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The UK Health Security Agency is refusing to publish any further data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status because previous figures show that the triple vaccinated population are on the verge of developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, and the double vaccinated are suffering Antibody-Dependent Enhancement.

Back in October 2021, The Expose exclusively revealed how the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data was showing that the Covid-19 injections has a real-world effectiveness against infection of minus-109%.

Source

Not long after this, the UKHSA added a note to their reports stating ‘case rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infection‘

Click to enlarge

This was clearly done in response to our report, and also because they could no longer use their own data to show that the Covid-19 injections are effective. But it was perfectly okay when Pfizer used this exact method to falsely claim their mRNA Covid-19 injection was 95% effective of course.

Now, as we quitely predicted, the UKHSA have gone one step further, and have announced that they will no longer publish the number of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths by vaccine status.

The reason?

The UKHSA claims this is because the UK Government has ended free universal Covid-19 testing and this therefore affects their “ability to robustly monitor Covid-19 cases by vaccination status”.

However, this doesn’t explain why they’re no longer able to publish the data on Covid hospitalisations and deaths. If someone is hospitalised with Covid-19 then we’re pretty sure the doctors and nurses are going to know about it, and if someone dies of Covid-19 we’re pretty sure a doctor is going to know about it.

There’s a good reason though as to why their excuse falls short, and it’s because they are lying. The UK Health Security Agency has been looking for an excuse for months to stop publishing the data because it clearly shows that the triple vaccinated population are on the cusp of developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), and the double vaccinated population are suffering Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease (VAED) and Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE).

The Evidence

The UKHSA claims that vaccine effectiveness wanes substantially over time and this is why it’s important to get a booster dose.

Source

But this is a lie. Vaccine effectiveness doesn’t wane. Immune system performance does.

Vaccine effectiveness isn’t really a measure of a vaccine, it is a measure of a vaccine recipients immune system performance compared to the immune system performance of an unvaccinated person.

Vaccines allegedly help develop immunity by imitating an infection. Once the imitation infection induced by the vaccine goes away, the body is left with a supply of “memory” t-cells and antibodies that will remember how to fight that disease in the future.

So, when the authorities state that the effectiveness of the vaccines weaken over time, what they really mean is that the performance of your immune system weakens over time.

A vaccine effectiveness of -50% would mean that immune system of the vaccinated is now performing at a worse rate than the natural immune system of the unvaccinated. It would mean the Covid-19 vaccines have damaged the immune system.

With that being said it should come as no surprise to anyone as to why the UKHSA no longer wish to publish the Covid-19 data by vaccination status, because it clearly shows in all areas that the Covid-19 injections are proving to have a negative vaccine effectiveness that is declining by the week, and therefore a negative immune system performance, which implies the fully vaccinated are developing Covid-19 vaccine induced Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

The following table showing the number of cases by vaccination status between week 9 and week 12 of 2022, is taken from the UKHSA Week 13 – 2022 – Vaccine Surveillance Report, the very last report to contain figures on Covid-19 by vaccination status –

Source – Page 40

As you can see from the above, the triple vaccinated population accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases in each age group by an extremely concerning amount, except for the under 18’s.

The highest number of cases in those four weeks was recorded among triple jabbed 50-59-year olds, with 210,265 confirmed cases. This compares to just 7,669 cases among unvaccinated 50-59-year-olds.

The UKHSA also used to conveniently provide the case-rates per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status in their vaccine surveillance reports, and the following table has been stitched together from the case-rate tables found in the Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 Vaccine Surveillance Reports –

Source

As you can see from the above the case-rates per 100k have been highest among the triple vaccinated population over these 3 months, except for the 18-29-year-olds in the week 3 report only, and the under 18’s in all 3 months.

However, it is worth noting the rapid decline in rates among unvaccinated children compared to the small decline in rates among vaccinated children. This suggests that in just a few weeks the case rate will be highest among triple jabbed kids. But now we’ll never know because the UKHSA is hiding it.

Now that we know the case-rates we can use Pfizer’s simple vaccine effectiveness formula to calculate the real-world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness among the triple vaccinated.

Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Unvaccinated Case Rate x 100

The following chart shows the Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness among the triple vaccinated population in England in the Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 reports of 2022 –

This is nowhere near the claimed 95% effectiveness by Pfizer is it?

As you can clearly see the vaccine effectiveness has been falling month on month, with the lowest effectiveness recorded among 60-69-year-olds at a shocking minus-391%. This age group has experienced the sharpest decline, falling from minus-104.69% in week 3.

But one of the more concerning declines in vaccine effectiveness has been recorded among 18-29-year-olds, falling to minus-231% by Week 12 of 2022 from +10.19% in Week 3.

However, vaccine effectiveness isn’t really a measure of a vaccine, it is a measure of a vaccine recipients immune system performance compared to the immune system performance of an unvaccinated person.

Using the case rates provided by UKHSA, we can also calculate the immune system performance. All we need to do is alter the vaccine effectiveness formula slightly for a negative immune system performance, and use the same formula for a positive immune system performance –

Positive Immune System Performance = Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Unvaccinated Case Rate x 100
Negative Immune System Performance = Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Vaccinated Case Rate x 100

The following chart shows the immune system performance of the triple vaccinated population in England by age group in four week periods, compared to the natural immune system of the unvaccinated population –

The lowest immune system performance is currently among 60-69-year-olds at a shocking minus-80%, but all triple vaccinated people aged 30 to 59 are not far behind, with an immune system performance ranging from minus-75% to minus-76%.

Even the 18 to 29-year-olds are within this region at minus-70%, falling from an immune system performance of +11.35% between week 51 and week 2, meaning they have suffered the fastest decline in immune system performance.

AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is the name used to describe a number of potentially life-threatening infections and illnesses that happen when your immune system has been severely damaged.

People with acquired immune deficiency syndrome are at an increased risk for developing certain cancers and for infections that usually occur only in individuals with a weak immune system.

If that immune system performance was to hit around the -95% mark then this would strongly suggest the triple vaccinated population have developed some new form of Covid-19 vaccine induced acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and unfortunately based on the current trend seen over the past 3 months, the youngest age groups do not have long to wait.

But we won’t be able to officially confirm it because the UK Health Security Agency have decided to sweep it under the carpet and hide the official data.

That isn’t the only terrible outcome that the UKHSA are attempting to conceal though. Because UKHSA data also suggests the double vaccinated are suffering Antibody-Dependent Enhancement.

Antibody-Dependent Enhancement

The UKHSA have been trying to hide this revalation since the turn of the year, when they decided to stop publishing the rates per 100,000 for the double jabbed and instead only publish the rates for the triple jabbed.

The rates are calculated by dividing the total population size of each vaccination status group by 100,000; and then dividing the total number of cases, hospitalisations or deaths among each vaccinated group by the calculated figure.

e.g. – 3 million Double Vaccinated / 100k = 30
500,000 cases among double vaccinated / 30 = 16,666.66 cases per 100,000 population.

Questions were raised at the time as to why the UKHSA decided to stop publishing the rates for the double vaccinated, mainly because in the weeks prior they were beginning to look terrible for the double vaccinated population. But, as is usually the case, the UKHSA never provided a reason.

However, the UKHSA produces a separate report containing the overall population size by age group and vaccination status, meaning we can take these figures and actually calculate the case, hospitalisation and death rates per 100,000 among the double vaccinated ourselves.

Here’s the table taken from the Week 12 Influenza and Covid-19 Surveillance Report –

The following chart shows the actual double vaccinated population size by age group on the 20th March 2022, based on the figures provided by UKHSA above –

Source – Page 85

Now that we know the population size all we have to do is divide each population by 100,000; and then divide the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths by the answer to that equation, to calculate the case, hospitalisation and death rates.

The following chart shows the Covid-19 hospitalisation rate per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status between 28th Feb and 27th March 22. The unvaccinated case rate has been taken from page 45 of the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report – Week 13 – 2022, and the double vaccinated case rate has been calculated with the number of hospitalisations provided on page 41 of the same report –

the rates per 100,000 are highest among the double vaccinated in every age group except for the 18-29-year-olds. This data shows that all double vaccinated people aged 30 and over are more likely to be hospitalised with Covid-19 than unvaccinated people.

The following chart shows the Covid-19 death rate per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status between 28th Feb and 27th March 22. The unvaccinated case rate has been taken from page 45 of the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report – Week 13 – 2022, and the double vaccinated case rate has been calculated with the number of deaths provided on page 44 of the same report –

The death-rate per 100,000 is highest among the double vaccinated in all age groups excluding the 30-39 year olds where the death rate is the same as the unvaccinated, and the 18-29-year-olds where the death rate is lower. This data shows that all double vaccinated people aged 40 and over are more likely to die of Covid-19 than unvaccinated people.

If the rates per 100,000 are higher among the vaccinated, which they are, then this means the Covid-19 injections are proving to have a negative effectiveness in the real-world. And by using Pfizer’s vaccine effectiveness formula we can accurately decipher what the real world effectiveness among each age group actually is.

Pfizer’s vaccine formula: Unvaccinated Rate per 100k – Vaccinated Rate per 100k / Unvaccinated Rate per 100k x 100 = Vaccine Effectiveness

The following chart shows the real world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation among the double vaccinated population in England, based on the hospitalisation rates provided above –

This data shows that all double vaccinated people over age 30 are between 0.2 and 2 times more likely to be hospitalised, with a minus-1% vaccine effectiveness among 30 to 39 year olds, and a minus-76% vaccine effectiveness among the over 80’s.

The following chart shows the real world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness against death among the double vaccinated population in England, based on the death rates provided above –

This data shows that all double vaccinated people over age 40 are between 2 and 3 times more likely to die of Covid-19, with a minus-90% vaccine effectiveness among 30 to 39 year olds, and a minus-156% vaccine effectiveness among the over 80’s.

But why are most double vaccinated people more likely to be hospitalised, and more likely to die of Covid-19 than unvaccinated people?

Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease

Intensive research conducted by health experts throughout the years has brought to light increasing concerns about “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement” (ADE), a phenomenon where vaccines make the disease far worse by priming the immune system for a potentially deadly overreaction.

ADE can arise in several different ways but the best-known is dubbed the ‘Trojan Horse Pathway’. This occurs when non-neutralizing antibodies generated by past infection or vaccination fail to shut down the pathogen upon re-exposure.

Instead, they act as a gateway by allowing the virus to gain entry and replicate in cells that are usually off limits (typically immune cells, like macrophages). That, in turn, can lead to wider dissemination of illness, and over-reactive immune responses that cause more severe illness.

Of the information collated by Pfizer so far from the ongoing study they have conducted, it is plain to see that they are fully aware antibody-dependent enhancement is a possible consequence of their Covid-19 injection, and it looks like they may even know the consequence has killed people.

Pfizer, the company hit with the largest healthcare fraud settlement and criminal fine to date in 2009; which also happens to be the same company behind the first every mRNA gene therapy injection administered to the general public under emergency use authorisation in the name of Covid-19, has admitted in confidential documents, that it desperately tried to keep from going public, that its Covid-19 mRNA gene therapy may cause Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to delay the release of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine safety data for 75 years despite approving the injection after only 108 days of safety review on December 11th, 2020.

But in early January 2022, Federal Judge Mark Pittman ordered them to release 55,000 pages per month. They released 12,000 pages by the end of January.

Since then, PHMPT has posted all of the documents to their website. The latest drop happened on 1st April 22.

One of the documents contained in the latest data dump is ‘reissue_5.3.6 postmarketing experience.pdf’. Table 5, found on page 11 of the document shows an ‘Important Potential Risk’, and that risk is listed as ‘Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease (VAED), including Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Reporatory Disease (VAERD)’.

Vaccine-associated enhanced diseases (VAED) are modified presentations of clinical infections affecting individuals exposed to a wild-type pathogen after having received a prior vaccination for the same pathogen.

Enhanced responses are triggered by failed attempts to control the infecting virus, and VAED typically presents with symptoms related to the target organ of the infection pathogen. According to scientists VAED occurs as two different immunopathologies, antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) and vaccine-associated hypersensitivity (VAH).

Pfizer claim in their confidential document that up to 28th Feb 2021, they had received 138 cases reporting 317 potentially relevant events indicative of Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease. Of these 71 were medically signifiant resulting in 8 disabilities, 13 were life-threatening events, and 38 of the 138 people died.

Of the 317 relevant events reported by 138 people, 135 were labelled as ‘drug ineffective’, 53 were labelled as dysponoea (struggling to breathe), 23 were labelled as Covid-19 pneumonia, 8 were labelled as respiratory failure, and 7 were labelled as seizure.

Pfizer also admitted that 75 of the 101 subjects with confirmed Covid-19 following vaccination, had severe disease resulting in hospitalisation, disability, life-threatening consequences of death.

But Pfizer still definitively concluded, for the purposes of their submitted safety data to the Food and Drug Administration, the very data that was needed to gain emergency use authorisation and make them billions and billions of dollars, that ‘None of the 75 cases could be definitively considered as VAED’.

But Pfizer then went on to confirm that based on the current evidence, VAED remains a theoretical risk.

This confidential data proves that the Covid-19 injections should never have been granted emergency use authorisation, and should have been pulled from distribution by the FDA as soon as they sighted the figures.

But the FDA failed to act, and that is precisely why the UK Health Security Agency has been looking for, and found an inadequate excuse not to publish any further data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status.

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***

Read Part I:

Destination Ukraine: The Ignorance of War

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 07, 2022

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Important factors have come into play this past week as reported from the streets here in Warsaw.

While NATO, the US military and Ukrainian president Zelensky have to this point been thwarted by the nuclear realities in their goal of fomenting World War III in Ukraine it may be that Poland, due to its own ulterior motives, will do the dirty work on their behalf.

NATO member countries and the political leaders of each have expressed very public reticence towards crossing into Ukrainian territory with their national armies.

Zelensky’s whistle-stop tour this past week in attempting to solicit the support of these same leaders by shaming them publicly has almost universally fallen on deaf ears, if not created indignation amongst each nation’s media, a media that seems to be quickly turning on Zelensky himself. As mentioned in the recent article, “Destination Ukraine: The Ignorance of War,” it is media derived popular support for war that is essential to furthering NATO goals. To lose that support means peace.

NATO has rarely stood for peace.

However, the singular exception to this sudden western coup that now seems ready to cast Zelensky aside and force him to accept the Russian proposals for peace is Poland.

Judging by the established reports coming from the Donbas of Eastern Ukraine, NATO has mere days to stir the pot of war away from peace via some manner of sudden escalation that will thus allow NATO to enter Ukraine.

Yesterday, Mariupol fell to Russian troops and the remains of the Azov battalion and its generals there are surrounded. The Russian goal of the liberation of the Donbas including Donetsk and Luhansk is now only a matter of days away.

While some reporters suggest that the impetus to draw NATO onto Ukrainian soil may come from Germany or via a bio-weapons attack orchestrated by American military bio-weapons interests discovered there, the more likely player may be right here: Poland.

After five days here in Warsaw this allegation of Poland’s ulterior motive came to my attention first by my translator Andrew and was confirmed during one of my many interviews with local citizens.

Often the most important story is right before one’s eyes and materializes only when paying close attention while attentively walking the streets.

If Poland is not held in check by its NATO brethren, this war is far from over.

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It was announced two weeks ago that faux-US president Joe Biden would be visiting NATO member countries and the HQ in Brussels to stir up what has been so far a lacklustre- by US standards- support for Ukraine. However, his trip at that time did not include Poland.

Strangely, the news reported that Biden would suddenly be making a speech in Warsaw. Why?

Before arriving in Warsaw, Biden, on March 25 used his first Polish stop to visit the troops of the 82^nd Airborne Division, one of America’s elite military divisions currently based in Rzeszow. They are part of the 10,000 US servicemen already here. I have seen these troops here in Warsaw marching together on the streets near Warsaw’s Central Station.

In keeping with Barack Obama’s warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” while sitting with the 82nd for pizza and a photo op, Biden did exactly that before finishing his first slice. Referring to the situation in Ukraine and presumably US boots on the ground there, in a moment worthy of the 25^thAmendment, said Biden with his chemical grin,

“You’re going to see when you’re there.”

Within minutes, the collective energies of the US State Dept. were in overdrive denying Biben’s faux-pas and attempting to explain it away. But the words stuck. Especially with the Poles.

Next, on Saturday in Warsaw, Biden appeared before a packed outdoor crowd and delivered a very forcefully pro-war speech. There is no space in this article to challenge this speech for what it was:  factually inept. Other journalists will surely take on this task since virtually every sentence was a crafted distortion of history and the on-scene realities of this war to date. It was obviously designed to continue popular Polish enthusiasm for this war, and likely, according to the streets, much more.

But, it was just before the Teleprompter scrolled to a close that Biden, raising his voice and holding his fists and eyes to the heavens, stated to the now rabid crowd,

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,”

Washington and NATO leaders again immediately scrambled to deny this outrageous call for regime change in Russia and explain that it was not so.

The singular exception was Poland. Why?

It should be remembered that just before Biden’s arrival Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski had offered a Polish idea to Washington. Poland would send a tranche of 28 Russian MIG-29s to Germany so that US pilots could then fly them to airbases within Ukraine. This was not very funny on many levels. For many good reasons, this was summarily rejected by Washington, since this Polish ploy would trigger WWIII.

But Kaczynski was not finished with crafting further lunacy in an attempt to hide its possible ulterior motive, beyond that of driving a NATO entry into the war.

Two weeks ago Kaczynski offered that Poland now intended to seek NATO permission to send its military to the Ukrainian city of Lviv in order to establish humanitarian corridors that would allow Ukrainian refugees who were escaping west to safely enter Poland. There are many problems with this, but the most important, beyond NATO Article 5, is that Lviv is not on the Polish/ Ukrainian border as many western reporters have claimed. Lviv sits eighty kilometres to the east, firmly inside Ukrainian territory.

Lviv’s true proximity makes Kaczynski’s claim of “humanitarian” efforts as duplicitous as was his offer of used Russian fighters the week before. If this was done, and should a single Polish military member be attacked, injured or killed by Russian forces- allegedly or under false pretences, Article 5 would require NATO toimmediately enter the war on behalf of defending, not Ukraine, but Poland!

NATO, again, rejected this madcap plan for obvious reasons. Kaczynski did not. Why?

Reports from the refugees, aid agency workers and journalists who have been embedded in Lviv have told this reporter that although they have seen and heard bombings and rocket strikes in and around Lviv, they have not witnessed or reported any civilian targets being hit or any civilian casualties. The mayor of Lviv confirmed this publicly in a post on Telegram this past Saturday after his city took at least six strikes on Friday night just hours after Biden’s war-torn speech in Warsaw while Kaczynski sat watching in the wings.

Have the Russians also been listening to the streets?

While I Prowled the streets of Warsaw talking to as many people who either spoke English or Polish within the time that my excellent translator Andrew could provide to me, the answer to this most important question, “why Poland?” became more clear.

A Deputy Prime Minister’s Iron Hand

Jaroslaw Kaczynski is deputy prime minister of Poland and leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. According to those I spoke with he is far more powerful behind the scenes in Poland than current President Andrezej Duda and exercises a strong, almost authoritarian hand over parliamentarians and particularly all things military.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, was formerly the President but died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with many other Polish political and military leaders. Evidence indicated this crash was indeed an accident, but in the current Kaczynski’s mind it was a Russian hit, hence he detests all things Russian, in particular Vladimir Putin.

The current plot thickened when, on March 15 from Kyiv, Ukraine Kaczynski stated,

“I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”

Kaczynski’s NATO offering called for sending 10,000 NATO troops from the member states to cross the Polish border and occupy Lviv while also imposing a no-fly zone. Like his first offer of MIG-29s NATO turned it down flat. But Kaczynski may go it alone.

During my many interviews with Ukrainian refugees who had arrived from Kyiv and many other western cities and towns via Lviv and then onwards to Warsaw, only one reported being accosted by any of the limited military factions roaming western Ukraine. Ana, with her small son and daughter, had made it out of Kyiv by train in the dead of night just past 2 AM. The train had all its lights out and moved slowly westward. Suddenly, several windows of the train were shot out by rifle fire. This caused all aboard to hit the deck. Fortunately, no other shots were fired and the train and her family made it safely to Lviv and then on to Warsaw.

Regarding the journey from Lviv to the Polish border, I did not speak to anyone who had problems along the way. Humanitarian aid flows in regularly while refugees flow out. To the East, it is quite another matter.

So, Kaczynski’s desire to provide “safe passage” corridors seems merely a ruse to serve other intentions. Why?

Regardless, Polish President Andrzej Duda vetoed his idea as NATO did as well.

According to the Poles I spoke with, Duda and Kaczynski do not agree very much regarding Polish military matters. However, it is Kaczynski who has the real power in Poland which he has built up over many years. Reportedly he has contempt for Duda and works behind his back to affect his agenda. It is the ulterior motive here in Poland that some that I interviewed think may see Kaczynski effect his “Humanitarian Effort” regardless of NATO approval which Duda demanded, but Kaczynski does not think is essential.

Considering Bidens rhetoric that whipped those Poles in attendance into a frenzy on Friday night, this speech certainly served Kaczynski’s agenda, not that of peace.

To understand the possible entry of Poland it is important to consider the last ten years under Kaczynski’s ever-growing power. Certainly, he is far more aligned with the war hawks of NATO than Duda which should not be surprising.

Poland, under Kaczynski’s tutelage, has declared that it wishes to be the strongest military power in Central Europe. In 2020 the Polish government pledged to “radically increase” the country’s defence capabilities and to expand the Polish Armed Forces to a staggering 300,000 personnel. Current numbers are, respectively, 113,000 regular active servicemen and women and 32,000 TDF, the equivalent to the National Guard.

Kaczynski has declared this expansion a state of emergency in national defence saying,

“The security conditions have deteriorated so much that Poland, as a frontline state, has no choice but to radically re-arm itself and become one of the best European armies…”

Accordingly, Poland now plans to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2026, using a funding scheme that includes bonds, loans and leasing options. The PiS-led cabinet already is among NATO’s top spenders (2.2% of GDP in 2022). This year’s military spending stands at 57.7 billion zlotys, or 12.5 billion euros, which will consume 12 per cent of the country’s budget.

As stated by the Defence Ministry, the military modernisation plan until 2035 has a price tag of 524 billion zlotys (115 billion euros), but details have not been made public. The increased spending also does not require parliamentary approval, let alone a referendum, even for the largest procurement items. All that is required is the signature of Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak, one of Kaczynski’s right-hand men.

Blaszczak has routinely signed purchasing requests that include “made in the USA”. Patriot air and missile defence systems, F-35 stealth fighters, HIMARS rocket launchers, Black Hawk helicopters (made in Poland by Lockheed Martin) and even used MRAP vehicles from Afghanistan, all since becoming defence minister in 2018.

An Abrams tank procurement, that has recently arrived, will be the most substantial so far at a cost of 23 billion zlotys (5 billion euros). Tank warfare is perfect for the flatlands of Western Ukraine. In all this, Blaszczak is clearly making Poland dependent on Washington.

Poland’s Ulterior Motive? The Lviv Connection

Image on the right: Jarosław Kaczyński speaking during the inauguration of a monument to his brother Lech Kaczyński (November 2018, Warsaw) (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)

760 years old, Lviv City is situated on the crossing of two profitable ancient trade routes. It developed and flourished rapidly and became one of the main trade centers of medieval Europe. It is reportedly a beautiful city full of the architecture of many influences including Austrian, Ukrainian and Polish since at various times in history all three laid claim to Lviv.

Lviv became part of Ukraine when taken by the Ukrainians from Austria in November 1918 with the creation of the West-Ukrainian People’s Republic and the unification with Great Ukraine.

But Lviv became Polish from 1919 to 1939 and Polish culture via immigration put a Polish stamp forever on Lviv that remains strong today. This takeover only served to intensify the resistance of the Ukrainians and consolidate them in the fight for a return of Lviv to Ukrainian sovereignty.

In September 1939, as a result of collusion between Stalin and Nazi Germany, Lviv became a part of the Soviet empire and with Ukraine being a USSR satellite it was returned to Ukraine under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement.

Here lies the rub, or possibly Kaczynski’s ulterior motive in repeatedly dangling a means for NATO to enter Ukraine during the past few weeks.

The Poles have never been happy with the Soviet land grab that included Lviv and this is yet another reason they detest all things Russian. In talking with several Poles they would like to see Lviv returned to Poland, but the reality that this would require war has meant that it was just not worth the sacrifice.

But a return of Lviv has always remained in mind. This was evidenced in 2018 when a fringe Polish political party, The Confederation of Independence and Freedom Party,  managed its historic and largest, yet relatively insignificant, number of seats in the Polish Parliament. Part of their platform is the return of Lviv. Certainly, these parliamentarians do not have the influence to drive Poland to war, but their platform does indeed show that the return of Lviv remains firmly in the minds of the Poles and their politicians.

Until a month ago such grand designs were opposed due to the need for a war to accomplish them. Now, that war is on the border and for the opportunists who may wish to reap the spoils of this war this may be their moment of opportunity. According to the streets, Kaczinsky himself sees this war as a chance not seen since the annexation of 1939.

Should NATO or the Polish military enter Ukraine via Polish borders the eighty kilometres to Lviv will be breached in a matter of hours since there is very little available Ukrainian defence with all forces dedicated already eastwards. Similar to 1939 the Polish/ Ukraine border could be redrawn once the current war turns into an armistice.  Possession being 9/10^th of the law during any ceasefire, this advent could see Lviv sit again on newly re-marked Polish soil.

Cease-Fire? Or, Not?

When closely examining the news that a cease-fire and peace negotiation are going well, this is as much a lie as the war has brought to bear so far. The news seems more designed to placate Wall Street and the current economic disasters of war rather than accurate reporting.

Yes, negotiations in Turkey has seen both sides sit down together but news that the Russian contingent has “accepted” Ukraine terms turn fact on its head while at the same time torturing the definition of the word.

The Ukrainian terms are laughable and it is not possible that Russia will approve them since to do so is an admission of defeat and a waste of military, political and human capital that would shame Russia before the world community. Its citizens who have been watching the body bags pile up for thirty- four days would be outraged.

It is far more accurate to say that the Russian contingent has received the Ukrainian proposals and is laughing all the way back to Moscow for further instructions. It is important to note that Russia, beyond its oft-repeated terms for a cease-fire has not at this point, delivered its own proposal to the Ukrainian side.

The Russian response will most certainly be summed up by using only the sixth and twenty-first letters of the English alphabet.

In the meantime, Russian troops will be getting R&R while resupplying and thankfully so will the refugees across Eastern Ukraine. As to the Ukrainian military, they will remain surrounded or under siege across the Donbas from Mariupol, to Luhansk, to Donetsk.

Meanwhile, NATO will continue to attempt to find an avenue for legitimizing its escalation and entry into Ukraine.

For the reasons stated on the streets of Warsaw and in this article, it is more than mere conjecture that the “Hot Phone” sitting on the desk of Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski may soon be ringing off the hook!

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Read Part III:

The Lies…and the Eyes…of Ukraine. Reporting from Lviv

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 19, 2022

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Dedication: For Andrew. (Proof that good never rests until the evils of war are vanquished.)

Brett Redmayne-Titley has spent the last decade travelling and documenting the “Sorrows of Empire.” He has authored over 200 articles all of which have been published and often republished and translated by news agencies worldwide. An archive of his many articles can be found at watchingromeburn.uk. He can be contacted at live-on-scene ((@))gmx.com.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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Two British citizens, Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, who went to Ukraine to fight for the now-disbanded “international legion” of foreign mercenaries created by Kyiv in early days of the war and were fighting alongside neo-Nazi Azov militia in Mariupol, were captured by Russian forces and fervently appealed to the British prime minister for their immediate release.

Image on the right: Viktor Medvedchuk (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

The Britons appeared on Russian state TV on Monday and asked to be exchanged for Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who is the leader of Ukraine’s Opposition Platform and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was charged with “high treason” and “aiding terrorism” by the Zelensky government and was placed under house arrest, from where he escaped and was rearrested last week. He is currently being held at an undisclosed location by the SBU, the fearsome Ukrainian intelligence agency being used as a tool for political persecution by the autocratic regime.

One of the captives wearing a T-shirt bearing the emblem of Ukraine’s infamous Azov battalion, Aiden Aslin, made a direct appeal to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson:

“If Boris Johnson really does care like he says he does about British citizens then he would help pressure Zelensky to do the right thing and return Viktor to his family and return us to our families.”

Asked on Sky News whether a possible swap was something the government would get involved with, Britain’s Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis said on Tuesday: “We’re actually going through the process of sanctioning people who are close to Putin regime, we’re not going to be looking at how we can help Russia.” Reading between the lines, neither would the Boris Johnson government be looking at how to help British citizens.

“We always have responsibility for British citizens, which we take seriously. We’ve got to get the balance right in Ukraine and that’s why I say to anybody: do not travel illegally to Ukraine,” Lewis added while conveniently overlooking the fact British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss publicly acknowledged she supported individuals from the United Kingdom who might want to go to Ukraine to join an international force to fight.

She told the BBC on Feb. 27, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, it was up to people to “make their own decisions,” but argued it was a “battle for democracy.” She said Ukrainians were fighting for freedom, “not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe.” The British government is as criminally culpable for inciting citizens to join NATO’s crusade in Ukraine as gullible volunteers who actually joined the fight in the war zone on the call of the government.

Favoring providing lethal weapons only instead of deploying British mercenaries as cannon fodder in Ukraine’s proxy war, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace took a nuanced approach and said with diplomatic overtones Ukraine would instead be supported to “fight every street with every piece of equipment we can get to them.” In other words, Ukraine would be made an “ordnance depot” of NATO powers on Russia’s western flank.

On April 9, Boris Johnson undertook a clandestine visit to Kyiv amidst much secrecy and tweeted a picture sitting beside Zelensky after the visit. Johnson’s trip came a day after the EU’s top executives, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell, publicly visited Kyiv and met with Zelensky.

British media hailed the “daredevil feat” of taking the train journey in the war zone by the prime minister and compared him to the fabled British secret agent, James Bond 007. During the visit, he pledged 120 “armored vehicles” and new “anti-ship missile systems” to Ukraine.

The British government also announced it would be sending £100 million of military equipment, including more Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles, helmets, night-vision devices and body armor. The United Kingdom guaranteed an extra $500 million in World Bank lending to Ukraine, taking the total loan guarantee to up to $1 billion.*

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

Too Much to Ignore: COVID Vaccines Cause 16,633% More Miscarriages Compared to Flu Vaccines

By Mary Villareal, April 20, 2022

There had been an increase in the number of women who have lost their unborn or newly born children in the United States following their Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination. The number has now surpassed 4,000, just 16 months after the first COVID vaccine was given emergency use authorization.

The World Health Tyranny: Towards the WEF “Great Reset of Misery”

By Peter Koenig, April 21, 2022

On 1 December 2021 the 194 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) reached a consensus to begin the process of drafting and negotiating a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

To the Home Office We Go: The Extradition of Julian Assange

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, April 21, 2022

It was a dastardly formality.  On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

“Police Terrorism” in America: Patrick Lyoya Chased and Shot in the Back

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 21, 2022

Over two weeks after Patrick Lyoya, 26, was stopped, chased, tackled and shot in the back of the head by a Grand Rapids patrolman,killing him instantly, there still has not been any punitive action taken against the white officer responsible for the death of the Congolese immigrant.

The Art of Transformation: Vasily Kandinsky at the Guggenheim

By Prof. Sam Ben-Meir, April 21, 2022

Through September 5, New York’s Guggenheim Museum is hosting “Around the Circle,” an immense retrospective of this extraordinarily innovative and influential painter – one that invites us to rethink Kandinsky’s contribution in light of his anarchist social thought, his interest in the emancipatory potential of synesthetic experience, and his determination to explore the possibilities of mon-representational forms.

Canada Must Condemn Israeli Violence at Al-Aqsa

By CJPME, April 21, 2022

On Friday alone, Israeli forces injured at least 153 Palestinians, and videos have emerged showing the use of brutal violence against journalists and medics. Yet in her response to the incident, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly failed to directly criticize Israeli actions. More than 5,000 Canadians have written to Prime Minister Trudeau, urging him to respond by condemning Israeli violence and suspending military trade.

From Syria to Ukraine, Western Media Is Practicing the Same Lies. Eva Bartlett

By Manar Salameh and Mazen Eyon, April 21, 2022

Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett affirmed that the crimes of terrorist organizations in Syria and cover-up of the Western media have been repeated again since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, noting that the hands of the West and its media machine are stained with the blood of innocent civilians in the two countries.

“Preemptive Nuclear War”: The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Threatens the Future of Humanity

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 21, 2022

The underlying US nuclear doctrine consists in portraying nuclear weapons as a means of “self defense” rather than as a “weapon of mass destruction”. Moreover, there are powerful financial interests behind the NPR which are tied into the $1.3  trillion nuclear weapons program initiated under President Obama.

European Feed Stocks Expected to Run Out Soon

By Free West Media, April 21, 2022

The situation for Europe’s farmers is getting worse. Prices are rising and feed stocks are starting to run out. Animal breeders around Europe are deeply concerned. At the same time, the EU and the governments of some countries in various ways prevent farmers from maintaining or increasing their production.

Babies Are Saying Less Since the Pandemic: Why That’s Concerning

By Sarah D. Sparks, April 20, 2022

 New studies from Rhode Island Hospital and the nonprofit LENA Foundation find that infants born during the pandemic vocalize significantly less and engage in less verbal “turn-taking” behaviors found to be critical for language development. As those babies grow, experts worry they will need significant supports to be ready for school.

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***

In the first edition of her “Don’t Ask That Question” podcast program, investigative reporter Kelly O’Meara talks to Kristina Borjesson about the shut-down of their investigation of TWA 800 crash & current attempts to shut down Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Kelly O’Meara is a valuable addition to the podcast community of investigative reporters.

\We worked together investigating the Flight 800 crash and talk about our bizarre experiences that included her car being broken into and her TWA investigation documents and laptop being stolen and the press censoring and doing hit pieces on our TWA 800 coverage.

–

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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***

On 1 December 2021 the 194 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) reached a consensus to begin the process of drafting and negotiating a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

An intergovernmental negotiating body was constituted and held its first meeting at the beginning of March 2022, with the purpose of agreeing on the process and the timelines for reaching consensus on a so-called “Pandemic Treaty”. A second meeting is planned for 1 August 2022 to discuss progress towards an agreement on the contents and legal bearing of such a treaty. The interim result will then be presented to the 76^thWorld Health Assembly in 2023, with the aim of adopting the new instrument, the so-called infamous “Pandemic Treaty” by 2024.

Why infamous Pandemic Treaty?

In a recent European Parliamentary session, Ms. Christine Anderson, Member of the European Parliament (MEP), from the German party an “Alternative for Germany”, made the following very pertinent comment and posed an appropriate question –

“Many who favor the treaty believe that it offers the best way to increase political commitment from states to reform global health governance. However, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that this proposition has no basis in fact. Government responses to COVID-19 have purportedly violated or manipulated many treaties, including human rights agreements.”

“To what extent will the Commission ensure that the citizen, who has no direct vote in a body such as the WHO, is not bypassed in the decision-making process and that a shift of competence further and further away from the voter does not lead to an increasing ‘de-democratization’ of our society?”

See the full 6-min. video below.

This was indeed a benign question – one that underscores the gravity of the new Pandemic Treaty. If approved by the World Health Assembly, the Pandemic Treaty will be above and overarching the sovereignty of the 194 WHO member countries.

WHO could declare a pandemic whenever it decides, or gets instructions from the dark Financial and Power Cabal pulling the strings behind the UN-curtain.

The World Health Organization could decide on international lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing – and much worse, like forced vaccination – with, as we now know from the covid-19 vaxxes, causing disease or even death. By now the world knows or ought to know, that these vaxxes are not vaccines, but experimental mRNA injections – injections containing varying bio-chemical and mostly poisonous, even deadly concoctions.

WHO could declare a worldwide pandemic for the common flu – pretty much what they did with the so-called Covid-19, a virus that was never isolated, never identified as anything else than the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus that hit China from 2002 to 2004. SARS was, in fact a trial, for what was to follow 17 years later – on a worldwide scale.

The SARS virus was tailor-made in a class-3 US bio-lab. The virus was based on extensive blood samples taken from Chinese rural populations, to target the Chinese genome. Chinese authorities learned about this western blood-harvesting by “scientists” of famous US learning institutes, such as Harvard and others, in the 1990s.

See section ”The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGD project) in China” of this text.

This was the reason for China’s extraordinary preparedness at the first announcement of the “new” / old virus, the Covid-19 virus, hitting again China (the city of Wuhan) first, in the early days of 2020.

Because China knows that bio-war labs can design specific DNA-directed viruses, and because China is also aware of the 20-some war-grade (grade 3) US-funded bio-labs in Ukraine which Russia in her ongoing military intervention in Ukraine is aiming at dismantling, and China is also aware of the risks that viruses may have been intended to again attack the Chinese genome, like the SARS virus in 2002-2004 – therefore, China’s authorities are proceeding with a “zero covid” policy. Therefore, is the current Shanghai lockdown a severe precautionary measure?

As was demonstrated by the Ebola outbreak – 2014 – 2016 in West Africa – Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone – fatality rates of Ebola and similar epidemic diseases can be as high as 40% when compared to the infection rate. See this. That’s a stark contrast to the low covid death rate of 0.07 to 0.1%.

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Under the new “Pandemic Treaty” WHO would have the authority to vaccinate children, babies right after birth, when their immune system is still basically zero and damages could be lasting or even killing newborns.

WHO could mandate general vaccination against any disease deemed “dangerous” by the powers that be, with an injection that is not really a vaccination but an “experimental jab” – possibly leading to millions of deaths, if the current covid crisis and “covid-vaxxes” are any indication. Exponentially more deaths are caused by the fake and criminal covid-19 vaxxes, than by the covid infections which have similar symptoms to those of the common flu.

As we now know, the purpose of the covid-vaxxes is not the prevention of a disease, quite the contrary – it’s the wanton promotion of massive disabilities and death caused by experimental substances injected into human bodies.

The “Masterminds” behind WHO, as well as their invisible handlers, are eugenists, interested in a drastic reduction of the world population. The new Pandemic Treaty is an ideal tool for an eugenist agenda.

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Under the New Pandemic Treaty, the WHO would convert into the World Health Tyranny, the WHT.

That’s where we are at today. WHO, alias WHT, today is funded by two thirds to three quarters by interest groups, like the pharma industry and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Only about a quarter or one third (variable by year) of the WHO budget is funded by the member countries. The bulk of WHO funding comes from interest groups.

The Gates Foundation is a key donor, the largest after United States. Gates also appointed the current Director General of WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He was before the head of GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, housed just next door to WHO in Geneva. GAVI is also a Bill Gates creation. Dr. Tedros is WHO’s first DG, who is not a medical doctor.

See this 5-min video interview of Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, a former World Health Organization (WHO) scientist, describing how the WHO is months away from overriding the U.S. Constitution and those of all 194 WHO member countries.

If this new WHO “Pandemic Treaty” is adopted by the World Health Assembly, then national laws, those of sovereign countries, made to protect their citizens from diseases and pandemic outbreaks, are overruled and made worthless.

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Logically, an agency in charge of world health, should basically focus on disease prevention. WHO is wired as a curative agency, mostly staffed by medical doctors and scientists, thereby playing into the interests of the pharma-industry.

For those who are not yet aware, how WHO came into being as a specialized UN agency, just a quick reminder who invented and created WHO – and with what purpose.

WHO was created by the Rockefeller foundation in 1948 – and following the pattern of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), in existence since 1902 and integrated in 1948 into the new World Health Organization. The motto: Who decides over health and disease, decides over life and death. Sounds like a suitable axiom for eugenists.

At that time, the Rockefeller magnate also owned Standard Oil, a worldwide hydrocarbon corporation, mostly a petrol monopoly. Up to the 1950’s medicines were largely plant-based. Rockefeller’s petro-clan geniuses felt medication or modern pharma might as well be “crafted” from petro-chemicals. Thus, grew a new pharma-industry – exponentially. The drugs available today are an umpteen-multiple of those available when medication was plant-based. Today plant-based medicines are almost exclusively used by indigenous people.

Petrochemical-based pharma produces generally also myriad of side effects. These side effects have to be fought with new medication with other side effects – some of them deadly. And so, the spiral spins along.

The new medical apparatus – to which Rockefeller gave the impetus – has produced a medical labyrinth – a mill of health and disease, once caught in it, escaping from it is not easy. So-called health services have become an important economic growth factor. U.S. health care spending grew 9.7 percent in 2020, reaching $4.1 trillion, or 19.7% of GDP. Once-upon a time a patient, has become an income-producing client in today’s medical factory.

The new Pandemic Treaty of the WHO might render the world health system in a prison-like spiral, to the point where people are totally in the hands of one tyrannical world organization – in charge of health and disease, or life and death.

We the People, must not allow the creation of a health tyranny as envisaged today, and supported by the WEF and its henchmen of darkness.

We must stop WHO from becoming a World Health Tyranny. In fact, we should collectively deny the authority of WHO, requesting our governments to exit WHO. We do not need or want a Global World Health Tyranny. By dismantling it, we the People, would also put a nail in the WEF’s coffin.

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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 has worked for over 30 years on water and environment 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).

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***

The Ulster Defence Regiment, the largest in the British army, fueled the conflict in Northern Ireland and was a sectarian weapon in Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy, shows a new book drawing on declassified files.

Say ‘UDR’ to the vast majority of Britons and, despite the increasingly totemic status of ‘our boys’ in the military, eyebrows will universally raise.

Yet the Ulster Defence Regiment was active throughout most of the recent conflict in Ireland – the longest period of continuous duty of any British military unit.

Successive UK governments lavishly praised its courage and commitment to peace. There were regular visits by members of the royal family to barracks and parade grounds across Northern Ireland from Fermanagh to Belfast.

A recently-published book, however, reveals a quite different story.

UDR Declassified by Micheál Smith relies for hard evidence on declassified internal British memos, position papers and analysis, much of which were retrieved from the UK National Archives over the last two decades by the Pat Finucane Centre.

Successive governments in London, the book argues, fueled the conflict in Northern Ireland by policing and alienating one part of the community (those who are pro-Irish unity, mainly Catholic) while arming, training and providing intelligence information through the UDR to the other section of the community (those who are pro-union, mainly Protestant).

“Writers of books like this”, says Smith, “often get accused of re-writing history.  But history is always rewritten whenever new evidence proves it wrong. This evidence allows us to narrow the permissible lies”.

‘A kind of monster’

The UDR was formed in April 1970, supposedly to replace the discredited “B-Specials”, a quasi-military force. All the UDR’s original seven battalions, however, were led by former B-Special county commandants.

Hardly surprising, then, that the UDR is described by French political scientist, Anne Mandeville, as “a kind of monster”.

While it was supposedly an arm of the British state, she says, in reality it was “deeply in solidarity with the Protestant community”.

Integrated into the British Army, it was also divided from it “organically, geographically and by its specificity”, a toxic recipe for any law-enforcement unit seeking cross-community support.

For many Catholics, the slogan ‘UDR by Day: UVF by Night’ was a lived reality, referring to the oldest loyalist paramilitary group in the conflict, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Stories abound of people stopped on the roadside in the dead of night – or on the way home from church or Gaelic sporting fixtures – to be insolently abused or worse.

The one-time leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Nobel peace prize winner, John Hume, described the regiment as a “group of Rangers supporters put in uniforms, supplied with weapons and given the job of policing the area where Celtic supporters live”.

More officially, a 1984 briefing document prepared for the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Douglas Hurd, concluded:

“The regiment is mistrusted, even hated, in much of the Catholic community, and by many Catholic politicians”.

It added:

“More significantly, it is not held in the highest regard by the RUC itself (including the Chief Constable …) even amongst regular soldiers it is not universally popular.”

The UDR was also seen as an impediment to peace. In 1986 a Foreign Office official noted in a memo to a Ministry of Defence colleague that:

“For all its courage and dedication (which I certainly do not underestimate), and despite its incorporation into the British Army, the UDR is an inescapably sectarian body and an obstacle to reconciliation between the two communities in Northern Ireland.”

Counter-insurgency

Smith, while pulling no punches, freely concedes not every member of the regiment was motivated by sectarian hatred. Far from it, he says many of its members wished to end the conflict through patrolling, surveillance and lending their local knowledge to support the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

The main thrust of this book, however, judges the UDR in its structural context, rising well above a day-by-day account of its sectarian and criminal failings. Instead it examines the regiment’s role as a key element of British colonial/post-colonial counter-insurgency strategy in Ireland.

That is not to say the UDR’s dubious record is overlooked. Smith points out that between 1985 and 1989, UDR members were twice as likely to commit a crime as the general public. The UDR crime rate was 10 times that for police officers in the RUC and about four times the British army rate.

The central problem, he says, is that London never viewed the problem in Northern Ireland as rooted in a demand for civil rights, equality and constitutional reform. Instead it blindly interpreted republican violence as a criminal conspiracy that must be crushed.

The book is full of examples where, rather than deal even-handedly with both communities, London concluded that armed republicanism was its only true enemy. Just three examples from the book suffice to show the malign out-workings of this policy.

Shockingly, it points out that the word “collusion” to describe covert collaboration between loyalist paramilitaries and state forces was first used as early in the conflict as September 1971 when a rifle was reported taken and “connivance” suspected.

Even more disturbing was the lack of police inquiries into “missing” weapons such as the “theft” of sub-machine gun serial number UF57A30490, taken from Glenanne UDR barracks in County Armagh, in May 1971.

This weapon was subsequently used to murder 11 people in 11 months, leaving four children orphaned and 19 fatherless.

Heavily infiltrated

London cannot say it was unaware of the dangers. In 1975, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and opposition leader Margaret Thatcher were informed by an official that:

“The Army’s judgment [was that] the UDR were heavily infiltrated by extremist Protestants and that in a crisis situation they could not be relied on to be loyal”.

Stunning evidence, even earlier, of the UDR’s dangerous proclivities is provided in an internal British discussion document entitled ‘Subversion in the UDR’, written in August 1973.

“It seems likely”, says the document, “that a significant proportion (perhaps 5% – in some areas as high as 15%) of UDR soldiers will also be members of the UDA, Vanguard Service Corps, Orange Volunteers or UVF”, referring to loyalist paramilitary forces.

Yet, the document concludes, little should be done about this:

“The discovery of members of para-military or extremist organisations in the UDR is not, and has not been, a major intelligence target” and the UDR remained “wide open to subversion and potential subversion”.

Moreover, the same document concludes that “some soldiers are undoubtedly leading double lives” and that “the UDR is the single best source of loyalist weapons and their only significant source of modern weapons”.

Rather amazingly, there is even doubt over the very legality of the UDR. A 1981 memo, only recently discovered in the archives, notes concerns amongst Ministry of Defence legal advisers as to whether UDR soldiers were legally ‘on duty’, as the formal call-out procedures had not been followed since the early 1970s.

As a result, officials were concerned about the legality of arrests, search operations and other actions.

Technically, it may yet be possible for people to challenge pre-1981 arrests by the UDR through the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Convictions of persons for failing to answer a question or for resisting arrest might also be called into question.

But the book’s central focus is what the UDR did while its soldiers were let loose on the populace, legally or otherwise.

Blame for this deplorable and deadly lack of action, Smith concludes, should not be laid at the door of individual UDR members but at those who devised a policy of using it as a counter-insurgency weapon for three decades and who continue to escape detection and accountability of any kind.

The price, he points out, was paid by the UDR’s many victims whose lives continue to be blighted by its existence and because of its shameful record.

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Anne Cadwallader has been a journalist in Ireland, North and South, for the last 40 years, working for the BBC, RTE, The Irish Press, and Reuters. She is an advocacy case worker at the Pat Finucane Centre, a non-party political, anti-sectarian human rights group advocating a non-violent resolution of the conflict in Ireland.

Featured image: Soldiers of 11 UDR on a patrol break in the South Armagh area. The soldier on the right is carrying a jamming device to prevent the detonation of radio-controlled improvised explosive devices. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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***

The situation for Europe’s farmers is getting worse. Prices are rising and feed stocks are starting to run out. Animal breeders around Europe are deeply concerned. At the same time, the EU and the governments of some countries in various ways prevent farmers from maintaining or increasing their production. This is in addition to the already alarming shortage of seeds and fertilizers.

Only this autumn will the catastrophic impact be witnessed due to a sharp reduction in grain production. Moreover, meat and milk producers could see large parts of their businesses eliminated long before that. Western leaders have issued warnings about food shortages, but have offered no solutions.

The news agency Reuters recently interviewed the Italian farmer Carlo Vittorio Ferrari, who runs a farm with his brother near the town of Cremona in northern Italy. Among other things, they have about two thousand pigs, which it is now becoming unsustainably expensive to raise. He fears that their fourth-generation family business will be lost due to the conflict in Ukraine, which more and more people believe could be the death knell for global food security. This is because war-ravaged Ukraine and sanctioned Russia, in addition to being major exporters of wheat, maize and fertilizers, were also major suppliers of animal feed globally. Europe’s import-dependent feed stocks have recently declined rapidly and are likely to run out soon.

Michele Liverini, vice president of the Italian feed producer Mangimi Liverini SPA, said that the combination of all negative factors and most recently the war in Ukraine has created a “perfect storm”. Liverini is also sounding the alarm that soon their supply of animal feed will run out.

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***

Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett affirmed that the crimes of terrorist organizations in Syria and cover-up of the Western media have been repeated again since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, noting that the hands of the West and its media machine are stained with the blood of innocent civilians in the two countries.

In an exclusive interview with SANA, Bartlett, who worked as a war correspondent in Syria and is present today in Donbas to cover the special military operation, pointed out the similarity between the political and media disinformation practices carried out by US and its allies during the crisis in Syria and what is currently happening in Ukraine.

She stressed that the Western media are participating in the crimes committed against civilians in Ukraine, as they were doing in Syria, through their lies and covering up of the facts.

Bartlett added that the Western media’s coverage of what is happening in Ukraine and its description of the Russian operation as an invasion was just an expected issue, just as the media in the West and the US have whitewashed the page of terrorist organizations in Syria since their occurance in 2011 and covering up the atrocities they committed over many years.

