States is the self-proclaimed “exceptional nation,” such confiscations are becoming a new norm in U.S. diplomacy. Nobody yet knows what happened to Libya’s gold reserves that Muammar Gadafi had intended to be used to back an African alternative to the dollar. And Afghanistan’s gold and other reserves were simply taken by Washington as payment for the cost of “freeing” that country from Russian control by backing the Taliban. But when the Biden Administration and its NATO allies made a much larger asset grab of some $300 billion of Russia’s foreign bank reserves and currency holdings in March 2022, it made official a radical new epoch in Dollar Diplomacy. Any nation that follows policies not deemed to be in the interests of the U.S. Government runs the risk of U.S. authorities confiscating its holdings of foreign reserves in U.S. banks or securities.

This was a red flag leading countries to fear denominating their trade, savings and foreign debt in dollars, and to avoid using dollar or euro bank deposits and securities as a means of payment. By prompting other countries to think about how to free themselves from the U.S.-centered world trade and monetary system that was established in 1945 with the IMF, World Bank and subsequently the World Trade Organization, the U.S. confiscations have accelerated the end of the U.S. Treasury-bill standard that has governed world finance since the United States went off gold in 1971.

Since dollar convertibility into gold ended in August 1971, dollarization of the world’s trade and investment has created a need for other countries to hold most of their new international monetary reserves in U.S. Treasury securities and bank deposits. As already noted, that enables the United States to seize foreign bank deposits and bonds denominated in U.S. dollars.

Most important, the United States can create and spend dollar IOUs into the world economy at will, without limit. It doesn’t have to earn international spending power by running a trade surplus, as other countries have to do. The U.S. Treasury can simply print dollars electronically to finance its foreign military spending and purchases of foreign resources and companies. And being the “exceptional country,” it doesn’t have to pay these debts – which are recognized as being far too large to be paid. Foreign dollar holdings are free U.S. credit to the Unites States, not requiring repayment any more than the paper dollars in our wallets are expected to be paid off (by retiring them from circulation). What seems to be so self-destructive about America’s economic sanctions and confiscations of Russian and other foreign reserves is that they are accelerating the demise of this free ride.

Blowback resulting from US/NATO isolating their economic and monetary systems

It is hard to see how driving countries out of the U.S. economic orbit serves long-term U.S. national interests. Dividing the world into two monetary blocs will limit Dollar Diplomacy to its NATO allies and satellites.

The blowback now unfolding in the wake of U.S. diplomacy begins with its anti-Russia policy. Imposing trade and monetary sanctions was expected to block Russian consumers and businesses from buying the US/NATO imports to which they had become accustomed. Confiscating Russia’s foreign currency reserves was supposed to crash the ruble, “turning it into rubble,” as President Biden promised. Imposing sanctions against importing Russian oil and gas to Europe was supposed to deprive Russia of export earnings, causing the ruble to collapse and raising import prices (and hence, living costs) for the Russian public. Instead, blocking Russian exports has created a worldwide price inflation for oil and gas, sharply increasing Russian export earnings. It exported less gas but earned more – and with dollars and euros blocked, Russia demanded payment for its exports in rubles. Its exchange rate soared instead of collapsing, enabling Russia to reduce its interest rates.

Goading Russia to send its soldiers to eastern Ukraine to defend Russian speakers under attack in Luhansk and Donetsk, along with the expected impact of the ensuing Western sanctions, was supposed to make Russian voters press for regime change. But as almost always happens when a country or ethnicity is attacked, Russians were appalled at the Ukrainian hatred of Russian-language speakers and Russian culture, and at the Russophobia of the West. The effect of Western countries banning music by Russian composers and Russian novels from libraries – capped by England banning Russian tennis players from the Wimbledon tournament – was to make Russians feel under attack simply for being Russian. They rallied around President Putin.

NATO’s trade sanctions have catalyzed helped Russian agriculture and industry to become more self-sufficient by obliging Russia to invest in import substitution. One well-publicized farming success was to develop its own cheese production to replace that of Lithuania and other European suppliers. Its automotive and other industrial production is being forced to shift away from German and other European brands to its own and Chinese producers. The result is a loss of markets for Western exporters.

In the field of financial services, NATO’s exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT bank-clearing system failed to create the anticipated payments chaos. The threat had been so loudly for so long that Russia and China had plenty of time to develop their own payments system. This provided them with one of the preconditions for their plans to split their economies away from those of the US/NATO West.

As matters have turned out, the trade and monetary sanctions against Russia are imposing the heaviest costs on Western Europe, and are likely to spread to the Global South, driving them to think about whether their economic interests lie in joining U.S. confrontational Dollar Diplomacy. The disruption is being felt most seriously in Germany, causing many companies to close down as a result of gas and other raw-materials shortages. Germany’s refusal to authorize the North Stream 2 pipeline has pushed its energy crisis to a head. This has raised the question of how long Germany’s political parties can remain subordinate to NATO’s Cold War policies at the cost of German industry and households facing sharp rises in heating and electricity costs.

The longer it takes to restore trade with Russia, the more European economies will suffer, along with the citizenry at large, and the further the euro’s exchange rate will fall, spurring inflation throughout its member countries. European NATO countries are losing not only their export markets but their investment opportunities to gain from the much more rapid growth of Eurasian countries whose government planning and resistance to financialization has proved much more productive than the US/NATO neoliberal model.

It is difficult to see how any diplomatic strategy can do more than play for time. That involves living in the short run, not the long run. Time seems to be on the side of Russia, China and the trade and investment alliances that they are negotiating to replace the neoliberal Western economic order.

America’s ultimate problem is its neoliberal post-industrial economy

The failure and blowbacks of U.S. diplomacy are the result of problems that go beyond diplomacy itself. The underlying problem is the West’s commitment to neoliberalism, financialization and privatization. Instead of government subsidy of basic living costs needed by labor, all social life is being made part of “the market” – a uniquely Thatcherite deregulated “Chicago Boys” market in which industry, agriculture, housing and financing are deregulated and increasingly predatory, while heavily subsidizing the valuation of financial and rent-seeking assets – mainly the wealth of the richest One Percent. Income is obtained increasingly by financial and monopoly rent-seeking, and fortunes are made by debt-leveraged “capital” gains for stocks, bonds and real estate.

U.S. industrial companies have aimed more at “creating wealth” by increasing the price of their stocks by using over 90 percent of their profits for stock buybacks and dividend payouts instead of investing in new production facilities and hiring more labor. The result of slower capital investment is to dismantle and financially cannibalize corporate industry in order to produce financial gains. And to the extent that companies do employ labor and set up new production, it is done abroad where labor is cheaper.

Most Asian labor can afford to work for lower wages because it has much lower housing costs and does not have to pay education debt. Health care is a public right, not a financialized market transaction, and pensions are not paid for in advance by wage-earners and employers but are public. The aim in China in particular is to prevent the rentier Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector from becoming a burdensome overhead whose economic interests differ from those of a socialist government.

China treats money and banking as a public utility, to be created, spent and lent for purposes that help increase productivity and living standards (and increasingly to preserve the environment). It rejects the U.S.-sponsored neoliberal model imposed by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization.

The global economic fracturing goes far beyond NATO’s conflict with Russia in Ukraine. By the time the Biden administration took office at the start of 2021, Russia and China already had been discussing the need to de-dollarize their foreign trade and investment, using their own currencies. That involves the quantum leap of organizing a new payments-clearing institution. Planning had not progressed beyond broad outlines of how such a system would work, but the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s foreign reserves made such planning urgent, starting with a BRICS-plus bank. A Eurasian alternative to the IMF will remove its ability to impose neoliberal austerity “conditionalities” to force countries to lower payments to labor and give priority to paying their foreign creditors above feeding themselves and developing their own economies. Instead of new international credit being extended mainly to pay dollar debts, it will be part of a process of new mutual investment in basic infrastructure designed to accelerate economic growth and living standards. Other institutions are being designed as China, Russia, Iran, India and their prospective allies represent a large enough critical mass to “go it alone,” based on their own mineral wealth and manufacturing power.

The basic U.S. policy has been to threaten to destabilize countries and perhaps bomb them until they agree to adopt neoliberal policies and privatize their public domain. But taking on Russia, China and Iran is a much higher order of magnitude. NATO has disarmed itself of the ability to wage conventional warfare by handing over its supply of weaponry – admittedly largely outdated – to be devoured in Ukraine. In any case, no democracy in today’s world can impose a military draft to wage a conventional land warfare against a significant/major adversary. The protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s ended the U.S. military draft, and the only way to really conquer a country is to occupy it in land warfare. This logic also implies that Russia is no more in a position to invade Western Europe than NATO countries are to send conscripts to fight Russia.

That leaves Western democracies with the ability to fight only one kind of war: atomic war – or at least, bombing at a distance, as was done in Afghanistan and the Near East, without requiring Western manpower. This is not diplomacy at all. It is merely acting the role of wrecker. But that is the only tactic that remains available to the United States and NATO Europe. It is strikingly like the dynamic of Greek tragedy, where power leads to hubris that is injurious to others and therefore ultimately anti-social – and self-destructive in the end.

How then can the United States maintain its world dominance? It has deindustrialized and run up foreign official debt far beyond any foreseeable way to be paid. Meanwhile, its banks and bondholders are demanding that the Global South and other countries pay foreign dollar bondholders in the face of their own trade crisis resulting from the soaring energy and food prices caused by America’s anti-Russian and anti-China belligerence. This double standard is a basic internal contradiction that goes to the core of today’s neoliberal Western worldview.

I have described the possible scenarios to resolve this conflict in my recent book The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism. It has now also been issued in e-book form by Counterpunch Books.

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The visit of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Moscow is connected with his desire to find a way out of the current crisis in which Germany finds itself in. Behind his visit were certain financial and economic circles who see that Germany is dying as a global economic powerhouse and believe that strengthening trade relations with Russia could be a salvation for the failing economy and energy crisis.

Schröder’s recent visit to Moscow caused a lot of media attention and mixed reactions in Germany. Many Germans supported his statements on relations with Russia and the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, the commissioning of which, in the opinion of the former chancellor, would be the simplest solution to solving the problem of gas deficit in Germany.

At the same time, he received a lot of criticism from the elite, who described him as “Putin’s lobbyist”. The current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, distanced himself, stating that Schröder’s trip was not agreed upon with him.

Although Schröder has retired from politics, he still carries heavy political weight in Germany. Undoubtedly, the German business community, who are now going through difficult times, have their interests represented by him. It can be safely assumed that one of the main topics of discussion was the situation with Russia’s oil and gas complex around Nord Stream-1 and Nord Stream-2.

At the end of July, German media announced that Schröder was in Moscow and discussed with Russian officials the delivery of gas via the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Later, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that President Vladimir Putin had met with Schröder, stating that the former chancellor is very worried about the real state of affairs and the energy crisis that is flaring up in Europe.

Schröder asked Putin to explain the situation and Russia’s point of view, but he did not want to be a mediator in solving the situation in Ukraine or the current gas issue. On the other hand, Putin explained to Schröder that deliveries of Russian gas to Europe have been reduced multiple times due to European sanctions and Ukraine’s suspension of transit through one of the legs of the gas pipeline under a fabricated pretext. Deliveries via Nord Stream fell from 167 million cubic metres per day to about 30 million. The Russian president confirmed that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is technically ready for “immediate use” though.

The energy crisis that is shaking the EU and Germany is largely artificial and externally induced, and for this reason many German citizens support the former chancellor’s statements about the need to launch Nord Stream 2 and maintain dialogue with Russia. Many German citizens see Schröder as a political veteran who is trying to save the country from economic adversity.

Germans agree that there is little chance that Berlin will listen to the words of the former chancellor, and, according to some comments, Schröder’s willingness to build contacts with Putin seems more profitable than the actions of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Even those who generally do not support Schröder believe that he remains one of the few who see the bigger picture.

Although Schröder is an experienced statesman, it is unlikely that German authorities will listen to him despite his efforts to solve the difficulties that Germany is facing in the economy and energy sector. The current German administration is not able to conduct an effective dialogue with the Kremlin as it wrestles between Western liberal ideology and the harsh reality of needing energy, especially as winter is slowly but surely approaching.

Figures like Schröder, who do not hold an anti-Russian position and prefer to resolve issues through discussions, become more important in shaping public opinion and understanding the reasons why there is an energy crisis and inflation to begin with.

According to European Commission data, which the DPA agency had access to and was reported by German media, Germany will have to save 10 billion cubic metres of gas from August 2022 to March 2023 in order to achieve the EU’s 15% savings goal. This is significantly more than the others and corresponds to approximately the annual consumption of five million four-person households.

In comparison, Italy will have to save a little more than eight billion cubic metres of gas in order to achieve the EU’s target; France and the Netherlands only need to save five billion cubic metres. In total, the EU wants to save around 45 billion cubic metres of gas.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck announced earlier that his country is ready to comply with the EU’s goals. He even said that Germany is ready to save more than 15%. But this highly unlikely, which makes Schröder’s visit to Moscow all the more important if Berlin wants to save itself from a catastrophic economic and energy disaster before the winter arrives.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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Conservative former attorney general Yoon Suk-yeol, elected in May by the narrowest margin in the country’s history, claims he is on holiday to avoid meeting with the US congressional speaker and contain escalating tensions

All eyes are still on Nancy Pelosi. The US Speaker of the House of Representatives’ high-profile tour of Asia, whose agenda is at odds with the guidelines outlined by the White House, has led to an unprecedented escalation of tensions between Washington and Beijing, the protagonists of a bitter rivalry for global hegemony. The unannounced but clearly expected landing in Taipei, the heart of Taiwan, raised hackles within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which responded by summoning the US ambassador to Beijing and launching the largest military manoeuvres in its history around the island of Formosa. With live fire.

The combative congressional speaker left Taiwan on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after setting foot on the island. Earlier, Pelosi had met with Tsai Ing-wen, the twelfth president of the so-called Republic of China, with whom she had closed ranks in defence of the enclave’s “vibrant democracy” in the face of pressure from the Asian giant. But the official trip by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, interpreted in regional terms as a pulse on China, did not end there. After visiting Singapore and Malaysia, beyond Taiwan, the next destination on the map was South Korea.

Pelosi, who had been meeting presidents and prime ministers at every stop on her route, had hoped to meet the tenant of the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence, Yoon Suk-yeol, on her arrival in Seoul. However, the conservative former prosecutor, a political novice elected to office in May by the narrowest margin in the country’s history, has declined the offer on the grounds that he was on holiday. Foreign Minister Park Jin, who is in Cambodia for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was also unavailable for a reception. The only contact between the two was a phone call.

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in Seoul (PHOTO/@SpeakerPelosi)

Yoon’s rebuff to the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, denied by his entourage, has generated an avalanche of criticism internally and, above all, externally. The People’s Power Party leader has been interpreted as a move to avoid a warming of relations with China, and analysts have been dismayed to see in him a more aggressive profile with respect to Beijing’s postulates. The presence of South Korea at the NATO summit in Madrid suggested that Seoul would adopt a more determined stance in favour of the United States, but the strategic weight of China, the country’s main trading partner, hindered the plans.

