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As debate over ‘The Science’ has increased, people are questioning whether there was more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors. Was it incompetence or coordination?

It’s been two years since COVID-19 became a dominant and all-consuming issue. Now there are signs we are witnessing the unravelling of some of the key policy responses – blanket lockdowns and population-wide injections – that have been so aggressively promoted by many, although not all, governments around the world. Of course, the unravelling is patchy: many countries are maintaining high levels of restrictions and the infrastructure for reinstating measures persists. There is also reluctance by many to concede there have been problems with the COVID-19 responses to date. However, doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns are now widely aired whilst there is increasing awareness that the mRNA shot is not safe. And it is at least clear that very significant numbers of people, including scientists and academics, are expressing views that are at odds with authority or mainstream claims that lockdowns reduce mortality and that mass injections are a rational and efficacious solution.

As debate over ‘The Science’ has increased, more and more people have started to question whether or not there is more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and so-called ‘Big Pharma’. In the early days of COVID-19 any such talk was immediately dismissed as ‘conspiratorial’ nonsense and, broadly speaking, people raising non-mainstream doubts about any aspect of the COVID-19 issue were subjected to vilification by ‘authoritative’ voices and corporate media. Such dynamics were very much in evidence with respect to speculation about the origins of COVID-19. And yet, today, the so-called ‘lab leak theory’ has moved from a ‘sphere of deviance’ to a ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ with many people, from mainstream science and corporate media to popular podcasts, discussing it. At the same time, public awareness of the WEF and its political agendas, perhaps more accurately described as visions, is growing. Indeed, a constant refrain from some quarters is that what was yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s fact. So, if all this is not about a virus, what might actually be going on?

COVID-19 and the ‘Structural Deep Event’ concept

First and foremost, it is necessary to dispel the idea that any attempt to understand intersections between political-economic agendas and COVID-19 is necessarily absurd or smacks of batshit-crazy conspiracism. It is a fact that powerful political and economic actors do not blindly and irrationally stumble through history but rather strategise, plan and take actions that are expected to achieve results. They may make mistakes and plans are not always successful, but that does not mean they do not try and sometimes succeed in their aims and objectives. For example the tobacco industry worked long and hard, and with some success, to shape scientific and political discourse regarding their product and delay public awareness of its dangers.

Second, it is also true that powerful actors can have clear perceptions of their interests and are guided by the desire to realise, protect and further them. Where those interests come from might be reducible to any number of material or ideological influences. But origins do not matter, powerful actors still have conceptions of their interests and what they want to do.

Third, it is also true that powerful political and economic actors are, well, powerful. They have resources and skills at their disposal that other less powerful actors do not. One potent  tool available is that of propaganda, which grants significant leverage and influence to those with the skills and resources to disseminate it. For those liberals who remain at peace with their world – believing that powerful actors simply relay their political, economic and social goals to knowledgeable publics who then consent, or refuse to consent, to those goals – the fact that propaganda is exercised extensively across liberal democratic states comes as a shock. Indeed, it is the experience of this author that many ‘liberal’ scholars struggle to recognise the role of propaganda even in well documented examples such as that of the tobacco industry shaping the science on the harms of smoking or the bogus claims regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Recognising that propaganda is a major component of exercising power within so-called liberal democratic states logically removes any justification for the assumptions that a) powerful actors cannot or do not manipulate publics and b) citizenry are sufficiently autonomous and knowledgeable to be able to grant or withhold consent.

History is replete with examples of powerful actors successfully pursuing goals and manipulating populations in the process. In the days after 9/11, we now know that British and American officials were planning a wide-ranging series of actions – so called ‘regime-change’ wars – that went well outside the scope of the official narrative regarding combating alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’. One British embassy cable stated, four days after 9/11, that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region’. Within weeks British Prime Minister Tony Blair communicated with US president George W. Bush saying, amongst many other things, ‘If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once’. As these two western leaders conspired at the geo-strategic level, a low-level ‘spin doctor’, Jo Moore, commented on the utility of 9/11 in terms of day-to-day ‘media management’, noting that it was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Jo Moore was forced to resign, Bush and Blair laid the tracks for 20-plus years of conflict in the international system, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recently ended 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

Professor Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkley) developed the idea of the  ‘structural deep event’ and this is useful in capturing the idea that powerful actors frequently work to instigate, exploit or exacerbate events in ways that enable substantive and long-lasting societal transformations.

These frequently involve, according to Scott, a combination of legal and illegal activity implicating both legitimate and public-facing political structures as well as covert or hidden parts of government – the so-called deep state which is understood as the interface ‘between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government’. So, for example, Scott argues that the JFK assassination became an event that enabled the maintenance of the Cold War whilst 9/11 likewise enabled the global ‘war on terror’, and that both involved a variety of actors not usually recognized in mainstream or official accounts of these events. It is important to note that Scott claims his approach does not necessarily imply a simplistic grand conspiracy, but is rather based on the idea of opaque networks of powerful and influential groups whose interests converge, at points, and who use and exploit events to pursue their objectives.

Applied to COVID-19, a ‘structural deep event’ reading would point toward a constellation of actors, with overlapping interests, working to advance agendas, and being enabled to do so because of COVID-19. Such a reading does not necessarily include or exclude the possibility of COVID-19 being an instigated event. What are the grounds for seriously considering a ‘structural deep event’ reading?

The failed COVID-19 response, injection inefficacy and propaganda

There is a strong, perhaps overwhelming, case to be made that the key responses to COVID-19 – lockdowns, cloth masking and mass injection – were flawed. A large swathe of scientists and medical professionals are now clearly and repeatedly warning governments and populations that lockdowns are harmful and ineffective, whilst mass injection of populations may also be doing more harm than good. Put in lay terms, the idea of quarantining entire (healthy) populations for extended periods of time in response to a respiratory virus, and then attempting to submit entire populations to an experimental mRNA injection on a repeated basis, does not appear to be scientifically robust.

It has also become apparent that a remarkable and wide-ranging propaganda effort was used to mobilize support for lockdowns and, later on, injections. For example, it is understood that many Western governments have behavioural psychology units attached to the highest levels of government, designed to shape thoughts and behaviour. According to Iain Davis, in February 2020 the WHO had established  the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG); ‘The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prof. Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant’. In the UK, behavioural scientists from SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour) reconvened on 13 February 2020 and subsequently advised the UK government on how to secure compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Broadly, these propaganda techniques appear to have involved maximising perceived threat in order to coerce populations to comply with lockdown and, eventually, to accept a series of injections.

We also now know that propaganda activities have included smear campaigns against dissenting scientists and, in at least one major case, were initiated by high-level officials: in Autumn 2020, Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussed the need to swiftly shut down the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors were advocating an alternative (and historically orthodox) COVID-19 response focused on protecting high-risk individuals and thus avoiding destructive lockdown measures. Collins wrote in an email that this ‘proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises’. Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed.

The legacy corporate media, social media platforms and large swathes of academia appear to have played an important role in disseminating this propaganda and promoting the official narrative on COVID-19. The proximity of legacy corporate media to political and economic power has been well understood for many decades: concentration of ownership, reliance upon advertising revenue, deference to elite sources, vulnerability to smear campaigns and ideological positioning are all understood to sharply limit the autonomy of legacy media (these factors also arguably shape academia). With COVID-19 these dynamics are exacerbated by, for example, direct regulatory influence, such as Ofcom direction to UK broadcasters, and censorship by ‘Big Tech’ of views deviating from those of the authorities and the WHO. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) have coordinated major legacy media in order to counter what they claim to be ‘misinformation’, and this appears to have played a role in suppressing legitimate scientific criticism whilst elevating ‘official’ narratives. Currently moves are afoot to further strengthen elite control over media discourse via legislation aimed at preventing so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’.

Extreme and arguably flawed policy responses – societal lockdown and mandated mass injection – combined with widespread propaganda activities aimed at securing the compliance of the population might be explicable in a number of ways. For example:

1. The cock-up thesis might be invoked to explain all of this as an irrational panic response by well-intentioned or ideologically driven actors who got things badly wrong and imitated each other while doing so;
2. It might be that these policy responses are the result of narrow vested interests and corruption;
3. Powerful actors might have sought to take advantage of COVID-19 to advance substantial political and economic agendas and, as part of this, helped to promote key aspects of the COVID-19 event.

Following two years of massive societal disruption aimed at containing a seasonal respiratory virus and the persistence of some aspects of the COVID-19 narrative despite substantive scientific challenges, it is tempting to speculate that there are corruption and concerted political and economic drivers behind policy, rather than blunders and incompetence. Moving beyond speculation, are there well-established grounds to take explanations 2 and 3 seriously?

Manipulation and exploitation of Health Agencies: Regulatory Capture at the NIH and CDC plus the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Pandemic Preparedness Agenda

Evidence for vested interests and corruption has come, in particular, from analyses of US regulatory bodies and the actions of the WHO. In particular, evidence has emergedshowing that key authorities in the US – the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – under the influence of Fauci, the Chief Medical Officer to the US President, have suffered from severe conflicts of interest. The term ‘regulatory capture’ is frequently used to describe this situation.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s detailed analysis of the US-led COVID-19 response in The Real Anthony Fauci, documents the corrupt relationship between so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and Anthony Fauci arguing that, to all intents and purposes, there has been ‘regulatory capture’ whereby pharmaceutical companies and public officials enjoy mutually beneficial arrangements. This mutual infiltration is understood by Kennedy to underpin the COVID-19 response, especially the commitment to a ‘vaccine-only’ solution and suppression of preventative treatments such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).  By way of  example, Kennedy relays the case of Dr Tess Lawrie and WHO researcher Andrew Hill in which Hill appeared to confirm there was pressure to delay publication of results supporting the efficacy of Ivermectin. Regarding HCQ, Kennedy writes:

By 2020, we shall see, Bill Gates exercised firm control over WHO and deployed the agency in his effort to discredit HCQ’ …

On June 17, the WHO – for which Mr. Gates is the largest funder after the US, and over which Mr. Gates and Dr Fauci exercise tight control – called for the halt of HCQ trials in hundreds of hospitals across the world. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ordered nations to stop using HCQ and CQ. Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium banned HCQ for COVID-19 treatment.

More broadly, the WHO has been important in terms of co-ordinating some COVID-19 policy responses.  Although notionally an independent entity, the WHO has increasingly come under corporate influence via both the growth of corporate-influenced organisations such as Gavi (Global Vaccine Alliance), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and private financing via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO is also currently negotiating a treaty with the governments of member states to provide unprecedented powers to this organization to enable rapid responses, transcending national governments, when the WHO declares pandemics in the future, thus centralizing control and potentially overriding national sovereignty.

This line of analysis might lead to a conclusion that what we have experienced to date – harmful lockdowns and injection strategies underpinned by massive propaganda – is primarily the result of corruption, conflicts of interest and vested interests, rather than what could reasonably be described as good faith errors by politicians and bureaucrats.

The World Economic Forum and the ‘Great Reset’

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been associated by some analysts with the COVID-19 event and in 2020 Klaus Schwab, its founder, published a co-authored book titled COVID-19: The Great Reset. Schwab declared: ‘The Pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’. One key component of the political-economic vision promoted by the WEF is ‘stakeholder capitalism’ (Global Public-Private Partnerships, GPPP) involving the integration of government, business and civil society actors with respect to the provision of services. Another key component involves harnessing ‘the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, especially the exploitation of developments in artificial intelligence, computing and robotics, in order to radically transform society toward a digitised model. Slogans now frequently associated with these visions include ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, ‘smart cities’ and ‘build back better’.

It is also apparent that the WEF, as an organising force, has considerable reach. It has been involved with training and educating individuals – through its Young Global Leaders Programme and its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow – who have subsequently moved into positions of considerable power. It has also been noted that many national leaders (e.g. Merkel, Macron, Trudeau, Ardern, Putin, and Kurz) are WEF Forum of Young Global Leaders graduates or members and have ‘played prominent roles, typically promoting zero-covid strategies, lockdowns, mask mandates, and ‘vaccine passports’. In 2017 Schwab boasted:

When I mention our names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like prime minister Trudeau, president of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for prime minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more half of this cabinet are actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum …. that’s true in Argentina, and it’s true in France now with the president a Young Global Leader.

Corporate members of the WEF’s Forum of Young Global Leaders includes Mark Zuckerberg whilst ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow’ included Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

Financial Crisis, the Central Banks and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)

It is now established that a major crisis in the repo markets during the Autumn of 2019 was followed by high-level planning aimed at resolving an impending financial crisis of greater proportions than the 2008 banking crisis.  According to some analysts, one response appears to have been a strengthened drive to control currencies via the Central Banks: Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), Agustin Carstens, stated in October 2020 that:

We intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash we don’t know who is using a $100 bill today … the key difference with the CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.

A programmable CBDC potentially provides complete control over how and when an individual spends money, in addition to allowing authorities to automatically deduct taxes through a person’s ‘digital wallet’. According to some analysts, this development would also effectively remove any significant control over financial policy at the national level.

Technologies associated with programmable CBDCs overlap with those associated with 4IR and concepts regarding digitised society. Specifically, digital identity, a potential component of the intended CBDC, provides a basis for the creation of a digital grid upon which information relating to all aspects of an individual’s life will be available to governments, corporations and other powerful entities such as the security services. Also notable is the relationship between digital ID and the drive to create ‘vaccine passports’ as part of the COVID-19 response: Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation are central players in ID2020, alongside Gavi. The objective appears to be a global-level digital ID framework that integrates with health/vaccination status.

Both of these political-economic phenomena point toward a conclusion more closely aligned with the ‘structural deep event’ (Scott) thesis, in that they highlight the possibility that COVID-19 has been an event exploited to advance major political and economic agendas. This hypothesis is at least in part distinct from the idea that corruption and narrow vested interests explain most of what we have seen.

Threats to democracy and understanding what this all means

The political and economic processes identified regarding the WEF, digital ID and the central banks are not speculative or theoretical, they are directly observable and ongoing. It is also worth spelling out the potential interaction between these agendas and threats to democracy. It is now clear and empirically demonstrable that populations are being subjected to increasingly coercive and aggressive attempts to limit their autonomy, including restrictions on movement, the right to protest, freedom to work and freedom to participate in society. Most notably, significant numbers of people have been pushed, sometimes required, to take an injection at regular intervals in order to continue their participation in society. These developments have been accompanied by, at times, aggressive and discriminatory statements from major political leaders with respect to people resisting injection. The threat to civil liberties and ‘democracy as usual’ is, arguably, unprecedented. The economic impact has been dire and COVID-19 has seen a dramatic and continued  transfer of wealth from the poorest to the very richest (e.g. Oxfam, 2021).

Furthermore, the combination of a programmable CBDC, a ‘vaccine passport’ that determines access to services and real-world spaces and the availability of all online behaviours to corporations and governments can enable a system of near total control over an individual’s life, activities and opportunities. This system of control can be seen in China with the social credit system currently being implemented in certain provinces. Integration of personal data and money though a digital ID would also allow individuals to be readily stripped of their assets.

Of course, it is still possible that the sustained adherence to lockdown and mass injection (in spite of growing evidence against their efficacy) are explicable through reference to government blunders, whilst the parallel political and economic projects and rapid reduction in civil liberties are coincidences.

However, it would be remiss to set aside the fact that organisations such as the WHO and the WEF exist within a wider network, or constellation, of extremely powerful, non-elected political and economic entities made up of major multinational corporations, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), large private foundations and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These include, in no particular order, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other central banks; asset managers Blackrock and Vanguard; global-level entities such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Club of Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and major corporations including so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Tech’ such as Apple, Google (part of Alphabet Inc), Amazon and Microsoft. And, of course, governments themselves are part of this constellation, with the most powerful – the US, China and India – having considerable influence. In addition, the European Union (EU) supranational body, via its President Ursula von der Leyen, has promoted the EU Digital COVID Certificate and demanded that all EU citizens be injected.

As such, it is entirely plausible that a convergence of interests, shared by multiple political and economic actors, has occurred, which has enabled the advancement of political and economic agendas. COVID-19, in this scenario, might well have been a mobilizing event instrumentalized by powerful players. It may also be the case that the current war in the Ukraine is an event that will be propagandized and used in a similar fashion.

Indeed, precisely this broad thesis is advanced in recent publications. In States of Emergency Kees van der Pijl argues there has been a ‘biopolitical seizure of power’ in which an intelligence-IT-media complex has crystallized as a new class block seeking to quell growing unrest and the strengthening of progressive social movements throughout the world. Under cover of Covid-19, and via ruthless exploitation of people’s fear of a virus, van der Pijl traces how this new class block is attempting to impose control via high-tech, digitised societies necessitating  mandatory injections and digital ID, as well as censorship and manipulation of public spheres. In short, van der Pijl describes a total surveillance society involving massive concentration of power and the end of democracy. Iain Davis’ Pseudopandemic similarly presents the COVID-19 event as primarily a propagandized phenomena that has functioned to enable the continued emergence of a technocratic order built around the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP) and ‘stake-holder capitalism’ that has appeared primarily to serve the interests of what he describes as an elite ‘parasite class’. Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, although focused on documenting the corruption with respect to public health institutions and ‘Big Pharma’, is clear about its consequences for our democracies. Early in the book he notes that Fauci ‘has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism’. Later in the book, Kennedy discusses the interplay between military, medical and intelligence planners and raises questions about an ‘underlying agenda to coordinate dismantlement of democratic governance’:

After 9/11, the rising biosecurity cartel adopted simulations as signaling mechanisms for choreographing lockstep responses among corporate, political, and military technocrats charged with managing global exigencies. Scenario planning became an indispensable device for multiple power centers to coordinate complex strategies for simultaneously imposing coercive controls upon democratic societies across the globe.

Other important analyses, all of which run along similar lines, have been provided by Cory Morningstar, Paul Shreyer and Whitney Webb, amongst others. And, not to be forgotten, James Corbett was one of the first to warn of the impending dangers of a biosecurity state all the way back in March 2020. Others such as Patrick Wood alerted us to these developments long before the arrival of COVID-19.  Along with all this, transhumanism, life extension or ‘enhancement’ through technology and digitalised society, observable in some of the output from the WEF and public musings of key individuals, appears to reflect a set of beliefs in technology and progress that can be traced back to Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years. Philosophical debates over technology and what it means to be human have remained at the heart of the Enlightenment ‘project’, although perhaps deeply buried. Associated with this might be scientism as a religious cult of the West.

Attempts to attach a label to the complex political and economic processes we are witnessing include descriptors such as ‘global fascism,’ ‘global communism,’ ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘neo-serfdom’, ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘technocracy,’ ‘centralization vs. subsidiarity,’ ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘global public-private partnerships,’ ‘corporate authoritarianism’, ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘tyranny’ and ‘global capitalism.’ Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, openly refers to the threat of global totalitarianism.

The task confronting humanity

For those occupying corporate or mainstream positions in politics, media or academia, the fear of being tarred with the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label is usually enough to dampen any enthusiasm for serious evaluation of the ways in which powerful and influential political and economic actors might be shaping responses to COVID-19 to further political and economic agendas. But the stakes are now simply too high for such shyness and, indeed cowardice, to be allowed to persist. There are strong and well-established grounds to take  analyses along the lines of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis seriously, as set out in this article, and there are clear and present dangers to our civil liberties, freedom and democracy.

Building on the work already started, researchers must explore more fully the networks and power structures that have shaped the COVID-19 responses and which have sought to move forward various political and economic agendas. Analysing more fully the techniques used, including propaganda and exploitation of COVID-19 as an enabling event, is now an essential task for researchers to undertake. Equally important is for scholars of democracy and ethics to further unpack the implications of these developments with respect to liberty and civil rights. Such work, ultimately, can not only deepen our understanding of what is going on; it can also provide a guide for those who seek to oppose what is being described by some as ‘global totalitarianism’ or ‘fascism’.

It could of course be the case that such a research agenda ultimately leads to a refutation of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis and confirmation that everything witnessed over the last two years has been one almighty cock-up. But if that is not the case, and we have all buried our heads in the sand by assuming there is nothing deeper going on, we will have failed ourselves and future generations. The stakes could not be higher and it has never been more essential to seriously engage with uncomfortable possibilities – even if that means interrogating explanations that move beyond reducing what we are all experiencing to blunder and incompetence.

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Dr Piers Robinson is a co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and was Chair/Professor in Politics, Society and Political Journalism, University of Sheffield, 2016-2019, Senior Lecturer in International Politics (University of Manchester 2010-2016) and Lecturer in Political Communication (University of Liverpool, 1999-2005). He researches and writes on propaganda, media, international politics and conflict.

Notes

1. Thanks to David Bell, Isa Blumi, Heike Bruner, Jonathan Engler and Nick Hudson for comments and input.

2. Sheldon Watts offers historic background illustrating how the establishment regularly rewrites the science to serve other purposes. In the case of Cholera, the main editors of The Lancet in the late 19th century actually contradicted their own findings of a previous decade in order to accommodate trade interests concerning the quarantining of British ships from India that would have harmed the British Empire’s economic model. From being a human communicable disease, it transformed into a dark-skinned disease of the orient. Watts, Sheldon. “From rapid change to stasis: Official responses to cholera in British-ruled India and Egypt: 1860 to c. 1921.” Journal of World History (2001): 321-374. Thanks to Isa Blumi for this reference.

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The first tweet I saw when I checked my timeline this morning was from foreign policy analyst Clint Ehlirch, pointing out that the Russian ruble has already started recovering from the dip created by Western sanctions, and is almost at pre-war levels:

The Russian Ruble is nearing its pre-invasion value.

Sanctions were designed to collapse its value. They failed. pic.twitter.com/OLmVIsS34E

— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) March 29, 2022

Ehrlich states, “sanctions were designed to collapse the value of the Ruble, they have failed”.

…to which I can only respond, well “were they?”

…and perhaps more importantly, “have they?”

Because it doesn’t really look like it, does it?

If anything, the sanctions seem to be at best rather impotent, and at worst amazingly counterproductive.

It’s not like the US/EU/NATO don’t know how to cripple economies. They have had years of practice starving the people of Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela and too many others to list.

Now, you could argue that Russia is a larger, more developed economy than those countries, and that’s true, but the US and its allies have previously managed to hurt the Russian economy quite drastically.

As recently as 2014, following the “annexation” of Crimea, Western sanctions were tame compared to the recent unprecedented measures, but crucially the US massively increased its own oil production, then later that year (following a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry) Saudi Arabia did the same.

Despite objections from other members of OPEC – Venezuela and Iran chiefly – the Saudis flooded the market with oil.

The result of these moves was the biggest fall in oil prices for decades – collapsing from $109 a barrel, in June 2014, to $44 by January 2015.

This kicked Russia into a full recession and saw Russia’s GDP shrink for the first time under Putin’s leadership.

Again, just two years ago, allegedly as part of competing with Russia for a share of the oil market, Saudi Arabia once more flooded the market with cheap oil.

So, the West does know how to hurt Russia if it really wants to – by increasing oil production, flooding the market and tanking the price.

But has the US increased its oil production this time round? Have they leant on their Gulf allies to do the same?

Not at all.

In fact, in a point of beautiful narrative synchronicity, the US claims it’s “unable” to increase its oil production due to “staff shortages” caused by that gift that keeps on giving – Covid.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia is not tanking the oil market, but deliberately increasing prices.

Yes, right now, with the Western allies locked in an alleged economic war with Russia the price of oil is soaring, and may continue to do so.

This is good news for the Russian economy, to the point it may even make up for the damage done by the brutal sanctions.

The high price of oil and need “not to rely on Putin’s gas” or “de-Russify”our energy supply will doubtless result in millions being poured into “green” technology.

Those Western sanctions are targeting other Russian exports too, including grains and food in general.

Russia is a net exporter of food, meaning they export more food than they import. Conversely, many countries in Western Europe rely on imported food, including the UK which imports over 48% of its food supply.

If Europe refuses to buy Russian food, the net effect is that Russia hasfood…and the West doesn’t.

And, just as with oil, increasing food prices will help rather than hinder the Russian economy.

Take wheat for example, of which Russia is the biggest exporter in the world. The vast majority of this wheat is not even sold to Western countries – but instead to China, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan – and so is not even subject to sanctions.

Nevertheless, the sanctions, and the war, have actually driven the price of wheat up almost 30%.

This is good for the Russian economy.

Meanwhile, according to CNN, the US is likely to enter a full-blown recession by 2023, France is considering food vouchers and countries all over the world are expected to begin rationing fuel.

So, the sweeping sanctions imposed against Russia by the West, allegedly in response to the invasion of Ukraine, are not having their stated aim – tanking the Russian economy – but they are driving up the price of oil, creating potential energy and food shortages in the West and exacerbating the “cost of living” crisis created by the “pandemic”.

You should always be wary of anybody – individual or institution – whose actions accidentally achieve the exact opposite of their stated aim. That’s a simple rule to live by.

Remember how Orwell described the evolution of the concept of war in 1984:

War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

Recall that “the worst food shortages for fifty years” were predicted as a result of Covid. But they never materialised.

Likewise, we were due to experience Covid-related energy disruptions and power cuts. Short of the UK’s damp squib of a “petrol crisis”, they never really arrived.

But now they are heading our way after all – because war and sanctions

Increased food prices, decreased use of fossil fuels, lowering standards of living, public money poured into “renewables”. This is all part of a very familiar agenda, isn’t it?

Regardless of what you feel about Putin, Zelensky, the war in general or Ukrainian Nazis, it’s time to confront the elephant in room.

We need to be asking: What exactly is the real aim of these sanctions? And how come they align so perfectly with the great reset?

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The word “security” conjures a couple of distinctly different and conflicting images. One is of human beings living in safe, viable, and sustainable communities, where individuals can freely develop their full potential, not hindered by threat and assault and exclusion from the daily necessities of life.