Bartlett said that the scenes that show Ukrainian civilians welcoming the Russian forces are similar to what the world saw in Syria when the Syrian Arab Army entered to liberate the areas where terrorists were deployed.

Bartlett went on to say that most Western media deny the existence of Nazism in Ukraine and lie about what is happening, noting that BBC and other media promoters in the West were not satisfied with such behavior only, but also reached the point of manipulating video footages and removing images that appear Nazi slogans.

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Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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***

This is a link to the police bodycam video of the encounter with Patrick Lyoya which led to his death:  (18) Bodycam footage from fatal Grand Rapids police shooting of Patrick Lyoya – YouTube. Or watch video below.

Over two weeks after Patrick Lyoya, 26, was stopped, chased, tackled and shot in the back of the head by a Grand Rapids patrolman, killing him instantly, there still has not been any punitive action taken against the white officer responsible for the death of the Congolese immigrant.

The City of Grand Rapids has refused to even release the name of the officer since he has not yet been charged with a crime.

This incident in a major midwestern municipality clearly illustrates the systematic refusal by the local, state and federal government agencies to address the ongoing deaths at the hands of the police. Two years after the brutal shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many others, the relevant authorities responsible for the funding and oversight of law-enforcement have refused to take any action to reform the operational culture of the police.

Lyoya’s family immigrated to the United States from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2014, according to quotes cited in the press from his father. Both of his parents are demanding justice in the case.

A videocam from the police officer illustrates the aggressive questioning and posture of the white Grand Rapids patrolman. After Lyoya attempted to get away from the officer, he was pursued and tased. Later the videocam shows Lyoya being tackled and further abused physically. At the instance that the fatal shot was fired to the rear of the head, the police videocam appears to have been turned off by the officer. An independent autopsy requested by the Lyoya family confirmed that he died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Since the killing of Lyoya, people in Grand Rapids have demanded the release of the officer’s name and that he be terminated from the police department. They are also insisting that prosecutors file criminal charges against the unnamed law-enforcement agent. The case has gained international attention due to the fact that Lyoya was an immigrant from Africa and was unarmed.

The government of the DRC and its Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde discussed the killing of Lyoya at a cabinet meeting on April 15 in Kinshasha, the capital of the central African state. The U.S. has extensive business interests in the DRC which is a major producer of strategic minerals.

An article published in the Guardian from the Agence France Press (AFP) said of the situation that:

“During a government meeting on Friday (April 15), DR Congo Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde ‘forcefully condemned the cowardly assassination by a white police officer in the United States of a citizen of Congolese origin Patrick Lyoya, unarmed, during a traffic stop,’ according to the minutes of the meeting. He said the U.S. ambassador in DR Congo had expressed ‘his deep regrets and his government’s condolences following this despicable act.’

U.S. (Grand Rapids) police have released four videos from the incident, one of which shows the officer — who has not been named — lying on top of Lyoya as the two scuffled, and then appearing to shoot him in the head.”

This incident has revealed the actual social character of the U.S. to not only the Lyoya family but to over 1.3 billion Africans living on the continent. The U.S. promotes itself as the paragon of democracy, human rights and peace. However, the country is one of the most violent in the world with thousands killed annually.

A CBS report on the incident notes:

“The father of Patrick Lyoya said his son was ‘killed like an animal’ after recently released videos showed the 26-year-old Black man being fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop. The family fled from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014 for a safer life in the U.S. ‘I came here to save my family,’ Peter Lyoya told CBS News. ‘My son has been killed like an animal. The one [who] was supposed to be protecting Patrick’s life, is the one [who] killed Patrick and take Patrick’s life away,’ he added.”

U.S. Role in the Historic Destabilization of the DRC

The region where the DRC is today has been for centuries a center for exploitation and national oppression. During the period of African enslavement, the Angola and Congo areas were victimized by the Portuguese and French role in the Triangular Trade in human beings and natural resources.

By 1876, the Belgian monarchy had seized large swaths of territory in order to force Africans to engage in rubber production. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 awarded the Congo area to Belgian colonial corporations. Conditions were so brutal that millions of Africans died under the rule of colonial agents at the direction of the monarchy. In 1908, the colonial project in Congo was brought under the tutelage of the government in Brussels.

Between 1908 and 1960, Africans were denied education, equal employment, the control over their land and natural resources as well as political rights. A rebellion during 1959 created the conditions for multi-party elections which led to national independence on June 30, 1960.

The first elected leader was Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, a Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist with a mass base among the Congolese people. Since Lumumba wanted to end Belgian domination over the resources of his country, he was targeted for liquidation by the U.S. administration of then President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lumumba was overthrown just three months into his tenure as prime minister. He attempted to flee to the eastern region of the country where his supporters had taken control of several cities and provinces.

However, he was captured with the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in January 1961. He was held illegally by the puppet collaborators of the U.S. and other imperialist states. By late January he was tortured to death along with two other cabinet ministers in his government.

A series of neo-colonial surrogate regimes were imposed on the vast country for 36 years until Mobutu Sese Seko was forced out of office in May 1997. Nonetheless, the continued domination of the resources of the DRC has hampered its capacity for a much-deserved political stability and economic prosperity.

Consequently, the underdevelopment in the DRC and in other African states, can be linked directly to the ongoing interference into the internal affairs of these mineral rich countries. Therefore, many Congolese nationals have migrated to the U.S. in search of economic opportunities and social stability. However, the U.S. still remains a racist-capitalist and imperialist country. The African American people brought to the U.S. as enslaved persons have been denied full equality, economic justice and self-determination for more than 400 years. Africans from the continent are viewed by the ruling class and their police agencies as being deserving of the same degree of brutality as all Black people.

U.S. Government Guilty of Systematic Brutality and Terrorism

The police execution of Patrick Lyoya is a direct result of the legacy of policing in the U.S. which dates back to the early period of European colonial enslavement. Despite the mass demonstrations and rebellions which swept many municipalities during 2020, the current administration of President Joe Biden maintains a similar position as successive leaders: they are all committed to the maintenance of the status-quo as it relates to the role of police in containing the African American people and other oppressed groups.

Biden made his position clear in the State of the Union Address earlier in the year. He denounced the mass slogans calling for the defunding of the police and instead urged more public money for law-enforcement. Additional funding for police departments has been bolstered by the American Rescue Plan (ARP) which was supposedly designed to assist workers and oppressed peoples suffering from the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Independent activists and mass organizations within the labor and nationally oppressed movements will undoubtedly continue the demands aimed at defunding and dismantling the existing system of policing. This system of policing on a domestic level is reflected in the foreign policy imperatives of the White House and Wall Street.

The Biden administration has pursued the same policies of war and economic domination of the peoples of the world. Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and a host of other states are considered principal enemies of the imperialist ruling class in the U.S. Therefore, the struggle against police terrorism with impunity is inherently linked to broader issues aimed guaranteeing peace and stability from the DRC to the streets of Western Europe and North America.

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

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***

The Russian-born artist Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was one of the early pioneers in the field of abstract painting – along with Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Hilma af Klint, among others. Through September 5, New York’s Guggenheim Museum is hosting “Around the Circle,” an immense retrospective of this extraordinarily innovative and influential painter – one that invites us to rethink Kandinsky’s contribution in light of his anarchist social thought, his interest in the emancipatory potential of synesthetic experience, and his determination to explore the possibilities of mon-representational forms.

The historian E.H. Gombrich remarked that Kandinsky “was really a mystic who… longed for a regeneration of the world through a new art of pure ‘inwardness’.” To be sure, Kandinsky’s work is shaped throughout by his conviction that art has the power to transform the individual and society – and to affect the kind of inspiration or awakening which can lead us beyond the psycho-social coordinates embedded in capitalism.

Two thinkers who would greatly influence Kandinsky were the anarchist philosophers Pyotr Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer. Kropotkin (1842-1921) would argue against the social Darwinists who viewed the natural world as ‘red in tooth and claw’ – the war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it. In fact, as he took great pains to show, the natural world was predominately based on cooperation, or what Kropotkin would call ‘mutual aid’ – and indeed, he was able to turn to Darwin himself in making this case. The upshot was that such mutual aid could and should serve as the ecological basis for human relations; in contrast to the artificial competitiveness perpetuated by capitalism.

For his part, Kandinsky sought the close collaboration of like-minded artists and would have nothing to do with those whose crass materialism urged them to thrive in the brutal world of capitalist competition – for “hatred, bias, factions, jealousy and intrigue are the consequences of this purposeless, materialistic art,” as he would state in what is perhaps his most well-known book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912).

Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) embraced a kind of mystical anarchism, which went a step beyond Kropotkin who he knew personally, and whose writings he translated into German. The state was not, as Kropotkin thought, an institution that could be wiped out by a revolution – rather, it was “a condition, a certain relationship between human beings… we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Revolution can only be successful when “we are seized by the spirit, not of revolution, but of regeneration.” As he would write in “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism” (1901): “Hence, not war and murder – but rebirth.”

Vasily Kandinsky, Dominant Curve, April 1936

Kandinsky shares Landauer’s view that the authentic artist can provide a sensual expression of this inner renascence, this new life in the face of decadence and profound ‘spiritual darkness.’ Central to the radical ecology of Kropotkin and Landauer was the call for spiritual and ethical renewal; and Kandinsky fully endorsed their view that art could serve as the means to restore the self to wholeness and achieve the regeneration of humanity.

To begin with, Kandinsky was well aware of the effects that pure color could have on our state of mind – the way in which, for example, a bright red could affect us like the sound of a trumpet. Likewise, sounds or music could in their turn produce imagery. This unity of the senses – the experience of having perceptions in one sensory modality triggered by a stimulus from another – is known as synesthesia; and in some individuals it is highly developed, involuntary, and insuppressible. Kandinsky would describe such a synesthetic episode while attending a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (1850) at the Bolshoi Theater: “I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me…” The thirty-year old Kandinsky was pursuing a law degree in Moscow at the time; but after that experience he abandoned his law career and left Russia to study painting at the prestigious Munich Academy of Fine Arts in Germany.

In his classic work, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), the philosopher Merleau-Ponty argued that “synesthetic perception is the rule…” that is, the overlapping and intertwining of the senses is consistent with our primordial and preconceptual experience, which is inherently synesthetic. We have, in fact, “… unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel….” Synesthetic experience seems anomalous because we have alienated ourselves from direct experience with the things that surround us. Retrieving this capacity means overcoming our estrangement from the world, with all the implications that has for our social, cultural, and political renewal.

His exploration of the unity of the senses would in time push Kandinsky beyond representation and transform his canvases into ‘compositions’ or ‘improvisations’ (as he called them) ever more akin to music. Just as a deep bass tone would produce a certain emotional response, so a color, or combination of colors (a ‘color chord’) would generate a spiritual vibration or ‘inner resonance.’ The Blue Mountain (1908-09) offers a striking example of Kandinsky’s expressionistic use of color. The lower third of the painting includes six figures, three of whom are astride horses at full gallop (one of his favorite motifs). They are flanked by two large trees that dominate the middle ground and extend to the top of the canvas: the one on the left is predominantly yellow, while on the right the tree is largely red-orange or vermillion. In the background and between them looms the large blue mountain of the title. For Kandinsky, yellow and blue constitute the primordial contrast. Yellow has an eccentric movement and seems to draw closer to us. Blue is concentric, implies depth and movement away from the viewer. But Kandinsky has not painted the mountain blue simply because it is farthest away from us: unlike yellow, which is terrestrial, blue is celestial and awakens our highest spiritual aspirations.

Kandinsky was determined to probe the nature of synesthesia when he became a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group in 1911, which included, among others, Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Marc. Their aims were ambitious, to say the least: to generate a “große Umwälzung” (great upheaval) that would not only defy traditional modes of artistic production, but awaken us from “the nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game…” (CSA, p. 2); and finally usher forth “a new spirit won by the conquest of one’s inner self,” as Landauer would put it, “We are all waiting for something great – something new.”

Vasily Kandinsky, Women in the Woods, 1907

If we take our time with Kandinsky’s canvasses, we will discover that what at first may appear as mere abstraction, in fact contains representational elements which have been aesthetically transmuted into something altogether different, while still retaining their original reference, as in a kind of dream. “I did not wish to banish objects completely,” as Kandinsky explained in his 1914 Cologne Lecture, “objects, in themselves, have a particular spiritual sound, which can and does serve as the material for all realms of art…” The familiar is defamiliarized and reality becomes like a dream just when our everyday, codified ways of navigating the world are suspended, or bracketed.

Take Small Pleasures (1913) for example: at first glance we may not realize that we are looking at a landscape with the sun in the top left corner and the moon on the right. In the center of the painting, we find something like a large hill with a winding stream and atop which is a kind of citadel with trees, as well as echoes and re-echoes of the sun and moon – almost as if it were a landscape within a landscape. On the right-hand side is a boat with three oars jutting out; and above which an ominous black cloud has gathered.

In Picnic (1916) the representational elements are more clearly delineated, but again one must look carefully to appreciate all the wealth of imagery contained in this relatively small watercolor. There are two women in bell-shaped dresses and hats; the one in green sits upon a picnic blanket, the border of which has been richly designed. Beside her is a yellow wicker basket, out of which has been laid a baguette, an apple, and a decanter of wine. Yet one could easily miss all of these and other fine details, in part because Kandinsky has placed and oriented them unconventionally within the overall composition.

After 1920, Kandinsky’s lyrical abstractions would be succeeded by geometric compositions, which he regarded as more universal in their significance, less bound up with the “particular emotions that are characteristic of man in his individuality.” As the German philosopher Karsten Harries would observe: “Kandinsky’s desire to penetrate to more fundamental levels of reality led him to develop an art which seems less spontaneous, colder, more cerebral.” In seeking to expunge from his work all personal associations, Kandinsky turned to the “impersonal language of geometry and in clearer, less suggestive colors” – but, for all that, his canvasses were no less dramatic or intense.

Kandinsky clearly held the circle in the highest regard – his enthusiasm for it seems almost boundless, not because of its geometric form as such but rather due to its inner force: “I find in circles… inner possibilities.” The circle is at once a symbol of renewal, and wholeness – as well as signifying the Self, the infinite, eternity, fulfillment, cosmic unity, and God. Kandinsky’s imagery drew upon shamanic traditions, and included motifs acquired from Finno-Ugric, Russian and Siberian folklore. For example, in Around the Circle (1940), a red and black circle with a “golden all-seeing eye” dominates the painting and may be regarded as the primary stand-in for the self. Beside it is a form resembling a bird as it ascends toward the upper right corner; and adorning this creature is a serpent and crescent, which may be indications of its potency, including its power to serve as a bridge between worlds, or dimensions of consciousness. In the lower left, three unsupported steps lead to an open doorway through which we can see a moon glowing in the distance. Kandinsky was fond of stairs and ladders, which would reappear in a number of paintings from this period: like the bird they could be viewed as suggesting the capacity for spiritual transition and transformation.

What Kandinsky sought to achieve may seem to us to be beyond the scope of painting or art in general – for we inhabit an era that has come to doubt, if not cynically mock, the radical potential of art to heal the self and transform the psycho-social life of humanity. Fortunately, there is perhaps no greater venue to appreciate this collection of paintings than at the Guggenheim Museum: a body of work that so readily pays homage to the circle – that invests such energy in the inspirational and transmutative power of the circle – is especially at home in Frank Lloyd Wright’s concentrically circular temple to art. Kandinsky’s greatest works function almost like finely wrought keys, designed to unlock the hidden recesses of the self, and reach into “the caverns of our souls,” to quote Landauer once more – so that we may discover our “most authentic and precious inner being and… become one with the world in a mystical union.”

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from Guggenheim Museum

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***

It was a dastardly formality.  On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

The final arbiter will be the UK Secretary of the Home Office, the security hardened Priti Patel who is unlikely to buck the trend.  She has shown an all too unhealthy enthusiasm for an expansion of the Official Secrets Act which would target leakers, recipients of leaked material, and secondary publishers.  The proposals seek to purposely conflate investigatory journalism and espionage activities conducted by foreign states, while increasing prison penalties from two years to 14 years.

Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring was never going to rock the judicial boat.  He was “duty-bound” to send the case to the home secretary, though he did inform Assange that an appeal to the High Court could be made in the event of approved extradition prior to the issuing of the order.

It seemed a cruel turn for the books, given the ruling by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4, 2021 that Assange would be at serious risk of suicide given the risk posed by Special Administrative Measures and the possibility that he spend the rest of his life in the ADX Florence supermax facility.  Assange would be essentially killed off by a penal system renowned for its brutality.  Accordingly, it was found that extraditing him would be oppressive within the meaning of the US-UK Extradition Treaty.

The US Department of Justice, ever eager to get their man, appealed to the High Court of England and Wales.  They attacked the judge for her carelessness in not seeking reassurances about Assange’s welfare the prosecutors never asked for.  They sought to reassure the British judges that diplomatic assurances had been given.  Assange would be spared the legal asphyxiations caused by SAMs, or the dystopia of the supermax facility.  Besides, his time in US detention would be medically catered for, thereby minimising the suicide risk.  There would be no reason for him to take his own life, given the more pleasant surroundings and guarantees for his welfare.

A fatuous additional assurance was also thrown in: the Australian national would have the chance to apply to serve the post-trial and post-appeal phase of his sentence in the country of his birth.  All such undertakings would naturally be subject to adjustment and modification by US authorities as they deemed fit.  None were binding.

All this glaring nonsense was based on the vital presumption that such undertakings would be honoured by a government whose officials have debated, at stages, the publisher’s possible poisoning and abduction.  Such talk of assassination was also accompanied by a relentless surveillance operation of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, directed by US intelligence operatives through the auspices of a Spanish security company, UC Global.  Along the way, US prosecutors even had time to use fabricated evidence in drafting their indictment.

The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, in their December 2021 decision, saw no reason to doubt the good faith of the prosecutors.  Assange’s suicide risk would, given the assurances, be minimised – he had, the judges reasoned, nothing to fear, given the promise that he would be exempted from the application of SAMs or the privations of ADX Florence.  In this most political of trials, the judicial bench seemed unmoved by implications, state power, and the desperation of the US imperium in targeting the publishing of compromising classified information.

On appeal to the UK Supreme Court, the grounds of appeal were scandalously whittled away, with no mention of public interest, press freedom, thoughts of assassination, surveillance, or fabrication of evidence.  The sole issue preoccupying the bench: “In what circumstances can an appellate court receive assurances from a requesting state which were not before the court at first instance in extradition proceedings”.

On March 14, the Supreme Court comprising Lord Reed, Lord Hodge and Lord Briggs, delivered the skimpiest of answers, without a sliver of reasoning.  In the words of the Deputy Support Registrar, “The Court ordered that permission to appeal be refused because the application does not raise an arguable point of law.”

While chief magistrate Goldspring felt duty bound to relay the extradition decision to Patel, Mark Summers QC, presenting Assange, also felt duty bound to make submissions against it.  “It is not open to me to raise fresh evidence and issues, even though there are fresh developments in the case.”  The defence team have till May 18 to make what they describe as “serious submissions” to the Home Secretary regarding US sentencing practices and other salient issues.

Various options may present themselves.  In addition to challenging the Home Secretary’s order, the defence may choose to return to the original decision of Baraitser, notably on her shabby treatment of press freedom.  Assange’s activities, she witheringly claimed, lacked journalistic qualities.

Outside the channel of the Home Office, another phase in the campaign to free Assange has now opened.  Activist groups, press organisations and supporters are already readying themselves for the next month.  Political figures such as former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn have urged Patel “to stand up for journalism and democracy, or sentence a man for life for exposing the truth about the War on Terror.”

Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard has also fired another salvo in favour of Assange, noting that the United Kingdom “has an obligation not to send any person to a place where their life or safety is at risk and the Government must now abdicate that responsibility.”

The prospect of enlivening extraterritorial jurisdiction to target journalism and the publication of national security information, is graver than ever.  It signals the power of an international rogue indifferent to due process and fearful of being caught out.  But even before this momentous realisation is one irrefutable fact.  The plea from Assange’s wife, Stella, sharpens the point: don’t extradite a man “to a country that conspired to murder him.”

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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 Lawyers for Assange

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***

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is urging the Canadian government to condemn Israeli violence following a series of repeated raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque over the weekend. On Friday alone, Israeli forces injured at least 153 Palestinians, and videos have emerged showing the use of brutal violence against journalists and medics. Yet in her response to the incident, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly failed to directly criticize Israeli actions. More than 5,000 Canadians have written to Prime Minister Trudeau, urging him to respond by condemning Israeli violence and suspending military trade.

“Like many Canadians, we were shocked this weekend to watch the videos of Israeli forces firing stun grenades and rubber bullets into the Al-Aqsa mosque, and beating Palestinians randomly with batons,” said Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. “Canadians have very little patience left for statements which talk about the ‘de-escalation’ on ‘all sides’ without making a distinction between the Israeli perpetrators and the Palestinian victims,” added Woodley. CJPME notes that demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights will be continuing in multiple cities across Canada this weekend.

Within the last week, Israeli occupation forces raided the Al-Aqsa mosque five times, indiscriminately deploying the use of batons, tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber-coated steel bullets. Widely circulating videos depict Israeli soldiers engaging in unprovoked violent attacks against women, journalists, medics, and people with disabilities. On Friday alone, Israel’s raid injured more than 153 Palestinians, and ended in arrests of at least 400. Reports show that those injured in the initial attack include 3 journalists, 3 paramedics, and 2 compound guards, many of whom were shot with rubber-coated bullets. During this attack, medical teams were preventing from accessing the scene. On Sunday, dozens of Palestinian worshippers were trapped for hours inside the mosque’s prayer rooms as more than 700 extremist Israeli settlers were escorted around the compound by Israeli forces.

CJPME notes that Canada’s failure to clearly condemn Israel’s actions gives a green light to further escalation. Since the start of Ramadan, at least 18 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, including 3 children. On Wednesday evening, far-right Israeli settlers were marching through Jerusalem’s Old City; Israeli forces were assaulting Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah; and a rocket fired from Palestinian militants in Gaza heightened the threat of Israeli airstrikes in retaliation.

CJPME has been urging Members of Parliament to respond to Israeli violence by taking action to suspend military trade Israel. As revealed in an in-depth CJPME report published last week, Canada’s arms exports to Israel have been accelerating in recent years, and in 2020 reached their highest level in over three decades. CJPME also recommends the launch of a parliamentary study to determine whether past and current Canadian arms exports have been used against civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) or in airstrikes on Gaza.

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Featured image: Head band of figure in the poster says “Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades” (Image from 2021)

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***

According to a report by Defense News a US-EU initiative is envisaged with a view to integrating strategic and military decision making. What is being negotiated is “a key document on their defense relationship, a so-called administrative arrangement between the U.S. Defense Department and the European Defence Agency”.

This initiative first discussed in December 2021 is slated to be negotiated outside the realm of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Defense News describes the US and the EU as “two global players”, pointing to the coordination of  their respective defense endeavors in a broader framework (which could include related economic affairs including sanctions).

This Partnership would also require the endorsement of all EU member nation states including those which are not members of NATO (Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Sweden). How would national sovereignty be affected?

Of significance it would also exclude NATO member states which are not members of the EU. Specifically this pertains to Turkey, a heavyweight within NATO which has a bilateral military cooperation agreement with Russia. This contradictory relationship (cross-cuttng alliance) is an obvious source of division and conflict within NATO.

(The non-EU countries members of NATO include Albania, Canada, Iceland, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Turkey, the U.K and the U.S.).

At this juncture, the US Department of Defense is not leading this initiative. On the U.S. side it’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his EU counterpart Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Does this initiative point in the direction of a broader process of Western “political integration” between North America and the EU, Beyond the Realm of Military and Strategic Affairs?

How will the national sovereignty of  the 27 member states of the European Union be affected? Are they slated to be inserted into a broader Trans-Atlantic (North America – EU) political and economic straitjacket.

Is this a hegemonic process of American “Colonization” and Demise of the “European Project”. 

“The event is meant to open an additional trans-Atlantic channel on security matters and complement similar communications already happening via NATO, officials have said. Having such a forum specifically for the trade-minded European Union would energize the bloc’s defense ambitions and signal Washington’s link to the continent on yet another level, the thinking goes.” ( “First Ever Defense Talks Between US, EU Near Amid Ukraine War”, Defense News)

How will this new “Trans-Atlantic” relationship affect NATO? Is the North Atlantic Treaty (14 articles) signed in Washington D.C. on April 4, 1949 “Obsolete”?

What is also at stake is the issue of US-EU corporate integration of the military industrial complex.

The pact would allow routine interactions between American and EU institutions on defense issues and open the door for U.S. defense contractors to participate in the bloc’s growing defense spending under certain conditions. Defense News)

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***

Amid the stress and disruption of the pandemic, parents and caregivers have had less time and energy to engage their babies and toddlers in conversation—and the lack of talk already shows in their language skills.

New studies from Rhode Island Hospital and the nonprofit LENA Foundation find that infants born during the pandemic vocalize significantly less and engage in less verbal “turn-taking” behaviors found to be critical for language development. As those babies grow, experts worry they will need significant supports to be ready for school.

Since 2010, Sean Deoni, the director of the Advanced Baby Imaging Lab at the INSPIRE Center of Rhode Island Hospital, and his colleagues have tracked more than 1,700 Rhode Island families with infants. The researchers conduct regular cognitive and language development tests as well as brain scans as the children grow and monitor how the children are exposed to language in their earliest years of life.

During the pandemic, the lab was able to continue its assessments, but Deoni said he and his colleagues quickly realized their study population was changing.

“We began to notice anecdotally several months into the pandemic that kids seemed to be having a little greater challenge in doing their cognitive tests,” Deoni said. “Children just seemed to be taking a little bit longer to get through their assessments; they maybe weren’t as attentive or not performing as well as we normally had seen. And over time, those individual anecdotal statements became a chorus.”

By a year into the pandemic, the average cognitive performance of children ages 3 months to 3 years was the lowest it had been since the researchers had begun to measure it in 2010. For toddlers ages 16 months or younger, expressive and receptive language scores fell from about 90 points on a scale of 140 in 2020 to 60 in 2021 on normalized assessments of verbal skills. Moreover, neuroimaging data show babies born during the pandemic have had slower growth in white matter, the communication channels of the brain, compared to infants born in the years before the pandemic.

“It’s not that they start off low and they’ll slowly get back to [normal], but [they] actually seem to be decreasing as time is going on, which means that the cumulative impact of the COVID environment seems to be getting worse,” he said. “And this seems to be across the brain, impacting not just motor systems or later cognitive systems, but almost every neurodevelopmental system. So that’s alarming.”

Gaps of words and conversation

Both Deoni’s research and separate research by the LENA Foundation suggest these developmental delays may be sparked by less language engagement.

Thirty years ago, University of Kansas child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley realized that infants’ language development hinges greatly on others engaging them in rich conversation about the world around them. Their landmark study, “Meaningful Differences,” estimated that by age 3, children in professional families heard more than three and a half times as many words every hour as children in families receiving welfare did—leading to a controversial but often-cited gap of 30 million words by the time the children started school.

But even more importantly, adults help infants build language skills by “conversational turn-taking“—speaking in response to a baby’s coos or cries and then pausing to let the baby or toddler vocalize back to them. Parents often use exchanges like these to answer their children’s needs or encourage their interests.

In the three years before the pandemic, a 2-year-old in the Rhode Island study heard, on average, 100-140 words per hour, and had 35-50 conversational exchanges with the adults around them. By contrast, in 2020 and 2021, a 2-year-old heard about 20-70 words an hour and had 15-25 conversational exchanges per hour. Deoni also found toddlers during the pandemic spent a greater portion of their time watching television. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no media use for children under 2.)

Jill Gilkerson, the LENA Foundation’s language research director, tracks infants’ language environment through a recording device attached to a harness. The infant or toddler wears the harness at home over several days, and the recorder is triggered by verbal sounds made by both the infant and others around her, screening out nonverbal sounds like burps.

Gilkerson found on average, that while vocalizations fell for all infants born after the pandemic, the drop was greatest for the poorest 25 percent of children. The lowest-income babies and toddlers fell from the 50th percentile to the 25th percentile in the frequency of their vocalizations, and from the 45th percentile to the 25th percentile in the number of conversational exchanges they had with caregivers.

Gilkerson said the pandemic stressed families in ways that could reduce their engagement: more harried parents—often with older siblings home—and fewer children in formal day care programs with teachers trained to engage them. Moreover, in many cases early-education teachers used face masks, which were intended to limit the spread of COVID but also made it harder for babies to see teachers’ expressions and hear their responses.

Gilkerson and Deoni both urged education leaders to partner with local early-childhood educators and parents to provide more language enrichment for children born during the pandemic.

For example, in a separate study, Gilkerson found that after families participated in a 10-week program to learn conversational strategies, their infants had an 8 percent increase in vocalizations and a 30 percent increase in conversational turns.

“The stark reality is we are going to have a generation of children who are going to start less ready for school,” Gilkerson said. “Kids are resilient and we know a lot of them can see a bounce back, but we want to start as early as possible. I worry about the children whose parents have fewer resources. It’s going to be harder to get that bounce back.”

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Sarah D. Sparks covers education research, data, and the science of learning for Education Week.

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***

The Western world has tried to “isolate” and “cancel” Russia, but apparently this plan has failed and Moscow remains absolutely integrated with its major trading and strategic partners. China and India remain willing to cooperate with Russia widely, increasing current levels of bilateral trade. This demonstrates how the current situation in Eastern Europe cannot be resolved by coercive means.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs pledged April 19 that it will strengthen cooperation with Russia, no matter what happens in the international scenario. The message comes in an official statement from the foreign ministry following a meeting held the day before between Chinese deputy MOFA Le Yucheng and Russian ambassador to Beijing Andrey Denisov. The document says:

“No matter how the international situation changes, China will, as always, strengthen strategic coordination with Russia to achieve win-win cooperation, jointly safeguard the common interests of both sides, and promote the building of a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind (…) In the first quarter of this year, the bilateral trade volume between China and Russia reached 38.2 billion US dollars, an increase of nearly 30%, [which] fully demonstrates the great resilience… of cooperation between the two countries”.

Later, commenting on the statement, Ambassador Denisov stated:

“Russia always regards developing relations with China as its diplomatic priority and is ready to further deepen bilateral comprehensive strategic coordination and all-round practical cooperation in the direction set by the two heads of state (…) [Further efforts to strengthen Russia-China ties] will continuously benefit the two peoples.”

Although it is a well-known fact that bilateral relations between Moscow and Beijing have improved substantially in recent years, forming an important axis of economic and diplomatic cooperation, the current message is of enormous importance, as it works as a response to recent US pressure against China.

Last month, US President Joe Biden called his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and during an hour-long conversation “warned” about the possible “consequences” that would be suffered by Beijing if there was not an immediate end to its economic support for Russia.

Naturally, Xi ignored Biden’s threats and the Chinese foreign ministry maintained its stance of absolute neutrality on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Not mixing political and economic issues is a key point of the Chinese foreign policy tradition and this is exactly what is being applied now. Beijing refuses to maintain positions on any political event outside its strategic environment, which is why it keeps the Russian military operation  off the agenda in Beijing-Moscow bilateral relations, continuing to have projects to improve cooperation, independently of such extra-economic issues.

However, it is not only the Chinese who show interest in cooperating with the Russians, ignoring the Western attempts of “cancellation”. Apparently, India is about to announce its highest ever level of trade cooperation with Russia in oil. According to reliable sources quoted by the Economic Times on April 19, state-owned companies in New Delhi are planning to buy as much Russian oil as possible in the short term, considering the expected availability and low prices of the commodity.

The Indian attitude sounds absolutely pragmatic and not ideological: faced with the conflict scenario, Indians seek to benefit from the availability of Russian oil, which arises as a consequence of the sanctions applied by the West to prevent the oil from entering the European market. With large quantities available and prices dropping, it is in India’s interest to acquire as many Russian barrels as possible and this is what is about to be done.

Obviously, this was not what the West expected from the Indians. The US has always tried to make its military partnership with India – focused on creating an “anti-China axis” – a kind of hierarchical relationship, in which Indians would automatically obey and align themselves with every decision taken by the Americans.

However, despite the pressure in this direction and the constant US threats to cut ties with New Delhi, India remains convinced of defending its interests above all, making it clear that it will continue to cooperate with Russia in terms of both military trade and energy partnership.

It is impossible to look at such news and continue to believe the Western media narrative that “Russia is isolated”. Moscow has lost a part of world trade and even then, not completely, as Western countries have not yet managed to fully break off relations with Russia. On the other hand, it has not only preserved most of the global consumer market in emerging nations but has also boosted its ties with China and India, which indicates great economic support and, even more, the emergence of new intra-BRICS cooperation opportunities.

What all this means is simple to understand: the special military operation in Ukraine will not end through economic pressures, coercive measures and attempts at “cancellation”, but through the Ukrainian willingness to accept the peace terms, which are (as Russia insists) political and military neutrality and recognition of the sovereign republics of Donbass and Russian Crimea. As long as the Ukrainian government is unwilling to do so, Russia seems to continue the operation and have sufficient economic strength to maintain it.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

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***

Before his ouster as prime minister in a no-trust motion in the parliament on April 10, Imran Khan claimed that Pakistan’s Ambassador to US, Asad Majeed, was warned by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu that Khan’s continuation in office would have repercussions for bilateral ties between the two nations.

Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani politician who served as the Federal Minister for Human Rights under the Imran Khan government, quoted Donald Lu as saying:

“If Prime Minister Imran Khan remained in office, then Pakistan will be isolated from the United States and we will take the issue head on; but if the vote of no-confidence succeeds, all will be forgiven.”

During Imran Khan’s historic two-day official visit to Moscow on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, besides signing several bilateral contracts in agricultural and energy sectors, President Putin reportedly offered Imran Khan S-300 air defense system, Sukhoi aircraft as replacement for the Pakistan Air Force’s dependence on American F-16s and an array of advanced Russian military equipment on the condition that Pakistan abandons its traditional alliance with Washington and forge defense ties with Russia, according to two government officials who accompanied Imran Khan on the Moscow visit.

Alongside China, India and Iran, Pakistan under the leadership of Imran Khan was one of the few countries that adopted a non-aligned stance and refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite diplomatic pressure from Washington.

After the United States “nation-building project” failed in Afghanistan during its two-decade occupation of the embattled country from Oct. 2001 to August 2021, it accused regional powers of lending covert support to Afghan insurgents battling the occupation forces.

The occupation and Washington’s customary blame game accusing “malign regional forces” of insidiously destabilizing Afghanistan and undermining US-led “benevolent imperialism” instead of accepting responsibility for its botched invasion and occupation of Afghanistan brought Pakistan and Russia closer against a common adversary in their backyard, and the two countries even managed to forge defense ties, particularly during the four years of the Imran Khan government from July 2018 to April 2022.

Since the announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban by the Trump administration in Feb. 2020, regional powers, China and Russia in particular, hosted international conferences and invited the representatives of the US-backed Afghanistan government and the Taliban for peace negotiations.

After the departure of US forces from “the graveyard of the empires,” although Washington is trying to starve the hapless Afghan masses to death in retribution for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the global hegemon by imposing economic sanctions on the Taliban government and browbeating international community to desist from lending formal diplomatic recognition or having trade relations with Afghanistan, China and Russia have provided generous humanitarian and developmental assistance to Afghanistan.

Imran Khan fell from the grace of the Biden administration, whose record-breaking popularity ratings plummeted after the precipitous fall of Kabul last August, reminiscent of the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport, and Washington accused Pakistan for the debacle.

Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley squeamishly described the Kabul takeover in his historic Congressional testimony that several hundred Pashtun cowboys riding on motorbikes and brandishing Kalashnikovs overran Kabul without a shot being fired, and the world’s most lethal military force fled with tail neatly folded between legs, hastily evacuating diplomatic staff from sprawling 36-acre US embassy in Chinook helicopters to airport secured by the insurgents.

Apart from indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids mounted by Americans, Afghan security forces didn’t put up serious resistance anywhere in Afghanistan and simply surrendered territory to the Taliban. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15.

The sprawling Bagram airbase was the nerve center from where all the operations across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.

In southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the Pashtun ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support, the Taliban military offensive was spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the illustrious son of the Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar and the newly appointed defense minister of the Taliban government, as district after district in southwest Afghanistan, including the birthplace of the Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in quick succession.

What has stunned military strategists and longtime observers of the Afghan war, though, was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost the whole of northern Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan was the bastion of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups. In recent years, however, the Taliban has made inroads into the heartland of the Northern Alliance, too.

The ignominious fall of Kabul clearly demonstrates the days of American hegemony over the world are numbered. If ragtag Taliban militants could liberate their homeland from imperialist clutches without a fight, imagine what would happen if the United States confronted equal military powers such as Russia and China. The much-touted myth of American military supremacy is clearly more psychological than real.

Imran Khan is an educated and charismatic leader. Being an Oxford graduate, he is much better informed than most Pakistani politicians. And he is a liberal at heart. Most readers might disagree with the assertion due to his fierce anti-imperialism and West-bashing demagoguery, but allow me to explain.

It’s not just Imran Khan’s celebrity lifestyle that makes him a progressive. He also derives his intellectual inspiration from the Western tradition. The ideal role model in his mind is the Scandinavian social democratic model which he has mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in his speech at Karachi before a massive rally of singing and cheering crowd in December 2012.

His relentless anti-imperialism as a political stance should be viewed in the backdrop of Western military interventions in the Islamic countries. The conflagration that neocolonial powers have caused in the Middle East evokes strong feelings of resentment among Muslims all over the world. Moreover, Imran Khan also uses anti-America rhetoric as an electoral strategy to attract conservative masses, particularly the impressionable youth.

It’s also noteworthy that Imran Khan’s political party draws most of its electoral support from women, youth voters and Pakistani expats residing in the Gulf and Western countries. All these segments of society, especially the women, are drawn more toward egalitarian liberalism than patriarchal conservatism, because liberalism promotes women’s rights and its biggest plus point is its emphasis on equality, emancipation and empowerment of women who constitute over half of population in every society.

Image on the right: Bhutto in 1971 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 nl)

Imran Khan’s ouster from power for daring to stand up to the United States harks back to the toppling and subsequent assassination of Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in April 1979 by the martial law regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

The United States not only turned a blind eye but tacitly approved the elimination of Bhutto from Pakistan’s political scene because, being a socialist, Bhutto not only nurtured cordial ties with communist China but was also courting Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union played the role of a mediator at the signing of the Tashkent Agreement for the cessation of hostilities following the 1965 India-Pakistan War over the disputed Kashmir region, in which Bhutto represented Pakistan as the foreign minister of the Gen. Ayub Khan-led government.

Like Imran Khan, the United States “deep state” regarded Bhutto as a political liability and an obstacle in the way of mounting the Operation Cyclone to provoke the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and the subsequent waging of a decade-long war of attrition, using Afghan jihadists as cannon fodder who were generously funded, trained and armed by the CIA and Pakistan’s security agencies in the Af-Pak border regions, in order to “bleed the Soviet forces” and destabilize and weaken the rival global power.

Karl Marx famously said: “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce.” In addition to a longstanding CIA program aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency in Ukraine by training, arming and international legitimizing neo-Nazi militias in Donbas, Canada’s Department of National Defense revealed on January 26, that the Canadian Armed Forces had trained “nearly 33,000 Ukrainian military and security personnel in a range of tactical and advanced military skills.” While The United Kingdom, via Operation Orbital, had trained 22,000 Ukrainian fighters.

A “prophetic” RAND Corporation report titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” published in 2019 declares the stated goal of American policymakers is “to undermine Russia just as the US subversively destabilized the former Soviet Union during the Cold War,” and predicts to the letter the crisis unfolding in Ukraine as a consequence of the eight-year proxy war mounted by NATO in Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine on Russia’s vulnerable western flank since the 2014 Maidan coup, toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

Nonetheless, regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA and State Department in January 2019, as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.

The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department documents, in the 1998 interview to The Nouvel Observateur, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan joined the American-led, SEATO and CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s client state since its inception in 1947. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan.

Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security agencies were alarmed by his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that although the Bhutto government did provide political and diplomatic support on a limited scale to Islamists in their struggle for power against Pashtun nationalists in Afghanistan, being a secular and progressive politician, he would never have permitted opening the floodgates for flushing the Af-Pak region with weapons, petrodollars and radical jihadist ideology as his successor, Zia-ul-Haq, an Islamist military general, did by becoming a willing tool of religious extremism and militarism in the hands of neocolonial powers.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Featured image is from IRF

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***

Nuclear sanity: ultimate (or, God help us, immediate) disarmament.

Nuclear insanity: ongoing development and deployment, endless investment, eventual (either accidental or intentional) use.

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., addressing Congress several weeks ago, made a heartfelt and powerful case for nuclear sanity, for a revamping of the system of mutually assured destruction, which gives certain national leaders “Godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it . . .”

He went on:

“We cannot uninvent the atom, its military applications, and technological knowhow. The nuclear Pandora’s box is sadly forever opened. We must, however, do everything in our power to be able to look the next generation in the eye and say that we did everything — everything —in our power to avert the unfathomable, a nuclear war on this planet; and that includes supporting negotiations that not only end Russia’s war in Ukraine, but also future negotiations to end the budding 21st century nuclear arms race which is spinning out of control.”

Until the other day, I thought all I needed to do was grasp the sanity of nuclear disarmament — help spread the word — and the world would eventually come around. Then, out of the blue, I stumbled upon the “rationality” of nuclear insanity, and it shocked me into a new level of understanding. Suddenly, against my will, I’m starting to get it and, ever since, I’ve been trying (psychologically) to duck and cover. This transcends geopolitics.

Here’s the beginning of a recent, miniscule Reuters story:

“The global market for nuclear missiles and bombs should surpass $126 billion within ten years, up nearly 73 percent from 2020 levels, according to a report by Allied Market Research on Monday, as Russian aggression in Ukraine spurs military spending.”

I could hardly read beyond this paragraph. There’s a “global market” for nuclear missiles? You mean, like there’s a market for oil, for gold . . . for bananas? I had always fathomed nukes solely as geopolitical, as harbingers of hell, birthed by World War II and the Manhattan Project, forever entwined with the words Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita when the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped at Alamogordo, N.M in July 1945.: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

But obviously somebody has to build them. There are more than 12,000 nuclear warheads here and there on Planet Earth, with more coming. Just because their use is suicidal, that doesn’t mean the builders shouldn’t profit from them.

I had no choice but to visit the source of the Reuters article, the Allied Market Research report, which discussed the nuclear arms market with such a creepy-cold objectivity, I started to sense the mental equivalent of nuclear winter (I started calling it cranial winter), e.g.:

“There is expected to be a nuclear arms acquisition race by superpowers such as the U.S. and Russia, to accelerate business opportunism within coming years. In 2021, the U.S. and Russia had 5,550 and 6,255 nuclear warheads and are expected to reach 6,380 and 6,734 in 2030 respectively. The expenditure done by major companies such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Airbus, and Boeing toward research, development, management, conducting exhibitions and seminars to conduct importance and feasibility of nuclear weapons will encourage nations to increase their budget allocation. . . .

“The rise in border disputes among neighboring nations, plans for territorial expansion, and efforts to establish strategic and political dominance at the global level remain primary factors that support the nuclear bombs and missiles market. The ongoing dispute between Ukraine and Russia as of March 2022 will notably impact the business dynamics in the coming years.”

And there you have it: the upside of World War III. The upside of Armageddon. There’s money to be made in border disputes and superpower clashes — lots of money. Keep at it, boys! As The Nation noted:

“In 2015, the defense industry mobilized a small army of at least 718 lobbyists and doled out more than $67 million dollars pressuring Congress for increased weapons spending generally.”

Money makes the world go around, and if you can control its flow, you make the world go around. Or so it seems. And I confess, I’m not sure what the takeaway is on all this. As The Nation story pointed out, nuclear-weapons contracts are welfare-sated. The business model is called “cost-plus,” that is: “no matter how high cost overruns may be compared to original bids, contractors receive a guaranteed profit percentage above their costs. High profits are effectively guaranteed, no matter how inefficient or over-budget the project may become.”

And:

“The continuing pressure of Congressional Republicans for cuts in domestic social programs are a crucial mechanism that ensures federal tax dollars will be available for lucrative military contracts.”

Nuclear winter begins with cranial winter: with a coldly abstracted reality in which profit trumps sanity. Duck and cover won’t save us.

Those of us who want a future have some serious negotiating to do, not with Russia but with Congress — with ourselves.

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---

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research!

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

The Bureau of Land Management announced today that it will resume oil and gas leasing on public lands, violating President Biden’s campaign promise to end new oil and gas leasing and locking in new extraction that thwarts his pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite its pause on new oil and gas leasing and drilling on publicly owned lands and waters, the Biden administration approved more drilling permits in 2021 than President Trump did in the first year of his presidency, according to federal data analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity.

The oil and gas industry continues raking in record profits while communities pay the price. The watchdog organization Accountable.US reported in February that Shell, Chevron, BP and Exxon made more than $75.5 billion in profits in 2021, some of their highest profits in the past decade.

The communities most at risk from new fossil fuel extraction are primarily Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples, people of the global majority, and those on the frontlines of fossil fuel industry expansion. These are the same communities that turned out in record numbers to get Biden elected in 2020 and who have since been urging Biden to use his executive authority to fulfill his campaign promise and ban new federal fossil fuel projects.

Several analyses show that climate pollution from the world’s already-producing fossil fuel developments, if fully developed, would push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that avoiding such warming requires ending new investment in fossil fuel projects. Thousands of organizations and communities from across the United States have called on Biden to halt federal fossil fuel expansion and phase out production consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Statements from climate, social justice and environmental organizations:

“As frontline community members in the Permian Basin that have been advocating for putting a stop to new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, Citizens Caring for the Future finds it extremely disheartening that BLM is going forward with these lease sales,” said Kayley Shoup of Citizens Caring for the Future. “Our day-to-day life and health is directly affected by these sales and the subsequent production that comes along with them. It would take a small army to truly enforce regulation here in the Permian, and we know that is the reality in oil and gas regions around the country. We live our lives surrounded by the industry and we understand that in order to take on climate change and make a meaningful dent in emissions the Biden administration must take action that puts a stop to new development.”

“The Biden administration’s claim that it must hold these lease sales is pure fiction and a reckless failure of climate leadership,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s as if they’re ignoring the horror of firestorms, floods and megadroughts, and accepting climate catastrophes as business as usual. These so-called reforms are 20 years too late and will only continue to fuel the climate emergency. These lease sales should be shelved and the climate-destroying federal fossil fuel programs brought to an end.”

“The West is drying up and going up in flames. Between extreme drought, the shrinking of the Colorado River, and now urban wildfires in the winter, how much more death, destruction and devastation do we have to see before this administration takes action?” said Natasha Léger, executive director of Citizens for a Healthy Community. “It’s time for climate leadership and to stop leasing our public lands for oil and gas development. We need heroes to break through the political and economic inertia that has us on a collision course to inhabitability.”

“As the Interior Department announces that it plans on continuing oil and gas leasing on federal land, Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic condemns any further extraction, especially within the Arctic,” said Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic. “Our lands are warming at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world, causing detrimental impact to the fragile ecosystems that call it home and directly impacting the rest of the world, as well. With conservative climate models predicting that we have less than 30 years to radically change our relationship with oil and gas, the future rests in the United States’ hands. We can no longer commodify our land and water, especially at the rate climate change is occurring. We are nature fighting back.”

“It is unconscionable that the BLM will go forward with these oil and gas lease sales as we continue to see the devastating effects of climate change, particularly in the Southwestern United States,” said Deborah McNamara, campaigns director at 350 Colorado. “According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s August 2021 assessment, there is ‘high confidence’ that human-influenced rising temperatures are a direct cause of the extension of the wildfire season, increased drought, and decreased precipitation in the southwest United States. In order to curb emissions and do what scientists are telling us we must do in order to avert the absolute worst climate impacts, we need a rapid phase out of fossil fuel production by 2030. Continuing business as usual at the BLM with ongoing oil and gas lease sales will not get us where we need to be in order to solve the climate crisis and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

“How much more can Gulf Coast states endure? Most of us weren’t born with a silver spoon to get lawyers all the time to fight these civil laws aka ‘environmental acts,’ or have the luxury of property rights because it was all taken from us so long ago,” said Love Sanchez of Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend. “Now here we are, working class people, simple people, 95% of the time BIPOC people, that just want to protect our land and water. Then, I’m not surprised, we now have the Interior, who decides they want to continue their projects in the Gulf Coast. It’s a very disappointing thing to hear. Fortunately, we will continue to be persistent in protecting these waters.”

“We have heard a lot of rhetoric from President Biden and his administration about the need to take action on climate,” said Kyle Tisdel, climate and energy program director with the Western Environmental Law Center. “But not only is the administration not doing everything it could — it is not really doing anything. Climate action was a pillar of President Biden’s campaign, and his promises on this existential issue were a major reason the public elected him. Achieving results on climate is not a matter of domestic politics. It’s life and death.”

“Candidate Biden promised to end new oil and gas leasing on public lands, but President Biden is prioritizing oil executive profits over future generations,” said Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth. “Biden’s Interior Department has even issued permits to drill at a rate faster than the Trump administration. Now, the Bureau of Land Management is preparing to hold its first public lands lease sale, despite having no legal obligation to do so. If Biden wants to be a climate leader, he must stop auctioning off our public lands to Big Oil.”

“This is pure climate denial,” said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians. “While the Biden administration talks a good talk on climate action, the reality is, they’re in bed with the oil and gas industry. Rest assured, with the climate crisis raging, we can and will fight back. We can’t afford not to.”

“The Biden administration fiddles while Rome burns,” said Shelley Silbert, executive director at Great Old Broads for Wilderness. “The most destructive fire in Colorado history consumed over 1,000 homes last December. When your house is on fire, you act immediately. Climate disasters hit us harder each day and we’re out of time. The Biden administration must address the climate crisis now, and a vital step is stopping oil and gas leasing on public lands immediately. There is no other option.”

“Right now, fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters makes up a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions at a time scientists are saying we must move urgently to cut emissions by at least half. Not only does it devastate our planet, it’s a handout to Big Oil at the expense of average Americans, who will bear the brunt of its societal, health and financial ramifications,” said Dan Ritzman, Lands Water Wildlife director at the Sierra Club. “We urge the Biden administration to take advantage of this historic opportunity to make good on campaign promises, fulfill a global commitment to acting on climate, and serve American communities by phasing out oil and gas production on public lands and oceans.”