In a turn of events, the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), the platform of former president Moon Jae-in and leader of the opposition, praised Yoon’s non-appearance. “For the president] to meet with Pelosi in the midst of the escalating US-China conflicts is like jumping into a fire with a powder keg on his back,” said MP Kim Eui-gyeom. On her last official visit to Seoul in 2015 as minority leader in the lower house, Pelosi was able to meet with then-president Park Geun-hye and her Foreign Minister.

On this occasion, the octogenarian speaker was received by her counterpart, the President of the South Korean National Assembly, Kim Jin Pyo, and other high-ranking members of Parliament, with whom she held a meeting lasting about an hour. Pelosi then underlined the strong alliance built between the two countries out of the ashes of the Korean War (1950-1953), one of the first stages of the Cold War that ended with the partition of the peninsula. However, the joint communiqué, issued at the end of the meeting, does not even allude to his visit to Taiwan and China’s reactions in the last few hours.

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, accompanied in Seoul by the US diplomatic legation in South Korea (PHOTO/@SpeakerPelosi)

For the problems in that part of the region go beyond that. In Seoul’s sights is North Korea’s nuclear programme, the main source of its national security concerns. Neighbouring Pyongyang has been conducting missile tests at a pace never seen before and observers believe Kim Jong-un’s regime is preparing its seventh nuclear test, the first since 2017, posing a direct existential threat to the lower 38th Parallel. Any pronouncement by Pelosi is susceptible to North Korea. Her mere visit prompted a reaction from the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The current situation clearly shows the insolent interference of the United States in the internal affairs of other countries”.

In the joint statement issued by Pelosi and Kim Jin Pyo, the parties express concern “about the growing threat” from Pyongyang. “We agree to support the efforts of the two governments to achieve practical denuclearisation and peace through international cooperation and diplomatic dialogue, based on strong and extended deterrence against the North,” the note concludes. There is hardly any mention of China or Taiwan, a sign that Seoul is opting for a appeasement approach, continuing the line drawn by former president Moon Jae-in despite the promises with which Yoon Suk-yeol won by the narrowest of margins in May.

Pelosi intends to deliver another coup on her regional tour by reviewing the 28,500 US troops stationed at Panmunjom, the four-kilometre-wide, 238-kilometre-long demilitarised area on the border between the two Koreas. Known as “the most tense place in the world”, this site witnessed the signing of the armistice that ended the fratricidal war nearly seven decades ago. If it happens, the visit would be the first by a senior US official to the area since former President Trump visited in the company of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in 2019.

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Featured image: Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi meets with South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo in Seoul (PHOTO/@SpeakerPelosi)

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The US and South Korea are planning new war games where they will simulate taking out North Korea’s military leadership, including the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday.

The drills will simulate targeting Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear sites plus bases needed to supply them. Sources familiar told The Daily Beast that the war games will end with a “decapitation” exercise where they attack North Korea’s command structure and take out Kim.

According to the report, the US will not publicly acknowledge that they are practicing killing Kim in the war games. Washington and Seoul haven’t held such exercises since President Trump canceled them in 2018 after meeting with Kim.

The last time the war games were held was in 2017, and Kim responded by ordering an underground nuclear weapons test. The North hasn’t launched a nuclear test since, but the US is risking provoking one by simulating Kim’s assassination.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jong-sup, agreed to restart the drills last weekend. When they were held last about 50,000 South Korean troops, and 20,000 US troops participated.

The renewed war games come after South Korea’s new President Yoon Suk-yeol said he would strengthen military ties with the US. His predecessor, Moon Jae-in, was a proponent of peaceful reunification with the North, and Yoon has said he will take a tougher stance on Pyongyang.

Yoon seeks the return of US nuclear bombers and submarines to South Korean territory. The US removed all of its nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula in 1991.

The Biden administration has maintained that it’s open to talks with Pyongyang but hasn’t offered any incentives to bring them to the table, such as sanctions relief. The North restarted launching missile tests last year, and the US has been warning that they may be preparing for a nuclear test.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from VOA News

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Google denied permission to use its Google Surveys platform to publish a brief survey about people’s experiences with COVID-19 and myocarditis, according to Steve Kirsch, executive director of Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.

Google denied permission to use its Google Surveys platform to publish a brief survey about people’s experiences with COVID-19 and myocarditis, according to Steve Kirsch, executive director of Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.

Kirsch on Wednesday reported the rejection, telling readers of his Substack post:

“Clearly, they don’t want anyone to know the truth. The only truth they want you to know is what the government tells you.”

Kirsch said his team put together a two-question survey, and Google rejected both questions. Here’s what Kirsch and his team tried to ask:

1. Has anyone in your household (including yourself):

a. Had COVID

b. Is now unable to work because of a COVID infection

c. Died from COVID

2. Has anyone in your household (including yourself):

a. Had the COVID vaccine

b. Had a diagnosis of myocarditis after getting the COVID vaccine

c. Died from the COVID vaccine

“Apparently, Google won’t let you ask any questions related to … COVID or the vaccines. Wow. Just wow,” Kirsch said.

Kirsch, a tech entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, included a screenshot of Google Surveys’ explanation for why it wouldn’t allow their survey.

According to Google Surveys, the team’s survey questions were problematic because:

“Surveys that request information related to certain medical topics or vividly describing a certain medical topic issue are a non-starter.

“In this scenario we must reserve the right to allow or not allow surveys with these topics at our sole discretion.”

Google Surveys also said the questions must be removed because questions involving “offensive, obscene, gruesome, hocking or distasteful content” are unallowed on their platform.

Questions about COVID and myocarditis deemed ‘offensive’

Google does allow its own survey data about COVID-19 on its Google Health platform.

Google Health — whose stated mission of “helping everyone, everywhere be healthier through products and services that connect and bring meaning to health information” — touts a “COVID-19 Open Data Repository.”

According to Google Health’s website, their data repository is “one of the most comprehensive collections of up-to-date COVID-19-related information to help public health professionals, researchers, policymakers and others in analyzing, understanding, and managing the virus.”

Google says the data come “from authoritative sources, gathered automatically as well as from volunteers and contributors, and is updated daily or more frequently.”

According to the website:

“We aggregate data from hundreds of data sources to ensure global representation.

• Authoritative sources (governmental, health, universities)
• General sources (news media, publications)
• Crowdsourcing (volunteers, contributors)”

Google Health also states: “We welcome your contributions.”

According to Google, its Google Health initiative helps “researchers and scientists in advancing the science of public health” and provides “researchers with datasets and tools they can use to discover novel insights in support of public health.”

Kirsch suggested Google wouldn’t allow his team to run their survey because it questioned the official COVID-19 government narrative.

Kirsch said:

“We already know from other surveys we’ve run that the vaccines are not safe. Disallowing such surveys is a danger to society.”

“I can’t wait for the day when I hear a Google executive admit, ‘It was a mistake to censor this information and make it difficult for the public to learn the truth about how unsafe these vaccines are.’

“Will that day ever come? Probably not.”

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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Fairfield, Iowa.

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Twitter last week censored Shmuel Shapira, M.D., MPH, for suggesting a connection between the monkeypox outbreak and mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, according to a Kanekoa’s Newsletter Substack post published Wednesday.

Shapira, who said he was injured after receiving his third dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, said Twitter demanded he remove a tweet that said:

“Monkey pox cases were rare for years. During the last years a single case was documented in Israel. It is well established the mRNA vaccines affect the natural immune system. A monkey pox outbreak following massive covid vaccination: *Is not a coincidence.”

Shapira is a full professor of medical administration at Hebrew University and served as director of Israel’s Institute for Biological Research from 2013-2021.

According to the author of the Kanekoa Newsletter, Shapira might be “the most senior ranking medical-scientist in the world to openly criticize the COVID vaccines.”

Shapira also is the founder and head of the military medicine department at the Hebrew University and Israeli Defense Forces Medical Corps, and a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Israel.

He has published more than 110 peer-reviewed scientific articles and is the editor of three academic journals.

As director of Israel’s Institute for Biological Research, Shapira initially was the “driving force behind the efforts to develop an Israeli COVID-19 vaccine” until he “unexpectedly” stepped down in May 2021, The Times of Israel reported.

According to Kanekoa, Shapira started his Twitter account in January 2022 and has grown increasingly vocal in his criticism of mRNA vaccines since he first denounced the Israeli Genesis Award for giving the award to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Kanekoa collected 11 Twitter posts by Shapira:

• On Jan. 18, 2022, Shapira said (translated from Hebrew by Google): “The Israeli Genesis Award was given to the CEO of Pfizer, so wretched. Instead of giving it to an Israeli scientist, and all this for a mediocre, short-acting vaccine that yielded Pfizer a profit of billions, a wretched and exiled one. Bourla will be appointed the King of Israel now. Let me remind you that vaccinated Israel is the fourth-leading in the number of corona patients in the world. There is a championship!”
• On Feb. 6, 2022, Shapira asked: “What grade would you give to a vaccine that people are vaccinated with three times and get sick twice (as of today)? Not to mention significant side effects …”
• On April 9, 2022, Shapira said: “The CEO of the company, millions of whose vaccines were used in Israel for vaccination, stated in an interview with NBC that Israel serves as the world’s laboratory. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first case in history where experimental guinea pigs paid an exorbitant rate for their participation.”
• On May 13, 2022, Shapira said: “I received 3 vaccinations, I was physically injured in a very significant way as many others were injured … And in addition, my trust in the nature of the decisions and in the processes of making them has been severely eroded. No one asked and checked. I will fight with all my might so that truthful answers regarding all decisions and not just regarding the vaccine are given …”
• On June 7, 2022, Shapira said: “We are talking about vaccine five in two and a half years. When the vaccine is planned for the sequence from January 2020 (the great-grandfather of the great-grandfather of the current variants). A vaccine that does not prevent infection does not prevent morbidity. And it is allegedly attributed to significant side effects to say the least. Why? What is the logic? Which authority approved? And don’t say that it prevents a serious illness, no one has proven it.”
• On June 8, 2022, Shapira said: “I will continue and ask why give an outdated fifth vaccine that does not prevent disease and apparently causes many significant common side effects.”
• On July 5, 2022, Shapira discussed the “son of a 36-year-old Australian friend” who developed “severe ventricular arrhythmias and went into heart failure” only “days after the second Pfizer vaccine.” “The compensation is automatic by the Australian government,” he said. “Despite the behavior of their government they admit to the connection and the phrase ‘no connection’ does not appear in the lexicon.”
• On July 15, 2022, Shapira shared a chart of New South Wales COVID-19 rates showing an increased risk of COVID-19 infection with every new dose of the mRNA vaccine on which hecommented: “According to official data from Australia the more you are injected the more likely you are to get sick as the fourth injection jumps the chance dramatically. According to this study it is supposedly an anti-vaccine at least according to what I have been taught.”
• On July 18, 2022, Shapira said: “I am not anti-vaccine, I am anti-stupidity, anti-fake science, and anti-incompetent management.”
• On July 28, 2022, Shapira said: “T [Twitter] warned me to remove the T connecting MP [monkeypox] to C [COVID-19]. Each day I understand better where we live and in which year.”
• On July 31, 2022, Shapira shared a link to the OpenVAERS COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System that showed a total of 1,357,937 reports including 170,151 hospitalizations and 29,790 deaths, above which he simply commented: “Safe & Efficient.”

“In a post-lockdown world,” Kanekoa said, “where governments increasingly coordinate with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to censor criticism of COVID vaccines, even senior ranking medical-scientist are being silenced for speaking about the science that counters the pharmaceutical industry’s narrative.”

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PolitiFact claims to be a fact-checking organization that exposes false information. But, in practice, PolitiFact can turn out to instead be the promoter of false information.

For example, consider this paragraph from a PolitiFact article from last week by Madison Czopek:

Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, marketed as Comirnaty, in August 2021 became the first COVID-19 vaccine to achieve full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Millions of people have received the two-dose Pfizer vaccine, which is a safe and effective way to prevent COVID-19.

This short, two-sentence paragraph from the self-proclaimed fact-checking organization is filled with falsehoods.

First, the coronavirus shots from Pfizer-BioNtech are not a “vaccine” under the normal meaning of the term. As Dr. Joseph Mercola explained early in 2021, soon after the rollout of the shots, the shots from both Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna are better understood as “gene therapy.” Further, Mercola addressed in an article on the matter that even at that early stage supposed fact checkers were trying to suppress the different nature of these new shots.

Maybe it is OK to let this first problem slide. Even many people who challenge the shots’ worthiness often just call them “vaccines.” You might expect more from someplace saying it is doing fact checking, but it is within the normal range of how people talk about the coronavirus shots.

The next two problems, though, are inexcusable.

Second, contrary to what the PolitiFact article suggests, there has been no widespread use of Pfizer’s Comirnaty shot. What millions of people have received is a different shot — Pfizer-BioNtech’s emergency use authorization coronavirus shot. Megan Redshaw explains the situation regarding Comirnaty in a July 11 article at the Children’s Health Defense website:

According to Pfizer’s press release, Comirnaty was previously made available to the 12 to 15 age group in the U.S. under EUA [(Emergency Use Authorization)] and 9 million U.S. adolescents in this age group have completed a primary series.

‘The vaccine, sold under the brand name Comirnaty for adults, has been available under an emergency use authorization since May 2021 for the 12-15 age group,” Reuters reported. “It will now be sold under the same brand name for adolescents as well.’

Yet, Pfizer’s information hotline says it has no specific information on when Comirnaty will be available.

The FDA said Friday the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine ‘has been, and will continue to be, authorized for emergency use in this age group since May 2021.’

The CDC’s website states that Comirnaty is ‘not orderable.’

A branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services overseeing the Strategic National Stockpile indicated Comirnaty was not available because Pfizer did not have time to change the labels.

According to FDA documents, Comirnaty is not available in the U.S. and nobody has received a fully approved and licensed COVID-19 vaccine.

Third, the paragraph from the Politifact article repeats the favorite mantra of politician and big money media pushing the coronavirus shots: The shots are “safe and effective.” Regarding the shots supposed safety, I dealt with that matter in a previous article challenging PolitiFact’s pharmaceutical propaganda. You can read here my February 13 article “PolitiFact’s Crummy Fact-checking on Coronavirus Shots Safety.” As far as effectiveness, is PolitiFact joking? Even Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle P. Walensky finally admitted back in August of 2021 what had become common knowledge among observers of the coronavirus shots’ effects: The shots do not prevent transmission of coronavirus. Wake up, PolitiFact. It is a year later and you are still touting the shots as an “effective way to prevent COVID-19.” Oh boy. And across America and the world we have seen the continued failure of the shots to prevent coronavirus-related sickness and death for shot recipients as well. For a sample of the evidence indicating the shots’ are ineffective and even counterproductive in preventing sickness and death read here Daniel Horowitz’s analysis of data from Great Britain in a March 22 The Blaze article.

The coronavirus shots have proven to be a big failure in regard to their hyped health promotion purposes. Nonetheless — facts, schmacts — PolitiFact continues on in its role as the shots’ dogged promoter.

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The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority has confirmed that a person died of Guillain-Barré syndrome that was causally linked to receiving the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.

A patient who had received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine has died after developing Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and a prolonged hospital stay.

To protect patient confidentiality, and because it is such a rare disease, Professor Hannelie Meyer from the National Immunisation Safety Committee said no patient details, not even the province where the death occurred, will be made public.