This notion of security prioritizes such socially beneficial institutions as housing, health care and education. It encourages the arts, maintains infrastructure and sustains ecosystems.

This kind of security also provides for the people’s defense. That defense is not, however, prioritized over social needs, and it is not formed for committing acts of aggression against others.  Such a society may take a variety of forms but, in the broadest sense, all of them could be called socialist in that they put people before profits.

More often than not, however, when we talk about security, we are talking about something completely different. This notion of security is rooted in the kind of fear bred in the heart of the thief and the murderer, ever on guard that those to whom they have caused pain might rise against them and take back what has been stolen.

This type of security also results from a desire to manage broken communities and societies through coercion and punishment, rather than addressing root causes. It is the security of those who prefer to fight “wars on crime” instead of “wars on poverty.”

This security is prioritized over every social need. Its primary directive is protection of the powerful few, and the preservation and expansion of their markets and profits. This is the “security” of capitalism and Empire, that is, the U.S./NATO Empire.

According to the World Inequality Report, one percent of the world’s population owns 38% of its wealth, while the poorest 50% own just 2%. My former colleague at the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), Jon Hunt, used to say, “The Pentagon is the insurance company of transnational corporations and global capitalism.”

The insurance company of transnational corporations and global capitalism. [Source: Britannica.com]  

The United States was founded as an empire, and that is what it is today. While its architects once clamored about the “manifest destiny” of U.S. occupation of the continent “from sea to shining sea,” the objective today is U.S. hegemony around the world.

The U.S. Empire wants to dominate other nations, but it is not against the idea that they should be more developed. The U.S. wants to replicate its model in many other places while also bringing home lessons learned abroad.

As the wealth gap grows each day in our own country, the U.S. ruling class must also find new ways to exercise its control over the nation. Global capitalism depends on the growth of power-elites around the world to facilitate privatization of resources, as well as expansion of markets and access to cheap labor.

Meanwhile, as resources dwindle every day—especially water resources—and the twin crises of economic collapse and climate change proliferate, the export of the U.S. security model becomes a priority for the control, displacement and dispossession of peoples, and, of course, for the repression of the inevitable resistance.

The United States is unique in this way. The export of our security model across the world is unparalleled. That model represents the very infrastructure of the Empire. It is Empire’s skeleton. This is why the United States maintains more than 800 foreign military bases, the spine of the imperial beast.

But not only that. We are exporting our police model; our legal model; our border militarization model; our prison model. In fact, as if to underscore the reality that, in the U.S., the nation and Empire are one, our Department of Homeland Security is itself an international agency, with more than 2,000 agents stationed outside our borders.

Colombia is a case in point in terms of a country whose security model has been restructured based on a U.S. model. And it is more than that. Colombia is a most willing proving ground for the development of new programs, new aspects of security, new partners, subsequently taken to a much wider international stage. In terms of the diffusion of the U.S. security model, Colombia is not just a doorway to Latin America, but to the world.

Colombia functions as a military colony of the U.S. Empire (and NATO, given its status as Latin America’s sole NATO partner). As such, the nation has at least seven U.S. military bases and, truly, the U.S. military has access wherever it wants to go.

Source: marxistleninist.wordpress.com

Colombian military officials regularly report to the Pentagon’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Colombia’s troops have served in Afghanistan and Yemen, and they have patrolled air and sea space with U.S. troops along the coasts of Central America and Western Africa.

I have personally seen Colombian troops in the village of Herrera, Municipality of Rioblanco, Department of Tolima, who were carrying canteens on their belts stamped “USA.” You can be sure that no U.S. soldier has ever been approved to wear any clothing or accessory bearing the insignia of another country’s military, no matter how close an ally.

Today, Colombia’s two largest troop concentrations are in the southwest of Colombia and along its border with Venezuela.  Both are frequently visited by advisers from SOUTHCOM. Colombia is a launching pad for any potential military action in the region on behalf of or involving the United States and against progressive governments and movements across Latin America.

Colombia has also become a major trainer of military, police and prison personnel internationally, especially in Central America and Mexico. General John Kelly, former commander of SOUTHCOM and former Secretary of Homeland Security, told a House hearing on April 29, 2014, that

“The beauty of having a Colombia – they’re such good partners, particularly in the military realm, they’re such good partners with us. When we ask them to go somewhere else and train the Mexicans, the Hondurans, the Guatemalans, the Panamanians, they will do it almost without asking. And they’ll do it on their own…. But that’s why it’s important for them to go, because I’m–at least on the military side–restricted from working with some of these countries because of limitations that are, that are really based on past sins. And I’ll let it go at that.”

Plan Colombia is the military and security aid project that was implemented by the U.S. and Colombian governments in the late 1990s, at a price tag of some $12 billion. One result was the establishment of the U.S.-funded and advised ESMAD (Escuadron Móvil Antidisturbios, the highly militarized Colombian riot police).

ESMAD and the Colombian National Police are reviled across Colombia for their attacks against people’s movements, something I myself have witnessed. As if to underscore the internationality of both the people’s resistance and the repression of the people, it is significant that the first protester killed by ESMAD was Carlos Giovanni Blanco in Bogotá in 2001 while protesting the U.S. war against Afghanistan.

Escuadron Móvil Antidisturbios. [Source: flickr.com]

In an article titled Colombia’s ESMAD and the History of U.S. Policing, my colleague, Maya Hernandez, explains:

“The exportation of the U.S. policing model started during the Cold War, when American officials traveled to over fifty countries, offering assistance for stemming the spread of communism to local police forces. By embarking on a global campaign to encourage the use of policing to fight communism, the U.S. successfully created a transnational repressive police force. These counterinsurgency tactics are ongoing. Today, the U.S. trains police in 91 different countries, mostly in the Global South, thus internationalizing the targeting of people of color by focusing their efforts in non-White majority countries. According to a recent article published in the Washington Post, “U.S. funding for foreign police training expanded from $4.3 million in 2001 to $146 million in 2018.” This is a continuation of the domestic root of policing to protect the interests of the wealthy and, especially, the profits secured from the global plunder of transnational corporations and their regional collaborators. In other words, overseas police training is essential to the prosperity of the U.S. Empire.

As a close ally to the United States, Colombia is one of the first countries to use the U.S.’ policing model. In 1999, the Colombian government, backed by President Bill Clinton, created ESMAD or Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron…. Since its inception, ESMAD has flagrantly violated the rights of thousands of Colombians, consistently escalating violence against social leaders and activists and silencing peaceful protest. In rural areas, ESMAD has been used against protests led by peasant farmers communities, including attacks against mass indigenous consultations known as mingas, and against communities protesting to be included in voluntary programs of rural development to create alternatives to coca production. Disproportionately, the targets have been indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities….

Between 1999 and June 2019, ESMAD was involved in the extrajudicial killings of 34 persons. Since then, the number has grown. Many of us watched in horror the news reports depicting the repression by ESMAD and the Colombian National Police against participants in the national strike that began April 28, 2021, in Cali, Bogotá, and elsewhere.

Although it received less international news coverage, before that was the massacre perpetrated by the police in Bogotá on September 9, 2020. On that day, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, Javier Ordóñez was beaten to death by local police before a crowd of witnesses while he pleaded for his life. He was murdered for violating a curfew. Across Bogotá, thousands of people took to the streets in protest of police brutality and, before the day was done, ESMAD and other police units had killed 13 more people.

Javier Ordóñez [Source: thecaraveglu.com]

For us in the United States, what took place in Bogotá on that day looked all too familiar. As Javier Ordóñez spoke his last words pleading, “Please, I’m choking!” we were painfully reminded of the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 27, 2020. His last words: “I can’t breathe.”

Likewise, as we looked on at the repression unleashed against Colombian protesters on September 9 and during the national strike, the similarities were clear. The riot gear worn by ESMAD was just like the riot gear worn by U.S. police who attacked protesters in Portland, Seattle, and other cities across the U.S.

The rubber bullets, the tear gas canisters, the helicopters used to track, threaten and assault protesters that we saw deployed in Colombia? We recognized those, too. After all, they were “Made in the USA.”

Of course, the U.S. also brings home new ways to repress. Colombians seeing the repression of U.S. protesters would have recognized the presence of paramilitaries working with police (Kyle Rittenhouse), arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances.

Protesters rally on the steps of the Kenosha County Courthouse while the jury deliberates in the Kyle Rittenhouse case inside in Kenosha, Wisconsin on November 16, 2021. [Source: peoplesworld.org]

In an excellent document about the 2020 uprising titled A Year in Review: Racism, Repression and Fightback in the USA, coordinated by my colleague, Natalia Schuurman, she writes,

 “On June 29, 2020, about a month after George Floyd’s murder, USA Today reported protests in at least 1,700 cities and towns, large and small, across all 50 states. In early June of 2020, a poll from the Pew Research Center estimated that at least 15 million people nationwide had participated in protests, with the number growing by the millions into late June. By then, the National Guard had mobilized in at least 25 states, deploying at least 62,000 federal troops on the ground working in cooperation with local and statewide police to ‘dominate the streets,’ as former President Trump described.”

While watching footage of the repression of the National Strike in Cali, I was angered by videos of Colombian National Police helicopters harassing and firing on protesters with live ammunition. I wanted to know more about Colombian police air capabilities and ties to U.S. funding. I learned about one company that is emblematic not only of how the U.S. exports its security model to Colombia and the rest of the world, but also of the multi-faceted aspects of that model.

Between 2012 and 2017, the Falls Church, Virginia-based contractor Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE) received at least $616.7 million from the U.S. State Department to support the air capabilities of the Colombian National Police. This included support for and development of the Tuluá National Police Air Base, located near Cali, and used as a base of operations against the 2021 national strike. According to PAE officials, “The company… will provide administrative, technical, maintenance, training, safety, logistics and procurement services for 59 aircraft units that include Bell-206 helicopters, C-208 caravans, UH-1HII, UH-60L and UH-60A.”

On January 6, 2021 (the same day as the Capitol Hill riot in Washington, D.C.), PAE announced that it was one of three companies that had been awarded a $3.3 billion contract to process 98% of visas to immigrants and non-immigrants, with operations in 120 countries.

As we can see, the U.S. security model is diverse… and profitable. PAE is also one of the top ten contractors for privately run immigrant detention centers in the U.S., for which it received more than $801 million between 2013 and the first six months of 2019. From processing visas to jailing immigrants to repressing popular movements in Colombia, PAE is well-paid to administer key components of the Empire’s concept of security.

Militarized policing leads directly to militarized prisons and mass incarceration. It is not enough that here in the U.S., we have the largest population of incarcerated persons in the world.

Source: usprisonculture.com

Among the characteristics of the U.S. prison model are overcrowding; torture, especially in the form of solitary confinement; long periods being held incognito while in transfer; neglect of healthcare; a prevalence of rape and physical abuse that is largely ignored by prison officials; persons of color and the poor jailed at rates far above their representation in both crime statistics and the general population; and the detention of political prisoners which, in the U.S., is mostly directed against those who resist racism.

The U.S. model of mass incarceration is something we should be ashamed of. Instead, we export it around the world. We call this Prison Imperialism. It started in 2000 with an agreement between the U.S. and Colombian governments to restructure Colombia’s prison system, spread from there to Guantánamo in occupied Cuba, Bagram in Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Today the U.S. is building an Empire of Prisons across the Global South.

Woeful overcrowding at Tramacúa prison. [Source: afgj.org]

But what of the other concept of security—the security, safety and well-being of our own people, those who live and work and play and go to school within the borders of the United States?

Many people internationally have a flawed perception of life in the United States, including on the Left. I was recently at an event in Colombia, in Popayan, Cauca. I am sure everyone there would have described themselves as socialist and anti-imperialist.

At one point, an Indigenous leader came up to me and asked me if it was true that in the United States, there is no poverty. I also spent five weeks in Cuba in 2015, the most humane country I have visited in my life. Even there, I spoke with people who had a distorted view of the U.S. as a land of opportunity.

The reality is that every time a person rises in this system, others must fall. The United States has the largest inequality gap in the developed world. And while workers and the poor and, indeed, everyone but the richest and most powerful have suffered economically and in every other way during the pandemic, according to the Institute for Policy Studies,the wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by 71%, more than $2 trillion!

Life in the U.S. is indelibly marked by pervasive racism, rising inequality, repression of popular movements, rampant climate chaos and the rise in hate crimes and paramilitary groups.  The belligerent aspect of the nation’s political bosses, police, and military parallels the loss of U.S. prestige and influence in the world economically, as the world becomes more multi-polar, and China challenges the U.S. as the world’s largest economy.

The U.S. is on a downward slide, an Empire in decline. But that Empire retains the most massive monopoly on destructive power in the world, and it will use it at home and abroad to protect the interests of its wealthiest citizens and benefactors.

The starting point of any discussion about reality in the United States has to be around the topic of racism. One Black man of every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by a police officer. Likewise, class oppression and racism are deeply intertwined in the U.S. Homelessness is part of our national fabric and identity.

Homeless row at Venice Beach. [Source: ktla.com]

Driving Indigenous nations from their homes, kidnapping Africans for enslavement in another land, the dispossession and poverty that are the lot of our nation’s poor: It is upon this more than anything else that the so-called American Dream is built.

Homeless people are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than the general population. The problem is greatly compounded if one is a person of color.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, “Estimates of homelessness in the United States range from fewer than 600,000 to more than 1.5 million people, and the estimates vary by source.”

I would like to mention some of my own experiences. When I was a young man, I worked with homeless persons for about five years in the cities of Chicago and Tucson and have continued to support the movement for the rights of the homeless. My comrades in this struggle and I were equally involved in the movement against war and nuclear weapons. We saw them as the same: The State had abandoned its duties to the poor and workers in order to increase an already ridiculously bloated military budget.

When I was engaged in this work, I could not begin to count the times we heard about police beatings of homeless persons, how often we treated their wounds. Where I lived in Chicago, it was common knowledge that the police would beat, torture and even kill victims, especially Black, Latino, and homeless Chicagoans.

One police detective and commander, Jon Burge, a veteran of the U.S.’s Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, was found to have tortured at least 118 people between 1972 and 1991. Homeless people are not only the victims of police violence, but that of para-police and paramilitaries. Between 1999 and 2019, there were 1,852 reported incidents of violence against the homeless, 515 of which resulted in fatalities.

Nationwide, homelessness has increased each of the past four years. Meanwhile, funding for the military has increased. Instead of homes for those with no home, we house soldiers in our 800+ international military bases. We build prisons that hold 2.7 million of our people behind bars, 60% of whom are people of color, and we build squalid immigrant detention centers that incarcerate some 400,000 persons per year, including children tragically separated from their families.

What the U.S. wants for the world is inequality, for the elite to rise to the top, and for the rest of us to serve them. This is obvious. Let me repeat again: Among the so-called “developed nations,” we have the largest wealth gap. Our top allies in South America, Brazil and Colombia, are the first and second most unequal countries in the Western Hemisphere.

The moment any person or people cease to be useful, or resist, the Empire wants to bomb us, starve us, jail us, displace us, or disappear us. What the Empire hates most is the threat of a good example. The U.S. Empire will use any tactic or trick possible to destroy that threat. The sanctions and blockades against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are designed to cripple these nations and destroy the alternative examples they offer to the U.S. models.

While the U.S. seeks to be a destroyer of some nations, it seeks to reinforce others. The U.S. approach to nation-building is fundamentally a military strategy. First destroy, then occupy, then rebuild it as a vassal state and perhaps, eventually replicate the U.S. reality in the name of development.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 11 countries combined. But that is only part of the story. All aspects of U.S. government are in some manner subservient to the Pentagon and the overarching militarism that pervades this society.

Likewise, U.S.-style democracy promotion and nation-building is included explicitly as part of a total spectrum Pentagon strategy known as DIMEFIL. DIMEFIL refers to the components of Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Finance, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement as applied to the concept of nation-building.

Marc Plattner is the Editor of the Journal of Democracy, published by the government-created and funded National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a leading supporter and instigator of U.S.-sponsored regime change. Plattner states, quite openly that

“Liberal democracy clearly favors the economic arrangements that foster globalization—namely, the market economy and an open international trading system…. Liberalism is based on the natural rights and the desire for property…. Globalization has fostered democratization, and democratization has fostered globalization.  Moreover, both trends generally have furthered American interests and contributed to the strengthening of American power…. It is worth emphasizing that the international order that sustains globalization is underpinned by American military predominance.”

What, then, is the nature and tactical objective of U.S. military predominance? It cannot be fit into such simplistic and traditional concepts as victory or peaceful resolution—especially not resolution.

Resolution requires concessions of land rights, security for the political opposition, healthy and independent labor institutions, and other such troublesome ideas. Perpetual war has become the new reality. Manageable conflict may be ongoing for long and perhaps endless periods of time. But it allows for continued privatization without respect for the demands and sovereignty of others.

Victory certainly has not been the unitary objective in either Afghanistan or Colombia. It is too easy to talk about the recent events of Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban as a defeat for U.S. imperialism, which it was.

But if that is all we focus on, we forget that the reason the U.S. began its involvement in Afghanistan in the first place was precisely to overthrow a socialist government, and to set in motion the events that would help lead to the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in a 1998 interview that,

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?”

Thomas A. Drohan, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and professor emeritus of military and strategic studies at the USAF Academy, writes that,

“Effectively, we are at war and peace all the time…. When peace fails—that is, war is not deterred—the DoD’s job is to prevail in the resulting conflict. For the grey zone in between, military strength is to reinforce ‘traditional tools of diplomacy, ensuring that the President and our diplomats negotiate from a position of strength.’ The problem with this viewpoint is that we also tend to assume, ‘war is an act of violence.’

Misapplied to warfare, this assumption overlooks effective methods of waging war in our densely interactive security environment…. Confusion about what constitutes legitimate competition thickens the fog of war in a boundless battlespace of weaponized information. What’s clear is that warfare is hybrid conflict marked by cooperation and confrontation….

We are in arenas of warfare that are all-domain, all-instruments-of-power, and all-effects. Conflict involves cooperation and confrontation. How will we fight?”

Karl Marlantes is a Vietnam war veteran who commanded a Marine rifle platoon. He has written three books that were best sellers, two of which are taught at West Point, Annapolis, the Naval War College, the Air Force Academy, and various other military schools.

Reflecting on U.S. endless and unwinnable wars in light of the defeat in Afghanistan, he writes in an editorial for Time magazine, that

“…the question no one is discussing is why for decades successive administrations of both parties continue to involve us in wars that not only we don’t win, but that for years we keep on fighting even when we know we can’t win and our objectives in those wars are confusing and malleable. If you look back over the history of our war in Afghanistan, it was clear as early as 2002 that we didn’t fully understand what we were doing there anymore or how to go about doing it. Yet we remained for nearly 20 more bloody years.

Why do we keep doing this? How can we stop?….

Most Americans don’t seem to care about any of this until, after a series of escalations, the national pain crosses some hard to define threshold and the American people want out. The policy makers usually do not want out. Their reasons range from genuine belief in the war’s objectives to self-serving fear of being blamed for failure and the ensuing damage to their political or bureaucratic careers….

Unleashing the awesome and massive power of the American military should only be done to defend against threats to our democracy and the values and hard-won rights of its citizens. Since World War Two, we have repeatedly used this power unwisely, resulting in a humiliating cycle of wasted lives and money….

In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq we sacrificed our young and spent massive amounts of money fighting to build nations that look and think like we do, a goal that most Americans don’t really care about, especially when they don’t face getting drafted. In those wars there was no direct threat to Americans that our fundamental values would be taken from us. The reason we lose these wars is that our opponents are fighting for something they care about very much indeed.”

Who among our own people truly cares about the objectives of the Empire and U.S. militarism? I think again about those two kinds of security. Where I live in Tucson, Arizona, I am only three blocks from the Casa Maria soup kitchen I used to be part of back in the 1980s. It is still operating, every day passing out hundreds of free lunches, providing a few showers, a place for the poor and the homeless to just sit and relax and not be harassed.

The neighborhood I live in is a poor and mostly Latino neighborhood. When I walk down the alley next to my house, I see the trash, the human excrement, the discarded blankets and clothes, the discarded syringes of those who can only imagine relief in this cruel world at the end of a needle. If it is early enough in the morning or late enough in the evening,

I will see the homeless huddled in storefront doorways, under trees, on benches, sleeping on the hard concrete and ground, even in the coldest or the hottest parts of our desert weather.

Meanwhile, military aircraft from the nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base fly overhead, perhaps on test runs to drop Tomahawk missiles made by our city’s top employer, defense contractor Raytheon. These planes, these missiles, cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions, billions of dollars.

What is the U.S. security model? The U.S. security model is inequality—inequality at the point of a sword. At the end of the day, the homeless man sleeping in the winter cold a few blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C., and the homeless youth sifting through garbage a few blocks from the Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá, both represent the putrid fruits of the same Empire. Wherever we live, within the U.S. or outside it, our struggle must be one as we reach across borders and boundaries to dismantle the Empire and achieve liberation. Therein lies our security.

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This is the English version of an article solicited by the magazine Revistat from Catalunya.

James Patrick Jordan is National Co-Coordinator for the Alliance for Global Justice and is responsible for its Colombia, labor, and ecological solidarity programs. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and is a student and occasional presenter at Salt of the Earth Labor College. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from playboy.com

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Recently, the Russian government has demanded that European countries pay for their natural gas imports from Russia in rubles, rather than in dollars or euros. The action aims to prioritize Russian monetary interests at a time of conflict and polarization between Russia and the West, as can be deduced from the words of the Russian president himself, who made it clear that the target states of the measure were “unfriendly” countries.

Ukraine’s Nuclear Weapons Program Can No Longer be Denied

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 31, 2022

Ukraine has engaged in nuclear and missile programs for nearly three decades as part of their quest to have their own nuclear weapons. The revelation by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on February 19 about the possibility of achieving a nuclear status, just five days before Moscow launched its “special military operation”, was certainly not accidental.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel Was Part of CIA-linked Lobby Group with Husband of Assange Judge

By Matt Kennard, March 31, 2022

Home Secretary Priti Patel, who will soon decide whether to extradite Julian Assange to the US, has been a political adviser to – and been funded by – a right-wing lobby group which has attacked Assange in the British media for a decade.

Bruce Willis Developed Aphasia After Being Vaccinated: “Aphasia is a Language Disorder caused by Damage in a Specific Area of the Brain.”

By Steve Kirsch, March 31, 2022

I wanted to make sure everyone knows aphasia is one of the thousands of symptoms whose reporting rates were elevated after the COVID vaccines rolled out. It’s #1574 on that sorted list of symptoms elevated by the COVID vaccine that we calculated back in November 2021.

Who are the War Criminals? Ukrainian Soldiers Torturing Russian Prisoners of War

By Peter Koenig, March 31, 2022

American-initiated wars and conflicts have in the last 60 years killed between 20 and 30 million people. One wonders, who are the war criminals? Where do most war criminals abound as Presidents? The short answer is: In the freedom-loving United States of America. And they are literally all getting away with murder.

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the US dollar dominance as the global trading currency could be threatened by the sweeping sanctions taken against Russia from the late February ‘military operations’ undertaken in Ukraine.  The IMF is worried that using currencies as a weapon will fragment the world economy while making it less efficient.

There are now countries rushing to find ways of transacting and storing money that circumvent the US currencies and financial markets, as well as those of their allies.  Some countries are renegotiating the currency in which they get paid for trade.

Western countries, in unison with the US, EU and NATO, have imposed huge sanctions on Russia, including restrictions on its central bank, which could trigger the emergence of small currency blocs based on trade between separate groups of countries.

Russia has sought to reduce its dependence on the dollar after the US imposed sanctions in retaliation to its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

As of the end of January 2022, Russia held foreign currency reserves worth $469bn, which represented roughly a fifth of its foreign reserves in dollar-denominated assets just prior to the ‘military operations’ in Ukraine, with a notable chunk held overseas in Germany, France, the UK and Japan, who have now banded together to isolate Moscow from the global financial system, and have frozen more than half of Russia’s reserves.

Gita Gopinath, the IMF’s first deputy managing director, said the sanctions against Russia do not foreshadow the demise of the dollar as the reserve currency and that the conflict in Ukraine will slow global economic growth but will not cause a global recession.

Financial sanctions imposed on Russia threaten to weaken the dominance of the US dollar and could result in a more fragmented international monetary system, said Gopinath to The Financial Times. The conflict will also spur the adoption of digital finance, from cryptocurrencies to stablecoins and central bank digital currencies, she added.

Gopinath said the greater use of other currencies in global trade would lead to further diversification of the reserve assets held by national central banks and added,

“Countries tend to accumulate reserves in the currencies with which they trade with the rest of the world, and in which they borrow from the rest of the world, so you might see some slow-moving trends towards other currencies playing a bigger role [in reserve assets].”

Two monetary systems might emerge, with one western and the other Chinese, and may operate in divergent ways which overlap.

The Great Economic Rivalry, by Graham Allison and associates at Harvard, have concluded that China is strong peer competitor of the US, and its currency could become global money, given the size and sophistication of its economy.

China hopes its currency, the yuan, also known as renminbi, will replace the US dollar as the global currency.  The majority of international investors believe this will be inevitable, but none can say when.

When this happens Chinese exporters would have lower borrowing costs, more economic clout in relation to the United States, and would support President Jinping’s economic reforms.

On December 1, 2015, the IMF announced that it awarded the yuan status as a reserve currency, and added the yuan to its Special Drawing Rights basket on October 1, 2016. This basket currently includes the Euro, Japanese yen, British pound, and US dollar. By August 2015, the yuan became the fourth most-used currency in the world, as it surpassed the Japanese yen, Canadian loonie, and the Australian dollar.

Chinese exports are relatively more competitive against dollar prices around the world. Thanks to low-cost exports to the US, China’s economic growth soared.

Global reserves account for about 2% and the use of the yuan around the world is rising, while the decline in the dollar’s share can be accounted for by greater use of the Chinese renminbi.