“Let’s set aside all the niceties and speak plainly on this: Even people in positions of power and authority are fully aware that nothing goes unscathed in the aftermath of creating and maintaining fossil fuel infrastructures,” said Sha Merirei Ongelungel, executive director of Pasifika Uprising. “So whether you’re trying to reopen the Palau National Marine Sanctuary for commercial fishing and potential exploratory drilling or in the United States pushing to resume oil and gas leasing on public lands, the only safe inference is that our leaders are dishonest and hungry for more money and more power. And that is wholly unconscionable. What’s legal isn’t always ethical and too many leaders, the world over, are demonstrating this with their utter disregard for their communities and the climate. Frankly, I’m embarrassed for these so-called leaders. For all their power and authority, they will never have the true power and solidarity needed to lead us into a safer future like grassroots movements.”

“Ramping up exports of liquified natural gas to Europe in response to the invasion of Ukraine is a losing proposition that will take too long to implement to address current energy demands,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “Instead of taking decades to build the necessary export terminals so we can keep burning fossil fuels and turning the Earth into a fiery hellscape, we should be investing in solar production in urban settings where the energy is being used, on rooftops and parking lot awnings, so Europe and the United States can both transition to clean power sources and get that production online a whole lot faster.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could not be more clear. It is time to rapidly transition off of fossil fuels. Increasing leasing for fossil fuels on public lands is grossly misaligned with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and ensuring that young people inherit a habitable planet,” said Zanagee Artis, executive director of Zero Hour.

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***

Despite Washington repeatedly saying that the US would not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, the overthrow of Imran Khan from the Pakistani Prime Ministership suggests otherwise if he is to be believed. More alarmingly for Islamabad is that the political instability comes at a time when the Pakistani economy is struggling and Beijing is less willing to mindlessly pour money into the massive China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.

Khan on April 10 became the first prime minister in Pakistan’s history to lose office through a parliamentary no-confidence vote after attempting to dissolve the national assembly in what some described as a “civilian coup.” Following the Supreme Court’s order for the parliament to vote, which finally led to his downfall, Khan blamed the US for toppling his government because of his refusal to cancel his visit to Moscow in late February.

It is for this reason he urged citizens to take to the streets and express their protest, resulting in a series of mass rallies across the country of 220 million people, but also in Australia, the UK, across Europe including Greece, and several countries in the Middle East where large Pakistani communities live.

According to the former Prime Minister, the Pakistani ambassador to Washington reportedly sent a cable detailing the US Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Assistant Secretary Donald Lu telling him that relations with Pakistan would not be good so long as the government was led by him. Allegedly the term “impeachment” attributed to Lu is mentioned as many as eight times in the cable.

Pakistan, a traditional partner of the US, was very important to the Americans during their 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. Khan is seen by many Pakistanis as a very charismatic politician and has a hero’s status as a famous cricketer who won the World Cup three decades ago as captain of Pakistan’s national team. He is also a strong campaigner for the Palestinian cause, a critic of Israel and one of the sponsors of a UN resolution against Islamophobia.

However, the greatest resentment held by the Americans was because he visited Russian President Vladimir Putin on the day that the Russian military operation in Ukraine began, even though his trip to Moscow had been planned much earlier. Washington was also furious with Pakistan’s position in the UN vote on a resolution condemning Russia’s operation in Ukraine.

Image on the right: Shehbaz Sharif (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Pakistan’s new head of government Shehbaz Sharif is the younger brother of three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is living in voluntary exile in London after a Pakistani court sentenced him to ten years in prison for corruption. Less than two years ago, Shabazz Sharif himself was investigated for corruption, and he spent time in an investigative prison. As one of his priorities includes “restoring broken ties with the US”, it remains to be seen how he can balance relations with China and Russia, especially at a time when Washington is imposing pressure on those who maintain good relations with both powers.

On the economic front, Pakistan is nearly entirely reliant on China, but traditionally its geopolitical interests are hinged on American backing and support, such as the initial arming and funding of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union. It is recalled that Pakistan was the cradle of the Taliban, in which the Americans relied heavily on to fight the Soviets.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin managed to turn around a difficult legacy in the relationship between the two countries, and in recent years Pakistan has played a more significant role in Russia’s foreign policy, Islamabad will never be able to topple Moscow’s prioritised relationship with New Delhi. This is expected since Russia and India maintain consistently friendly ties, regardless of which party or leader is in power.

According to Asia Times, Beijing is reluctant to pump new funds until problems faced by Chinese investors are resolved and previous CPEC-related agreements are fully honoured by Pakistan. It comes as on April 18, Pakistan’s Finance Ministry refused to support a supplementary grant of another PKR 50 billion ($270,000,000) for CPEC power projects. This decision comes as China has already halted some of its projects (when Khan was still in power), over differences in cost estimations and contractual disputes with Pakistan.

Pakistan army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa hinted earlier this month that Pakistan’s military has not had a good experience with some of the Chinese military products they have procured and will likely return to favoring American equipment as it “is the best.” He added that the best way for the Americans to fight against Chinese influence in Pakistan is to offer counter-investments, effectively extending an olive branch to Washington at a time when Khan continues his anti-Western crusade.

It is crucial to highlight that the Pakistani military are the real powerbrokers in the country, much more so than the elected figures. It is partially for the reason that Khan was often in opposition to the military that he found himself ousted. With Pakistan seeking a return to favor in Western eyes, it is now offering small tokenistic openings such as publicly announcing issues with CPEC, expressing preference for American military equipment, and installing a much more Western-friendly Prime Minister.

How this will directly affect Islamabad’s relations with Moscow and Beijing remains to be seen, but it appears for now that Pakistan is returning to the Western fold.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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First published by GR on February 28, 2022.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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This war must be immediately terminated before it expands and sucks in the European NATO States and the United States. Towards that end, President Biden must publicly announce that NATO Expansion is over for good  and that Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova will not be joining NATO as member States.

President Biden must also call for an international peace conference for the conclusion of a treaty that will establish  the permanent neutrality of Ukraine which will be guaranteed by the United Nations Security Council under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. Then negotiations can take place between the United States and Russia over the de-nuclearization of Europe including the removal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from NATO States that are there in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a restoration of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that was so foolishly and recklessly terminated by the Trump administration.

Then a new round of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty Negotiations should be conducted in order to substantially lessen the tensions on land, sea and air between Russia and the U.S./NATO States including over the emplacement of alleged U.S. ABM sites in Europe that threaten Russia.

Make no mistake about it: The Origins of both the First World War and the Second World War hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity!

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Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Among his many books is “Destroying World Order.”

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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

Reviews

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

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

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

Human Microchip Implants and the “Internet of Bodies” (IoB)

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 19, 2022

Implantable microchips are marketed as the ultimate in convenience, but the goal is to create the Internet of Bodies (IoB), described by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an ecosystem of “an unprecedented number of sensors,” including emotional sensors, “attached to, implanted within, or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyze and even modify human bodies and behavior.”

Jackboots Policing: No-Knock Raids Rip a Hole in the Fourth Amendment

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, April 20, 2022

Brace yourself, because this hair-raising, heart-pounding, jarring account of a no-knock, no-announce SWAT team raid is what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us.

Video: America’s Nuclear Weapons: “Our Strategy to Preserve Peace…”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Caroline Mailloux, April 20, 2022

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

The Lies…and the Eyes…of Ukraine. Reporting from Lviv

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 19, 2022

The realities of this war, as I expected before arriving two weeks ago, have been slowly found on the faces, in the voices and deep in the penetrating eyes of those affected by it. These are the innocents, mostly, those who have a tale to tell and parse no words in telling it.

Dangerous Crossroads: NATO’s ‘Weapons for Peace’ Program Conducive to Escalation of Ukraine War

By Nauman Sadiq, April 19, 2022

Karen DeYoung reported for the Washington Post Thursday that Russia sent a formal diplomatic note to the United States on Tuesday, accusing Washington and its NATO clients of insidiously subverting the peace process with Ukraine initiated at the Istanbul talks on March 29, and the subsequent withdrawal of Russian forces from the outskirts of Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, thus ending the month-long offensive in Ukraine.

COVID Persists, but the COVID Vaccine Mandate “Does Not Prevent The Spread”

By Dr. Meryl Nass, April 19, 2022

There has been so much bad news about the vaccines in the last few months, it even leaked into the mainstream media.  I think the cabal’s plan, at least in the US but probably everywhere, is to stop propping the ludicrous vaccine claims up and allow them to die a natural death. I explain why below.

“One Less Traitor”: Zelensky Oversees Campaign of Assassination, Kidnapping and Torture of Political Opposition

By Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy, April 19, 2022

While claiming to defend democracy, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has outlawed his opposition, ordered his rivals’ arrest, and presided over the disappearance and assassination of dissidents across the country.

Joys of Western Democracy: American Victory and Loss of Political Sovereignty in Pakistan

By Dr. Ejaz Akram, April 19, 2022

After committing the shameful atrocities of direct colonization against the non-West, the West felt it was necessary to invent methods of indirect colonization. Other than institutional controls, they would incarcerate and assassinate many of the non-Western leaders who disobeyed the West.

Thinking Harder About False Flags and Other Fables

By Philip Giraldi, April 19, 2022

In my own experience as a CIA operations officer, I once “developed” a relationship with a Libyan intelligence officer using the false identity of an Italian businessman. The Libyan was amendable to an information sharing relationship with an Italian to line his own pockets, but would have balked at the treasonous implications of having a connection with an American.

The Hidden Truth Behind War with Russia

By Martin Armstrong, April 19, 2022

The plot behind Ukraine is far deeper than anyone is willing to talk about publically. Yanukovich was corrupt and his sons were acting like a protection racket. Yanukovich was keen on joining the EU but the treaty had a clause in there that would have put Ukraine in NATO through the backdoor.

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.

Visit and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

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.

Visit and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

“We’re all potential victims.”—Peter Christ, retired police officer

It’s the middle of the night.

Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep.

Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you.

You’re not just afraid. You’re terrified.

Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat has invaded your home, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need.

You brace for the confrontation.

Shadowy figures appear at the doorway, screaming orders, threatening violence.

Chaos reigns.

You stand frozen, your hands gripping whatever means of self-defense you could find.

Just that simple act—of standing frozen in fear and self-defense—is enough to spell your doom.

The assailants open fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction.

You die without ever raising a weapon or firing a gun in self-defense.

In your final moments, you get a good look at your assassins: it’s the police.

Brace yourself, because this hair-raising, heart-pounding, jarring account of a no-knock, no-announce SWAT team raid is what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us.

Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of so-called criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.

These raids, which might be more aptly referred to as “knock-and-shoot” policing, have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

No-knock raids, a subset of the violent, terror-inducing raids carried out by police SWAT teams on unsuspecting households, differ in one significant respect: they are carried out without police having to announce and identify themselves as police.

It’s a chilling difference: to the homeowner targeted for one of these no-knock raids, it appears as if they are being set upon by villains mounting a home invasion.

Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by criminals as opposed to a police mob. In many instances, there is little real difference.

According to an in-depth investigative report by The Washington Post, “police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.”

While the Fourth Amendment requires that police obtain a warrant based on probable cause before they can enter one’s home, search and seize one’s property, or violate one’s privacy, SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

If these aggressive, excessive police tactics have also become troublingly commonplace, it is in large part due to judges who largely rubberstamp the warrant requests based only on the word of police; police who have been known to lie or fabricate the facts in order to justify their claims of “reasonable suspicion” (as opposed to the higher standard of probable cause, which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property); and software that allows judges to remotely approve requests using computers, cellphones or tablets.

This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentially done away with the need for a “no-knock” warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

In addition to the terror brought on by these raids, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids are also characteristic of these SWAT team raids. In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for the residents with little consequences for law enforcement.

The horror stories have become legion in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

As one might expect, judges tend to afford extreme levels of deference to police officers who have mistakenly killed innocent civilians but do not afford similar leniency to civilians who have injured police officers in acts of self-defense. Indeed, homeowners who mistake officers for robbers can be sentenced for assault or murder if they take defensive actions resulting in harm to police.

Yet the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt.

That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

Aiyana Jones is dead because of a SWAT raid gone awry. The 7-year-old was killed after a Detroit SWAT team—searching for a suspect—launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops weren’t even in the right apartment.

Exhibiting a similar lack of basic concern for public safety, a Georgia SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving him with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

Payton, a 7-year-old black Labrador retriever, and 4-year-old Chase, also a black Lab, were shot and killed after a SWAT team mistakenly raided the mayor’s home while searching for drugs. Police shot Payton four times. Chase was shot twice, once from behind as he ran away.

“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs. They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t,” recalls Mayor Cheye Calvo, who described being handcuffed and interrogated for hours—wearing only underwear and socks—surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood.

If these violent SWAT team raids have become tragically widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” principle that has been used to justify the transfer of sophisticated military equipment, weaponry and training to local police departments, which in turn has helped to transform police into extensions of the military—a standing army on American soil.

The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

A study by a political scientist at Princeton University concludes that militarizing police and SWAT teams “provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction.” The study, the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, reveals that “police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor changes the number of officers assaulted or killed.”

SWAT teams, designed to defuse dangerous situations such as those involving hostages, were never meant to be used for routine police work targeting nonviolent suspects, yet they have become intrinsic parts of federal and local law enforcement operations.

There are few communities without a SWAT team today.

In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US.

Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year.

Where this becomes a problem of life and death for Americans is when these militarized SWAT teams are assigned to carry out routine law enforcement tasks.

In the state of Maryland alone, 92 percent of 8200 SWAT missions were used to execute search or arrest warrants.

Police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games.

A Connecticut SWAT team swarmed a bar suspected of serving alcohol to underage individuals.

In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring.

An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.

A Minnesota SWAT team raided the wrong house in the middle of the night, handcuffed the three young children, held the mother on the floor at gunpoint, shot the family dog, and then “forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour” while they searched the home.

A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house in order, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting.

And then there was the police officer who tripped and “accidentally” shot and killed Eurie Stamps, an unarmed grandfather of 12, who had been forced to lie facedown on the floor of his home at gunpoint while a SWAT team attempted to execute a search warrant against his stepson.

Equally outrageous was the four-hour SWAT team raid on a California high school, where students were locked down in classrooms, forced to urinate in overturned desks and generally terrorized by heavily armed, masked gunmen searching for possible weapons that were never found.

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which the citizenry (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of the citizenry is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons).

Likewise, our privacy, property and security are no longer safe from government intrusion.

Yet it wasn’t always this way.

There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of “writs of assistance.” These writs gave British soldiers blanket authority to raid homes, damage property and wreak havoc for any reason whatsoever, without any expectation of probable cause.

To our detriment, we have come full circle to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.

Rubber-stamped, court-issued warrants for no-knock SWAT team raids have become the modern-day equivalent of colonial-era writs of assistance.

Then again, we may be worse off today when one considers the extent to which courts have sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (occurring at a rate of more than 80,000 a year and growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing; and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause.

This is exactly what we can expect more of as a result of President Biden’s commitment to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention at taxpayer expense.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no matter what the politicians insist to the contrary, militarized police armed with weapons of war who are empowered to carry out pre-dawn raids on our homes, shoot our pets, and terrorize our families are not making America any safer or freer.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image: Minneapolis police force entry moments before shooting Amir Locke. Minneapolis Police Department via AP

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

Nuclear war is now upheld as a peace-making endeavour:  

“The sensible path to peace starts with the realization that peace can be secured only through strength. Nuclear weapons represent that strength. We must embrace it through funding and rhetoric.

We need new weapons and delivery systems, but, most important, we need a new strategy that recognizes the importance of nuclear weapons to a peaceful future.” (Washington Post, October 2013) 

“This presidential document states that nuclear weapons are the foundation of our strategy to preserve peace and stability by deterring aggression against the US, our allies, and our partners, (National Security Strategy of the United States of America)

The Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of the Cold War Era was scrapped and replaced with the Doctrine of Preemptive Nuclear War (PNW), namely the “peacemaking use” of nuclear weapons as a means of “self-defense” against both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states.

One thing was replaced by its opposite. MAD is real, PNW is fake. There is no such thing as “a peace-making use” of nuclear weapons.

Analysis: The Dangers of Nuclear War: Michel Chossudovsky

Comments: Link to Odysee

 

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A renowned virologist and former senior officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently warned against the dangers of the experimental COVID-19 gene-transfer vaccines, encouraged the un-jabbed to “stay unvaccinated,” and predicted an inevitable “collapse of our health system” due to health complications in the vaccinated.

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who once worked as a senior program manager for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and has been considered one of the most talented vaccine creators in the world, issued a video “Message to Austria” on November 20 to coincide with a large rally in Vienna opposing new lockdown measures.

As a first priority, he advised the public, “Never, Ever — allow anything, or anybody, to interfere or suppress your innate immune system,” which is the first line of defense human beings have to fight off all infections.

According to Vanden Bossche, the “vaccine antibodies,” which are induced by the current COVID-19 vaccines, suppress innate immunity and they “cannot substitute for it” since they quickly wane in their effectiveness and cannot prevent infection or transmission of the virus.

Thus, these experimental injections, in contrast to innate immunity, “do not contribute to herd immunity,” he said.

Vaccinating children ‘an absolute no go!’

This reality is most important in the case of children whose “innate immunity can easily be suppressed by vaccinal antibodies” since their “antibodies are so young and so naïve that they can easily be outcompeted by vaccinal antibodies,” he said.

And since children are protected from many diseases by their innate immunity, including COVID-19, its suppression by these vaccines exposes them to many more dangers, and “could even lead to autoimmune diseases,” the expert warned.

Therefore, injecting children with these biological agents “is an absolute no go!” the virologist said. “We cannot vaccinate our children with these vaccines.”

Booster shots for the vaccinated ‘absolutely insane!’

Turning his attention to the adult “vaccinees,” those who have been vaccinated, the specialist in microbiology said the suppression of innate immunity has already shown itself to be a problem in this population. “They are indeed going to have a difficult time to control a number of diseases,” including COVID-19.

Yet, since their innate antibodies have previously been trained through years of adapting and maturing, he said “they are usually more resilient to the vaccinal antibodies” than those of children.

However, this resilience can be further deteriorated by additional shots, and thus Vanden Bossche warns that giving these jabbed individuals boosters “is absolutely insane! What this will do is just further increase the immune pressure of the vaccinal antibodies on their innate immunity.” Thus, booster shots are “absolute nonsense! It is dangerous and should not be done!”

To the un-jabbed: ‘For God’s sake, stay unvaccinated!’

As for the unvaccinated, the Belgian physician described why they would fare much better, first breaking them down into three categories:

1. Those who have experienced no symptoms, who are “most likely simply protected by their innate antibodies;” 
2. Those who have experienced mild symptoms, not having to stay in bed for any time; and
3. Those who recovered from the disease and may have even had a severe case of it.

Due to what he called the “high infectious pressure” of the Delta variant, the respective innate immunity systems of these unvaccinated may now have to struggle a bit more, and thus the first category may experience mild symptoms, the second, moderate, and the third may have “some higher susceptibility to some other diseases. For example, influenza or the common cold.”

“But very, very importantly, all are protected,” he said. “They all are still protected against severe disease and the majority of them will be protected against very mild or moderate disease.”

This is the case, especially, the virologist said, since COVID-19 “is not a disease of healthy people. People who are in good health have a healthy innate immune system that can deal with a number of respiratory viruses without any problem. These people are not only protected against the disease, but they can even in many cases prevent infection.”

Vaccinees ‘serving as a kind of breeding ground for the virus’

Therefore, in order to maintain their healthy innate immune system as protection against COVID-19 and many other diseases, Dr. Vanden Bossche offered the following three requirements to the unvaccinated:

1. “For God’s sake, stay unvaccinated! They should stay unvaccinated;”
2. “Take care of their innate immunity, meaning they should take care of their health … if you do this and you are unvaccinated, you will be spared from severe disease without any vaccine. On the contrary, the vaccine would do the opposite;” and
3.  Those with comorbidities or underlying diseases “should be careful about contacts.” 

For this third category of the more vulnerable, the physician said, “This is not to discriminate against the vaccinees, but [the un-jabbed] should especially avoid contact with vaccinees at this point in time.

“Vaccinees are now the people, and there is no doubt about this, who are really serving as a kind of breeding ground for the virus,” he said. “We need to have an extra protection for those who have underlying diseases. Do not vaccinate them, but in fact prevent them from being exposed to high infectious pressure.”

Health issues in the vaxxed ‘will inevitably lead to a collapse of our health system’

He encouraged his Austrian listeners that the only fight they have is “the fight for your health, [in] not getting vaccinated.” In accomplishing this, all of the other measures will not be sustainable.

Though he expressed great concern for “the vaccinees,” stating “we need to help them as much as we can because they will need extensive treatment in many cases,” he observed that the percentage of this group now being hospitalized “is now steadily increasing. Whereas more and more, with training of the innate immune system, with more exposure to the virus, more and more non-vaccinated people get protected.”

“This will lead inevitably — and I am not a doomsday preacher — but this will inevitably lead to a collapse of our health system. It cannot be otherwise,” he said.

‘Strength is found in serenity’

However, in closing, the virologist had a hopeful message, stating the lockdown measures “are not sustainable” and cannot last “for a long time.” He encouraged them to “stay calm,” sharing a German saying that translates, “Strength is found in serenity.”

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Implantable microchips are marketed as the ultimate in convenience, but the goal is to create the Internet of Bodies (IoB), described by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an ecosystem of “an unprecedented number of sensors,” including emotional sensors, “attached to, implanted within, or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyze and even modify human bodies and behavior”

Sweden is one of the earliest adopters of implantable microchips. The chip is implanted just beneath the skin on the hand, and operates using either near-field communication (NFC) — the same technology used in smartphones — or radio-frequency identification (RFID), which is used in contactless credit cards

Implanted payment chips are an extension of the internet of things; they’re a way of connecting and exchanging data, and the benefits must be weighed against the potential risks

Countries around the world are now working on a system for a central bank digital currency (CBDC), a fiat currency in digital form that is programmable so that you can only spend your money on certain things or in specific places, as desired by the issuer

In the end, everything will be connected to a single implantable device that will hold your digital identity, health data and programmable CBDCs. Your digital identity, in turn, will include everything that can be known about you through surveillance via implanted biosensors, your computer, smartphone, GPS, social media, online searches, purchases and spending habits. Algorithms will then decide what you can and cannot do based on who you are

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While implantable microchips are marketed as the ultimate in convenience, the goal of this trend goes far beyond allowing you to open doors without keys and buy things without your wallet.

The goal is to create what’s known as the Internet of Bodies (IoB), described by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an ecosystem of “an unprecedented number of sensors,” including emotional sensors, “attached to, implanted within, or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyze and even modify human bodies and behavior.”¹

Key words in that sentence that the PR machine skips right over is the stated goal to “modify human bodies and behavior.” And who will be in charge of those modifications? They don’t say, but we can safely assume that it will be those who have something to gain from the modification of your actions and behaviors.

Sweden Paves the Way for Microchipping

As noted in the featured NBC News segment, Sweden is one of the earliest adopters of implantable microchips. The chip, about the size of a grain of rice, is implanted just beneath the skin on the hand, and operates using either near-field communication (NFC) — the same technology used in smartphones — or radio-frequency identification (RFID), which is used in contactless credit cards.

Already, Sweden has become more or less a cashless society. Now, this tiny implant will replace the need for debit and credit cards all together, as well as identification and keys. To pay for an item, all you have to do is place your left hand near the contactless card reader, and the payment is registered.

An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Swedes have been chipped so far, although Swedish authorities claim they don’t know the exact number, as there’s no central registry.

At present, it’s claimed that the chips cannot be tracked, but that doesn’t mean they’ll remain untrackable in the future. And, while these early microchips contain only limited amounts of information, we know the WEF dreams of implementing a global digital identification system that would include everything imaginable about you, from your online search history and medical information to your personal banking data, social credit score and more.

Humans Are Becoming Hackable

As noted by financial technology expert Theodora Lau, implanted payment chips are “an extension of the internet of things;” they’re a way of connecting and exchanging data, and the benefits must be weighed against the potential risks.²

This is particularly true if and when more personal information begins to be migrated into them, leaving you vulnerable to hackers and surveillance. She told BBC News:³

“How much are we willing to pay, for the sake of convenience? Where do we draw the line when it comes to privacy and security? Who will be protecting the critical infrastructure, and the humans that are part of it?”

A PBS NewsHour segment from 2019⁴ also reviews some of the concerns surrounding implantable microchips (see video above). Importantly, just about any smartphone can read the chip with the proper scanner installed, and “anybody would be able to hack it,” according to Dr. Geoff Watson, a consultant anesthetist⁵ who has teamed up with the chip’s inventor “to ensure the implant procedure is carried out to a medical standard.”

While many say they have no privacy fears around the current microchips, it’s reasonable to suspect that privacy concerns will rise in tandem with the amount of personal information held on the chips, and with the number of people who have the implants.

Credit card theft was rare in the beginning and typically involved physical loss of the card. Today, you can’t seem to keep a credit card for more than a handful of years before it’s somehow stolen even though the card is still in your possession.

Identity theft is also rampant, and getting worse by the day, as millions of illegals in need of new identities flood across the southern border of the United States.

As noted by the Center for Immigration Studies, illegal immigrants are not “undocumented,” as most will obtain fraudulent documents through identity theft.⁶ In other words, they’re stealing the legal identities of Americans. In 2020, the total cost for identity theft and identity fraud was $56 billion — the highest in recorded history — and affected 39 million Americans.⁷

There’s no reason to believe theft and fraud won’t happen as microchipping becomes more commonplace. And that risk is in addition to the risks involved with government spying on and controlling both your behavior and spending once the microchips are connected to your personal finances and programmable digital currencies.

In a November 2019 interview with CNN,⁸ history professor and adviser to WEF founder Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari, warned that “humans are now hackable animals,” meaning, the technology exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and that can be very dangerous if misused.

He predicted that algorithms will increasingly be used to make decisions that historically have been made by humans, either yourself or someone else, including whether or not you’ll be hired for a particular job, whether you’ll be granted a loan, what scholastic curriculum you will follow and even who you will marry.

The Plan to Control the ‘Useless Masses’

1/ Klaus Schwab’s top advisor says advancements in technology will render people useless and worthless. ➡️They’ll need drugs and computer games to cope. https://t.co/dq6HfqQ0Be
https://t.co/dq6HfqQ0Be

— Gigi Sims (@GigiSims10) April 11, 2022

In another interview, Harari discussed what Schwab refers to as The Fourth Industrial Revolution (read: transhumanism), noting that we’re now learning to “produce bodies and minds” (meaning augmented bodies, and cloud and artificial intelligence-connected minds) and that one of the greatest challenges we face will be what to do with all the people that have become obsolete in the process.

How will unaugmented people find meaning in life when they’re basically “useless, meaningless”? How will they spend their time when there’s no work, no opportunity to move up in some kind of profession? His guess is that the answer will be “a combination of drugs and computer games.” I’ll let you decide if that’s a vision of utopia or hell on earth.

Nothing Will Be Private — Not Even Your Bodily Functions

The WEF’s plan for the IoB even includes biosensors that measure and monitor your biological functioning and emotional states. Already, the U.S. Pentagon and Profusa Inc. have collaborated on the development of a tiny implantable biosensor that detects disease by tracking chemical reactions inside your body.⁹

For example, it would be able to determine whether you’ve been infected with a virus like SARS-CoV-2 or influenza long before any symptoms emerge. As explained by Defense One, the biosensor consists of two parts:¹⁰

“One is a 3mm string of hydrogel, a material whose network of polymer chains is used in some contact lenses and other implants. Inserted under the skin with a syringe, the string includes a specially engineered molecule that sends a fluorescent signal outside of the body when the body begins to fight an infection.

The other part is an electronic component attached to the skin. It sends light through the skin, detects the fluorescent signal and generates another signal that the wearer can send to a doctor, website, etc. It’s like a blood lab on the skin that can pick up the body’s response to illness before the presence of other symptoms, like coughing.”

Now, the sensor allows a person’s biology to be examined at a distance via smartphone connectivity, and Profusa is backed by Google, the largest data mining company in the world.

Knowing that, it’s hard to imagine that your biological data won’t be used to boost Google’s profits and increase government control. While Profusa was expecting to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2021, it doesn’t appear to have been approved yet.

Other Monitoring and Tracking Devices in the Pipeline

Another invention that stands poised to track your health is biocompatible near-infrared quantum dot microneedle arrays. As explained in a 2019 Science Translational Medicine article,¹¹ this novel vaccine delivery system is able to “deliver patterns of near-infrared light-emitting microparticles to the skin” that can then be “imaged using modified smartphones.” In short, it would serve as an invisible tattoo of your vaccination record.

Bill Gates has also funded the development of a birth control microchip that can be turned on and off by remote control. The National Post writes:¹²

“The birth control microchip … would hold nearly two decades worth of a hormone commonly used in contraceptives and dispense 30 micrograms a day … The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has given more than $4.5 million to MicroCHIPS, Inc., to ‘develop personal system that enables women to regulate their fertility’ …”

In November 2019, Daré Bioscience, a San Diego-based biopharma company, announced¹³ it had reached an agreement to acquire MicroCHIPS Biotech and would be adding the birth control microchip to its portfolio. Interestingly, back in 2014, MicroCHIPS appeared confident it would be able to get the product to market in 2018, but as of 2022, it’s still in development.

Programmable Digital Currencies Are Next

Countries around the world are now working on a system for a central bank digital currency (CBDC), a fiat currency in digital form that is programmable so that you can only spend your money on certain things or in specific places, as desired by the issuer.

In the video above, WhatsHerFace comments on Canada’s 2021 announcement of its plan for a CBDC that will be universally accessible, even if you don’t have a bank account or a cell phone. What kind of device might fulfill that? An implanted microchip, of course, that has your digital identity and digital wallet on it.

In 2007, American business man and film producer Aaron Russo told “Infowars” that the goal of the New World Order was to create “a one world government, where everybody has an RFID chip implanted in them, and all money is to be in those chips.”

“There will be no more cash, and this [information] was given to me straight from Rockefeller himself,” Russo said. “So, they can take out any money they want, any time they want. They say, ‘You owe us this much in taxes,’ and they just take it out of your chip. Total control. And … if you’re protesting against what they’re doing, they’ll turn off your chip and you have nothing … It’s total control of the people.”

Fast-forward to April 2022, and Canada is now permanently enshrining its government-imposed sanctions against protesters in its new budget.¹⁴ As you may recall, the Canadian government shut down the bank accounts of participants in the trucker protest against vaccine mandates, and even those who donated as little as $25 to the protest.

Crowdfunding platforms will now be more tightly regulated, and the government is also launching a legislative review of cryptocurrencies. Just imagine the control the Canadian government would have had with a programmable CBDC. They could have prevented the donations from occurring at all, and shut down the account of anyone who even tried to give a few dollars to the freedom movement.

A Carefully Crafted Plan for World Domination?

All of this is happening at the same time that the World Health Organization, another deep state technocrat stronghold, is building a global vaccine passport system.¹⁵ Once CBDCs and a global vaccine passport system are up and running, it won’t be long before they’re combined into one — likely in the form of an implantable microchip.

We can predict this because they’ve told us that this is the plan. Just look through the WEF’s website descriptions of The Great Reset¹⁶ and Fourth Industrial Revolution.¹⁷

Read the Rockefeller Foundation’s April 2020 white paper,¹⁸ “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities,” which spells out the direction of social control through the implementation of permanent COVID-19 tracking and tracing measures.

Look into the ID2020 Alliance,¹⁹ a public-private partnership founded by Bill Gates’ GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, The Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft, Accenture and Ideo.org.²⁰ Members in the alliance include the Learning Economy Foundation,²¹ founded by the United Nations in 2018,²²Facebook, Mastercard, ShareRing, Simprints and others.²³

ID2020 began as a digital identity program for Bangladesh, and has since expanded to include “the implementation of digital technologies which tie with the [Learning Economy] Foundation’s vision of a world in which learners can map their educational progress to achieve their academic, employment, and life goals.”²⁴

In the end, everything will be connected to a single implantable device. Right now, it’s a tossup as to whether a vaccine passport or a digital identity platform will be the foundation for what’s to come, but what is certain is that whatever it’s called, it will include your digital identity, vaccination status and other health data, and programmable CBDCs.

Your digital identity, in turn, will include everything else that can be known about you through surveillance via implanted biosensors, your computer, smartphone, GPS, social media, online searches, purchases and spending habits. Imagine having an AI listening, watching and scoring every move you make and every heartbeat, and algorithms deciding what you can and cannot do based on your behavior, expression, social contacts and personal views.

Add to that technologies that can modify your behavior and emotional state with or without your knowledge, which is what the WEF’s 2020 briefing document on the IoB describes.²⁵ It may sound like science fiction, but this is what they intend to do. Every new technology, every new surveillance opportunity they bring forward is to further this aim.

For decades, we’ve embraced technologies with our mind set on convenience and/or safety. That’s always how they rope us in. But we will lose everything worth living for if we continue down this path without foolproof privacy safeguards and personal autonomy rights in place.

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Notes

^1, 25 WEF, Shaping the Future of the Internet of Bodies, July 2020

^2, 3 BBC April 11, 2022

⁴ PBS January 30, 2019

⁵ New York Post August 3, 2017

⁶ Center for Immigration Studies June 19, 2009

⁷ Privacy Bee How Much Does Identity Theft Cost?

⁸ CNN November 26, 2019

^9, 10 Defense One March 3, 2020

¹¹ Science Translational Medicine December 18, 2019; 11(523)

¹² National Post January 24, 2015

¹³ Xconomy.com November 15, 2019

¹⁴ Reclaim the Net April 9, 2022

¹⁵ The Counter Signal April 11, 2022

¹⁶ WEF Great Reset

¹⁷ WEF Fourth Industrial Revolution

¹⁸ The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)

¹⁹ Biometric Update September 20, 2019

²⁰ ID2020 Founding Partners

^21, 22 Gavi.org, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

²³ ID2020 General Partners

²⁴ Biometric Update August 5, 2021

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Karen DeYoung reported for the Washington Post Thursday that Russia sent a formal diplomatic note to the United States on Tuesday, accusing Washington and its NATO clients of insidiously subverting the peace process with Ukraine initiated at the Istanbul talks on March 29, and the subsequent withdrawal of Russian forces from the outskirts of Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, thus ending the month-long offensive in Ukraine.

The document, titled “On Russia’s concerns in the context of massive supplies of weapons and military equipment to the Kiev regime,” was forwarded to the State Department by the Russian Embassy in Washington, in which Russia accused NATO of trying to “pressure Ukraine to abandon peace negotiations with Russia in order to continue the bloodshed.”

Moscow also warned Washington that US and NATO shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.” Russia experts suggested Moscow, which had labeled weapons convoys coming into the country as legitimate military targets but had not thus far attacked them, might be preparing to do so.

“They have targeted supply depots in Ukraine itself, where some of these supplies have been stored,” George Beebe, former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and Russia adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney, told the news outlet.

“The real question is do they go beyond attempting to target the weapons on Ukrainian territory, try to hit the supply convoys themselves and perhaps the NATO countries on the Ukrainian periphery” that serve as transfer points for the US supplies.

If Russian forces stumble in the next phase of the war as they did in the first,

“then I think the chances that Russia targets NATO supplies on NATO territory go up considerably,” Beebe said. “There has been an assumption on the part of a lot of us in the West that we could supply the Ukrainians really without limits and not bear significant risk of retaliation from Russia,” he said. “I think the Russians want to send a message here that that’s not true.”

Among the items Russia identified as “most sensitive” were “multiple-launch rocket systems,” such as Slovakia’s illicit deal with NATO for transferring its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for the transatlantic military alliance delivering four Patriot missile systems to Slovakia, and the Soviet-era Strela-10, SA-8, SA-10, SA-12, SA-13 and SA-14 mobile air defense systems, with range higher than Stingers and having capability to hit cruise missiles, and myriads of other advanced multiple rocket launchers, that NATO covertly provided to Ukraine.

The Czech Republic had delivered tanks, multiple rocket launchers, howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine among military shipments that had reached hundreds of millions of dollars and would continue, two Czech defense sources confided to Reuters.

Defense sources confirmed a shipment of five T-72 tanks and five BVP-1, or BMP-1, infantry fighting vehicles seen on rail cars in photographs on Twitter and video footage last week. “For several weeks, we have been supplying heavy ground equipment – I am saying it generally but by definition it is clear that this includes tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, howitzers and multiple rocket launchers,” a senior defense official said.

“What has gone from the Czech Republic is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” The senior defense official said the Czechs were also supplying “a range of anti-aircraft weaponry.” Independent defense analyst Lukas Visingr said “short-range air-defense systems Strela-10, or SA-13 Gopher in NATO terminology, had been spotted on a train apparently bound for Ukraine.”

Russia accused the Western powers of violating “rigorous principles” governing the transfer of weapons to conflict zones, and of being oblivious to “the threat of high-precision weapons falling into the hands of radical nationalists, extremists and bandit forces in Ukraine.”

Washington, the diplomatic demarche said, was pressuring other countries to stop any military and technical cooperation with Russia, and those with Soviet-era weapons to transfer them to Ukraine. “We call on the United States and its allies to stop the irresponsible militarization of Ukraine, which implies unpredictable consequences for regional and international security,” the note added.

Russia’s “paranoid attitude” accusing Washington and its NATO clients of scuttling the peace process with Ukraine and orchestrating a proxy war on Russia’s vulnerable western flank by funding, training, arming and internationally legitimizing Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist militias in order to destabilize and provoke Russia aside, in the spirit of apparent “reconciliation and multilateralism” defining the Biden administration’s approach to conducting international diplomacy, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken handed over the “power of attorney” to the Ukrainian leadership to reach a negotiated settlement with Russia without any pressure, whatsoever, from Washington to escalate hostilities with its arch-rival.

On April 3, confirming in an NBC News interview that Ukrainian President Zelensky had Washington’s full confidence to reach a peaceful settlement with Russia, Blinken, while assuming the air of “magnanimity and rapprochement,” revealed that President Joe Biden’s administration would support whatever the Ukrainian people wanted to do to bring the war to an end.

“We’ll be looking to see what Ukraine is doing and what it wants to do,” Blinken said. “And if it concludes that it can bring this war to an end, stop the death and destruction and continue to assert its independence and its sovereignty – and ultimately that requires the lifting of sanctions – of course, we will allow that.”

Blinken argued with overtones of diplomatic sophistry that although Putin had allegedly “failed to accomplish his objectives” in Ukraine – “subjugating Kyiv, demonstrating Russia’s military prowess and dividing NATO members” – he said it still made sense to pursue a negotiated settlement.

“Even though he’s been set back, even though I believe this is already a strategic defeat for Vladimir Putin, the death and destruction that he’s wreaking every single day in Ukraine … are terrible, and so there’s also a strong interest in bringing those to an end.”

Lending credence to ostensible “American neutrality” and “hands-off approach” to the Ukraine conflict, the Wall Street Journal published a misleading report on April 1 that German chancellor Olaf Scholz had offered Volodymyr Zelensky a chance for peace days before the launch of the Russian military offensive, but the Ukrainian president turned it down.

The newly elected German chancellor told Zelensky in Munich on February 19 “that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia,” the Journal revealed. The newspaper also claimed that “the pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.”

However, Zelensky rejected the offer to make the concession and avoid confrontation, saying that

“Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.”

While making the preposterous allegation that the hapless Ukrainian leadership vetoed NATO’s “flexible and conciliatory approach” to peacefully settle the dispute in order to absolve the transatlantic military alliance for its confrontational approach to Russia since the inception in 1949, the Journal report conveniently overlooked the crucial fact that last November, the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership.

The agreement unequivocally confirmed “Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO” and “rejected the Crimean decision to re-unify with Russia” following the 2014 Maidan coup. Then in December, Russia, in the last-ditch effort to peacefully resolve the dispute, proposed a peace treaty with the US and NATO.

The central Russian proposal was a written agreement assuring that Ukraine would not join the NATO military alliance and, in return, Russia would drawdown its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders. When the proposed treaty was contemptuously rebuffed by Washington, it appeared the die was cast for Russia’s inevitable invasion of Ukraine.

Following the announcement of drawdown of Russian forces in Ukraine, specifically scaling back Russian offensive north of the capital, by the Russian delegation at the Istanbul peace initiative on March 29, the Ukrainian delegation, among other provisions, demanded “security guarantees in terms similar to Article 5 of the NATO charter,” the collective defense clause of the transatlantic military alliance.

CNN reported on April 1 that Western officials were taken aback by “the surprising Ukrainian proposal.”

“We are in constant discussion with Ukrainians about ways that we can help ensure that they are sovereign and secure,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said. “But there is nothing specific about security guarantees that I can speak to at this time.”

“Ukraine is not a NATO member,” Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab told the BBC when asked whether the UK is prepared to become a guarantor of Ukrainian independence. “We’re not going to engage Russia in direct military confrontation,” he added.

While noting that Russian peace negotiations were “nothing more than a smokescreen,” Western diplomats contended that an Article 5-type commitment to Ukraine was unlikely given that the US and many of its allies, including the UK, were not willing to put their troops in direct confrontation with Russian forces. The theory that Russia would not attack Ukraine if it had Western security guarantees appears to still be a bigger risk than the US and its allies are willing to take.

As a way for Russia to “save face in the negotiations,” the Ukrainians even went to the extent of suggesting that any such security guarantees would not apply to the separatist territories in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. However, a number of US and Western officials have taken a skeptical approach to potential security guarantees, with many saying it is still premature to discuss any contingencies as the negotiations proceed.

Contradicting the misleading reports hailing Ukraine’s political and military leadership as purported “masters of their own destinies,” President Joe Biden told the EU leaders at a summit last month in Brussels that “any notion that we are going to be out of this in a month is wrong”, and that the EU and NATO needed to prepare for “a long-term pressure campaign against Russia.”

US and European officials voiced skepticism over Russia’s “sincerity and commitment” towards the peace talks, underlining that only a full ceasefire, troop withdrawal and return of captured territory to Ukraine would be enough to trigger discussions over lifting sanctions on Russia’s economy.

“The notion that you would reward Putin for occupying territory doesn’t make sense … it would be very, very difficult to countenance” a senior EU official told the Financial Times. “There’s a disconnect between these negotiations, what really happens on the ground, and the total cynicism of Russia. I think we need to give them a reality check,” the official added.

Western countries were discussing both “enforcement of existing sanctions” and drawing up “potential additional measures” to increase pressure on Russian president Vladimir Putin, senior EU and US officials told the British newspaper. They were not discussing a possible timeframe for easing sanctions, they said.

Advising Ukrainians to hold out instead of rushing for securing peace deal with Russia, the Sunday Times reported, senior British officials were urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to instruct his negotiators to refuse to make concessions during peace negotiations with Russian counterparts.

A senior government source said there were concerns that allies were “over-eager” to secure an early peace deal, adding that a settlement should be reached only when Ukraine is in the strongest possible position.

In a phone call and subsequently during a surprise visit to Kyiv, Boris Johnson warned President Zelensky that President Putin was a “liar and a bully” who would use talks to “wear you down and force you to make concessions.” The British prime minister also told MPs it was “certainly inconceivable that any sanctions could be taken off simply because there is a ceasefire.” London was making sure there was “no backsliding on sanctions by any of our friends and partners around the world,” he added.

Considering the backdrop of the Russo-Ukraine War that was deliberately orchestrated by NATO powers to insidiously destabilize and internationally isolate Russia, it stretches credulity that the powerless Ukrainian leadership “wields veto power” over NATO’s policy to reach a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Are readers gullible enough to assume the Ukrainian proposals for a peace treaty with Russia were put forth without prior consultation with NATO patrons and the latter cannot exercise enough leverage to compellingly persuade the impervious Ukrainian leadership to reach a peaceful settlement with Russia?

In conclusion, it’s obvious the credulous Ukrainian leadership’s insistence on seeking the EU membership amidst the war and demanding security guarantees in terms similar to Article 5 of the NATO charter instead of imploring for immediate ceasefire to save Ukrainian lives were clearly the deal-breaker stipulations that were deliberately inserted in the draft of Ukrainian proposals by perfidious NATO advisers to the naïve Ukrainian politicians in order to sabotage the peace negotiations with Russia.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

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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There has been so much bad news about the vaccines in the last few months, it even leaked into the mainstream media.  I think the cabal’s plan, at least in the US but probably everywhere, is to stop propping the ludicrous vaccine claims up and allow them to die a natural death. I explain why below.

There was just too much bad news, too few getting boosted, too much resistance from parents. Getting 8 or 10 doses into everyone was not going to happen.  The terrified obedient masses were becoming fewer and fewer.

For example, here is one story that got lots of traction: ABC News covered the fact that “At least 72 COVID cases in the fully vaccinated resulted from the Gridiron dinner.”  Not only did Nancy Pelosi test positive, but several other members of Biden’s Cabinet and many other Washingtonian glitterati did too.  All of whom had to have been vaccinated in order to attend.

There was plenty of happy talk that the afflicted politicians in DC had only mild COVID cases. Good for them. But, if vaccinations caused them to become asymptomatic spreaders instead of spreaders with symptoms, who would know to stay home while sick, the vaccines could actually be doing more harm than good in terms of transmission. They could be causing more COVID cases, not less.

By now, it has to be apparent to everyone who walks by a newsstand or turns on the TV that the media are begging much too hard for more shots.

It must be obvious to all that the shots do not prevent spread and therefore there is no logical way you can mandate them.  Because if my shot does not protect you (and only with lots of fairy dust will it protect me) why would you have any interest in whether or not I am vaccinated?

Once you stop caring about my vaccination status, the cabal’s nexus of control starts to fall apart. That was their ace in the hole. Time for them to move on to something else.

The kicker for childhood vaccines: the NY state Department of Health study of vaccine efficacy in children.  After 2 months, efficacy in the 5-11 year olds had fallen to 12%.

In other words, 7 out of 8 vaccinated kids derived no benefit after 2 months, only risk.  The data were derived from 365,000 children, and apparently there was no way CDC could spin them, or 12% was the best spin they could put on the data. This report is a huge obstacle to universal child vaccinations. They cabal cannot surmount it.

It is important to mention again–because we keep forgetting–that while the vaccines are nominally licensed for adults, in fact you can only find the EUA (unlicensed) product in the US, and legally an EUA is experimental–and therefore forcing someone to be vaccinated is a Nuremberg violation and a violation of federal law.

The imposition of mandates for these experimental gene therapy products is therefore a crime, being committed by states, federal government and certain companies and other institutions.  It seems that because US law was not designed for situations in which the government is the criminal, it has been very difficult to use the judicial system to change what is happening.  But surely if this persisted much longer an honest judge somewhere would finally rule that the vaccines are experimental and the COVID mandate house of cards would then collapse. Like Humpty Dumpty (it is Easter today after all):

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put COVID mandates together again

What else has been happening that undermines the vaccine story?  Well, in addition to all the collapsing athletes, there is now a large collection of mayors suddenly dropping dead throughout Germany.

In Australia, Queensland’s health minister just admitted that ambulances are being summoned for a lot more calls for cardiac events and sudden deaths:  40% more to be exact.  Thanks to Igor Chudov for following this story, and including a video of the clueless minister admitting it, but having no idea why…

Then there were the 3 insurance companies, one each from the US, India and Germany, that admitted there were about 40% more deaths than expected in working-age people in the second half of 2021.  The German official who blew the whistle, a CEO or VP, was immediately fired, which is a strong indication he was telling the truth.

Three doctor whistleblowers released a large cache of data from the military’s DMED database showing huge increases in service-member deaths.  There has been a lot of confusion about these data.  In part, that is because the military then reissued its data for the preceding several years, making the 2021 comparison look less dire.  Mathew Crawford has some ideas about what really happened to the data.  The only thing that is absolutely clear so far is that there has been a coverup, and the health of vaccinated members of the military appears to have taken a dive. But we don’t know how deep.

Everyone in the world must have heard the term ‘myocarditis’ by now, and knows that it is a vaccine injury.  A lot of people also know that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said post-vaccination myocarditis was extremely “rare but mild,” except it isn’t and she lied. The rate of myocarditis she cited is at least 10 times too low.  About 1 in 2000 young men aged 18-24 sought care for this diagnosis after getting their second mRNA shot.

In fact, CDC was so intensely worried about blowback regarding its recommendation to vaccinate teens (despite the risk of myocarditis) it got the heads of about 20 professional medical organizations to sign on to a declaration supporting CDC’s recommendation.  Wonder how much CDC paid for that. Getting such back-up was an unusual move, but perhaps unsurprising for risk-averse bureaucrats who worry about their own butt but not anyone else’s. Rochelle even mentions these “cosigners” from many medical organizations in her ABC-TV interview.  Collecting a bunch of “co-signers” is actually the proof that CDC knew its vaccine recommendation was going to considerably harm children.

While no one in a federal health agency has admitted it, many people must be aware that myocarditis is only the tip of the COVID vaccine injury iceberg.  Myocarditis got attention because it’s life-threatening and almost always happens within 4 days of the second shot–it can’t be written off as coincidence, the way heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, sudden deaths and perhaps many other diagnoses have been.

As if there wasn’t enough bad vaccine news, there was information from the Medicare database that FDA posted last July, but it only recently got attention. FDA revealed that heart attacks, pulmonary emboli, disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC, a life-threatening, bleeding plus clotting disorder) and ITP (another bleeding disorder) were related to the Pfizer vaccination in Medicare beneficiaries.  FDA promised to study this rigorously, but instead remained silent, and subsequently has never denied the relationship.

And then there is ivermectin.  So many ivermectin stories have been leaking into the popular press.  Tennessee’s legislature made ivermectin essentially an over-the-counter drug last week.  New Hampshire’s house voted in favor of this as well, while the NH Senate is now taking it up.  Kansas and several other states gave healthcare providers an immunity guarantee for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID.  Kansas also strengthened religious exemptions, effectively undermining school vaccine mandates.

Coupled with stories about lawsuits against hospitals for refusing to supply ivermectin to dying relatives, like this one, people are finally realizing there is probably something to this drug, and they have been cheated.  They were given a shot that barely works, is unsafe, and they were stopped from getting the good drug.  And what if they lost their business to the lockdowns? There must be a lot of anger simmering by now.  I imagine the Great Reset cabal must be worried about this, and has decided to loosen its grip for the moment and hopefully let off some citizen steam.