She has confirmed that they have positively linked the cause of death to the vaccine.

“It is a very rare event,” she said. “The person presented with the symptoms shortly after vaccination and this had led to prolonged hospitalisation, mechanical ventilation and further infections.”

GBS has been identified before as a possible side-effect of the vaccine. It has also been identified as a post-infection complication of Covid-19.

On 13 July, the American Food and Drug Administration revised its fact sheets for the J&J Covid-19 vaccine to include information pertaining to an observed increased risk of GBS following vaccination.

At the time there were about 100 preliminary reports of GBS in the US related to 12.5 million doses of the J&J vaccine. Of these, 95 were serious and required hospital admission. There was one reported death.

GBS is an immune system disorder where the body’s immune cells attack the nervous system and cause weakness and tingling in the arms and legs.

Professor Marc Blokman, who specialises in clinical pharmacology, said GBS was very rare and affected about 100,000 people worldwide every year.

“It can be mild but it can also lead to either rapid or progressive weakness and has the potential to affect the respiratory system,” he said. GBS could be caused by bacterial or viral infections and certain medicines or vaccines could predispose patients to develop the syndrome.

“We were acutely aware of it and it was part of the vigilance plan.”

He said the reported death due to the Covid-19 vaccine mirrors the situation in other countries.

“It is exceedingly rare. Very few cases are reported and even fewer are confirmed as being caused by the Covid-19 vaccine.

“We are convinced that the benefits of the vaccine still greatly outweigh adverse events.”

See the case ‘in proportion’

The chairperson of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra)board, Helen Rees, said the country would not have seen such a rare side-effect if the vaccine had not been rolled out to millions.

“We must be very careful to keep this event in proportion,” she said. “We must ask what is the risk of the disease itself?”

She said they were discussing the case with the World Health Organization and other regulators and can confirm that it was very, very rare.

Sahpra’s chief, Dr Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela, said this was the first death confirmed to be linked to the Covid-19 vaccine.

“There is one death after nine million doses of the vaccine,” she said.

They had assessed the deaths of 160 people up to now for possibly being caused by the Covid-19 vaccine and this was the first that had not been coincidental.

She said the investigation was still ongoing in a number of other cases.

Dr Nicholas Crisp, the deputy director-general in the Health Department, said a compensation fund for people harmed by the Covid-19 vaccine has to date received 75 claims that were causally linked to the vaccine and more are under investigation.

Headaches, dizziness, fever and pain were among the most common side-effects reported, according to data gathered from Sahpra’s safety app.

Sahpra statistics show that between 17 May 2021 and 15 July 2022, 217 deaths were reported to them with claims that it was linked to the Covid-19 vaccine.

Of these, 33 were under investigation and investigation for 184 had been finalised. In 154 cases the deaths were found to be coincidental. In 88 cases the deceased had Covid-19 and in two cases they had died of complications after a breakthrough infection.

In 30 cases the deaths could not be investigated properly due to a lack of information.

Meyer said they received a number of reports for anaphylaxis, a potentially fatal allergic reaction, but on investigation it was just a “very bad reaction”.

Among the serious adverse events investigated, about 70% had been coincidental and many had been stress-related.

But for less-severe reactions patients most often reported severe headaches, with 870 having received the Pfizer jab, a two-dose vaccine, and 372 the J&J shot.

Fever as a side-effect was reported by 176 patients who received the J&J vaccine and 440 who had Pfizer’s. Pain was reported by 147 patients who received the J&J vaccine and 320 who had the Pfizer vaccine.

Close to 300 people who received the Pfizer vaccine reported nausea, as did 147 people who were jabbed with J&J’s vaccine.

A total of 360 people who received either of the Covid-19 vaccines also reported shortness of breath, while about 480 reported dizziness.

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Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, as they repelled the Russian invasion that began in February, Amnesty International said today. 

Such tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians, as they turn civilian objects into military targets. The ensuing Russian strikes in populated areas have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure.

“We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.”

Not every Russian attack documented by Amnesty International followed this pattern, however. In certain other locations in which Amnesty International concluded that Russia had committed war crimes, including in some areas of the city of Kharkiv, the organization did not find evidence of Ukrainian forces located in the civilian areas unlawfully targeted by the Russian military.

Between April and July, Amnesty International researchers spent several weeks investigating Russian strikes in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. The organization inspected strike sites; interviewed survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims of attacks; and carried out remote-sensing and weapons analysis.

Throughout these investigations, researchers found evidence of Ukrainian forces launching strikes from within populated residential areas as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings in 19 towns and villages in the regions. The organization’s Crisis Evidence Lab has analyzed satellite imagery to further corroborate some of these incidents.

Most residential areas where soldiers located themselves were kilometres away from front lines. Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. In the cases it documented, Amnesty International is not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings – a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.

Launching strikes from populated civilian areas 

Survivors and witnesses of Russian strikes in the Donbas, Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions told Amnesty International researchers that the Ukrainian military had been operating near their homes around the time of the strikes, exposing the areas to retaliatory fire from Russian forces. Amnesty International researchers witnessed such conduct in numerous locations.

International humanitarian law requires all parties to a conflict to avoid locating, to the maximum extent feasible, military objectives within or near densely populated areas. Other obligations to protect civilians from the effects of attacks include removing civilians from the vicinity of military objectives and giving effective warning of attacks that may affect the civilian population.

The mother of a 50-year-old man killed in a rocket attack on 10 June in a village south of Mykolaiv told Amnesty International:

“The military were staying in a house next to our home and my son often took food to the soldiers. I begged him several times to stay away from there because I was afraid for his safety. That afternoon, when the strike happened, my son was in the courtyard of our home and I was in the house. He was killed on the spot. His body was ripped to shreds. Our home was partially destroyed.”

Amnesty International researchers found military equipment and uniforms at the house next door.

Mykola, who lives in a tower block in a neighbourhood of Lysychansk (Donbas) that was repeatedly struck by Russian attacks which killed at least one older man, told Amnesty International: “I don’t understand why our military is firing from the cities and not from the field.” Another resident, a 50-year-old man, said: “There is definitely military activity in the neighbourhood. When there is outgoing fire, we hear incoming fire afterwards.” Amnesty International researchers witnessed soldiers using a residential building some 20 metres from the entrance of the underground shelter used by the residents where the older man was killed.

In one town in Donbas on 6 May, Russian forces used widely banned and inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions over a neighbourhood of mostly single or two-storey homes where Ukrainian forces were operating artillery. Shrapnel damaged the walls of the house where Anna, 70, lives with her son and 95-year-old mother.

Anna said: “Shrapnel flew through the doors. I was inside. The Ukrainian artillery was near my field… The soldiers were behind the field, behind the house… I saw them coming in and out… since the war started… My mother is… paralyzed, so I couldn’t flee.”

In early July, a farm worker was injured when Russian forces struck an agricultural warehouse in the Mykolaiv area. Hours after the strike, Amnesty International researchers witnessed the presence of Ukrainian military personnel and vehicles in the grain storage area, and witnesses confirmed that the military had been using the warehouse, located across the road from a farm where civilians are living and working.

While Amnesty International researchers were examining damage to residential and adjacent public buildings in Kharkiv and in villages in Donbas and east of Mykolaiv, they heard outgoing fire from Ukrainian military positions nearby.

In Bakhmut, several residents told Amnesty International that the Ukrainian military had been using a building barely 20 metres across the street from a residential high-rise building. On 18 May, a Russian missile struck the front of the building, partly destroying five apartments and damaging nearby buildings. Kateryna, a resident who survived the strike, said: “I didn’t understand what happened. [There were] broken windows and a lot of dust in my home… I stayed here because my mother didn’t want to leave. She has health problems.”

Three residents told Amnesty International that before the strike, Ukrainian forces had been using a building across the street from the bombed building, and that two military trucks were parked in front of another house that was damaged when the missile hit. Amnesty International researchers found signs of military presence in and outside the building, including sandbags and black plastic sheeting covering the windows, as well as new US-made trauma first aid equipment.

“We have no say in what the military does, but we pay the price,” a resident whose home was also damaged in the strike told Amnesty International.

Military bases in hospitals

Amnesty International researchers witnessed Ukrainian forces using hospitals as de facto military bases in five locations. In two towns, dozens of soldiers were resting, milling about, and eating meals in hospitals. In another town, soldiers were firing from near the hospital.

A Russian air strike on 28 April injured two employees at a medical laboratory in a suburb of Kharkiv after Ukrainian forces had set up a base in the compound.

Using hospitals for military purposes is a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

Military bases in schools

The Ukrainian military has routinely set up bases in schools in towns and villages in Donbas and in the Mykolaiv area. Schools have been temporarily closed to students since the conflict  began, but in most cases the buildings were located close to populated civilian neighbourhoods

At 22 out of 29 schools visited, Amnesty International researchers either found soldiers using the premises or found evidence of current or prior military activity – including the presence of military fatigues, discarded munitions, army ration packets and military vehicles.

Russian forces struck many of the schools used by Ukrainian forces. In at least three towns, after Russian bombardment of the schools, Ukrainian soldiers moved to other schools nearby, putting the surrounding neighbourhoods at risk of similar attacks.

In a town east of Odesa, Amnesty International witnessed a broad pattern of Ukrainian soldiers using civilian areas for lodging and as staging areas, including basing armoured vehicles under trees in purely residential neighbourhoods, and using two schools located in densely populated residential areas. Russian strikes near the schools killed and injured several civilians between April and late June – including a child and an older woman killed in a rocket attack on their home on 28 June.

In Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces were using a university building as a base when a Russian strike hit on 21 May, reportedly killing seven soldiers. The university is adjacent to a high-rise residential building which was damaged in the strike, alongside other civilian homes roughly 50 metres away. Amnesty International researchers found the remains of a military vehicle in the courtyard of the bombed university building.

International humanitarian law does not specifically ban parties to a conflict from basing themselves in schools that are not in session. However, militaries have an obligation to avoid using schools that are near houses or apartment buildings full of civilians, putting these lives at risk, unless there is a compelling military need. If they do so, they should warn civilians and, if necessary, help them evacuate. This did not appear to have happened in the cases examined by Amnesty International.

Armed conflicts seriously hamper children’s right to education, and military use of schools can result in destruction that further deprives children of this right once the war ends. Ukraine is one of 114 countries that have endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, an agreement to protect education amid armed conflict, which allows parties to make use of abandoned or evacuated schools only where there is no viable alternative.

Indiscriminate attacks by Russian forces 

Many of the Russian strikes that Amnesty International documented in recent months were carried out with inherently indiscriminate weapons, including internationally banned cluster munitions, or with other explosive weapons with wide area effects. Others used guided weapons with varying levels of accuracy; in some cases, the weapons were precise enough to target specific objects.

The Ukrainian military’s practice of locating military objectives within populated areas does not in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks. All parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects and take all feasible precautions, including in choice of weapons, to minimize civilian harm. Indiscriminate attacks which kill or injure civilians or damage civilian objects are war crimes.

“The Ukrainian government should immediately ensure that it locates its forces away from populated areas, or should evacuate civilians from areas where the military is operating. Militaries should never use hospitals to engage in warfare, and should only use schools or civilian homes as a last resort when there are no viable alternatives,” said Agnès Callamard.

Amnesty International contacted the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence with the findings of the research on 29 July 2022. At the time of publication, they had not yet responded.

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Yesterday, Muqtada al-Sadr urged his supporters to continue protests at the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad.  The Muslim cleric has a large support base who demand the dissolution of parliament and a call for early elections.

Iraq has been suffering under a political stalemate that has prevented an elected government for almost 10 months.

Thousands of protesters entered and occupied the parliament which sits within the Green Zone last weekend.  The move was in response to attempts by a rival political faction to form a government with prime ministerial candidates unacceptable to Sadr and his followers.

The last election was held in October and Sadr won the largest bloc of seats in parliament, but was unable to form a government which would exclude his rivals. Sadr withdrew his members of parliament, and turned to the strategy of protests and the parliament occupation to achieve a change in the stalemate.

Sadr claims past dialogue has not achieved anything.  He said, “But we have already tried and experienced dialogue with them,” he added. “It has brought nothing to us and to the nation – only ruin and corruption.”

Outgoing Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi and President Barham Saleh have stressed the importance of “guaranteeing security and stability” in the country.

Why did they occupy the parliament?

Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi-American political advocate based in Washington, DC.  He was born in Baghdad and lived through the US invasion and total destruction of his country.  He told Al Jazeera TV recently, that the answer to Iraq’s current crisis is to end the sectarian quota system, end corrupt politicians, and end foreign meddling in Iraq.

Is Iraq a democracy?

After the US invasion of Iraq, the US government and their media outlets promoted the idea that the US was bring American style democracy to Iraq after removing a brutal dictator.  That never happened.  The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Iraq an “authoritarian regime” in 2019. The US officials in charge of inventing the Iraq government after the invasion, devised a very un-American governing system.  It has a multi-party system which keeps divisions and chaos center stage, while the Prime Minister, President, and the parliament all fight against each other vying for their own interests amid party and sectarian allegiances.  Under this un-American, but American-made system, it is almost impossible to get any worthwhile changes made.

Sectarian quotas   

Imagine in the US if congressional seats were divided by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Atheists.  Iraq is made up of numerous religious groups, and in the 2021 parliamentary election held in October, the political bloc led by Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr was confirmed the winner after having won a total of 73 out of the 329 seats in the parliament. The Taqadum, or Progress Party-led by Parliament Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi, a Sunni – secured 37 seats. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law party got 33 seats in parliament. Al-Fatah alliance, whose main components are militia groups affiliated with the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces, sustained its crushing loss and snatched 17 seats. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) received 31 seats, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) gained 18.

Corruption

Iraq’s is the most corrupt government in the Middle East, according to Transparency International, and is described as a “hybrid regime” between a “flawed democracy” and an “authoritarian regime”.

Brown University published the 2011 report “Costs of War”, in which concluded the US military presence in Iraq has not been able to prevent corruption, noting that as early as 2006, “there were clear signs that post-Saddam Iraq was not going to be the linchpin for a new democratic Middle East.”

Foreign meddling

Following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the main foreign players have been the US and Iran, though to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia and Israel have destabilized the country as well.

The use of Iraq as a proxy field for regional and international political conflict has resulted in a failed state. This has also formed fertile ground for extremist religious movements such as ISIS. Only by transforming Iraq into a successful state, can it eliminate terrorism.

Are US troops withdrawn from Iraq?

In January 2020, Iraq’s parliament voted to oust all US troops, and crowds chanted,”Baghdad is free, out with America.”  Finally, by December 9, 2021 US combat troops were withdrawn, but a contingent of 2,500 troops remain in an advisory and assistance role.

The effects of the US invasion on Iraq

“Iraq and Afghanistan and other places that the U.S. government have been interfering in have been destroyed because of U.S. intervention, but that wasn’t necessarily because of a series of mistakes or ignorance. In many cases that was the plan. …Many of the crimes that were committed were premeditated,” according to Raed Jarrar.

Michael Ledeen has said, “One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror.”

Ledeen was known as one of The Vulcans who also included John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and David Wurmser who signed an “An Open Letter to the President” to lobby Bill Clinton to remove Hussein from office. Clinton declined to act, but President George W. Bush was willing to destroy Iraq based on a lie.