Beijing was in the process of internationalizing the yuan before the Ukraine crisis and is already ahead of other nations in adopting a central bank digital currency.

The level of trade is not the only reason the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The strength of the American economy instills trust, but most importantly is the transparency of US financial markets and the stability of its monetary policy.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is Chair of the Working Group on US RMB Trading and Clearing group, with a goal to create a yuan trading center in the United States. The group includes former US Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner.  The center would lower costs for American companies trading with China.

The dominance of the US dollar is a product of the US economic size and open financial markets. However, high inflation is a greater threat to the stability in the dollar. The US dollar became the official reserve currency of the world in 1944 in the Bretton Woods Agreement.

The US dollar is not backed by gold or any other precious metal, and is a fiat (government-made) currency, since 1971.

59 per cent of global foreign currency reserves were denominated in dollars, another 20 per cent in euros, 6 per cent in yen and 5 per cent in sterling, as of the third quarter of 2021.

Gopinath noted that the dollar’s share of international reserves had fallen from 70 per cent to 60 per cent over the past two decades, with the emergence of other trading currencies, led by the Australian dollar.

If the US currency were to collapse, hyperinflation would lock the economy into a “wage-price spiral,” in which higher prices would force employers to pay higher wages, which they would pass on to customers as higher price, while Washington would print out currency to meet demand, making inflation even worse.

The dollar slid to more than a one-week low in late January 2022 as data showed a drop in US private sector employment due to the increase in COVID-19 infections.

US President Biden refuses to acknowledge Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as the de-facto leader of Saudi Arabia.  Biden only deals with King Salman, and has said he will not recognize MBS as the next King after Salman, and has labeled MBS a killer.

Biden wanted MBS to pump more oil to bring the price down after the Russia sanctions on gas and oil.  MBS would not take the White House calls, neither did the United Arab Emirates.  MBS will sell oil to China in yuan, as Saudi Arabia makes a historic pivot towards China, and away from the US, who has disappointed Saudi Arabia for not defending the oil facilities after repeated attacks by Yemeni rebels. Former President Trump insulted Saudi Arabia and the King personally. Saudi Arabia had previously depended on the US as a security defender, but now realizes that the oil rich kingdom can no longer depend on the US for respect, or security.

The US and China may one day sit in negotiations concerning the new world trade currency.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

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***

Last week, prosecutors and defense counsel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, completed three weeks of plea negotiations. At the end of the three weeks, the military judge presiding over the trials of the five plotters of the attacks on 9/11 signed an order reflecting that progress had been made and anticipating a continuation of the negotiations in May.

Among the defendants is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the admitted and acknowledged mastermind of the attacks.

All five have been defendants in the same capital murder prosecution for 10 years. None has had a jury trial. What were the lawyers negotiating?

Here is the backstory.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush opened a military prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house persons arrested for 9/11-related attacks and other acts in what he called the war on terror.

Bush believed that since Cuba is outside the United States, the Constitution would not restrain the government there, federal laws would not apply there and federal judges could not interfere with the government’s behavior there.

Bush’s CIA began a program of systematic torture of detainees by CIA and foreign intelligence personnel at so-called black sites in foreign countries. Much of the torture was inflicted on people who knew nothing of value to the CIA. The victims of CIA torture, whether they had information of value or not and whether they revealed what they had or not, were transferred to Gitmo.

Bush’s extraconstitutional behavior embraced the false belief — soon corrected by the U.S. Supreme Court — that it could confine detainees without charges for the remainder of their lives.

While the foreign torture was being conducted by the CIA on some detainees and others were being housed at Gitmo, the U.S. military tried its hand at torturing some of the prisoners it was supposed to be protecting.

When FBI agents arrived at Gitmo to interrogate detainees and informed them of their right to counsel, the torture stopped; it is a federal crime. The prisoners secured lawyers who filed complaints with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., which was assigned to hear these cases.

The complaints revealed horrific torture, and they were met with the government’s horrific and tortured interpretations of the Constitution. In six cases that eventually found their way to the Supreme Court, the detainees argued that their constitutionally protected rights to due process had been violated.

The Bush administration argued that the judicial branch had no jurisdiction over the government’s behavior at Gitmo, because Gitmo is outside the U.S. It also argued that, even if federal courts did have jurisdiction over the government at Gitmo, the detainees had no valid claims to present to the courts because the Constitution only protects Americans.

Congress jumped into this fray by suspending the right to habeas corpus for those at Gitmo. The right to habeas corpus is an ancient personal right in which the prisoner may compel his jailer to bring the prisoner to a neutral judge and legally justify the prisoner’s confinement. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus only when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.

The Bush administration lost five of six Gitmo cases in the Supreme Court. The case it won involved the location at which a detainee who is an American citizen was to be tried.

The jurisprudence of the remaining five cases held that wherever the government goes and confines people against their will, the Constitution goes with it, since all who exercise government power have taken an oath to do so consistent with the Constitution. Moreover, since there was no invasion or rebellion at Gitmo, the suspension of habeas corpus was nullified.

The court held that since the two operative amendments to the Constitution — the Fourth and the Fifth — protect all “people” and every “person” from the government, their protections are not limited to Americans only.

All this litigation eventually forced the government to commence the process for military jury trials with the full panoply of constitutional protections. Gitmo was established by Bush’s executive order on Jan. 11, 2002. In 20 years, there have been no jury trials of any 9/11 defendants.

Now, back to the current negotiations. They were initiated by the government because the Departments of Defense and Justice — after continual changes of judicial and prosecutorial personnel — now no longer want to try anyone, particularly those defendants who have been tortured.

That’s so because numerous military judges at Gitmo have consistently ruled that defendants may subpoena records of their torture and inform juries of it.

Those of us who believe that the Constitution means what it says argued that 9/11 was a series of federal crimes and the defendants should have been accorded constitutional protection from Bush’s torturers and tried in federal courts where their alleged crimes occurred — in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Had the feds done that, these cases would have been completed, and the defendants either convicted or acquitted, and the government would not be spending $100 million a year on Gitmo. But Bush’s disdain for constitutional norms has wrecked the rule of law in these cases and made it nearly impossible to try any of them — thus, the plea negotiations that are now under way.

The lawyers are negotiating dropping the death penalty and protecting the defendants’ religious liberties, medical treatment and creature comforts in prison, in return for guilty pleas.

The fanaticism of George W. Bush — under whose incompetent watch the attacks of 9/11 occurred and who killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to produce regime change because Saddam Hussein “tried to kill my daddy” — continues to haunt and demean the American judicial system.

Because Bush irreparably assaulted the Constitution he swore to uphold, the government is afraid to try the men who killed 3,000 Americans.

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***

Much is talked today about the fuel and energy crises that the current conflict in Ukraine can worsen. Not so much is talked, though, about how food insecurity can become a major crisis – especially in the Middle East and Africa, but actually everywhere. Global food chains are expected to be affected, thus further exacerbating already-rising food prices, as Lama Fakih (an executive Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch) warns.

Both Ukraine and Russia happen to be leading exporters of agricultural products to North African and Middle Eastern nations. These countries are heavily dependent on grains from Kiev, for example, and the price of bread and other basic food items has been escalating. Most of these countries already face internal conflicts and have populations struggling with food insecurity.

For example, approximately 80% of the wheat Lebanon imported in 2020 came from Ukraine. Egypt, in its turn, remains the world’s largest wheat importer, which places this North African country in a very delicate position: about 50 percent of its imports come from the Russian Federation, while another 30 percent come from Ukraine. Libya imports 40% of its wheat from Kiev, and Yemen imports around one third of its wheat from Ukraine, while 8% comes from Russia.

In fact, the potential damage is global. 45% of Ukrainian exports are agricultural-related. It is a leading exporter of poultry, wheat, barley, and corn, and much of its wheat comes precisely from the Eastern Ukrainian areas where most of the heavy conflict is going on.

In fact, the Black Sea area – affected by the current military operations – exports over 12 percent of the food traded globally. Moreover, Ukraine possesses about one-third of the planet’s most fertile soil, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). However, on March 9, Kiev banned exports of grains and many other food items in order to prevent a domestic crisis in times of war, thus disrupting supply chains. This is quite alarming because the planting season is to start this April.

The Russian Federation itself is the largest wheat supplier worldwide and one of the main producers of fertilizers. The problem is that it could halt fertilizer exports as a response to the heavy economic sanctions imposed on the country.

In Latin America, for example, Brazil imports 95% of its nitrogen fertilizers, Moscow being its leading supplier (21% of the amount imported by Brazil comes from there). Brazilian harvests have been much damaged by droughts since 2020. In any case, the increase in fuel prices in itself affects food transport costs, thereby affecting agricultural productivity worldwide.

There is a global energy shortage crisis today, which was caused by the supply-demand imbalance after the pandemic and was made worse by the global supply chain crisis, among other factors. Due to a number of climatic and natural reasons, Brazil, India and China have been facing energy problems. The crisis is severe in the Middle East and beyond. Lebanon too has been struggling with fuel shortages, and so has Syria, and Turkey.

There are fuel wars going on in the Levant, a situation that has been made worse by US sanctions – the  US Caesar Act, in this case. Iran has been shipping fuel to countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Venezuela, as part of its oil diplomacy, and there have been attacks on vessels (Damascus accuses Israel of being behind them). Western Europe, in its turn, had already been facing its own energy crisis which was aggravated by the pandemic, and by the delays in the completion of the now-halted Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

With on-going migration and energy crises, adding food insecurity to this scenario can lead to a catastrophic situation. One could say that by fueling the Ukrainian-Russian conflict and by sanctioning Moscow, the West is in fact punishing itself, but the truth goes beyond that: it is punishing the entire world.

Solving the current impasse depends on leaders opening channels of communication and dialogue with Moscow.

Unfortunately, the Western Establishment today does not seem to have political leaders up to this task. Rather than seeking dialogue with the Kremlin, they have been trying to turn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a kind of a Western showman and mouthpiece of North Atlantic Alliance interests.

He was in talks with the the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make an Oscar appearance – which did not happen – and has been addressing the parliament of a number of NATO countries to make his points (by videoconference). Joe Biden’s visit to Poland also only added fuel to the fire. To sum it up, the West is irresponsible in further fomenting tensions by sending more troops to Eastern Europe and failing to pursue good diplomacy. A cease-fire must be negotiated. But then Ukraine and the West must make concessions. Or else there will be hunger worldwide.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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***

Joe Biden wants to tax unrealized capital gains, and some neoliberal economists think it is a good idea.

Let’s take a look and see what we think.

A capital gain is an increase in the price of something since you purchased it.  It could be a stock, a bond, a house, artwork, gold, silver, anything for which there is a market.  An unrealized capital gain is a paper gain based on the day’s price. It is not income and it is not wealth until it is realized.  You realize it by selling the item, thereby having the money in your possession.  An unrealized capital gain is a potential possession.

So what does it mean to tax income you have not received? 

Suppose you purchase stock at the beginning of the year and it rises in value by year end. That rise is an unrealized capital gain.  You pay the tax on the unrealized gain, and then in the new year the stock market falls, wiping out the taxed gain. 

The tax you paid eats into your original investment.  You have experienced a wealth confiscation.

Most economists understand that there is no such thing as a capital gain on stocks or homes.

If you sell your stock or home, the replacement cost is the sale proceeds.  If the stock or home has increased in price since you purchased it, you have to pay a tax on the sale proceeds. (You get an exemption on your home gain up to a certain amount.)  Consequently, you cannot replace the stock or home with your sales proceeds net of tax.  So what did you gain?  You lost.

What would happen, for example, to the stock market if unrealized gains are taxed? There would be increased volatility.  People would tend to realize their gains as they occurred so as to avoid taxed gains being wiped out by a market correction.

It is also likely that net new investment would decline.  Capital gains are a measure of rising profitability. The capital gain satisfies the investor in the company, leaving him content with a low dividend, thus freeing most of the earnings for debt-free investment. 

If unrealized capital gains are taxed, the person has to find the money elsewhere to pay the tax, as he hasn’t realized the taxed gain. He has to sell some other asset, cut back his living standard, or borrow the money to pay the tax.  The cost and inconvenience of this would lead to pressure on companies to pay out more or all of their earnings in dividends in order for investors to avoid paying taxes on gains that might turn out not to be there.  This would reduce the funds the company has in retained earnings for investment, and force the company to borrow, that is, to indebt itself to maintain the same level of investment.

Consider also the effect of taxing unrealized capital gains on quarterly estimated tax payments. The taxpayer doesn’t know if a stock market boom is going to push up equity prices and leave him with a large unrealized gain at the end of the year or experience a correction, so how does he estimate the required quarterly payments for non-W-2 income?

Suppose the taxation of unrealized capital gains applies to your home.  In a rising housing market, where do you get the money to pay the tax on the rise in your home value?  Do you borrow it, sell your car, cut back your living standard?  Do you do this year after year in rising housing markets?  

The same question arises for an art dealer or collector.  

As you can see, taxing unrealized capital gains is a nonsensical idea.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

 

Joe Biden is well known for gaffes. He admits that he is a “gaffe machine”. He has a 47-year history of making confusing, embarrassing and misleading public statements, bigoted comments and angry outbursts. His gaffes have generally been shrugged off by his entourage, colleages and world leaders but revealed by journalists. Since he became US president Biden’s gaffes have, however, become risky and downright dangerous.

World leaders who came to distrust the US under a capricious and disruptive Donald Trump are feeling dubious about Biden’s gaffes which have sustained mistrust of Washington although he had pledged to stabilise the US political scene and foreign policy. Concerns over his behaviour have increased after he appointed himself commander of the NATO campaign against Russia.

In 2011, as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden forged an awkward relationship with the Russian leader. During a charged meeting in the Kremlin while standing next to Vladimir Putin, Biden told journalists he said, “I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.” According to Biden, “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, “‘We understand one another.'”

Despite Putin’s chilling response, the remark, coming from a man claiming to be a devout but tolerant Catholic, amounted to a major insult. Russians are steeped in their country’s millennial history and Orthodox Christianity. “Soul” is deeply embedded in the Russian psyche and persona.

This cold assessment of Putin more than a decade ago could very well have driven Biden’s strident advocacy of Ukraine after Russia deployed troops around that country in January and invaded on February 24. Biden took the lead and dragged a reluctant Europe into an all-out campaign against Putin and Russia without pausing to think about how the war could be brought to an end. When Biden has called Putin a “thug”, “a butcher” and a “murderous dictator”, the Kremlin responded by saying the US president was suffering from irritability and fatigue and should not be uttering personal insults.

During last week’s trip to Europe, Biden committed four serious gaffs. When asked what the US would do if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine, he said this “would depend on the nature of the use” but then added the US would respond “in kind”.  While visiting the US 22nd airborne, he told troops that they would witness Ukrainians resisting Russia “when you’re there”, suggesting that they would be deployed in Ukraine. He had previously vowed not to intervene and start World War III.

Biden went beyond insults when he breached US protocols by saying war crimes were being committed by Russia in Ukraine and called Putin a “war criminal” as this has legal implications. In addition to applying this term to the Russian president, the Biden administration has established its own mechanism for gathering evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Until Biden’s statement, the administration had avoided accusing Russia of war crimes.

Last Saturday, Biden escalated his rhetoric by saying Putin “cannot remain in power”, effectively calling for regime change in Russia. Although the White House promptly att empted to get round this existential gaff, no one has been convinced by its efforts. The Kremlin responded by saying, “That’s not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians.”

French President Emmanuel Macron reacted by saying,

“We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without escalation, that is the objective… If this is what we want to do, we should not escalate things, neither with words nor actions.”

Forty-eight hours after his dangerous gaffe, Biden said the US does not have a policy of regime change in Russia but refused to a apologise and said he was expressing personal “moral outrage” at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As US president he must keep personal opinions out of the public sphere and stick to describing policy.

Since Biden’s gaffes generally spring from his lips when he is offscript, his handlers need to ensure that he does not have a chance to go off-script by turning off the microphone as soon as he stops reading the approved text on a teleprompter and limiting appearances where he can speak independently. Biden’s gaffes could, indeed, cause World War III.

By insulting Putin and calling for his removal from power, Biden has made it all the more difficult for the US and Europe to find a way to end the Ukraine war.

Biden’s verbal stumbles have prompted Greek legislator Yanis Varoufakis to warn,

“The West Is ‘Playing with Fire’ If It Pushes Regime Change In Nuclear-Armed Russia”,

“Whenever the United States tried regime change, it didn’t turn out very well and has never been tried with a nuclear power”. (quoted in Democracy Now)

He said while the West is unified and has the backing of many countries, India, China and and many other countries, with half of the world’s population, do not agree with the campaign against Russia.

Varoufakis referred to the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who

“once said that if you are faced with a formidable enemy… what you should do… is to build a golden bridge behind your enemy from which your enemy can escape, to give him an opportunity to withdraw while claiming that he has achieved something”.

But, by calling Putin a war criminal, Biden

“is not leaving any room for a compromise, then he is effectively jeopardising the interests of Ukrainians.. a quagmire in the Ukraine is not exactly in the interests of any Ukrainian I know of”.

Instead of arming Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia, Varoufakis said the world should discuss

“Biden’s proposals for a resolution [of the conflict] that would mean an immediate ceasefire and an immediate withdrawal from the Ukraine in an exchange for some kind of deal that Putin can sell to his own henchmen as something of a victory. Instead of that, Biden is doubling down, and he’s speaking in a language which is consistent with regime change, which will be catastrophic for the people of Ukraine.”

In Varoufakis’ view, a deal would render Ukraine neutral, provide arrangements for the Russian-controlled Donbas area, and postpone discussion of the status of Russian-annexed Crimea. Such a deal would dissatisfy all partners but end the threat of nuclear war.

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***

Erster Weltkrieg, Zweiter Weltkrieg, Dutzende weitere Kriege – immer wieder Mord und Totschlag. Mütter schickten ihre Söhne auf das „Feld der Ehre“ und trugen anschließend eine schwarze Armbinde – „in stolzer Trauer“. Die Jugend starb, bevor sie zu leben beginnen konnte. Andere Völker zu bezwingen und zu beherrschen ist ein gutes Geschäft. Doch die Soldaten auf beiden Seiten erschlagen sich für nichts und wieder nichts.

Erich Maria Remarque schrieb im Vorwort seines 1957 in West-Berlin erschienenen Klassiker „Im Westen nichts Neues“:

„Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis sein. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Kriege zerstört wurde – auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam.“

Nie zuvor hat man in allen Staaten so viel Geld für die Rüstung ausgegeben, so viele tödliche Waffen geschmiedet wie heute. Aber für andere Zwecke – für Schulen, für den Unterricht, für kulturelle Dinge – haben wir kein Geld.

Wir führen Krieg – und sind nicht gegen ihn!

Viele Universitätslehrer, Professoren, haben in der Vergangenheit Stellung bezogen gegen den Krieg – und tun das auch heute. Doch wer von den großen Persönlichkeiten, den Philosophen oder Psychologen tritt auf und sagt der Jugend, sie soll einen Krieg nie mitmachen und keinem Staatsführer folgen, der einen Krieg beginnt.

Keine Mutter, kein Vater, kein Professor empfiehlt der Jugend, dass sie nicht in den Krieg ziehen soll, ruft sie dazu auf: „Geht nicht!“

Aus diesem Grund zog die Jugend in den Krieg – und zieht weiter in den Krieg:

Und wieder stirbt die Jugend, bevor sie zu leben beginnen kann.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Schwerpunkte: Klinische-, Pädagogische- und Medien-Psychologie). Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

World War I, World War II, dozens of other wars – murder and manslaughter again and again. Mothers sent their sons to the “field of honour” and wore a black armband afterwards – “in proud mourning”. Youth died before they could begin to live. Conquering and dominating other peoples is a good business. But the soldiers on both sides slay each other for nothing.

Erich Maria Remarque wrote in the preface of his classic novel “Nothing New in the West”, published in West Berlin in 1957:

“This book is not meant to be an indictment or a confession. It is only to attempt to report on a generation destroyed by war – even if it escaped its shells.”

Never before has so much money been spent on armaments, so many deadly weapons forged, in all the states as today. But for other purposes – for schools, for teaching, for cultural things – we have no money.

We are at war – and we are not against it!

Many university teachers and professors have taken a stand against war in the past – and continue to do so today. But who among the great personalities, the philosophers or psychologists stands up and tells the youth never to take part in a war and never to follow a state leader who starts a war?

No mother, no father, no professor recommends to the youth that they should not go to war, calls them to “Don’t go!”

For this reason, the youth went to war – and continues to go to war:

And again the youth dies before it can begin to live.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), a doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and a graduate psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from EuroYankee

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***

Recently, the Russian government has demanded that European countries pay for their natural gas imports from Russia in rubles, rather than in dollars or euros. The action aims to prioritize Russian monetary interests at a time of conflict and polarization between Russia and the West, as can be deduced from the words of the Russian president himself, who made it clear that the target states of the measure were “unfriendly” countries.

According to reports, Putin claimed that Western currencies are “compromised”, which is why it would be necessary to change the payment method to the Russian ruble. “Compromised” would be all currencies active in western countries considered hostile by the Russian government, which includes the US, UK and the entire European Union. In this sense, by preventing the use of Western currencies in transactions, Moscow would be guaranteeing its national interests, encouraging the growth of the search for ruble in the financial market.

As known, the Russian currency has been suffering a major drop since the beginning of the Special Operation in Ukraine, mainly due to the sanctions that have been imposed on Moscow. After the military operation’s beginning, the dollar grew by more than 104% compared to the ruble. Now, however, due to the Russian new payment policy, the trend is for there to be a significant increase in international demand for rubles, which favors Russian monetary and financial security.

Undoubtedly, there is no reason to be scandalized by this Russian measure. The Russian sanction against Western currencies is a moderate and peaceful one in the face of the attitudes that the West has been taking against Moscow in recent weeks, which include heavy sanctions such as banning the export of various consumer goods, exclusion flights in the airspace of NATO countries and various coercive maneuvers in the financial and monetary spheres (among which the most impacting one was the banning of the SWIFT system in Russia). So, considering all this, it is possible to conclude that, despite the apparent “shock” shown by Western media channels, the Russian attitude seems reasonable and prudent, seeking only to guarantee some Russian interests in the financial market.

Moscow has shown itself to be flexible on several points, tolerating that some transactions are not immediately transferred to the ruble system, giving a necessary time limit for the consolidation of the changes. However, the clear fact is that at some point European countries will need to present complete trade proposals in Russian currency if they want to continue to import gas.

In fact, adhering to the American measures, all the members of the European Union accepted to adopt the sanctions against Russia, which, despite pro-NATO propaganda, was really a big strategic mistake. If European nations had remained neutral about Ukraine, the Euro would not have been described as a “compromised currency” and countries using it would not be considered hostile. The sanctions, indeed, built the current polarized scenario in Europe and now the consequences are being seen clearly.

Many Union’s officials keep talking about a “contingency plan” to “reduce European dependence on Russian gas”, but this is a project with little chance of success. Russian gas is the fastest, cheapest, safest, and most ecologically correct option to supply the European market and no “contingency plan” will be drawn up suddenly to put an end to it without leaving serious consequences for the European supply. Now, the European public opinion is close to realizing that the EU’s governments have put the entire continent in a situation of not serving the interests of any European country, only the plans of NATO.

Still, in addition to the reaction to Western sanctions, it is also necessary to mention the geostrategic value of Putin’s maneuver. In the end, for its part, Russia just wants to ensure its insertion in the growing process of monetary multipolarization, where more and more countries accept to trade internationally using their local currencies. As an energy power, Moscow has the potential to strengthen the ruble and will not miss this opportunity.

Even if a contingency plan is devised to make Europe “less dependent on Russian gas”, this is not a matter for the current moment and Europe still needs gas for now while strategists think about such plans. So, accelerating the formation of a ruble payment plan for Euro-Russian transactions is a project of immediate urgency and could represent a major step towards normalization of Russia-EU relations.

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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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***

Ukraine has engaged in nuclear and missile programs for nearly three decades as part of their quest to have their own nuclear weapons. The revelation by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on February 19 about the possibility of achieving a nuclear status, just five days before Moscow launched its “special military operation”, was certainly not accidental.

Despite joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear state in 1994, Ukraine immediately began Research and Development (R&D) to form the technological basis for the possible creation of its own nuclear weapons. However, the biggest push for nuclear weapons was following the 2014 Maidan coup and the accession of Petro Poroshenko to the presidency.

According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency, Ukraine’s R&D on the creation of a nuclear explosive device (NED), which could later be used in the design of nuclear warheads, was carried out in both uranium and plutonium directions. Given Ukraine’s important role in R&D during the Soviet era, the country’s scientific community has the capabilities and industry potential to achieve this goal. In addition, in order to accelerate R&D, plutonium of the required quality was obtained by Ukraine from abroad.

The key role in the creation of NEDs was assigned to the National Scientific Center “Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology”. The experimental base available there makes it possible to research nuclear materials, including spent reactor fuel assemblies, which can be used to produce weapon-grade plutonium. The Institute for Nuclear Research and the Institute of Organic Chemistry in Kiev provided assistance to the Center in the development of methods for the separation of isotopes of nuclear materials.

The Institute for Nuclear Safety Problems in Chernobyl, as well as the State Scientific and Technical Center for Nuclear and Radiation Safety in Kiev, also participated in this work. It is worth noting the use of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as a site for the development of nuclear weapons. It was there, judging by the available information, that work was underway on the separation of plutonium and to manufacture a “dirty” bomb. The increased radiation in Chernobyl following the infamous 1986 disaster concealed Ukraine’s research and work.