There is more surprising vaccine news.  While many institutions are still imposing mandates (and we need to find out what $ carrots were given to universities and other entities to impose illegal mandates of experimental vaccines) in other, surprising places the mandates are disappearing.  Out west in Woke Land, the Washington state Department of Health said it would not require COVID vaccines to attend school after all.  Despite Gavin Newsom’s 2021 executive order mandating vaccines for school kids as soon as they are licensed, California’s Department of Health has just done the same thing that Washington’s did:  killed the COVID vaccine mandate for the 2022-23 school year.

Finally, Fauci himself and other media now openly admit the vaccines will not take us to herd immunity (no matter how many shots we get).

This is why I am convinced the ship is turning.  Those states’ health departments take their orders from CDC and DC.  I do not think FDA is going to be issuing any more fake licenses for COVID vaccines. [I say fake because a) the vaccines do not meet licensure criteria, and b) after issuing the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines licenses for adults, neither licensed product has been distributed in the US for actual use.]. The unvaxxed kids will be spared.  Hallelujah!

During the April 6, 2022 Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting, which I live-blogged and summarized, both briefers and committee members acknowledged that the neutralizing antibody titers that have been used as a surrogate for immunity in order to issue EUAs, were in fact not valid surrogates.

This had been obvious for awhile, but a recent Israeli study in healthcare workers made it crystal clear.  While neutralizing antibody titers rose tenfold after a fourth vaccination, by 2 months out the Pfizer vaccine had only 30% efficacy against infection, and the Moderna vaccine had only 11%.  So the high antibody titers were, in fact, meaningless.

This is really important, because Pfizer and Moderna have been relying on titers to get their vaccines okayed for the younger age groups, those below 16 and 18 respectively.  They don’t have data showing the vaccines are actually reducing cases by 50% or more, which is the standard FDA said was necessary.  They don’t have data showing that the vaccines prevent serious cases or deaths, another standard.

Up until now, FDA accepted titers in lieu of actual efficacy results from clinical trials to issue its EUAs for children–but with the recent VRBPAC admissions, which must have been planned in advance (otherwise why did multiple people at the meeting discuss it as settled fact when they had never mentioned it before?) FDA can no longer do so.

Another thing that happened at the VRBPAC meeting was that Peter Marks, the head of FDA’s Center for Biologics and highest FDA official there, said that if a new type of COVID vaccine is developed for the next booster, then the current vaccines would no longer be used, because it would be too confusing (according to STAT).  I believe this was another effort to prepare us for the demise of the current mRNA vaccines.

The fall of the vaccines means the fall of the vaccine passports. This ought to slow down the imposition of CBDCs and all-digital money for a bit. If we don’t have to show our vaccine certificate to go shop, eat, etc., (and people stop being fearful of catching something from each Other) people will be a lot less inclined to “show their papers” to go about their lives. It’s our job to explain over and over that this was how the Nazis maintained control.

Here I read the tea leaves

If there is a new vaccine waiting in the wings, FDA and its briefers were not telling us about it at the VRBPAC meeting, which was the time to do so.  For right now, I think the current crop of vaccines and the vaccine passports are going away.  I don’t think the authorities anticipate another severe COVID wave in the foreseeable future…as most people now have Omicron immunity.  The COVID fear will dissipate.

The original Wuhan strain appeared out of nowhere. No natural progenitor could be found.  And the original Omicron strain appears to have also originated in a lab.  If I was a member of the Great Reset cabal, I would be quite hesitant about releasing yet a third lab-engineered virus on the population.  Because millions of people will be looking for one, and it won’t take long before its laboratory provenance is discovered.  Then the pitchforks might really come out.

On the other hand, I do believe the cabal has bet the farm on their Reset, they can’t go back, and they are simply moving on to another means of accomplishing it besides COVID.  The over-the-top WHO Treaty/Constitution and its amendments designed to assume sovereignty over the world in the event of a pandemic is an ambitious Plan B.

But I don’t think it will fly.  Too many people know the WHO was wrong about virtually everything regarding management of this pandemic, not to mention the 2009 swine flu.  And then there was that little matter of WHO undertaking the SOLIDARITY Trial, in which WHO officials deliberately poisoned over 1,000 COVID patients with excessive doses of hydroxychloroquine and in many cases failed to obtain signed informed consents. The WHO could be liable for manslaughter.

Will Russia and China really agree to give up their sovereignty to Tedros?  China, maybe.  Brazil?  India?  Indonesia?  Japan?  Nigeria? Can all of their leaders, and their local power centers, have been sufficiently corrupted to turn over their nations to the cabal?  I think that could be a stretch.

I suspect the cabal will try their best to get a legal OK to take over the world with the upcoming WHO pandemic treaty, but it won’t fly.  Too many people already know about these plans.

After the WHO, the cabal will move on to something else, Plan C.  Climate catastrophe?  Aliens?  I’m guessing it will be a few years before we get hit with another nasty bug.  By then maybe the fiat currencies will have finally crashed, and the cabal won’t have as tight control of the reins. By then, Fauci, Walensky, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Trudeau, Draghi will hopefully be unpleasant memories.

I am not thinking we will all sing kumbaya. I expect a good deal of misery as the cabal pushes all the levers at its disposal.

The Shanghai city and port closure (China’s largest city and the world’s largest port) seems to me a deliberate attempt to interfere with worldwide transit of goods and to reduce food availability. The Chinese know how to treat COVID. They make the drugs and herbs. There is no need for them to lock down.

We are finally understanding that all these awful government policies were deliberate — intended to cement control over and impoverish us. But maybe we can start to build something a whole lot better.

We are shaking loose of the educational indoctrination system, the ruination of our foods, the user-unfriendly and health-damaging healthcare system. We are starting to grasp that our governments acted with malice aforethought to stupefy and eventually enslave us.

People are breaking free and taking responsibility for their future. Where I live, people are learning self-sufficiency skills, creating home-schooling coops, building greenhouses and growing food. The migration to the countryside was deliberate.

A better life? It just takes everybody waking up. Despite all the acrimony we have faced, the time is ripe to help our fellows see things clearly. We have to love them, help them, meet them where they are. Maybe it is just to talk about the Gridiron dinner. Or ivermectin. They won’t get it in a day. But keep trying. It is our only solution.

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Decades of unsanctioned wars and foreign interference have proved devastating for Baghdad, as Iraq continues to struggle with political instability, economic collapse, and widespread social unrest.

When the city of Baghdad was founded by Abbasid Caliph Abu Jaafar al-Mansur in 762 CE, it was given the epithet of “Madinat ul-Salam” – in English, the City of Peace.

While it certainly experienced long periods of peace, such that it was able to contribute to the rise of the Islamic Golden Age during the reign of Harun al-Rashid in the 9th century, it was always a victim of its own success.

As the Islamic seat of power and learning, it attracted the avarice of marauders and invaders. Most notably, it was sacked by Mongol invaders led by Hulagu Khan in 1258 CE, who proceeded to destroy the famed House of Wisdom that was home to the likes of the 9th century’s polymath al-Kindi or his contemporary al-Khwarizmi, whose algorithms are now essential to all modern technology.

Of course, since the departure of the Mongols, Baghdad has been the focus of numerous conquests and reconquests by rival empires. It has been under the sway of the Ottomans, Seljuks, Safavids, the British Empire and, most recently, the United States as part of its destructive global War on Terror.

Since Baghdad was last subjected to a foreign invader in 2003, it has yet to rise again and continues to suffer the after-effects of an unsanctioned American-led war based on lies.

The lie of WMDs

It is an established part of the historical record that former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, possessed chemical and biological weapons. These weapons were openly used by his government during the war with Iran in the 1980s, with the Iraqis themselves also coming under Iranian chemical weapon attack.

However, it has since been established beyond all doubt that Iraq’s stockpiles of such weapons and its wider weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) programme had been decommissioned ever since Saddam’s forces were defeated and expelled from Kuwait following the US-led Operation Desert Storm in early 1991.

As part of the ensuing “peace”, Iraq had to submit itself to extensive United Nations weapons inspections which, as is now undeniable, succeeded in its mission of disarming Saddam’s regime.

Nevertheless, and in the hasty run-up to the war, the White House under George W. Bush and the British government under Tony Blair began a wholesale campaign of deceptions and exaggerations in an attempt to amp up the public’s fears of Iraqi WMD deployment against the West.

This was partially effective as large segments of the media parroted their governments’ line without question. On the other hand – and despite the very recent memory of 9/11 – it was wholly ineffective with the public themselves, leading to some of the biggest protests in global history, with three million descending on the streets of Rome alone, and one million people demonstrating in London.

Still, the cries of millions in the West went entirely unheard by their respective governments and a “coalition of the willing” was formed because the United States was unable to get their upcoming war on Iraq sanctioned by the United Nations, thereby breaching international law when US-and UK-led troops invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Iraqi brain drain

Conventional military operations against the Iraqi armed forces did not last long, and Baghdad itself came under a ferocious “shock and awe” aerial bombardment campaign before falling on 9 April – the latest in a long line of destructive conquests of the unfortunate city.

Image on the right: At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.” (Source: Consortiumnews)

Very few things were spared, and very few living creatures emerged unscathed. Widespread looting of priceless cultural and historical artefacts took place – with US forces themselves often implicated – and this included the torching of the Iraqi National Library and National Archives, containing manuscripts that were millennia old and part of the cultural and intellectual heritage of humanity. Even animals were not spared, as hundreds of captive animals died of starvation at Baghdad Zoo.

But perhaps worse of all is that the ongoing nightmare of violence that was ushered in from the fall of Baghdad continues to this day.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Iran-backed Shia militias – many of whom worked for the interior ministry that was under the control of the Badr Brigades – began a concerted campaign to specifically target Iraq’s intelligentsia for assassination.

Countless academics, scientists, engineers, and medical doctors were abducted and murdered. This led to such fear that many took their families and left their country, leading to an Iraqi brain drain.

This marked a dark hour for Iraqi academia as, despite the oppressive nature of the regime, Saddam’s Baathist government encouraged education and almost totally eradicated illiteracy by making refusal to learn to read, write, or learning numeracy a criminal offence.

Education was not only totally free, but it was also open to any citizen of any Arab League country as part of the Baathists’ pan-Arab nationalist agenda.

Now, however, Iraq’s education system is in dire straits. Not only are about one-fifth of the entire population illiterate, but UNICEF says that school enrolment rates are low and dropping, as children are forced out of education in order to work to support families that have lost their main breadwinners to the incessant internecine conflicts that have wracked Iraq since 2003.

Clearly, and considering Iraq’s rich intellectual heritage, such a state of affairs ought to be cause for not only national concern, but also international.

A lack of education is known to lead to greater social inequality, which increases poverty and also contributes to allowing radical organisations such as the Shia militias or the Islamic State (IS) group to easily recruit desperate people.

What’s next for Baghdad?

Although IS was declared defeated in 2017 and Iraq is technically at peace, the country’s problems cannot be limited to one extreme group alone.

Arguably, the main reason why Baghdad has failed to stagger to its feet once more after the destruction wrought upon it since 1990 and especially since 2003 is the state of the country’s wider political situation.

Iraq is under the sway of competing global powers, particularly the United States and Iran. However, Tehran has almost certainly won the tug-of-war for influence and control in Baghdad’s halls of power, with Iraq slowly drifting towards becoming a theocratic rump state at Iran’s beck and call.

Iran not only influences Iraqi politics, but habitually uses Iraqi territory to settle scores against its rivals. This has included firing salvos of rockets against US targets, engaging its militia proxies to assassinate dissident academics, and openly bombing targets in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, claiming to target Israeli interests.

Tehran successfully does all this while the Iraqi authorities do very little – a marked departure from relations between the two countries in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War.

While the government may do very little, the Iraqi people themselves have held a series of protest movements, most recently one that began in 2019 that led to a brutal crackdown. More than 600 demonstrators calling for reforms and an end to foreign – especially Iranian – interference were killed by Iraqi security forces and allied Shia militias.

In all likelihood, and as Iraq’s economy continues to freefall despite windfall profits generated from fears of oil scarcity due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is almost certain that we will continue to see periodic protest movements. Even with economics aside, the politicised judiciary, sectarianism, and lack of accountability for corrupt officials will also provide fuel for demonstrations.

The more protesters see their peacefulness is being met with deadly violence and torture, the less peaceful these protests are likely to be.

In a country where IS managed to make it to Baghdad’s city limits in 2014, a large-scale, armed insurrection similar to that seen in other Arab Spring countries such as Syria will pose an existential threat to the state set up by the US in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

This could either lead to a popular revolt that overthrows decades of foreign interventionism, finally restoring Baghdad to its status as the City of Peace, or it could drown the city in blood as powers like Iran pour resources into the conflict to ensure they do not lose their most valuable imperial possession.

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While claiming to defend democracy, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has outlawed his opposition, ordered his rivals’ arrest, and presided over the disappearance and assassination of dissidents across the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has framed his country’s war against Russia as a battle for democracy itself. In a carefully choreographed address to US Congress on March 16, Zelensky stated, “Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided. The destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy.”

US corporate media has responded by showering Zelensky with fawning press, driving a campaign for his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and inspiring a flamboyant musical tribute to himself and the Ukrainian military during the 2022 Grammy awards ceremony on April 3.

Western media has looked the other way, however, as Zelensky and top officials in his administration have sanctioned a campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination of local Ukrainian lawmakers accused of collaborating with Russia. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia.

“There is one less traitor in Ukraine,” Internal Affairs Ministry advisor Anton Geraschenko stated in endorsement of the murder of a Ukrainian mayor accused of collaborating with Russia.

Zelensky has further exploited the atmosphere of war to outlaw an array of opposition parties and order the arrest of his leading rivals. His authoritarian decrees have triggered the disappearance, torture and even murder of an array of human rights activists, communist and leftist organizers, journalists and government officials accused of “pro-Russian” sympathies.

The Ukrainian SBU security services has served as the enforcement arm of the officially authorized campaign of repression. With training from the CIA and close coordination with Ukraine’s state-backed neo-Nazi paramilitaries, the SBU has spent the past weeks filling its vast archipelago of torture dungeons with political dissidents.

On the battlefield, meanwhile, the Ukrainian military has engaged in a series of atrocities against captured Russian troops and proudly exhibited its sadistic acts on social media. Here too, the perpetrators of human rights abuses appear to have received approval from the upper echelons of Ukrainian leadership.

While Zelensky spouts bromides about the defense of democracy before worshipful Western audiences, he is using the war as a theater for enacting a blood-drenched purge of political rivals, dissidents and critics.

“The war is being used to kidnap, imprison and even kill opposition members who express themselves critical of the government,” a left-wing activist beaten and persecuted by Ukraine’s security services commented this April. “We must all fear for our freedom and our lives.”

Torture and enforced disappearances “common practices” of Ukraine’s SBU

When a US-backed government seized power in Kiev following the Euromaidan regime change operation of 2013-14, Ukraine’s government embarked on a nationwide purge of political elements deemed pro-Russian or insufficiently nationalistic. The passage of “decommunization” laws by the Ukrainian parliament further eased the persecution of leftist elements and the prosecution of activists for political speech.

The post-Maidan regime has focused its wrath on Ukrainians who have advocated a peace settlement with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east, those who have documented human rights abuses by the Ukrainian military, and members of communist organizations. Dissident elements have faced the constant threat of ultra-nationalist violence, imprisonment, and even murder.

The Ukrainian security service known as the SBU has served as the main enforcer of the post-Maidan government’s campaign of domestic political repression. Pro-Western monitors including the United Nations Office of the High Commission (UN OHCR) and Human Rights Watch have accused the SBU of systematically torturing political opponents and Ukrainian dissidents with near-total impunity.

The UN OHCR found in 2016 that “arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment of such conflict-related detainees were common practice of SBU… A former Kharkiv SBU officer explained, ‘For the SBU, the law virtually does not exist as everything that is illegal can be either classified or explained by referring to state necessity.”

Yevhen Karas, the founder of the infamous neo-Nazi C14 unit, has detailed the close relationship his gang and other extreme right factions have enjoyed with the SBU. The SBU “informs not only us, but also Azov, the Right Sector, and so on,” Karas boasted in a 2017 interview.

Kiev officially endorses assassinating Ukrainian mayors for negotiating with Russia

Since Russia launched its military operation inside Ukraine, the SBU has hunted down local officials that decided to accept humanitarian supplies from Russia or negotiated with Russian forces to arrange corridors for civilian evacuations.

On March 1, for example, Volodymyr Strok, the mayor of the eastern city of Kreminna in the Ukrainian-controlled side of Lugansk, was kidnapped by men in military uniform, according to his wife, and shot in the heart.

On March 3, pictures of Strok’s visibly tortured body appeared. A day before his murder, Struk had reportedly urged his Ukrainian colleagues to negotiate with pro-Russian officials.

Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, celebrated the mayor’s murder, declaring on his Telegram page (see below): “There is one less traitor in Ukraine. The mayor of Kreminna in Luhansk region, former deputy of Luhansk parliament was found killed.”

According to Geraschenko, Strok had been judged by the “court of the people’s tribunal.”

Telegram post by Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, celebrating the assassination of “traitor” and Kreminna Mayor Volodymyr Struk

The Ukrainian official therefore delivered a chilling message to anyone choosing to seek cooperation with Russia: do so and lose your life.

On March 7, the mayor of Gostomel, Yuri Prylipko, was found murdered. Prylipko had reportedly entered into negotiations with the Russian military to organize a humanitarian corridor for the evacuation of his city’s residents – a red line for Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who had long been in conflict with the mayor’s office.

Next, on March 24, Gennady Matsegora, the mayor of Kupyansk in northeastern Ukraine, released a video (below) appealing to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration for the release of his daughter, who had been held hostage by agents of the Ukrainian SBU intelligence agency.

Then there was the murder of Denis Kireev, a top member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, who was killed in broad daylight in Kiev after the first round of talks with Russia. Kireev was subsequently accused in local Ukrainian media of “treason.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that “there would be consequences for collaborators” indicates that these atrocities have been sanctioned by the highest levels of government.

As of today, eleven mayors from various towns in Ukraine are missing. Western media outlets have been following the Kiev line without exception, claiming that all mayors been arrested by the Russian military. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied the charge, however, and little evidence exists to corroborate Kiev’s line about the missing mayors.

Zelensky outlaws political opposition, authorizes arrest of rivals and war propaganda blitz

When war erupted with Russia this February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a series of decrees formalizing Kiev’s campaign against political opposition and dissident speech.

In a March 19 executive order, Zelensky invoked martial law to ban 11 opposition parties. The outlawed parties consisted of the entire left-wing, socialist or anti-NATO spectrum in Ukraine. They included the For Life Party, the Left Opposition, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Union of Left Forces, Socialists, the Party of Shariy, Ours, State, Opposition Bloc and the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.

Openly fascist and pro-Nazi parties like the Azov National Corps were left untouched by the presidential decree, however.

“The activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response,” President Zelensky stated.

As he wiped out his opposition, Zelensky ordered an unprecedented domestic propaganda initiative to nationalize all television news broadcasting and combine all channels into a single 24 hour channel called “United News” to “tell the truth about war.”

Next, on April 12, Zelensky announced the arrest of his principal political rival, Viktor Medvedchuk, by Ukraine’s SBU security services.

Medvedchuk’s face is clearly bruised, apparently a result of beatings from Zelensky’s SBU goons. Don’t expect any questions about this image to appear in the pages of the NYT or in CNN’s 24 hour media circus. Can’t allow anything to undermine the pro-war narrative. pic.twitter.com/A0qhhmeaj8

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) April 12, 2022

The founder of the second largest party in Ukraine, the now-illegal Patriots for Life, Medvedchuk is the de facto representative of the country’s ethnic Russian population. Though Patriots for Life is regarded as “pro-Russia,” in part because of his close relations with Vladimir Putin, the new chairman of the party has condemned Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine.

Members of the state-sponsored neo-Nazi Azov Battalion’s National Corps attacked Medvedchuk’s home in March 2019, accusing him of treason and demanding his arrest.

In August 2020, Azov’s National Corps opened fire on a bus carrying representatives of Medvedchuk’s party, wounding several with rubber-coated steel bullets.

Zelensky’s administration escalated the assault on his top opponent in February 2021 when he shuttered several media outlets controlled by Medvedchuk. The US State Department openly endorsed the president’s move, declaring that the United States “supports Ukrainian efforts to counter Russia’s malign influence…”

Three months later, Kiev jailed Medvedchuk and charged him with treason. Zelensky justified locking away his leading rival on the grounds that he needed to “fight against the danger of Russian aggression in the information arena.”

Medvedchuk escaped house arrest at the onset of the war between Russia and Ukraine, but is a captive once again, and may be used as collateral for a post-war prisoner swap with Russia.

Under Zelensky’s watch, “the war is being used to kidnap, imprison and even kill opposition members”

Since Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24, Ukraine’s SBU security service had been on a rampage against any and all iterations of internal political opposition. Leftist Ukrainian activists have faced particularly harsh treatment, including kidnapping and torture.

This March 3 in the city of Dnipro, SBU officers accompanied by Azov ultra-nationalists raided the home of activists with the Livizja (Left) organization, which has organized against social spending cuts and right-wing media propaganda. While one activist said the Azov member “cut my hair off with a knife,” the state security agents proceeded to torture her husband, Alexander Matjuschenko, pressing a gun barrel to his head and forcing him to repeatedly belt out the nationalist salute, “Slava Ukraini!”

“Then they put bags over our heads, tied our hands with tape and took us to the SBU building in a car. There they continued to interrogate us and threatened to cut off our ears,” Matjuschenko’s wife told the leftist German publication Junge Welt.

The Azov members and SBU agents recorded the torture session and published images of Matjuschenko’s bloodied face online.

The torture of left-wing activist Alexander Matjuschenko on March 3 in Dnipro, recorded by Azov members and posted on Telegram by the city of Dnipro

Matjuschenko was jailed on the grounds that he was “conducting an aggressive war or military operation,” and now faces 10 to 15 years in prison. Despite enduring several broken ribs from the beating by state-backed ultra-nationalists, he has been denied bail. Meanwhile, dozens of other leftists have been jailed on similar charges in Dnipro.

Among those targeted by the SBU were Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich, members of the outlawed Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine. Both were arrested and jailed on March 6 and accused of “spreading pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views.”

In the following days, the SBU arrested broadcast journalist Yan Taksyur and charged him with treason; human rights activist Elena Berezhnaya; Elena Viacheslavova, a human rights advocate whose father, Mikhail, was burned to death during the May 2, 2014 ultra-nationalist mob attack on anti-Maidan protesters outside the Odessa House of Trade Unions; independent journalist Yuri Tkachev, who was charged with treason, and an untold number of others; disabled rights activist Oleg Novikov, who was jailed for three years this April on the grounds that he supported “separatism.”

The list of those imprisoned by Ukraine’s security services since the outbreak of war grows by the day, and is too extensive to reproduce here.

Oleg Novikov—opposition activist from my city, Kharkov, persecuted in the past by the Zelensky regime—was kidnapped 5/04/22 at 6am by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and taken to an unknown place. Oleg is disabled and has 3 young children. (Pic is from a previous arrest) pic.twitter.com/KSeHYC7DWJ

— Gonzalo Lira (@realGonzaloLira) April 9, 2022

Perhaps the most ghastly incident of repression took place when neo-Nazis backed by the Ukrainian government kidnapped Maxim Ryndovskiy, a professional MMA fighter, and brutally tortured him for the crime of training with Russian fighters at a gym in Chechnya. Ryndovskiy also happened to be Jewish, with a Star of David tattooed on his leg, and had spoken out on social media against the war in eastern Ukraine.

In Kyiv, local [I don’t know to fucking call them] extremists caught and brutally torture a famous Ukrainian athlete, MMA fighter, Maxim Ryndovsky. All his fault is that he trained with the Chechen club "Akhmat". pic.twitter.com/og1Psly7SE

— Maria Dubovikova (@politblogme) March 5, 2022

Ukraine’s SBU has even hunted opposition figures outside the country’s borders. As journalist Dan Cohen reported, Anatoly Shariy of the recently banned Party of Shariy said he was the target of a recent SBU assassination attempt. Shariy has been an outspoken opponent of the US-backed Maidan regime, and has been forced to flee into exile after enduring years of harassment from nationalists.

This March, the libertarian politician and online pundit received an email from a friend, “Igor,” seeking to arrange a meeting. He subsequently learned that Igor was held by the SBU at the time and being used to bait Shariy into disclosing his location.

For his part, Shariy has been placed on the notorious Myrotvorets public blacklist of “enemies of the state” founded by Anton Geraschenko – the Ministry of Internal Affairs advisor who endorsed the assassination of Ukrainian lawmakers accused of Russian sympathies. Several journalists and Ukrainian dissidents, including the prominent columnist Oles Buzina, were murdered by state-backed death squads after their names appeared on the list.

Common Ukrainian citizens have also been subjected to torture since the start of the war this February. Seemingly countless videos have appeared on social media showing civilians tied to lamp posts, often with their genitals exposed or their faces painted green. Carried out by Territorial Defense volunteers tasked with enforcing law and order during wartime, these acts of humiliation and torture have targeted everyone from accused Russian sympathizers to Roma people to alleged thieves.

Roma people (“gypsies”) left Kiev as refugees and went to border town, Lviv, where they are facing discrimination by Ukrainians. Like here, tied to poles. A popular Ukrainian Telegram channel celebrates this action and mocks the victims.#Kyiv #Ukraine #Russia #Nazi pic.twitter.com/3cWZ9a78uA

— Global Politics (@Geopol2030) March 21, 2022

This is the human rights that Zelensky brought to Ukrainian civilians#Mariupol #StandWithUkraine #RussiaUkraineWar pic.twitter.com/EWFC048M2q

— UN voice of Justice (@TheUN_voice) April 3, 2022

Ukraine’s SBU studies torture and assassination from the CIA

Vassily Prozorov, a former SBU officer who defected to Russia following the Euromaidan coup, detailed the post-Maidan security services’ systemic reliance on torture to crush political opposition and intimidate citizens accused of Russian sympathies.

According to Prozorov, the ex-SBU officer, the Ukrainian security services have been directly advised by the CIA since 2014.

“CIA employees have been present in Kiev since 2014. They are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding, for example, specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”

Below, Russia’s RIA Novosti profiled Prozorov and covered his disclosures in a 2019 special.

Journalist Dan Cohen interviewed a Ukrainian businessman named Igor who was arrested by the SBU for his financial ties with Russian companies and detained this March in the security service’s notorious headquarters in downtown Kiev. Igor said he overheard Russian POWs being beaten with pipes by Territorial Defense volunteers being coached by SBU officers. Pummeled to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem, the Russian prisoners were brutalized until they confessed their hatred for Putin.

Then came Igor’s turn.

“They used a lighter to heat up a needle, then put it under my fingernails,” he told Cohen. “The worst was when they put a plastic bag over my head and suffocated me and when they held the muzzle of a Kalashnikov rifle to my head and forced me to answer their questions.”

Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the first head of the SBU after the Euromaidan regime change operation of 2013-14, nurtured close ties to Washington when he served as general consul to the Ukrainian embassy to the US during the George W. Bush administration. During that time, Nalyvaichenko was recruited by the CIA, according to his predecessor at the SBU, Alexander Yakimenko, who served under the Russian-oriented government of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.

In 2021, Zelensky appointed one of Ukraine’s most notorious intelligence figures, Oleksander Poklad, to lead SBU’s counterintelligence division. Poklad is nicknamed “The Strangler,” a reference to his reputation for using torture and assorted dirty tricks to set-up his bosses’ political rivals on treason charges.

This April, a vivid illustration of the SBU’s brutality emerged in the form of video (below) showing its agents pummeling a group of men accused of Russian sympathies in the city of Dnipro.

Ukrainian SBU is arresting civilians in Dnipropetrovsk.

pic.twitter.com/bbHFeADnqg

— Vera Van Horne (@VeraVanHorne) April 5, 2022

“We will never take Russian soldiers prisoner”: Ukraine’s military flaunts its war crimes

While the Western media has focused squarely on alleged Russian human rights abuses since the outbreak of war, Ukrainian soldiers and pro-Ukrainian social media accounts have proudly exhibited sadistic war crimes, from field executions to the torture of captive soldiers.

This March, a pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel called White Lives Matter released a video of a Ukrainian soldier calling the fiancee of a Russian prisoner of war, seen below, and taunting her with promises to castrate the captive.

Ukrainian soldiers’ use of the cellphones of dead Russian soldiers to mock and hector their relatives appears to be a common practice. In fact, the Ukrainian government has begun using notoriously invasive facial recognition technology from Clearview AI, a US tech company, to identify Russian casualties and taunt their relatives on social media.

#ukraine soldiers calling family of deceased to mock and swear at them. Knowing modern phones – the soldier in question must’ve been alive before they unlocked his device. That’s another POW #warCrime to their repertoire. pic.twitter.com/D55T6Hu0se

— Lukasz Raczylo 🐭 🅨 (@raczylo) March 27, 2022

This April, a pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel called fckrussia2022 posted a video depicting a Russian soldier with one of his eyes bandaged, suggesting it had been gouged during torture, and mocked him as a “one-eyed” pig.

Perhaps the most gruesome image to have appeared on social media in recent weeks is the photo of a tortured Russian soldier who had one of his eyes gouged before he was killed. The accompanying post was captioned, “looking for Nazis.”

Photos distributed by pro-Ukraine Telegram channels showing captured, tortured and executed Russian soldiers

Video has also emerged this April showing Ukrainian soldiers shooting defenseless Russian POWs in the legs outside the city of Kharkov. A separate video published by Ukrainian and US-backed Georgian Legion soldiers showed the fighters carrying out field executions of wounded Russian captives near a village outside Kiev.

Ukrainian and Georgian Legion fighters celebrate after executing captive Russian soldiers on video

It is likely that these soldiers had been emboldened by their superiors’ blessings. Mamula Mamulashvili, the commander of the Georgian Legion, which participated in the field executions of wounded Russian POW’s, boasted this April that his unit freely engages in war crimes: “Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner.”

Similarly, Gennadiy Druzenko, the head of the Ukrainian military medical service, stated in an interview with Ukraine 24 that he “issued an order to castrate all Russian men because they were subhuman and worse than cockroaches.”

Ukrainian officials present woman tortured and killed by Azov as victim of Russia

While Western media homes in on Russian human rights violations at home and inside Ukraine, the Ukrainian government has authorized a propaganda campaign known as “Total War” that includes the planting of bogus images and false stories to further implicate Russia.

In one especially cynical example of the strategy, Ukraine 24 –  a TV channel where guests have called for the genocidal extermination of Russian children – published a photo this April depicting a female corpse branded with a bloody swastika on her stomach. Ukraine 24 claimed that it found this woman in Gostumel, one of the regions in the Kiev Oblast that the Russians vacated on March 29.

Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, and Oleksiy Arestovych, the top advisor to President Zelensky, published the photo of the defiled female corpse on social media. While Vasylenko left the photo online, Arestovych deleted it eight hours after posting when confronted with the fact that he had published a fake.

In fact, the image was pulled from footage originally recorded by Patrick Lancaster, a Donetsk-based US journalist who had filmed the corpse of a woman tortured and murdered by members of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion in a Mariupol school basement they had converted into a base.

At 2:31 in Lancaster’s video, the woman’s corpse can be seen clearly.

Ukrainian political operative @lesiavasylenko is spreading an especially cynical fake:

The original image was captured by @PLnewstoday and showed the corpse of a woman tortured and murdered in a Mariupol school basement by Ukrainian Nazis – the allies of Vasylenko. pic.twitter.com/gRnURAAaQ9

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 4, 2022

As weapons pour into Ukraine from NATO states and the war intensifies, the atrocities are almost certain to pile up – and with the blessing of leadership in Kiev. As Zelensky proclaimed during a visit to the city of Bucha this April, “if we do not find a civilized way out, you know our people – they will find an uncivilized way out.”

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The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

Featured image: Above: The torture of left-wing activist Alexander Matjuschenko on March 3 in Dnipro, recorded by Azov members. Below: President Volodymyr Zelensky poses during a media engagement.

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In 2009 the Guahibo Indigenous community of El Trompillo was forced to move from what members say is their ancestral land.

The official owners of the land are reportedly connected to former senator Alfonso Mattos, and plantation companies affiliated with Mattos have been developed in the territory; sources say they are polluting the land, water and air.

El Trompillo community members hope the higher courts rule in their favor and return them to their land – but in the meantime they live in cramped, impoverished conditions.

This story is a collaboration between Mongabay Latam and Rutas del Conflicto in Colombia.

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Nearly 13 years have passed since the Guahibo Indigenous community El Trompillo was allegedly forcibly relocated from their territory. Members report persistent hunger and overcrowding in makeshift dwellings cobbled out of green canvas and garbage bags in the municipality of La Primavera in the Colombian department of Vichada. They say they still have hope of someday returning to their ancestral land 30 kilometers (19 miles) away, land that is officially owned by a former Colombian senator and his family and allocated for oil palm plantations.

“We are waiting for [agencies] to tell us that we can return, but in the meantime, they are damaging the land, our sacred places,” said one community member, who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.

Like this individual, almost all sources contacted for this story asked for their identity to be protected due to the violent conditions that exist in this part of Colombia. Over the past year, the presence of paramilitary-linked armed groups has increased, according to the Department of Protection of Citizens’ Rights; in their March 2021 report, the agency stated these groups include Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia[Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia] and the Puntilleros Libertadores del Vichada [Liberators of Vichada]. Alleged murders of land claimants in other parts of the eastern plains region of Colombia has also caused fear among Indigenous communities.

A typical dwelling in the El Trompillo community. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

El Trompillo’s claimed territory is located in the Altagracia, an extensive savannah of 130 square kilometers (50 square miles) between the Negro and Elvita rivers and surrounded by gallery forests and wetland ecosystems called morichales. The formal owners of the land are relatives and close associates of former senator Alfonso Mattos and their oil palm estates are managed by the companies Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada, which also belong to Mattos and his family. Alfonso Mattos is the brother of Carlos Mattos, who has a Spanish extradition request against him for bribing a judge, and the livestock farmer Edward Mattos, who has been accused of murder and links to paramilitarism in the departments of Cesar and Meta.

Indigenous community members say they have witnessed the mismanagement of waste by the oil palm companies occupying their land.

“They have a very large garbage dump; in some parts the water is very dirty because of the liquids they put on the oil palm, while other parts are full of bags and plastic,” said one person who requested anonymity for safety reasons. A local official said he was able to verify waste management complaints, but requested that his name be withheld due to fear of reprisal.

Mongabay Latam and Rutas del Conflicto reporters observed discarded waste such as bags, tarpaulins and empty plastic containers in the Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada oil palm plantations. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

An environmental engineer who has worked for other oil palm companies in Colombia’s Altillanura region confirmed evidence of solid waste mismanagement.

“There are regulations for the management of such waste,” said the engineer, who requested anonymity. “From what these images [of Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada] show, they [the companies] are not complying with Decree No. 1076 of May 26, 2015, which provides directives for oil palm crop cultivation.”

Complaints against the oil palm project first began in 2016. According to environmental regulatory agency Corporinoquia, Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada were sanctioned on May 16, 2016 and ordered to immediately suspend operation of its palm oil extraction plant “for not having environmental permits relating to atmospheric emissions.” Corporinoquia also found the companies responsible for “dumping industrial wastewater without prior treatment.” In August 2017, Corporinoquia representatives returned to the area and again found irregularities, for which it filed charges as part of an environmental sanctioning process.

Both Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada are owned by the family of former senator Alfonso Mattos, which includes his wife Ana Cecilia Lacouture and his children David Alfonso, Catherine and Stephanie Mattos Lacouture, per Chamber of Commerce records.

Indigenous children from the El Trompillo community. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

In the mid-1990s, when the Guahibo community were still practicing a traditional semi-nomadic life, the 16th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) arrived in San Teodoro, a town neighboring Altagracia, quickly turning it into a key location for drug trafficking.

Altagracia was divided into 14 plots by the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (Incora), which are currently being exploited by Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada. Among the farms operating in the area are San Cayetano and Judea, which are now reportedly owned by people with close links to former senator Alfonso Mattos.

Altagracia (brown area) is the Guahibo ancestral territory. The green area bordering it to the north is land cultivated with oil palm. Image from Google Earth.

The Guahibo territory has been divided into 14 plots. Image by the National Land Restitution Unit.

On May 3, 1999, a group of about 200 paramilitary members arrived in San Teodoro, a neighboring town of Altagracia, killing five people, including Eduardo Ríos, president of the Community Action Board of San Teodoro.

Rumors spread that the armed group wanted to kill the Guahibo people: “They said that they were going to kill us, we were afraid at that time,” said a Guahibo community member who wished to remain anonymous for safety concerns.

Between 2005 and 2006, paramilitary groups in the area demobilized, giving way to the arrival of large agribusiness companies, a move promoted by the government of former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

Aerial shot of the Agrícola El Encanto oil palm plantation. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

Guahibo community members said that they continued to live in Altagracia until 2008, when 20 armed men appeared and told them that the land had an owner and they were required to leave. Community members say the men said they represented Alfonso Mattos.

The incident prompted some from the community to move to Puerto Carreño, the capital of Vichada. But community members who stayed said that armed men returned, this time with Alfonso Mattos, to demand that those who remained leave the territory.

“We didn’t leave, but in August [2009] unknown individuals arrived and set fire to some farms. We couldn’t put up with it anymore so we came to La Primavera,” said a Guahibo community member.

Indigenous leaders, legally represented by Corporación Claretiana Norman Pérez Bello, have requested that the National Land Agency revoke the awarded plots. They also requested that the Land Restitution Unit formally hand over the 14 plots occupied by the companies to the Guahibo community.

Afternoon in El Trompillo. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

In 1989, Colombia signed Convention No. 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which protects and recognizes the collective property of Indigenous peoples’ ancestral territories.

“From then on, several laws have been approved to give these communities titles for the land on which they have historically lived and developed their cultural practices,” said Brayan Triana, a lawyer at the Land Observatory of the University of Rosario in Bogotá.

Mongabay Latam and Rutas del Conflicto contacted Alfonso Mattos by phone and WhatsApp to ask for his version of the story and also about the environmental protocols of Agrícola El Encanto and Aceites del Vichada. Messages were also sent to the emails of the two companies registered with the Chamber of Commerce. No responses were received.

In 2020, a judge ruled in favor of the Guahibo community’s claim. However, those who claim ownership of the land opposed the ruling and the case will go to a higher court to ultimately determine to whom the land belongs. It is expected that this next step of the legal process will take several years.

In the meantime, the 32 displaced Guahibo families continue to hold on in El Trompillo. There they are joined other displaced Indigenous communities, including other Guahibo communities and groups such as the Cuiba and Piapoco. In total, 636 people live on 0.23 square kilometers (0.09 square miles).

The El Trompillo settlement is not the only one of its kind in this part of Colombia. Several other such as Puerto Gaitán and Puerto Carreño dot the region, creating belts of poverty in urban areas.

Overcrowding and hunger is rife. The Guahibo of Altagracia survive on the little work community members can find in La Primavera and on the sale of woven goods. “Sometimes there’s work for one day, but it’s not permanent. We also sell what the women make, but it’s not enough to provide food every day,” one community member said.

Crafts made by the weavers in the El Trompillo community. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

A representative of Corporación Claretiana, who wished to remain anonymous, said agro-industrial and oil development for the region is sponsored by the State itself and completely excludes Indigenous residents. He said communities have been subjected to systematic violence to remove them from their territories for decades.

Sources said displacement may also have a detrimental impact on Indigenous cultures and exposes residents to public health and social problems such as drug addiction.

“We hope that our ancestral territory will be returned to us, along with our sacred sites, the animals, the streams, the trees – everything,” said a Guahibo community member who requested anonymity. “We can’t accept that they are damaging where we have lived for so long.”

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Featured image: Aerial shot of the Agrícola El Encanto oil palm plantation. Image by Juan Carlos Contreras Medina.

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After committing the shameful atrocities of direct colonization against the non-West, the West felt it was necessary to invent methods of indirect colonization. Other than institutional controls, they would incarcerate and assassinate many of the non-Western leaders who disobeyed the West. But killing was bloody and messy, reminiscent of their colonial atrocities. Hence a new mode of injustice was perfected, that of the regime change. Advances in information technology and impact of corporate and social media on human consciousness, brought about more subtlety to the science of regime change. This icing on the cake of international institutions such as UN, FATF, IBRD & IMF, are all used to bring down representative and pro-people governments. Methods used for regime changes are bribery, threat, extortion and blackmail. If the above observation be true, then who says that the West is civilized? If the populations of EU and USA claim that it is them who vote such governments into power who are against self-determination in the developing world, then West’s democracy is opposed to universal self-determination to which they are signatories inside the UN. Law of the jungle, brutality and injustice are ways of uncivilized barbarians.

This is what the barbarians have done once again in Pakistan. The West has successfully conducted ‘operation regime change’ in Pakistan in an attempt to steal Pakistan away from its family of Asian nations. Instead, Pakistan has been by force shoved back into its old role, as NATO’s minion. Imran Khan’s elected government was struck down in a campaign in which a weak state and a weak civil society were bought out with money. Opposition political parties, PTI’s turncoat members, an extremely poisonous, seditious and anti-people media, dishonorable judges, US-subservient Army top leadership, all collaborated to take down an honest leader and replaced him with well-known thugs, a staggering number of whom are either indicted or convicted for crimes ranging from corruption, treason and murder.

If homegrown governments are replaced with foreign imposed rule, then Pakistan can never be sovereign enough to make its own policies. This means that China cannot pledge its future to an uncertain Pakistan and must help Pakistan in bringing about political stability. If CPEC is existential for BRI and BRI is existential for China, then bringing stability to Pakistan by counter-intervention is China’s only option. If the US is not ready to let go of Pakistan, then China should consider ‘buying’ more influence in Pakistan in order to defeat the Indian and American influence in Af-Pak-Iran region.  As a Pakistani I say that with shame that since our ruling elite gets sold so cheaply that it may not be an expensive proposition for China to beat America in its dirty game by out-bidding the US in Pakistani parliament’s horse-trading. However, it is against the Chinese principles of governance to do such a thing.

So, why did the US do that?

It is public knowledge that the West has been openly against CPEC and BRI. West’s regional agent, India, has made dozens upon dozens of statements against the Chinese plans of connectivity and threatened to invade Gilgit-Baltistan to cut off Pakistan from China. Imran Khan was in favor of CPEC and Eurasian integration. He was also in favor of good bilateral relations with Russia. Particularly, he was in favor of promoting more connectivity and cooperation amongst the Muslim countries. This is a necessary prerequisite of the BRI since the Muslim world occupies the central and the biggest landmass without which no land connectivity would be possible between Europe and East Asia. This is also why FM Wang Yi made a statement last month that China wants to help the Muslim world to bring about peace. This statement was diametrically opposite of America’s ‘war policy’ in the Muslim world. The Western imperialism doesn’t allow intra-Muslim cooperation at all because of its necessity to oppose self-determination in the Muslim World. They killed Liaqat Ali Khan, Z. A. Bhutto, Zia, Shah Faisal, Gaddafi, Nasser, and many others whom they found guilty of promoting solidarity and cooperation among Muslim countries. This is why the West constantly promotes the three phobias; while Imran Khan spoke against Islamophobia, and rejected Sinophobia and Russophobia.

What Should Pakistan Do?

Out of the formerly colonized world, only China escaped West’s iron cage because they cleverly negotiated a political system for themselves which suited their needs. I cannot go into the details for this system here, but I will focus on just one aspect of it which is its one party system. In addition to the ‘one party’, there are numerous small parties that work in tandem with the CPC inside China. However, the biggest party that leads all aspects of life in China is the CPC. More importantly, to call the CPC a ‘party’ is perhaps too narrow of a description. It is much more than just a ‘party’ because of how the word ‘party’ is understood in the Western world. For lack of another term for now, we can call it a single party system.

In a book length discussion elsewhere I have argued that single party systems with state based governance which are pro-people have more in common with the essence of Islamic political thought than does Western democracy which thrives on divisive individualism rather than society’s need for inner unity across different levels. Pakistan should consider a state based single party system of governance which is based on the widest understanding of the Islamic tradition. From a purely traditional point of view, Western democracies defy the principles of Islamic political thought in a way that state-based single-party systems which affirm transcendence may not. From an Islamic point of view, Western democracies may not be permissible because of their deep secularism is tantamount of denial of transcendence.

More importantly, after trying and failing for 75 years, it is the call of common sense that Pakistan should abandon its overall Westernization project in favor of its own traditions. Pakistan should carefully analyze the Chinese path of development and security to see how it worked for China.

The Problem with Western Democratism:

The West presents itself that it has political and ideological diversity because of its multiple party or two party democracies, but in reality they are only superficially pluralistic because their puppet masters are the same. The corporations and bankers who bankroll the campaigns of both political parties wield the decisive influence on state policies. Many Western governments of EU and America are deeply influenced by this international establishment.

In an effort to protect itself from Western regime changes, China conceived of a single party system, which has served it well, so much so, that when the CPC took over China, the Western history books soon added a chapter to their history of China books titled ‘loss of China’. The West lost China because it came up with a system which made infiltration difficult for the outsiders and very dangerous for the inside collaborators. This is why the West is always sulking about China’s ‘dictatorship’. Whereas in reality, China’s pro-people system is more democratic than the elite-privileging democracies of the West whose people are falling by the wayside at a fast pace.

Some scholars of contemporary history and social sciences have argued that China is unique, hence not copyable. I dispute that China is unique. In one sense all people are unique and in another sense, all people are similar. The ability to relate across cultures lies in the latter principle, otherwise there would be no intercultural understanding, interfaith dialogues and inter-civilizational harmony. I believe it is possible that people, cultures and civilizations have learnt from each other. There is historical evidence for this. Therefore, if Pakistan failed in its experiment with Western democracy (like China did from 1900 to 1949) it is alright. It can try something new and off the beaten path of backward Western ideologies of 300 year old enlightenment and 200 years old modernism. Pakistan should not hesitate to consult with friendly neighbors to see what has worked for them. It is my claim that considering elements of China’s journey to development and security will be very useful for Pakistan.

How can Pakistan prevent such a thing from happening again?

Foreigners are in control of the Pakistani parliament with the help of the insiders. This is nothing new for Pakistan, as in the case of many developing nations. History has reminded Pakistan again; Pakistan institutions are weak because its system is faulty. Large swaths of state officials and civil society can be easily bought. Civil bureaucracy, media, judiciary; all of them become compromised. Importantly, out of all the institutions, Pakistani military is more functional than other sectors of the state and it is dearly loved by its people. How could officers like Bajwa make it to the top who are willing to sacrifice national interest under the US influence? It is common knowledge in Islamabad that in 2016, most army officers in Pakistan thought that Gen. Zubair Mahmood Hayat was more competent and deserving than Bajwa for the position of the army chief. But the American influence inside the senior military elite was so strong, that it prevented the smooth meritocratic functioning of our military.

In a paper titled “Is there an Islamic Theory of Civil-Military Relations?” I have argued that civilian rule is superior to military rule because of the very nature of military command. This is why in China a civil president is head of the military commission. Since militaries are powerful, their presence is bound to be political. But Western democratism opposes political role of military in theory, but often supports military rule elsewhere as in Pakistan. In Pakistan the size and strength of the military makes it the most powerful and the most political out of all institutions. But under the influence of Western ideas our military claims that we have nothing to do with politics, which isn’t true. However, since that is the official stance, military can easily evade accountability of their political actions. If military’s political calculus is right, they claim applause from the nation. If their political calculus is wrong, they say we are neutral to national politics. This gives our military plausible deniability while transgressing an important principle: if you have political power, you must also have political accountability.

To pretend that militaries will never be political is a daydream. This is why President Xi Jinping routinely speaks to his military and encourages them to play their ‘political role’ with dutiful diligence and responsibility. Pakistan needs the same. It needs a system which give our military due space to play their political role, but openly and responsibly.

Pakistan is a country of intelligent, well-meaning and hospitable people, a strong military, but it has a weak political system that cannot protect itself against foreigners. The West not only proposes but also disposes an archaic system of governance for us. Like most psychologically colonized societies of South Asia, their Westernized ruling elites accept the ‘white man’s gospel’ uncritically and naively to think that Western democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Even if they follow the dictates of their Western masters, the masters are still not happy. As demonstrated in Musadeq’s Iran, Morsi’s Egypt, French overthrow of democracy in Algeria, all of these cases indicate that the West is not serious about either proposing a democratic system, let alone respecting one if one has come about.

China’s situation during Guomingdang period was somewhat similar. Only after having a single party system could they come out of under the Western thumb. The Western critics often say that the single party system doesn’t allow for choice and dissension. This is propaganda. All dissension in a single party system is shared on the widest platform. This type of rule keeps the foreigners out. Despite this, the West created problems for China in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang. But laws in China are tough enough and it doesn’t take CPC’s judicial system very long to send the corrupt to the gallows. Pakistan should seriously consider it. First Pakistan should go for system change, second it should go for cultural change, which means saying no to all forms of westernization which is harmful for our civilization, and secondly, delving into intelligent understanding of Islam while doing socio-political reforms to replace westernization.

Rahul Gandhi, the head of India’s opposition political party tweeted: “Modi should explain to the nation why he spent billions of USD to purchase expensive weapons in the name of fighting Pakistan, when whole Pakistan can be bought in less than 1 billion USD”. But regime change in Pakistan according to some estimates may have only taken a few million dollars. If modest amount of money can overthrow our regimes, then certainly our security is compromised. Who is responsible for our security? It is not only the military but our civil society institutions and public too. A political system that better protects one’s state is more superior than the one that is ready to sell the state for personal gains. The path of Western democracy is disastrous for humanity. Many Muslims disagree with the Taliban’s understanding of Islam, but for 20 years they could not be decisively infiltrated by the US and the Indians. US and NATO forces spent trillions of dollars in Afghanistan, but could not infiltrate to their core. One of the biggest reasons for this was that the Taliban do not believe in westernization of their political system.