Oil rich

Iraq is the second highest oil producer in OPEC, has one of the biggest oil reserves in the world, and will continue to be of utmost geostrategic significance for the global economy.

Has Iraq recovered from the US invasion on Iraq?

Iraq has never recovered from the US invasion, which destroyed water, electricity, medical, food and education infrastructures which were highly stable and productive prior to the US attack. The US invasion caused the growth of terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria which had never previously existed. Those terrorists created by the invasion have threatened the US, Europe and the world.

In 2008 the US began to gradually reduce the number of its troops in Iraq, completing its withdrawal in December 2011. However, the US re-entered Iraq at the request of the government to fight ISIS.  Eventually, ISIS was defeated in both Iraq and Syria.  The small number of US troops in Iraq might be accepted by Iraqis, but the Syrian people view the US occupiers as Thaieves by withholding the oil fields from Syrian use, which has Syrian households suffering with just one hour of electricity per day.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

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***

Followed by the visit of the U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, the emerging situation is quite tense. Despite advance warnings, she made her visit and offended the 1.4 billion Chinese people. The anger and anxiety, of the Chinese public, are well understood. All peace-loving nations and individuals stand with China and condemned her action.

Pakistan being the Iron Clad and closest friend of China, always stood with China at all odd times. At this moment, Pakistan reaffirms its strong commitment to the ‘One-China’ Policy and firmly supports China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Pakistan is deeply concerned over the evolving situation in the Taiwan Strait, which has serious implications for regional peace and stability. The world is already reeling through a critical security situation due to the Ukraine conflict, with destabilizing implications for international food and energy security. The world cannot afford another crisis that has negative consequences for global peace, security, and the economy. Pakistan strongly believes that inter-state relations should be based on mutual respect, non-interference in internal affairs, and peaceful resolution of issues by upholding principles of the UN charter, international law, and bilateral agreements. The people of Pakistan share the Chinese feelings and sentiments and support Chinese sovereignty.

On August 3, 2022, local time, on the sidelines of the series of foreign ministers’ meetings on East Asia cooperation and his visit to Cambodia, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi gave an interview with reporters and elaborated on China’s solemn position on U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to China’s Taiwan region.

Wang Yi stressed that this is an out-and-out farce. The U.S. is playing dirty tricks to encroach upon China’s sovereignty under the guise of “democracy”, and separatist forces for “Taiwan independence” like Tsai Ing-wen are hanging on to the U.S. coattails, turning their back on the just cause of the Chinese nation. However, these perverse actions cannot in any way change the prevailing international consensus on the One China principle, nor can they change the irreversible historical trend of Taiwan’s return to the motherland. Those who play with fire will not come to a good end. Those who offend China will surely be punished. It is hoped that the US will understand Chinese feelings and public sentiments and avoid any further confrontation. The Chinese people are genetically peace-loving and have demonstrated restraint and patience during the last four decades and have not fought any war. China believes in peaceful resolutions of all disputes and differences through diplomatic and political means and has exercised the same in the past. China is a net contributor to global stability and security throughout history. It has never invaded nor imposed war on any other country. However, if war is imposed on it, China has the right to respond appropriately. China has attained a certain level of development in all dimensions and reached a stage where it cannot be coerced so easily. World opinion supports China and believes Pelosi’s action is unjustified.

The people of Pakistan understand the public sentiments in China and cannot ignore the voice of 1.4 billion Chinese friends. Both countries have a history of supporting each other in all critical moments. China always looked after Pakistan’s vital national interests and raised its voice on all platforms for Pakistan, including the UN. China is currently President of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

It is believed that all peace-loving nations and individuals stand with China and support the Chinese stance. They will not allow spoiling the global peace and stability. The countries in the region should play a proactive role to defuse the tension and pave the way for peaceful and smooth development of the region and global economy.

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Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan, Founding Chair GSRRA, Sinologist (ex-Diplomat), Editor, Analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization). His e-mail is [email protected].

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***

Guest is Dr. Roman Braun, a doctor of psychology, master of educational sciences and NLP master trainer. He specializes research in propaganda and propaganda analysis. He is also best-selling author of the following books:

• The Power of Rhetoric
• NLP – An Introduction: Communication as leadership tool

In this session, Dr. Braun talks about his experience in the last 30 years and reveals the possibility to recognize propaganda  independent of the subject by its structure. The subject of propaganda is interchangeable, but the procedure is always the same.
Propaganda has been utilized in the corona crisis. However, he currently observes the dynamics in the propaganda content, away from the corona theme. From that point of view, he can infer the goal of manipulative communication.

*

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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

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***

U.S. provocations against China have moved into high gear. Even as the war in Ukraine, instigated by Washington, unfolds with disastrous consequences for European economies and vibrates through the world economy, a more ominous confrontation is planned.

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, with its accompanying battle group of warships, a guided missile cruiser, destroyers and nuclear submarines, is headed to the coast of China near the Taiwan Strait. This aggressive show of force is intended as a threat to back up Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s announced plan to visit Taiwan.

China has stated strong objection to this open military escalation as a flagrant violation of the U.S.-agreed position that China is one country and incorporates Taiwan as a province.

President Xi Jinping warned U.S. President Joe Biden in a conference call July 28 that “Those who play with fire will perish by it.” Xi called on the U.S. to honor the One China principle to which they had agreed (see this).

“Don’t say we didn’t warn you” was a July 29 Global Times headline. It is the highest level of warning used in the past before China has taken military action.

“China’s responses will be systematic and not limited to a small scale, given the severity of Pelosi’s actions and the damage to political trust from Sino-U.S. relations,” said Yang Mingjie, head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Taiwan Studies.

He said China’s response could include “military options and comprehensive countermeasures from the economy to diplomacy.”

Based on the strong warnings from China, it is uncertain whether Speaker of the House Pelosi’s six-person congressional visit to Taiwan goes ahead as part of her visit to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. The purpose of the trip is to reassert an aggressive intervention in Asia and openly challenge the One China agreement.

Pelosi, who ranks third in the line of succession to the presidency, would be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the island in 25 years. Pelosi is hardly on a personal trip. The visit is an arrogant challenge to China’s unity and will be backed up by a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group and military jets.

China’s consistent position

China has held a consistent, well-understood position on its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Washington is now openly violating a signed international agreement made 50 years ago, on Feb. 28, 1972, between Premier Zhou Enlai and U.S. President Richard Nixon, called the Shanghai Joint Communique. U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Special Advisor Henry Kissinger participated in drafting this document.

At that time the U.S. was isolated in Asia and all but defeated in Vietnam. This was the motivation to normalize relations — after two decades of failed efforts to overturn the Chinese Revolution through harsh sanctions and military disruptions. The U.S. was especially anxious to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. This division between the two largest but still developing socialist countries was a historic setback for the working class internationally.

Now, 50 years later, U.S. imperialist power is waning. China, Russia, Iran and other countries of the region are increasingly united and able to assist each other when faced by U.S. imperialism’s military threats and new levels of economic sanctions.

The bottom line of the People’s Republic of China in 1972 for normalizing relations with the U.S. was a signed pledge of noninterference in its internal affairs and respect for its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Of course, like all its agreements and treaties, the U.S. has violated this pledge numerous times through its interference in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan and its funding under U.S. AID programs to hostile and disruptive movements within China.

Of greatest importance was the inclusion of Taiwan in the Shanghai Joint Communique of 1972, which remains valid today. The United States acknowledged that

“all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China, and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.”

What Wall Street wants to disrupt

China’s planned economy now surpasses the capitalist economy of the U.S. To the U.S. ruling class, efforts to disrupt China have become a priority.

With a population of only 23 million, Taiwan has become a pawn in the struggle to disrupt China. Several cities on the Chinese mainland have larger populations than the island province of Taiwan. Why is disrupting Taiwan so important to Washington’s strategy?

China is Taiwan largest trading partner. It is an important manufacturing center for semiconductor computer chips and other high-tech products that are critical in global supply chains. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) currently dominates the market in the production of the most advanced types of semiconductor chips. Its integrated circuits produce power appliances, cars, laptops and phones. It now makes 92% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

None of these advanced chips are currently made in the U.S. Meanwhile, China is putting enormous resources into quickly developing its own computer chips. Breaking this essential supply chain is intended to disrupt Chinese global production. Of course it will be even more disruptive to the U.S. and the European Union. Already, based on aggressive sanctions threats, the U.S. has forced Taiwanese semiconductor companies to stop doing business with major Chinese clients like Huawei.

One China policy

Taiwan island has remained officially a province of China since 1683 during the Qing Dynasty.

Following the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the corrupt U.S.-backed Kuomintang Nationalist forces withdrew to China’s island province of Taiwan with U.S. naval support. The victorious Chinese Communist Party then established the People’s Republic of China.

On Taiwan, the Kuomintang forces established what they called the Republic of China, claiming it was the government of all China, and they continue to do so today. But even Taiwan’s constitution claims that Taiwan is a province of all of China. The overwhelming majority of the world, along with the United Nations, officially agree that Taiwan is part of People’s China.

U.S. imperialism, however, has reversed course and is seeking through political and military measures to use Taiwan to destabilize China and provoke a military confrontation.

U.S. military ‘Pivot to Asia’

In 2011 President Barack Obama announced a “Pivot to Asia,” aimed at encircling and containing China. Under Donald Trump, the official position was that the military must prioritize planning for major power conflict with the People’s Republic of China. He took this military hostility to the next level with a trade war.

President Joe Biden has taken it even further, with more weapons sales and aggressive actions. Democrats and Republicans in Congress try to outdo each other in proposing anti-China measures.

The U.S. military presence in Taiwan doubled last December — although not included in counts are U.S. Green Berets training Taiwanese soldiers; other U.S. advisors and contractors involved in weapons placement, technical assistance and training; and a steady escalation of U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.

The U.S. military and its weapons contractors have told Taiwan what to order, including drones, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles, the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System and naval sea mines.

The Pentagon has provided similar weapons to Ukraine.

A $108-million U.S. arms sale May 25 was the fifth under the Biden administration and the fourth approved this year. It follows a $95-million air defense system in April and a $100-million upgrade for Patriot missiles in February. A $14.2-billion backlog of military equipment ordered since 2019 has not yet been delivered.

The goal is to make Taiwan a “porcupine” bristling with weapons. The island is being aggressively transformed into an offensive launch platform for war, even as U.S strategists seek to provoke China into military action.

Washington for years employed a similar strategy to build up military and fascist forces within Ukraine as a platform against Russia, with the aim of provoking the current disastrous war there.

These continuing weapons sales, along with Pelosi’s visit, are aimed at further undermining the One China policy.

Nikkei Asia reports that the U.S. has been in discussions to build a network of offensive missiles which would violate the INF treaty on Taiwan. On May 5 the State Department removed wording on its official website that had said “the United States does not support Taiwan independence” and that had acknowledged “the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.”

This year, for the first time, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea were invited to participate in a NATO Summit as “Indo-Pacific Partners.” This invitation was part of a new “NATO Strategic Concept” — a 10-year strategy plan that openly declares China a threat: “The close alliance between China and Russia threatens western values.”

Endless war, the quick fix

U.S. wars in Asia have cost millions of lives, poisoned generations of children and left environmental destruction that is still unrepaired. Who can forget the devastation caused by U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria? Millions of people were displaced. While each ended in failure for U.S. imperialism, they reaped trillions of dollars in profits for the military industries and the capitalist class.

The very real danger of a new war is rising. As a capitalist crisis deepens, U.S. imperialism will again choose war. Not because they win the wars, but the parasitic capitalist class desperately needs a huge infusion of military spending. Like an infusion of drugs, it’s a quick, temporary fix.

The U.S.-instigated war in Ukraine has not led to the predicted collapse of the Russian economy, but it has disrupted supply chains of energy and food globally. It is a major cause of the current recession.

A military confrontation with China would be far more disruptive. And it is even less likely to succeed.

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This article was originally published on Workers World.

Sara Flounders is Co-Director of the International Action Center. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: The USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group is now in the South China Sea. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Rawad Madanat)

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***

 

 

 

 

On Monday evening, President Biden announced that, under his direction, a US drone strike was launched on Saturday that killed “the emir of al Qaeda,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Biden said that al-Zawahiri was the “number-two man” and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He also said the assassination of the 71-year-old Egyptian-born physician was necessary because he was “deeply involved in the planning of 9/11” and was a “mastermind” behind the bombings of the USS Cole in 2000 and the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

As has been the case in every CIA targeted drone strike, no details or proof of the allegations made by the president were presented. According to news reports, US intelligence tracked al-Zawahiri down and found him living in a safe house in a densely populated section of Kabul.

The reports said that Biden approved the attack a week ago and that the CIA fired two Hellfire missiles and killed al-Zawahiri on a balcony of the house. The press cited intelligence officials as saying no one else was killed, including members of al-Zawahiri’s family or any nearby civilians.

Speaking from the White House Blue Room balcony, the President justified the act of US imperialist military violence, saying,

“Now justice has been delivered, and this terrorist leader is no more.” He added, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.”

Biden also made it clear the assassination of al-Zawahiri was a warning to anyone deemed an enemy by the US government. He said:

“You know, we—we make it clear again tonight that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out.”

Coming in the midst of the escalating US-led war against Russia in Ukraine, and on the eve of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, Biden’s thuggish words could only be taken as an implicit threat against Russian President Putin and Chinese leader Xi.

A statement from the Taliban, the Islamist political organization that took control of Afghanistan after the US withdrawal last summer, condemned the drone attack in somewhat muted language, declaring: “It is an act against the interests of Afghanistan and the region. Repeating such actions will damage the available opportunities.”

The New York Times reported,

“The CIA missiles hit a house in Kabul’s Sherpur area, a wealthy downtown enclave within what is considered the city’s diplomatic quarters, which once housed dozens of Western embassies and now is home to some high-ranking Taliban officials. The strike took place at 9:48 p.m. on Saturday East Coast time, or 6:18 a.m. on Sunday in Kabul time, officials said.”

Yahoo News reported,

“A senior administration official said that the president was first briefed on intelligence relating to al-Zawahiri’s whereabouts on July 1. The official described Biden as ‘immersed in intelligence,’ wanting to know about the layout of the safe house, the impact of a strike on other residents and on civilians living nearby.”

The Times also reported,

“Two top aides to Mr. Biden—Jonathan Finer, his deputy national security adviser, and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, his homeland security adviser—were first briefed on the intelligence in April. Later other officials were brought in, including Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who briefed the president.”

The weapon used to kill al-Zawahiri, the AGM-114R9X (air to ground missile), is a modified Hellfire missile. It does not employ explosives, and instead uses kinetic energy and six blades to eviscerate the target.

It is a highly secretive weapon that has been employed by the US Air Force and the CIA against “high value targets,” not all of whom have been identified. It has been used in at least five countries, including Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan, to supposedly combat terrorism by dicing up enemies of US imperialism.

The Times called the grisly strike a “major victory” for Biden “at a time of domestic political trouble.”

Among the concerns of the Democratic administration is the likelihood that the party will lose its majority in one or both houses of Congress in the November midterm elections. It is significant that the strike took place on the eve of significant primary elections in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington.

Biden said that the action was proof that the administration would “continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan” after the US military withdrawal from the country one year ago.