The employees of the Odessa National Polytechnic University have significant experience in mathematically modeling the kinetics of thermonuclear reactions, as do the specialized departments of the Kiev National University, named after I.I. Taras Shevchenko. In addition, the Institute of Physics and Technology of Materials and Alloys of the National Academy of Sciences specializes in hydrodynamics computer modeling. Particular attention was paid to the creation of special alloys, which was carried out at the Institute of Electric Welding. E. O. Paton and the Institute of Metal Physics. G. V. Kurdyumova.

In recent years, Ukraine has stepped up exploration of existing uranium mines, as well as the development of promising uranium deposits in the Mykolaiv, Dnepropetrovsk and Kirovograd regions. At the same time, foreign companies were contracted to assist Ukraine in setting up its own uranium enrichment. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the hydrometallurgical plant in Zhovti Vody is already processing uranium oxide concentrate from ore mined in Ukraine, which can be used in the process of uranium enrichment in gas centrifuges without additional processing and purification.

At the same time, work was underway in Ukraine to modernize existing weapons and create new missile that can be used for nuclear weapons. It is recalled that in December 2013, a cooperation agreement was reached with Turkey in the rocket sphere, specifically with Ukrainian rocket and space companies Yuzhmashzavod and Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, which were previously involved in the manufacture of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missile arsenal. The main goal of this cooperation is to establish a mobile complex equipped with a solid-propellant ballistic missile with a range of up to 1,500 km.

Yuzhmashzavod is also developing the Grom-2 (Thunder-2) mobile ground-based missile system. The export version of it can fire up to 500 km. Since 2017, the Alibey missile range has been operated in the Odessa region to conduct rocket technology flight tests.

Having implemented nuclear and missile programs for decades, Ukraine has been establishing the necessary conditions to manufacture its own nuclear weapons. In particular, significant achievements have been made in modeling nuclear chain reactions and isotope separation of fissile materials. Kiev was close to creating a nuclear explosive device based on plutonium by obtaining it from stored spent nuclear fuel. Effectively, Ukrainian specialists could produce such a device within a relatively short time, perhaps only months.

It also appears that when Russian Special Military Operation began, the Ukrainian leadership destroyed or relocated all valuable documentation stored in scientific centers in Kiev and Kharkiv to the National University “Lviv Polytechnic”. This was done, among other things, to deny accusations about the presence of a weaponized component of Ukraine’s so-called peaceful nuclear program.

In this way, although the West scoffs at the idea of Russia’s mission to de-militarize Ukraine, evidence of the country’s nuclear weapons program will be further exposed as more details, documents and facilities come under Russian control. With Kiev seemingly willing to negotiate on its neutrality status, along with Russia’s dismantling of the country’s nuclear weapons program, it will ensure that Ukraine in the post-war period will not be a NATO spearhead aimed against Moscow, thus stabilizing a situation that has been extremely volatile and violent since 2014.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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***

The German government has triggered the first stage of an emergency plan for natural gas supplies and urged consumers to save energy in the face of growing concerns that sanctions-hit Russia could stop deliveries unless it is paid in roubles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last week his country would only accept payments in roubles for natural gas deliveries to “unfriendly countries” – those that have imposed sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including all European Union members.

The announcement was seen as an effort to shore up the rouble, which has collapsed against other currencies since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 and Western countries responded with debilitating sanctions against Moscow.

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of gas in terms of volume, accounting for nearly half of the EU’s imports in 2021. For Germany, Europe’s largest economy, that figure stood at 55 percent last year. And although Germany’s gas imports from Russia dropped to 40 percent in the first quarter of 2022, economy minister Robert Habeck has said his country will not achieve full independence from Russian supplies before mid-2024.

Click here to read the full article.

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Featured image is from Libertarian Car Talk

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***

On March 29, the Government of Canada released its new emissions reduction plan. The document is filled with spending promises and ambitious targets, but it’s important to step back and ask whether anything about the plan is achievable.

The report outlines how Canada will, “reduce emissions across the entire economy to reach our emissions reduction target of 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and put us on a path to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.” While this aspirational goal is commendable, it is divorced from the reality that, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada, we have not yet even begun to lower our total national emissions. As stated in a report published in 2021, “Canada’s total GHG emissions in 2019 were 730 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2 eq), a slight increase from 728 Mt CO2 eq in 2018.”

Our emissions may even be higher than estimated, as new research shows that fugitive emissions from sources like natural gas may be orders of magnitude larger than currently accounted for. Similarly, the Climate Action Tracker (an independent scientific collaboration between Climate Analytics and the NewClimate Institute) states that, “We rate Canada’s policies and action as ‘Highly Insufficient’ when compared to modelled domestic pathways.”

So, where does the government believe these massive emissions cuts can be made?

The 2030 plan begins with a focus on homes and buildings, which together represent approximately 13 percent of Canada’s total emissions. However, updating model codes for buildings and supporting large-scale and expensive home retrofits in an already problematic era of skyrocketing property values will require vast amounts of resources in a world already strained by supply chain disruptions and intensifying geo-political instability.

A key cornerstone of the plan is related to the oil and gas sector and the spectrum of technologies known as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), with a complementary investment tax credit to incentivize their development and adoption. While CCUS has the potential to decrease or mitigate the carbon emissions from a variety of industrial processes from concrete production to oil extraction, experts are dubious about its potential to significantly lower Canada’s overall carbon footprint.

Prior to the release of the Trudeau government’s 2030 plan, over 400 Canadian climate scientists and other academics (myself included) signed a letter calling on the federal government to reject the introduction of tax credits for CCUS technologies on the grounds that, “Despite decades of research, CCUS is neither economically sound nor proven at scale, with a terrible track record and limited potential to deliver significant, cost-effective emissions reductions.”

Why are experts so skeptical about a purported overreliance on these technologies to purify Canada’s carbon stream? Several independent reports have found that existing CCUS innovations have failed to meet their targets according to numerous metrics, and none are on track to be met. In fact, one report found that carbon capture projects can even increase total emissions. For some, this may conjure memories of the failed American drive for ‘clean coal,’ which proved to be a billion dollar boondoggle, or other missteps in Australia and here in Canada—all backed by huge amounts of public investment.

The fact is that despite oil prices returning to strong levels and possible future reductions in costs, CCUS is not economically viable. Even if it were financially practicable, it would take precious resources away from other, proven technologies such as renewable energy. In other words, by the time we develop new CCUS to a scale where it would have any significant impact, it will likely be too late.

Regrettably, the Trudeau government has chosen to implement new subsidies to attempt to force the technology into wider adoption under the guise that “climate action must go hand in hand with keeping life affordable for Canadians and creating good jobs.” However, the question must be asked: who is paying for these subsidies? No new taxes on the oil and gas sector are identified as part of Canada’s new climate action plan. Instead the report implores the fossil fuel sector to do its part: “Canada’s oil and gas industry is currently generating record cash flow. If deployed strategically, these funds could enhance carbon competitiveness and enable the sector to do its fair share in contributing to the country’s climate goals.”

This is a toothless statement directed at an industry that, with few exceptions, has shown virtually no willingness to engage in real climate action.

Despite decades of boldfaced lies by oil and gas companies about their contributions to tackling global warming, the ‘polluter pays’ principle has yet to be forced upon the extractive sector—the same firms that have for decades reaped record profits despite abandoning their messes both in the form of orphaned wells and climate harms. It is clear, to cite the Parkland Institute’s Kevin Taft’s historic warning, that the conventional energy sector has fully captured and harnessed the institutions of democracy for its own use.

Nor is there any explanation of where funding for the billions of dollars for other programs will come from. At a time when the Liberal government is emerging from under a burden of historic stimulus spending in the wake of the COVID crisis, announcing negotiations to buy a fleet of F-35 fighter jets, and entering into a cooperation agreement with the NDP that will see the introduction of dental and pharmacare, one might question the scope of the government’s fiscal flexibility. This isn’t to say that more spending is unjustified—indeed, the cost of doing nothing will far outweigh the costs of climate action.

Of course, CCUS has real-world applications and is far from a useless technology (I have been too critical of its uses in the past), and it will likely have a sustained future in certain industries where emissions are more or less unavoidable, or as a stepping stone to carbon dioxide removal or direct air capture which can be used to gradually undo industrial emissions. The problem is that every moment we take from engaging in real action pushes us toward greater extremes, like increasingly severe natural disasters such as last year’s fire and flood cycle in British Columbia, or the possibility of deploying solar geoengineering.

And while the Trudeau government should be applauded for other initiatives such as supporting farmers and agri-producers and funding clean energy and energy efficiency projects led by Indigenous peoples, it is clear this larger climate plan is mostly one of not rocking the boat—and hoping things work out. Rather than investing wholeheartedly in a just and equitable transition (there is some funding earmarked for renewable energy), we are stuck placating the oil and gas sector with solutions that go nowhere near the material dismantling of fossil capital that is required to avert climate catastrophe.

Perhaps now is the time to take a step back and reassess. If the government is going to commit over $9 billion towards climate action, it needs to be targeted at programs that will quickly and effectively reduce emissions. Unfortunately, this means that our grandiose strategy of planting billions of trees is probably all for naught, as is hoping the oil and gas sector will do its part voluntarily. Ultimately, relying too heavily upon silver bullet technologies like CCUS to make a sizable difference is a fantasy that relies on other future, unproven innovations like nuclear fusion or even small modular reactors.

The steps we must take will be painful. They will cost jobs, and they will involve sacrificing some of the comforts we’ve become accustomed to. First and foremost, real climate action must start with the rapid phase out of oil and gas production in Canada. And despite the protestations of former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, such a transition is indeed possible.

As one of the world’s worst climate offenders, we have a responsibility to act, and earn a reputation for leadership which others may follow. Until real action is taken, any plan will be nothing more than thoughts and prayers.

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Burgess Langshaw Power is a former policy analyst currently completing his PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School, University of Waterloo. His policy expertise includes climate interventions and energy technologies. Views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his school or employer.

Featured image: Carbon capture, utilization and storage features heavily in the Trudeau government’s new climate plan, but critics question whether it represents another gift to to the oil and gas industry. Photo by Claudia Otte/Fotolia.

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***

An international aid group warned Wednesday that Afghanistan is on the brink of complete collapse as the Biden administration and European governments refuse to release the war-torn nation’s central bank reserves, depriving the economy of critical funds as millions face poverty and starvation.

In a statement ahead of an international donor conference for Afghanistan, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said the country “is now the world’s largest-ever humanitarian appeal, requiring a staggering US$4.47 billion in humanitarian aid—quadruple the needs at the start of 2021 and more than is required for either Syria or Yemen.”

Since the Taliban retook power last August following two decades of U.S.-led warfare, IRC noted, “the speed of Afghanistan’s economic collapse has been unprecedented.” Following the withdrawal of American troops, the Biden administration froze billions of dollars in Afghan central bank assets held in the U.S. despite warnings that the move would push the country closer to full-scale economic ruin.

Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order aiming to permanently seize Afghanistan’s assets and split them between the families of 9/11 victims and an ill-defined “trust fund” for Afghans. Blocked from accessing its own reserves, Kabul has struggled to afford even the import taxes on containers of badly needed food.

Moreover, the Biden administration has left in place crippling economic sanctions that could kill more civilians than 20 years of war, according to one analyst.

European governments and international institutions also took punitive steps following the Taliban’s return to power, suspending financing for projects in Afghanistan and leaving humanitarian groups on the ground without the resources needed to help the growing number of sick and malnourished Afghans.

“Afghans that could support themselves and their families six months ago are now entirely dependent on aid,” IRC said Wednesday. “With each week that goes by, more Afghans are forced to resort to the unimaginable to survive: since August, the number of Afghans resorting to negative coping capacities has risen sixfold, such as selling young daughters into marriage, pulling children out of school to work, selling organs, skipping meals, or taking on high levels of debt.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Afghans desperate for cash to feed their families are turning to “backbreaking work” in the notoriously dangerous mines of northern Afghanistan. Some toiling in the mines are as young as 10 years old, according to the newspaper.

UNICEF recently warned that more than a million Afghan children will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition this year and 13 million kids in total will need humanitarian assistance.

David Miliband, IRC’s president and CEO, said Wednesday that the actions of the international community have pushed Afghanistan toward “total collapse.”

“If the Afghan economy is not resuscitated, the severity of the current humanitarian crisis will only deepen, with dire consequences for life and limb of ordinary Afghans,” said Miliband. “Further economic distress will only mean greater displacement, greater insecurity, and greater misery.”

Miliband urged countries and humanitarian groups participating in Thursday’s donor conference to ramp up aid to Afghanistan, but stressed that such charity work “only addresses the symptoms rather than the drivers of a failing economy.”

“Afghanistan urgently requires a roadmap for international engagement to address the economic crisis, including benchmarks for the release of frozen Afghan assets to the central bank,” Miliband argued. “In the immediate term, this will require donors and financial institutions to help rebuild the capacity of the central bank to operate independently, adhere to international banking standards, and manage the Afghan economy.”

“The urgent work to stave off famine and preventable deaths in the coming weeks and months should not crowd out the important work to halt the trajectory of this crisis and stabilize the economy,” he continued. “Until these measures are taken, Afghan civilians will continue to pay for the transgressions of others with their own lives and suffering.”

Welthungerhilfe, a Germany-based humanitarian nonprofit, voiced similar fears on Tuesday, pointing out that 95% of the Afghan population “no longer has adequate nutrition”—a crisis exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has pushed up commodity prices and intensified supply chain disruptions.

“Afghanistan is in free fall,” said Thomas ten Boer, Welthungerhilfe’s director in Kabul. “The sanctions are crushing the economy and preventing money from entering the country. Agricultural production will continue to plummet because farmers cannot purchase seeds or fertilizer due to drastic price hikes.”

“We are risking the future of an entire generation that now lacks both adequate nutrition and a proper education,” he added.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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***

Last Thursday, the Acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban interim government Amir Khan Muttaqi made a stunning remark to greet the visiting Chinese Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kabul when he said, “This is the most important high-level delegation received by Afghanistan.” It spoke volumes about the quiet success of Beijing’s diplomacy to turn the tables in the Hindu Kush. 

The body language of the red carpet welcome extended to Wang Yi showed that China has emerged as the most influential external player in Afghanistan by a long shot in the period since the Taliban took power last August. Without doubt, the US’ preoccupations in the European theatre, which seem open-ended, can only work to China’s advantage.  

Therefore, there are expectations regarding the Third Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Neighbouring Countries of Afghanistan that China is hosting in Tunxi in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui on March 30-31. 

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, while announcing the two-day meeting beginning on Wednesday, put the event in its context saying that the Afghan situation “is now in a critical transition from chaos to order.” Indeed, he qualified this by adding that the country faces “multiple challenges from within and outside that need to be addressed with more support and help.” 

The Chinese spokesperson said the meeting hopes to “pool more consensus” from Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries and to discuss “ways to jointly stabilise the situation.” Thus, the neighbouring countries’ forum will engage the Afghan Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in a formal “Dialogue” format where he will interact with the participants of the event in Tunxi — foreign ministers of China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia — as regards the country’s “difficulties and needs.” 

Interestingly, the Chinese spokesman specifically confirmed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend the meeting in Tunxi “upon invitation.” This is important against the backdrop of the US-Russia confrontation and the West’s concerted attempts in the recent months to entice the Taliban regime into the western orbit through a mix of alluring offers and bullying. 

Neither Russia nor China wants Afghanistan to become a turf of the great game, but that said, they also cannot be passive towards the reinstallation of the NATO intelligence apparatus so close to their borders at the emergent regional security scenario.

It is improbable that tomorrow’s meeting will lead to the recognition of the Taliban government. However, beneath that threshold, an intensification of the regional states’ engagement with the Taliban regime can be expected. 

Wang Yi’s visit to Kabul coincided with the arrival of a high-level Russian delegation in the Afghan capital led by the presidential envoy on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov, which included representatives of various agencies of the government, especially the economic ministries. Conceivably, Russia is drawing up a roadmap for stepping up security-cum-economic cooperation with the Taliban’s interim government. The internal situation in Afghanistan is stabilising and the prospects of any organised resistance to the Taliban have receded significantly. 

Both Russia and China are gearing up for the deepening of their economic cooperation with Kabul. It is entirely conceivable that they may take recourse to innovative payment mechanisms to sidestep the tyranny of the US dollar (“world currency”), thereby undercutting Washington’s capacity to keep the Taliban regime on a tight leash financially through bullying and blackmail until it proved pliable to the Western diktat. 

During Wang Yi’s visit to Kabul, both the Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and Muttaqi himself emphatically stated their interest in expanding the cooperation with China within the ambit of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wang Yi has proposed that China is “ready to make efforts to extend” the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to Afghanistan and help the country develop as “a bridge for regional connectivity.” 

Basically, both Beijing and Moscow have reason to be satisfied with the Afghan interim government’s performance so far, which suggests that the Taliban leadership’s commitment to the peaceful reconstruction of the country is not to be doubted. Wang Yi, in fact, went to the extent of complimenting the Taliban regime for its “series of positive measures to respond to the concerns of the international community.” Wang Yi told Muttaqi, “We oppose the political pressure and economic sanctions on Afghanistan imposed by non-regional forces at every turn.” 

Of course, the clincher will be the Taliban regime’s performance on the security front. Baradar pledged that Kabul will not allow any forces to engage in activities that undermine China.” He just stopped short of mentioning the shenanigans by the western intelligence. Specifically, Baradar underscored the importance that the Taliban leadership attaches to China’s security concerns. 

He said Kabul “will take concrete and strong measures to achieve security across Afghanistan and contribute to maintaining regional security.” Importantly, Baradar sought China’s help in enhancing Afghanistan’s “security capacity.” Wang Yi took the opportunity to convey Beijing’s expectation that Kabul will “earnestly fulfil its commitment to resolutely crack down on all terrorist forces, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.” 

With the US and the European Union hopelessly bogged down in their confrontation with Russia, the situation surrounding Afghanistan is radically transforming. The Taliban leadership is savvy enough to sense this. To be sure, there is no stopping the BRI projects in Afghanistan in this changed situation. 

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Featured image: China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) with Acting Prime Minister of Interim Government Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, Kabul, March 24, 2022 (Source: Indian Punchline)

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***

Our thoughts are with Bruce Willis. 

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Bruce Willis is 67 and developed aphasia after being vaccinated. Could it just be a coincidence? Maybe, but how did Willis’ doctors rule out the vaccine being causal?

We aren’t told this. Why not?

Why aren’t they explaining to us why this couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine?

The medical authorities always tell us they want to reduce vaccine hesitancy so why not tell us how the doctors ruled out the vaccine as causal in Willis’ case?

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I wanted to make sure everyone knows aphasia is one of the thousands of symptoms whose reporting rates were elevated after the COVID vaccines rolled out. It’s #1574 on that sorted list of symptoms elevated by the COVID vaccine that we calculated back in November 2021.

But I also very distinctly remember, very early on after the vaccines rolled out, a story from Dr. Byram Bridle of a teenage girl, perfectly healthy before getting the vaccine, who couldn’t speak shortly after getting vaccinated.

Of course, we now know this wasn’t just a coincidence.

The numbers of reports to the VAERS system bear this out.

Here’s a “baseline” year 2019 for all vaccines put together:

Here’s what the numbers are just for the COVID vaccine alone:

Bruce Willis is 67 and developed aphasia after being vaccinated. Could it just be a coincidence? Maybe, but how did Willis’ doctors rule out the vaccine being causal?

We aren’t told this. Why not?

340 vs. 12 for his age group… a factor of 28 higher reporting rate for the COVID vaccines.

Bad luck? I don’t think so.

Why aren’t they explaining to us why this couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine?

The medical authorities always tell us they want to reduce vaccine hesitancy so why not tell us how the doctors ruled out the vaccine as causal in Willis’ case?

The actual case reports show people are normal before getting vaccinated and unable to talk shortly after.

If this isn’t causal, then how do you explain all these amazing coincidences? And why are the reports so much higher after the COVID vaccines vs. all other vaccines?

More troubling are the actual case reports.

Here are just the first three that came up in the search report:

VAERS ID: 906282 (history) Given the vaccine at 712 pm on 12/20/20. At approximately 715 pm, she began to clear her throat and then became unable to speak, followed by audible wheezes and short, shallow breaths. At 1923, Epinephrine was administered. At 1928, she was able to speak again and was transported to the ED. The patient reports after arrival to the ER, the symptoms returned. She was given PO Benadryl, followed by IV Benadryl, and then a 2nd dose of Epinephrine. She was admitted to the ICU for observation

VAERS ID: 907710 (history) About 30 minutes after injection felt brain fog and had a hard time finding words; About 30 minutes after injection felt brain fog and had a hard time finding words; It”s like we were having to concentrate more than usual to do routine stuff; This is a spontaneous report from a contactable consumer (patient himself). A 44-year-old male received BNT162B2 (PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE, Lot number Ej1685), intramuscular on the left arm, as first single dose on 20Dec2020 (at 06:30) for COVID-19 immunisation. The patient did not have a relevant medical history. No relevant concomitant medications were provided. About 30 minutes after injection felt brain fog and had a hard time finding words. Another nurse that got vaccinated at the same time felt the same way. It”s like we were having to concentrate more than usual to do routine stuff. The patient was not treated for the events. The patient did not perform COVID test before vaccination but after vaccination Nasal Swab, Rapid PCR, was Negative. He was recovering from the events.; Sender”s Comments: Linked Report(s) : US-PFIZER INC-2020504556 same drug, same event and different patient

VAERS ID: 911587 (history): 5 to 10 minutes after receiving vaccine started feeling “drunk”, anxious, paranoid. Muscles became mildly tense and teeth clenched. The physical aspects only lasted a short time (10-15 minutes)the anxiousness paranoia and “drunk” feeling lasted approximately another hour. An hour after receiving vaccine started experiencing nausea and vomiting with extreme muscle soreness that was generalized and fatigue. After napping the nausea and vomiting resolved. Woke up shivering in cold sweats and shivering. Began experiencing forgetfulness and having problems thinking correctly. Issues with finding words, conversing and conveying information to other people. Shortly after waking up began experiencing severe back pain in lower to mid left back. Pain was shooting and it did not seem to matter on positioning. Back pain has resolved. Day 2 still experiencing severe fatigue, extreme muscle soreness, forgetfulness and not thinking correctly. Having issues finding words to use and communicate. Thinking process seems slow. Occasional cold sweats and shivering. Day 3 still feeling of forgetfulness, unable to find words and communicate correctly, slow thinking process, occasional cold sweats and shivering, occasional bouts of anxiety (lasts only 2-3 minutes at a time), short bouts of shortness of breath with exertion resolved quickly. Some muscle soreness seems to be resolving.

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While President Biden is accusing President Putin of being a war criminal, he seems to conveniently forget how his predecessors in the White House all the way back to the 1960s, to and including Lyndon Johnson have committed directly or by proxy war crimes around the world in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Egypt, Korea, Vietnam, Yemen — and the list is almost endless.

American-initiated wars and conflicts have in the last 60 years killed between 20 and 30 million people.

One wonders, who are the war criminals?

Where do most war criminals abound as Presidents? The short answer is: In the freedom-loving United States of America. And they are literally all getting away with murder.

Western media fully ignore this fact when they repeat Biden’s accusation calling Mr. Putin a war criminal and worse.

The West, perhaps out of desperation since the end is near, has become a dystopian, lie-infested world, beset by untruths, censoring free-speech, deleting the truth for lies and more. Unknown in recent history.

Since western war criminals literally are getting away with murder, Ukraine soldiers have taken a lesson and become some of the most atrocious war criminals in recent history.

As reported by RT (German), 27 March 2022, they are torturing Russian military prisoners of war in the most brutal ways, in total disregard of the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War; see this 3-min video by RT (German) or click the image below.

The Geneva Convention on Prisoners of war dates back to 29 July 1929. It became effective in June 1931. The Convention has since been renewed, updated and adjusted on 12 August 1949 as a UN Human Rights Instrument – the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. It entered into force on 21 October 1950.

Article 3 of the Convention specifies that Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. See this.

Soldiers of the Ukrainian army are certainly not abiding by this law and must be held accountable by an International Court of Law judging war crimes.

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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)

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

Featured image is from South Front

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If Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanted to highlight the hypocrisy that so many non-Western nations perceive in President Biden’s efforts to depict the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a global “battle between democracy and autocracy,” he couldn’t have chosen better than to attend the Middle East foreign ministers’ meeting in Israel today.

All five of his interlocutors from Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco represent governments that are either monarchical, outright tyrannical, or have invaded and occupy their neighbors’ territory by the force of arms.

Blinken’s enthusiastic endorsement of this burgeoning axis of Mideast states regardless of their human rights records marks a return to the familiar Cold War politics where generous U.S. support for all kinds of repressive states, especially in the Global South, was justified by the overriding necessity of containing and defeating the Soviet Union.

Blinken of course is trying to get these same governments to back sweeping U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia in order to demonstrate their opposition to Moscow’s aggression — even as a growing number of Putin-enabled oligarchs seek safe haven in Israel and the UAE, in particular.

Blinken also hopes to at least soften or mute their opposition to the still-to-be-concluded revived nuclear deal, no doubt by reassuring them that Washington will sell them ever more sophisticated and expensive U.S.-made weapons systems and participate in more joint military exercises with them.

Thus far, Washington has commended Israel’s efforts to mediate between Moscow and Kiev and its dispatch of humanitarian aid, but has otherwise been disappointed by Tel Aviv’s failure to provide Ukraine with specific weapons that could materially help Kiev repel the invasion.

As for the five Arab states at the meeting, despite voting to condemn Russia’s aggression in the UN General Assembly, they have tried to steer a more neutral course on the war. The Biden administration has been particularly frustrated by the UAE’s rejection of urgent Western appeals to increase the country’s badly needed oil and gas exports to help make up for the shortfall in global markets caused by Western sanctions against Russia. It also didn’t help that its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, extolled his March 1 telephone conversation with Putin while reportedly refusing to take a call from Biden.