The new regime is ready to do for the West what Imran Khan was not prepared to do. They don’t want us to support Kashmiris’ human rights. They want us to give the US military bases to kill our brothers in Afghanistan and our tribal areas. They want us to become part of wars of global fascism against humanity. They want to weaken our military, tarnish its image. They want us to accept the Indian hegemony (like Bangladesh), they don’t want us to be close to China and Russia and eventually they want to go for our nuclear weapons (like Ukraine).

Pakistan needs help in form of counter-interference from China. Only 1,500 people have taken hostage the future of 220 million people. The cost of losing Pakistan to the US is prohibitive for China in the long run.

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Ejaz Akram is an Associate Professor of Religion and Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

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More than 769 athletes have collapsed on the field during a game from March 2021 to March 2022

The shocking statistic was revealed by One America News Network (OAN), which also found the average age of the athletes who suffered cardiac arrest is just 23 years old

An updated report by Good Sciencing, a team of investigators, news editors, journalists and “truth seekers,” has detailed 890 cardiac arrests and other serious issues among athletes, including 579 deaths, following COVID-19 shots

With cases like these becoming impossible to ignore, even a mainstream media sports channel in Australia speculated that the health issues could be linked to COVID-19 shots, and one of the hosts acknowledged that multiple players have suffered from heart issues and Bell’s palsy following COVID-19 booster shots

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More than 769 athletes have collapsed on the field during a game from March 2021 to March 2022. The shocking statistic was revealed by One America News Network (OAN), which also found the average age of the athletes who suffered cardiac arrest is just 23 years old.¹ The unprecedented surge in cardiac arrest and other heart issues among elite athletes coincides with the rollout of COVID-19 jabs.

The Miami Open made headlines in early April 2022 after 15 players — all of whom had reportedly received COVID-19 injections² — dropped out. Among them were favorites Paula Badosa and Jannik Sinner. Badosa left the court in tears after becoming unwell, and Sinner’s opponent said he saw him “bend over” on the court, noting “it was very strange.”³ Even the fans were confused, with one stating, “What is going on?”⁴

As Pearson Sharp of OAN explained, “These are just two of more than 769 athletes who have collapsed during a game, on the field, over the last year.” He continued:⁵

“How many 23-year-old athletes were collapsing and suffering heart attacks before this year? Do you know any 23-year-old people who had heart attacks before now? And these are just the ones we know about. How many have gone unreported? Nearly 800 athletes — young, fit people in the prime of life — falling down on the field. In fact, 500% more soccer players in the EU are dropping dead from heart attacks than just one year ago.

Coincidence? When the Pfizer vaccine is known to cause heart inflammation? No. In fact, many doctors treating these players list their injuries and deaths as being directly caused by the vaccine … This is not a coincidence.”

VAERS May Not Show the Whole Picture

As of April 1, 2022, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is where adverse events caused by COVID-19 jabs in the U.S. are supposed to be collected, lists 26,693 deaths along with 147,677 hospitalizations in association with the COVID-19 shot.⁶ There are also 13,677 heart attacks and 38,024 cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue sac surrounding the heart).

Myocarditis and pericarditis cause symptoms such as chest pain, shortness of breath and a fluttering or pounding heart. Cases have occurred most often after mRNA COVID-19 injections (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna), particularly in male adolescents and young adults, according to the CDC. Further, myocarditis occurs more often after the second injection, usually within a week.⁷

Past investigations have shown only between 1%⁸ and 10%⁹ of adverse reactions are ever reported to VAERS, which is a passive, voluntary reporting system, so the actual number could be much higher. Kyle Warner is one athlete who filed a VAERS report about his own health injuries following the COVID-19 jab. It took him 45 minutes to complete — a length of time that many doctors can’t or won’t devote when it comes to reporting adverse vaccine reactions seen among their patients.

Warner, who is 29 years old, was at the peak of his career as a professional mountain bike racer when, in June 2021, he got his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot. He suffered a reaction so severe that, months later, he was still spending days in bed, easily overwhelmed by too much mental or physical exertion.

“I believe where there is risk, there needs to be choice,” he said.¹⁰ Instead, “People are being coerced into making a decision based on lack of information versus being convinced of a decision based on total information transparency.”¹¹ Despite the rising number of adverse effects being reported in VAERS, top government officials, such as NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, have attempted to discredit it.

Most notably, this occurred during a Senate hearing when both individuals implied that if a person had received the jab and was then killed in a car accident, it’s possible it could be recorded in VAERS as a vaccine injury.¹² However, while anyone can make a report to VAERS — a component that critics use to claim that VAERS can contain errors and even false claims — due to the lengthy and complicated submittal process, adverse events are notoriously under- — not over- — reported.

Shocking Stories of Athletes Harmed by COVID-19 Jabs

Warner developed pericarditis, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and reactive arthritis following his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot.¹³ Again, he’s a young, world-class athlete whose life has been sidelined by the shots.

Unfortunately, many doctors are unwilling to acknowledge that the COVID-19 shots might be related to patients’ injury complaints, and many who have been injured find their stories have remained hidden from public view, with YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms censoring their personal stories and videos. Some, however, have made it through to mainstream media, including:

U.K. football legend and sports commentator Matt Le Tissier, featured in the video above, is among those who have been speaking out about the large number of athletes who have collapsed or died on the field — and he lost his job as a commentator because of it. In an interview with Red Voice Media, Le Tissier is asked about his thoughts on the surge of cardiac events in the sporting world, to which he responded:¹⁷

“I’ve never seen anything like it. I played for 17 years. I don’t think I saw one person in 17 years have to come off the football pitch with breathing difficulties, clutching their heart, heart problems …

The last year, it’s just been unbelievable how many people, not just footballers but sports people in general, tennis players, cricketers, basketball players, just how many are just keeling over. And at some point, surely you have to say this isn’t right, this needs to be investigated.”

By December 2021, 300 reports of athletes collapsing, and some dying, had already been collected,¹⁸ including high-profile European Soccer star Adama Traore, who clutched his chest and collapsed on the field. An updated report by Good Sciencing, a team of investigators, news editors, journalists and “truth seekers,” has detailed 890 cardiac arrests and other serious issues among athletes, including 579 deaths, following COVID-19 shots.¹⁹

They’re maintaining a “nonexhaustive and continuously growing list of mainly young athletes who had major medical issues in 2021/2022 after receiving one or more COVID vaccines” and note:²⁰

“It is definitely not normal for so many mainly young athletes to suffer from cardiac arrests or to die while playing their sport, but this year it is happening. Many of these heart issues and deaths come shortly after they got a COVID vaccine. While it is possible this can happen to people who did not get a COVID vaccine, the sheer numbers clearly point to the only obvious cause.

… Initially, many of these were not reported. We know that many people were told not to tell anyone about their adverse reactions and the media was not reporting them. They started happening and ramping up after the first COVID vaccinations.

The mainstream media still are not reporting most, but sports news cannot ignore the fact that soccer players and other stars collapse in the middle of a game due to a sudden cardiac arrest. Many of those die — more than 50%.

We also note that many posts in Facebook, Instagram, twitter, forums and news stories are being removed. So now we are receiving some messages saying there is no proof of the event or of vaccination status. That is partly because this information is being hidden.”

Gary Dempsey, a professional soccer player with a nearly two-decade career, also tweeted just how unusual the recent wave of cardiac events among athletes is:²¹

“Was a professional for nearly 20 years. From 1996. Played nearly 500 games. Club and international level. Never ever was there 1 cardiac arrest. Either in the crowd or a player. It’s actually quite scary.”

Heart Issues and Bell’s Palsy ‘Through the Roof’

This is from a main stream sports channel in Australia pic.twitter.com/HJHWAlEpRg

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) April 11, 2022

The video above is from a mainstream sports channel in Australia,²² detailing another professional athlete, Ollie Wines, who is out of the game due to nausea, dizziness and heart palpitations.

With cases like this becoming impossible to ignore, the “Sunday Footy Show” panel speculated that the health issues could be linked to COVID-19 shots, and one of the hosts acknowledged that multiple players have suffered from heart issues and Bell’s palsy following COVID-19 booster shots. “Wards filled with people suffering the same issues,” he said.²³

Former professional footballer Matthew Lloyd, who was recently diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, stated, “Heart issues and Bell’s palsy have gone through the roof since the boosters and Covid issues.”²⁴

During phase 3 clinical trials of mRNA COVID-19 shots, more cases of facial paralysis occurred in the vaccine groups (seven out of 35,654) compared to the placebo group (one out of 35,611), leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to recommended monitoring vaccine recipients for facial paralysis.²⁵

Lloyd also said that he’s heard of many cases of heart issues similar to Wines’. “We had [sports journalist] Michelangelo Rucci on … and he said that there’s a ward filled with people with similar symptoms to Ollie Wines — nausea, heart issues — so there has to be something more to it.”²⁶

It’s well known that toxic spike proteins can circulate in your body after infection or COVID-19 injection, causing damage to cells, tissues and organs. As your heart beats faster during intense athletic activity, the spike proteins are able to circulate faster throughout your body, pointing to a potential reason why so many athletes are collapsing on the field.

It’s important that these stories are heard, so if you or a loved one has been injured by a COVID-19 injection, please share your story with us and encourage others you know who have a story to share theirs as well.

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Notes

¹ The Gateway Pundit April 8, 2022

² Need to Know News April 3, 2022

^3, 4 Principia Scientific International April 7, 2022

⁵ OAN News April 10, 2022, 3:51

⁶ Open VAERS, COVID-19 Vaccine Data

⁷ U.S. CDC November 12, 2021

⁸ The Vaccine Reaction January 9, 2020

⁹ BMJ 2005;330:433

¹⁰ YouTube, Dr. John Campbell, Kyle’s Vaccine Complication October 21, 2021, 1:01

^11, 13 YouTube, Dr. John Campbell, Kyle’s Vaccine Complication October 21, 2021, 41:51

¹² YouTube, January 11, 2022, Min 2:49:30

¹⁴ Newsbreeze November 6, 2021

¹⁵ Sport24 September 24, 2021

¹⁶ Banned News October 27, 2021

¹⁷ Rumble, February 1, 2022, Minute 23:30 – 24:35

¹⁸ The Gateway Pundit December 6, 2021

^19, 20, 21 Good Sciencing, Real Science

²² Twitter, Luke Rudkowski April 11, 2022

^23, 24, 26 Mail Online April 10, 2022

²⁵ JAMA Internal Medicine April 27, 2021

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The plot behind Ukraine is far deeper than anyone is willing to talk about publically. Yanukovich was corrupt and his sons were acting like a protection racket. Yanukovich was keen on joining the EU but the treaty had a clause in there that would have put Ukraine in NATO through the backdoor. Ukraine would have to comply will all the rules and regulations of NATO without formally being admitted. Worse still, Ukraine was to trade exclusively with the EU when Russia was its main trading partner and its fuel came from Russia. This was the first attempt by the West to bring Ukraine into NATO.

That is why Yanukovich backed out and that is what began the whole uprising. To appease the protestors, Yanukovich agreed to early elections in nine months. This is where the US Neocons were hard at work to actually see the uprising as an opportunity and they wanted to install their own people. That was all in the leaked phone call of Victoria Nuland.

Zelensky was elected with overwhelming support to create peace which was exactly OPPOSITE of the objectives of the American Neocons. The Ukrainian Nationalists (Nazis) threatened to kill Zelensky if he pushed for peace with Russia. Zelensky did a political flip-flop and yielded to the Nazi movement. Reliable sources insisted that the Nazis threatened to kill Zelensky to prevent any peace with Russia.

Don’t forget McCain and Lesley Graham even addressed the Ukrainian Nazis promising them to support back in December 2016 after Trump was elected, but before he was sworn in. The Neocons were hard at work to ensure that there would be no peace with Russia.

The entire Russiagate has been discredited but we must understand the reality of international relations. Hillary, who is a Neocon and was friends with John McCain to the point he is the one who handed the fraudulent Steel Dossier to James Comey at the FBI, was instrumental in the failed takeover of Russia by the bankers blackmailing Yeltsin and interfering in the 2000 election which brought Putin to power. Hillary clearly concocted the whole theory that Trump was a puppet of Putin. The Neocons even spun the story that Putin was ex-KGB and that meant he wanted to resurrect the old Soviet Union which was also a lie.

With the seriousness of these actions, we are now heading into war over fake news. Obama had refused to provide military aid to Ukraine and the entire Russiagate was to box in Trump who was then advised to provide military weapons to Ukraine to prove he was not a puppet of Putin. It was the Neocons who were trying to push Trump into an eye-to-eye confrontation.

What Kennedy did to the Neocons was reject their advice and in the Cuban Missle Crisis, this resulted in a monumental shift in US-Russian relations. It forced both parties to realize that they needed each other and that confrontation was not the answer. The Neocons disagreed. This probably cost Kennedy his life. I believe the Neocons had him killed and Oswald was hinted that he was somehow connected to Russia. The CIA refused to release the files and the only reason is to hide the fact that the Neocons took out Kennedy.

Before he died, Robert McNamara (1916 – 2009) was a leading Neocon that pushed the country into the Vietnam war.  He was famous for saying: “I learned early on never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It’s a very good rule.” McNamara finally admitted that they were wrong particularly in their assessment of Russia as a threat. The perception that Russia is a threat is still dominating the agenda today and there is absolutely no attempt to create world peace.

By creating Russiagate, the main objective was to prevent Trump from working any peace deal with Russia. That was the same objective of McCain and Graham running to Ukraine now that Trump was elected to promise aid to the Ukrainian Nazis to keep up their war against Russians. Can you imagine if the Cuban Missile Crisis took place during the Trump Administration, the Neocons would have been in their glory warning Trump any peace deal would confirm he was just a puppet of Putin. That would have e guaranteed war – not peace. This was the strategic move – a checkmate against Trump seeking peace as did Kennedy.

Reliable sources also claim that the transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky that was used for impeachment was not the full conversation. Trump had assumed that Zelensky was serious about peace and would have supported that decision. But this would have been seen as making Trump the puppet of Putin. This scenario was vital to prevent peace and eventually put the pieces in place for the war that now clouds the horizon.

The DEMONIZING of Trump began to PREVENT world peace and to strip Trump of any ability to reach a peace deal with Russia. Putin did NOT want to reestablish the old Soviet Union, but instead, he saw the rise of China economically and sought to bring Russia into an economic player on the global scale. He wanted to be remembered for being the leader who brought Russia to its economic greatness – not the reestablishment of the USSR which was the dream of Stalin, not Lenin nor Putin.

The image of Trump and Putin had to be manipulated to direct the world into the new political agenda leaving these two leaders who wanted to make their respective nations great again. So far, they have accomplished their goals with strategic cunning and manipulation. To this day, there remain people who are just obsessed with their hatred of Trump. They refuse to come up for air remaining below the surface in the darkness of the depths. To see the plot, they first have to realize that Trump is no longer president and the Neocons will do everything in their power to prevent him from ever running again. That’s what the January 6th hearings are all designed to do – charge him with INSURRECTION to prevent him constitutionally from ever running again. But with that failing, they would more likely than not assassinate him. These people are playing for keeps and they see their goal – the destruction of Russia and China – within their reach.

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The White House plan to destroy Russia by calling President Vladimir Putin names proceeds apace. Apparently, the man whom President Joe Biden has called a “thug,” “killer,” and “war criminal” is now also charged with carrying out a “genocide” and, according to CIA Director William Burns, he may in “despair” over his apparently stalled invasion, be contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile over at the Pentagon, positively aglow with the largest “defense” budget since Vietnam, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley is advising that the war started in Ukraine will require building still more US military bases in Europe to confront Putin.

It is unclear who exactly in the band of rogues surrounding Biden is most responsible for the rhetorical flourishes and hyperbole, though one might assume that it is in a fact a group effort by a chorus of mental midgets, most of whom were inherited from the beatified Barack Obama’s Administration. Only Hillary is missing. But at the same time, one must wonder how if all the sobriquets inevitably fail to bring down Putin what plan B might be. After all, as Russia is a significant country possessing a ballistic and submarine launched nuclear missile capability that could destroy the United States, there will have to be some way to dialogue with the Kremlin after the Ukraine fiasco has ended. Calling foreign heads of state criminals and mass murderers is not the best way to restore a satisfactory level of mutual respect that will permit discussion regarding issues of mutual concern, like war and peace.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is being heavily coached by neocon handlers to push the right buttons to appeal to international sentiment in favor of his country. He has been very successful at being alarming about the Russian threat coupled with his demands for more and better weapons. Two expressions that have come to the surface recently to further blacken Vladimir Putin have centered around the concern that the Russians will employ what is referred to as a false flag deception or use chemical weapons in such a fashion, possibly against themselves, so as to justify broadening their invasion. Indeed, the two can be used together. A false flag essentially involves an assailant or a contact pretending to represent something apart from their or his/her genuine identify in an attempt to deceive the targeted individual. False flags are used extensively in intelligence operations and also in military operations where an attempt is being made to hide the true attribution of an act of war.

In my own experience as a CIA operations officer, I once “developed” a relationship with a Libyan intelligence officer using the false identity of an Italian businessman. The Libyan was amendable to an information sharing relationship with an Italian to line his own pockets, but would have balked at the treasonous implications of having a connection with an American. Libya was, not so long ago, a colony of Italy and my contact spoke decent Italian. That was a classic false flag operation conducted to carry out espionage against a foreign target.

Photograph of men in Khan Sheikdoun in Syria, allegedly inside a crater where a sarin-gas bomb landed. (Source: Consortiumnews)

A more recent instance of what might be regarded as a false flag with much more lethal consequences was when President Donald Trump attacked a Syrian airbase with 59 cruise missiles in the wake of an almost certainly fabricated report that President Bashar al-Assad’s army had used chemical weapons in an attack on Khan Shaykhun in 2017. Independent investigators subsequently determined that the anti-regime terrorists who were occupying the city at the time had themselves staged the attack and deliberately set it up and blamed it on the Syrian government to produce an expected US response, which was forthcoming as Trump responded to the news headlines and did not bother to order anyone to check the reliability of his intelligence sources before ordering “bombs away.” Fortunately, the evidence that it had likely been a false flag carried out by allies of Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) soon surfaced and there were no additional American attacks.

The latest recriminations hurled at Putin have included his alleged massacre of possibly hundreds of civilians at Bucha as well as the killing of over 50 civilians at the Kramatorsk Train station on April 8th, which almost immediately raised suspicion about a possible false flag. Starting with motive, it made no sense for Russia to either massacre civilians or attack a non-military target like a transportation hub, which would produce a large number of casualties, as it would give NATO and the US a wedge issue to increase pressure on Russia and its soldiers while also turning world opinion against Moscow. In that sense, both the claimed massacre and the attack succeeded as they were both immediately linked to Russia by hostile media.

But that is where the stories began to unravel. Russian soldiers left the town of Bucha on March 30^th. Two days later, Bucha was occupied by the Ukrainian Azov Brigade with the objective of finding and removing ‘traitors’. The Azov Brigade has been plausibly described as extremely nationalist and even as neo-Nazi. On April 2/3 the first video was published that showed freshly killed men laying on the streets of Bucha, several of them displaying white arm bands that were presumably used for signaling to departing Russian forces that they were “friendlies.” The “west” and Ukrainian officials immediately called those dead the result of “Russian atrocities.”

Azov has reportedly shot men “fleeing” the combat zones as “traitors” and pledged no surrender to or collaboration with the Russians. It has credibly been responsible for atrocities committed against Russian ethnic Ukrainian citizens in the past. Going back to motive, it was definitely in the Ukrainian interest to kill a couple hundred of its own civilians to further demonize Putin and bring about a western direct military intervention, which is what Zelensky and his neocon advisers have been attempting to do. So, was it a false flag attack in which Ukrainian soldiers deliberately killed Ukrainian citizens so the deaths could be blamed on Russia?

And it also turned out that the missile used in the Kramatorsk Train station attack was of a type found in the Ukrainian arsenal, not that of Russia. A video report by Italy’s LA7 video channel was made by one of their teams inside Ukraine. They were one of first Western news teams to arrive at the alleged bombing site in Kramatorsk. At the time of the attack, numerous Ukrainian citizens were evacuating the city due to its proximity to fighting with Russian forces. Kramatorsk is the temporary seat of the administration of the Donetsk region because the city of Donetsk is in the hands of Russian affiliated Donbass militias and is not under the control of the Kiev based Ukrainian authorities.

The Italian film clip shows close-ups of the remains of the projectile that hit the building, which reveals that the serial number is that of the Tochka-U vehicle launched ballistic missile, which Kiev claimed was Russian, is actually far more plausibly Ukrainian. The clearly visible missile’s serial number appears as (Φ91579), and a comparison, admittedly made by Russian analysts, indicates that the missile belongs to the same series of weapons that have been fired against targets in the regions in the Donbass that are seeking union with Russia. They have been used against “Khartszsk in 04.09.2014 (rocket number ‘Φ15622’) and Tshevsky in 02.02.2015 (Rocket No. ‘Φ91565’), Lugvinova in 13.02.2015 (Missiles No. ‘Φ91566, Φ915527, Φ915328’), Perdiansk in 19.03.2022 (rocket no. ‘Φ915611’), and Militobol on 17.03.2022 (rocket no. ‘Φ915516’).” Furthermore, the missile in question is, according to the Kremlin, still in the Ukrainian arms inventory but considered obsolete by the Russian military.

But let’s think this through a little deeper. If the Russians truly want to blame the Ukrainians for killing other Ukrainians what better way to do it than to fake a missile launch using ordnance that is in operational use with the Ukrainian Army? There exist what are claimed to be eyewitness accounts of Russian troops using the Tochka inside Ukraine, though they come through Ukrainian controlled sources, but the Kremlin very likely has some Tochkas sitting around in various arsenals even if they are no longer suitable for front line use. And the serial numbers, which are painted on or appear on attached labels, can be changed.

The fundamental problem is not the possible use of a false flag in what is already a war between two neighboring states. It should be expected, when convenient for either side. The complication is that actually authenticable information about what is taking place is rare and the two sides are both lying and spinning like crazy to convince an international audience as well as their own citizenry of a “truth” which is actually often closer to fiction. As has long been recognized, the first victim of a war is the truth.

So forget about false flags and other tactical contrivances as well as the lies coming out of Washington and Western Europe. The sad part is that the focus on possible atrocities has reversed what the United States and the west should be doing, i.e. creating an environment where there can be a ceasefire leading to genuine negotiations that can bring about a status quo acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Washington and its allies seem intent on funneling ever more weapons into Ukraine based on a steady stream of questionable accounts of Russian war crimes, a guarantee that the fighting will go on for many more months, if not longer.

Witness for example the line being promoted by the notorious retired US Army Colonel Alexander Vindman, formerly of the US National Security Council but Ukrainian-Jewish born and an enthusiastic advocate of war with Russia. He argues based on the claimed Russian crimes that

“Despite what people like Tucker Carlson tell you, there are not two sides to the story of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It IS a story of good and evil. All you have to do is look at the massacre of civilians in Bucha, the missile strike on Kramatorsk railway station, or the countless other atrocities being committed by Russian forces across Ukraine to see it clearly.”

Vindman’s thinking comes out of the neocon playbook of a proper role of the United States as the rule maker for the entire world without any accountability for its own action. He can easily be dismissed as little more than a partisan prepared to go with any half-truth as long as it denigrates Russia. Whatever one feels about “gallant little Ukraine” versus the Russian bear, this kind of advocacy by someone wrapping himself in the Ukrainian flag provides no real rationale for the United States to get involved in a war in which it has no real interest and which will almost certainly turn out badly for all involved. Unfortunately, Vindman is not the only public figure who suffers from precisely the same tunnel vision.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The government of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined an ignominious collective last week in announcing a refugee deal with Rwanda, seedily entitled the UK-Rwanda Migration Partnership.  The fact that such terms are used – a partnership or deal connotes contract and transaction – suggests how inhumane policies towards those seeking sanctuary and a better life have become.

In no small measure, the agreement between London and Kigali emulates the “Pacific Solution”, a venal response formulated by the Australian government to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat and create a two-tiered approach to assessing asylum claims.  The centrepiece of the 2001 policy was the transfer of such arrivals to Pacific outposts in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru, where they would have no guarantee of being settled in Australia.  Despite being scrapped by the Labor Rudd government at the end of 2007, the policy was reinstated by a politically panicked Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 under what was billed the Pacific Solution Mark II.

The victory of the conservative Liberal-National Party coalition in the 2013 elections led to its most cruel manifestation.  Operation Sovereign Borders, as the policy came to be known, cast a shroud of military secrecy over intercepting boats and initiating towaways.  The crude, if simple slogan popularised by the Abbott government, was “Stop the Boats”.  Such sadistic policies were justified as honourable ones: preventing drownings at sea; disrupting the “people smuggler model”.  In truth, the approach merely redirected the pathways of arrival while doing little by way of discouraging the smugglers.

More measures followed: the creation of a specifically dedicated border force kitted out for violence; the passage of legislation criminalising whistleblowers for revealing squalid, torturous camp conditions featuring self-harm, suicide and sexual abuse.

Inspired by such a punitive example despite its gross failings and astronomical cost (the Australian policy saw a single asylum seeker’s detention bill come to $AU3.4 million), the Johnson government has been parroting the same themes in what the UK Home Office called, misleadingly, a “world first partnership” to combat the “global migration crisis”.  The partnership sought to “address” the “shared international challenge of illegal migration and break the business model of smuggling gangs.”  Not once did it refer to the right to asylum which exists irrespective of the mode of travel or arrival.

Johnson also reiterated the theme of targeting those “vile people smugglers” who have turned the ocean into a “watery graveyard”, failing to mention that such individuals serve to also advance the right of seeking asylum.  More on point was his remark that compassion might be “infinite but our capacity to help people is not.”

If one is to believe the Home Office, sending individuals to Rwanda or, as it puts it, “migrants who make dangerous or illegal journeys” is a measure of some generosity.  Successful applicants “will then be supported to build a new and prosperous life in one of the fastest-growing economies, recognised globally for its record on welcoming and integrating migrants.”

Rwanda is certainly going to benefit with a generous bribe of £120 million, slated for “economic development and growth”, while it will also receive funding for “asylum operations, accommodation and integration similar to the costs incurred in the UK for these services.”

The country will also take some pride in sidestepping its own less than savoury human rights records, which boasts a résumé of extrajudicial killings, torture, unlawful or arbitrary detention, suspicious deaths in custody and an aggressive approach to dissidents.  In 2018, Rwanda security forces were responsible for killing at least 12 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo.  They had been protesting a cut to their food rations.  Various survivors were then arrested and prosecuted for charges ranging from rebellion to “spreading false information with intent to create a hostile international opinion against the Rwandan state.”

The UK-Rwandan partnership also perpetuates old libels in discrediting cross-Channel crossers as purely economic migrants who somehow forfeit their right to fair assessment.  Emilie McDonnell of Human Rights Watch UK dispels this myth, noting Home Office data and information gathered via freedom of information laws that 61% of migrants who travel by boat are likely to remain in the UK after claiming asylum.  The Refugee Council, in an analysis of Channel crossings and asylum outcomes between January 2020 and June 2021, noted that 91% of those making the journey came from 10 countries where human rights abuses are acknowledged as extensive.

Refugees and asylum seekers are the stuff of political value, rising and falling like stocks depending on the government of the day.  For Johnson, the agreement with Rwanda was also a chance to preoccupy the newspaper columns and an irate blogosphere with another talking point.  “Sending refugees to Rwanda,” claimed The Mirror, “is the political equivalent of a distraction burglary, only less subtle and infinitely more criminal.”

The event in question supposedly warranting that hideous distraction was serious enough.  Johnson, along with his wife Carrie and UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak, were all found to have breached government COVID-19 emergency laws and fined by the police.  In the history books, this is already being written up as the “partygate affair”, which featured a number of socialising events conducted by staff as the rest of the country endured severe lockdown restrictions.  Those same history books will also note that the prime minister and chancellor are both pioneers in facing police-mandated penalties.

Johnson’s own blotting took place on June 19, 2020, when he held a birthday gathering in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street.  “In all frankness, at that time,” he reasoned, “it did not occur to me that this might have been a breach of the rules”.  With such a perspective on legality and breaches, the Rwanda deal seems a logical fit, heedless of human rights, a violation of dignity, a potential risk to life and a violation of international refugee law.

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

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***

The parliament of Pakistan recently ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote. The reasons for the former cricket star’s political downfall are not entirely clear. His economic policies were a mixed bag at best, but he deserves credit for one thing: he’d taken a bold stand against international investment agreements that give transnational corporations excessive power over national governments.

In fact, Khan had begun a process of terminating 23 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) that allow corporations to sue governments in unaccountable supranational tribunals. Instead, he believed such disputes should be handled through local arbitration.

Khan had learned the hard way how these so-called “investor protection” agreements can tie the hands of government officials, limiting their ability to act in the public interest. In 2019, a year after Khan became Prime Minister, a tribunal (three private judges behind closed doors, to be clear) of the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ordered Pakistan to pay an Australian mining company $6 billion in compensation for denying a mining permit on environmental grounds.

A similar suit by the same company, Tethyan Copper — a subsidiary of Canadian giant Barrick Gold, through a different tribunal under the International Chamber of Commerce brought the total amount Pakistan owed Tethyan to $11 billion.

The ICSID ruling concluded that Pakistan had violated a BIT with Australia by failing to provide Tethyan “fair and equitable treatment,” a vaguely worded obligation that corporate plaintiffs love to exploit. The tribunal also decided that denying the license for Tethyan’s Reko Diq gold and copper project was tantamount to “indirect expropriation” — never mind the fact that the Supreme Court of Pakistan had ruled the permit invalid because the company had violated national mining and contract laws.

ICSID’s response was to order Pakistan to draw billions of dollars from its public coffers to compensate Tethyan for their lost expected future profits. The company had only invested about $150 million in the project.

Khan’s government went to great lengths to reverse the decision, highlighting that the $6 billion ICSID award alone represented about 2 percent of its GDP, or 40 percent of its cash reserves in foreign currency. The government argued that international tribunals must realize that their decisions have an impact on state policies, including poverty alleviation. But the U.S. District Court, responsible for enforcing the ICSID ruling, declared that Pakistan’s hopes of annulling the award were nothing more than “wishful thinking.”

The ruling against Pakistan under this investor-state dispute settlement system is even more unfair as it came just after the IMF had approved a $6 billion loan to the country that imposes harsh austerity measures on public spending. To overcome this financial straitjacket, Pakistan had no choice but to give in to this concerted attack by financial institutions and international courts and the world’s second-largest gold mining company.

On March 20, Barrick Gold announced that it had reached a settlement with Pakistan that will allow the company to resume their controversial Reko Diq mining project in the province of Balochistan. This is a disturbing example of international investment treaties’ chilling effect on environmentally responsible policies and public interest regulations.

Other countries facing similar corporate lawsuits must pay special attention to this case. Mexico, for example, is being sued by the U.S. mining company Odyssey Marine Exploration for $3.54 billion. Filed before the ICSID in 2019 under the terms of NAFTA, the suit challenges Mexican authorities’ decision to deny a seabed mining permit to extract phosphate (used for fertilizers) in the Gulf of Ulloa, off the coast of Baja California Sur. The Puerto Chale Fishing Cooperative had strongly opposed the project, on the grounds that their members’ livelihoods depend on the marine areas and seafloor that Odyssey is intent on dredging.

After the company retaliated by bringing a claim to ICSID, the Fishing Cooperative and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) attempted to submit an amicus curiae brief to share their concerns. They also argued that the decision by Mexico’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) to deny the exploitation permit was consistent with the precautionary principle recognized in national and international law. The ICSID tribunal refused to admit the brief. (https://bit.ly/3umy8dL)

In their recent report “A Sea of Trouble: Seabed Mining and International Arbitration in Mexico,” Jen Moore of the Institute for Policy Studies and Ellen Moore of Earthworks explain that such refusals are common in this arbitration system designed to favor transnational corporations. The majority of the panel, made up of highly paid corporate lawyers, essentially asserted that the cooperative’s contribution was “irrelevant.”

One of the three arbitrators, Phillippe Sands, did express a dissenting opinion. Not only should the cooperative be heard, Sands argued, but that the failure to admit its concerns exposes the failings of the arbitration system, with potentially far-reaching impacts on environmental protection policies in Mexico.

With Khan’s ouster in Pakistan, it’s unclear what will happen to his government’s efforts to withdraw from Bilateral Investment Treaties and the invest-state dispute settlement regime. But resisting this anti-democratic system should not be a partisan issue. All governments should have the authority to adopt economic measures in the public interest — without the threat of expensive corporate lawsuits.

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Updated and translated from the original Spanish version available in La Jornada.  

Manuel Pérez-Rocha is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies. Follow him on Twitter: @ManuelPerezIPS

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***

Information warfare remains active in Ukraine. There is strong controversy over the actual data of the conflict, with each side claiming a different number of deaths. Ukrainian and Western media outlets seem to be diminishing the seriousness of Kiev’s situation, trying to claim that there are few casualties. The objective appears to be to improve troops’ morale and show the world that the supposed “Ukrainian resistance” is “winning the war” against the “Russian invaders”. However, there does not seem to be any credibility in this type of narrative.

One of the most curious discussions about the Russian special military operation is the number of Ukrainian casualties. On Friday, April 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Kiev had so far lost around 2,500 to 3,000 soldiers in combat. The number seems really small under the circumstances of the conflict, considering the combat scenes witnessed since February and the Russian victory in many confrontation situations, and this raises a number of questions as to why Kiev and its allies want to make it look like they have few casualties.

Since March, the mainstream media has changed its analysis perspective on the Ukrainian case, betting less and less on humanitarian speeches and endorsing a discourse that improves the morale of Kiev’s troops. Western media agencies confirm Zelensky’s data and point out that the supposed low number of deaths is due to the strength of the “Ukrainian resistance”, which would be hindering Russian plans and obtaining significant victories in the fighting situations.

Although unconvincing on a military level, this narrative praises Zelensky’s image, making him look like a “brave leader” and “military genius”, and the Ukrainian troops, who are seen as “strong and resilient”. This also garners international support, encourages the interest of mercenaries, and arouses the attention of oligarchs to financially support the confrontation, making them believe in a possible Ukrainian victory, which is virtually questionable.

However, what is most surprising about this issue is that the Ukrainian lies seem really blatant, considering that according to Moscow the number of Kiev agents killed by the Russian troops is much higher, exceeding 23,000 soldiers. This high level of discrepancy between the official data reveals that one side is necessarily very wrong in its analysis, possibly distorting data for propaganda purposes – and considering the current context this side seems to be the Ukrainian one, which intends to improve its morale in the face of an obvious defeat.

Russian Ministry of Defence spokesman Igor Konashenkov recently commented on the case revealing Moscow’s data about the conflict:

“The Russian Ministry of Defence has reliable figures on the true losses suffered by the Ukrainian Army, the National Guard and foreign mercenaries, which Zelensky is afraid to provide to the people of Ukraine. Today, its irretrievable losses amount to 23,367 people (…) In total, since the start of the special military operation, 134 Ukrainian aircraft, 460 drones, 246 anti-aircraft missile systems, 2,269 tanks and other armoured vehicles, 252 multiple launch rocket systems, 987 pieces of field artillery and mortars, as well as 2,158 special military vehicles have been destroyed”.

In addition, in a recent interview with CNN, Zelensky stated that Ukrainian forces would be willing to fight the Russians for the next “ten years”. According to him, Ukraine is determined to retake the entire length of its territory, which, in his opinion, includes the sovereign republics of the Donbass and Russian Crimea. He made it clear that Ukraine chose the path of confrontation and that it will not retreat before achieving its objectives using military force.

However, in his speech, he recognizes his country’s inability to carry out the conflict without Western help, which is why he urges his allies to send more and more weapons as soon as possible:

“We need the equipment today or tomorrow, not within two or three months (…) We want to liberate our country, to take back what belongs to us. We may be fighting with the Russian Federation for 10 years to take back what is ours. We may choose this path”.

To carry out his war plans, Zelensky must completely renounce any military realism. His tactic seems to be to garner more and more international support and funding to delay the defeat of the Maidan Junta as long as possible – not by chance he stated that he is willing to fight for ten years. To do this, he lies about the data of the conflict, making his financiers believe that it is profitable to invest in his possible victory.

However, it is clear for most experts on military issues that it is incredible for Ukraine to win a confrontation with Russia. Although Western countries send money, weapons, equipment and mercenaries, Russian military superiority remains undisputed. These resources only serve to prolong the conflict and delay the inevitable outcome of the success of the special military operation, and Moscow does not seem to be in a “rush” to declare victory.

The part that suffers the most from all this is the Ukrainian civil population, which does not have its “morale improved”, but, on the contrary, has its suffering prolonged by his war plans.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

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***

Like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, propaganda is pouring out of the US that is shaping our perceptions of the war in Ukraine. It is produced by the CIA, it is pronounced by the State Department and it is published by the media. It is coming from everywhere.

The heroes and the villains were cast from the start. The media rewrote history and created the myth of the “unprovoked war.” As if Russia’s launching of an illegal war was not sufficient to cast them as the villain in our minds, the media everywhere added the adjective “unprovoked” to create the super-villain needed to produce the necessary support for the war. As if NATO had not broken its promise not to encroach on Russia’s borders. As if Russia’s security concerns had not been ignored. As if Russia has not been surrounded by military bases and missiles. As if Ukraine wasn’t being flooded with weapons. As if Yeltsin and Putin had not protested and drawn their red lines for years.

The heroes and villains were further developed and characterized by stories that came out of Ukraine in the early days of the war. On the first day of the war, a Russian ship aimed its guns at Snake Island and demanded the surrender of the Ukrainian forces. Establishing the roles of super-villain and super-hero in our minds, the Ukrainians bravely defied the Russians, and the Russians remorselessly murdered the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian guards “died heroically,” Zelensky said, promising that “All of them will be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine.”

But the guards couldn’t be posthumously awarded anything because they weren’t dead. They were captured and released a few days later. But the characters had been cast in our minds. Not enough that the Ukrainians really were heroically defending their land against an illegal and villainous Russian assault, to produce the necessary war fervor, a super-villain was needed.

Only days later, a Russian warship was seriously damaged or destroyed by Ukrainian forces only, like the guards of Snake Island, to seemingly show up a few days later.

The western media would also continue to clean up the story and clarify the hero and the villain by erasing the Ukrainian ultranationalists from history and from the story, from their role in the Donbas to their role in 2019 of pressuring Zelensky out of making peace with Russia and signing the Minsk Agreement to their role today.

Then the US began to write the perfect super-villain for the perfect script and the perfect public perception. From the beginning, Russia was deliberately targeting civilians. Not just killing them like a villain, but deliberately killing them like a super-villain.

But a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency leaked to Newsweek that, in the first month of the war, “almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.” A retired Air Force officer, working with a “large military contractor advising the Pentagon,” told Newsweek that “the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.” The advisor warned that “If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately . . . then we are not seeing the real conflict.” The Newsweek article points out that the US dropped more missiles on the first day in Iraq in 2003 than Russia dropped on Ukraine in the first 24 days. “The vast majority of the airstrikes are over the battlefield, with Russian aircraft providing “close air support” to ground forces. The remainder – less than 20 percent, according to U.S. experts – has been aimed at military airfields, barracks and supporting depots.” The DIA analyst concluded that “that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians. . . . I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so.”

More recently, a senior DIA official told Newsweek,

“It’s bad. And I don’t want to say it’s not too bad. But I can’t help but stress that beyond the clamor, we are not seeing the war clearly. Where there has been intense ground fighting and a standoff between Ukrainian and Russian forces, the destruction is almost total. But in terms of actual damage in Kyiv or other cities outside the battle zone, and with regard to the number of civilian casualties overall, the evidence contradicts the dominant narrative.”

According to Washington and the media, Russia was not only targeting civilians from the very beginning of the war, they were also planning possible chemical weapons attacks. President Biden, himself, claimed that Putin was considering using chemical weapons in Ukraine. But a “senior US defense official,” in a leak that was reported by Reuters on March 22, said that “There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.”

Two weeks later, “three US officials” told NBC News that “there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine.” It was disinformation intended, they said, “to deter Russia from using banned munitions.”

The disinformation campaign is being coordinated by the White House National Security Council. The released declassified information, the officials said, “wasn’t rock solid:” they were publicizing “low-confidence intelligence.” It was propaganda being used in the disinformation war against Russia. But that disinformation is being consumed by the US public and shaping its perceptions of the war to create the necessary war fervor.

The promised false flag attack against the Russian speaking people of the Donbas that would justify the Russian invasion and feature video of fake corpses, “never materialized.”

The US also tried to “get inside Putin’s head” and, perhaps more importantly, shape public perception in the West of a weak, incompetent and disconnected Putin, by releasing intelligence that discovered that Putin is being misled by his advisors about Russia’s military performance in Ukraine. While some officials said that intelligence was reliable, others said it “wasn’t conclusive – based more on analysis than hard evidence.” When questioned, Biden later classified it as “speculation” and “an open question.”

Another case of disclosing disinformation in an attempt to warn China, to negatively shape public perception of China and to continue to attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and China was the claim by US officials that Russia had asked China to supply weapons. European and US officials told NBC that that accusation “lacked hard evidence” and that, in fact, “there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia.”

While US officials say the disinformation war is meant to deter Russian actions and to get inside Putin’s head, it is simultaneously being consumed by Americans and getting inside their heads, shaping their perceptions of Putin, Russia and the war.

The shaping of the American mind by the media has a long history in the CIA. In the first quarter century of the CIA, according to Carl Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists . . . carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.” Occasionally, “full‑time CIA employees masquerad[ed] as journalists abroad.” Cooperation included articles written by the CIA running almost word for word under columnists’ bylines and “planting misinformation advantageous to American policy.”

The disinformation war was not confined to new organizations. The Church Committee found that, by the end of 1967, the CIA had already subsidized the publication of well over one thousand books.

By 1955, the CIA was collaborating with Hollywood to shape the American mind through movies. In Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, Joel Whitney says “the goal was ‘to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety’.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff plotted on how to insert those ideas and actually met with top Hollywood figures at the MGM Studios office of director John Ford. The CIA would go so far as to have operatives infiltrate Hollywood studios. Paramount Studios even had an executive and censor who was a CIA operative who made sure Paramount’s movies cut out any anti-American content or criticism of US foreign policy.

So, where’s the truth. For most Americans, being informed citizens of the world and informed participants in democracy means turning to the newspapers and news outlets. But those newspapers and news outlets are reporting disinformation emanating from the CIA, the State Department and the White House that is shaping the perceptions and the minds of the American people.

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Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

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***

The Biden administration and its allies continue to use Russian President Vladimir Putin as the convenient excuse for their economic failures. The most recent falsehood is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused March’s 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Prices were surging long before Russian troops entered Ukraine. Furthermore, Putin did not stop exporting food and gas; it was the Biden administration and Congress that imposed sanctions, making US consumers suffer additional price increases. The blame for the economic effects lies with the US government, not Russia.

The United States has for years been meddling in Ukraine’s affairs with the explicit goal of moving US and NATO military forces ever closer to Russia. The most notorious example was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

Russia has a legitimate grievance over the US supporting expanding NATO to include Ukraine, despite the US having promised not to support expanding NATO beyond Germany’s borders during negotiations over how to end the Cold War. Foreign policy experts, including George Kennan, the architect of the Cold war “containment” strategy, warned that Russia would respond adversely to NATO expansion near Russia.

Before the Ukraine conflict, Biden and his fellow Democrats blamed price increases on “greedy” corporations, going so far as to claim that increasing antitrust prosecutions would somehow bring down prices. Then Putin became the new excuse.

The main culprit behind rising prices is neither Putin nor “greedy” corporations. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are to blame. Starting in September 2019, when the Fed panicked over a spike in interest rates in the “repurchasing” market that banks use to give each other overnight loans, the Fed has engaged in an unprecedented spree of money creation. The Fed further stepped up its easy money and low, and even zero, interest rate policies in response to the lockdowns. Increasing prices are the direct result of the Fed’s policies.

The Fed is planning to try to tame prices by increasing interest rates and reducing its balance sheet. This will likely tip the economy into a recession. Increasing interest rates will also cause the federal government’s debt payments to increase, which is a reason the Fed will not increase rates to anywhere near where they would be in a free market.

The best-case scenario may be a return to 70s-style “stagflation.” The worst-case scenario is that the Fed’s failure to rein in inflation, fueled by Congress’s failure to stop spending, combined with the continued resentment over the US’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy, will cause a rejection of the dollar’s reserve currency status and lead to a major financial crisis. Such a crisis could result in widespread poverty, as well as violence, crackdowns on liberties, and even the rise of a totalitarian government.

The crisis could still be avoided, but only if Congress becomes serious about cutting spending, starting with the military industrial complex. Congress should also start to reform monetary policy by auditing the Fed, legalizing alternative currencies, and exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from all capital gains taxes. The welfare-warfare-fiat money system will end. What is not known is when it will end and whether it will be replaced by an even more authoritarian government or by a return to limited, constitutional government.

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Ukraine: The Fakes of Anti-Russian Propaganda

By Manlio Dinucci, April 18, 2022

The New York Times published on April 4 a satellite photo, dated March 19, showing a street in the Ukrainian city of Bucha strewn with corpses. The photo, disseminated by the mainstream on a global scale, was presented as evidence of a “war crime committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.”

Towards A New Global Financial System: Sergey Glazyev

By Pepe Escobar, April 18, 2022

The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.

Einstein and Freud’s ‘Why War?’ Revisited: Why Anti-War Efforts Go Nowhere

By Robert J. Burrowes, April 18, 2022

Of course, while an utterly inadequate analysis of what, fundamentally, is driving war is the critical foundation of the anti-war movement’s problems, it is still just one of the substantial range of problems it faces, some of which derive from this flawed analysis but others which a better analysis would expose.

Video: The Global Financial Revolution and The Great Reset: Banking Expert Ellen Brown

By Ellen Brown and Kristina Borjesson, April 18, 2022

Public banking expert Ellen Brown talks about her recent Global Research article, “The Coming Global Financial Revolution, Russia is Following America’s Playbook” in which she details the hidden history of decisions and actions taken by America’s leaders that resulted in the current global economic system; how Russia is emulating the US’s past actions; and how ultimately the coming multipolar global economic reset/revolution could yield positive outcomes for the U.S., including ending America’s oil wars and sparking a revival of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

US, EU Sacrificing Ukraine to ‘Weaken Russia’: Former NATO Adviser Jacques Baud

By Jacques Baud and Aaron Mate, April 18, 2022

As the Russia-Ukraine war enters a new phase, former Swiss intelligence officer, senior United Nations official, and NATO advisor Jacques Baudanalyzes the conflict and argues that the US and its allies are exploiting Ukraine in a longstanding campaign to bleed its Russian neighbor.

Why Food Prices Are Expected to Skyrocket

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 18, 2022

Food shortages and skyrocketing food prices now appear inevitable. The global food price index hit its highest recorded level in March 2022, rising 12.6% in a single month. On average, food prices were one-third higher than in March 2021. In the U.S., food prices rose 9% in 2021, and are predicted to rise another 4.5% to 5% in the next 12 months.

Ukraine Demands Its Troops to Fight to Death in Mariupol Despite Inevitable Capture

By Paul Antonopoulos, April 18, 2022

Although the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other elements of the Ukrainian military are only holding onto a few key areas of Mariupol, Kiev stubbornly does not recognize their inevitable defeat in the port city. Kiev carefully hides its own losses and forces its troops to continue resisting and suffer unjustified losses despite not even having enough ammunition or infantry to continue the battle.

Our Case Against NATO: Africans and the Struggle Against Imperialism

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 18, 2022

Two examples of repression and mass killings by countries in the aftermath of WWII were carried out in French-controlled Algeria and the British-dominated Gold Coast (later known as Ghana after independence in 1957). These acts by the colonial powers were designed to preserve imperialist rule in Africa. Both Britain and France were founding members of NATO.

Letter to the California Legislature. Say No to the COVID Tyranny Bills

By Margaret Anna Alice, April 18, 2022

Who is to decide what is “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “false,” “misleading,” or “harmful”? To claim the State has the right to override medically trained physicians is to subject medical science to political science, consequently putting not only individual patients but all of humanity at grave risk.

The Shanghai Covid Lockdown. Who Was Behind It?

By Emanuel Pastreich, April 18, 2022

Corporate newspapers and social media have been flooded with horrific images of the Shanghai lockdown for the last week, a massive enterprise that has confined millions of Chinese to their homes for weeks and has resulted in the implementation of severe restrictions on access to basic supplies.

Il New York Times ha pubblicato il 4 aprile una foto satellitare, datata 19 marzo, che mostra una strada della città ucraina di Bucha cosparsa di cadaveri. La foto, diffusa al mainstream su scala mondiale, è stata presentata quale prova di un “crimine di guerra commesso dalla truppe russe in Ucraina”. Un esame tecnico dimostra che la foto satellitare non è stata scattata il 19 marzo, quando le truppe russe si trovavano a Bucha, ma il 1° aprile, due giorni dopo che esse avevano lasciato la città. La data e l’ora esatta dell’immagine sono state calcolate dal programma SunCalc, in base all’angolo di inclinazione del Sole sopra l’orizzonte e quindi alla direzione delle ombre. Nell’immagine satellitare pubblicata dal NYT, l’angolo del Sole è di 42 gradi. Ciò significa che la foto satellitare è stata scattata alle 11:57 GMT del 1° aprile.

Inoltre, l’esame delle foto dei cadaveri effettuato da un esperto forense scopre vari indizi di una messinscena. Altri fondati dubbi sulla narrazione ufficiale del “massacro di Bucha” emergono dalla stessa cronologia degli eventi: il 30 marzo i soldati russi  lasciano Bucha,  il 31 marzo il Sindaco di Bucha lo conferma e non parla di morti, il 31 marzo i neonazisti del Battaglione Azov entrano a Bucha,  il 4 aprile viene pubblicata la foto satellitare con i cadaveri nelle strade. Inoltre, invece di conservare i corpi per poterli esaminare e appurare le cause della morte, essi vengono frettolosamente sepolti in una fossa comune dove rimangono per giorni. Vengono quindi riesumati per aprire una “indagine” e accusare la Russia di “crimine di guerra”.