However, while the Republicans did not challenge the decision to assassinate al-Zawahiri, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma said the strike on al-Zawahiri “reflects the total failure of the Biden administration’s policy towards that country.” Republican Representative Michael McCaul of Texas said the strike “serves as a reminder the American people were lied to by President Biden. Al Qaeda is not ‘gone’ from Afghanistan as Biden falsely claimed a year ago.”

Drone assassinations became standard military practice during the first term of the Obama administration and were continued by the Trump White House. As with his predecessors, Biden’s targeted assassination was carried out in violation of international law.

Assurances from the CIA that no one else was killed cannot be uncritically accepted. According to research by Airwars, over the last 20 years and after more the 91,000 strikes in seven war zones, “at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes.”

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Featured image: Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri in an photograph taken by Hamid Mir, who took this picture during his third and last interview with Osama bin Laden during November 2001 in Kabul. Dr. al-Zawahri was present at the interview where he acted as translator for bin Laden. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

---

ISBN Number: 0-9737147-1-9
Product Type: PDF File
click here to order

Price: $9.50

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

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

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***

Washington’s hard power display of taking out Al-Qaeda’s Al-Zawahiri will not be reciprocated by Beijing over Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan. It does however, definitively bury the decades-long era of cooperative US-Chinese relations.

This is the way the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.

Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.

All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.

Another disposable asset

Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order.

Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.

No “Pearl Harbor moment”

Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.

Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way.

The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.

That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.

What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:

Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.”

That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.

Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations.

Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner… China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”

Chess, not checkers

The Sinophobic matrix predictably dismissed Xi’s reaction to the fact on the ground – and in the skies – in Taiwan, complete with rhetoric exposing the “provocation by American reactionaries” and the “uncivilized campaign of the imperialists.”

This may be seen as Xi playing Chairman Mao. He may have a point, but the rhetoric is pro forma. The crucial fact is that Xi was personally humiliated by Washington and so was the Communist Party of China (CPC), a major loss of face – something that in Chinese culture is unforgivable. And all that compounded with a US tactical victory.

So the response will be inevitable, and it will be classic Sun Tzu: calculated, precise, tough, long-term and strategic – not tactical. That takes time because Beijing is not ready yet in an array of mostly technological domains. Putin had to wait years for Russia to act decisively. China’s time will come.

For now, what’s clear is that as much as with Russia-US relations last February, the Rubicon has been crossed in the US-China sphere.

The price of collateral damage

The Central Bank of Afghanistan bagged a paltry $40 million in cash as ‘humanitarian aid’ soon after that missile on a balcony in Kabul.

So that was the price of the Al-Zawahiri operation, intermediated by the currently US-aligned Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So cheap.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone carrying the two Hellfire R9X that killed Al-Zawahiri had to fly over Pakistani airspace – taking off from a US base in the Persian Gulf, traversing the Arabian Sea, and flying over Balochistan to enter Afghanistan from the south. The Americans may have also got human intelligence as a bonus.

A 2003 deal, according to which Islamabad facilitates air corridors for US military flights, may have expired with the American withdrawal debacle last August, but could always be revived.

No one should expect a deep dive investigation on what exactly the ISI – historically very close to the Taliban – gave to Washington on a silver platter.

Dodgy dealings

Cue to an intriguing phone call last week between the all-powerful Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, and US deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Bajwa was lobbying for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a crucial loan at the soonest, otherwise Pakistan will default on its foreign debt.

Were deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan still in power, he would never have allowed that phone call.

The plot thickens, as Al-Zawahiri’s Kabul digs in a posh neighborhood is owned by a close advisor to Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the “terrorist” (US-defined) Haqqani network and currently Taliban Interior Minister. The Haqqani network, needless to add, was always very cozy with the ISI.

And then, three months ago, we had the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum, meeting with Biden’s National Security Advisor  Jake Sullivan in Washington – allegedly to get their former, joint, covert, counter-terrorism machinery back on track.

Once again, the only question revolves around the terms of the “offer you can’t refuse” – and that may be connected to IMF relief. Under these circumstances, Al-Zawahiri was just paltry collateral damage.

Sun Tzu deploys his six blades

Following Speaker Pelosi’s caper in Taiwan, collateral damage is bound to multiply like the blades of a R9-X missile.

The first stage is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already having engaged in live fire drills, with massive shelling in the direction of the Taiwan Strait out of Fujian province.

The first sanctions are on too, against two Taiwanese funds. Export of sable to Taiwan is forbidden; sable is an essential commodity for the electronics industry – so that will ratchet up the pain dial in high-tech sectors of the global economy.

Chinese CATL, the world’s largest fuel cell and lithium-ion battery maker, is indefinitely postponing the building of a massive $5 billion, 10,000-employee factory that would manufacture batteries for electric vehicles across North America, supplying Tesla and Ford among others.

So the Sun Tzu maneuvering ahead will essentially concentrate on a progressive economic blockade of Taiwan, the imposition of a partial no-fly zone, severe restrictions of maritime traffic, cyber warfare, and the Big Prize: inflicting pain on the US economy.

The War on Eurasia

For Beijing, playing the long game means the acceleration of the process involving an array of nations across Eurasia and beyond, trading in commodities and manufactured products in their own currencies. They will be progressively testing a new system that will see the advent of a BRICS+/SCO/Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) basket of currencies, and in the near future, a new reserve currency.

The Speaker’s escapade was concomitant to the definitive burial of the “war on terror” cycle and its metastasis into the “war on Eurasia” era.

It may have unwittingly provided the last missing cog to turbo-charge the complex machinery of the Russia-China strategic partnership. That’s all there is to know about the ‘strategic’ capability of the US political ruling class. And this time no missile on a balcony will be able to erase the new era.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

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

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*

Why don’t they get rid of the muzzle?

While the health law specifies that a generalized obligation is no longer conceivable without prior discussion by the deputies, the minister manages to continue to impose it on us while the epidemic is over, the early treatments recognized and the ineffectiveness of the mask on the population obvious![1][2] HIS OWN ROLE IS UNMASKED.

Constantly reactivated, the obligation to wear a mask causes a return of the trauma. This mask is not only a false protection, but a continuation of the destruction of our Humanity, towards transhumanism.

Even more serious than in the first analysis:

“The obligation of the generalized wearing of the mask is emblematic of the management of the “pandemic”. This constraint is not of a sanitary nature and testifies to a nonsense; it is a commandment presenting itself, at the same time, as a law and its destruction. It is the passage to the act of an exit from the Political.

The reasons for the obligation can be summarized in the fact that, without it, there would be no manifest sign of the supposed “extreme seriousness” of the covid. The centrality of wearing a mask lies in the fact that, by constantly reminding us of the “pandemic”, the constraint places us in the gaze of the power confiscating our intimacy“[3].

“Obligation then becomes a supreme law conditioning our “freedom” and instituting a negative relationship with oneself and with the other. It enjoins us to renounce our human life. The reality of death being no longer channeled by culture, it covers the totality of existence.

Thus, the corona mask is not the articulation of the symbolic and the real. It is therefore not a mask, because it is not veiling.”[4]

“Something of the Real is captured: the desire for relationship. From then on, the people who put on the mask do not carry the word, but the cry of the one who has become a person. They exhibit both the rejection of the other and what results from it, their own annihilation.

“The wearing of the corona mask produces a loss of “symbolic appetence”, of this desire of relation manifesting itself outside the satisfaction of the elementary needs of the survival. The “primordial meeting with the other” is an impulsive push, that of the drive of life, essential in the installation of a bond with the outside.”

This natural desire, this drive of life, is today attacked by the wearing of the mask and its perpetuation after the suppression of the emergency law and any danger of this small virus clearly testifies to its instrumentalization by the globalist, eugenicist and transhumanist power. The normal man must disappear in their eyes and they use their means.

“The wearing of the corona mask leads to an indifferentiation of the ego and the not-ego, of the subject and the object. (…). From this indifferentiation, results a fusion with the things themselves. The corona mask thus allows the installation of a schizophrenic structure, where the individual identifies himself with the objects of the speech. He becomes his mask”.

Thus the media power of the billionaires takes hold on the Human via the MASK tool.

THE MASK, A TOOL OF POWER THAT IS HARMFUL TO HEALTH[5]

The publication of decrees (of a questionable legality, jurists are looking into it) authorizing a pharmacist, doctor or health establishment to impose it, as soon as the French law abolishing the state of emergency was voted on July 26, 22, the same day, demonstrates the certain will as a TOOL of power to pursue the conditioning of the populations.

Let’s not doubt that pretexts such as pollution, ozone or the Lockness monster will be used by the leaders not to let go of its very efficient collaborator, the muzzle.

This would be only moderately serious, if this piece of fabric infected and infecting with various miasmas did not keep the global population in fear and thus in submission to the ruling bodies. In spite of the numerous worldwide proofs of the ineffectiveness of the mask against viruses and its danger of spreading bacteria and fungi (especially in frail, cancerous, immunocompromised people, primary or secondary to gene injections, etc.), the attraction of the cloth persists for reasons that psychiatrists will shed light on by helping us understand how it works.

“The world through a mask is not the same. It is uncomfortable, strange, and out of step with our normalcy.”[6]

It can be both amusing and terrible to read psychoanalysts’ reflections during covid19 about the mask:

“A strange game is played around the mask in the practices and we know that language is also non-verbal. This body speaks to us a lot with the mask object! There are those who wear it easily, those who forget it, those who will not come and who may take the option of the line as a space of freedom created, those who talk about it with anger to feel locked up, suffocated and objectified and those who twist it in all directions as if they wanted to tear it off their face as if this double skin disturbed them. Others who no longer see it.

There are also those who, “by chance” at the moment of opening the door of the office, have just broken their mask by putting it on. A nice missed act, isn’t it?

This was the case of this patient, who in life, could no longer bear the mask of the simulacrum. In front of the door, her mask had cracked. So it was a good thing and we talked about it.

And of this other one who realized in front of my door that she “left without”, letting go for the first time on so many superstitious prohibitions.

Bravo ! In front of the door of the office, yes, the masks fall as the missed acts have always multiplied. Masked and unmasked at the same time.”[7]

Fear is embedded after these months of manipulation and it is difficult to get out of it like the distressing spectacle of masked drivers alone in their cars, young people running on a beach, mask stuck by sweat and heat wave, and worse: Pelosi who faces Chinese planes to land in Taiwan and comes out masked on the airport tarmac. Was it fear or manipulation on her part? How sad!

BEWARE! DESPITE THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ANY SERIOUS COVID RISK, THE GLOBALISTS WOULD LIKE TO RE-IMPOSE THE MASK ON US

“In the whole choreography of the pandemic, the body does not speak. The mask is a gag. Fixed on the mouth, it forbids speech, the vehicle par excellence of the relation to others, speech being, of all the functions of the body, the most closely linked to the common existence”.

Let’s be vigilant and spread all the information that shows its inefficiency, its harmfulness and its toxicity. Let’s inform our neighbors and friends who are still afraid of the risk for themselves of this infecting and dehumanizing rag. Let us not take lightly its prolongation beyond the infections that antibiotics will overcome, the disorders induced towards schizophrenia and psychosis should not be underestimated. We already see the damage in some normal people who were previously covid and have become very “special” and deaf to all reasoning.

THE MASK PROMOTES COVID INFECTIONS[8][9]

“The disadvantages and risks include that a cloth mask becomes a culture medium for a wide variety of bacterial pathogens and a collector of viral pathogens; given the hot, humid environment and the constant source, where home fabrics are hydrophilic while medical masks are hydrophobic.”[10]

Global experience has confirmed this statement by Prof. Rancourt of December 2020.

Jacinda Ardern “baffled” by the spike in COVID infections in New Zealand, a country where masks are mandatory (anguillesousroche.com)

Non-masked countries are less infected

The UK government’s own investigation found that the evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in schools is “inconclusive.”[11]

The UK government’s SAGE advisor, Dr. Colin Axon, judged the masks as “comfort blankets” that do virtually nothing, recalling that the COVID-19 virus particle is up to 5,000 times smaller than the holes in the mask.

“The small sizes are not easy to understand, but an imperfect analogy would be to imagine marbles being shot at builders’ scaffolding, some might hit a pole and bounce off, but most would obviously pass through,” Axon said.

A prospective randomized study in Denmark with 6,000 participants[12] also found that:

“there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected with Covid-19,” the Spectator reported.

WHO BETRAYED SCIENCE

A “show and tell”

It is indeed within the framework of a “show and tell” that the WHO recommends to wear the mask, while at the same time, it recognizes that this device does not make it possible to stop the virus and to protect the person who wears it. The advantage that the organization sees in this incentive lies in the modification of the behavior of the populations, who are encouraged to make their own masks and thus take an active part in their destruction.”[1].

The WHO,[13] whose perverse and toxic role in this Covid crisis is well-documented, overturned on June 5, 2020 more than a decade of decisions by public health agencies around the world that did not recommend masks for the general population.

The WHO made its 2020 recommendation on the preventive medical intervention of face masks for the general population worldwide by acknowledging:

“At present, the widespread use of masks by healthy individuals in the community setting is not yet supported by high-quality direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”

WHO and local public health officials are impeding scientific progress, promoting “observational studies” without controlled trials, rather than protecting public health. It should be of great concern to all that the WHO’s pretext of “a growing body of observational data on mask use by the general public in several countries” has morphed into the mantra of “a growing body of evidence,” which is on the lips of virtually every public health official and city mayor in the country.”

This mantra of “a growing body of evidence” is advanced as the false miracle justification for draconian masking laws, under real circumstances in which:

• There have been NO new randomized studies supporting masking
• All of the many past randomized studies do not support masking

None of the known harms of masking have been studied (application to the general population).

This is the opposite of science-based policy.

Politicians and public health officials are implementing the worst decision model that can be applied in a society that claims to be rational and democratic: forced preventive measures without scientific basis, while recklessly ignoring the consequences.

Denis Rancourt proves as early as 2020 that there is no scientific evidence to support forced masking on the general population, and that all medical studies of the last decade indicate the opposite: DO NOT recommend forced masking of the general population.

Recall in detailed summary in numerous articles that face mask requirements for the entire population cause:

– generalized discomfort,
– breathing difficulties,
– vision problems (e.g., glasses fogging up),
– impaired communication,
– psychological social distancing,
– skin irritation and infections,
– altered self-expression,
– prolonged exposure to bacterial cultures near the eyes, nose and mouth
– possible collection and administration of viral pathogens that would not otherwise be inhaled, and
– possible amplification of the particle size fraction of exhaled aerosol of infectious particles.

The mantra of “more and more evidence” is totally misleading[14]

Wearing a mask is particularly harmful for children at risk of learning disabilities. Let’s be vigilant in fear of bad ideas at the start of the school year[15][16][17]. Let’s protect them from the useless and toxic gene injection, but also from the wearing of the mask that the enfermistes might want to impose on us at the beginning of the school year in September 2022.

The compulsory wearing of masks for children is maltreatment ! FranceSoir reminds us of an article from August 2020. They knew! It is very illogical and extremely serious to demand masks for children, because they do not contaminate others. It is totally aberrant to demand masks for children in class when, contrary to the flu epidemics, the school is not a place of propagation of Covid19 (9) and in case of flu which is frequently transmitted by the children in school, they have never been subjected to such an obligation nor to the flu vaccines.