Whether Blinken succeeds in persuading his interlocutors to take stronger measures to isolate Russia or reconcile them to Washington’s revival of the nuclear deal remains to be seen. But the warm embrace of his Israeli and Arab counterparts in Monday’s meeting would seem to undermine — at least in the Middle East — Biden’s sweeping message Saturday that Washington is a defender of an international rules-based liberal order that is leading the “perennial struggle for democracy and freedom.”

Egypt under President Abdel al-Sisi is widely considered, along with Syria, to be perhaps the most repressive dictatorship in the region with thousands of peaceful dissidents languishing for years in overcrowded prisons and most non-governmental organizations operating under unprecedented constraints when they are permitted to operate at all.

“Egyptians under Sisi are living through the worst repression in the country’s modern history, according to the latest edition of Human Rights Watch’s “World Report.”

Bahrain, whose Sunni royal family rules over a restive Shia majority, according to the same report, pursues a policy of “zero tolerance for dissent,” continues to conduct mass trials against dissidents, and has imprisoned key leaders of the Shia community since the 2011 “Arab Spring.”

Particularly ironic given the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s defense of its territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s invasion and possible occupation, three of the five participating governments in Monday’s meeting have invaded and occupied their neighbors’ territory in defiance of international law. Morocco invaded and eventually annexed the Western Sahara in the wake of Spain’s 1975 withdrawal, prompting a mass exodus of most of the former colony’s Sahrawi inhabitants, many of whom remain in refugee camps in Algeria.

Of course, Israel gained control of and occupied the Gaza Strip, Syrian’s Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank in the 1967 war and subsequently unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights also in defiance of international law. It has also established 130 government-approved settlements housing more than 400,000 of its Jewish citizens on the West Bank in violation of the Geneva Convention, leaving some 2.7 million Palestinians on the West Bank under military occupation, a situation which a growing number of international human rights organizations have denounced as a form of “apartheid.”

As for the UAE, which, along with Saudi Arabia, led the counterrevolution across the Middle East against the “Arab Spring” imprisoned scores of activists, academics, lawyers, and other dissidents under “dismal and unhygienic conditions” at home, its participation in the Yemen war has resulted in its effective occupation of Yemen’s Mayun Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and control of Socotra Island. It has also promoted and armed secessionist groups elsewhere in southern Yemen.

If Blinken wants to focus on Russia’s aggression and defiance of the international “rules-based order,” this meeting is not a good look.

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“To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulative evil of the whole.” – Judges of the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials.

When it comes to the legal use of force between states, it is considered unimpeachable fact that in accordance with the intent of the United Nations Charter to ban all conflict, there are only two acceptable exceptions. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security authorized by a Security Council resolution passed under Chapter VII of the Charter, which permits the use of force.

The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter, which reads as follows:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

A plain-language reading of Article 51 makes it clear that the trigger necessary for invocation of the right of self-defense is the occurrence of an actual armed attack — the notion of an open-ended threat to security does not, by itself, suffice.

Prior to the adoption of the U.N. Charter, the customary international law interpretation of the role of pre-emption as applied to the principle of self-defense was Hugo Grotius, the 17^th century Dutch legal scholar who, in his book De Jure Belli Ac Pacis (“On the Law of War and Peace”) declared that “war in defense of life is permissible only when the danger is immediate and certain, not when it is merely assumed,” adding that “the danger must be immediate and imminent in point in time.”

Grotius formed the core of the so-called “Caroline Standard” of 1842, (named after a U.S. ship of that name which had been attacked by the British navy after aiding Canadian rebels back in 1837) drafted by then U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster. It supported the right of pre-emption or anticipatory self-defense only under extreme circumstances and within clearly defined boundaries.

“Undoubtedly,” Webster wrote, “it is just, that while it is admitted that exceptions growing out of the great law of self-defense do exist, those exceptions should be confined to eases in which the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’”

Until the adoption of the U.N. Charter in 1945, Webster’s criteria, borrowing heavily from Grotius, had become Black Letter Law regarding anticipatory action in international law. However, once the United Nations was established and the U.N. Charter sanctified as international law, the concept of pre-emption or anticipatory self defense lost favor in customary international law.

George Ball, deputy under-secretary of state for President John F. Kennedy, made the following famous remark about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Cuba in response to the deployment of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles on Cuban territory in 1962. As it was being discussed in the White House Situation Room, Ball said: “A course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor…It’s…it’s the kind of conduct that’s such that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.”

Oct. 29, 1962 Executive Committee of the National Security Council meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

The Ball standard guided the administration of President Ronald Reagan when, in 1983, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Israel claimed that “in removing this terrible nuclear threat to its existence, Israel was only exercising its legitimate right of self-defense within the meaning of this term in international law and as preserved under the U.N. Charter.”

The Reagan administration ultimately disagreed, with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkparick saying, “our judgement that Israeli actions violated the Charter of the United Nations is based on the conviction that Israel failed to exhaust peaceful means for the resolution of this dispute.” Kirkpatrick, however, noted that President Reagan had opined that “Israel might have sincerely believed it was a defensive move.”

The American argument dealt with the process of the Israeli action, namely the fact that Israel had not brought the problem before the Security Council as required by Article 51. In this, the U.S. drew upon the judgement of Sir Humphrey Waldock, the head of the International Court of Justice, who in his 1952 book, The Regulation of the Use of Force by Individual States in International Law, noted:

“The Charter obliges Members to submit to the Council or Assembly any dispute dangerous to peace which they cannot settle. Members have therefore an imperative duty to invoke the jurisdiction of the United Nations whenever a grave menace to their security develops carrying the probability of armed attack.”

After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the United States was able to assemble a diverse international coalition by citing not only Article 51, which provided a somewhat weak case for intervention based upon self-defense and collective security, but also Security Council resolution 678 passed under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. That authorized the use of force to evict Iraq from Kuwait. Regardless of where one stood on the merits of that conflict, the fact is, from the standpoint of international law, the legality underpinning the U.S. and coalition use of force was rock solid.

The aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military campaign to liberate Kuwait, however, lacked such clarity. While Kuwait was liberated, the Iraqi government was still in place. Since Resolution 678 did not authorize regime change, the continued existence of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government posed a political problem for the United States, whose president, George H. W. Bush, had likened Saddam Hussein in an October 1990 speech to the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler, requiring Nuremburg-like retribution.

US Misuse of Ceasefire Resolution

The Security Council, under pressure from the United States, passed a ceasefire resolution, 687, under Chapter VII, which linked the lifting of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq for invading Kuwait to the verified disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) under the auspices of U.N. weapons inspectors.

The U.N. disarmament process was troubled by two disparate undercurrents. The first was the fact the Iraqi government was an unwilling participant in the disarmament process, actively hiding material, weapons, and documentation pertaining to banned missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear programs from the inspectors.

This active program of concealment constituted a de facto material breach of the ceasefire resolution, creating a prima facia case for the resumption of military action for the purpose of compelling Iraq into compliance.

The second was the reality that the United States, rather than using the disarmament process authorized by the Security Council to rid Iraq of WMD, was instead using the sanctions triggered by continued Iraqi noncompliance to create the conditions inside Iraq to remove Saddam from power.

The weapons inspection process was only useful to the United States if it furthered that singular objective. By the fall of 1998, inspections had become inconvenient to U.S. Iraq policy.

In a move carefully coordinated between the U.N. inspection team and the U.S. government, an inspection-based confrontation was orchestrated between U.N. inspectors and the Iraqi government, which was then used as an excuse to withdraw the U.N. inspectors from Iraq. The U.S. government,  citing the threat posed by Iraqi WMD in an inspection-free environment, launched a three-day aerial bombardment of Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox.

Neither the U.S. nor the U.K. (the two nations involved in Operation Desert Fox) had received authority from the U.N. Security Council prior to taking military action. There is no specific legal authority that would allow either the U.S. or Britain to act in a unilateral fashion regarding the enforcement of a Chapter VII resolution such as 687. While the Security Council would obviously be able to authorize compelled compliance (i.e., the use of force), no single nation nor collective possesses unilateral enforcement authority, making Operation Desert Fox an illegal act of aggression under international law.

The U.S. has sought to get around this legality by crafting a case for military action under the rubric of the “right of reprisal”, with the act of Iraq being in material breach of its obligations under resolution 687 serving as the justification for reprisal. To argue what by most accounts is a tenuous case, however, the strike in question would have to be limited to targets that could be exclusively defined as being related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The fact that the U.S. and U.K. struck a plethora of sites, none of which were related to the manufacture or storage of WMD, undermines the legitimacy of any justification under a claim of reprisal, making Operation Desert Fox an unauthorized (i.e., illegal) use of military force.

Deterrence

U.N. weapons inspectors in central Iraq, June 1, 1991. (UN Photo)

One of the purposes alleged to justify an action under the “right of reprisal” was the notion of deterrence, namely that by carrying out a limited reprisal in response to a documented material breach of a Chapter VII resolution, the U.S. and UK would be deterring Iraq from any future acts of non-compliance.

One of the key aspects of deterrence in defense of the law, however, is the need for the act upon which deterrence is derived being itself legitimate. Given that Operation Desert Fox was, prima facia, an illegal act, the deterrence value generated by the action was nil.

The inability to craft a valid deterrence policy produced the opposite of what had been intended — it emboldened Iraq to defy the will of the Security Council under the misguided conclusion that its constituent members were impotent to act against it.

In 2003 the administration of President George W. Bush proved the Iraqis wrong.

Having failed to implement a viable doctrine of military deterrence when dealing with Iraq’s unfulfilled obligations under Security Council resolutions, the U.S. crafted a new approach for resolving the Iraqi problem once and for all—the doctrine of pre-emption.

This doctrine was first articulated by President Bush in his June 2002 address to West Point, where he declared that while “in some cases deterrence still applied, new threats required new thinking … if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

On Aug. 26, 2002 Vice President Dick Cheney specifically linked Bush’s embryonic doctrine of pre-emption to Iraq, declaring at a convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars that:

“What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness…deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator or the two working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.”

Certified Pre-Emption

In early September 2002 the Bush administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS), which certified as official U.S. policy the principle of pre-emption. It noted that the Cold War-era doctrines of containment and deterrence no longer worked when dealing with a post-9/11 threat matrix which included rogue states and non-state terrorists.

“It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat,” the NSS stated.

“Given the goals of the rogue states and terrorists, the U.S. can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker…and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

The NSS went on to offer a legal argument for this new doctrine. “For centuries international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat — most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack.”

According to the NSS, the concept of immediacy as a pre-condition for the legitimate employment of anticipatory self-defense had to be adapted to the new kinds of threats that had emerged. “The greater the threat,” the NSS declared, “the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.”

The new Bush Doctrine of pre-emption was not well received by legal scholars and international relations specialists. As William Galston, at the time a professor of public policy for the University of Maryland, observed in an article published on Sept. 3, 2002,

“A global strategy based on the new Bush doctrine of preemption means the end of the system of international institutions, laws, and norms that we have worked to build for more than half a century. What is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental shift in America’s place in the world. Rather than continuing to serve as first among equals in the postwar international system, the United States would act as a law unto itself, creating new rules of international engagement without the consent of other nations.”

Galston’s words were echoed by then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who shortly after the NSS was published declared that the notion of pre-emptive self-defense would lead to a breakdown in international order. For any military action against Iraq to have legitimacy under the U.N. Charter, Annan believed, there needed to be a new Security Council resolution which specifically authorized a military response.

The U.S. and U.K. did, in fact, seek to secure such a resolution in early 2003, but failed. As such, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003 under the sole authority of the U.S. doctrine of pre-emption, “was not in conformity with the U.N. charter,” according to Annan, who added “From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.”

As the de facto first test case of the new American doctrine of preemption, the U.S. would have benefitted from having been proven right in the major threat assumptions which underpinned the need for urgency. History has shown that the major threat issue — that of Iraqi WMD, was fundamentally flawed, derived as it were from a manufactured case for war based on fabricated intelligence.

Likewise, the so-called nexus between Iraq’s WMD and the al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of 9/11 turned out to be equally as illusory. The doctrine of pre-emption carries with it a high standard of proof; about Iraq, this standard was not remotely met, making the 2003 invasion of Iraq illegal under even the most liberal application of the doctrine.

Ukraine

Putin announcing military operation against Ukraine on Feb. 24. (AP screenshot)

Concerns that any attempt to carve a doctrine of pre-emption out of the four corners of international law defined by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter would result in the creation of new rules of international engagement, and that that would result in the breakdown of international order were realized on Feb. 24.

That is when Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine for the ostensible purpose of eliminating neo-Nazi affiliated military formations accused of carrying out acts of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass, and for dismantling a Ukrainian military Russia believed served as a de facto proxy of the NATO military alliance.

Putin laid out a detailed case for pre-emption, detailing the threat that NATO’s eastward expansion posed to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s ongoing military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass.

“[T]he showdown between Russia and these forces,” Putin said, “cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.” NATO and Ukraine, Putin declared,

“did not leave us [Russia] any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action. The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with permission of Russia’s Federation Council, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22, I made a decision to carry out a special military operation.”

Putin’s case for invading Ukraine has, not surprisingly, been widely rejected in the West. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Amnesty International declared, “is a manifest violation of the United Nations Charter and an act of aggression that is a crime under international law. Russia is in clear breach of its international obligations. Its actions are blatantly against the rules and principles on which the United Nations was founded.”

John B. Bellinger III, an American lawyer who served as legal adviser for the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, has argued that Putin’s Article 51 claim “has no support in fact or law.”

While Bellinger notes that Article 51 does not “impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations,” he hastens to note that Ukraine had not committed an armed attack against Russia or threatened to do so.

Bellinger is dismissive of Russia’s claims to the contrary, noting that “Even if Russia could show that Ukraine had committed or planned to commit attacks on Russians in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Article 51 would not permit an action in collective self-defense, because Donetsk and Luhansk are not U.N. member states.”

While the notion that a lawyer who served in an American presidential administration which crafted the original doctrine of pre-emption used to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would now be arguing against the application of that very same doctrine by another state would seem hypocritical, hypocrisy alone does not invalidate Bellinger’s underlying arguments against Russia, or the claims put forward by its president.

Unfortunately for Bellinger and those who share his legal opinion, a previous U.S. presidential administration, that of William Jefferson Clinton, had previously crafted a novel legal theory based upon the right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.

The Clinton administration argued that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it was, in fact, dominated by the United States, claimed such a status.

While the credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense” collapsed when it transpired that its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide that created, not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity, turned out to be little more than a covert provocation carried out by the C.I.A. for the sole purpose of creating the conditions for NATO military intervention.

While one may be able to mount a legal challenge to Russia’s contention that its joint operation with Russia’s newly recognized independent nations of Lugansk and Donetsk constitutes a “regional security or self-defense organization” as regards “anticipatory collective self-defense actions” under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.

Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led “special military operation.” [OSCE figures show an increase of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]

Finally, Russia has articulated claims about Ukraine’s intent regarding nuclear weapons, and in particular efforts to manufacture a so-called “dirty bomb”, which have yet to be proven or disproven. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a reference to seeking a nuclear weapon in February at the Munich Security Conference.]

The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on fact, not fiction.

While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground.

Coming in Part 2: Russia, Ukraine, and the Law of War: War And War Crimes.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Featured image: Nuremberg Trials. 1st row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel. 2nd row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality/Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S)

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Mariupol, the strategic Sea of Azov port, remains in the eye of the storm in Ukraine.

The NATO narrative is that Azovstal – one of Europe’s biggest iron and steel works – was nearly destroyed by the Russian Army and its allied Donetsk forces who “lay siege” to Mariupol.

The true story is that the neo-Nazi Azov batallion [stationed in Mariupol] took scores of Mariupol civilians as human shields since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, and retreated to Azovstal as a last stand. After an ultimatum delivered last week, they are now being completely exterminated by the Russian and Donetsk forces and Chechen Spetsnaz.

Azovstal, part of the Metinvest group controlled by Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is indeed one of the biggest metallurgic plants in Europe, self-described as a “high-performance integrated metallurgical enterprise that produces coke and sinter, steel as well as high-quality rolled products, bars and shapes.”

Amidst a flurry of testimonials detailing the horrors inflicted by the Azov neo-Nazis on Mariupol’s civilian population, a way more auspicious, invisible story bodes well for the immediate future.

Russia is the world’s fifth largest steel producer, apart from holding huge iron and coal deposits. Mariupol – a steel Mecca – used to source coal from Donbass, but under de facto neo-Nazi rule since the 2014 Maidan events, was turned into an importer. Iron, for instance, started to be supplied from Krivbas in Ukraine, over 200 kilometers away.

After Donetsk solidifies itself as an independent republic or, via referendum, chooses to become part of the Russian Federation, this situation is bound to change.

Azovstal is invested in a broad product line of very useful stuff: structural steel, rail for railroads, hardened steel for chains, mining equipment, rolled steel used in factory apparatus, trucks and railroad cars. Parts of the factory complex are quite modern while some, decades old, are badly in need of upgrading, which Russian industry can certainly provide.

Strategically, this is a huge complex, right at the Sea of Azov, which is now, for all practical purposes, incorporated into the Donetsk People’s Republic, and close to the Black Sea. That implies a short trip to the Eastern Mediterranean, including many potential customers in West Asia. And crossing Suez and reaching the Indian Ocean, are customers all across South and Southeast Asia.

So the Donetsk People’s Republic, possibly part of the future Novorossiya, and even part of Russia, will be in control of a lot of steel-making capacity for southern Europe, West Asia, and beyond.

One of the inevitable consequences is that it will be able to supply a real freight railroad construction boom in Russia, China and the Central Asian ‘stans.’ Railroad construction happens to be the privileged connectivity mode for Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And, crucially, of the increasingly turbo-charged International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

So, mid-term, Mariupol should expect to become one of the key hubs of a boom in north-south routes – INSTC across Russia and linking with the ‘stans’ – as well as major BRI upgrades east-west and sub-BRI corridors.

Interlocked Eurasia

The INSTC’s main players are Russia, Iran and India – which are now, post-NATO sanctions, in advanced interconnection mode, complete with devising mechanisms to bypass the US dollar in their trade. Azerbaijan is another important INSTC player, yet more volatile because it privileges Turkey’s connectivity designs in the Caucasus.

The INSTC network will also be progressively interconnecting with Pakistan – and that means the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key BRI hub, which is slowly but surely expanding to Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s impromptu visit to Kabul late last week was to advance the incorporation of Afghanistan to the New Silk Roads.

All that is happening as Moscow – extremely close to New Delhi – is simultaneously expanding trade relations with Islamabad. All three, crucially, are Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members.

So the grand North-South design spells out fluent connectivity from the Russian mainland to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan), to West Asia (Iran) all the way to South Asia (India and Pakistan). None of these key players have demonized or sanctioned Russia despite ongoing US pressures to do so.

Strategically, that represents the Russian multipolar concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership in action in terms of trade and connectivity – in parallel and complimentary with BRI because India, eager to install a rupee-ruble mechanism to buy energy, in this case is an absolutely crucial Russia partner, matching China’s reported $400 billion strategic deal with Iran. In practice, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will facilitate smoother connectivity between Russia, Iran, Pakistan and India.

The NATO universe, meanwhile, is congenitally incapable of even recognizing the complexity of the alignment, not to mention analyze its implications. What we have is the interlocking of BRI, INTSC and the Greater Eurasia Partnership on the ground – all notions that are regarded as anathema in the Washington Beltway.

All that of course is being designed amidst a game-changing geoeconomic moment, as Russia, starting this Thursday, will only accept payment for its gas in rubles from “unfriendly” nations.

Parallel to the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, since it was launched in 2013, is also progressively weaving a complex, integrated Eurasian network of partnerships: financial/economic, connectivity, physical infrastructure building, economic/trade corridors. BRI’s role as a co-shaper of institutions of global governance, including normative foundations, has also been crucial, much to the despair of the NATO alliance.

Time to de-westernize

Yet only now the Global South, especially, will start to observe the full spectrum of the China-Russia play across the Eurasian sphere. Moscow and Beijing are deeply involved in a joint drive to de-westernize globalist governance, if not shatter it altogether.

Russia from now on will be even more meticulous in its institution-building, coalescing the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – a Eurasian military alliance of select post-Soviet states – in a geopolitical context of irreversible institutional and normative divide between Russia and the West.

At the same time, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will be solidifying Russia as the ultimate Eurasian bridge, creating a common space across Eurasia which could even ignore vassalized Europe.

Meanwhile in real life, BRI, as much as the INSTC, will be increasingly plugged into the Black Sea (hello, Mariupol). And BRI itself may even be prone to re-evaluation in its emphasis of linking western China to western Europe’s shrinking industrial base.

There will be no point in privileging the northern BRI corridors – China-Mongolia-Russia via the Trans-Siberian, and the Eurasian land bridge via Kazakhstan – when you have Europe descending into medieval dementia.

BRI’s renewed focus will be on gaining access to irreplaceable commodities – and that means Russia – as well as securing essential supplies for Chinese production. Commodity-rich nations, such as Kazakhstan and many players in Africa, shall become the top future markets for China.

In a pre-Covid loop across Central Asia, one constantly heard that China builds plants and high-speed railways while Europe at best writes white papers. It can always get worse.

The EU as occupied American territory is now descending, fast, from center of global power to the status of inconsequential peripheral player, a mere struggling market in the far periphery of China’s “community of shared destiny.”

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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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***

In a bizarre turn of events Tuesday, Russian and Ukrainian delegations taking part in peace negotiations in Istanbul appeared to have reached a breakthrough. But following a tepid response by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, contemptuously dismissing Russian peace overtures as nothing more than “delaying tactics” meant to “deceive people and deflect attention,” head of the Russian delegation Vladimir Medinsky walked back the earlier optimistic remarks, saying “a gradual military de-escalation does not necessarily mean an immediate ceasefire.”

Hours later on Tuesday evening, in what appeared to be either a coincidence or a sabotage attempt, an ammunition depot across the Ukraine border in Russia “mysteriously exploded,” sending thick plumes of smoke into air, visible in videos posted on social media, injuring four Russian soldiers, and effectively pouring cold water over the optimism generated by the likelihood of the success of the peace process between Ukraine and Russia.

A Ukrainian missile appeared to have hit a temporary Russian military encampment outside Belgorod, in Russia’s village of Krasny Oktyabr, about 40 miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, said the Russian state-run news agency Tass. The strike would only be the second that struck a military target inside Russia and wounded soldiers. Last week, Tass reported two men were hurt when a shell from Ukraine exploded in the same area.

The Russian offer scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, isn’t the first time the Kremlin extended the hand of friendship to Kyiv. Last week, Russia made a similar peace gesture that wasn’t even dignified with a response by Western policymakers and went almost unheeded in the establishment-controlled media.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the offer to scale back military operations was a confidence building step for the ongoing negotiations with Ukrainian officials in Istanbul.

“In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing an agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions,” Russian Deputy Defense Minister leading the Russian peace delegation told reporters.

Ukrainian negotiators said that under their proposals, Kyiv would agree not to join alliances or host bases of foreign troops, but would have security guarantees in terms similar to Article 5, the collective defense clause of the transatlantic NATO military alliance.

The proposals, which would require a referendum in Ukraine, mentioned a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014. The fate of the southeastern Donbas region, which Russia demands Ukraine cede to separatists, would be discussed by the Ukrainian and Russian leaders.

Kyiv’s proposals also included one that Moscow would not oppose Ukraine joining the European Union, Russia’s lead negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said. Russia has previously opposed Ukrainian membership of the EU and especially of the NATO military alliance. Medinsky said Russia’s delegation would study and present the proposals to President Vladimir Putin.

Welcoming the Russian peace initiative, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday the signals from peace talks with Russia “could be called positive” but added that Ukraine would not slacken its defensive efforts until it noticed “concrete actions.”

It would be prudent, however, of the Ukrainian leader to get rid of the duplicitous NATO interlocutors and try reaching a political settlement to the conflict with Russia bilaterally if he wishes peace and stability to prevail in the embattled country, because opportunistic NATO leaders have their own axe to grind by taking advantage of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine.

The Biden administration doesn’t seem particularly enamored of the Russian peace proposal that could bring much-needed relief to the war-ravaged country because, as the seasoned American politician and peace activist Ron Paul aptly observed, Washington’s policy appeared to be “fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian.”

While on a whirlwind Middle East trip in Morocco, Antony Blinken, the charismatic secretary of state idolized by diplomatic community for wavy salt-and-pepper hair and suave Parisian etiquette who has childishly refused to diplomatically engage with his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov since the start of the conflict on Feb. 24, derisively mocked the diplomatic breakthrough achieved in Istanbul as nothing more than “delaying tactics” meant to “deceive people and deflect attention.”

Paranoidly echoing the secretary of state’s imagined apprehensions, the Pentagon said Russia had started moving very small numbers of troops away from positions around Kyiv, describing the move as more of a “repositioning” than a withdrawal. “We all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told a news briefing. “It does not mean that the threat to Kyiv is over.”

Not to be left behind in the collective Russophobic hysteria inflicting Western policymaking circles and the mainstream media alike, Britain’s defense ministry said Moscow was being “forced to pull out troops” from the vicinity of Kyiv to Russia and Belarus, to resupply and reorganize after “taking heavy losses,” adding that Russia was likely to compensate for its reduced ground maneuver capability through “mass artillery and missile strikes.”

“The combat potential of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been significantly reduced, which allows us to focus our main attention and efforts on achieving the main goal—the liberation of Donbas,” Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu proudly boasted Tuesday. He added that 123 of Ukraine’s 152 fighter jets had been destroyed, as well as 77 of its 149 helicopters and 152 of its 180 long- and medium-range air defense systems, while its naval forces had been totally eliminated.