Altre prove tecniche dimostrano la falsità della narrazione ufficiale della strage di Kramatorsk, attribuita alle truppe russe. Il numero di serie del missile Tochka-U che ha colpito la stazione ferroviaria di Kramatorsk, l’8 aprile 2022, è Ш91579 (in russo). Questo numero di serie contrassegna lo stock di missili Tochka-U in possesso dell’esercito ucraino. Solo le Forze Armate Ucraine hanno missili Tochka-U. La Russia non li ha dal 2019: sono stati tutti disattivati. Le Repubbliche Popolari di Donetsk e Lugansk non hanno né hanno mai avuto Tochka-U. 

La direzione del cono e la sezione di coda del missile che è atterrato sul terreno vicino alla stazione ferroviaria di Kramatorsk mostra chiaramente che è stato sparato dalla 19a Brigata Missilistica Ucraina, schierata vicino a Dobropolie a 45 km da Kramatorsk. In precedenza le Forze Armate Ucraine hanno usato missili Tochka-U della stessa serie come Ш915611 lanciati su Berdyansk e Ш915516 lanciato su Melitopol. Gli stessi missili sono stati usati contro Donetsk e Lugansk. Il 10 aprile, due giorni dopo la strage di Kramatorsk, l’Esercito ucraino ha lanciato due  missili a grappolo dello stesso tipo Tochka-U: uno contro Donetsk e uno contro Novoaydar (Repubblica Popolare di Lugansk).

Manlio Dinucci

 

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***

The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.

Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Glazyev’s recent intellectual production has been nothing short of transformative, epitomized by his essay Sanctions and Sovereignty and an extensive discussion of the new, emerging geo-economic paradigm in an interview to a Russian business magazine.

In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”

Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.

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The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?

Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.

At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.

Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail. The British colonial economic system based on slave labor was overtaken by structurally more efficient economic systems of the US and the USSR. Both the US and the USSR were more efficient at managing human capital in vertically integrated systems, which split the world into their zones of influence. A transition to a new world economic order started after the disintegration of the USSR. This transition is now reaching its conclusion with the imminent disintegration of the dollar-based global economic system, which provided the foundation of the United States global dominance.

The new convergent economic system that emerged in the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and India is the next inevitable stage of development, combining the benefits of both centralized strategic planning and market economy, and of both state control of the monetary and physical infrastructure and entrepreneurship. The new economic system united various strata of their societies around the goal of increasing common wellbeing in a way that is substantially stronger than the Anglo-Saxon and European alternatives. This is the main reason why Washington will not be able to win the global hybrid war that it started. This is also the main reason why the current dollar-centric global financial system will be superseded by a new one, based on a consensus of the countries who join the new world economic order.

In the first phase of the transition, these countries fall back on using their national currencies and clearing mechanisms, backed by bilateral currency swaps. At this point, price formation is still mostly driven by prices at various exchanges, denominated in dollars. This phase is almost over: after Russia’s reserves in dollars, euro, pound, and yen were “frozen,” it is unlikely that any sovereign country will continue accumulating reserves in these currencies. Their immediate replacement is national currencies and gold.

The second stage of the transition will involve new pricing mechanisms that do not reference the dollar. Price formation in national currencies involves substantial overheads, however, it will still be more attractive than pricing in ‘un-anchored’ and treacherous currencies like dollars, pounds, euro, and yen. The only remaining global currency candidate – the yuan – won’t be taking their place due to its inconvertibility and the restricted external access to the Chinese capital markets. The use of gold as the price reference is constrained by the inconvenience of its use for payments.

The third and the final stage on the new economic order transition will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency. I expect that the model of such a monetary unit that we developed will play its role at this stage. A currency like this can be issued by a pool of currency reserves of BRICS countries, which all interested countries will be able to join. The weight of each currency in the basket could be proportional to the GDP of each country (based on purchasing power parity, for example), its share in international trade, as well as the population and territory size of participating countries.

In addition, the basket could contain an index of prices of main exchange-traded commodities: gold and other precious metals, key industrial metals, hydrocarbons, grains, sugar, as well as water and other natural resources. To provide backing and to make the currency more resilient, relevant international resource reserves can be created in due course. This new currency would be used exclusively for cross-border payments and issued to the participating countries based on a pre-defined formula. Participating countries would instead use their national currencies for credit creation, in order to finance national investments and industry, as well as for sovereign wealth reserves. Capital account cross-border flows would remain governed by national currency regulations.

The Cradle: Michael Hudson specifically asks that if this new system enables nations in the Global South to suspend dollarized debt and is based on the ability to pay (in foreign exchange), can these loans be tied to either raw materials or, for China, tangible equity ownership in the capital infrastructure financed by foreign non-dollar credit?

Glazyev: Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of dollars. Since the US, Britain, EU, and Japan refused to honor their obligations and confiscated the wealth of other nations which was held in their currencies, why should other countries be obliged to pay them back and to service their loans?

In any case, participation in the new economic system will not be constrained by the obligations in the old one. Countries of the Global South can be full participants of the new system regardless of their accumulated debts in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption. Further, should these countries reserve a portion of their natural resources for the backing of the new economic system, their respective weight in the currency basket of the new monetary unit would increase accordingly, providing that nation with larger currency reserves and credit capacity. In addition, bilateral swap lines with trading partner countries would provide them with adequate financing for co-investments and trade financing.

The Cradle: In one of your latest essays, The Economics of the Russian Victory, you call for “an accelerated formation of a new technological paradigm and the formation of institutions of a new world economic order.” Among the recommendations, you specifically propose the creation of “a payment and settlement system in the national currencies of the EAEU member states” and the development and implementation of “an independent system of international settlements in the EAEU, SCO and BRICS, which could eliminate critical dependence of the US-controlled SWIFT system.” Is it possible to foresee a concerted joint drive by the EAEU and China to “sell” the new system to SCO members, other BRICS members, ASEAN members and nations in West Asia, Africa and Latin America? And will that result in a bipolar geo-economy – the West versus The Rest?

Glazyev: Indeed, this is the direction where we are headed. Disappointingly, monetary authorities of Russia are still a part of the Washington paradigm and play by the rules of the dollar-based system, even after Russian foreign exchange reserves were captured by the west. On the other hand, the recent sanctions prompted extensive soul searching among the rest of the non-dollar-block countries. western ‘agents of influence’ still control central banks of most countries, forcing them to apply suicidal policies prescribed by the IMF. However, such policies at this point are so obviously contrary to the national interests of these non-western countries that their authorities are growing justifiably concerned about financial security.

You correctly highlight potentially central roles of China and Russia in the genesis of the new world economic order. Unfortunately, current leadership of the CBR (Central Bank of Russia) remains trapped inside the intellectual cul-de-sac of the Washington paradigm and is unable to become a founding partner in the creation of a new global economic and financial framework. At the same time, the CBR already had to face the reality and create a national system for interbank messaging which is not dependent on SWIFT, and opened it up for foreign banks as well. Cross-currency swap lines have been already set up with key participating nations. Most transactions between member states of the EAEU are already denominated in national currencies and the share of their currencies in internal trade is growing at a rapid pace.

A similar transition is taking place in trade with China, Iran, and Turkey. India indicated that it is ready to switch to payments in national currencies as well. A lot of effort is put in developing clearing mechanisms for national currency payments. In parallel, there is an ongoing effort to develop a digital non-banking payment system, which would be linked to gold and other exchange-traded commodities – the ‘stablecoins.’

Recent US and European sanctions imposed on the banking channels have caused a rapid increase in these efforts. The group of countries working on the new financial system only needs to announce the completion of the framework and readiness of the new trade currency and the process of formation of the new world financial order will accelerate further from there. The best way to bring it about would be to announce it at the SCO or BRICS regular meetings. We are working on that.  

The Cradle: This has been an absolutely key issue in discussions by independent analysts across the west. Was the Russian Central Bank advising Russian gold producers to sell their gold in the London market to get a higher price than the Russian government or Central Bank would pay? Was there no anticipation whatsoever that the coming alternative to the US dollar will have to be based largely on gold? How would you characterize what happened? How much practical damage has this inflicted on the Russian economy short-term and mid-term?

Glazyev: The monetary policy of the CBR, implemented in line with the IMF recommendations, has been devastating for the Russian economy. Combined disasters of the “freezing” of circa $400 billion of foreign exchange reserves and over a trillion dollars siphoned from the economy by oligarchs into western offshore destinations, came with the backdrop of equally disastrous policies of the CBR, which included excessively high real rates combined with a managed float of the exchange rate. We estimate this caused under-investment of circa 20 trillion rubles and under-production of circa 50 trillion rubles in goods.

Following Washington’s recommendations, the CBR stopped buying gold over the last two years, effectively forcing domestic gold miners to export full volumes of production, which added up to 500 tons of gold. These days the mistake and the harm it caused are very much obvious. Presently, the CBR resumed gold purchases, and, hopefully, will continue with sound policies in the interest of the national economy instead of ‘targeting inflation’ for the benefit of international speculators, as had been the case during the last decade.

The Cradle: The Fed as well as the ECB were not consulted on the freeze of Russian foreign reserves. Word in New York and Frankfurt is that they would have opposed it were they to have been asked. Did you personally expect the freeze? And did the Russian leadership expect it?

Glazyev: My book, The Last World War, that I already mentioned, which was published as far back as 2015, argued that the likelihood of this happening eventually is very high. In this hybrid war, economic warfare and informational/cognitive warfare are key theaters of conflict. On both of these fronts, the US and NATO countries have overwhelming superiority and I did not have any doubt that they would take full advantage of this in due course.

I have been arguing for a long time for the replacement of dollars, euro, pounds, and yen in our foreign exchange reserves with gold, which is produced in abundance in Russia. Unfortunately, western agents of influence which occupy key roles at central banks of most countries, as well as rating agencies and key publications, were successful in silencing my ideas. To give you an example, I have no doubt that high-ranking officials at the Fed and the ECB were involved in developing anti-Russian financial sanctions. These sanctions have been consistently escalating and are being implemented almost instantly, despite the well-known difficulties with bureaucratic decision making in the EU.  

The Cradle: Elvira Nabiullina has been reconfirmed as the head of the Russian Central Bank. What would you do differently, compared to her previous actions? What is the main guiding principle involved in your different approaches?

Glazyev: The difference between our approaches is very simple. Her policies are an orthodox implementation of IMF recommendations and dogmas of the Washington paradigm, while my recommendations are based on the scientific method and empirical evidence accumulated over the last hundred years in leading countries.

The Cradle: The Russia-China strategic partnership seems to be increasingly ironclad – as Presidents Putin and Xi themselves constantly reaffirm. But there are rumbles against it not only in the west but also in some Russian policy circles. In this extremely delicate historical juncture, how reliable is China as an all-season ally to Russia?

Glazyev: The foundation of Russian-Chinese strategic partnership is common sense, common interests, and the experience of cooperation over hundreds of years. The US ruling elite started a global hybrid war aimed at defending its hegemonic position in the world, targeting China as the key economic competitor and Russia as the key counter-balancing force. Initially, the US geopolitical efforts were aiming to create a conflict between Russia and China. Agents of western influence were amplifying xenophobic ideas in our media and blocking any attempts to transition to payments in national currencies. On the Chinese side, agents of western influence were pushing the government to fall in line with the demands of the US interests.

However, sovereign interests of Russia and China logically led to their growing strategic partnership and cooperation, in order to address common threats emanating from Washington. The US tariff war with China and financial sanctions war with Russia validated these concerns and demonstrated the clear and present danger our two countries are facing. Common interests of survival and resistance are uniting China and Russia, and our two countries are largely symbiotic economically. They complement and increase competitive advantages of each other. These common interests will persist over the long run.

The Chinese government and the Chinese people remember very well the role of the Soviet Union in the liberation of their country from the Japanese occupation and in the post-war industrialization of China. Our two countries have a strong historical foundation for strategic partnership and we are destined to cooperate closely in our common interests. I hope that the strategic partnership of Russia and the PRC, which is enhanced by the coupling of the One Belt One Road with the Eurasian Economic Union, will become the foundation of President Vladimir Putin’s project of the Greater Eurasian Partnership and the nucleus of the new world economic order.

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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 in Moscow. 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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***

According to many Western commentators—from the center-left to the far-right—China is the major threat to democracy, climate, peace and sovereignty in the 21st century. It is an issue where Donald Trump and Joe Biden are completely aligned. On the other side of the Atlantic too, Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer are closing ranks behind a sinophobic story-line.

Supposedly “critical” voices add that the Chinese behaviour “is not that different from the European imperialism of the 16th to 19th century.” And so the West projects its own image onto China. In reality, the alarmism surrounding China distracts from the ongoing Western imperialism that still holds the greatest power on the world stage.

Western powers remain dominant

It is true that China, a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, has become the largest economy in the world. But there is a great deal of nuance to be added to that statement. For instance, foreign multinational corporations dominate 40% of the Chinese domestic market and even capture 53% of the added value within the Chinese export market. In the age of multinationals, GDP is clearly not a good parameter for measuring economic power.

A study looking at the profits of the 2,000 largest corporations in 2013 confirmed that U.S. multinationals continued to dominate 12 corporate sectors (reaping over 40% of total profits); Japan dominated one sector and China zero.

The same pattern holds for the total wealth of countries. In 2020, the Global North still owned 71% of global assets whilst China owned 17.9%, almost exactly the same as its share of the world population. In other words, Western power has not so much declined as it has globalized.

Exploiting the Global South

More important than the size of the economy is its structure. The most significant mechanisms for extracting rents from the Global South are illegal financial flows, profit repatriation by multinationals and unequal trade, totaling about $3 trillion of stolen wealth every year.

By comparison: That is 20 times the annual development aid that rich countries “donate,” but in reality abuse, for political influence at the UN and for deals surrounding fishing rights and deadly border controls. In all three financial flows, China is a victim not an exploiter.^[1]

If we look at foreign investments, China is equally irrelevant. In 2018, China suffered a net loss of $63 billion in foreign investment, meaning that China lost more to foreign investors than it gained from its own investments abroad. On all seven continents, the Global North as a whole remains the largest foreign investor.

The military threat of the West

Western countries have an estimated 935 military bases in other countries and colonies. China has eight, even if we include its bases in the South China Sea. Outside of its own region, China has only one military base—in Djibouti, where there are also American, French, Japanese, Italian and Saudi-Arabian military installations.

Yet the West is directly threatening China. The United States and the United Kingdom have 290 military bases encircling China and the U.S. is threatening with a nuclear “first-strike capability.” The military budget of NATO is $1.2 trillion, six times that of China. So who is actually threatening whom here?

U.S. military bases around China, and world. [Source: inf.news]

The West is the biggest claimant of debts

The Western press loves to repeat that China is “the largest bilateral creditor” to developing countries. But that is an utterly meaningless statement. In 2020, according to World Bank data, China had $171 billion in outstanding debts with low and middle income countries. Rich countries and the multilateral banks where they have a majority stake (the IMF, World Bank, ADB and IADB) had a total combined debt claim that was almost ten times bigger—$1,100 billion.

More importantly, the private sector—which demands vastly higher interest rates—was responsible for an even greater sum: $2,825 billion in outstanding loans and bonds. The ten largest private creditors in the Global South are all banks and investment funds located in Western Europe and the United States. So who is really driving the debt crisis?

Debt imperialism

An oft-heard accusation against China is that it abuses its loans to confiscate harbors and other sovereign assets in low-income countries. Yet a comprehensive investigation by Johns Hopkins University of more than a thousand Chinese loan commitments between 2000 and 2019 found the accusation to be patently untrue. China never even went to a judge to demand payment, let alone confiscate sovereign assets.

Compare that with reality: one French billionaire who single-handedly controls 16 harbors in West Africa and 12 African countries that are still using a French-controlled currency. Can the real imperialists please stand up?

Multiple studies have shown that Chinese loans are often used as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank. These Western-dominated banks do actually make harsh demands when they lend out money, mostly surrounding budget cuts in health care, education and social welfare.

In many cases the Chinese loans actually help low and middle-income countries evade Western pressure. Chinese finance and trade, for example, was crucial for the Pink Tide in Latin America, when several left and anti-imperialist governments made major strides in the eradication of poverty. That is the real story behind the so-called “debt-trap diplomacy.”

Western coups and electoral interference

There is also a perception that China, contrary to the West, does not make any demands on human rights and democracy when it comes to diplomatic and financial support. That is partially true, because China has an official policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The silver lining, of course, is that China also does not bomb or overthrow other governments to bring “freedom and democracy.”

Since the end of the Second World War the United States has attempted to overthrow 71 foreign governments and has interfered in 81 foreign elections, the latter already before the turn of the millenium. And such practices have certainly not ended. CIA agents brag about them openly.

The list of foreign electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000 comes from a comprehensive study by Dov Levin. The list of (attempted) coups since WW2 comes from William Blum based on his book Killing Hope. To that list I added Turkey (1980), Burkina Faso (1987) Azerbaijan (1993), Palestine (2006-7), Bolivia (2008), Ecuador (2010), Paraguay (2012), Brazil (2016), Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (ongoing).

Source: sundial.csun.edu

Conversely, against China there are only five “accusations”—often with very little evidence—of foreign electoral interference and China has not overthrown any government, with the exception of Tibet. When it comes to respecting the sovereignty of other countries, China is clearly doing a better job.

The United States is the biggest threat to democracy

Furthermore, the idea that the West values human rights and democracy simply does not align with the facts. The United States has military ties to 74% of all dictators around the world. And mind you: That is based on the categorization of Freedom House, a notoriously pro-American think tank that is almost completely funded by the U.S. government.

Even the closest allies of the United States—with a mutual defense agreement, such as NATO—have been responsible for a disproportionate decline in democracy over the last ten years, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

It is no wonder that a global survey last year found that the United States is perceived as the biggest threat to democracy.

The Chinese people do not want Western meddling

Various academic studies—from Western universities such as Harvard—have shown that the Chinese government enjoys overwhelming support among the Chinese people, more than 95 percent. That is vastly superior to all Western countries and not actually that surprising.

The Chinese government has lifted 620 million people out of poverty since 1981—based on an “ethical poverty line” of 7.40 dollars a day—whilst the number of people in poverty elsewhere has increased by 1.3 billion.

Source: bbc.com

The zero-Covid strategy of China—so often dismissed as an authoritarian show of force in the West—also enjoys enormous support. China has the lowest covid death rate in the world. Even in absolute terms, China has one-seventh the number of deaths than Belgium, a country of little more than 11 million people.

Because of its targeted and proactive policies only a little more than one in five Chinese people have endured a lockdown. And this was often for a limited amount of time. The longest lockdown of a major city was in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, and lasted for two months.

Living standards in China have continued to climb, even during the pandemic. That is why China is one of the few countries with a mortality deficit during the pandemic. A major achievement that is also combined with large-scale exports of vaccines to low and middle-income countries, leaving Western Covid aid completely in the dust.

If you follow the news about China, you might get the idea the the population needs to be saved by the West. But that is complete nonsense. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Chinese people view the West as a threat.

Sanctions are insincere, brutal and counterproductive

Of course, none of this means that China does not abuse human rights, especially against a number of minorities. But the Western condemnation of a (cultural) genocide in Xinjiang—a severe accusation that is questioned by experts—has absolutely nothing to do with the otherwise very real oppression of the Uyghurs.

In Yemen a physical genocide has been unfolding since 2015—fully perpetrated with Western arms—already with 259,000 murdered children under the age of five, primarily starved by a humanitarian blockade and systematic bombardments against civilian targets. That is a genocide that could stop tomorrow, if only there were enough political will in Europe and the United States. The West’s supposed “concern” for human rights is a complete farce.

Source: melgurtov.com

Nearly all countries that do not receive military support, training or weapons from the United States are sanctioned. It is a brutal method that has already killed an estimated 100,000 people in Venezuela. Yet sanctions are also counterproductive, because the anger of the population logically turns against a clear external enemy.

According to a comprehensive study of 115 sanction regimes, “external pressure is more likely to enhance the nationalist legitimacy of rulers than to undermine it.” Sanctions are clearly not humanitarian interventions. They are better understood as a collective punishment (a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention) against any country that refuses to submit to Western hegemony.

Colonization of the atmosphere

Just as important as the economic colonization of the Global South, is the colonization of the atmosphere. Because of the enormous greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the Global North, low and middle-income countries have very little space to improve their living standards. A recent study in Nature confirmed that the Global North was responsible for 92% of the climate catastrophe that is engulfing the planet.

The study uses a simple method: Every country has a right to the same amount of emissions in proportion to its average population size since 1850. If you go over your fair share, you have a climate debt. Based on a 1.5 degrees carbon budget—in line with the Paris accords—China will likely never exceed its fair share. Most Western countries, on the other hand, exceeded their fair share decades ago.

In 2018 the IPCC of the UN determined that a maximum of 580 Gton of CO2 could be emitted to stand a decent chance (50%) of not exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming. The Indian scientists Jayaraman and Kanitkar subsequently calculated when the Global North should achieve zero emissions to stay within their fair share of that remaining budget, discarding for the moment all previous emissions.

Based on these calculations Jayaraman and Kanitkar came up with the year 2025 for the United States, 2031 for Japan and 2033 for the European Union. These power blocs—to this day—have much higher per capita emissions than the rest of the world. Regardless, they have all set their carbon neutrality targets at 2050.

The historic climate debt preceding 2018 can subsequently be paid off through climate finance for the Global South. Based on a $135 carbon price—the minimum for achieving 1.5 degrees of warming, according to the IPCC—the rich G7 countries have a climate debt of $114 trillion, provided they fulfill the ambitious targets of the Indian scientists.

Oxfam research shows that G7 countries provided only $17.5 billion in climate support in 2017-18. At that rate, we will have paid off our debts by the year 6500, when the planet is long cooked. So who is really responsible for the climate catastrophe?

Western imperialism is still the issue

Compared to the Global North, China remains a relatively poor country. Its per capita GDPlies between that of Botswana, Suriname, the Dominican Republic and Thailand. This makes the constant Western finger-pointing at China, seemingly for every problem in the world, all the more perverse.

The facts show: Even in an absolute sense, the West still has the most financial, economic and military power. The West supports most dictatorships, overthrows most governments and interferes in the most foreign elections. The West is complicit in genocide, colonizes the atmosphere and punishes any country that refuses to bow to its dictates.

The International People’s Assembly has issued a comprehensive plan to challenge this global medical, financial and food apartheid. Join them. And do not let the alarmism surrounding China distract you. The fight for a just world begins at home and nowhere else.

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Chris de Ploeg is an investigative journalist, grassroots organizer, speaker, moderator and author of Ukraine in the Crossfire. Chris was a lead organizer in the historic student movement of 2015 that occupied the humanities faculty and the managerial headquarters of the University of Amsterdam for nearly two months, under the banners of De Nieuwe Universiteit and the University of Colour. Chris can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. The nuance is that China (like other middle-income countries) can mitigate some of their losses to the West through unequal trade with low-income countries. However, studies that take this into account show that China continues to suffer net losses due to the structure of international trade. In other words, whatever China gains from unequal trade with Africa and South Asia is essentially siphoned off to the Global north, and then some. 

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On March 19 John Philpot, a Montreal lawyer who successfully defended an accused at the ad hoc UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, was awarded the Ingabire Umuhoza Prize for Democracy and Peace in Brussels.

He spoke to the Taylor Report about the war and human tragedy that struck Rwanda not just in 1994 but in the years preceding when the RPF invaded from Uganda under a Ugandan general, Paul Kagame. Since the RPF seizure of power there has been no justice in the country, as witnessed by the long prison term served by the democracy advocate Victoire Ingabire.

Philpot’s acceptance speech stressed that African countries are again speaking up and challenging the neo-colonial order that aided and abetted Paul Kagame.

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The New York Times published on April 4 a satellite photo, dated March 19, showing a street in the Ukrainian city of Bucha strewn with corpses. The photo, disseminated by the mainstream on a global scale, was presented as evidence of a “war crime committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.”

A technical examination shows that the satellite photo was not taken on March 19, when the Russian troops were in Bucha, but on April 1, two days after they left the city.

Screenshot of image 

The exact date and time of the image were calculated by the SunCalc program, based on the Sun’s angle of inclination above the horizon and thus the direction of the shadows. In the satellite image published by the NYT, the Sun’s angle is 42 degrees. This means that the satellite photo was taken at 11:57 GMT on April 1.

Examination of the photos of the bodies by a forensic expert uncovers several clues to a staged event.

Other well-founded doubts on the official narrative of the “Bucha massacre” emerge from the same chronology of events: on March 30 the Russian soldiers leave Bucha, on March 31 the mayor of Bucha confirms this and does not mention any dead bodies, on March 31 the neo-Nazis of the Azov Battalion enter Bucha, on April 4 the satellite photo with the corpses in the streets is published. Moreover, instead of preserving the bodies in order to examine them and ascertain the causes of death, they are hastily buried in a mass grave where they remain for days. They are then exhumed to open an “investigation” and accuse Russia of a “war crime”.

Other technical evidence demonstrates the falsity of the official narrative of the Kramatorsk massacre, attributed to Russian troops. The serial number of the Tochka-U missile that hit the Kramatorsk train station on April 8, 2022 is Ш91579 (in Russian). This serial number marks the stock of Tochka-U missiles in the possession of the Ukrainian Army. Only the Ukrainian Armed Forces have Tochka-U missiles. Russia has not had them since 2019: they have all been deactivated. The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics do not have and have never had Tochka-U.

The direction of the cone and the tail section of the missile that landed on the ground near the Kramatorsk train station clearly shows that it was fired from the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, deployed near Dobropolie 45 km from Kramatorsk. Previously the Ukrainian Armed Forces used Tochka-U missiles of the same series — Ш915611 Ш915516 — which were launched on Berdyansk and Melitopol. The same missiles were used against Donetsk and Lugansk. On April 10, two days after the Kramatorsk massacre, the Ukrainian Army launched two cluster missiles of the same Tochka-U type: one against Donetsk and one against Novoaydar (Lugansk People’s Republic).

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This article was originally published in Italian on byoblu.

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

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In 1932, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein exchanged letters, later published under the title ‘Why War?’ See ‘Why War? An exchange of letters between Freud and Einstein’.

 

However, whatever insight these two giants of an earlier era brought to our understanding of war, the reality is that a great deal has been learned since they corresponded. 

Sigmund Freud. Image Right

Nevertheless, since the emergence of an identifiable, organized anti-war movement during World War I which has grown to include a diverse range of activists and organizations from across the political spectrum, as well as peace and conflict resolution scholars from various disciplines, there is little evidence that this movement, or any of the many organizations within it, has been learning from its failures by systematically undertaking or commissioning further research to understand the phenomenon of war more completely and then devising a strategy to end it based on that learning.

Hence, during its existence for more than 100 years, the organized anti-war movement – and the subsequently developed peace movement with its broader agenda – has had minimal impact in preventing or halting particular military conflicts, including wars, and zero impact in ending war generally, as the record testifies.

And so, even today, war continues in several countries in West Asia (the Middle East), Africa, elsewhere and, more recently, in Ukraine with the antiwar movement again demonstrating its ineffectiveness and, in the case of Ukraine, failing to comprehend the deeper agenda behind what is taking place in that country.

See ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’.

Of course, while an utterly inadequate analysis of what, fundamentally, is driving war is the critical foundation of the anti-war movement’s problems, it is still just one of the substantial range of problems it faces, some of which derive from this flawed analysis but others which a better analysis would expose. These include, for example, an understanding of why the fear of most of those within the anti-war movement is preventing the movement from mustering the commitment and courage that will be necessary if we are to undertake the many actions necessary to end war. In essence, fear makes most participants in the movement happy to complain about war but not take action themselves (or take action that has zero or minimal impact).

As Daniel Berrigan noted in his 1969 book No Bars to Manhood: ‘the waging of war, by its nature, is total – but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.’

This cowardice means that a large proportion of the anti-war movement contents itself with a range of powerless measures – usually extending no further than signing petitions, issuing lameduck ideologically-oriented statements,writing articles, organizing conferences, issuing calls for negotiations or appeals to politicians – all invariably devoid of emotional and geopolitical reality as well as realistic measures to avert/halt the latest war.

This might include advocacy of measures, such as those developed under the guise of international humanitarian law, in relation to ‘outlawing war’ or outlawing particular weapons systems, despite the obvious observation that these legal constraints are routinely violated with impunity by any military power, starting with the United States, or non-state actor that is unconstrained by questions of legality.

Beyond this, ‘action’, when it is taken, is usually confined to conducting (notoriously ineffective) street protests or employing other tactics devoid of strategic impact in the context (of ending war). As former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once noted about a massive anti-war demonstration: ‘Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.’ See Alexander Haig. As a four-star general, Haig, not regarded as the most intelligent Secretary of State in US history, certainly understood that tactical choice is a question of strategy. Most activists have no idea.

So if we are to end war as a phenomenon in human affairs, or even meaningfully attempt to prevent or end a particular war, we need to do a number of things. Most fundamentally, we must start with a sound understanding of what causes violence to begin with because war does not emerge from a vacuum. War, when all is considered, is just another manifestation of violence, like everything from violence against women to economic exploitation to environmental destruction.

And if we are not able or willing to investigate and understand what is causing violence, and address this fundamental cause as part of our strategy, then our other efforts to end the manifestations of violence, including war, must all be in vain. Again, as the record readily testifies.

What Causes Violence?

So what is the cause of violence? Here is what 41 years (1966-2007) of concerted effort taught me.

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The political leaders who decide to wage war, the military leaders who plan and conduct it, as well as the soldiers, sailors and aircraft personnel who fight war each suffered violence as a child. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The neo-Nazi suffered violence as a child. The individual who inflicts violence on his (or her) partner suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist or religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child. The individual who overconsumes, or even consumes certain products and/or otherwise destroys the biosphere, suffered violence as a child.

So let me illustrate this point, in a very simplified way, by briefly explaining the parenting experience of a neo-Nazi. This individual has been terrorized by their parents and/or other significant adults in their life into projecting their fear onto particular groups of human beings and into believing that violence is a morally correct and superior way of dealing with these ‘different’ people. But for a much fuller and more nuanced explanation of this point, see the sections headed ‘The Emotional Profile of Archetype Perpetrators of Violence’ and ‘The Spectrum of the Violent Personality’ in ‘Why Violence?’

If we want to end violence in all of its manifestations, structural and otherwise, locally and globally, then we must finally end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an additional incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand – by nuclear war or other means – is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behaviour is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to ‘socialize’ children to ‘fit into’ their society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviours in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than this and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school.

See ‘Why Violence?’ and

‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (for example, by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (for example, by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is simply one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response.

See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’ and

‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible.

See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? As mentioned above, we do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen (that is, one who pays their taxes, including those for war, and votes and/or lobbies politicians rather than acting powerfully themSelf).

The bottom line is simple: As parents, teachers, religious figures and adults generally, we want the child to be obedient to our commands, and not powerfully able to act in accord with their own Self-will. And we achieve this outcome by terrorizing the child into doing what we want rather than nurturing the child’s innate capacity to listen, deeply, to themSelf in order to follow their own will.

Moreover, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themSelf, other people and the state of the world – with the bulk of this information mediated by elite agents including education systems, the entertainment industry and the corporate media – the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information, no matter how truthful, out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why some people are ‘climate deniers’, most people do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe and even those people who do take action usually do so ineffectively.

See ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’

But the same can be said for those working to end war – see ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ – end the nuclear weapons race or engage in other struggles, including liberation struggles, that are vital parts of the global struggle to create a more peaceful, just and sustainable human culture.

See ‘Why Activists Fail’.

And to briefly put this issue in the current global context, the vast bulk of the human population, including most of those individuals whom society would regard as ‘highly intelligent’, has been readily terrorized into believing that they are threatened by a pathogenic virus (labeled ‘SARS-CoV-2’) when there is no documented, scientific proof that such an entity as a pathogenic virus even exists – see ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong – and certainly no documented scientific proof that a virus labeled SARS-CoV-2 exists.

See ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’

and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’.

And for an account of researcher Christine Massey’s fruitless search over the course of more than a year to find evidence of an isolated virus, via Freedom of Information requests to health/science institutions all over the world, see

‘177 health/science institutions globally all failed to cite even 1 record of “SARS-COV-2” purification, by anyone, anywhere, ever’.

Despite this, the vast bulk of the human population has been terrorized into accepting a series of medical intrusions (including lockdowns, PCR tests, mask-wearing and gene-altering injectables) when, in fact, there is no documented, scientific proof that (assuming there was a ‘pathogenic virus’) lockdowns, PCR tests, mask-wearing or ‘vaccines’ even ‘work’ and/or extensive documentation of their harm. See, for example,

‘And How Are the Children? Lockdowns, Massive Fear, Deaths from Suicides and Drug Abuse’,

‘The WHO Confirms that the Covid-19 PCR Test is Flawed: Estimates of “Positive Cases” are Meaningless.

The Lockdown Has No Scientific Basis’, ‘Conclusion Regarding Masks: They Do Not Work’,

‘Masks “don’t work,” are damaging health and are being used to control population: Doctors panel’,

‘The Truth about the Covid-19 Vaccine’,

‘A Final Warning to Humanity’, ‘COVID Shots to “Decimate World Population,” Warns Dr. Bhakdi’ and

‘20 Facts about Vaccination Your Doctor Forgot To Tell You’.

And because the fear generated by the elite-driven ‘virus’/injectable narrative has been so debilitating and thus engendered a high level of obedience by the population at large, it is a rare individual who has investigated both the shortcomings in this narrative and the horrific agenda that this narrative is concealing, let alone identified a powerful strategy to resist it. See ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’.

So, to return to the focus of this article, let me briefly reiterate this vital point: The essence of what human beings call ‘socialization’ is the process by which each child is terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning or their learning capacity is seriously diminished.

The multifaceted violence inflicted throughout childhood and adolescence ensures that the adult who emerges is suppressing awareness of an enormous amount of fear, pain, sadness and anger (among many other feelings) and must live in delusion to remain unaware of these suppressed feelings. This ensures that, as part of their delusion, the individual develops a strong sense that what they are doing already is functional and working (no matter how dysfunctional and ineffective it may actually be) while not investigating the existence of evidence that might contradict their delusion and/or unconsciously suppressing awareness of any evidence they come across that does contradict it. They do this because, unconsciously, people learn to identify obedience with ‘functional and working’ (because they do not get punished for being obedient). See

‘Why Violence?’,

‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’,

‘Do We Want School or Education?’,

‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and

‘Human Intelligence or Human Awareness?’

Just one critically important outcome of this terrorization process is that a significant proportion of the human population is effectively insane, and this certainly includes the Global Elite and those primary elite agents on which it relies to generate and maintain wars. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Another critically important outcome of this terrorization process is that the international conflict resolution architecture – which is essentially a legal framework – does not take emotional factors into account. Hence it is not capable of resolving conflicts in any meaningful way. This is why negotiations often go nowhere, particularly in a timeframe that would avert adverse outcomes. And why ‘agreements’ that are reached are utterly superficial. The fundamental drivers of the conflict – invariably including suppressed terror, self-hatred and anger which are often unconsciously projected at the other party – are never addressed and will continue to manifest as violence in various forms, even if military violence is ended in a particular context. See ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’.

So if we want a powerfully effective anti-war movement (or peace movement, environmental movement, social justice movement….) then we need Self-aware individuals who can think, plan and act powerfully as part of strategically-oriented organizations to achieve ambitious longer-term goals. Such as ending the institution of war.

Anything less will fail. Again, as the record demonstrates.

So what can we do?

Ending war is possible. But it will take a courageous, sophisticated, strategic effort, given how deeply violence is embedded into the human ‘socialization’ process which makes war just one of the many approved violent behaviours in which adults are expected and encouraged to participate, beginning with paying taxes to finance it.

So while it is possible to end war, this won’t be happening any time soon.

And it can’t happen until we commit ourselves to eliminating violence against children so that human society creates adults who are psychologically whole and powerfully able to participate in conflict without resorting to violence to ‘resolve’ it.

Nevertheless, in parallel with efforts to eliminate violence against children, those powerful enough can also participate in a comprehensive strategy to end war as explained on the ‘Nonviolent Strategy’ website, starting with this list of ‘Strategic Goals to End War’. This is extrapolated from a book which explained why a strategy of nonviolent defense, understood and implemented by sufficient committed and organized individuals, is strategically superior to any military strategy.

See The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

Or, if you want to participate in a strategy to end a particular war, such as that in Ukraine, particularly given the possibility of it morphing into a longer term insurgency – see ‘Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda’ – you can read how to do so here: Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

But, as explained above, precisely because of their socialization experience during childhood, most of those who would identify as ‘anti-war’ are simply too frightened to act powerfully in resisting it. Hence, war will continue until we address its root cause: violence against children.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Public banking expert Ellen Brown talks about her recent Global Research article, “The Coming Global Financial Revolution, Russia is Following America’s Playbook” in which she details the hidden history of decisions and actions taken by America’s leaders that resulted in the current global economic system; how Russia is emulating the US’s past actions; and how ultimately the coming multipolar global economic reset/revolution could yield positive outcomes for the U.S., including ending America’s oil wars and sparking a revival of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

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As the Russia-Ukraine war enters a new phase, former Swiss intelligence officer, senior United Nations official, and NATO advisor Jacques Baud analyzes the conflict and argues that the US and its allies are exploiting Ukraine in a longstanding campaign to bleed its Russian neighbor.

Guest: Jacques Baud. Former intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service who has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the United Nations, and with the Swiss military.

Transcript

AARON MATÉ:  Welcome to Pushback.  I’m Aaron Maté.  Joining me is Jacques Baud.  He has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the UN, and with the Swiss military.  He is also a former strategic intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service.  Jacques, thank you for joining me.

JACQUES BAUD:  I thank you for inviting me.

AARON MATÉ:  Let me just start by asking you to talk more about your background and how it has informed your visibility into the crisis in Ukraine.

JACQUES BAUD:  Well, as you just said, I’m a strategic intelligence officer.  I used to be in charge of the Warsaw Pact forces in strategic…that was during the Cold War, but still, I have a good visibility on what’s going on in Eastern Europe.  I used to speak and read Russian as well, so that gives me some access to some documents.  And recently I had been seconded to NATO as head of the struggle against proliferation of small arms.  And in that capacity, I was involved in several projects from 2014 onwards with NATO in Ukraine.  And so, I know the context quite well.  I was also monitoring the possible influx of small armaments in the Donbas in 2014.  And I have also worked—because in my previous assignment in the UN, I used to work on the restoration of armored forces, so when the Ukrainian armed forces got some problems with personnel issues, with suicide, with all these kind of things that you had in 2014, also problems in recruiting military—I was asked to participate on the NATO side on several projects in restoring Ukrainian armed forces.  And so that’s a little bit, in a nutshell, my background regarding this area.

AARON MATÉ:  You’ve written a lengthy article which I will link to in the show notes for this segment, and you lay out the causes of the Ukraine conflict in three major areas.  There is the strategic level, the expansion of NATO; the political level, which is what you call the Western refusal to implement the Minsk agreements; and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbas over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.

Let me ask you to start there.  Talk about what you call the dramatic increase on civilians inside the Donbas in February, the period that led to the Russian invasion, immediate period, and how this escalation of attacks, as you say, helped lead to this war, this Russian invasion.

JACQUES BAUD:  Well, I think we have to understand, as you know, that the war in fact hasn’t started on 24 February this year.  It started already in 2014.  But I think that the Russians always hoped that this conflict could be solved on a political level, in fact; I mean the Minsk agreements and all that.  So, basically what led to the decision to launch an offensive in the Donbas was not what happened since 2014.  There was a trigger for that, and the trigger is two things; I mean, it came in two phases, if you want.

The first is the decision and the law adopted by [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in March 2021—that means last year—to reconquer Crimea by force, and that started a build-up of the Russian armored for…not the Russian, [rather] the Ukrainian armored forces in the southern parts of the country.  And so, I think the Russians were perfectly aware of this build-up.  They were aware that an operation was to be launched against the Republics of the Donbas, but they did not know when, and, of course, they were just observing that, and then came the real trigger.

You may remember that—I think it was on the 16th of February—Joe Biden, during a press conference, told that he knew that the Russians would attack.  And how would he know that?  Because I still have some contacts, and nobody actually thought that the Russians—before end of January, beginning of February—I think nobody thought that the Russians would attack Ukraine.  So, there must have been something that made Biden aware that the Russians would attack.  And this something, in fact, is the intensification of the artillery shelling of the Donbas starting on the 16th of February, and this increase in the shelling was observed, in fact, by the [Border] Observer Mission of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], and they recorded this increase of violation, and it’s a massive violation.  I mean, we are talking about something that is about 30 times more than what it used to be, because the last eight years you had a lot of violations from both sides, by the way.  But suddenly on the 16th of February you had a massive increase of violation on the Ukrainian side.  So, for the Russians, Vladimir Putin in particular, that was the sign that the operation—the Ukrainian operation—was about to start.

And then everything started; I mean, all the events came very quickly.  That means that if we look at the figures, you can see that there’s, as I said, a massive increase from the 16th-17th, and then it reached kind of a maximum on the 18th of February, and that was continuing.

And the Russian parliament, the Duma, also was aware of this possible offensive, and they passed a resolution asking Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the two self-proclaimed Republics in the Donbas.  And that’s what Putin decided to do on the 21st of February.  And just after adopting the decrees, the law recognizing the independence of the two Republics, Vladimir Putin signed a friendship and assistance agreement with those two Republics.  Why did he do that?  So that would allow the Republics to ask for military help in case of attack.  And that’s why, on the 24th of February when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the offensive, it could invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter that provides for assistance in case of attack.

AARON MATÉ:  And as you noted, the OSCE documented a big increase in ceasefire violations, artillery firing on the rebel-held side, but do you think, based on what you observed of the positioning of Ukrainian troops, do you think that the threat of an imminent invasion or assault by the Ukrainian forces was real?  Can you gauge that from how they were positioned on the other side of the front line?

JACQUES BAUD:  Yes.  Absolutely.  I mean, we had reports, and those reports were available during the last couple of months.  Since last year we knew that the Ukrainians were building up their forces in the south of the country, not on the eastern border with Russia but on the border with the contact line with Donbas.  And, as a matter of fact, as we have seen from the 24th of February, the Russians had almost no resistance in the start of the offensive, especially in the north.  And so, they could, what they have done since then, they could surround the Ukrainian forces in the south, in the southeast part of the country—that means between the two Republics of the Donbas and the Ukraine mainland, if you want.  And that’s where the bulk of the Ukrainian forces are today.  And according to the…that’s exactly the Russian doctrine to fight, I mean operational doctrine.  Their main offensive was on the south, clearly, because the objective stated by Vladimir Putin—we can probably come back on these details later on—but this was demilitarization and denazification.

Both objectives, in fact, were about to be done or to be reached in the south of the country, and that’s where the main efforts of the offensive was done.  In the offensive order, the effort against Kiev is a so-called secondary effort, and it had, as a fact, you had two functions basically.  First of all, to put some pressure on the political leadership in Kiev because the name of the game is to bring the Ukrainians to the negotiations.  That was the first objective of this second effort.

The second objective of this second effort was to bind or to pin down the rest of the Ukrainian armed forces so that they could not reinforce the main forces which are in the Donbas area.  And that worked quite well.  So that means that the Russians could surround, as I said, the main forces, the bulk of the armed forces—the Ukrainian armed forces.  Once they have achieved that they could withdraw some troops from Kiev, and that’s what they have done since end of March.  They have pulled several units in order to reinforce what they want; I mean their own forces to carry on under the main battle in the Donbas area.  So now they are pulling, and they have pulled these troops from the Kiev area, and these troops will now help to flank for the vanguard, the offensive against the main forces in the Donbas.  And that’s what some called the ‘mother of all battles’ that is currently going on in the Donbas area, where you have—nobody knows exactly the number of Ukrainian troops; estimates vary from sixty thousand to eighty thousand who are surrounded—and the forces would be cut in smaller cauldrons and then destroyed or neutralized.

AARON MATÉ:  It’s pretty clear to me that Zelenskyy’s government had no interest in serious diplomacy on all the critical issues that could have avoided a war, and I think the main factor is what I presume to be US pressure behind the scenes, which we can’t fully prove now.  But I imagine evidence of that might come out later.  And certainly, the open hostility of Ukraine’s far right, who essentially threatened Zelenskyy’s life if he made peace with Russia.  And these threats have dogged him throughout his presidency and continued right up to the eve of the invasion, and it led to people like his top security official saying in late January that the implementation of the Minsk accords would lead to Ukraine’s destruction—after Zelenskyy was elected on a platform of implementing Minsk—and that carried over to the final talks on implementing the Minsk accords that were brokered by Germany and France.

At those talks in February, Zelenskyy’s government all of a sudden refused to even speak to the representatives of the rebels, which makes an accord possible.  And meanwhile you had developments like this, which we just learned about from The Wall Street Journal, which was that the German chancellor [Olaf] Scholz on February 19th told Zelenskyy that, quote, “Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia.”  And this pact Scholz proposed would be signed by Biden and Putin, but Zelenskyy rejected this—rejected out of hand.

But my question is, because I think it’s pretty conclusive that the Zelenskyy-Ukraine side sabotaged diplomacy, but what about Russia?  Do you think Russia exhausted all of its diplomatic options to avoid a war?  For example, why not go to the UN and ask for a peacekeeping force in the Donbas?  And second of all, if the aim is to protect the people of the Donbas, why invade far beyond the Donbas and not just go there?

JACQUES BAUD:  Well, I think the Russians have totally lost faith in the West.  I think that’s the main thing.  They don’t trust the West anymore, and that’s why I think now they rely on a total victory on the military side in order to have some benefits in the negotiation.

I think Zelenskyy…I’m not sure exactly if he’s so reluctant to have peace.  I think he cannot do it.  I think from the very beginning he was caught between his…remember that he was elected with the idea of achieving peace in the Donbas.  That was his objective; that was his program as president.

But I think the West—and I would say the Americans and the British didn’t want this peace to occur.  And of course, the Germans and the French who were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement for the Ukrainian side, they never really implemented this—their function.  I mean, they have never done their job, clearly.  And especially France, which is simultaneously a member of the Security Council.  Because I will just remind you that the Minsk agreements were also part of a resolution of the Security Council.  So, meaning that they have not only the signature of the different parties that was done in Minsk, but you have also the members of the Security Council who were responsible for implementation of the agreement, and nobody wanted to have this agreement made.  So that means that, I think, there was a lot of pressure on Zelenskyy so that he wouldn’t even talk to the representatives of the two breakaway Republics.

And after that we have seen, by the way, that we have several indications that Zelenskyy was not completely, or is not completely, in control of what’s going on in Ukraine.  I think the extreme, let’s say, nationalist extreme right—I don’t know exactly what is the right term because it’s a mixture of everything—but these forces definitely prevent him, or prevented him, so far to do anything.  And we can see also that he’s back and forth regarding peace.  As soon as he started, you may remember that at the end of February, as soon as Zelenskyy indicated that he might be willing to start negotiations, this was the time where these negotiations were to take place in Belarus.  Within hours after Zelenskyy decided that, the European Union came with a decision providing for half a billion arms to Ukraine, meaning that the Americans, certainly, but I think the West as a whole, made every possible effort to prevent a political solution to the conflict, and I think the Russians are aware of that.

Now we have also to understand that the Russians have a different understanding of how to wage a war on the Western powers, especially the US.  That means that in the West we tend to, if we negotiate, we negotiate up to a certain point and then negotiations stop, and we start war.  And that’s war, period.  In the Russian way of doing things, it’s different.  You start a war, but you never leave the diplomatic track, and you go on both ways, in fact.  You put mental pressure and you try to achieve an objective, also with diplomatic means.  This is very much a Clausewitzian approach to war—when [Prussian general and military theorist Carl von] Clausewitz, as you know, defined war as the continuation of politics with other means.

That’s exactly how the Russians see that.  That’s why during the whole offensive, and even at the very beginning of the offensive, they started, or they indicated they were willing, to negotiate.  So, the Russians certainly want to negotiate, but they don’t trust the Western countries—I mean the West at large—to facilitate that negotiation.  And that’s the reason why they didn’t come to the Security Council.  By the way, they know that, probably, because, as you know, this physical war that we witness now is part of a broader war that was started years ago against Russia, and I think, in fact, Ukraine is just…I mean, nobody is interested in Ukraine, I think.  The target, the aim, the objective is to weaken Russia, and once it will be done with Russia, they will do the same with China, and you can already see.  I mean, we have seen that now, the Ukrainian crisis has overshadowed the rest, but you could have a very similar scenario happening with Taiwan, for instance.  So, the Chinese are aware of that.  That’s the reason why they don’t want to give up their, let’s say, relationship with Russia.

Now, the name of the game is weakening Russia, and you know that there have been several studies done by the Rand Corporation on extending Russia, overextending Russia, and so on, and where the whole scenario is…

AARON MATÉ:  Just to explain that for people who aren’t familiar with it, Rand is a Pentagon-type think tank, and they did a study in 2019 looking at all the different ways in which the US could overextend and unbalance Russia, and the top option was to send weapons to Ukraine to fuel a conflict there that could draw Russia in, which is exactly what’s happened.

JACQUES BAUD:  Absolutely.  And I think that this is a complete design for weakening Russia, and that’s exactly what we see unfolding right now.  We could have anticipated that, and I think Putin anticipated that.  And I think he understood that, if on the end of February, I mean, on the 24th of February, or let’s say just before because he had to make the decision before, but in the days before deciding on the offensive, he understood that he could not do nothing.  He had to do something.  The Russian public opinion would never have understood why Russia would remain just observing the Donbas Republics being invaded or destroyed by Ukraine.

So, nobody would have understood that.  So, he was obliged to go.  And then, I think…and that’s what, if you remember what he said on the 24th of February, he said regardless of what he would do, the amount of sanctions he will receive would be the same.  So basically, he knew that the slightest intervention in the Donbas would trigger a massive launch of sanctions, so he knew that.  So, then he decided, ‘Okay, then I have to go for the maximal option,’ because one option would have been just to reinforce, don’t mess with the Republics and just defend the Republics on the line of contact.  But he decided to go for the larger option, which is to destroy those forces that threatened Donbas.