Of the more than 3700 articles on children and Covid listed on PubMed on 17/8/2020 and the 70 specifically dedicated to possible transmission by children, none of them provides evidence of transmission from a child to another child or to an adult in the real world.[18]

These articles all confirm, without exception, that Covid 19 is rare and almost always benign in children, that children under 19 are not infected by schoolmates but usually by parents at home, that they do not infect adults, and that confinement of children and cessation of school activities are responsible for frequent behavioral and social psychological disturbances, in addition to an obvious impact on their schooling. ALL THESE ARTICLES HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED BY WORLDWIDE EXPERIENCE.

Let us never forget: the mask is a technique of confinement

“The current treatment of our bodies immediately brings to mind the technique of confinement used in the prison of Guantanamo. This camp inaugurates a new exhibition, not of the body, as in the old regime or in the early capitalism, but of its image, more precisely a negation of the body image.

Not only were the prisoners’ eyes masked by opaque glasses, but their nose and mouth were covered by a surgical mask. The body of the prisoner is confiscated, not to subdue it, but to keep it locked within itself. Nothing must distract the prisoner’s mind from an imprisonment, which must be perceived as having no beginning and above all no end.

Compared to the reception, without explicit condemnation, of the images of Guantanamo, the enrolment in the “war against the coronavirus” is an additional stage in the renunciation of our humanity. (…)

In the “war against the coronavirus“, aptly named by President Macron in March 2020 and endorsed by the term “commando” that the new Minister of Health is expected to create, military language is omnipresent, and there is no longer any distinction between inside and outside. This psychotic fusion exists not only at the individual level, but also at the societal level.

The manufacture of psychosis has long been a concern of our leaders. The sensory deprivation techniques applied at Guantanamo Bay allowed for the manufacture of psychotic individuals in two days. These techniques were a direct application of research by behavioral psychologists, including Donald O. Hebb of McGill University in Quebec.

Unmasking the death drive

The principle of identity is essentially lodged in the face, the wearing of a mask is presented as an original fact, carrying an obsessive-compulsive disorder preventing any registration of the other.

If the face makes the social link possible, the corona mask is an unveiling that steals the features of its wearer. It “lifts the lock of the ego and gives free rein to the gush of the impulse“.

The wearing of the corona mask, as a support of the pulsional equipment, is in the heart of the “sanitary” device. It has for function the decomposition of the symbolic body, the annihilation of what makes us human beings.

The wearing of the mask prevents any rupture with the discourse of power and allows the eternal return of the trauma. It is a fetish replacing any symbolization.

But to symbolize is already to establish a distance with the super-moic injunction and to exist as a “we“, it is to refuse to be “taken one by one” in this war against the human race and thus to counter an “attack of the collective through the individuals” by Jean-Claude Paye, Tülay Umay whose article should be read in extenso.

In conclusion, the use of the mask, beyond the multiple physical, societal, educational, etc. disadvantages that we have quickly perceived as mistreatment of both children and adults, is much more than that.

It is the tool of the conscious perversity of the leaders who persecute us, want to dehumanize us and do it in full conscience.

The order authorizing its continuation in hospitals, published on the same day as the removal of the emergency covid law [France] on July 26, 2022 is a tragic demonstration of this.

They knew, they know and they should quickly understand that we also know, and that their regrets, even remorse, such as those of JF Delfraissy and A Fischer, will not be enough to absolve them of their grave decisions which have ruined too many lives and will continue to ruin more, as the deleterious effects of all their liberticidal decisions will be spread out over decades, as much by their psychological consequences as by the long term complications of gene injections

Dr. Nicole Delépine

This article was originally published by  nouveau-monde.ca and mondialisation.ca

Notes :

[1] L’APHP ose imposer le masque après le 1er août : est-ce légal ? — Nouveau Monde (nouveau-monde.ca)

[2] Les masques sont inutiles et dangereux : l’expérience désastreuse de la Nouvelle-Zélande — Nouveau Monde (nouveau-monde.ca)

[3] Coronavirus. Ceci n’est pas un masque ! | Mondialisation — Centre de Recherche sur la Mondialisation Par Jean-Claude Paye et Tülay Umay, 13 avril 202

[4] « La pulsion de mort est la structure même de la pandémie. Générique et universelle, elle se « fonde sur une détresse physiologique et sur la rage impuissante » de l’infans, de celui qui ne peut parler. Elle empêche tout libre arbitre et induit une acceptation généralisée du port du masque. Cette pulsion devient la revendication d’un idéal qui est d’échapper à la condition humaine et ainsi l’acceptation d’un passage vers le transhumanisme. » CQFD

[5] Les masques sont inutiles et dangereux ! Stop aux mensonges médiatiques ! | Mondialisation — Centre de Recherche sur la Mondialisation mise à jour de la bibliographie internationale fin juin 2022

[6] Le monde à travers un masque : l’impact psychologique — Nos Pensées (nospensees.fr)

[7] Masque et acte manqué — Psychologue.net

[8] France – L’AFNOR prouve que le masque « grand public » recommandé par le gouvernement est une véritable escroquerie. | Mondialisation — Centre de Recherche sur la Mondialisation

[9] Fögen Z. The Foegen effect: A mechanism by which facemasks contribute to the COVID-19 case fatality rate. Medicine (Baltimore). 2022 Feb 18
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35363218/
L’obligation de porter un masque a causé plus de décès COVID, conclut une étude (anguillesousroche.com)

[10] Face Masks, Lies, Damn Lies, and Public Health Officinals: “A Growing Body of Evidence” | PDF | Randomized Controlled Trial | Infection (scribd.com) Masques faciaux, mensonges, foutus mensonges et responsables de la santé publique : « Un nombre croissant de preuves »
Un nouveau mantra vil est sur les lèvres de tous les responsables de la santé publique et de tous les politiciens de la campagne mondiale pour imposer un masquage universel au grand public :
« il y a un nombre croissant de preuves ».
Cette phrase propagandiste est un vecteur conçu pour atteindre cinq objectifs principaux :
• Donner la fausse impression qu’un bilan des preuves prouve désormais que les masques réduisent la transmission du COVID-19 ;
• Assimiler à tort les commentaires faits dans des lieux scientifiques avec des « preuves » ;
• Masquer le fait qu’une décennie de preuves de niveau politique prouve le contraire : que les masques sont inefficaces contre les maladies respiratoires virales ;
• Masquer le fait qu’il existe désormais une preuve d’observation directe que les masques en tissu n’empêchent pas l’exhalation de nuages ​​de particules d’aérosol en suspension (dessus, dessous et à travers les masques) ;
• Détourner l’attention des méfaits et risques connus considérables dus aux masques faciaux, appliqués à des populations entières.

[11] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59895934

[12] Henning Bundgaard Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask WearersFREE A Randomized Controlled Trial Annals of Internal Medicine
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M20-6817?s=09&journalCode=aim
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32829745/

[13] Attention l’OMS veut manipuler à nouveau le monde via le moneypox (monkeypox) | Mondialisation — Centre de Recherche sur la Mondialisation

[14] revue de la littérature scientifique par Denis Rancourt concernant l’(in)efficacité mesurée des masques pour réduire le risque de transmission des maladies respiratoires virales, article publié le 11 avril 2020 chez ResearchGate, intitulé « Les masques ne fonctionnent pas : un examen de la science pertinente à la politique sociale de COVID-19 ». lu quelque 400 000 fois sur ResearchGate, publié dans plusieurs lieux et objet de nombreux articles de commentaires et d’interviews. Ils ne peuvent pas dire qu’ils ne savaient pas.

[15] Cavadini, T., Fort, M., Pascalis, O., & Gentaz, É. (2022). Quels sont les effets du port du masque sur la reconnaissance des visages et des émotions chez les enfants et les adultes ? Apports des recherches. A.N.A.E., 176, 113-125.

[16] Discussions autour des effets du port du masque — Psychologie du Développement Sensori-Moteur, Affectif et Social — UNIGE

[17] Impact of lip-reading on speech perception in French-speaking children at risk for reading failure assessed from age 5 to 7 | Cairn.info

[18] • Weiyong Liu .et al: Detection of Covid-19 in Children in Early January 2020 in Wuhan, China N Engl J Med. 2020 2 avril ; 382 (14) : 1370-1371
• Liu Y, Yan L-M, Wan L, et al. Viral dynamics in mild and severe cases of COVID-19. Lancet Infect Dis. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S1473 -3099(20)30232 -2
• Hong H, Wang Y, Chung H-T, Chen C-J, Clinical characteristics of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in newborns, infants and children, Pediatrics and Neonatology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedneo.2020.03.001.
• Wu Z, McGoogan JM. Characteristics of and important lessons from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in China: summary of a report of 72 314 cases from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. • JAMA 2020; published online Feb 24. DOI:10.1001/jama.2020.2648
• Jonas F Ludvigsson macroanalysis of Covid 19 in children. Acta Paediatr. 2020 23 mars.
• Peter Brodin Why is COVID-19 so mild in children? Editorial Acta Paediatrica 24 March 2020
• Ji Young Park First Pediatric Case of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Korea J Korean Med Sci. 2020 Mar 23;35(11)
• LiangSua the different clinical characteristics of corona virus disease cases between children and their families in China – the character of children with COVID-19 Emerging Microbes & Infections 2020, VOL. 9
• Qinxue Shen Novel Coronavirus Infection in Children Outside of Wuhan, China Pediatr Pulmonol. 2020 Apr 7. doi: 10.1002/ppul.24762. Online ahead of print
• Ya-Nan Han et al A Comparative-Descriptive Analysis of Clinical Characteristics in 2019-Coronavirus-infected Children and Adults Pediatrics April 2020
• Haiyan Qiu Clinical and epidemiological features of 36 children with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Zhejiang, China: an observational cohort study Lancet Infect Dis. 2020 25 mars; S1473-3099 (20) 30198-5.
• Zhonghua Er Ke Za Zhi pour la Société de pédiatrie et Association médicale chinoise : Recommandations pour le diagnostic, la prévention et le contrôle de la nouvelle infection à coronavirus 2019 chez les enfants (première édition intermédiaire). 2020 ; 58 : 169–74.]., Chinese Journal of Pediatrics
• Wen Yan Jiao et al Behavioral and Emotional Disorders in Children during the COVID-19 Epidemic THE JOURNAL OF PEDIATRICS 2020 www.jpeds.com

[19] in « Un taxi pour l’enfer », fim documentaire américain réalisé par Alex Gibney

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The nation’s first class action settlement involving a COVID shot mandate should be a wake-up call to every employer that did not accommodate or exempt employees who opposed the COVID shots for religious reasons. NorthShore University HealthSystem will pay more than $10.3 million for unlawfully discriminating against more than 500 current and former health care workers and for denying religious exemptions from the COVID shot mandate.

There is no pause button on the federal employment law under Title VII. Employees do not lose their right to reasonable accommodation for their religious beliefs simply because an employer or even the federal government pushes a vaccine mandate under the guise of a pandemic. It is past time for employment law attorneys to stop sitting on the sidelines. They need to help people obtain justice.

Liberty Counsel has been working with thousands of employees who face these abusive and unlawful mandates.

Liberty Counsel settled the nation’s first classwide lawsuit for health care workers over a COVID shot mandate and NorthShore will pay $10,337,500 to compensate these employees who were victims of religious discrimination, and who were punished for their religious beliefs against taking an injection associated with aborted fetal cells.

As part of the settlement agreement, NorthShore will also change its unlawful “no religious accommodations” policy to make it consistent with the law, and to provide religious accommodations in every position across its numerous facilities. No position in any NorthShore facility will be considered off limits to unvaccinated employees with approved religious exemptions. In addition, employees who were terminated because of their religious refusal of the COVID shots will be eligible for rehire if they apply within 90 days of final settlement approval by the court, and they will retain their previous seniority level.

This is a historic, first-of-its-kind class action settlement against a private employer who unlawfully denied hundreds of religious exemption requests to COVID-19 shots. The agreed upon settlement was filed in the federal Northern District Court of Illinois and must be approved by the court. Employees of NorthShore who were denied religious exemptions will receive notice of the settlement, and will have an opportunity to comment, object, request to opt out, or submit a claim form for payment out of the settlement fund, all in accordance with deadlines that will be set by the court.

The amount of individual payments from the settlement fund will depend on how many valid and timely claim forms are submitted during the claims process. If the settlement is approved by the court and all or nearly all of the affected employees file valid and timely claims, it is estimated that employees who were terminated or resigned because of their religious refusal of a COVID shot will receive approximately $25,000 each, and employees who were forced to accept a COVID shot against their religious beliefs to keep their jobs will receive approximately $3,000 each.

The 13 health care workers who are lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit will receive an additional approximate payment of $20,000 each for their important role in bringing this lawsuit and representing the class of NorthShore health care workers.

Liberty Counsel will receive 20 percent of the settlement sum, which equals $2,061,500, as payment for the significant attorney’s fees and costs it has required to undertake a lawsuit against NorthShore and hold it accountable for its actions. This amount is far less than the typical 33 percent usually requested by attorneys in class action litigation.

In October 2021, Liberty Counsel sent a demand letter to NorthShore on behalf of numerous health care workers who had sincere religious objections to NorthShore’s “Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination Policy.” If NorthShore had agreed then to follow the law and grant religious exemptions, the matter would have been quickly resolved and it would have cost it nothing. But, when NorthShore refused to follow the law, and instead denied all religious exemption and accommodation requests for employees working in its facilities, Liberty Counsel filed a class action lawsuit, along with a motion for a temporary restraining order and injunction.

Liberty Counsel Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Litigation Counsel Horatio G. Mihet said, “The policy change and substantial monetary relief required by the settlement will bring a strong measure of justice to NorthShore’s employees who were callously forced to choose between their conscience and their jobs.”

Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel said: “Let this case be a warning to employers that violated Title VII. It is especially significant and gratifying that this first classwide COVID settlement protects health care workers. Health care workers are heroes who daily give their lives to protect and treat their patients. They are needed now more than ever.”

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It has been several weeks since the police execution of Jayland Walker, 25, in Akron, Ohio on June 27.

After public outrage over the death of Walker, who was shot 46 times by a group of eight law-enforcement officers, Mayor Daniel Horrigan declared a state of emergency while numerous people have been arrested and charged with serious crimes for merely exercising their democratic rights.

Tensions remain extremely high in Akron due to the continuing anger and disgust of the shooting death of Walker. During the July 4 holiday weekend, people poured into the streets prompting police reactions which led to arrests and minor incidents of property destruction.

Nonetheless, over the last month there are lingering fears of further social unrest and violence in Akron. A National Night Out event which was scheduled in several districts of the city for August 4 had been cancelled in at least four areas.

The event scheduled to be held in Akron’s Goodyear Heights, Highland Square, Middlebury and Kenmore neighborhoods will not take place. Event planners and officials are claiming that safety concerns and potential demonstrations could occur resulting in the disruption of the celebrations.

Every municipal ward sponsors the annual gathering which is initiated by community leaders or a council member. Ostensibly the campaign is designed to facilitate police and community relations with an underlying theme of crime reduction.

In Ward 10, Councilwoman Sharon Conner made the decision to cancel the event. She indicated that everyone had a right to protest although she was concerned that many people living in the district were gun owners. Conner was concerned about a possible adverse reaction by some residents to demonstrations demanding justice for Jayland Walker.