It’s worth recalling that the Russian special military operation, dubbed “Operation Z” by Vladimir Putin, wasn’t a full-scale war. It was a calculated military incursion having well-defined security objectives: the liberation of Donbas and denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.

Those military objectives have already been achieved in large measure, as not only the Russian-majority Donbas including Kherson and Mariupol have been liberated but the battles are ongoing in the adjacent areas in the northeast, Kharkiv and Sumy, that will hopefully fall soon.

Sergey Shoigu has already proved through facts and figures how the country has been demilitarized with the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces significantly reduced. As for denazification, Donbas was the hub of neo-Nazi Azov, Right Sector, Dnipro 1 and 2, Aidar and myriad of other ultra-nationalist militias funded, armed and trained by the CIA since the 2014 Maidan coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia. With the liberation of Donbas and deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces, neo-Nazi militias wouldn’t find a foothold, at least, in east Ukraine bordering Russia’s vulnerable western flank.

As for the “40-mile-long” convoy of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belorussia in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital, that was simply a power projection gambit astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s cunning military strategists to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine, where real battles for territory were actually fought, and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.

Except in the early days of the war when Russian airstrikes and long-range artillery shelling targeted military infrastructure in the outskirts of Kyiv to reduce the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces, the capital did not witness much action during the month-long offensive. Otherwise, with the tremendous firepower at its disposal, the world’s second most powerful military had the demonstrable capability to reduce the whole city down to the ashes.

What further lends credence to the indisputable fact that the Russian assault on Kyiv was meant simply as a show of force rather than actual military objective to occupy the capital is the factor that Belarusian troops didn’t take part in the battle despite staging military exercises alongside Russian forces before the invasion and despite the fact that Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko is a dependable ally of the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin.

Although Russia lost the lives of 1,351 soldiers during the war, as candidly admitted by the Russian defense ministry, the myth of countless charred Russian tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces littering the streets of Ukraine’s towns and cities is a downright fabrication peddled by the corporate media as a psychological warfare tactic to insidiously portray the losing side in the conflict as a winning side.

Besides the handful neo-Nazi militias and foreign mercenaries fighting pitched battles against Russian forces in Donbas, the much-touted “resistance” was nowhere to be found in the rest of Ukraine. As soon as the war began last month, the “valiant resistance” fled across the border to the safety of Poland, Romania and neighboring countries.

The opportunistic militant leaders of the virtually nonexistent “resistance” are reaping windfalls by reportedly selling caches of anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions provided by NATO countries in the thriving arms markets of Eastern Europe and buying opulent mansions in southern France and Italy.

In the 2001 census, nearly a third of Ukraine’s over 40 million population registered Russian as their first language. In fact, Russian speakers constitute a majority in urban areas of industrialized eastern Ukraine and socio-culturally identify with Russia. Ukrainian speakers are mainly found in sparsely populated western Ukraine and in rural areas of east Ukraine.

Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian together belong to the East Slavic family of languages and share a degree of mutual intelligibility. Thus, Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians are one nation and one country whose shared history and culture goes all the way back to the golden period of the 10^th century Kyivan Rus’.

In addition, Russians and Ukrainians share Byzantine heritage and together belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian denominations whose history can be traced back to the Christ and his apostles. Protestantism and Catholicism are products of the second millennium after a Roman bishop of the Byzantine Empire declared himself Pope following the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

In comparison, what do Ukrainians have in common with NATO powers, their newfound patrons, besides the fact that humanitarian imperialists are attempting to douse fire by pouring gasoline on Ukraine’s proxy war by providing caches of lethal weapons to militant forces holding disenfranchised Ukrainian masses hostage.

While addressing a meeting on socioeconomic support for the constituent entities of the Russian Federation on March 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly elucidated the salient reasons for pre-emptively mounting a military intervention in Ukraine in order to forestall NATO’s encroachment upon Russia’s security interests. Here are a few trenchant excerpts from the lucid and eloquent speech:

“We are meeting in a complicated period as our Armed Forces are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions.

“It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to speak their native Russian language, and to bring up their children as they want.

“Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it … Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed over this time … Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.

“Just like in the 1990s and the early 2000s, they want to try again to finish us off, to reduce us to nothing by turning us into a weak and dependent country, destroying our territorial integrity and dismembering Russia as they see fit. The failed then and they will fail this time … Yes, of course, they will back the so-called fifth column, national traitors – those who make money here in our country but live over there, and live not in the geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality.”

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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 Af-Pak and Middle East 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.

“Wiki-Gate”: Julian Assange Was Framed by the People Who Supported Him

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 31, 2022

Julian Assange was initially lauded and supported by the mainstream media. In 2008  The Economist, which is partly owned by the Rothschild family granted Assange The New Media Award. Was this a genuine endorsement of  Assange’s commitment to “freedom of the press”? Or was it a public relations ploy?

“Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince’s $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine”

By Simon Shuster, March 31, 2022

On the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince.

India: Massive Strike of 200 Million Workers Draws Attention to Increasing Problems and Apprehensions of Workers

By Bharat Dogra, March 31, 2022

The call for a 2 day national level strike by workers given by 10 central trade unions and other supporting organizations in India drew a strong response by  over 200 million (20 crore) workers on March 28 and 29, according to organizers.

The Presidential Election in South Korea: Dark Threatening Fog Is Covering Up the Future of the Korean Peninsula

By Prof. Joseph H. Chung, March 30, 2022

In South Korea, something which should not happen has happened. Yoon Suk-yeol has won the presidential election with a margin of little more than 240,000 votes. If there is any person who should not become the head of Korea, he is Yoon who has revealed himself as the most corrupted, dishonest and violent person and who relies on shaman (MooDang) for decisions.

Oliver Stone Documents the Past to Illuminate the Present. “JFK: Destiny Betrayed”

By Edward Curtin, March 30, 2022

While Kennedy was the last U.S. president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness  that the promotion of war and the military industrial complex were at the top of their job description.

Italian Airport Workers Refuse to Load Arms for Ukraine

By Alessio Arena, March 30, 2022

Workers at the Galileo Galilei Airport in Pisa — a civilian airport — reported March 12 that they had been involved in the loading of a cargo plane with what was alleged to be humanitarian aid destined for Ukraine. The aid turned out to be arms and ammunition destined for the troops of the Zelensky regime.

French Lawyer Arrested for Treason After Helping Reiner Fuellmich Prove World Leaders Have Committed Crimes Against Humanity in the Name of COVID-19

By The Daily Expose, March 30, 2022

Virginie de Araujo Recchia, a French attorney living in France who is participating in the work of the Citizen Jury with Reiner Fuellmich, was arrested in her home at dawn on March 22nd in front of her children. The arrest comes three weeks before ahead of the French presidential elections.

Senators Urge US to Halt UN Probe into Alleged War Crimes During Gaza Bombing

By Middle East Eye, March 30, 2022

A bipartisan group of 68 US senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, calling on the Biden administration to lead an effort to end a United Nations commission that is probing alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

The Current Ukrainian Government’s Nazism

By Eric Zuesse, March 30, 2022

Sadism is a marked feature of racist fascism, or “nazism,” and it’s proudly displayed in today’s Ukraine, such as in this string of cellphone videos. It was posted as a string of tweets during March 20-22 by a “Juan Sinmiedo”, whose account then became “suspended” by Twitter, because it was publicly exposing truths about Ukraine that mega-corporate America assiduously suppresses U.S.-and-allied publics from knowing.

What Are FDA’s Criteria for Issuing a COVID Vaccine EUA? What Happens When Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines Fall Short? Next Up, Babies and Toddlers

By Dr. Meryl Nass, March 30, 2022

FDA made it very clear what its standards were for COVID vaccines. FDA repeatedly told its advisory committee, the public and vaccine manufacturers what it required in order to issue an EUA for a COVID vaccine.  I have copied 4 of the FDA’s power-points below so we can all agree on what, precisely, those standards are.

Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why

By William M Arkin, March 30, 2022

Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act.

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 at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Below are excerpts of an important article by Time Magazine pertaining to the creation of a multibillion dollar military project in Ukraine including a the recruitment of a private mercenary army.

Our thanks to Time Magazine for having brought this article by Simon Shuster to our attention.

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On the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince.

As the party got seated inside a private karaoke room on the second floor, Igor Novikov, who was then a top adviser to Ukraine’s President, remembers feeling a little nervous. He had done some reading about Blackwater, the private military company Prince had founded in 1997, and he knew about the massacre its troops had perpetrated during the U.S. war in Iraq. Coming face to face that night with the world’s most prominent soldier of fortune, Novikov remembers thinking: “What does this guy want from us?”

It soon became clear that Prince wanted a lot from Ukraine. According to interviews with close associates and confidential documents detailing his ambitions, Prince hoped to hire Ukraine’s combat veterans into a private military company. Prince also wanted a big piece of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, including factories that make engines for fighter jets and helicopters. His full plan, dated June 2020 and obtained exclusively by TIME this spring, includes a “roadmap” for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues and investment.

… 

This account of Prince’s ambitions in Ukraine is based on interviews with seven sources, including current and former U.S. and Ukrainian officials as well as people who worked directly with Prince to try to realize his aspirations in Ukraine. Those business plans, which have not been previously reported, were confirmed by four of the sources on both sides of the negotiations, all of whom recalled meeting in person with Prince last year to discuss them. The documents describe a series of ventures that would give Prince a pivotal role in Ukraine’s military industry and its ongoing conflict with Russia, which has taken more than 14,000 lives since it began seven years ago.

The documents detail several previously unreported ventures that Prince and his partners wanted the Ukrainian government to approve. One proposal would create a new private military company that would draw personnel from among the veterans of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Another deal would build a new munitions factory in Ukraine, while a third would consolidate Ukraine’s leading aviation and aerospace firms into a consortium that could compete with “the likes of Boeing and Airbus.”  (emphasis added)

Click here to read the full article on Time Magazine.

 

 

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With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Madeline Roache

Featured image is by Neil Jamieson for TIME

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 at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

Members of the Russian and Ukrainian diplomatic delegations met on March 29 to negotiate peace terms in Istanbul, Turkey, after more than a month of “Special Military Operation”. The conversations did not have much practical effect.

The Ukrainians made a series of proposals, some of which met Russian demands for pacification and others did not. There was no scheduling of a personal meeting between two presidents Putin and Zelensky, which practically rules out the possibility of an official agreement in the short term. Quite unexpectedly, however, the Western media has been describing the Istanbul talks’ results as a peace deal, which is obviously not true.

The meeting did not start in a very friendly way. Both delegations, amidst the hostility of the conflict, refused to greet each other, opening the conversations in an impolite manner. There were not many expectations of good results in the negotiations, but the promises of reducing violence were positive. Kiev presented some proposals that matched Russian demands but harmed its package of conditions by insisting on a review of some issues that are out of negotiation for the Kremlin.

Moscow’s core demands can be summed up in neutral Kiev, outside of NATO and the EU, recognizing Crimea as part of Russia and the Donbas republics as independent countries. In the midst of the current scenario, the Ukrainian government already seems resigned to the fact that it is impossible to join NATO and is also gradually accepting that the EU will not give space to Kiev.

However, Zelensky remains adamant about the regions that have ceased to be part of Ukrainian territory since 2014. Moscow has already made it clear that there is no possibility of reviewing Crimea’s legal status under any circumstances and that the Donbas republics must have their sovereignty recognized without reservations. So, either Zelensky fully accepts such conditions or the peace talks will always be fruitless.

However, despite all the obstructions, the talks ended better than expected as at least the Ukrainian government was willing to compromise on some points, which was enough for the Russian delegation to consider the possibility of reducing the intensity of operations in some regions. Spokespersons for the Kiev delegation said that the next rounds would focus on discussing humanitarian issues and ceasefire possibilities, ruling out any chance of dialogue on territorial issues.

In some western media channels, the talks were treated, however, as a great advance for peace and there are even some fake news circulating on the internet about a possible end to the conflict. Clearly, data is being manipulated in order to promote an information war in which the dominant narrative is that Russia has accepted conditions of peace. The result of this is to justify the need for new coercive measures against Russia in the coming days, as the conflict will obviously continue and then the same channels that pointed out that Russia had committed to the end of the Operation will then claim that Moscow has failed to fulfill its vows of peace.

It is important to emphasize that there has been no significant progress towards peace. Russia will continue the operation and there is no expectation of an end to the conflict in the short term. There was a positive balance in terms of negotiating mutual promises and reducing violence, but not in ending military activities. Over the course of eight years, the Russian government maintained the most peaceful stance possible on the Ukrainian crisis, remaining inert in the midst of the civil war and trying to prevent the genocide in Donbass through legal and diplomatic means.

This stance is officially over. Now, it is no longer in Russia’s interest to sign any premature peace agreement that will generate new clashes in the future. Moscow is unyielding in its plan to keep Kiev neutral and demilitarized, outside the Western military and economic blocs and passive in the face of territorial issues in Crimea and Donbass.

The fact that a meeting between Putin and Zelensky has been ruled out shows that there is, for the time being, no disposition towards an end to the conflict, considering that an agreement of such nature could only be signed by the two leaders or their respective foreign ministers. So, the biggest positive balance so far is the fact that Russia is still willing to partially reduce the intensity of operations in some regions, as it has done since the beginning of the conflict. It was the Russian side that has promoted all the de-escalations so far, opening up humanitarian corridors and allowing the flow of aid to the victims. On the other hand, violations of such measures have become commonplace for Ukrainian troops, without any denouncement by the pro-NATO western media.

In the end, despite mainstream media’s propaganda, there is no asymmetry of conditions in the current situation. The basic package of measures demanded by Moscow needs to be met by Zelensky for peace to happen. Russia does not seem to be in a hurry to sign an agreement and is willing to maintain the military mission for as long as necessary to achieve its objectives.

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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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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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***

 

Introduction

In South Korea, something which should not happen has happened. Yoon Suk-yeol has won the presidential election with a margin of little more than 240,000 votes.

If there is any person who should not become the head of Korea, he is Yoon who has revealed himself as the most corrupted, dishonest and violent person and who relies on shaman (MooDang) for decisions.

Nonetheless, Yoon will become the head of South Korea. Who have voted for him? Those who have voted for Yoon may be grouped into the following groups.

First there are those who were not allowed to know who Yoon was because of the lie campaigns led by corrupted media.

Second, there are those who are parts of the corruption community led by the oligarchy composed of academics, business, bureaucrats, media, politics (ABBMP).

Third, there are those who were most likely paid for voting for Yoon.

• It was a victory of the past over the future;
• it was a victory of war over peace;
• it was a victory of economic stagnation over sustained growth of the economy.

Victory of the Past over the Future

The presidential candidate of the Democratic party (DP), Lee Jae-myung has promised the continuation of a President Moon Jae-in‘s work of building a society where everybody lives in harmony, where 50% of the elders do not kill themselves because they are hungry and lonesome, where the youth can have dating, love, marry and have children, where one can have decent job without college degree, where the rich do not despise the poor. This is the future of Korea he was going to build, but he lost the election.

Under the future president, Yoon Suk-yeol representing the People Power Party (PPP), South Korea will go back to what it was under the pro-Japan conservative government which ruled Korea for 60 Years since 1948.

The corruption culture will be restored. The bribe money will be the express way to wealth, fame and power; the income gap will be widened; the rich will oppress the poor; the media will hide the corruption of the conservative establishment; the police, the prosecutor and the court judge will allow the illegal and immoral activities of the member of the corrupted communities on the one hand and, on the other, punish the good deeds of the opposition forces; the “Hell Korea” will continue; the young will not marry; the elders will continue to kill themselves; the minimum wage will decrease; the work hours will become longer.

Victory of War Over Peace

Lee Jae-myung, the defeated presidential candidate representing DP had a very constructive and bold plan for the peace on the Korean peninsula. His idea was the implementation of the North-South agreement of 2018 which made two commitments, namely, the declaration of the end of the Korean War and North-South economic cooperation.

But, these agreements could not be respected because of the objection on the part of Japan and the South Korean conservative party and the U.S.

Lee was ready to go ahead despite the objection by Japan, conservative South Korea and the U.S. Lee’s plan included the following.

First, he would continue to negotiate for the repatriation of the OPCON so that a Korean general would command the Korean armed forces in war. This would allow South Korea not to participate in the pre-emptive attack against North Korea or Taiwan war or Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands conflict.

Second, Lee would negotiate with Washington to allow the realization of his plan for peace in the Korean peninsula and North-South economic cooperation. Lee was optimistic for the negotiation results. He counted on the fact that Korea is 6th global military power and 9th global economic power; Lee thought that this would give him some advantage in the negotiation with Washington.

Third, even if Washington continue objecting the North-South peace-dialogue and economic cooperation, Lee would go ahead with his plan, because  the U.S. badly needs South Korea as the forefront military base needed for the containment of China.

On his part, Yoon Suk-yeol has declared that South Korea will join the QUAD, that he will think of undertaking pre-emptive attack against North Korea, that the Japanese Self Defence Force (SDF) may join the pre-emptive attack against North Korea and that South Korea will not ask Washington to transfer the OPCON back to Korea.

These declarations mean the 70-year old desire of the pro-Japan conservative forces to unify the two Koreas not by dialogue of peace but by force. This was planned in 2017 involving the combined armed forces of the U.S., Japan and South Korea. But the idea was abandoned because of costs and the fear of third World War which might result from such attack.

There is no doubt that the combined armed forces of the three countries can easily topple the North Korea regime. But, there is no doubt that North Korea will fight back and, in the end, nobody wins.

What these three countries are aiming at is the absorption-reunification of Korea by force for different reasons.

For the pro-Japan conservative South Koreans, the peaceful unification means two risks.

First, North Koreans are likely to punish them for their collaboration with Japan during the Japanese occupation in Korea.

Second, in a unified Korea, they will become a marginal minority and lose their privilege.

As for Japan, it also has two reasons for favouring absorption-unification of Korea by force.

First, it would provide a chance to invade and re-conquer Korea in complicity with pro-Japan South Koreans who identify themselves more with Japanese than with Koreans. In other words, Korea would be annexed to Japan in some forms.

Second, this is important, unified Korea would mean a major military power threatening Japan.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, the absorption- unification means that the whole of the Korean peninsula become the American military base and provide important strategic advantage for Washington in the war against China and even Russia.

The victory of Yoon would provoke the following results.

First, it will most likely force Pyongyang to accelerate the production of nuclear bombs and launch long-range ICBM and hit exact spots which will be announced in advance; it will be somewhere near Guam.

Second, if North Korea finds that the peace-dialogue is impossible, it may join the Russia-China camp and the possibility of the reunification of Korea will become more difficult and the dark challenging clouds of war will cover the peninsula.

There will be another security challenge which Yoon may provoke. It is the possibility of war involving Taiwan or the Senkaku-Miaoyu Islands. It is likely that Japan would initiate a shooting war forcing the U.S. and South Korea under Yoon to join the war.

We must understand why Japan would provoke a war with China. The ambition of Japan to rule against Asia is still there. Nationalist Shintoism restored; the dream of Kakko-Ichi-U (Japan rules over the world) is still alive and the 1927 Tanaka Memorial (roadmap of Japan’s world conquest) is still relevant for neo-imperialists led by Shinzo Abe and the his party, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

However, to rule the world, at least Asia, Japan must do something to kill China. The Taiwan President, Tsai In-wen is ardent promoter of Taiwan independence and close friend of Tokyo and Washington. It is possible that Japan wished for China’s invasion of Taiwan. Indeed, it can happen.

For Washington, Taiwan is a fixed aircraft carrier at the front door of China and the best weapon which has been used for decades for the containment of China. Therefore, Washington will continue to arm Taiwan. This will increase the possibility of the intervention of the China’s PLA.

It is true that Washington recognizes the principles of ONE CHINA by virtue of three joint declarations (1972, 1979 and 1982) and the Taiwan Relations Act (1982) and China’s right to govern Taiwan.

But, Washington adopted an ambiguous Taiwan policy by installing the American Institute in Taiwan (IAT) and by imposing the flexible condition of American weapon sales to Taiwan by virtue of the Six Assurances imposed by Ronald Reagan in 1982.

There are five conditions which Taiwan must respect to avoid a possible invasion by Beijing:

• declaration of Taiwan independence,
• internal turmoil in Taiwan,
• military alliance with other countries,
• acquisition of weapons of mass destruction(WMD) and
• the violation of the 1992 Taiwan-China Consensus for One-China system.

Among these five conditions for China invasion into Taiwan, the most important condition is the Taiwan’s Independence Declaration.

In Taiwan, there are two major parties: the Kwomintang (KMT) and the Democratic and Progressive Party (DPP). The KMT has been in power except for two governments of DPP.

Washington has been supplying weapons for decades. But, the two Republican governments have been the most active in selling weapons to Taiwan, namely the Bush government and Trump government.

For instance the government of G.W. Bush shipped each year weapons amounting to USD 3.74 billion when Chen Shui-bian of DPP (2000-2008) was in power. The Trump government provided each year weapons amounting to as much as USD 4.45 billion, when Tsai Ing-wen of DDP (2016-2022)was in power.

The DDP is the party claiming more autonomy vis-à-vis China. For the time being, it refrains from the declaration of independence to avoid the invasion of China’s PLA. But, there is heavy pressure from Taiwan population for independence. Nevertheless, Tsai has been avoiding the declaration of independence saying that Taiwan is a de facto independent.

However, the sustained shipping of weapons to Taiwan can be seen by China as Washington’s pressure on Taiwan to choose independence.

Even if Taiwan does not declare independence, China may attack Taiwan, if it imports WMD such as strategic nuclear weapons. The acquisition of WMD is one of the conditions of China’s Taiwan invasion.

Another possibility is to create a situation in which Taiwanese plane or warship is attacked by the PLA.

Once the shooting war starts, the Japanese SDF will play the major part of the shooting, while the U.S. will minimize its direct fighting.

The most dreadful perspective is the role of the Korean armed forces. Since the Korean government has no authority of mobilizing its own armed forces because of the OPCON agreement, the ROK forces will have to join Japan. And the outcome is clear enough.

Taiwan will be destroyed and it will be governed directly by China. But, Japanese economy and the Korean economy will be devastated.

Nevertheless, Japan wants this war, because it has not abandoned its dangerous dream of ruling Asia after having destroyed China. Besides, the armament is the best way of reviving the Japanese economy, just like it was during the 1930s before the Pearl Harbour attack.

As for the U.S. it wants this war, because this war destroys both China and Japan which are or will be enemies of America.

In short, the electoral victory of Yoon may bring a doomsday for Korea.

Victory of Economic Stagnation over Sustained Growth

Lee’s vision of economic policy was the liberation from the trap of neo-liberal regime and corruption.

Under the neo-liberal regime, the ultimate objective was to maximize GDP growth. To do so, corporate profit should be maximized through the use of technology which reduced the labour cost on the one hand, on the other, the use of the imported low cost raw materials and intermediate goods which also cut down production cost.

Lee was planning to avoid the neo-liberal regime and continue the policies of Moon Jae-in.These policies include the following policy measures.

First, Lee would continue to break the bribery culture which has ruled the government-business relations. Under the previous pro-Japan conservative government, the government used to offer all sorts of privileges to Chaebols including tax allowances, grants and subsidies, easy access to privileged information and above all overlooking of illegal and immoral activities of large corporations for bribes paid to politicians and bureaucrats. The bribe culture affects the productivity of corporations and slows down GDP growth.

Second, Lee was going to improve the Chaebol-SME relations. Under the pro-Japan conservative government, Chaebols abused SMEs. For example, Chaebols did not respect contracts with SMEs, even stole new technology developed by SMEs. Lee was going to better integrate SMEs into the value chains led by the Chaebols. In fact, this policy has had some success under President Moon Jae-in.

Third, Lee was planning to assure GDP growth which is beneficial to all citizens in such a way that income be more equally distributed and the rate of jobless will decrease.

Fourth, the labour rights were to be better protected and promoted. The planned measures included these: more unionization, labour participation in national economic policy designs, shorter work hours, overtime payment, more nursing homes for working mothers.

Fifth, under the leadership of President Moon Jae-in, more resources have been allocated for the benefits of to low income people, senior citizens, single mother, disabled and other marginal groups. This policy would continue.

The increasing purchasing power of the ordinary Korean will enhance domestic demand, create more jobs and promote sustained economic growth.

By contrast, Yoon is planning to restore the radical version of the neo-liberal economic regime through the following measures.

First, the role of the government will be minimized so that the contents of national economic policy will be determined by large corporations.

Second, the public corporations will be privatized. Even the public health insurance will be privatized.

Third, the regulations, in particular, those related to housing will be deregulated allowing real estate speculation.

Fourth, the corporate tax will be reduced so that corporate profit can increase.

Fifth, the minimum wage will be cut and labour unionization will be prevented.

Sixth, the government will cut welfare spending including old age pension, housing allowance, grants to public health services. This will make the survival of the low-income people.

Concentration of Income and Wealth

The combination of these planned measures implies the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the corrupted community led by the oligarchy composed of academics, business, bureaucrats, media and politicians (ABBMP).

The income distribution is still skewed in favour of the rich despite the efforts of the government of Moon Jae-in. But, Yoon’s policy will worsen the inequality of income distribution leading to shrinking domestic demand, increasing jobless and eventually long-run economic stagnation.

Importing Japan’s Stagnation Model

What is frightening is the possibility of importing the Japanese model of decades-long economic stagnation. The fundamental reason for the Japanese decades-long economic stagnation was Japan’s failure to overcome the shock of the 1989 asset bubble busting.

But, it is important to find out who were responsible for the asset bubble. In 1985, the value of stocks was 60% of GDP but in 1989, it represented 250% of GDP. In 1989, the real estate value of the Japanese territory was four time that of the U.S. territory, although the area of the Japanese territory was 3.7% of that of the U.S.