And that’s where you have those two objectives.  Demilitarization, which is not the whole demilitarization of all Ukraine, but it was to suppress the military threat that was on the Donbas; that’s the main objective of that.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding of what he said and, of course, he was not very clear, but that’s part of the Russian way of communicating and doing things.  They want to keep options open, and that’s the reason why they say the minimum things and they just say what’s necessary.  And this is exactly what Putin meant on the 21st, what he said about suppressing the military threat against the Donbas.  Denazification had nothing to do with killing Zelenskyy or destroying the leadership in Kiev.  That was definitely not the idea, and, as a matter of fact, as I said, the main way they conceive war is to combine a physical action and diplomatic action.  So that means that in such a way of doing you have to keep a leadership and you have to keep them in order to negotiate, and that’s why there was no way you would kill or destroy the leadership in Kiev.

So, denazification was basically not about the 2.5 percent of the extreme right in Kiev.  That was about the 100 percent of Azov people in Mariupol and Kharkov, and this kind of thing.  So, we tend to misunderstand because some people said, ‘Well, but, you know, why denazify?  Because there is only 2.5 percent of political rightwing parties, only 2.5 percent or something like that, so it’s meaningless.  So, why denazify?  It makes no sense.’  But it was not about that.  It was definitely about those groups that were in fact recruited from 2014 by the Ukrainians in order to, let’s say, I would say pacify or control.  I don’t know exactly what’s the right word for that, but to fight in Donbas.  These people were extremists, fanatics, and these people were dangerous.

AARON MATÉ:  And one of the points you make in your article, which I didn’t know, is that part of the reason why Ukraine had this need for militias, far-right militias and foreign mercenaries, is because of a high rate of defection inside its own military ranks, people not wanting to serve, and even defecting to the other side of the rebellion in the Donbas.

JACQUES BAUD:  Exactly.  In fact, I noticed that, as I told you, I was in NATO and was monitoring the influx of weapons in the Donbas, and what we noticed is that we couldn’t identify import of weapons or export of weapons from the Russian side to the Donbas.  But what we could see is that you had a lot of Ukrainian units who defected, in fact, and complete battalions.  And in 2014, most of the heavy artillery that the Donbas gained were from defectors.  The whole units defected with ammunition and people and all that.  The reason is that the Ukrainian army was based on a territorial…was manned and organized on a territorial way.  That means you had a lot of Russian-speak[ers] in the armed forces.  Once they were sent to fight in the Donbas, they didn’t even want to fight their own colleagues and Russian-speaking people, so they preferred to defect.

And in addition to that you had in 2014, I mean in 2014 to 2017, in that period the leadership of the Ukrainian army was extremely poor.  You had a lot of corruption.  I’m not sure that the military was prepared for such a kind of war, in fact, because the war that was fought at that time by the rebels was very similar to what you can see in the Middle East today, or in the last years.  That made very mobile units moving around very rapidly, much faster than the heavy units that the Ukrainian army had, and, as a result, if we see the pattern of the different battles that were fought in 2014, 2015, you could see that the Ukrainians could never lead.  They had never the initiative.  The initiative was always with the rebels.  And it was not guerrilla.  That’s important to say.  It was kind of extremely mobile warfare.  And in addition to that you had, I think, the army was not really prepared to fight in general.  So, you had a lot of suicides, you had a lot of alcohol problems, you had a lot of accidents, you had a lot of murders within the Ukrainian army.

And that led a lot of young Ukrainians to leave the country, because they didn’t want to join the army.  And what I’m saying is, I mean, it was recorded and reported by official reports in the UK and the US, I think.  They made some very interesting reports on the low rate of recruitment of individuals, because people didn’t want simply to join the army.  And that’s the reason why NATO was involved, and I was involved in such a program, trying to reshuffle the image of the army and find solutions to improve the recruitment condition of the army, and things like that.

But the solutions that were provided by NATO were in fact institutional solutions that would take time, and in order to compensate with lack of personnel and probably to have more aggressive military personnel, they started to use internationalists and mercenaries, as a matter of fact.  Nobody knows exactly the number of these paramilitaries or extreme rights militias.  Reuters put the figure at one hundred thousand.  I’m not able to verify that, but that was a figure given by Reuters.  And that seems to fit what we can observe now in the different regions of the country.  So, these paramilitaries took a major role not in mobile warfare, and I would say [not in] the normal field warfare, but they were used in maintaining order within cities.  And that’s exactly what you have today in Mariupol, for instance, where you had those people, because they are not equipped for field operations.  They are equipped for urban warfare.  They have light equipment, they have some armored vehicles, but they don’t really have tanks, anything like this.

So, this is definitely units that are meant for urban warfare.  That’s what they do in major cities.  And these guys are extremely fanatic, we can say, and they are extremely dangerous.  And that explains the way Mariupol, the battles and the extremely brutal fights that you have in Mariupol as an example, and we probably will see the same thing in Kharkov, for instance.

AARON MATÉ:  As we wrap, I want to ask you about some of the recent atrocities that we’ve seen reported.  There were reports of mass civilian killings by Russia inside the town of Bucha and also killings of Ukrainian forces, and then you had the attack on the train station in Kramatorsk.  I’m wondering if you’ve evaluated both of these incidents and what you make of them.

JACQUES BAUD:  Well, there are two things in that.  And the first is that the indication we have on both incidents to me indicates that the Russians were not responsible for that.  But, in fact, we don’t know.  I think that’s what we have to say.  I mean, if we’re honest, we don’t know what happened.  The indications we have, everything, all the elements we have tends to point at Ukrainian responsibilities, but we don’t know.

What disturbs me in the whole thing is not so much that we don’t know, because in war there’s always such situations, there are always situations where you don’t know exactly who is really responsible.  What disturbs me is that Western leaders started to make decisions without knowing what’s going on and what happened.

And that’s something that disturbs me quite deeply, that before having any result of any kind of inquiry, of investigation, and I mean international, impartial investigation, without having that we start already to take sanctions, to make decisions, and I think that illustrates how the whole decision-making process in the West was perverted.  Since February or even before, in fact, because we had a similar thing after the hijacking—or not hijacking, by the way, it was not a hijacking—but the incident in Belarus with this Ryanair flight.  You may remember last May, last year, that people started to react just minutes after the incident was reported in the press, even they didn’t know what was going on!  So, that’s this way of doing from the political leadership in Europe, I mean the European Union, but also in European countries.  That disturbs me as an intelligence officer.  How can you make a decision with such impact on populations or on whole countries that disturbs even our own economies?  So, it tends to backfire on us.  But we take decisions without even knowing what’s going on, and that, I think, indicates an extremely immature leadership that we have in the West in general.  That’s certainly the case in the US, but I think in this example of the Ukraine crisis shows that the European leadership is not better than what you have in the US.  It’s probably even worse, I think, sometimes.  So, that’s what should worry us, that you have people deciding based on nothing, and that’s extremely dangerous.

AARON MATÉ:  Jacques Baud, he is a former strategic intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service, also served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the UN, and the Swiss military.  Jacques, thank you very much for your time and insight.

JACQUES BAUD:  Thank you for everything.  Thank you.

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Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. In 2019, Maté was awarded the Izzy Award (named after I.F. Stone) for outstanding achievement in independent media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation magazine. Previously, he was a host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!.

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Food shortages and skyrocketing food prices now appear inevitable. The global food price index hit its highest recorded level in March 2022, rising 12.6% in a single month. On average, food prices were one-third higher than in March 2021. In the U.S., food prices rose 9% in 2021, and are predicted to rise another 4.5% to 5% in the next 12 months

Inflation was already ramping up well before Russia went into Ukraine, thanks to the uncontrolled printing of fiat currencies that occurred in response to the COVID pandemic. Governments’ COVID responses have also wreaked havoc with global supply chains, causing disruptions that continue to this day

Ukraine has ceased exports of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat and cattle, and Russia has banned exports of fertilizer.

Together, Russia and Belarus provide nearly 40% of the global exports of potash, a key fertilizer ingredient. Russia also exports 48% of the global ammonium nitrate, and combined with Ukraine, they export 28% of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium fertilizers. Experts are now predicting fertilizer prices may double as a result of Russia’s ban on fertilizer exports

The long-term answer lies in regenerative biodynamic farming, which does not use any chemical inputs

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In the featured video, “Breaking Points” cohosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti discuss one of the greatest threats currently facing the people of the world, namely food shortages and skyrocketing food prices.

According to a recent NPR report,¹ the global food price index hit its highest recorded level in March 2022, rising 12.6% in a single month.² On average, food prices were one-third higher than in March 2021. In the U.S., food prices rose 9% in 2021, and are predicted to rise another 4.5% to 5% in the next 12 months.³

But while the Ukraine conflict is cited as the primary cause, it’s not the sole reason. Price inflation was already ramping up well before Russia went into Ukraine, thanks to the uncontrolled printing of fiat currencies that occurred in response to the COVID pandemic. Governments’ COVID response have also wreaked havoc with global supply chains, causing disruptions that continue to this day.

The climate has also been uncooperative, causing poor harvests around the world. China, for example, has reported it expects the lowest harvest yields in history this year, thanks to serious flooding of its farmland in the fall of 2021.⁴

Compounding Crises Threaten Global Food Productivity

That said, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is certainly making a bad problem worse. Ukraine is known as “the bread basket” of Europe, responsible for producing and exporting 12% of all food calories traded on the international market. Russia is also a major exporter of food, and together with Ukraine, the two countries account for nearly 30% of global wheat exports, nearly 20% of the world’s corn and more than 80% of the sunflower oil.⁵

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s projections, wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine will be reduced by more than 7 million metric tons in 2022. At the same time, the Ukrainian government has decided to ban all export of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat and cattle, to ensure food safety for its own people, while Russia has banned exports of fertilizer.⁶

As reported by Wired, the current food crisis in Ukraine is made up of several components, and the effects will have a worldwide rippling effect, thanks to our dependency on global trade:⁷

“Goods that have already been harvested — last autumn’s corn, for instance — can’t be transported out of the country; ports and shipping routes are closed down, and international trading companies have ceased operations for safety. (Plus, while those crops sit in bins, destruction of the country’s power grid takes out the temperature controls and ventilation that keep them from spoiling.)

This year’s wheat, which will be ready in July, can’t be harvested if there’s no fuel for combines and no labor to run them. Farmers are struggling over whether to plant for next season — if they can even obtain seeds and fertilizer, for which supplies look uncertain …

Analysts worry that the countries that buy the most wheat from Ukraine — predominantly in Africa and the Middle East — will have the hardest time paying as prices rise.”

Scott Irwin, an agricultural economist and professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois told Wired magazine:⁸

“This crisis is beyond the normal ability to shuffle supplies around. We’ve exploded that system, and the cost is going to be extreme economic pain.”

Serious Fertilizer Shortage Looms

Together, Russia and Belarus provide nearly 40% of the global exports of potash, a key fertilizer ingredient. Russia also exports 48% of the global ammonium nitrate, and combined with Ukraine, they export 28% of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium fertilizers.⁹

Experts are now predicting fertilizer prices may double as a result of Russia’s ban on fertilizer exports. For some farmers, that will be a death knell that causes them to go out of business. The rest will be forced to charge more for their commodities, resulting in skyrocketing food prices.

Biodynamic Solutions

Are there any solutions to this pressing dilemma? I would argue that there are, but it’ll require rapid response and adaptation from farmers everywhere. As explained in “Kiss the Ground,” a documentary about biodynamic farming, a beautiful harmony exists within nature, and we can benefit by tapping into that natural system with biodynamic practices rather than working against it.

As noted in the film, a preview of which is included above, “Biodynamic farming is simply farming in service of life.” While it requires a leap of faith to make the transition, the results speak for themselves. Biodiversity improves rapidly on farms that make the transition, and the quality of the food (and the quality of life of the farmer) is greatly augmented.

Biodynamic agriculture builds upon the foundation of organic farming. That means zero pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are used. But biodynamic then goes a step further. The goal is to make the land better than it was before. It doesn’t just stop the destruction of soil, but actually regenerates it.

The farm as a whole is basically viewed as one organism, where each part of the farm supports the rest. Livestock have their role, as do microorganisms and beneficial insects. Rather than working against you, they’re now working for you to improve the fertility of the soil and the quality of the food grown in it.

Biodynamic farming is really about being a part of nature and working with it rather than trying to conquer nature through unnatural and ultimately destructive means.

Biodynamic farming can also, over time, help stabilize the climate. Not only do biodynamic farmers not pollute the air, water or soil in the first place, but the plants also pull carbon from the air, depositing it back into the soil where it does the most good, and requires far less watering. Regenerative practices also prevent the loss of topsoil and increase rainfall.

For example, regenerative ranchers in Northern Mexico, in the Chihuahuan Desert, who have added 1 million acres of rotational grazing, report getting 15% to 20% more rainfall than their neighbors who haven’t regenerated their land.

Support Biodynamic Farming

Many of the food products we sell under the Mercola brand are produced by Demeter certified biodynamic farmers in eight countries. Demeter is the oldest ecological certification in the world. Most recently, we’ve initiated the first-ever standards for Demeter Certified Biodynamic supplements as well.¹⁰

We also fund the Billion Agave Project, initiated by Regeneration International on a regenerative farm in Mexico run by the Organic Consumers Association. It’s a fantastic solution that solves several problems at once.

This project is a game-changing ecosystem-regeneration and reforestation strategy that uses a combination of agave plants and mesquite (a nitrogen-fixing companion tree), to salvage and regenerate degraded semi-arid lands that aren’t suitable for other crops.

Forty percent of the world is arid or semi-arid and in danger of becoming desert where nothing will grow. But we can reverse this process using native plants and permaculture techniques such as this one.

By taking a limb from a healthy mesquite tree, adding some natural hormones and wrapping the branch with a bag filled with compost, you will, after three to four months, have a small tree ready for planting as new roots grow into the compost-filled bag. At that point, you can either plant it into a container or directly into the soil.

This process is known as “air layering.” A 1-year-old mesquite tree grown in this way will be as big as a 7-year-old mesquite tree grown from seed, significantly speeding up the reforestation effort. The roots of the mesquite tree can burrow hundreds of feet down in search of water, and they in turn provide nutrition for other plants, as they exchange liquid carbon from the tree for the nutrients from the soil.

In this way, the mesquite supports the growth of the agave without need for chemical fertilizers, and the agave can then be used to produce a fermented nutrition-rich biomass that supports grazing livestock that otherwise might not have enough to eat.

A Way to Support Grazing Cattle on Semi-Arid Lands

Agave is best known for producing tequila, but a local farmer in Mexico discovered he could use the massive leaves, which are typically discarded as junk, to produce a nutrient-rich livestock feed. Cows, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and even sheepdogs enjoy it.

The feed is produced by finely chopping up the leaves, each of which can weigh 40 to 80 pounds, and then fermenting them in a closed container. To this fermented mash, you can then add mesquite pods at a ratio of 80% to 90% agave leaf and 10% to 20% mesquite pods. This mix is superior to alfalfa in terms of nutrition, but costs only a third or a quarter of the price.

A big part of the cost-savings is from the reduced water consumption. Alfalfa needs about 26 times more water than agave and mesquite. Most of the animals on the farm eat the natural vegetation and get the agave mash as a supplement.

However, by adding garbanzo beans — another low-water crop — you could produce a feed that the animals could live on exclusively. Considering some areas are now considering culling their livestock herds due to a shortage in cattle feed,¹¹ this could be a novel solution in some instances.

New Market Opportunities

Changing the farming subsidies to prioritize regenerative farming would go a long way to changing the status quo, but private investing is another route to success that is now coming to the fore.

There’s a new type of asset being developed on the stock exchange called Natural Asset Stocks, or Natural Asset Corporations. The government of Costa Rica, for example, is putting all government-owned forests and farmlands into a Natural Asset Corporation.

This is a type of stock different from anything we’ve seen so far. Basically, these stocks will allow fund managers, private investors and corporations to invest in natural assets. The part you end up owning is the ecosystem services of that land.

So, for example, you could own the environmental services resulting from the Billion Agave Project, which include carbon sequestration amounts and water savings. Over time, as the whole system matures and the soils are regenerated, your asset rises in value.

This new asset system will allow Wall Street to divert financial assets into ecosystem assets that benefit the planet in a multitude of ways, and still get a return on their money.

The Organic Consumers Association has also developed a system of verification to go along with this new asset system. Using modern technology, it will be able to accurately measure things like the number and size of plants and the health of the soil.

They’re also using a blockchain accounting system to verify the calculations and make it very difficult to cheat. So, anyone who invests in a natural asset will be able to verify, several years down the road, at a very low cost, whether the asset has improved or degenerated.

Regenerative Farming Could Save the World

A number of people have pushed regenerative farming for decades, warning that the current chemical-dependent monoculture is unsustainable in the long run, and subject to geopolitical disruptions. We’re seeing the reality of those warnings right now.

Had heed been taken sooner, we wouldn’t be in such a precarious position right now. But hindsight is 20/20, and I believe many farmers will now be forced to make the tough choice to make the conversion to biodynamic if they want to survive in the long term.

Their transition is not going to bring immediate help to the global population, as it takes a number of years to turn depleted soils into soils that can support food production without chemical inputs. But we have to start thinking in the longer term if any of us are to survive.

As a nonfarmer, you can support this effort by buying food from regenerative and biodynamic farmers. Regenerative International, incorporated in 2014, has built a global network of regenerative farmers and ranchers, with some 400 affiliates in 60 countries.

You can find a map of these regenerative farms on RegenerationInternational.org. Of course, you can also implement regenerative strategies in your own garden, even if it’s a small one. The future does look bleak at the moment, with food shortages and skyrocketing prices appearing inevitable, but doing nothing is not the answer. We must all start thinking ahead and make wiser choices.

The globalization of food production has led us to the brink of disaster. The answer is to return to locally grown foods. Similarly, our reliance on chemical-dependent monocultures has just been proven to be a weak link that needs to be replaced by regenerative methods that don’t need chemicals to thrive. We have the answers to the problem. We just need to implement them, as rapidly as possible.

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Notes

¹ NPR April 8, 2022

^2, 3, 9 National Interest April 11, 2022

⁴ Bloomberg March 22, 2022

^{5, 6, 7, 8} Wired March 11, 2022

¹⁰ Regeneration International June 25, 2021

¹¹ Reuters March 18, 2022

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***

The Russian Ministry of Defence offer of surrender terms to the personnel of the extreme nationalist neo-Nazi battalions and foreign mercenaries in the Azovstal iron and steel works to end hostilities by 1.00 pm Moscow time on Sunday would only have been a proforma gesture.

Moscow’s statement said, that radio interceptions at Azovstal — as many as 367 in the past twenty-four hours — showed that the militants were in a hopeless situation, practically without food and water, and were seeking permission to lay down arms and surrender but “the Kiev authorities categorically forbid them to do this.”

Yesterday, Denis Pushilin, Head of the Donetsk administration, openly called for “elimination” of the neo-Nazi militants holed up in Azovstal. 

Azovstal is a massive Soviet-era plant, a city within the city of Mariupol. There is an underground city beneath the plant built in the Soviet era which includes Cold-War realities — structures to withstand bombing, blockades, and even nuclear strike. The Russian estimation is that a maximum of 2500 people could be holding out in the underground city equipped with armoured vehicles and huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition. 

The Russian side is in some hurry to finish off the operation in Mariupol. The forces there are are urgently needed to be redeployed to the Donbass front. Kiev, on the other hand, is banking on delaying the Russian operation which gives it more time to reinforce its forces in Donbass. 

President Zelensky has once again switched tack to speak about the diplomatic track. His latest stance is that Ukraine is ready to discuss abandoning its bid to join NATO and the status of Crimea with Russia, but not until Moscow halts hostilities and withdraws its troops! 

The Ukrainian armed forces already lost 23,367 people while 1,464 people surrendered in Mariupol as of yesterday and another 2,500 are blocked at the city’s Azovstal plant. As for the Donbass, Russian forces enjoy superiority in numbers, logistics, firepower and terrain and a defeat on that front will leave Zelensky no choice but to seek a negotiated settlement on Russian terms. (See a relatively balanced prognosis by the American military analyst Colonel (Retd.) Daniel Davis, The Battle For Donbas Will Be A Tough Fight For Ukraine.) 

Indeed, Zelensky and his American mentors hope that the battle for Donbass is wide open. The point is, although much of the war in eastern Ukraine will be fought in areas of open ground, Russian forces also have to take several significant population centres to achieve their objectives in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, including Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, Lysychansk, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk as well as several smaller towns. 

The Russian performance so far does not bode well for rapid success against built-up areas. Again, the weapons provided by the West have helped Ukrainian forces significantly to prevent Russia controlling the skies. The Ukrainian side is counting on these factors to stem the tide of the battle. Plus, of course, their morale is high.  

Be that as it may, this time around, there is no confusion in the Russian mind that a peace settlement is round the corner. The Russians are unlikely to allow themselves to be hoodwinked again, when they took Zelensky for his word, trooped into the talks at Istanbul where an agreement was initialled on the basis of which, in an extravagantly emotional gesture of goodwill, they withdrew troops from Kiev and other northern territories, but only to see their interlocutors in Kiev backtrack on the terms of the agreement. 

The strange Russian behaviour conveyed misperceptions that the Kremlin might be looking for the exit door. Evidently, that has emboldened the Western powers to embark upon a large-scale rearmament project for Ukraine, including transfer of heavy offensive systems, high-precision ammunition, modern air defence systems, American Stinger missiles, etc. for use in the upcoming new phase of military confrontation.

It is an open secret that military personnel of the NATO countries are deployed alongside the Ukrainian forces under the guise of “foreign volunteers.” The foreign fighters are led by US officers and the whole command of the Ukrainian armed forces is concentrated mainly in the hands of the Americans. 

Arguably, the sinking of the warship Moskva fits into this paradigm. Russian analysts estimate that the last week’s missile strike on the Russian flag ship Moskva was actually masterminded and coordinated by the Pentagon. According to the ADS-B Exchange flight tracking site, a US Navy plane with electronic gear was spotted near the village of Zhurilovka in eastern Romania in the vicinity of the stricken ship Moskva (which probably guided the missile attacks.) Read here and here.

The implied message is: ‘Bring ‘em on.’ In military terms, though, the sinking of the ageing warship, 43 years old, may not be a game changer for the Russian operation. Everything now hinges on the offensive in Donbass — and, potentially further Russian operation in Kherson and Odessa without which the NATO will continue to pose acute threat to Russia in the Black Sea region. The NATO is already slouching toward Moldova.

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Featured image: Russian forces take control of strategic city pf Mariupol (Source: IP)

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***

Although the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other elements of the Ukrainian military are only holding onto a few key areas of Mariupol, Kiev stubbornly does not recognize their inevitable defeat in the port city. Kiev carefully hides its own losses and forces its troops to continue resisting and suffer unjustified losses despite not even having enough ammunition or infantry to continue the battle.

As far back as April 11, writing on Facebook, the Ukrainian 36th Brigade admitted that all infantry soldiers had been killed and that “shootings battles” against Russian forces were now being conducted by artillerymen, anti-aircraft gunners, radio operators, drivers and even the cooks and musicians from the orchestra.

Over a week later and the number of Ukrainian servicemen who remain in Mariupol is not exactly known. According to Russian intelligence, no more than 700 Ukrainian fighters remain inside the last pockets of resistance, including about 200 foreign mercenaries. They hide in the underground facilities of the Azovstal plant with little to no ammunition, medicine and provisions.

Despite having obviously lost contact with its own forces and not wanting to admit the impossibility of their evacuation or sending military reinforcements to help them, Kiev declared the continuation of resistance to the bitter end. In effect, Ukrainian authorities have doomed their soldiers and foreign fighters to a senseless death unless they as individuals make the decision to surrender.

On April 11, during a failed breakthrough, three tanks, five infantry fighting vehicles and seven armored vehicles of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were destroyed. As of April 14, 2,673 people surrendered to the Russian military in the Greek-founded port city, the largest number of people who surrendered since Russian military operation in Donbass began in February.

Although Kiev’s forces have openly announced they will commit war crimes by killing Prisoners of War (PoW) and wounded Russian soldiers, with a video appearing online on March 28 of Ukrainian soldiers doing exactly that, other videos show Russian soldiers feeding captured Ukrainian troops, something that would certainly not appear in the mainstream Western media.

With Western media not reporting as such, this information is still distributed through Ukrainian social media and has resulted in thousands surrendering. Even Western media are struggling to find evidence and testimonies of Ukrainian soldiers being tortured, beaten or humiliated. This is strikingly different from the massacres perpetrated against Russian and Donbass forces.

Ukrainian prisoners are allowed to call their relatives and notify them that they are still alive. In fact, unlike their Russian counterparts, captured Ukrainian PoW’s that are cleared of war crimes are already participating in the clearing of rubble and destruction to clean up cities affected by the war.

An uncomfortable fact for Western mainstream media is that all the so-called “national battalions”, i.e. the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Tornado and Aidar, are official units of the National Guard of Ukraine, which falls under the command of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. However, during wartime, which means since 2014, the National Guard obeys the orders of the Ukrainian commander-in-chief and the Ministry of Defense, meaning that both the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard are professional military outfits.

At the same time, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have much greater capabilities, firepower and technical means than the National Guard, and therefore the damage from the actions of the Army in Donbass is much greater. Ukrainian artillerymen have been targeting and killing civilians in Donbass for years,.. This has been extensively reported on by human rights organizations and the United Nations but sidelined and ignored by Western media.

Measures like releasing Ukrainian prisoners to their families after writing a receipt/contract stating that they refuse to participate in further hostilities and pledge not to fight again, so long as they had not previously committed war crimes, may look naïve but it is with the hope of minimizing casualties on both sides and deradicalizing the Far-Right Kiev regime.

Despite the reality that Mariupol has effectively fallen, Kiev is still unwilling to announce a surrender of its forces in the city, effectively dooming hundreds of Ukrainians and foreign fighters to their death. It is not known why Kiev insists on fighting to the last man in Mariupol, but after eight years since Donbass forces failed to capture the city, the domination of the Azov Battalion has effectively come to an end.

Although ignored by Western media, witness testimonies show that the Mariupol-based Azov Battalion enforced Ukrainization on the city’s inhabitants, so-much-so that those speaking Russian were fined, and in the most extreme cases executed, as happened to an ethnic Greek only 10 days before the Russian military operation began on February 24.

With Kiev unwilling to backtrack on its racist extremism and insistence on indiscriminately targeting Donbass civilians, emboldened by the idea that it would have the complete backing of the West, Ukraine has now completely lost access to the Azov Sea with the Russian capture of Mariupol.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

 

While the Pentagon and the United States State Department continues to provide a distorted rationale for the instigation of a major military conflict in Eastern Europe, billions of dollars are being utilized to transfer offensive weapons aimed at preventing a peaceful resolution to the current war in Ukraine.

Although the corporate and government-controlled media outlets in Western Europe and North America have reported to the public on a daily basis that their own administrations cannot be blamed for the current war in Ukraine, for any serious observer, the culpability for the tensions now existence on an international level can be traced back to the desire by imperialism to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

NATO was formed in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War and the initiation of the Cold War by Washington against the rising socialist and national liberation movements around the world. In 1949, only two countries on the African continent were independent, Ethiopia and Liberia. Both of these countries in 1949 were highly compromised due to the intervention of the United States and Britain in their internal affairs stemming from the legacy of African enslavement and the rise of imperialist fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. The founding members of NATO were all in North America and Western Europe being Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

Many of these states were involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonialism. All of them benefited from the super-exploitation of African and other oppressed peoples after the transformation of the world economic system beginning in the 15th century. The outcomes of the World War I and World War II left the U.S. as the dominant imperialist power in the world.

The only real and effective challenge to the hegemony of the U.S. and its allies during the post WWII period were the socialist states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) founded in 1949 after more than two decades of armed struggle, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) consolidated in 1948, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north which declared independence in August 1945, along with the other anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial movements arising in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, which were objectively bolstered by the burgeoning African American and workers’ struggles which developed during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The position of the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s represented the height of political hypocrisy. African Americans were being denied fundamental civil rights protections which were originally put in place during the period after the Civil War (1861-1865). There were Civil Acts and amendments to the U.S. Constitution between 1866-1875 ostensibly designed to reconstruct some semblance of democratic governance. Nonetheless, the Reconstruction process was overthrown during the latter decades of the 19th century placing African Americans in the social position of neo-slavery at worst and second-class citizenship at best.

Participants in the leading civil rights organizations after WWII were pressured to denounce the socialist camp and pledge allegiance to U.S. imperialism as the only legitimate system of governance not only domestically but internationally. Those leading activists and public figures who refused to adopt the Cold War policies of Washington were subjected to investigations, prosecution, imprisonment, economic isolation and exile. All the while African Americans were being lynched by mobs, killed without justification by police, executed by the state and denied fundamental due process and equal protection under the law.

Military Interventions to Halt National Liberation

Two examples of repression and mass killings by countries in the aftermath of WWII were carried out in French-controlled Algeria and the British-dominated Gold Coast (later known as Ghana after independence in 1957). These acts by the colonial powers were designed to preserve imperialist rule in Africa. Both Britain and France were founding members of NATO.

In Algeria on the same day as Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied forces, French troops massacred thousands of people across the North African state for merely demonstrating against the racist and repressive policies of Paris. France had colonized Algeria since 1830 and would not relinquish control until the people waged an eight-year armed and diplomatic struggle aimed at national liberation.

Even France24 in a report published during 2021 said of the historical event: “On May 8, 1945, thousands had rallied in Setif as allied powers, including colonial ruler France, marked a hard-won victory in Europe over Nazi Germany. ‘Long live the allied victory,’ demonstrators shouted.

But the festive gathering soon turned into a demonstration for an end to colonial rule, with cries of ‘Long live independent Algeria!’ That was a provocation for French police, incensed by the appearance, for the first time, of Algerian flags. As they ordered the removal of the green and white standards, scuffles broke out. Demonstrator Bouzid Saal, 22, refused to drop his flag — so a French policeman shot him dead. Outrage tore through the massive crowd. The ensuing riots and revenge attacks on Europeans sparked a wave of repression by French authorities that left as many as 45,000 dead, according to Algerian official figures. French historians put the toll at up to 20,000, including 86 European civilians and 16 soldiers. The killings would have a transformative impact on the nascent anti-colonial movement. A full-blown independence war broke out nine years later, finally leading to the country’s independence in 1962…. The French launched a 15-day campaign of violence, targeting Setif and the surrounding rural region, bombing villages and hamlets indiscriminately. General Raymond Duval led French authorities’ ruthless clampdown, imposing martial law and a curfew on a patch of territory stretching from Setif to the sea, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north. Nationalist leaders were detained on pure suspicion, and villages suspected of harboring separatists were strafed by the air force and set ablaze. Women, children and the elderly were massacred, and some 44 villages were destroyed in 15 days of retribution. Executions continued until November 1945, and some 4,000 people were arrested.” (See this)

Of course, the official propaganda of the U.S. is that the purpose of their intervention in WWII was to fight against fascism and spread democracy in Europe. Yet the Allies utilized repression in an attempt to prevent the majority of people around the globe suffering under the yoke of western domination from achieving freedom and national independence.

In recent months the Algerian government has been involved in a diplomatic row with France as well as Spain over the legacy of colonialism and the status of the Western Sahara, which remains under the control of the Kingdom of Morocco with the support of the imperialist centers of authority in Europe and North America. French President Emmanuel Macron made statements suggesting that Algeria as a country did not exist prior to 1830 and the history of the anti-colonial movement, as told by Algiers, were a fabrication. These provocative comments by Macron and the role of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez who endorsed the continued colonization of the Western Sahara under Moroccan tutelage, represents the contemporary attitude of NATO member-states.

The second example related to the founding NATO member-states’ historic repression against anti-colonial movements occurred in the Gold Coast on February 28, 1948. African veterans of the war combined with traditional leaders boycotting the inflated prices of British-controlled goods, held peaceful protests to request adequate pensions and benefits for their military service for London as well as reasonable costs for commodities. British security forces opened fire on the demonstrators marching to Christiansborg Castle (Osu) to present their petition to colonial authorities when three leaders of the protest were assassinated. Later as the African masses rose up in rebellion against the massacre, the British arrested scores of people deemed as the organizers of the unrest. This series of events in 1948 led to the independence struggle headed by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who founded the Convention People’s Party in June 1949, just over one year later, creating the conditions for another eight-year campaign to achieve freedom from Britain on March 6, 1957.

Nkrumah had been brought back to the Gold Coast in late 1947 to work as an organizer for the then United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), an anti-colonial grouping. In the aftermath of the event of February 1948, sharp differences would surface between Nkrumah and other leading UGCC officials.

A source on the events of 1948 in the Gold Coast notes:

“The people’s protests lasted five days. By 1st March the colonial governor had declared a state of emergency and put in place a new Riot Act. On 12th March the governor ordered the arrest of ‘The Big Six,’ leading members of the UGCC, which included Kwame Nkrumah, as he believed they were responsible for orchestrating the disturbances. The Big Six were incarcerated in remote northern parts of the country. It was around this time that Nkrumah and the other five began to have significant disagreements over the direction of the movement for independence. By 1949 Nkrumah had broken away from the UGCC to form the Convention People’s Party (CPP) taking the masses of the people with him. The CPP, through a campaign of ‘Positive Action,’ achieved an end to the Gold Coast colony and brought the new dawn of independent Ghana on 6th March 1957.” (See this)

The independence movements in Africa utilized various forms of organizational tactics aimed at achieving victory over colonialism. In the former Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, Africans had no other choice than to resort to arms in their fight against Lisbon. Portugal received maximum logistical and diplomatic support from NATO in their war against the national liberation movements of the PAIGC, MPLA and FRELIMO in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique respectively.

Azores island in the Atlantic served as a NATO base of operations against the guerrilla movements in Africa. Under the U.S. administration of President Richard Nixon from 1969-1974, the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger even wrote memorandums encouraging the Pentagon and NATO unconditional support for fascist-colonial Portugal. These memoranda were also designed to undermine the morale of the liberation movements and solidarity efforts in the West seeking to end colonial rule of tens of millions of African people.

After the failure of the war by Lisbon to defeat the liberation movements, a military coup occurred in Portugal in April 1974. Although the question of NATO membership did not initially arise, a debate would erupt over the future role of the country within the military alliance. Portugal relinquished control over its African colonies, however, the European country remained within the western sphere of influence including membership in NATO.

NATO and Imperialism in the 21st Century

Over the last two decades, NATO has enhanced its profile through participation in numerous U.S.-coordinated military operations in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya. These interventions have left untold numbers of civilians and government personnel dead, injured and displaced.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Yugoslavia erupted in micro-nationalist warfare which lasted until the conclusion of the decade. The 1999 bombing of Serbia, including the capital of Belgrade, was designed to solidify the dominance of the Pentagon-NATO alliance in Europe and consequently throughout broader geo-political regions of the world. Serbia was subjected to massive airstrikes for over two months. The following year, even after the government in Belgrade had been functionally neutralized, then President Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown, kidnapped and brought to the Netherlands to stand trial in a U.S.-engineered special tribunal on war crimes. Milosevic later died in detention while in subsequent years, several of the newly-independent states in the area were recruited into NATO.

Source: Global Times

Afghanistan in 2001 was bombed, invaded and occupied by the U.S. which mobilized other NATO states to engage in the 20-year war ostensibly aimed at ending jihadist terrorism in Central Asia. After eight months in office President Joe Biden ordered the withdrawal of Pentagon forces from Afghanistan. Other NATO states had already exited the country. The character of the pullout from Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 13 Marines stationed outside the airport at Kabul during the evacuation.

In retaliation, the U.S. launched a drone strike on innocent people in Kabul killing members of a family which had cooperated with the NATO occupation. At present, there is a widespread humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan leaving millions displaced, impoverished and hungry. To add even more distress to the Afghan people, Biden expropriated $3.5 billion in assets being held in U.S. banks. Consequently, the White House has turned its back on the victims of a disastrous NATO intervention and occupation leaving tens of millions without employment, food, medicines and the capacity to generate income and international trade. (See this)

This humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan by the Pentagon and NATO has served to further damage the popular standing of the Biden presidency. Nonetheless, there has been no reduction in the Pentagon budget which strangles the working and oppressed masses in the U.S. At present the war in Ukraine has taken center stage in regard foreign and domestic policy. Countries around the world are being pressured into rallying alongside imperialism in its war drive to expand the NATO project through the destabilization of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China in the Far East.

In the North African state of Libya during the early months of 2011, the U.S. backed counter-revolutionary rebel elements sought to overthrow the Jamahiriya government led by Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The United Nations Security Council at the time voted to pass two resolutions which authorized a total arms and economic blockade against Libya as well as the establishment of a so-called no-fly zone which is merely another form of war declaration. A similar no-fly zone had been imposed over Iraq during the 1990s accompanied by draconian sanctions which killed an estimated one million people, many of whom were women, children and seniors. (See this)

After the ground operations in Libya, which began on February 17 were not reaping the desired results by imperialism, a massive blanket bombing of the oil-rich country by the Pentagon and NATO was launched on March 19 which lasted for seven months. There were reports that anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people were killed and two million displaced. The longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi was targeted and assassinated as he was attempting to exit the areas around Sirte.

The impact of the destruction of Libya as in the cases of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan had regional and international implications. Instability due to the dislocation of millions during and after the air campaign fueled further destabilization in neighboring Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

Libya since 2011 has become a notorious center for human trafficking and internecine conflict that has spilled over into other states prompting migration across the Mediterranean into Southern Europe. The human traffickers engage in dangerous methods of transportation across North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. Thousands die every year seeking to escape the detention centers and continuing sectarian battles in Libya.

The migration of Africans and Asians to Southern Europe has provided a political rationale for the growth of ultra-right groupings and governments committed to ending entry into their countries by people of color. European Union (EU) coast guard units routinely intercept migrants at sea to repatriate them back to Africa. In Europe, migrants are often confined to detention centers where they are harassed by the authorities.

Moreover, on a political electoral level, the migration question has become a major wedge issue in Europe and the U.S. Successive administrations in Washington led by Democrats and Republicans have failed to develop a comprehensive immigration policy. At least part of this inability to adequately address the issue lies in the refusal to abandon the imperialist foreign policy of Washington and Wall Street.

Imperialist wars of occupation since 2001 involving Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Libya, among other states, are at the root of the dislocation of tens of millions. This is the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons since the conclusion of WWII.

The UN Refugee Agency reports on its website that:

“At least 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26.4 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom of movement. At a time when 1 in every 95 people on earth has fled their home as a result of conflict or persecution, our work at UNHCR is more important than ever before.”

These figures are rarely reported on in the U.S. media, and when they are, it is not done in a manner which links the unprecedented levels of displacement with imperialist wars waged by the Pentagon, NATO and its allies around the globe. Absent a social and historical context in which to explain the origins of the crisis, people are encouraged to believe that the refugee, IDP and migrant situations are somehow a result of the purported moral deficiencies of people in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Yet the African, Latin American and Asian geo-political regions are still being targeted by NATO for containment, exploitation and conquest.

By absolving itself of culpability, the U.S. can attempt to justify its denial of entry to migrants and refugees and their discriminatory treatment while awaiting a decision on whether they can legally live in the country. Within the immigration laws and policies of the U.S., racism is often utilized to limit the number of peoples of African, Asian and Latin American descent into the U.S.

In the Horn of Africa state of Somalia there has been instability for the last three decades due to the political and military interference of the U.S. and NATO. More recently in 2006-2007, the administration of President George W. Bush encouraged troops from Ethiopia under the TPLF-EPRDF leadership of Meles Zenawi to invade Somalia in order to prevent the consolidation of power by the Islamic Courts Union.

Airstrikes by the Pentagon and the British Royal Air Force were initiated on a regular base in Somalia under the guise of preventing terrorism. Numerous attempts to form a unified civilian transitional government have not been able to include the Al-Shabaab underground armed guerrillas. Al-Shabaab has since its emergence as the major opponents to the western-backed federal government, has split into at least two identifiable factions.

For the last fifteen years, the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), which included troops from several regional states including Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda, has failed to military defeat al-Shabaab. Once again in recent weeks, the mandate of AMISOM was extended for another year with no real prospect of a final resolution to the conflict in Somalia.

Much of the military training and weaponry are supplied by the U.S. and its NATO allies for AMISOM. The putative peacekeeping operations also maintains UN Security Council diplomatic backing and funding. U.S. soldiers and other personnel working with intelligence agencies have been killed in action in Somalia. Suicide bombings and other armed attacks take place in several areas of the country including the capital of Mogadishu.

Relationships developed between AU member states with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and NATO are not just on a bilateral basis. NATO itself has outlined an extensive program of engagement, training and collaboration with the AU Secretariat in Addis Ababa. The same reasons cited by AFRICOM for its deployments of thousands of troops on the continent mirrors the language of NATO. Both institutions claim that they are invited to participate in joint training exercises with African military forces from various regions.

In addition, a significant number of African officers are trained in Pentagon war colleges in the U.S. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, some of these ranking soldiers have been involved in military coups against elected governments. This has been the case in Mali, Guinea and Libya where internal conflict and lack of democratization is objectively underwritten by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

AU-affiliated regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have been unable to reverse a series of military coups taking place in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad. ECOWAS along with France and the U.S. have issued statements opposing the military usurpation of power yet these coup regimes remain in office with absolute impunity.

Therefore, the training supplied by the Pentagon and NATO cannot ensure stability and security on the African continent. In order for AU member-states to achieve genuine independence and sovereignty it must come from the internal dynamics within the political structures established by the democratic forces operating inside these countries. The western bourgeois democracies represented by NATO have never extended the notions of self-determination and independent foreign policies to the underdeveloped nations and regions of the world.

In language provided by NATO in regard to its cooperation with AU member-states, the military alliance says:

“Since 2005, NATO has been cooperating with the African Union (AU) – a regional organization with 55 members created in 2002. The NATO-AU relationship started modestly with AU requests for logistics and airlift support for its mission in Sudan. The cooperation has evolved over time and, although primarily based on ad-hoc military-technical cooperation, NATO Allies are committed to expanding cooperation with the AU to make it an integral part of NATO’s efforts to work more closely with partners in tackling security challenges emanating from the south.” (See this)

However, over the last 17 years the degree of instability in Africa has heightened substantially particularly since the Pentagon-NATO engineered counter-revolution in Libya during 2011. Conditions have deteriorated in some countries such as the Central African Republic and Mali that the governments of these states, even the military juntas, are turning towards Moscow for security assistance and training. (See this)

France and the U.S. have taken great exception to the presence of Russian-based military advisors in the CAR and Mali. The Wagner group, a defense services corporation which operates as a private enterprise, has been present in Mali in recent months prompting threats by Paris to withdraw its military assistance to Bamako. In response, the military junta in Mali ordered the French ambassador to leave the West African state within 72 hours. (See this)

In the same above-quoted NATO document on AU cooperation, it goes on to emphasize:

“In January 2007, the AU made a general request to all partners, including NATO, for financial and logistical support to AMISOM. It later made a specific request to NATO in May 2007, requesting strategic airlift support for AU member states willing to deploy in Somalia under AMISOM. In June 2007, the North Atlantic Council (NAC) agreed, in principle, to support this request and NATO’s support was initially authorized until August 2007. Strategic sealift support was requested at a later stage and agreed in principle by the NAC in September 2009. The AU’s strategic airlift and sealift support requests for AMISOM have been renewed on an annual basis. The current NAC agreement to support the AU with strategic air- and sealift for AMISOM extends until January 2022…. NATO has a liaison office at the headquarters of the AU. The liaison office is comprised of a Senior Military Liaison Officer, a Deputy and one support staff. The liaison office provides, at the AU’s request, subject matter experts, who work in the AU’s Political Affairs, Peace and Security Department alongside African counterparts. The NATO Senior Military Liaison Officer is the primary coordinator for the Alliance’s activities with the AU. The size of NATO’s presence on the ground in Addis Ababa is based upon the requests from the AU and the availability of resources from Allies.”

How can the AU member-states secure and protect the interests of the 1.3 billion people on the continent with these levels of penetration by NATO within its military structures? These contradictions must be corrected in order to build viable internal defense mechanisms, combined with strategies and tactics which are compatible with the needs of the workers, youth and farmers in Africa. Neo-colonialism is manifested in the economic and subsequent military policies of contemporary African states. The source of what is described as “Islamic terrorism” has its origins in the counterinsurgency efforts by Washington to undermine those governments seeking to build genuine independence, unity and socialism. The jihadist groupings founded and funded by Washington and its allies serve the interests of the Pentagon and NATO by providing a rationale for sanctions, bombings, invasions and the installation of puppet regimes beholden to the interests of imperialism.

Global Impact of NATO Expansion in Eastern Europe: Food Deficits and Energy Crises

One of the most alarming aspects of the war in Ukraine and the ongoing sanctions against the Russian Federation are the sharp rise in prices for consumer goods and energy. Fuel prices in the state of California in the U.S. have gone up to as high as $6 per gallon. In other regions of the country, prices are coming down slightly, perhaps due to the release by the Biden administration of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a tactic which has been used by other presidents in the past.

The U.S. has witnessed the highest inflation rate in over 40 years. The 7-8% rate noted by the federal government does not tell the complete story. Costs related to living expenses such as rents, taxes, car prices, food and other commodities have increased substantially. Since there has not been a raise in the minimum wage means that working people are losing income every single quarter of the year.

On an international scale, food supplies to various geo-political regions have been seriously curtailed because Russia and Ukraine are considered two of the largest agricultural producers in the world. In various African and Middle Eastern states, the potential for enormous food deficits is more than apparent. These countries are attempting to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020 which caused serious disruptions in industrial and agricultural production. Lockdowns and the rapid spread of the coronavirus has caused millions of deaths and many more severe illnesses which often have long term public health, economic and social consequences.

One report on the escalating crisis in food supplies published by the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington pointed out that:

“Russia and Ukraine are considered the breadbaskets of the world. In 2021, the two countries exported more than one-quarter of the world’s wheat. They are both major suppliers of corn, sunflower seed oil, and barley; Russia is also a major supplier of fertilizer, which is critical for agricultural production. Food prices are soaring, exacerbating inflation rates and reducing the purchasing power of populations across the Middle East and Africa, where 70% of Russian wheat exports went in 2021. These escalating costs, fed by actual and anticipated scarcity, are exacerbating economic crises for Egypt and Lebanon, with a heavy reliance on Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports, and imperiling vulnerable populations in conflict zones, including Yemen, Syria, and Somalia, which heavily rely on emergency food aid.”

NATO war impacts African states (Source: Statista)

In the energy sector the banning of Russian oil and natural gas in Western Europe are inevitably causing disruptions in supply. Opportunistically the U.S. has proposed a plan to redirect its energy supplies to NATO countries in Eastern and Western Europe. However, this process. which is highly unfeasible, will take time to develop the necessary supplies of oil and natural gas to those states which have adopted Washington’s foreign policy.

Sanctions above all else are acts of war. The attempted strangulation of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Russia and China, etc. are designed to destabilize these states and to make them susceptible to regime change in favor of the U.S. and other NATO governments. Russia, China and a host of other states have vowed to resist these efforts to isolate them from world trade and international relations.

The New York-based think tank, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), acknowledged the strategic role of Russia in providing energy resources to European states. An article on the CFR website reveals:

“Overall, Russia supplies about one-third of European natural gas consumption, used for winter heating as well as electricity generation and industrial production. The European Union (EU) also turns to Russia for more than one-quarter of its crude oil imports, the bloc’s largest single energy source. Some EU states are far more dependent than others. Portugal and Spain use little Russian energy, while Germany, the largest European economy, gets more than half of its natural gas and more than 30 percent of its crude oil supplies from Russia. France gets most of its electricity from nuclear power but still relies on Russian imports to meet its fossil fuel needs. Analysts say plans in Germany and other countries to phase out nuclear and coal power could increase this dependence.”

These factors portend much for the economic and consequent political future of the capitalist and imperialist governments in Europe. The disruptions in food and energy supplies perpetuated by the foreign policy imperatives of Washington and Wall Street will have ramifications far beyond the theater of war in Ukraine and Russia.

The Need for a New Security System in Europe

Undoubtedly, the Biden administration is failing again in its efforts to enhance the electoral prospects for the upcoming midterm elections. Can the war propaganda against Russia and China be enough to ensure the maintenance of a majority for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives and the Senate which will be seated in January 2023?

EU countries would be in a much better position if they rebuffed the pressures exerted by the White House and State Department by initiating its own diplomatic overtures towards Russia and China aimed at developing a more reasonable approach to regional security on that continent. European historians should be fully aware of the dangers of another imperialist war.

The uncertainty generated by the war in Ukraine on an international scale could very well result in a similar and perhaps more costly defeat for U.S. foreign policy. This coupled with the lack of a social spending strategy absent legislative action by Congress could doom the second half of the Biden administration to a paralyzing gridlock positioning the Republican Right for a resurgence of dominance along with the potential for a second Trump presidency.

Working and oppressed people in the U.S. are compelled to unite on an independent basis to end the war drive of the ruling class and its surrogates in the political superstructure. The actual impediments to the realization of a just and equitable society in the U.S. are not to be found in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. These U.S.-based class enemies of the majority domestically and globally have a vested interest in maintaining the Pentagon-NATO budget to facilitate the continuing exploitation of the peoples of the world.

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Author’s Note:

This paper was prepared and delivered in part to a webinar entitled: “The Case Against NATO” which featured presentations from various scholars and activists around the world. The speakers, in addition to Abayomi Azikiwe, were Carlos Run, the Venezuelan Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America and the President of the Simon Bolivar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples; Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Jenny Clegg, former lecturer in International Studies and long-time China specialist; Chris Matlhako, the 2nd Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the General Secretary of the Friends of Cuba Society and member of the South African Peace Initiative; Prof. Qingsi of the Renmin University in China; and moderator Prof. Radhika Desai of the Department of Political Studies and the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. The entire webinar can be viewed at this website.

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

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“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook)

I am writing to urge No votes on AB2098, SB1390, AB1797, SB1464, SB871, SB866, and SB1479, and part of a decalogue of medical tyranny bills (down to seven now that SB1184 passed on April 5 while AB 1993 and the HIPAA-violating SB 920 were pulled).

AB2098 threatens to strip physicians and surgeons of their licenses for “unprofessional conduct,” which it defines as:

“disseminat[ing] or promot[ing] misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”

Similarly, SB1390 criminalizes the “amplification of harmful content” on social media platforms.