Earlier on July 29, a car caravan designed to build support for the termination of employment and prosecution of the police involved in the brutal shooting, moved its way through several neighborhoods in Akron slowing down and blocking traffic in some instances. This action represented a form of civil disobedience which could not be ignored by the city administration and the general public.

There were dozens of vehicles which participated in the demonstration on July 29. Obviously, the protest was becoming quite effective prompting the police to use forceful tactics to put the action to an end.

An article published by the Akron Beacon Journal described the situation as follows:

“The caravan formed at about 7:30 p.m. near Inman Street and Archwood Avenue, according to police, who said the protesters blocked intersections as they moved through the city. The group traveled to a neighborhood in Kenmore, then to Lock 3 and around Main Street, according to police Lt. Michael Miller. ‘Members of the group reportedly began chanting and intentionally disturbing citizens who were downtown to enjoy the entertainment at various venues,’ Miller said in a news release.”

Therefore, according to this police version of events reported by the local media, the disruption of the entertainment areas could not be tolerated by the local authorities. Rather than risk a repeat of the police attack and arrests on July 29, the August 4 National Night Out events would pose a risk to the normal operations of the city.

This same report from the Beacon Journal continued by noting that:

“Protesters later demonstrated near the Akron Police Department on South High Street, moving south to the Polsky Building. A vehicle trying to leave the Polsky parking deck collided with a protester’s vehicle at the site, police said. Protesters said on social media that the driver of the exiting vehicle intentionally slammed into them; police say the person was attempting to get out of the parking deck.”

The names of the three people arrested had not been released by the police according to press reports. Despite these demonstrations, Mayor Horrigan and Police Chief Stephen Mylett have failed to make any public statements specifically related to the case. Eight of the officers involved in the firing of more than 90 shots have been placed on administrative paid leave pending the completion of an investigation.

City Administration and Police Have Refused to Issue an Apology to the Family of Walker

On July 15, a preliminary autopsy of Walker was released to the public by Summit County Medical Examiner Dr. Lisa Kohler. The report indicated that Walker had sustained numerous serious wounds which could have resulted in his death.

Kohler said that she could not determine the number of shots fired by the eight officers who discharged their weapons. She said that 46 bullets either struck or grazed Walker during the incident.

Walker was unarmed at the time of the police shooting. Officers claim that Walker had fired at them during a chase which lasted for several minutes. Walker exited the vehicle attempting to flee from the police when he was gunned down. Police then claimed that a handgun was found in the vehicle which Walker was driving.

Walker’s family has expressed extreme skepticism over this version of the killing articulated by the police. The family and its lawyer point to the fact that Walker was fleeing unarmed and consequently posed no threat to the police.

Moreover, the administration and the police have refused to publicly apologize to the Walker family for the circumstances surrounding the death of their loved one. Such a posture has created an atmosphere in Akron which has eroded even further the general attitude among African Americans towards the mayor and the police chief.

The lawyer representing the family of Walker, Atty. Bobby DiCello of the Dicello, Levitt, Gutzler firm, emphasized in the aftermath of the statement by the medical examiner that the city administration is doing more to protect the police rather than the family of the deceased. DiCello said:

“If [city leaders] were focused on protecting Jayland, they wouldn’t have to protect anyone right now. Because nothing was found in his system, it underscored the senselessness [of his killing]. He panicked and paid for it with his life. They could have released the autopsy and an apology, but they didn’t. The reason why is because they are afraid of the courtroom process. The subject needs to be: Where is the public apology? Enough of the quiet nice words. We are not interested in secret concern. We are interested in a public apology for taking a life that was not necessary. … At the end of the day, there shouldn’t have been a single bullet fired.”

United Nations to Investigate the Police Killing of Jayland Walker

A recently created United Nations Human Rights Council division has expressed an interest in investigating the police killing of Jayland Walker. This was revealed when the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement contacted the law firm representing the family of Walker.

This UN project was officially established during 2021. It represents an outcome of the mass demonstrations which swept the United States and the international community during mid-2020 in the aftermath of the brutal police and vigilante killings of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The UN Human Rights Council convened a full session during the summer of 2020 on the racial profiling and murders of African Americans by law-enforcement in the U.S. The hearing took place at the UN offices in Geneva, Switzerland. One of the brothers of George Floyd, Philonise, addressed the hearing on June 17 asking for the assistance of the international community in bringing justice to African Americans subjected to racial discrimination.

Several African Union (AU) member-states, including Botswana, motivated the convening of the UN Human Rights Council hearing two years ago. The hearing was based upon a resolution passed at the aegis of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz) during the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Summit held in July 1964 in Cairo, Egypt. The OAU, founded in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was transformed into the AU in 2002. At the time, Malcolm X was the leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which was patterned to a significant degree on the OAU formed one year before.

On the UN Human Rights Council website there is language which describes the mandate for the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement. The document reads:

“The Expert Mechanism’s mandate is detailed in resolution 47/21. It is established ‘in order to further transformative change for racial justice and equality in the context of law enforcement globally, especially where relating to the legacies of colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade in enslaved Africans, to investigate Governments’ responses to peaceful anti-racism protests and all violations of international human rights law and to contribute to accountability and redress for victims.”

This development represents the continuation of the legacy of Pan-Africanism and Internationalism within the African American struggle in the U.S. As Malcolm X emphasized during the last year of his life (1964-65), the plight of Black people in the U.S. must be brought before the UN and other global bodies in order to expose the human rights violations and crimes against humanity suffered by now more than 40 million people of African descent.

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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 is from Abayomi Azikiwe

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Because of the science-based concerns explained in a series of three Open Letters to Parents and Pediatricians (see links below), we urgently ask pediatricians around the world to call for an immediate halt to the global campaign to vaccinate children against COVID.

The three Open Letters are intended to help parents, grandparents, and physicians to better understand and appreciate the following:

• The human immune system is ingeniously complex, beautifully collaborative, extraordinarily competent, and precious.
• The interplay between the immune system and viruses involves complex and delicate adjustments (ongoing counter-moves) on the part of both the virus and the immune system—at both the individual level and the population level.
• Compared to the complex, comprehensive, multidimensional, collaborative approach used by the natural immune system (to protect us from infection), the COVID vaccines use a simplistic, unidimensional, exclusionary approach that sidelines and disrupts important components and functions of the immune system.
• The mass COVID vaccination campaign profoundly disturbs the immune ecosystem, with extremely worrisome short-term and long-term consequences—at both the individual level and the population level.
• In fact, the COVID mass vaccination campaign is responsible for abnormally generating a prolonged series of dominating new variants that become increasingly infectious, increasingly vaccine-resistant (due to “immune escape”), and inevitably more virulent. This mass vaccination campaign has failed to appreciate the complexity and delicacy of the immune ecosystem and, thereby, has prolonged the COVID pandemic and made it much more dangerous.
• Children, in particular, must be protected from the harmful effects (at both the population level and the individual level) of the COVID mass vaccination campaign.
• When given to infants and toddlers, the COVID vaccines interfere with the foundational education of a child’s innate immune system. Our concern is that this interference will irreversibly render those children less able to handle not only SARS-CoV-2 but many other glycosylated viruses, and also predispose those children to autoimmune disease and malignancies.
• There is desperate need for a representative panel of international experts—comprised of exemplary virologists, immunologists, vaccinologists, evolutionary biologists, epidemiologists, and other relevant experts—to engage in respectful, healthy, inclusive, honest, objective, rigorously scientific, video-archived, public dialogue about the COVID mass vaccination campaign, particularly the mass vaccination of children.  So far, such dialogue has not occurred.
• Since the WHO, CDC, FDA, NIH, AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics), pharmaceutical companies, conventional media, and most physicians have chosen not to engage in the above-mentioned dialogue and have failed to stop the misguided COVID mass vaccination of children—the activism of concerned, respectful, informed parents, grandparents, and pediatricians represents our best hope to bring about an immediate halt to the COVID vaccination of children, until proper scientific dialogue and thorough re-evaluation of the COVID vaccination campaign occur.

We would much prefer that the issues raised in the three Open Letters be addressed via healthy scientific dialogue, by an above-mentioned panel of exemplary experts. Unfortunately, proponents of the mass vaccination campaign have shown no interest or willingness to engage in such dialogue, despite repeated pleas by scientists and physicians who have challenged the scientific merits of the prevailing COVID narrative and its mass vaccination campaign.

In the absence of such dialogue, we call for an immediate halt to the mass COVID vaccination of children, until proper scientific dialogue and thorough re-evaluation of the COVID vaccination campaign has occurred.  We urgently and strongly encourage pediatricians around the world to join us in that call for an immediate halt.  It is our hope that the three Open Letters will stimulate, facilitate, and focus dialogue on the most profoundly important aspects of the COVID situation.  We encourage proponents of the mass COVID vaccination campaign to review the information presented in the three Open Letters and respectfully challenge aspects with which they disagree. We welcome such challenge, for that is the purpose and the tradition of healthy scientific dialogue.

Please share this letter as widely as possible—with parents, friends, colleagues, and organizations.

An Open Letter to Parents and Pediatricians Regarding COVID Vaccination. This is the original Open Letter.  It provides 1078 references, click here.

Open Letter, Part II: A Review and Update, click here.

Open Letter to Parents Regarding COVID Vaccination—Part III: Questions to Ask Your Physician—One Pediatrician’s Responses, click here.

Other relevant links and video interviews:

• Intra-pandemic vaccination of toddlers with non-replicating antibody-based vaccines targeted at ASLVI[1]- or ASLVD[2]-enabling glycosylated viruses prevents education of innate immune effector cells (NK cells). (Dr. Vanden Bossche and Dr. Rennebohm), click here.
• Video-interview regarding the initial Open Letter to Parents and Pediatricians (Dr. Rennebohm and Dr. Philip McMillan), click here.
• The Immunologic Rationale Against C-19 Vaccination of Children (Dr. Vanden Bossche), click here.
• Predictions on the Evolution of the COVID 19 Pandemic (Dr. Vanden Bossche), click here.
• An Explanation of why the COVID mass vaccination campaign has prolonged the COVID pandemic, made it more dangerous, and is now paving the way for appearance of new pandemics—involving monkeypox, avian flu, RSV, and polio. (Dr. Vanden Bossche), click here. 
• Immuno-epidemiologic ramifications of the C-19 mass vaccination experiment: Individual and global health consequences. (Dr. Vanden Bossche), click here.
• A Call for an Independent International COVID Commission (Dr. Rennebohm), click here.

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Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche’s Website: www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org

Dr. Rennebohm’s Website: www.notesfromthesocialclinic.org

Featured image: The drawing at the beginning of this document is by Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), a compassionate German artist who was deeply concerned about children, mothers, human suffering, poverty, injustice, and war. If she were with us today, Kathe would undoubtedly be deeply concerned about the mass COVID vaccination of children.

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

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The Russian Defence Ministry announced yesterday that at around 9.20 a.m. Moscow time, Razoni, ship flying the flag of Sierra Leone, left Odessa port in Ukraine as part of the recent grain deal. Razoni is carrying a cargo of maize to Istanbul port. 

The MOD said the “control of the humanitarian operation for the departure of the first ship carrying agricultural products was planned with the active participation of Russian officers who are part of the Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul.” 

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said yesterday, “this is a good and important first step” that the first ship with 26-, 27,000 tons of grain sailed out of Odessa.

Searching for the needle in a haystack is exciting, as there could be sudden surprises. There are growing signs that the diplomatic front on Ukraine conflict is livening up. 

On Monday, the US President Joe Biden offered talks with Russia. In his statement ahead of the tenth Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, Biden reiterated the US’ “shared belief” with Russia that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that “my administration has prioritised reducing the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”  

Biden continued: 

“I’ve worked on arms control from the earliest days of my career, and the health of the NPT has always rested on meaningful, reciprocal arms limits between the United States and Russian Federation. Even at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to work together to uphold our shared responsibility to ensure strategic stability. Today, my Administration is ready to expeditiously negotiate a new arms control framework to replace New START when it expires in 2026. But negotiation requires a willing partner operating in good faith. And Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression in Ukraine has shattered peace in Europe and constitutes an attack on fundamental tenets of international order. In this context, Russia should demonstrate that it is ready to resume work on nuclear arms control with the United States.” 

Simultaneously, Blinken also alluded to Russia’s key role for “making sure that countries with nuclear weapons, including the United States, pursue disarmament; making sure that countries that don’t have nuclear weapons do not acquire them by upholding and strengthening nonproliferation; and making sure that countries can engage in the peaceful use of nuclear energy, something that is even more vital as we deal with the challenges posed by climate change.” 

Blinken has had a makeover lately pushing back an avalanche of hawkish opinion represented by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, US Senate, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian Parliament who demand that Russia be formally designated a state sponsor of terrorism, a label reserved for North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Iran. 

Indeed, Blinken’s phone call to Russian FM Sergey Lavrov on prisoner exchange was a US-Russia re-engagement since February and therefore a subtle messaging in itself. (Biden’s offer of talks has come within the week.) 

These fresh tidings need to be seen alongside the trend of the “collective West” lately working to ease the anti-Russian sanctions. The following developments suggest a pattern: 

• Canada announced on July 9 — on Germany’s request and  Washington’s backing — while also ignoring Ukraine’s objections, a waiver of sanctions that allowed the return of equipment for Nord Stream 1 pipeline so as to support Europe’s access to “reliable and affordable energy”; 
• European Union issued a guideline on July 13 (in relation to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad) “that the transit of sanctioned goods by road with Russian operators is not allowed under the EU measures. No such similar prohibition exists for rail transport” (via Lithuania.)
• On August 1, the UK eased some restrictions to allow companies to provide insurance and reinsurance to Russian entities, which have implications for shipping and aviation industries. 
• The EU also allowed “exemption (for Russia) from the prohibition to engage in transactions with certain state-owned entities as regards transactions for agricultural products and the transport of oil to third countries.” 
• Bloomberg had reported on June 13 that “US government is quietly encouraging” agricultural and shipping companies to buy and carry more Russia’s fertilizer, whose exports are down 24% this year as “many shippers, banks and insurers have been staying away from the trade out of fear they could inadvertently fall afoul of the rules… and (Washington) is in the seemingly paradoxical position of looking for ways to boost them (Russian exports.)”

However, on the war front, Russia’s special military operations to grind the Ukrainian forces are continuing, albeit without significant changes on the battlefield. The current frontline in Donbass appears to be along the Bakhmut –Soledar-Seversk line where Ukrainian forces try to slow  down the Russian offensive on the cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk from the eastern direction.

Positional battles are also going on along the entire frontline in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The western media, prompted by the Kiev regime, is hyping up an imminent Ukrainian “counteroffensive” in the southern region of Kherson, but that is a stretch. In fact, in the weekend, Ukraine’s 128th Mountain Assault Brigade in Zaporozhye direction reportedly suffered such heavy losses that demoralised troops began abandoning combat positions and desertion from the frontline. 

Although Razoni sailed out yesterday, Russian strikes also destroyed one launcher of  US-made anti-ship Harpoon missile system in Odessa Region while high-precision strike also destroyed two advanced US rocket launchers of HIMARS in Kharkov.