Then, in 1989, the Bank of Japan raised the interest rate from 2% to 6%; it was too much. The bubble exploded. The value of stocks fell by 60%; the value of real estate had a free fall of 80%.

Japan tried all the known policies to overcome the shock of the bubble explosion but failed. The GDP which had a growth rate varying between 4.5% and 20% before 1990 fell to 1.72% in the period 1990-1995 and to 1.1% in the period 1996-2018.

This is the horror story of the saga of the falling Japanese economy. There were many years of minus GDP growth. The per capita GDP fell from USD 44,674 in 2010 to USD 39,295, a fall of 12%.

The important question is this: “Who were responsible for this crime of destroying the Japanese economy?” It was the greed of the Golden Triangle referring to the oligarchy composed of bureaucrats, politician and large corporations.

True, the oligarchy has made major contribution to the Japanese economic miracle, but over the years, it transformed itself into closely knit corruption community and appropriated the bulk of the national wealth through bribe money and real estate speculation money.

The real estate speculation has produced three harmful results:

First, it has enforced illegal or immoral activities of the oligarchs thus expanding the community of corruption.

Second, it is so easier to make money that the large corporations have invested more funds in real estate than in technological innovation. As a result, leading Japanese corporations have lost their global share. For example, in the period 2005-2011, Toyota’s global share dropped from 51% to 41%; Honda’s global share fell from 39% to 29%, the Share of DRAM decreased from42% to 9%.

Third, the Japanese model has worsened the inequality income distribution, caused under-development of SMEs and decreased regular jobs. Despite the injection of astronomic amount money in the economy it did not revive. The amount of fiscal money injected was 250% of GDP; the money created in the name of Quantity Easing (QE) as almost 90%of GDP.

But, there was no demand for goods and services, because the ordinary Japanese had empty pockets; there was no job creation, because the SMEs had no demand for their goods. Moreover, they could not get bank money, because they had little collateral. At the end of the road, decades-long economic stagnation was waiting.

In a word, the saga of the falling Japanese economy was due to the greed of the corrupted elite.

This can happen in Korea under the pro-Japan corrupted conservative government of Yoon Suk-yeol.

In fact, the Korean GDP maintained annual grow rate of about 9.00% for three decades 1960s, 1970s and 1980s dropped to 7.22% in the 1990s and 4.60% in 2000s. It fell to 2.92% in the 2010s. The sudden drop of the GDP growth rate was due to the poor performing of Korean exports of goods and services.

In the latter half or the 1970s, the average annual rate of Korean exports was 22.3% to decrease to 14.74% in the 1980s, then to drop to 11.0% in the 1990s; it rose to 12.47% in the 2000s and finally it had a free fall of 5.26% in the 2010s.

However in the 2010s, if we except 2011 (24%), 2013(14%) and 2017 (10.0%), for 7 years, the rate of exports growth was below 1.0%. In other words, the downward trend of Korean exports became accelerated since the second half of the 2000s.

The sustained trend of declining GDP growth and the drastic slowdown of exports is largely due to the increase access to financial resources of the 1980s allowing wide spread real estate speculation by the Korean oligarchy.

In the 1980, the housing price increases by 17% per year. The large corporations being able to make money easily through real estate speculation did not invest funds for the development of technology and the improvement of global competitiveness. In fact, since 1980, the favoured pass time was “Jae-taek” (technique of making easy money); this is the “Zaitech” imported from Japan.

The real estate speculation has continued despite the efforts of the government of Moon Jae-in. In Seoul, the ratio of housing price to income is 33 which was 15 in the 1990. In Seoul, an apartment of 100 m² is sold for more than 2.5 million USD.

Remember this. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 in Korea was due to the abundance of money around and the access to easy and quick money which could be made by real estate speculation. The large corporation borrowed so much money to make speculation money that the average of corporate debt ratio was 600%.

This is just incredible. The corporate debt ratio exceeding 100% is a sign of alarm. The crisis of 1997-98 was due to the impossibility for the Chaebols to pay debt in a situation where foreign funds were fleeing.

This was the first financial national crisis for Korea. To overcome the crisis, millions of ordinary Koreans gave their golden wedding rings and other golden items to pay the national debt.

Fortunately, the crucial measure taken by the Kim Dae-jung government was the structural adjustment designed to discipline the Chaebols, make their accounting system more transparent and induce them to be more specialized so that their global competitiveness be improved.

However the most powerful measure was the non-bailing-out of insolvent Chaebols, banks and businesses. This was the major difference between Japanese model which bailed out insolvent companies who were friends of the oligarchs and the Korean model in which insolvents companies were not bailed out.

These Korean measures were possible because Korea had the leadership of Kim Dae-jung of the Democratic Party as president. If Korea had a conservative president, Korea might have had the long-run economic stagnation like in Japan.

The failure of Abe Shinzo’s Abenmics was due to the absence of the Kim Dae-jung’s model of corporate structural adjustment.

There is the danger that Yoon repeat the failed model of Shinzo Abe of Japan.

To conclude, the election of Yoon Suk-yeol casts dark menacing fog on the future of the Korean peninsula. It is our duty to watch out so that one of the rare democracies in the world would not disappear with the fog.

*

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Dr. Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and member of the Research Center on Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM.

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

Featured image is licensed under KOGL Type 1

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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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

The timing of the early March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in U.S. history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events.

While Kennedy was the last U.S. president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness  that the promotion of war and the military industrial complex were at the top of their job description.  They have gladly served the god of war and ravaged countries around the world with the glee of sadists and madmen.  Pusillanimous in the extreme, they have sought the presidency knowing they would never oppose the gunmen in the shadows who demanded their obedience.  They heard the message from the streets of Dallas loud and clear and followed orders as required.

Their long history of provocations against Russia in Eastern Europe and Ukraine that has resulted in the current Russian attack on Ukraine is a most frightening case in point.  While Kennedy embraced dialogue and negotiations that recognized the humanity and validity of other countries leaders’ viewpoints – e.g. Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, et al. – and was cognizant, as he said, that genuine peace had to exclude a Pax Americana, his replacements have demanded U.S. dominance and the growth of empire.

It is therefore essential to understand why JFK was assassinated by the U.S. national security state; it is a fundamental requisite for piercing the miasma of lies that have been used over the decades to conceal the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and the intense anti-Russia hatred.

JFK: Destiny Betrayed, a four-hour, four-part follow-up to Oliver Stone’s two hour feature film JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (11/22/21), does precisely that. While JFK Revisited is by the nature of its shorter and undivided length a better film as film, JFK: Destiny Betrayed is the deeper history lesson because of its more extensive documentation.

click to access Episode Guide

It is largely based on the scriptwriter, James DiEugenio’s masterful book, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, which draws on hundreds of thousands of documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board, which was formed as a result of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK.  As such, the book, and the new film, hoist the U.S. government by its own petard, and thus the film’s powerful indictment can only be dismissed by ignoramuses, propagandists, or sensibilities too tender to accept factual truth.  At an Orwellian time when “fictionalized documentaries” are being promoted, and the difference between fact and fiction is being scrambled to scramble brains, that, regrettably, may be many people.  But for anyone who takes history and facts seriously, this is a dazzling and deeply disturbing film whose implications are enormous.

It is divided into four parts, each approximately an hour.  This allows the viewer to space out their viewing to allow each section to sink in.  I think this is a good idea, for there is much to comprehend, especially for one not well-versed in this history.

Chapter One opens with an emphatic point: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells how his father immediately suspected that the CIA was involved in the murder of President Kennedy and that when the Warren Commission Report (WC) was released he didn’t believe it.  The WC had been pushed by people such as Eugene Rostow, Joseph Alsop, et al., no friends to Kennedy; was controlled by Allen Dulles, the CIA Director whom Kennedy had fired following the Bay of Pigs treachery; and was promoted by The New York Times upon its release with the claim that the commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president was supported by all its documents when in fact those documents were not released for many months following.  Thus the N.Y. Times lied to serve the coverup as it has done ever since. This was typical of mainstream media then and now.

The first part of the documentary informs the viewer of many such lies of commission and omission:

• That the CIA lied to Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs.
• That Allen Dulles never told the Warren Commission that the CIA had tried repeatedly to kill Fidel Castro.
• That the CIA lied to JFK about its attempts to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle.
• That the CIA lied to him about the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, another Kennedy ally.
• That the CIA lied to Robert Kennedy when he learned of its attempts to assassinate Castro by telling him they had stopped when they had not.

Lies piled upon lies on every side.

Sandwiched between, in a deft placement that says “try to lie about this,” is the Zapruder film that graphically refutes the lie that the president was not shot from the front; it confirms witness testimony that the kill shot came from the right front and a large back portion of the back of his head was blown out by a gunman who wasn’t Oswald.  Presto: a conspiracy.

And then the viewer learns how years later the Church Committee Hearings uncovered many more lies.  How Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was a confidential FBI informer; how, contrary to press lies, JFK never authorized the plots to assassinate Castro, etc.

And when the lies became more known, The House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979) sealed half-a-million records until 2029, many of which were only released due to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film.  Still, in 2022 records are still being held back against the law.

Chapter Two opens with the absurd deceptions involving Kennedy’s autopsy.  Brief but powerful and a preliminary introduction to an extensive analysis in Chapter 3, this section presents evidence that doctors were pressured to lie about the frontal wounds, that Captain James Humes, the doctor in charge of the autopsy, had never done a gunshot autopsy and was part of the coverup – literally with JFK’s head, that the president’s personal doctor, George Burkley, disappeared crucial evidence, etc.

Then, in a creative switch used throughout the four parts, we learn some more of why Kennedy was killed.  How as a young U.S. Representatives in 1951 he went to Vietnam with his brother Robert and became convinced that the French war there was wrong and also unwinnable, and that Vietnam should be free of colonial domination.  How years later as a Senator he spoke out against Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ advice to use nuclear weapons at Diên Bên Phù to help the beleaguered French (one of many times he opposed the use of nuclear weapons).  How he gave a famous Senate speech in 1957 opposing colonialism and was attacked by both parties for it.  How he supported the non-aligned nations movement, including Sukarno in Indonesia and many leaders throughout Africa.

Then we are returned to Dallas and the assassination where we learn about the conflicting number of shots, the “magic bullet that allegedly and comically was claimed to have created seven wounds in Kennedy and Gov. John Connally, the failure of the chain of custody for the bullets, and the various anomalies associated with Oswald’s alleged rifle that are revealed with multiple photos.  A viewer’s ears would no doubt particularly perk up when learning that the rifle the government says Oswald used that he ordered through mail order under the alias A. Hidell and was sent to his post office box registered under the name Lee Oswald, could not be picked up by Oswald since it was sent to the name Hidell.  And so… ?

Before moving on to the third section, I would like to note the book-like quality of this streaming film documentary.  The sections are called chapters and its title and much of its contents are taken from DiEugenio’s book.  So you could say it is similar to a novel that is converted into a screenplay, but in this case it is a carefully sourced and researched non-fiction (I prefer the word “fact”) book with fifty-four pages of notes.  Watching it is like reading a book in that the viewer needs to slowly evaluate not only the narrative drive of the presentation but also the quality of the filmed notes that buttress the telling from beginning to end.  As one who has read the book very carefully two times, always noting sources, and as one who has researched, written about, and taught university courses on the JFK and other political assassinations, I can attest to the solidity of the film’s sources.  I can think of none that are not accurate.  Like the earlier JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, the collaboration between Stone, a filmmaker of genius, and DiEugenio, a supremely talented researcher, has produced two remarkable films, slightly different in style and substance, but achieving the same clarification of purpose: Factual truth about who killed President Kennedy and why, and why it matters today.

Chapter Three is perhaps the most devastating of the four.  Much of it is spent on showing the evil treachery involved in the autopsy of the president at Bethesda Naval Hospital that is central to the coverup of the truth. This coverup was carried out within the higher reaches of the government, and its only purpose could be to protect the killers within that government.  It is very hard to stomach such truth, but it is necessary.

Only one person was present both at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at the autopsy: Dr. George Burkley, JFK’s White House physician.  Deeply involved in the coverup, Burkley changed his statements from inadvertent truth to falsehoods like a jumping bean, finally firmly supporting the lies of Dr. Humes, who performed the autopsy under the direction of military/intelligence higher-ups and then incredibly destroyed his notes.  Burkley also backed the lies of those others involved in replacing Kennedy’s brain with another, and then patching up the back of his head to conceal his large wound in order to deny the fatal head shot came from the front.  He supported Robert Knudsen, the White House photographer who took photos of JFK’s fraudulently repaired head. All these men conspired to cover up the truth by literally covering up of the hole in the back of the president’s head. This was betrayal of the highest order.  Treachery close to home.

Yet to learn in detail that Kennedy’s brain was replaced and that his badly damaged brain is missing is matched in depravity with learning that JFK’s arch-enemy, General Curtis LeMay, made sure to quickly return from Canada to attend the autopsy where he sat with others in bleachers, puffing a cigar as Kennedy was cut up and patched like a show piece.  As Kennedy’s most belligerent foe and the real life Dr. Strangelove, one who hated the president and who advocated dropping nuclear weapons on Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and using terrorism against the American people to blame on Cuba (Operation Northwoods) – all emphatically repudiated by JFK who thought such suggestions insane and evil – the image of the sadistic LeMay in the autopsy room is haunting.

This chapter also tells us of a National Security Meeting on July 20, 1961 when Allen Dulles and the military urged Kennedy to do a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, one of many such attempts that the president rebuffed without hesitation.  Watching this, one cannot help thinking of what is taking place with President Biden, unlike Kennedy, a lifetime war hawk and clearly not in his right mind.  We have been warned.

The concluding chapter is “Fingerprints of Intelligence” and confirms what the first three parts make obvious: that the CIA and its minions killed their own president to prevent him from seeking peace and reconciliation in a world on the edge of nuclear destruction.  We learn all about the CIA’s running of Oswald as a false defector to the Soviet Union and a patsy in JFK’s murder.  We learn how the agency lied repeatedly about its connections to him.  We learn about parallel plots to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa with fall guys similar to Oswald waiting in the wings.  We learn how Lyndon Johnson changed Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, etc. immediately after his death and how the military industrial complex won the day.

Oliver Stone tells us this.  And he tells us JFK’s ghost won’t rest.

This documentary makes that clear, but ghosts only have a way of sometimes disturbing consciences when they also know the facts.  JFK: Destiny Betrayedhas all the facts one needs to rile one’s conscience, if one watches it, and if one can see through today’s repetition of history as the old Cold War has become the new old Cold War and betrayal rules the day as the CIA has been rehabilitated through insidious propaganda, as if nothing happened in 1963, or it doesn’t matter.

Yet nothing could be more untrue.

Ukraine is no anomaly; it fits the propaganda neatly. President Biden’s 813 billion dollar military budget request does likewise.  As the film makes clear, President John F. Kennedy was killed by the national security state for seeking peace, while our leaders are seeking war.  It’s still the same old story.  The warfare state rules.  That has not changed from the day John Kennedy died.

The only thing that can possibly change is people’s knowledge of the truth and how that can change their consciences to oppose the war promoters.  This film can do the former.  As for the latter, only time will tell.

JFK: Destiny Betrayed is a powerful corrective to the historical amnesia that has settled over the United States.  It is an incandescent example of how the marriage of film and scholarship can produce popular history at its best.  For anyone who wants to understand the new Cold War that is verging on going nuclear, this film is essential viewing.

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

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

Featured image is from Behind the Curtain

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

To order his book click the cover page.

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

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

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

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Earlier this month on pro-government IndiaTV, celebrity astrologer Acharya Indu Prakash presented an hour-long Ukraine special in which he predicted good fortune was 99% in favor of Putin. He said that Russia’s military operation in Ukraine “was the last resort for Mr. Putin, he was left with no options. Even now, attempts are being made to create this narrative that Putin is engaging in a bad war.”

Such an outlook would shock most Western audiences as this rhetoric is seldom heard. However, such an outlook is mostly shared across the political spectrum in India, as highlighted by an article published in The Washington Post on March 29, titled: “In India, a U.S. partner, Modi’s base is inundated with anti-U.S. commentary on Ukraine.” The opening sentence of the article wrote:

“Turn on a television in India this past month, and the arguments espoused by some of the country’s most popular media personalities follow a pattern: The United States provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine. The Americans were possibly developing biological weapons in Ukraine. Joe Biden, the US president who fumbled the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, has no business criticizing India over the war he sparked in Ukraine.”

Due to this position, New Delhi has been continuously lambasted by Western officials, media and academics for protecting the interests of the country and its citizens.

Among some of the many examples, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said for India to: “Think about where you want to stand when the history books are written in this moment in time, and support for the Russian leadership is support for an invasion that obviously is having a devastating impact”; Award-winning and renowned conservative American host of the Trish Regan Show tweeted: “If INDIA buys Russian crude oil, INDIA should expect to be sanctioned by the United States. And, believe me, that won’t work out so well for India’s economy. Right now: you’re with US or you’re against us. Simple”; and, The Telegraph newspaper complained that “India is the only Quad member not to have condemned the invasion.”

India, despite traditionally being a non-aligned country, joined the QUAD formation with the US, Japan and Australia to oppose China at sea in the so-called Indo-Pacific region. New Delhi believes that such a formation will be beneficial in its confrontation with China over its support for Pakistan and control of Aksai Chin, which New Delhi says is occupied by the East Asian country.

A Pew Research poll in 2017 found 49% of Indians viewed the US favorably while 47% viewed Russia favourably. A 2020 Pew Research poll found that 49% of Indians saw Russia positively, a significantly higher amount when compared to a quarter of Japanese and Australians and 19% of Americans who viewed the country favorably. Some domestic polls have shown that most Indians approve of their government abstaining from criticizing Russia, just as India did for the seventh time at the United Nations on March 25.

None-the-less, India’s cooperation with the US through the QUAD formation and its increasing confrontation with China appears to have created misunderstandings in Western capitals about New Delhi’s independent foreign policy. With the advent of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, India maintained a balance by refusing to condemn and sanction Russia, something that has created great irritation in the West, thus demonstrating that they do not care for India’s interests but only in India serving their interests.

With Russia locked out of using Dollars and the SWIFT system, discussions of India-Russia trade in local currencies accelerated so much that purchases for agriculture, pharmaceuticals and energy without dollars will seemingly become a reality. The Reserve Bank of India reportedly met with officials from Russian banks VTB, Sberbank and Gazprombank so that a rupee-ruble trade mechanism could be established.

M. K. Bhadrakumar, an Indian columnist and former diplomat, highlighted that 60-70% of weaponry for India’s armed forces is of Russian origin, and that New Delhi’s capitulation to Western demands will “render a crippling blow to India’s defence preparedness.”

“By the colour of our skin, our religion, our culture, our geography, our political economy, we will never be accepted by the West as ‘one of us’. Do not be mesmerised by promises of equal partnerships […] Fundamentally, what the Western powers are planning is a form of neo-colonialism borne out of the desperate need to arrest the decline of their economies through a massive transfer of wealth from the rest of the world inhabited by 88% of mankind — Asia,” he added.

As Western condemnation against India intensifies, discussions of neo-colonialism is re-entering Indian discourse. Because India suffered from centuries of colonial rule, which saw an astronomical $45 trillion plundered by the British alone between 1765 to 1938 (almost 9 times the current combined GDP of Britain and India), the country never wants to be colonized again, including in the form of 21st century neo-colonialism.

Although the US has found India as an ally to oppose China, pushing the South Asian country to abandon all its interests and carefully crafted foreign policy to serve exclusively the interests of the West, whilst lambasting India for not adopting Western positions in issues that New Delhi has no business being involved in, will only strengthen the discourse of Western attempts of neo-colonialism against India.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from thewire.in

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***

Throughout his extraordinarily long political career, Joe Biden has had a well-deserved reputation for making verbal gaffes. In 2018, he even admitted that he was “a gaffe machine.” That problem has worsened since he became president, especially with respect to foreign affairs. Biden has made several statements that suggested important shifts in U.S. policy – apparently without meaning to do so. His subordinates then scramble to assure other countries and the news media that Washington’s policy on that particular issue remains unchanged.

Such incidents have created needless confusion and raised serious questions about the president’s competence. His latest comments while visiting US troops stationed in Poland are the most inept to date. Biden told troops from the 82^nd Airborne Division that regular citizens in Ukraine were “stepping up” in the face of the Russian assault. “And you’re going to see when you’re there. And you – some – some of you have been there. You’re going to see – you’re going to see women, young people standing – standing the middle of – in front of a damn tank, just saying, ‘I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground.’”

Those remarks seemed to contradict the president’s previous, unequivocal statements that US forces would not be used to defend Ukraine. When reporters asked about Biden’s latest comments, the White House assured them that Washington’s stance remained the same. “The president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position,” a White House spokesperson stated.

This episode continues a frequent pattern in which Biden makes a highly controversial statement that his aides then desperately try to walk back. For example, he seemed to commit major gaffes not once, but twice, with respect to US policy toward Taiwan.

During a CNN town hall session in October 2021, the president was asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan from an attack by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Biden responded unhesitatingly: “Yes, we have a commitment.” He flatly misstated what US policy has been since Washington established formal diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1979 and adopted the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) to govern economic and cultural ties with Taiwan.

The TRA commits the United States only to sell Taiwan “defensive” weapons and to regard any PRC attack on the island as a serious “breach of the peace” in East Asia. It emphatically did not obligate the United States to defend Taiwan with its own military forces.

Members of the administration spent the next several days scrambling to “clarify” Biden’s comment. “He wasn’t announcing a change in policy nor have we changed our policy,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “We are guided by the Taiwan Relations Act.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also insisted that the United States remained committed to a “one-China” policy and the provisions of the TRA.

However, it was not the first time that Biden made comments misstating long-standing, official US policy on the Taiwan issue. During an August 2021 interview with ABC News, host George Stephanopoulos asked the president if Washington’s allies could still rely on US protection in light of the disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden responded: “We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond.” The same alliance obligation existed with respect to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, he added.

Insisting that Washington’s vague security relationship with Taiwan is the same as the explicit US defense obligations specified in the North Atlantic Treaty and the bilateral treaties with Japan and South Korea was wildly inaccurate. On that occasion, as with the October episode, Biden’s advisers worked to repair the damage the president’s indiscreet statement had caused. The next day, US officials rushed to assure Beijing that US policy regarding Taiwan had not changed, despite Biden’s comment suggesting the contrary.

The gaffes about Taiwan policy were bad enough, but Biden’s verbal incontinence in Poland could lead to a catastrophe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a response to the prospect that Ukraine might someday be invited to join NATO. Vladimir Putin had warned on several occasions that such a move by the United States and its allies would cross a red line threatening Russia’s security. Moreover, the Kremlin had been increasingly concerned not only by the possibility of Kyiv’s formal inclusion in NATO, but by evidence of a mounting military partnership between the United States and Ukraine.

Moscow already is fuming about the shipments of NATO weaponry flowing into Ukraine in the midst of the ongoing war. Russian officials have warned that convoys of such weapons are legitimate targets. The Kremlin also is watching nervously as hawks in the West lobby recklessly for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and Putin already put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. One hopes that Russian leaders understand that Biden is a gaffe-prone individual, and his casual comment about US troops going to Ukraine should not be taken seriously. If they did conclude that Washington’s policy was about to become even more confrontational than it is now, the consequences could be horrific.

Under less grave circumstances, Biden’s frequent verbal blunders might induce head shaking or even laughter. Given the alarming situation in Europe and the growing tensions between the United States and Russia, though, his loose tongue is no laughing matter.

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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 12 books and more than 950 articles on international affairs.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

Workers at the Galileo Galilei Airport in Pisa — a civilian airport — reported March 12 that they had been involved in the loading of a cargo plane with what was alleged to be humanitarian aid destined for Ukraine. The aid turned out to be arms and ammunition destined for the troops of the Zelensky regime.

Having learned the real content of the shipment, the workers refused to complete the loading operations and informed their rank and file union, Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), which publicly denounced the incident.

“From the Cargo Village located at the civilian airport, ‘humanitarian’ flights take off. These are supposed to be filled with food, provisions, medicines and anything else useful for the Ukrainian people tormented by weeks of bombing and fighting. But it’s not like that: When they showed up under the plane, the workers in charge of loading were faced with boxes full of various types of weapons, ammunition, explosives,” says the USB statement. And further: “We strongly denounce this real fraud, which cynically uses the ‘humanitarian’ cover to continue to fuel the war in Ukraine.”

Role of Italian regime

The Italian government is on the front line in the proxy war fought on Ukrainian territory by the Russian army against the troops of the Zelensky government, which had been armed, trained and financed for almost a decade by the U.S. and NATO.

Image on the right: People protest in Pisa, Italy, March 19 against the Italian government’s decision to send weapons to Ukraine’s government under the guise of humanitarian cargo. Banner reads ‘From Tuscany, bridges of peace, not flights of war!’

Italy’s role has reached the point where the country is being increasingly excluded from the initiatives of the French-German axis that leads the European Union. These initiatives have aimed at trying to stem the crisis, recently materialized in a high-level discussion among French President Emmanuel Macron (current president of the EU Council), German Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Media propaganda has pounded away, pushing an increasingly active Italian commitment in support of the Ukraine regime in Kiev. Leaders of Italy’s executive, headed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, have ranted against Moscow.

The country is being led by the hand to a paroxysm of Russophobia completely alien to its traditions and to the common sense of the population.

An impressive barrage of distorted information, hypocritical rhetoric on human rights and anathema to unified networks against the execrable demon of “pacifism” is lavished to legitimize sending weapons to the war theater. Doing this is a dangerous step towards generalizing and worsening a crisis that threatens to drag the continent and the whole world into the abyss.

The episode at Pisa airport shows that the attempt to impose pro-war sentiments on the Italian people is meeting resistance, despite the concerted effort almost all parties represented in Parliament have been making. In recent weeks, the media has conducted a hostile campaign against the main Italian trade union, the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) and against the National Association of Partisans of Italy (ANPI).