Who is to decide what is “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “false,” “misleading,” or “harmful”? To claim the State has the right to override medically trained physicians is to subject medical science to political science, consequently putting not only individual patients but all of humanity at grave risk.

You would be fulfilling Carl Sagan’s darkest fears, which have already become manifest over the past two years of politically-formulated COVID absolutism:

“We’ve arranged the society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is gonna blow up in our faces.…

“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.”

Passing AB2098 and SB1390 would establish a totalitarian Ministry of Truth, and none but the bravest would dare speak against the authoritarian edicts of political forces, themselves lavishly funded by corporations whose bottom line takes precedent over human rights and patients’ health.

Orwell describes this totalistic hubris as follows:

“At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.”

Over the past two years, every single COVID policy championed by tyrants, “experts,” colluders, and Covidians yielded grotesque profits for megacorporations; dictatorial powers for governments; and enormous losses of life, health, and rights for individuals.

The more research and data that has accumulated, the more evident it has become that the physicians who courageously challenged the propaganda machine were correct, while the policymakers were deadly wrong.

Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Masks: FAIL
2. Lockdowns: FAIL
3. Experimental injectable products (“vaccines”): FAIL
4. Anti–early treatment protocols: FAIL
5. Anti–natural immunity: FAIL
6. Discrimination against the unvaccinated: FAIL
7. Censoring information that contradicts the narrative: FAIL
8. Abrogating human rights in the name of the public good: FAIL
9. Incentivizing lethal CDC hospitalization protocols: FAIL
10. Turning the world into an open-air prison: FAIL

Indeed, the chiseled commandments issued from on high by the WHO, NIH, CDC, and FDA were so catastrophic, it’s like they were designed to fail.

Even Anthony “The Science” Fauci agreed with the traditional health recommendations these truth-telling doctors advocated before he contorted his decrees to fit political and profiteering aims:

If the doctors you want to strip of their licenses had formulated public health policies, there would have been little to no loss of life due to COVID or any of the additional interventions that have caused what has been described as the “worst-ever excess mortality … in history.”

Life insurance and health insurance companies have seen spiraling fatalities and injuries, including a 40-percent increase in mortality in the 18–64 group—a 12-sigma event—and an 84-percent increase in Millennial deaths (25–44) according to a former Blackrock portfolio manager. The funeral industry, on the other hand, is booming. Embalmers are also finding never-before-seen “white worm-like elastic clots in cadavers.”

When world-renowned pathologists conducted autopsies on several of the innumerable people who have died suddenly, 93 percent of those deaths were found to have been caused by the injectable product sold as our salvation.

The CDC’s adverse events reporting system supports this conclusion, having received 1,216,787 reports (including 26,693 deaths and 46,317 reports for kids) associated with these products through April 1, 2022.

The injuries millions of victims are experiencing are excruciatingly real, not rare. Athletes have been hit particularly hard, witnessing record-high numbers of deaths, injuries, and dropouts due to health issues such as myocarditis.

California’s excess mortality is especially shameful at 13.5 percent in 2020 with 38,799 excess deaths. The year the injectable products were introduced, 2021, saw an even greater increase in excess mortality at 18.7 percent or 52,278 deaths beyond the expected number.

Even though we’re only a few months into 2022, California’s excess mortality has already reached 19.9 percent—that’s 12,947 unexpected deaths in the first quarter alone.

Children are especially at risk; British children, for example, were found to be 54 timesmore likely to die if injected. For these and the reasons outlined in Letter to a Governing Body and Letter to a Tyrant, you must vote No on SB871, SB866, and SB1479, all of which put children’s lives and long-term health at risk.

And there are the Pfizer clinical trial documents gradually being released due to an FOIA request by attorney Aaron Siri’s team. Initially, the FDA (which, incidentally, received $2,875,842 from Pfizer for their application) wanted 55 years to release the data, and then they had the gall to ask for 75 years.

Fortunately, the judge rejected this request and ordered the FDA to release the documents at a rate of 55,000 pages per month. The pages that have been released to date reveal the FDA knew over a year ago that Pfizer/BioNTech’s product was associated with 1,223 deaths in the first 90 days, 158,000 adverse events, and 1,291 side effects, many of which are not only debilitating but life-threatening. They also show both Pfizer and the FDA were aware their experimental gene therapy product was associated with menstrual cycle disruption and miscarriages.

Here is a three-minute video of a nurse reacting to the nine pages’ worth of side effects released in the data dump. Long-time vaccine proponent and nurse educator Dr. John Campbell was appalled by the Pfizer documents and has subsequently realized he and others have been egregiously deceived. Dr. Chris Martenson also provides an accessible walk-through of the pages that had been released at the time of filming.

This Canadian COVID Care Alliance presentation uses Pfizer’s own data to prove their product is both unsafe and ineffective.

Additionally, life-saving early treatment protocols were libeled because their long-term safety records and demonstrable efficacy threatened pharmaceutical corporations’ ability to secure the emergency use authorizations (EUAs) that guaranteed them immunity from liability for any harm caused by their experimental products. Simultaneously, necrotic medications like remdesivir and noxious protocols like intubation/ventilation were financially incentivized, and deaths “with” (not “from”) COVID were tallied to inflate the COVID death count and buttress the fear-whipping propaganda being used to justify the worldwide push to authoritarianism.

COVID policies such as lockdowns resulted in small businesses being macerated by big-box and online stores. They also caused profound psychological harm and skyrocketing suicides, deaths of despair, and drug overdoses. More than 100 millionadditional people were plunged into famine and poverty—all while billionaires funneled trillions into their bank accounts during “the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the elites in history.”

The average citizen doesn’t hear anything about these pernicious repercussions because the billion-dollar-bribed legacy media, Big Tech, and governments connived with BigPharma to conceal the sky-falling evidence about the lethality and inefficacyof these injections, aided by corrupt regulatory-captured agencies like the FDA, CDC, and NIH.

History has repeatedly shown that when policy is guided by political science instead of medical science, people die. Lots of people.

As Groucho Marx said:

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

If you care about saving lives and protecting the health of California citizens, you must begin listening to the physicians who have been censored and silenced—not blacklisting them like AB2098 proposes.

AB1797’s proposal to develop an immunization tracking system would grant all government agencies access to citizens’ vaccination records. If you want a glimpse of the dystopian surveillance state this bill would contribute to the creation of, watch this video of a drone telling the Shanghai COVID prisoners:

“Residents of Jiuting. During the pandemic, we request that you strictly abide by COVID-19 restrictions and related guidelines. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing. This increases the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”

As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” https://t.co/0ZTc8fznaV pic.twitter.com/pAnEGOlBIh

— Alice Su (@aliceysu) April 6, 2022

SB1464 threatens to withhold state funding from law enforcement agencies and reallocate those funds to the county public health department if the agency “publicly announces that they will oppose, or adopts a policy to oppose, a public health order.”

This is the most Gestapo proposal of all these fascistic bills and would coerce sheriffs and law officers to potentially violate their conscience in the name of what have already been demonstrated to be calamitous public health policies.

Martin Luther King Jr. had something to say about such unconscionable behavior:

“There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

So why is it that Assembly Member Evan Low, Senator Richard Pan, Assembly Member Akilah Weber, Senator Scott Wiener, and Senator Dave Cortese have introduced such a treacherous set of bills?

Could it have something to do with being beholden to their pharmaceutical donors and corporate paymasters?

We know, for example, that the pharmaceutical industry has a record of committing fraud, knowingly keeping asbestos in its baby powder for decades, and peddling heart-stopping drugs like Vioxx, whose manufacturer even drew up a hit list for doctors who heroically attempted to expose the carnage wreaked by this drug:

“During a class-action case in Australia over Merck’s heart-attack and stroke-inducing drug, Vioxx, it was revealed that a ‘doctor hit list’ circulated within the ranks of the hierarchy. This list contained names the doctors who spoke out against the drug using labels such as ‘neutralize,’ ’neutralized,’ and ‘discredit.’ During the testimony, Julian Burnside, QC, acting for the plaintiff, read one email from a Merck employee that said, ‘We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live.’

“Also reported in the Australian were documents that surfaced in the Federal Court in the Melbourne hearing regarding the criminal intent of Merck staffers who admitted they intended to ‘stop funding to institutions’ and ‘interfere with academic appointments.’”

—Milanda Rout, “Vioxx Maker Merck and Co Drew Up Doctor Hit List,” April 1, 2009, The Australian, cited in Dissolving Illusions (paperback, Kindle, audiobook)

But these pharmaceutical corporations with an uninterrupted history of murderous coverups, fraud, bribery, corruption, extortion, and exploitation are all miraculously on the side of good instead of being profit-drunk psychopaths now, right … right? Yeah, right.

Perusing Open Secrets, we learn Assembly Member Low has garnered funding from pharmaceutical-industry–serving EcoLab, Inc., which has its own WEF pagedescribing it as “a trusted partner at nearly 3 million customer locations,” as well as KPMG LLP, which also has a WEF page and appeared at Davos 2019 and Davos 2020.

Amazon, FedEx, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have all donated to one or more of these politicians (e.g., Hastings to Low, Pan, and Wiener).

What do these multinational corporations have in common? Let’s just say they all profited magnificently from pandemic protocols—Netflix making record profits in 2020, FedEx nearly tripling its income, and Amazon tripling its profits in the first quarter of 2021 alone.

Weber collected nearly a million dollars in donations and PAC money, including:

“a $200,000 check from the California Medical Association, $100,000 each from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America IEC and the California Dental Association Independent Expenditure PAC …”

Those organizations also benefit from continuing and escalating the unsafe and ineffective COVID protocols and despotic measures these proposed bills seek to deliver.

Frédéric Bastiat writes:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

If you are one of the rare uncorrupted politicians in possession of moral character, independent thought, compassion, wisdom, sanity, reason, respect for science, and a backbone, you will vote No on each of these venal, tyrannical bills.

Otherwise, be prepared to say goodbye to the few remaining Californians—including your most skilled, knowledgeable, and ethical physicians and surgeons—as they hightail it to a free state that respects their rights and protects their health like Florida.

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The United States’ and NATO’s so-called “lethal aid” to the post-Maidan regime in Kiev is in no way breaking news. It has been going on for nearly a decade now and has directly contributed to the mass murder of around 15,000 people in Donbass. In addition to weapons, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have received top-level training by the US, UK and other NATO militaries. In recent months, these arms deliveries have skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. In addition to thousands, even tens of thousands of antitank guided missiles (ATGMs) and man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), the “Javelin” and “Stinger” missiles being the most prominent examples, Ukraine also received thousands of drones and loitering munitions.

Apart from weapons, the North Atlantic Alliance has also mobilized its vast ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities and is relaying battlefield information to the Kiev regime. It remains to be seen how effective this is, given the collapse of Kiev’s joint military command and control structure, but it definitely shows the West’s commitment to their favorite regime. In other words, the US has been involved in every conceivable way, except for a direct shooting war with Russia. However, even that may change in the coming days and weeks.

The Kiev regime recently passed a law officially allowing foreign citizens to serve in its intelligence and higher echelons of military hierarchy. Of course, this doesn’t seem like news flash to most people, especially given that US intelligence has been heavily involved in Ukraine for decades. However, coupled with the recent Kiev’s request for the MQ-9 “Reaper” unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV), this may be much bigger news than what the mainstream media is reporting. These US MQ-9 “Reaper” drones are infamous for sowing death and destruction across the world, with former US President Obama authorizing at least 6,000 documented drone strikes around the world (the actual number may be orders of magnitude greater), which would make it approximately 2 drone strikes per day during Obama’s 8 years of presidency.

And this is when we get to the connection between Kiev’s new law and the drones. The transfer of the MQ-9 “Reaper” is useless without the necessary training for the drone operators. This alone takes over two months, which is the time the Kiev regime simply doesn’t have. In order to make any possible difference, these drones would need to be used as soon as humanly possible. So, which other options does this leave for the regime? Well, it’s rather simple, but also very dangerous. Here’s why.

With the transfer of US combat drones, we may see American operators directly involved in their usage in combat. And the dangerous part is that these operators don’t even need to be stationed in Ukraine. The “Reaper” drones can be controlled via satellite links. The operator may be located somewhere in Germany, Italy or even the US mainland. And the legally gray area comes with the possible transfer of jurisdiction over these operators to the official Ukrainian military command. Strictly speaking, even though this would still mean that the US and NATO wouldn’t be directly involved, in case that the Kremlin finds about it (which it most certainly would), they would hardly see it as non-involvement. And if Moscow is to see it that way, we are talking about what would basically be direct US intervention. And we all know what kind of danger that poses to the world.

The obvious question arises – what should Russia do in that case? Decades of diplomatic efforts by the Kremlin have fallen on deaf ears. Why would the ever increasingly belligerent West listen to reason now, after doing everything in their power to push Ukraine into this bloodbath and after investing trillions to encircle Russia and weaken its position in Europe and the post-Soviet near abroad? Russia’s massive advantage, both qualitative and quantitative, in developing and deploying hypersonic weapons doesn’t seem to deter the US. Not even the recent combat usage of the “Kinzhal”, a highly maneuverable air-launched hypersonic weapon, in service with the Russian Aerospace Forces since 2017, doesn’t seem to deter the US. One way or the other, Russia will simply not allow the US to kill Russian soldiers with impunity. Is Washington DC so out of touch with reality, that they’re ready to raise the stakes so high?

And if anyone is to think this is plain paranoia and that it is based on circumstantial evidence, Russia’s reaction in recent days most certainly isn’t. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently “strongly advised” against sending additional US weapons to Ukraine. While Russia has protested NATO arming of the Kiev regime for years, this is the first time it has issued a stark warning to the United States. Now, Russia may not need to strike targets in the US mainland, but since these combat drones need to fly from somewhere, this may well be NATO airports in Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania or any other NATO member state, all of which are in the striking distance of Russian ballistic, cruise or hypersonic missiles. The question remains, what’s next?

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

Once-overlooked prescient warnings, conveyed through black-and-white grainy footage, reach through history like that dead girl in Carrie. They haunt all the more forcefully given the foresight it took to make them.

We’ve all heard of the military-industrial complex (MIC) – the escalating intertwining of the national security apparatus and the private weapons industry. It produces an irresistible economic/political incentive for reckless, endless war.

Its characteristics are unique in many ways, but in others, the MIC is merely another iteration of the essential problem of intersecting corporate and state interests — their chief mutual interest being the accumulation of greater and greater concentrations of power for themselves.

Mussolini described the phenomenon like this in the early 20^th century:

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
-Benito Mussolini

The gears of private industry are lavishly oiled with public money. In turn, the public decision-makers (bureaucrats), who are theoretically tasked with acting in the public’s interests, receive innumerable benefits — both while in office and especially after leaving, including appointments to lucrative board positions, gifted stock options, etc.

Interests across the two domains (state and private sector) – which theoretically remain separate in liberal ideology — become so intertwined that distinguishing one from the other is impossible.

To set the context of the MIC’s inaugural insertion into public consciousness, in 1961, the United States had just recently risen over the ashes of war-ravaged Europe to claim the throne as the global hegemon.

The industrial-scale arms industry remained a relatively new advent, and so the MIC was largely a new phenomenon in human history. If all of its elements weren’t entirely new, the MIC was at least a new incarnation of the inherent and ancient issue of state usurpation of power by private interests for personal and in-group gain.

Eisenhower introduced the MIC into the American psyche, coining the term in his farewell address from the Oval Office:

Via the president’s January 17, 1961 farewell speech:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

We’ve previously covered the most recent glaring example of the MIC in action – US generals dutifully crying on television about the Afghanistan pullout. Their defense industry sponsors/owners directed them to fear-monger about ending a 20-year losing war – to keep the gravy train rolling, for at least another year – and they complied.

The Afghanistan war, incidentally, produced no tangible outcome of value for any American except the defense contractors who paid Jack Keane to promote it on cable news. Defense contractors, in addition to buying spokesmen like Keane, also purchase advertising on said corporate media channel in exchange for war propaganda that favors healthy stock prices.

It’s all very incestuous, and, at the core, it’s all funded at the public’s expense via the US treasury.

As we will see — as Eisenhower explains himself in the portion of the speech that often goes overlooked in favor of the famous line about the MIC — the same types of public-private mechanisms are currently playing out in the biomedical context:

“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present–and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

If you’ve been paying attention to the last two years’ events, that excerpt should send shivers down your spine.

The MIC and the biomedical state – administered by the “scientific-technological elite” — are a single entity. They’re one and the same, different feathers of the same bird. They each conduct the business of technocratic social management in their own way. One produces kinetic and chemical weaponry; the other, biological weaponry.

Their methods differ, but their interests are the same.

Here’s a case study:

EcoHealth Alliance tried to entice DARPA – the scientific arm of the Pentagon — to join in on the same Wuhan coronavirus gain-of-function that the organization illicitly conducted in China in partnership with the CCP. (EcoHealth Alliance being the organization Fauci funneled government money to for gain-of-function research in that same Chinese WIV government-run lab.)

Via DRASTIC Research:

“EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in concert with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) attempted to carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity Bat Coronavirus research that would clearly qualify as Gain of Function (GoF), in a grant proposal submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.”

What we’re looking at is a transnational, public-private grant proposal involving multiple state and private actors collaborating to engineer deadly new viruses.

The application actually proposed spraying aerosolized viruses into wild bat caves – just to see what happened:

“The grant proposal includes some elements of research that are already public via scientific papers, as well as other elements that have never been made public, including vaccinating wild bats using aerosolized viruses and further work on published and unpublished strains that could have directly produced SARS-CoV-2.”

The Pentagon apparently, according to the leaked documents, shot down the proposal – not on the grounds that this was a ludicrous and dangerous project, and, in practice, would constitute an act of war against China, but on a technicality.

Two years later, by mere coincidence, if you believe the official narrative, a deadly bat coronavirus naturally emerged from a Wuhan wet market – the exact type of virus that EcoHealth Alliance proposed spraying into the wild in the exact geographical area.

Whether DARPA was involved or not in the eventual release of SARS-CoV-2 into the wild is largely irrelevant for this point. The mere fact that Peter Daszak, Fauci and Co. knew this kind of activity to be in DARPA’s wheelhouse demonstrates the deep ties between the various arms of the now-transnational biomedical technocratic complex.

Eisenhower’s warning from six decades ago begs the question: what are the prescient warnings offered today that coming generations will look back on in awe?

*

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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.

Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose, Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. Please support his independent operations however you can.

Featured image: President Dwight D. Eisenhower (National Archives)

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***

From the beginning, the official COVID-19 narrative has been inconsistent, hypocritical and/or contradictory because medical authorities used double standards to create the illusion their narrative was logical and sensible.

We are not only in an epidemiological crisis, we also are in an epistemological crisis. How do we know what we know? What differentiates opinion from a justified belief?

For nearly two years, the public has been inundated by a sophisticated messaging campaign that urges us to “trust the science.”

But how can a non-scientist know what the science is really saying?

Legacy media sources offer us an easy solution: “Trust us.”

Legions of so-called “independent” fact-checking sites that serve to eliminate any wayward thinking keep those with a modicum of skepticism in line.

“Research” has been redefined to mean browsing Wikipedia citations.

Rather than being considered for their merit, dissenting opinions are more easily dismissed as misinformation by labeling their source as untrustworthy.

How do we know these sources are untrustworthy? They must be if they offer a dissenting opinion!

This form of circular reasoning is the central axiom of all dogmatic systems of thought. Breaking the spell of dogmatic thinking is not easy, but it is possible.

In this article I describe six examples of double standards medical authorities have used to create the illusion their COVID-19 narrative is logical and sensible.

This illusion has been used with devastating effect to raise vaccine compliance.

Rather than citing scientific publications or expert opinions that conflict with our medical authorities’ narrative — information that will be categorically dismissed because it appears on The Defender — I will instead demonstrate how, from the beginning, the official narrative has been inconsistent, hypocritical and/or contradictory.

1. COVID deaths are ‘presumed,’ but vaccine deaths must be ‘proven’

As of April 8, VAERS included 26,699 reports of deaths following COVID vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially acknowledges only nine of these.

In order to establish causality, the CDC requires autopsies to rule out any possible etiology of death before the agency will place culpability on the vaccine.

But the CDC uses a very different standard when it comes to identifying people who died from COVID.

The 986,000 COVID deaths reported by the CDC here are, as footnote [1] indicates, “Deaths with confirmed or presumed [emphasis added] COVID-19.”

If a person dies with a positive PCR test or is presumed to have COVID, the CDC will count that as COVID-19 death.

Note that in the CDC’s definition, a COVID fatality does not mean the person died from the disease, only with the disease.

Why is an autopsy required to establish a COVID vaccine death but not to establish a COVID death?

Conversely, why is recent exposure to SARS-CoV-2 prior to a death sufficient to establish causality — but recent exposure to a vaccine considered coincidental?

2. CDC uses VAERS data to investigate myocarditis yet claims VAERS data on vaccine deaths is unreliable

On June 23, 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met to assess the risk of peri/myocarditis following COVID vaccination, especially in young males.

This was the key slide in this presentation:

The observed risk of myocarditis is 219 in about 4.3 million second doses of COVID vaccine in males 18 to 24 years old.

The CDC is fine with using VAERS data to assess risk of myocarditis following vaccination — yet the agency rejects all but nine of the 26,699 reports of deaths following the vaccines.

Why does the CDC trust the peri/myocarditis data in VAERS but not the data on deaths?

One reason may be because the onset of myocarditis symptoms is closely tied to the time of vaccination.

In other words, because this condition closely follows inoculation the two events are highly correlated and suggestive of causation.

For example, here is another slide from the same presentation:

The majority of cases of vaccine-induced peri/myocarditis suffered symptoms within the first few days after injection. As explained above, this is highly suggestive of a causative effect of the vaccine.

A recent study in The Lancet included a similar graph, taken directly from VAERS, on deaths following vaccination:

Once again, the event (death) closely follows vaccination in the majority of cases.

As we regard the two graphs above we should acknowledge that the temporal relationship between the injection and the adverse event is suggestive of causation but does not stand as proof of such.

However, it is also important to note that if the vaccination caused the deaths, that is exactly what the plot would look like.

It should be clear that the CDC has no justification for dismissing VAERS deaths if the agency is willing to accept reports of myo/pericarditis from the very same reporting system.

3. CDC pushes ‘relative risk’ for determining vaccine efficacy, but uses ‘absolute risk’ to downplay risk of adverse events

In Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial, nine times more placebo recipients developed severe COVID than those vaccinated during the short period of observation. This constitutes a relative risk reduction of 90%.

This seemed an encouraging finding and was used as a major talking point to compel the public to accept this experimental therapy despite the absence of any long-term data.

However, the risk of a trial participant contracting severe COVID (Table S5) was 1 in 21,314 (0.0047%) if they were vaccinated.

If they received the placebo, the risk was still only 9 in 21,259 (0.0423%).

The vaccine reduced the absolute risk of contracting severe disease by 0.038%.

Mainstream media and the CDC never mentioned the minuscule reduction in absolute risk of contracting severe COVID by getting inoculated.

Moreover, with 0.6% of vaccine recipients in the trial suffering a serious vaccine injury (one that results in death, medical or surgical intervention, hospitalization or an impending threat to life), approximately 16 serious adverse events will result for every serious case of COVID prevented by vaccination.

However, when it comes to risk of myo/pericarditis, the CDC states, “Myocarditis and pericarditis have rarely been reported, especially in adolescents and young adult males within several days after COVID-19 vaccination.”

The CDC further states, “While absolute risk remains small, the risk for myocarditis is higher for males ages 12 to 39 years…”

In other words, the risk of adverse events is being considered in absolute terms, not relative.

The CDC presentation slide above (Table 1) indicates the relative risk of contracting myo/pericarditis in males 18 to 24 is 27 to more than 200 times higher than expected in (unvaccinated) young men that age.

When assuaging the public’s fear around vaccine-induced myocarditis, the CDC finds it useful to cite absolute risk — yet when promoting the efficacy of the vaccine, the CDC emphasizes relative risks.

This double standard has been quietly and masterfully employed to reduce vaccine hesitancy and encourage compliance.

4. FDA requires randomized control studies for early treatment medications — but not for boosters

The CDC reports that as of April 8, 98.3 million Americans had received a COVID booster.

On March 29, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second booster for the immunocompromised and adults over age 50.

These authorizations were made not because of solid evidence the boosters are effective but rather to remedy the fact that the primary vaccine series has been widely shown to have waning efficacy within a few months.

As reported by The Defender, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s vaccine division, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, admitted the fourth booster dose approved last week was a “stopgap measure” — in other words, a temporary measure to be implemented until a proper solution may be found in the future.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, the FDA continues to recommend and authorize boosters.

Yet when it comes to early treatment options, the agency holds medicines — including those the agency has already licensed and approved for other uses — to a different standard.

In this CNN interview from August 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns people not to take ivermectin for COVID because “there is no clinical evidence that this works.”

With regard to hydroxychloroquine, Fauci said, “We know that every single good study —  and by good study, I mean randomized control study in which the data are firm and believable — has s shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in the treatment of Covid-19”, as reported by the BBC on July 29, 2020.

Where, then, are the randomized control studies in which the data are firm and believable that show boosters are effective at preventing COVID?

There aren’t any. None have been done.

As of today, the FDA still refuses to authorize the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID despite hundreds of studies that demonstrate significant benefits (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) in prevention as well as early and late treatment.

The double standard here is blatant. There are no randomized control studies that show boosters are effective in preventing COVID.

Nevertheless, these experimental therapies have the FDA’s blessing while inexpensive, highly effective safe and proven medicines are ignored despite the enormous evidence that supports their use.

5. FDA uses immunobridging to justify Pfizer shots for young kids, but rejects antibodies as indicative of immune protection from COVID

Immunobridging is a method of inferring a vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing disease by assessing its ability to elicit an immune response through the measurement of biochemical markers, typically antibody levels.

The FDA asserts the presence of SARS-COV-2 antibodies is not necessarily indicative of immune protection from COVID.

Moreover, the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologics Product Advisory Committee reached a consensus last week that antibody levels cannot be used as a correlate for vaccine effectiveness.

Their decision is consistent with the CDC’s executive summary of a science brief released on October 29, 2021:

“Data are presently insufficient to determine an antibody titer threshold that indicates when an individual is protected from infection.”

Nevertheless, the FDA used immunobridging as a means to justify authorization of the Pfizervaccine to children ages 5 to 11, as explained in The Defender here and here.

Because there were no deaths or serious cases of COVID in the pediatric trial, the FDA chose to reject its own position (and that of its advisory committee) regarding antibody titers as a correlate for vaccine efficacy.

6. Causation must be proven for vaccine injuries, but correlation suffices for proving vaccine efficacy

When it comes to vaccine injuries the public is often reminded that correlation does not equal causation.

In other words, just because an injury was preceded by inoculation doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the injury.

But what constitutes causation in medicine? A mechanism of action needs to be identified and pathological studies must confirm this mechanism while eliminating other potential causative factors. Causation can be proven only on a case-by-case basis.

Proving causation requires an enormous burden of proof in medicine.

For example, does smoking cause lung cancer? The answer is yes, it can. That doesn’t mean that it will.

However, when it comes to the benefit of medical intervention, such as a vaccine, causation does not have to be established. Correlation suffices.

In the COVID vaccine trials, fewer vaccinated people contracted COVID than unvaccinated ones. Yet there were those who received the vaccine who contracted the disease anyway.

To be fair, this is how all new medical interventions are evaluated. The benefit doesn’t have to be caused by the vaccine in the strictest sense, there just has to be a correlation between vaccination and a relative protective effect.

The more often this happens, the more confident we can be that the outcome wasn’t simply a coincidence.

Likewise, when it comes to assessing the harm of medical intervention, the most sensible outcome to consider is mortality. After all, what would be the point of introducing a vaccine that prevented some deaths while causing more?

Nevertheless, this is, in fact, what we have done with the Pfizer product. The interim results from the Phase 3 trial demonstrated that all-cause mortality in the vaccinated cohort was higher than in the placebo.

This glaring problem gets brushed aside because there were two deaths from COVID in the placebo arm versus just one in the vaccinated cohort, allowing the vaccine manufacturer to claim a 50% efficacy in preventing this outcome.

However, if we attribute a protective benefit to the vaccine in preventing this one fatality, we must also conclude that the vaccine was responsible for the extra death when considering mortality from all causes.

Doing otherwise would be applying yet another double standard.

How the pandemic could have played out differently

To summarize how devastating the use of these double standards in crafting the “safe and effective” narrative was, let’s look at how different the situation would be if we had adopted the opposite standard:

1. There would have been an extremely low number of deaths from COVID. Very few, if any, autopsies have definitively confirmed that a fatality was caused by SARS-CoV-2. If confirmation by autopsy is the standard, there have been essentially zero deaths from COVID during the pandemic.
   On the other hand, if we presume the deaths registered in VAERS are in fact vaccine-induced fatalities — similar to how the CDC presumed many deaths from COVID — we can affirm there have been more than 26,000 vaccine deaths.
2. Using absolute risk reduction as a measure of efficacy, vaccines would have been widely rejected as ineffective, providing only a 0.038% risk reduction for contracting severe COVID.
3. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been readily available for people who got COVID. And for those who got the vaccine but got COVID anyway, these medicines would have been a great alternative to boosters, which wouldn’t have been approved due to the lack of a single randomized control study proving they work.
4. No children between the ages of 5 and 11 would have received this risky, experimental vaccine as it wouldn’t have been authorized for this age group — because Pfizer’s pediatric trials did not demonstrate any meaningful outcomes in children ages 5 to 11.
5. The Pfizer vaccine would no longer be in use because interim data demonstrated that all-cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated.

*

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Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.

Featured image is from CHD

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***

Imperial proprietorship over the small Caribbean Island of Cuba, from the United States’ perspective, has been from its earliest founding understood as a foredrawn conclusion, a predetermined inexorable; a geographical inevitable.

Heads of State, from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe to John Quincy Adams et al. shared a similar conviction, “[that Cuba’s] proximity did indeed seem to suggest destiny, a destiny unanimously assumed to be manifest.”ⁱ Through the mid 19th century, US opinion toward Cuba was made jingoistically evident by Secretary of State John Clayton, “This Government,” he advised, “is resolutely determined that the island of Cuba, shall never be ceded by Spain to any other power than the United States.”ⁱⁱ

The Secretary went on to define his nation’s hardened and inalterable commitment to the possession of the island, “The news of the cession of Cuba to any foreign power would, in the United States, be the instant signal for war.”ⁱⁱⁱ

These assertions were now foundational, as reiterated by Indiana Senator (and historian) Albert J. Beveridge in 1901,

“Cuba ‘[is] an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union’ and ‘[is] indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself,’”^ivsentiments that were (later) codified into the Cuban Constitution by the US (after the Spanish/American war of 1898) in the form of the Platt Amendment^v ratified in 1903.

Which Louis A. Perez soberly describes as, “[An] Amendment [that] deprived the [Cuban] republic of the essential properties of sovereignty while preserving its appearance, permitting self-government but precluding self-determination,”^vi in contradiction to (Cuba’s heroic bard of national emancipation) José Martí’s 19^th century grand-vision of a truly liberated and self-governing island nation.

In fact, this historic outlook permeates US strategy toward Cuba for the next century; merged in a complex web of amicable approbation combined with antagonistic condemnation, defiance, resentment, and ruin – all converging at a flashpoint called the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which not only shocked and bewildered US policymakers, but, for the first time, challenged their historic preconceptions of US hegemonic (i.e., imperial hemispheric) dominance. One man stood at the center of their bewilderment, criticism, disdain, and resentment: Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. Thus, US policy then directed at Cuba, by the early 1960s, was designed to punish this man, the small island nation, and its people, for his disobedience and defiance; and, as such, was intentionally aimed at destabilizing all efforts of rapprochement, as long as he (Castro) remained alive.

Although US intelligence (throughout the 1950s) provided the Eisenhower administration with a thorough history delineating the dangers of instability looming throughout the island, commanded by then military despot and “strong-man” Fulgencio Batista (who seized his return to power in an army-coup in 1952), the US foolishly continued to provide economic, logistical and materiel support to the unpopular and graft-driven dictatorship.^vii

US intelligence understood the potential danger posed by “[this] young reformist leader”^viii Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries. Castro and the 26th of July movement were a defiant response to what they considered a foreign controlled reactionary government.^ix

This response stood as a direct threat to the natural order of things, i.e., the US’s historic prohibition (beyond legalistic euphemisms and platitudes)^x of any genuine vestige of national sovereignty and self-determination by the Cuban people – which undergirded a belief that, like most Latin American states, the Cuban people were innately “child-like,” incapable of true self-governance.^xi Beyond that, after the ousting of Batista, and “flush with victory,” a young Fidel Castro, on January 2, 1959 (in Santiago de Cuba), assertively threw down the gauntlet, “this time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will not be thwarted. It won’t be as in 1895, when the Americans came in at the last hour ‘and made themselves masters of the country.’”^xii

Hence, as Jeffery J. Safford makes evident, this existential risk, in the minds of US policymakers, would have to be dealt with, embraced, evaluated, and analyzed (at least initially)^xiii in order to maintain the desired outcome – i.e., evading Communist influence and maintaining economic “stability” through the protection of US interests on the island of Cuba no matter the cost.

In March of 1960, while naively underestimating Castro’s success and support on the island, “the Eisenhower administration secretly made a formal decision to re-conquer Cuba … with a proviso: it had to be done in such a way that the US hand would not be evident.”^xiv

Ultimately, US policymakers wanted to avoid a broader “backlash of instability” throughout the hemisphere by overtly invading the small island nation. That said, Castro and his revolutionaries understood the stark realities and nefarious possibilities cast over them, given the US’s history of flagrant regime change throughout the region. Castro’s accusations as presented at the United Nations, on 26 September 1960, which declared that US leaders were (intending if not) preparing to invade Cuba, were dismissed by the New York Times as “shrill with … anti-American propaganda.”^xv

Furthermore, Castro was ridiculed, by US representative James J. Wadsworth, as having “Alice in Wonderland fantasies”^xvi of an invasion. But Castro’s committed revolutionary coterie knew better, “In Guatemala in 1954 [Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara witnessed] the first U.S. Cold War intervention [in the region] as U.S.-trained and backed counter-revolutionary forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz…”^xvii

In fact, similarly, the imminent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated assault, known as the Bay of Pigs (BOPs) invasion, under the Kennedy administration in April 1961, was heavily reliant upon anti-revolutionary factions, the Cuban people, and the military, rising up to join the invaders^xviii – which as history proves, and journalist/author David Talbot underscores, did not come to pass:

To avoid Arbenz’s fate, Castro and Guevara would do everything he had not: put the hard-cored thugs of the old regime up against a wall, run the CIA’s agents out of the country, purge the armed forces, and mobilize the Cuban people … Fidel and Che became an audacious threat to the American empire. They represented the most dangerous revolutionary idea of all – the one that refused to be crushed.^xix

This became an epic ideological battle in the myopic mind of US officials: the possible proliferation of an assortment of “despotic” Communist controlled fiefdoms vs. the-free-world! Indeed, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., special aide and historian to President John F. Kennedy in 1961-63, ominously warned the Executive, that “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands,”^xx had great appeal in Cuba (and throughout Latin America), i.e., everywhere that, “distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favor[ed] the propertied classes … [thus] the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, [were] now demanding opportunities for a decent living.”^xxi This was the urgent and fundamental threat (or challenge) Fidel Castro and his movement posed to US hemispheric rule.

US media focused heavily on the plight of the “majority middleclass” Cuban exiles, that chose to leave the island as a result of the revolution’s redistributive polices.^xxii

Cubans, particularly the initial waves, were dispossessed of substantial wealth and position and often arrived Stateside in chiefly worse conditions.^xxiii But the essential question as to, “why the [majority of] Cuban people [stood] by the Castro ‘dictatorship’?,”^xxiv as Michael Parenti contends, was ignored by public officials and the press alike:

Not a word appeared in the U.S. press about the advances made by ordinary Cubans under the Revolution, the millions who for the first time had access to education, literacy, medical care, decent housing [and] jobs … offering a better life than the free-market misery endured under the U.S.-Batista ancient régime.^xxv

Castro’s revolutionary ideals based on José Martí’s patriotic theme of national sovereignty and self-determination, effectively armed the Cuban people through a stratagem of socialist ideology and wealth redistribution meshed in a formula of land reform and social services (i.e., education, healthcare, jobs and housing) which included the nationalization of foreign owned businesses; as such, US policymakers believed, “His continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of ‘Communism’ and Anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more ‘weak’ Latin American republics.”^xxvi Fidel Castro was thus wantonly placed within the crosshairs of US covert-action.

American officials assumed that the elimination of Castro was central to the suppression of his socialist principles, as Alan McPherson demonstrates, “In fall 1961, after the [BOPs] disaster, [JFK] gave the order to resume covert plans to get rid of Castro, if not explicitly to assassinate him.”^xxvii

Earlier in 1960, then CIA director, Allen Dulles’ hardline that Castro was a devoted Communist and threat to US security “mirrored [those] of the business world such as, William Pawley, the globetrotting millionaire entrepreneur whose major investments in Cuban sugar plantations and Havana’s municipal transportation system were wiped out by Castro’s revolution.”^xxviii

Thus, US officials, the Security State and US business-interests were unified, “After Fidel rode into Havana on a tank in January 1959, Pawley [a capitalist scion] who was gripped by what Eisenhower called a ‘pathological hatred for Castro,’ even volunteered to pay for his assassination.”^xxix

Countless attempts followed, thus, killing Castro became vital to the idea of US hemispheric “stability,” i.e., capitalist economic and ideological control; and as such, Intelligence Services believed, “[The] political vulnerability of the regime lies in the person of Castro himself…”^xxx

Hence, the purging of Fidel Castro and the cessation of his ideas, through the punishment of the Cuban people, became not only the strategy of choice for the US, but its incessant authoritative doctrine. Accordingly, as longtime US diplomat to Cuba, Wayne Smith verifies, the US’s two overarching obsessive qualms which it believed required the eradication of Fidel Castro were: the long-term influence of his revolutionary socialist ideals in Latin America and beyond; and, the possible establishment of a successful Communist state on the island which would diminish US security, stature, image, influence and prestige in the hemisphere; and, in the eyes of the world.^xxxi

Through 1960-64, Castro had good reason to be on guard, “…the fact that the Kennedy administration was acutely embarrassed by the unmitigated defeat [at the BOPs] -indeed because of it- a campaign of smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost immediately.”^xxxii

Then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy stated unequivocally, as Schlesinger reveals, that his goal, “was to bring the terrors of the Earth to Cuba.”^xxxiii

RFK went on to emphasize the point that the eradication of the Castro “regime” was the US’s central policy concern,

“He informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries, ‘…top priority in the United States Government -all else is secondary- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared.’”^xxxiv

Beyond the multifaceted covert actions directed at Cuba under Operation Mongoose, RFK and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, aided by the CIA et al., implemented a long-term multi-pronged plan of punishment, focused on Cuba through Latin America, which included disinformation campaigns, subversion and sabotage (they called hemispheric-defense-policies) that comprised a Military Assistance Program (MAP), which included economic support, subversive tactical training and materiel, devised to terminate “the threat” (i.e., Castro and his ideas) by establishing an Inter-American-Security-Force (of obedient states) under US control.^xxxv

With Cuba now in the crosshairs, in the early 1960s, “the CIA … played savior to the [anti-Castro] émigrés, building a massive training station in Miami, known as JMWave, that became the agency’s second largest after Langley, Virginia. In fact, it coordinated the training of what became known as the disastrous landing … in 1961.”^xxxvi

Conversely, historian Daniel A. Sjursen focuses more on JFK (than the CIA) as the culprit behind the heightened tensions amongst the three principal players. By 1962, with Cuba in the middle, both superpowers (the US and the USSR) stood at a standstill amid the very real possibility of a global conflagration which, Sjursen states, was primarily due to US bravado on behalf of a “military obsessed” young President, “In preparing for a May 1961 summit meeting with Khrushchev [Kennedy stated] ‘I’ll have to show him that we can be as though as he is….’”^xxxvii

Sjursen argues,

“This flawed and simplistic thinking grounded just about every Kennedy decision in world affairs from 1961 to 1963 … and would eventually bring the world to the brink of destruction with the Cuban Missile Crisis; and, suck the US military into a disastrous unwinnable war in Vietnam.”^xxxviii

And yet, as Smith contends, Kennedy was certainly not without bravado, but ultimately, did make attempts to “defuse” the situation. Kennedy, Smith discloses, ruffled-feathers within the Security State by,

1) his desire to end the Cold War,

2) his starting of a rapprochement with Castro (who was desirous of such — even if indirectly) and, 3) his goal to pull-out of Vietnam.^xxxix

In fact, with the Kennedy-Khrushchev negotiations finalized by JFK’s promise not to invade Cuba if Soviet warheads were removed from the island – Khrushchev acquiesced, to Castro’s dismay, but tensions did diminish.^xl

Be that as it may, Philip Brenner maintains, the crisis did not go-away on 28 October 1962 for either the US or the USSR. The Kennedy-Khrushchev arrangements had to be implemented. On 20 November, the US Strategic Air Command was still on high alert: full readiness for war – with the naval quarantine (i.e., blockade) firmly in place.^xli

As a result, Castro stayed open to negotiations with the US, but at the same time purposefully cautious.

“At this point Castro, like Kennedy and Khrushchev, was circumventing his own more bellicose government in order to dialog with the enemy. Castro, too, was struggling, [but willing,] to transcend his Cold War ideology for the sake of peace. Like Kennedy and Khrushchev both, [he knew,] he had to walk softly.”^xlii

Nevertheless, Castro stressed the fact that the Soviet Union had no right to negotiate with the US per inspections or the return of the bombers, “Instead, he announced, Cuba would be willing to comply based on [specific] demands: that the United States end the economic embargo; stop subversive activities … cease violations of Cuban airspace; and, return Guantanamo Naval Base.”^xliii Of course, the United States security apparatus was arrogantly steadfast in its refusal to agree or even negotiate the matter.^xliv

In spite of that, a reproachment (devised by Kennedy diplomat, William Attwood, and, Castro representative to the UN Carlos Lechuga) was surreptitiously endeavored through a liaison, journalist Jean Daniel of the New Republic, who stated that, Kennedy, retrospectively, criticized the pro-Batista policies of the fifties for “economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation” of the island and added that, “we shall have to pay for those sins….”^xlv Which may be considered one of the most brazenly honest statements, regarding the island, on behalf of an American President, in the long and complex history of US/Cuban relations.

Daniel then wrote, “I could see plainly that John Kennedy had doubts [about the government’s policies toward Cuba] and was seeking a way out.”^xlvi

In spite of JFK’s pugnacious rhetoric directed at Cuba, during his 1960 Presidential campaign, Castro remained open and accommodating, he understood the forces arrayed upon the President, in fact, he saw Kennedy’s position as an unenviable one:

I don’t think a President of the United States is ever really free … and I also believe he now understands the extent to which he has been misled.^xlvii …I know that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with….^xlviii

While in the middle of (an Attwood arranged and Kennedy sanctioned) clandestine meeting with Castro, Daniel reported, that (at 2pm Cuban-time) the news arrived that JFK was dead (shot in Dallas, Texas, on that very same day, 22 November 1963, at 12:30pm), “Castro stood-up , looked at me [dismayed], and said ‘Everything is going to change,…’”^xlix and he was spot-on. Consequently, with (newly sworn-in) President Lyndon Baines Johnson mindful of the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was “proclaimed” a Castro devotee, accommodations with the Cuban government would be much more difficult. As such, the Attwood-Lechuga connection was terminated.^l Julian Borger, journalist for the Guardian, maintains that “Castro saw Kennedy’s killing as a setback, [he] tried to restart a dialogue with the next administration, but LBJ was … too concerned [with] appearing soft on communism,”^li meaning opinion polls, and their consequences, trumped keeping channels of communication open with the Cuban government. Which obliquely implies the notion that relations with Cuba might have been different if JFK had not been murdered.

With the Johnson administration bogged down in an “unwinnable war” in Southeast Asia and Civil Rights battles occurring on the streets of the US, Cuba and its revolution began to fall off the radar. By 1964, the Johnson administration, concerned with public opinion, as mentioned, took swift and immediate action to stop the deliberate terror perpetrated on the Cuban people. LBJ, in April of that year, called for a cessation of sabotage attacks. Johnson openly admitted, “we had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean.’”^lii

Nonetheless, the national security apparatus (i.e., the CIA, the Joint-Chiefs and military intelligence) along with US policymakers (and US based exile groups), remained obstinate, steadfast and consistent in their goal – to punish (if not kill) Fidel Castro and his revolution, by maintaining a punitive program of economic strangulation with the hopes that Castro would be, not only isolated on the world stage, but condemned by his own people who would rise up and eradicate the man and his socialist regime – which did not occur. Of course, the termination of hostilities directive ordered by Johnson did not include economic enmity – which persisted throughout the 1960s and beyond. In fact, a CIA field-agent appointed to anti-Castro operations detailed the agency’s sadistic objectives as expressed through author John Marks, by explaining:

Agency officials reasoned, … that it would be easier to overthrow Castro if Cubans could be made unhappy with their standard of living. ‘We wanted to keep bread out of the stores so people were hungry … We wanted to keep rationing in effect….’”^liii

The purpose of the economic blockade remained fixed from the early 60s onward: to contain, defame, discredit and destroy Castro and his experimentation with, what the US considered, subversive Communist ideals.

Finally, the US’s belligerent, if not insidious, hardline-stance toward this small island nation reignited at the end of the 1960s, which included not only an economic strangle-hold, but full-blown underground sabotage operations. The 37th president of the United States, Richard M. “Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify its covert [Hybrid War] operations against Cuba.”^liv Nixon and his then National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, still believed, callously, that military aggression, violence, brutality and intimidation (coalesced by vicious economic sanctions) were the answers to America’s woes abroad.

US policy toward Cuba for more than sixty-years is reminiscent of a famous quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.” Hence, Castro’s Cuba (not only America’s nemesis, but also the model of an uncompromising US global order) was the consequence of an even longer and persistent imperial US foreign policy: If the United States had not impeded Cuba’s push for national sovereignty and self-determination in the initial part of the 20th century; if it had not sustained a sequence of tyrannical despots on the island; and, if it had not been complicit in the termination and manipulation of the 1952 election, an ineradicable character such as the young reformist, and socialist,

Fidel Castro may never have materialized.^lvUltimately, the headstrong US stratagem of assassination and suffocation of Castro and his socialist revolution failed, not only by bolstering his image on the island, but abroad as well. Ironically, the US helped to create its own oppositional exemplar of resistance, in the image of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the Cuban people, i.e., the revolution – two men and a small island nation that stood up defiantly to the US led global-capitalist-order and would not relent. The US feared the Revolution of 1959’s challenge to class-power, colonialization; and, its popularity with the multitudes – thus, it had to be forcefully restricted through malicious policies of trade-embargoes, threats of violence and ideological-isolation.

In fact, the Cuban rebellion courageously and tenaciously stood up to, and resisted, specific contrivances (or designs) by which the US had customarily, boastfully and self-admiringly delineated its dominant status through the forceful protection of its exploitative-business-practices (aka, the “Yankee boot”) on the backs of the Cuban people, for which, Fidel Castro and his bottom-up-populist-crusade were held ominously, insidiously and interminably responsible….

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Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh, School of History; a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist – a self-taught musician, and performer. As a musician, he uses American Roots Music to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.

Notes

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Facebook briefly suspended the page of a Palestinian news site following its rolling coverage of the violent Israeli raid on al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday.

The Al-Qastal news site said on Saturday that Facebook had deleted its page without warning or explanation, causing it to lose thousands of followers. Hours later, however, the page announced it has been reinstated.

“Al-Qastal page is finally back after great efforts from its friends and lovers of al-Aqsa and al-Quds, who did not abandon it,” it said in a statement to Twitter.

Earlier, the news site said that its Facebook page had been deleted “without any introductions or advance warning… due to its extensive coverage of events of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa Mosque, despite the strict adherence to Facebook publishing standards”.

It remains unclear why Facebook had suspended Al-Qastal’s Arabic news page. The bilingual Jerusalem-based outlet accused the social media platform of yielding to pressure from Israeli authorities who aim to “silence the voices of Jerusalemites,” according to its intitial statement.

Earlier on Friday, Al-Qastal confirmed that Israeli forces had targeted two of its reporters during the unrest in East Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque.

More than 150 people were wounded and at least 400 arrested by Israeli forces who attacked worshippers inside the mosque in a four-hour raid.

Al-Qastal confirmed that Israeli forces had shot a stun grenade at the head of one of its reporters, Nesreen Salem, during her coverage of the assaults. Reporter Mohammed Samreen was also wounded, with a rubber-coated steel bullet in the leg. He was later detained in the mosque’s courtyard then taken to the Al Mascobiya interrogation centre, al-Qastal said.

It added that Facebook had previously imposed restrictions on its page without any explanation.

Censorship of Palestinians 

Meta, the California-based multinational conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, has often been accused of censoring the experiences of Palestinians and their narrative on its platforms.

Hours after the Israeli raid on Friday, Dutch-Palestinian supermodel Bella Hadid claimed she was “shadow banned” by Instagram for posting about Palestine. Omar Suleiman, a prominent American-Muslim preacher, also claimed on Friday that his account was restricted.

Earlier this year, a Palestinian news page with over a million-and-a-half followers on Facebook was forced to shut down its operations in Jerusalem after the social media giant banned its account.

The Maydan al-Quds news network covered stories from Jerusalem for more than 18 months.

According to its director, Bilal Nour, Facebook closed the page in 2021, the same day as the killing of Palestinian man Fadi Abu Shkheidem by Israeli forces after he carried out a stabbing attack near the Chain Gate – one of the gates to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Nour said his network was “totally impartial” in its reporting on the incident.

In November, Palestinian activists and journalists launched a campaign called “Facebook Censors Jerusalem” to raise awareness about Meta’s alleged efforts to censor Palestinian content on its flagship social media platform.

The bulk of what they say were incidents of censorship are said to have occurred in May 2021, during protests in solidarity with Palestinians who were facing the threat of expulsions in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, the storming by Israeli forces of al-Aqsa Mosque, the 11-day offensive in Gaza, and intercommunal violence in Palestinian-majority cities in Israel.

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Featured image is from Liberation News