Against such a convoluted backdrop, an opinion is building up in the US that the Kiev regime is stringing the West, and needs to be firmly told that all good things must come to an end.

Reflecting this nascent thinking, the National Interest featured a piece last week by two influential American think tankers close to the Democratic Party circles who had served in the White House and  State Department under the Obama administration. Read it here. 

Conceivably, there is a convergence here with Russia’s grouse that but for Kiev’s intransigence, peace talks are possible. Putin has invited Turkish president Recep Erdogan to meet up at Sochi on Friday. (here , here.) Erdogan had said he hoped the recent grain deal would be a turning point for the resumption of political talks between Ukraine and Russia to end the armed conflict. (here)

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The collapse on Sunday afternoon of four of the sixteen northern towers of Beirut port’s ruined grain silos has revived Lebanese fears and trauma over the explosion two years ago today that devastated the area and deepened frustration over the failure of successive governments to deal with either the causes of the blast or its aftermath.

On August 4, 2020, 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely in a port warehouse detonated, causing a massive blast which killed 219 people, wounded 6,000 and damaged or destroyed the homes of 300,000 in three adjacent neighbourhoods.

The fall of the silos, the cloud of toxic dust this raised, and the threat posed by the rest of the gutted towers has provided the government with arguments to override popular objections to the demolition of the 50-year old, 48-meter-tall towers.

The collapse of the silos was caused by a fire which was ignited by hot weather in tonnes of fermenting grain which should not have remained after the explosion because of the risks it posed. The grain smouldered for two weeks at the base of the towers, caused them to lean, and filled the air with noxious fumes. Nearby householders were told to remain in-doors with windows and doors closed. The Lebanese Red Cross distributed KN95 face masks used against COVID to families in the area.

Firemen dispatched to deal with the situation found that water made the fire worse and foam did not smother it. Helicopters were barred from taking action as the rotors’ downdraft could bring down the silos which could fall at any time. Four did.

When the government headed by Najib Mikati decided in April that the silos had to be bulldozed and the area cleared, blast survivors, families of fatalities and Lebanese still shocked by the event rejected this plan. They argued that the silos should be shored up and preserved as a memorial to victims and as evidence to convict politicians of homicidal neglect of the volatile material stored in a warehouse with other combustible material.

Residents of West Beirut, in particular, argued that the silos should stand because their presence protected their sector of the city by absorbing most of the blast wave which remained powerful enough to shatter windows in buildings at the southern edge this part of the capital.

A Lebanese friend visiting Cyprus said he wanted the blackened and blasted silos to be saved as an historical site to be visited by coming generations of Lebanese and, after decades, studied by scholars. It is unlikely, however, that the silos will survive unless serious efforts are made to preserve them at a time Lebanon has no money to do this.

The silos have become an icon and a tourist destination.Visitors to Beirut are routinely taken to the fenced-off port to see the blackened husks of the grain towers which had survived the blast, the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II.

The freighter carrying the highly volatile material entered Beirut port in November 2013 with the aim of loading heavy machinery bound for Aqaba before continuing to Mozambique to deliver the main cargo.  However, when the machinery was lifted onto the ship and placed on the hold coverit buckled, alerting port officials to the poor condition of the vessel, which was declared unseaworthy and detained. The Russian captain and three crew members were held on the ship as caretakers for a year until a court ruled they should go home. Before leaving, the captain warned that the ammonium nitrate was deteriorating and was a serious danger to the port. Bankruptcy prompted the operator to abandon the ship after it was seized for non-payment of $100,000 in fees.

The cargo was shifted to an ill maintained warehouse where it remained until it exploded. The ship sank in 2018. Ownership of both the ship and its cargo has been disputed since the blast. Nothing was done by the Lebanese authorities for more than six years.

In December 2019, Port officials warned President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Hassan Diab about the severe danger posed by the material but nothing was done until the beginning of August 2020 when Syrian welders were told by port officials to make repairs on the warehouse doors.  It is suspected that sparks from their tools may have triggered the blast. They were killed along with firefighters who turned up to fight the fires ignited by the explosion.

Teams of Lebanese citizens responded to the blast by rescuing survivors from the ruins of their homes and offices and by clearing away debris.  Hospitals struggled to care for the wounded and reassure their relatives. Lebanese formed groups to help families repair homes and civil society organisations provided food and medicine for the homeless. The state was largely absent.

An Armenian survivor told this correspondent she appealed two young volunteers passing on a motor bike to bring her injured niece down from her flat on the fifth floor of a damaged building.  “Please, Ali, please Ali”, the woman said she cried. Ali and his friend braved the broken and debris littered stairs, saved the young woman and commandeered a car to take herto hospital. The Armenian lady guided us to the blasted building which has been beautifully restored. “All this was done by local groups with foreign money.” Nothing came from the government which was and remains paralysed to this very day by political deadlock and multiple economic and social crises.

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Israel is convinced that Moscow’s threat to close down the Jewish Agency in Russia is retaliation for the Zionist state’s positions on the war in Ukraine. In fact, Israel now fears that the crisis with Russia will escalate further, which has prompted officials in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice, and the National Security Council, to hold urgent discussions to assess the situation.

The feeling is that Israel is running out of time to deal with the crisis with Russia, because the Russian Jews in the occupation state maintain close links with their homeland. Israeli diplomats are working to guarantee that the “vital” activities and services provided by the Jewish Agency continue.

By closing the offices of the agency, Russia has dealt a severe blow to Jewish migration from the country to Israel, hence the occupation state’s concern. There is now even more tension between Moscow and Tel Aviv.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Israel’s interim Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has taken a hard line against the Russians. He was the first to join the West in issuing strong condemnations of President Vladimir Putin and accusing Moscow of “war crimes”. He also led Israel’s decision to support the condemnation of Russia at the UN. He has not spoken to Putin since taking over as prime minister, nor did the Russian leader call to congratulate him on his new role. This suggests that Russia’s closure of the Jewish Agency is purely political, an act of revenge, although it is alleged that the agency has broken Russian law.

Jewish immigrants to Israel from Russia are increasing in number, with 19,168 people making the move since the beginning of the year. In the whole of 2021, only 7,824 Jews made “aliyah”. The figures show that so far this year 48 per cent of all Jews migrating to Israel are from Russia.

Israel’s position on the war in Ukraine is not the only reason for the crisis with Russia. Another reason being talked about in Israel is the occupation state’s ongoing aggression in Syria, especially the recent attack that led to the closure of Damascus International Airport, and the attack on the port of Tartus, where there is a Russian naval base.

A third reason is related to the Russian demand for ownership of Alexander’s Court in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem, which was blocked by an Israeli court. Putin sent a personal message to former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in this regard, but nothing happened, and things got to the point where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke about the alleged “Jewish roots” of Adolf Hitler.

It is understandable to be astonished at Israel-Russia relations right now. They once enjoyed an era of mutual interests and harmony which led to great success for Jewish capitalists in Moscow, where some occupied influential positions in the Kremlin and others owned major media outlets. It also led to the largest migration of Russian Jews, close to one million people, to Israel between 1990 and 2006. That was the largest such migration since the upheaval of the occupation of Palestine in 1948.

Israel’s selective humanitarian façade: welcoming Ukrainians – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/Middle East Monitor]

Israeli leaders made routine official visits to Moscow. Of all world leaders, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Kremlin more than any other between 2016 and 2020. Moreover, the strategic regional environment saw Israel boosting its desire to build bridges with Russia, as the Middle East became a very competitive arena.

Decision-making circles in Tel Aviv intensified their communication with their counterparts in Moscow, after realising the weakening of the US position in the region, especially since President Joe Biden took office and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. It slowly dawned on Israeli officials that Washington was leaving behind a huge vacuum.

None of this prevented Israel from following the West in its position on Ukraine, in line with the international stance and the return of a Cold War atmosphere. Israel has been trying to curry favour with both sides in the war, as it usually does, but it did not succeed this time. Hence, the deteriorating relations with Moscow. The longer the war continues, the higher the price that Israel will have to pay.

Israelis tend to agree that they do not want the current tension with Moscow to become irreversible to the point that Russia would ban Israel’s air force jets from using Syrian airspace; that would be a nightmare scenario for Tel Aviv. At the time of writing, Israel does not have a clear idea of what its reaction would be if things get to that stage, but it would push it into a corner and limit the options on its northern front.

Many Israelis believe that they will need a miracle to get Russia to reverse the decision to close the Jewish Agency. Moscow seems to be heading towards the end of Jewish migration from Russia, and orders from the highest levels have been issued in this regard. This is not a whim, but a serious initiative stemming from the Kremlin’s vision for global leadership.

Hence the Israeli worry that things will not stop at the closing down of the Jewish Agency. Other Jewish institutions that disseminate information about Israel and teach the Hebrew language may also face closure. Putin appears to have decided to escalate the crisis with Israel, and the occupation state’s efforts and achievements over the past thirty years may well be negated as a result.

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New Jersey police may have used blood samples taken from babies to investigate crimes, according to public defenders in the state.

According to a lawsuit filed by the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (OPD), the practice came to light after a case in which New Jersey State Police successfully subpoenaed a testing lab for a blood sample drawn from a child. Police then performed DNA analysis on the blood sample that reportedly linked the child’s father to a crime committed more than 25 years ago.

The suspect then became a client of the OPD, which alerted the office to the techniques used to identify the man. The lawsuit, filed jointly by the OPD and the New Jersey Monitor, now seeks to compel the state of New Jersey to disclose information on the full extent of the practice.

All babies born in the state of New Jersey are required to have a blood sample drawn within 48 hours as part of a mandatory testing program that screens them for 60 different disorders. These samples are processed in a state-run lab, which shares data with the state health authority and communicates results to parents.

The blood samples are not directly shared with law enforcement agencies. But if police are able to reliably obtain the samples through subpoena, then effectively, the disease screening process is entering all babies born in the state into a DNA database with no ability to opt out.

According to the lawsuit, parents and the public at large are unaware that blood samples taken from their children could be used in this way.

“The New Jersey Monitor believe the public would be shocked by what has occurred in OPD’s client’s case and that law enforcement agencies are skirting warrant requirements in this way,” a section of the lawsuit reads. “It also believes that parents in particular would be shocked to learn that their children’s blood samples are being stored by the Department of Health for more than twenty years and are being accessed by law enforcement agencies without their knowledge or consent so that their DNA could be analyzed.”

Per reporting in the New Jersey Monitor, prior to the lawsuit, public records requests filed by the Monitor and the Public Defender’s Office seeking information on subpoenas served to the lab that conducts the disease screenings were denied by the state.

A spokesperson for the New Jersey State Police said the department could not comment on pending litigation.

Across the US, DNA collection laws differ widely from state to state. While states require that a person be charged with a crime before their DNA can be collected or that a determination be made by a judge to take a sample from a suspect, others allow it to happen any time an arrest is made. Laws around the length of time that samples can be held for also vary: some states require that they be expunged if criminal charges are not pressed within a certain length of time, but others — including New York — have been criticized for retaining the DNA of people who were never charged.

Read the case file here.

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The European Medicines Agency today recommended adding a warning for two types of heart inflammation to Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, marketed under the brand names Nuvaxovid and Covovax, based on a small number of cases reported in those who received the vaccine.

According to a statement, the EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee — responsible for assessing and monitoring the safety of human medicines — concluded that “myocarditis and pericarditis can occur following vaccination with Nuvaxovid.”

“The Committee is therefore recommending listing myocarditis and pericarditis as new side effects in the product information for Nuvaxovid, together with a warning to raise awareness among healthcare professionals and people receiving this vaccine,” the statement said.

The Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee also requested the “marketing authorization holder of Nuvaxovid provides additional data on risk of side effects occurring.”

According to Reuters, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) flagged a risk of heart inflammation from the Novavax vaccine in early June.

However, the agency on July 13 granted Novavax’s request for Emergency Use Authorization of the vaccine for adults 18 and over in the U.S.

Novavax hoped people who opted not to take Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines — both of which are associated with a risk of heart inflammation — would favor its shot because it “relies on technology used for decades,” Reuters reported.

The FDA’s “Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine” now includes a warningthat “clinical trial data provide evidence for increased risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of tissue surrounding the heart) following administration of Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine, Adjuvanted.”

The FDA’s “Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers” states that for most people who have had myocarditis or pericarditis after receiving the vaccine, symptoms began within 10 days following vaccination and that vaccine recipients should seek medical attention right away if they experience chest pain, shortness of breath, feelings of having a fast-beating, fluttering or pounding heart.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”

Pericarditis is inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart that can cause sharp chest pain and other symptoms.

Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that use mRNA technology, and the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine that uses adenovirus vector technology, the Novavax vaccine uses a more traditional vaccine technology.

As The Defender reported in June, that may be one reason the committee recommended the vaccine — in the hope that “unvaccinated holdouts,” suspicious of the newer technologies or allergic to components of the mRNA vaccines, will be more likely to get the Novavax shot.

Despite a unanimous vote by the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel, members raised several concerns about the Novavax vaccine, including heart-related adverse events observed during the clinical trials.

FDA documents show multiple instances of myocarditis and pericarditis reported after the administration of the Novavax vaccine:

“Multiple events of myocarditis/pericarditis were reported in temporal relationship to NVX-CoV2373 [the Novavax vaccine used during the trials] administration, similar to myocarditis following mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and raising concern for a causal relationship to NVX-CoV2373.

“Events of lymphadenopathy were infrequent but reported by a higher proportion of participants in the NVX arm, with the highest rate observed after Dose 2 (0.2%).

“Review of the data also identified small imbalances in certain thromboembolic events, including cardiac and neurovascular events, hypersensitivity events, cholecystitis, uveitis, cardiac failure, and cardiomyopathy.

“Data from passive surveillance during post-authorization use in other countries also indicate a higher-than-expected rate of myocarditis and pericarditis (mainly pericarditis) associated with the vaccine.”

In a safety database encompassing data from 40,000 Novavax vaccine recipients, four young men, ages 16 through 28, reported myocarditis or pericarditis within 20 days of injection, though one of the four had a viral illness that may have caused the symptoms.

One trial participant reported myocarditis after being injected with a placebo.

According to the FDA, there were 26,000 people in the Novavax clinical trial. Yet, only 21,000 of the 26,000 people who received the vaccine during the trial were “followed for at least 2 months.”

It is unknown if any participants developed heart inflammation after the two-month follow-up period, why the other 5,000 clinical trial participants were not followed or whether those individuals experienced heart inflammation.

In briefing documents released June 3, the FDA wrote:

“These events raise the concern for a causal association with this vaccine, similar to the association documented with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

The FDA asked Novavax to “flag” myocarditis and pericarditis as an “important identified risk” in its materials accompanying the vaccine. However, Novavax has not yet agreed to do so.

“Based on our interpretation of all the clinical data supporting NVX-CoV2373 … we believe there is insufficient evidence to establish a causal relationship,” the company said in a statement.

Novavax claimed that “natural background events” of myocarditis can be expected in any large database and the “totality of the clinical evidence” is “not enough to establish an overall causal relationship with the vaccine.”

Novavax on Monday asked the World Health Organization to expand emergency use listing of its vaccine for adolescents ages 12-17. Japan, Australia and the EU previously authorized the vaccine for that age group.

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Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

Featured image is from CHD