The ANPI is “guilty,” along with many other popular organizations, of refusing to conform to the single voice of war propaganda. While they oppose the “special military operation” ordered by Putin, they also oppose sending weapons to the Ukrainian army and, in the case of ANPI, against the expansion of NATO to the east.

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***

The globalist cabal wants to monopolize health systems worldwide, and a stealth attack is already underway in the form of an international pandemic treaty, proposed by the World Health Organization

The treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and would erode democracy everywhere. Not only would the treaty empower the WHO to mandate COVID jabs and vaccine passports globally, it could potentially also expand the WHO’s power to dictate all health care policy worldwide

The treaty would also give the WHO the power to censor health information worldwide. This would be disastrous, as the WHO has a long history of corruption and health policy failures that are intrinsically linked to conflicts of interest

When people are harmed by the WHO’s health policies, there’s no accountability because the WHO has diplomatic immunity

Bill Gates, the second largest funder of the WHO, has also been funding pandemic exercises, including Event 201 and the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s exercise on international response to deliberate biological events. This scenario involved a deliberate release of a genetically engineered bioweapon — a pneumonic plague — for which there is no available treatment. Both exercises were held in 2019

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The globalist cabal wants to monopolize health systems worldwide, and a stealth attack is already underway in the form of an international pandemic treaty.¹ The negotiations for this treaty began March 3, 2022.² As reported by The Pulse (video above):

“Coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization is proposing a new pandemic treaty they’re hoping will be accepted by enough member countries to become a reality by 2024.”

According to Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “me-first” approaches “stymie the global solidarity needed” to address global threats. His solution? Give the WHO all the power.

Over the past two years, in the name of keeping everyone “safe” from infection, the globalists have justified unprecedented attacks on democracy, civil liberties and personal freedoms, including the right to choose your own medical treatment. Now, the WHO wants to make its pandemic leadership permanent, and to extend it into the health care systems of every nation.

Treaty Threatens National Sovereignty

As noted by The Pulse, “there are a number of things in the treaty that the people of the world need to consider before going down this path.” In the featured video, The Pulse’s Joe Martino interviews Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, a member of the steering committee of the World Council for Health, who points out that the treaty gives the WHO:

“… an inordinate amount of power to make decisions in sovereign countries as to how people live and how they deal with pandemics, from lockdowns to mandates over treatment.”

In short, it would create a one-size-fits-all approach to disease, without regard for all the varying situations found in individual countries, and this is something we already know doesn’t work. The treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and would erode democracy everywhere.

At the same time, it would cost each member country millions of dollars to participate in this process. As explained by Mohamed, the treaty will need to go through a voting process at the World Health Assembly in 2023. They need a majority for it to pass and, if passed, all member countries will be bound by it.

The Treaty Is ‘Invalid and Unlawful’

Another concern raised by Mohamed is that many countries don’t even know about this treaty as of yet, and it’s possible that the WHO might try to push for earlier implementation than 2024 — all without public participation or input. “It is undemocratic, it is unconstitutional and therefore it makes the treaty invalid and unlawful,” she says.

She also highlights the WHO’s history of corruption and many health policy failures, which are “intrinsically linked to conflicts of interest.” In an open letter on the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the World Council for Health writes, in part:³

“The proposed WHO agreement is unnecessary, and is a threat to sovereignty and inalienable rights. It increases the WHO’s suffocating power to declare unjustified pandemics, impose dehumanizing lockdowns, and enforce expensive, unsafe, and ineffective treatments against the will of the people.

The WCH [World Council for Health] believes that the people have a right to participate in any agreement that affects their lives, livelihoods, and well-being.

However, the WHO has not engaged in a process of public participation, which is evidence that its priority is capturing more power for itself and its corporate accomplices, than serving the interests of the people. Without an unbiased democratic process, any agreement by the WHO, acting via the United Nations, will be unlawful, illegitimate, and invalid.

Historically, the WHO leadership has failed the people. Among many examples, it approved the injurious H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine for a controversially declared pandemic.

Equally, the WHO failed during the COVID-19 chapter as it encouraged lockdowns, suppressed early preventive treatments, and recommended product interventions that have proven to be neither safe nor effective.

The WHO cannot be allowed to control the world’s health agenda, nor enforce biosurveillance. While it receives funding from public sources belonging to the people, it is caught in a perpetual conflict of interest because it also receives substantial funding from private interests that use their contributions to influence and profit from WHO decisions and mandates.

For example, the Gates Foundation and the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine promotion alliance, contribute over $1 billion a year.”

Another concern is the fact that when people are harmed by the WHO’s health policies, there’s no accountability because the WHO has diplomatic immunity. According to Mohamed, “the WHO should not be making ANY decisions about world health in the future.”

The Ultimate Power Grab

As noted by Martino, while the treaty claims to be focused on pandemic planning and responses, there’s serious concern that it could be expanded to cover other areas of health as well. Mohamed agrees, saying that it could potentially be expanded, using the WHO’s constitution as the basis for that expansion. Article 2 of the WHO’s constitution states:

“In order to achieve its objective, the functions of the Organization shall be: a) to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work … k) to propose conventions, agreements and regulations, and make recommendations with respect to international health matters …

s) to establish and revise as necessary international nomenclatures of diseases, of causes of death and of public health practices … v) generally to take all necessary action to attain the objective of the Organization.”

Its power is already very significant, and the goal to turn the WHO into a global health dictatorship is virtually written into its constitution. Also, remember that the WHO removed the specificity of mass casualties from the definition of a pandemic, so now a pandemic can be just about any disease that occurs in multiple countries. Even obesity could theoretically qualify. So, the WHO could claim power over health care systems in any number of ways, given the chance.

Treaty Would Grant WHO Power to Mandate Vaccine Passports

While most of the world is more than ready to move on, the WHO seems unwilling to let go. A WHO official recently told the Ottawa Citizen that the COVID pandemic is still “far from over.”⁴

The reason for this reluctance to declare the pandemic over is likely because the WHO hopes to gain the power to mandate vaccine passports and COVID jabs worldwide. It’s already working on the creation of a global vaccine passport/digital identity program. As reported by WEBLYF:⁵

“Under the guise of a ‘trust network,’ another initiative called Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) is also gaining momentum.

Partnering with big tech companies, big corporations, and big universities, VCI describes itself as ‘a voluntary coalition of public and private organizations committed to empowering individuals with access to verifiable clinical information including a trustworthy and verifiable copy of their vaccination records in digital or paper form using open, interoperable standards.’

VCI’s SMART Health Cards, as reported by Off-Guardian, are already implemented by ‘25 states in America, plus Puerto Rico and DC, and have become the US’s de-facto national passport.’ As explained in the article:

‘The US government, unlike many European countries, has not issued their own official vaccine passport, knowing such a move would rankle with the more Libertarian-leaning US public, not to mention get tangled in the question of state vs federal law.

The SMART cards allow them to sidestep this issue. They are technically only implemented by each state individually via agreements with VCI, which is technically a private entity. However, since the SMART cards are indirectly funded by the US government, their implementation across every state makes them a national standard in all but name.’”

United Tribes of New Zealand Denounce the WHO Treaty

As noted by NZDSOS,⁶ “Is this the way we want to live our lives? Constantly at the behest of shadowy individuals and corporations who monitor our every move and determine what we can and can’t do, down to buying food?”

In a formal letter of notification to the WHO and the Executive Board of the World Health Assembly, the government of Aotearoa Nu Tireni in New Zealand strongly denounced this and any other treaty that challenges national sovereignty:⁷

“… you are thereby formally notified that the Wakaminenga Māorigovernment of Aotearoa Nu Tireni/New Zealand does not consent in any shape of form to any type of international pandemic treaty under the WHO or its assembly. Any such construct shall be void ab initio.

We, as United Tribes and Hereditary Chiefs, represent the only current legitimate government in New Zealand. The current NZ government represented by Jacinda Ardern is an illegitimate government because it is a corporation (SEC CIK #0000216105) listed on the US Security & Exchange Commission as Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand.^8,9

In accordance with the Clearfield Trust Doctrine, a corporation does not have any implied right to govern a sovereign people. We hereby register our vote of no confidence in the actions or authority of the corporation unlawfully posing as a government in our territory.

This unlawful Ardern government and its ministers stand charged by the Nga Tikanga Māori Law Society and the Wakaminenga Maori Government of Nu Tireni with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity related to their wilful disregard for the suffering and loss of life resulting from their unlawful response to the engineered bioweapon known as COVID-19 and the unlawful forced administration of a poison to our people and forced medical experimentation.

Also charged with serious crimes related to a pandemic response, the WHO and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have no standing or authority to form any binding agreement related to a pandemic response, in any jurisdiction and we command that these attempts shall cease and desist immediately pending the outcome of these charges under Rome statutes 6, 7 and 8, filed in the international Criminal Court 6 December 2021 …

You are hereby directed to cease and desist discussions or negotiations with the unlawful Arden Government, a NZ Corporation, known as Her Majesty Queen in Right of New Zealand. The Wakaminenga Maori Government of Aotearoa Nu Tireni reserves the right to discuss/negotiate with any international partner(s) of its choice, including the World Council for Health (WCH).”

Treaty Would Create Global Censorship of Health Information

The treaty would also give the WHO the power to censor health information worldwide. On the European Council’s web page discussing the pandemic treaty, under the headline “Restoring Trust in the International Health System,” it states:¹⁰

“The agreement … will set the foundation for better communication and information to citizens. Misinformation threatens public trust and risks undermining public health responses. To redeem citizen trust, concrete measures should be foreseen to improve the flow of reliable and accurate information as well as to tackle misinformation globally.”

In other words, under this treaty, we can expect even greater censorship than what we’ve experienced so far. Tech companies have already proven where their allegiance lies, and it’s not with the public.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have deplatformed just about everyone who posts health information that runs counter to what the WHO is saying, real-world data and verifiable facts be damned. Financial platforms have also banned people for the same reason. Now imagine there being a binding international law that makes all that censorship mandatory.

Their Playbook Was Revealed in 2019

Officially, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest funder of the WHO, second only to the U.S. government,¹¹ but the combined contributions from the Gates Foundation and GAVI made Gates the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO as of 2018.¹²

Gates has also been funding pandemic exercises, including Event 201,¹³ held October 18, 2019, which gained notoriety for its extraordinary accurate “predictions” of the COVID pandemic mere months before it was declared. Other co-sponsors included the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

However, earlier that year, February 14, 2019, Gates also funded the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) pandemic exercise for senior global leaders on international response to deliberate biological events, which took place in Munich, Germany.^14,15

NTI was founded to assess and reduce threats associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons,¹⁶ but they’ve since expanded to include biological threats.¹⁷ Gates has also given grants to the NTI for vaccine development in relation to biological threats.¹⁸

While Event 201 featured a fictional coronavirus outbreak, the NTI exercise involved response to “deliberate, high consequence biological events.” In other words, a deliberate release of a genetically engineered bioweapon — in this case a pneumonic plague — for which there is no available treatment. This exercise scenario was the first of its kind. The video above features a summary of the four-phase exercise.

Curiously, in mid-November 2019, The Guardian, The New York Times,¹⁹ The Washington Post²⁰ and others reported that two people in China had in fact been diagnosed with pneumonic plague.²¹

In addition to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NTI event was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the “philanthropic arm” of GlaxoSmithKline and an investor in Vaccitech, which owns the patents to AstraZeneca’s COVID jab.²² Both Gates and Wellcome are part of the technocratic globalist network that is pushing The Great Reset forward.

Another sponsor was Georgetown University,²³ which also curated the World Economic Forum’s library of COVID-19 treatments (primarily focused on antivirals and COVID gene transfer injections).²⁴

Curation was done by three Georgetown University professors and Rebecca Katz, director of the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security.²⁵ Katz is also listed as an author on the NTI paper,²⁶ “A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event,” published June 2019, in which they review the conclusions reached from that February 2019 exercise.

‘A Spreading Plague’

Together, these two pandemic exercises — both of which were sponsored by Gates — form a playbook for how to set up a biological attack and then hide the truth from the world so that you can not only profit from it in the short term but also centralize power, permanently transfer wealth and change the social and financial order to your own liking in the process.

Not surprisingly, a number of Event 201 participants also partook in the NTI’s exercise,²⁷ and hold positions within technocratic institutions like Wellcome, the WHO and the World Economic Forum.

Event 201, in particular, focused not on finding remedies and saving lives, but how to control “misinformation.” A vast majority of that exercise centered around the creation of effective propaganda and censorship. Similarly, “A Spreading Plague” also includes the recommendation to enlist private companies as “assets” to carry out the globalists bidding:²⁸

“In 2019 and 2020, international organizations, including the WHO, UNODA [United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs], and the World Economic Forum, should convene private sector companies to identify gaps and concrete next steps to strengthen the capability of companies to provide assets to assist with international response for deliberate biological attacks and other high-consequence biological events.”

In the NTI scenario — in which a fictional country called Carta is found to have engineered and released a biological weapon into the neighboring country of Vestia — we also see curious parallels to current-day accusations by Russia, which claims biological weapons research was being conducted in the Ukraine, necessitating defensive action.

All in all, the NTI tabletop exercise only adds to the evidence pile that suggests the COVID pandemic was premeditated and preplanned for financial and geopolitical purposes. It was a power grab.

The pandemic treaty with the WHO is precisely what the World Economic Forum and its allies now need, as it will put the technocratic cabal firmly in charge of the biosecurity of the whole world, and empower them to implement the rest of The Great Reset agenda.

You can learn more about The Great Reset on the World Economic Forum’s website^29,30 and in Klaus Schwab’s book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”³¹ (but you might want to review the overwhelmingly negative comments on Amazon first).

As noted in a July 21, 2020, World Economic Forum article,³² the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns “has the potential to hobble global prosperity for generations to come.” The answer, according to the World Economic Forum, is for countries to make sure the economic system is “built back better.”

Make no mistake, this catchy slogan is part and parcel of the Great Reset plan and cannot be separated from it, no matter how altruistic it may sound. Part of the “building back better” is to shift the financial system over to an all-digital centrally controlled currency system that is tied to a vaccine passport and/or digital identity system.

Together, they will form a pervasive system of social control, as desired behaviors can be incentivized and undesired ones discouraged through loss of various “privileges,” including access to your own finances. Digital currency can even be programmed by the issuer so that it can only be used for certain types of purchases or expenses.

While it’s going to be very difficult to stop this runaway train that is The Great Reset, part of our defense is to oppose and prevent the WHO’s pandemic treaty from becoming reality, as we’ll lose our national sovereignty if it does.

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Notes

¹ Reuters November 26, 2021

^2, 10 European Council, Treaty on Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness

³ World Council for Health Open Letter March 2022

⁴ Ottawa Citizen March 18, 2022

⁵ Weblyf March 2022

^6, 7 NZDSOS March 18, 2022

⁸ US Security & Exchange Commission as Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand

⁹ SEC CIK #0000216105

¹¹ Swiss Info May 10, 2021

¹² The Defender September 7, 2021

¹³ Center for Health Security Event 201

¹⁴ NTI February 14, 2019

¹⁵ NTI June 13, 2019

¹⁶ NTI Nuclear Threats

¹⁷ NTI Biological Threats

¹⁸ Gates Foundation National Threat Initiative

¹⁹ New York Times November 13, 2019

²⁰ Washington Post November 13, 2019

²¹ The Guardian November 13, 2019

²² The Corbett Report February 24, 2021

²³ Georgetown University Tabletop Exercise on Int’l Response to Deliberate Biological Events

^24, 25 WEF COVID-19 Treatments Curated by Georgetown University

²⁶ A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event June 2019

²⁷ A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event June 2019, List of Participants Page 8

²⁸ A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event June 2019, Page 17

²⁹ WEF The Great Reset

³⁰ WEF The Great Reset Highlights

³¹ COVID-19: The Great Reset (PDF)

³² World Economic Forum July 21, 2020

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One of the attorneys assisting Reiner Fuelmich in proving world leaders have committed crimes against humanity in the name of Covid-19, has been arrested in France on suspicion of terrorism and treason.

Virginie de Araujo Recchia, a French attorney living in France who is participating in the work of the Citizen Jury with Reiner Fuellmich, was arrested in her home at dawn on March 22nd in front of her children. The arrest comes three weeks before ahead of the French presidential elections.

Fuellmich’s team have allegedly been informed the charges involve counterterrorism and possibly treason, and relate to the passionate work she does for the French people as well as the world, in fighting to restore our God-given rights.

At the beginning of the year, Virginie de Araujo Recchia, in partnership with her colleague Jean-Pierre Joseph, and two other jurists, filed a complaint before the head of the investigating judges on behalf of the associations BonSens.org, AIMSIB and the Collectif des Maires Résistants (Collective of Resistant Mayors) against the parliamentarians who validated a law on mandatory Covid-19 vaccination in August 2021.

This law forced millions of professionals to undergo experimental gene therapy or risk losing their jobs.

According to sources close to the case, she was working on a complaint against political parties and the actions of some of their members.

She had just made public her report entitled “Dictatorship 2020” accusing the government of state terrorism, attacking the fundamental interests of the nation and crimes against humanity.

This document was intended to form the basis for a criminal prosecution against members of the government…

Download the report here.

This flagrant violation of rights demonstrates there is no more freedom of speech- and proves that if we speak out, as Virginie Araujo-Recchia has done, that we will be persecuted.

Even those who disagree with Virginie de Araujo Recchia’s message should know that their rights to free speech are threatened by such action. Just because you may go along with the “official” narrative now does not mean at some point you won’t disagree with it.

What happens then, if you have not moved to help another faced with this? You know this is fundamentally wrong, and against natural law.

This is a time for unification and standing up. We cannot continue to allow this tyranny to escalate. When Shakespeare said in King Henry VI “First, kill all the lawyers”… he was referring to the first step in destabilizing a society. For a society cannot be a peaceful society if it does not follow the Rule of Law or its Constitutions of God-given liberties. None of us is safe when tyranny rules.

The first casualty of war, as they say, is the truth. The next may be the lawyers and advocates, and then anyone else. Don’t stand by and let an arrest of a freedom loving patriot go unpunished or unheard. Please pray for her speedy release, her safety, and then flood the officials involved in this with calls and emails to protest this travesty.

If you don’t, this could just be the first in a wave of purges in the post-democracies of continental Western Europe.

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Featured image is from The Expose

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A bipartisan group of 68 US senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, calling on the Biden administration to lead an effort to end a United Nations commission that is probing alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

The lawmakers, led by Democratic Senator Ben Cardin and Republican Rob Portman, said that the investigation, which was announced following Israel’s bombing of Gaza last May, is a part of “continuing bias against Israel” and is taking up a “disproportionate use of resources in an ongoing campaign to disparage, discredit and denounce Israel”.

It follows a similar effort made by House lawmakers in January.

“An important step in this regard would be to redirect the wasteful use of funds and personnel on excessive devotion to disparaging Israel to allow the UN Human Rights Council to fairly promote human rights around the world,” said the letter sent on Monday.

“We write to urge you to prioritize reversing the UN Human Rights Council’s discriminatory and unwarranted treatment of Israel by leading a multinational effort in the Council and in the UN to end the permanent Commission of Inquiry on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.”

Last year, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) agreed to launch an investigation with a broad mandate to probe all alleged violations Israel had committed against Palestinians following its May offensive on Gaza, which killed 260 Palestinians, including 66 children, according to the UN.

The investigators, who have been tasked with trying to identify those responsible for violations and ensure they are held accountable, are due to present their first report in June.

The senators went on to write that the commission “will also have a carte blanche mandate – in perpetuity – to examine any period in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about violations not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also within Israel’s pre-1967 borders”.

“By unfairly singling out Israel, the UNHRC undermines its credibility to investigate human rights violations around the world,” they continued.

The US rejoined the UNHRC in February 2021 after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the organisation, claiming that it had a bias against Israel. Even after rejoining it, the Biden administration has said the council is “flawed” in its criticism of Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel has stated it will not cooperate with the UN on the investigation, with officials reportedly concerned that the results will say that Israel is an apartheid state.

Several international human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have already labelled Israel as being guilty of apartheid, and a UN special rapporteur already submitted a report with similar conclusions earlier this month.

Despite the increasing number of rights groups labelling Israeli policies as amounting to apartheid, the United States and Israel’s other western allies have refrained from making any such declarations.

The Human Rights Council was founded in 2006 with the aim of “strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights”, and consists of 47 countries elected to three-year terms by the UN General Assembly with quotas allocated to each continent.

It has been criticised for the election of members with poor human rights records. But while pro-Israel lawmakers in the US complain that the council unfairly targets Israel, only a fraction of its resolutions in 2020 focused on the Israeli government.

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Featured image: Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, the Gaza Strip, Palestine, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Nick_ Raille_07 / Shutterstock.com).

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First the CIA tried to block the public from being exposed to its dirty deeds—but now the strategy has shifted to trying to normalize them.

By depicting ugly, degrading, murderous and unspeakable acts as routine, they become accepted as “the way things are done.”

Almost since the very inception of the United States, it has waged covert warfare against target nations, whether by interfering in elections, supporting opposition factions even when they are fascists, bribing government leaders and high officials and—when all of the above fails—staging coup d’états.

For most of its existence, the CIA has been the primary instrument for carrying out these particular black operations, from the Congo to Cambodia. But for a long time it did not want anyone knowing about it, even censoring books by former officers—such as Victor Marchetti’s The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence and Ralph McGehee’s Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA—to remove details of the Agency’s special activities.

The Pentagon has also been deployed as a covert weapon, with figures like Ed Lansdale turning up on both sides of the CIA/DOD divide. Lansdale first helped put down the Marxist Huk rebellion in the Philippines while working for the U.S. Air Force, before hooking up with the CIA in Vietnam and later becoming involved in anti-Cuba operations, including the notorious Operation Northwoods.

An almost totally unrecognized aspect of covert U.S. policy is the role Hollywood has played in propagandizing the U.S. and global public—first to protect the CIA and Department of Defense (DoD) and their black operations, and more recently to promote them. For decades these agencies have worked hand-in-glove with filmmakers to manipulate not only their own public images, but perceptions of America’s role in the world.

Animals from The Farm

Back in the 1950s, when the CIA was interfering everywhere, from Guatemala to Indonesia to Syria, Hollywood helped shield the Agency from the limelight. The Production Code Administration (PCA)—the movie industry’s own self-regulation office—helped keep the CIA’s name out of numerous films. When this failed, the CIA stepped in, removing any references to it from scripts, such as in the Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Spy (1951).

Source: imdb.com

While the Agency, with Hollywood’s help, was staying out of public view, it was subtly promoting the idea of rebellions and coups against left-wing governments.

The 1954 animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm was secretly sponsored by the CIA, which bought the rights from Orwell’s widow before hiring a British production company to produce the film.

Originally published in 1945, Orwell’s book told the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

As recounted in Frances Stonor Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War, the CIA’s oversight led to a crucial change in the script in the film version. The core problem was that at the end of the story it is revealed that the authoritarianism of both the men (the capitalists) and the pigs (the Soviets) is equally corrupt, and that neither offered a way forward for workers and ordinary people.

As Orwell wrote, “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” However, in the CIA-influenced cartoon version, for popular consumption, the ending was changed so it shows the creatures only recognizing the corruption of the pigs, i.e., the Soviets, and then mounting a counter-revolution against them. This pro-revolutionary message—but only when the revolution deposes or fights against a left-wing government—was the first salvo in a battle that has since grown into all-out cultural warfare.

Source: upload.wikimedia.org

Scorpions and Man-Eating Sharks

After the debacle at the Bay of Pigs the CIA could no longer maintain its secret status, and the PCA’s stranglehold over movie content was weakening. This led to the Agency being openly named and discussed in movie scripts, so it started quietly monitoring screenplays for any references to itself.

For example, when it came to Vanished—the first-ever TV mini-series, from 1971—the CIA kept close tabs on the production as well as responses from reviewers. Months before it was broadcast, a memo from the CIA’s General Counsel to then-Director Richard Helms contains a review of the script. It notes how the DCI was referred to in a scene set in the Oval Office, where the President says, “Don’t let that surface charm fool you. He’s a man-eating shark. Of course, he’s our man-eating shark and thoroughly dedicated to his job.”

The CIA did not intervene to try to have this line changed—it appears in the broadcast version—so we can only assume that being characterized as a loyal, dedicated man-eating shark was acceptable to the Agency.

This same dark image of the CIA also features in Scorpio two years later, in which the Agency tries to kill one of its own due to fear of him exposing secrets. Scorpio was so beloved by the CIA that it became the first film to be allowed access to shoot at the Agency’s Langley headquarters, and officials even made up a batch of scorpion badges to hand out to the crew when they arrived. According to director Michael Winner in his autobiography, a “nice CIA lady” who was handing out the badges told him “This will show we’ve got a sense of humor, Mr. Winner!”

Post-Church Committee

However, then came the Church Committee and the revelations that the CIA was staging coups and assassinating people at will, with apparently no oversight. The CIA set up an Office of Public Affairs in the late 1970s to help manage its public image, but essentially withdrew from the entertainment industry until the early 1990s.

In the late ’70s and ’80s, several efforts were made to produce a CIA-themed TV show in the manner of the long-running ABC series The F.B.I., including one backed by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, but they all died due to a lack of interest from the Agency.

Scene from ABC’s long-running The F.B.I. series after which the CIA wanted to model its own. [Source: thefbiepisodeguide.wordpress.com]

Likewise, when the Reagan White House’s Hollywood liaison Joe Holmes reached out to then-Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Bill Casey about supporting an unnamed movie production, the request was also turned down.

A note from CIA Executive Director John McMahon to Casey urged him to reject the request and “keep to the reduced silhouette path.” Casey agreed, and his handwritten note says “James Bond is my favorite anyway.”

The upshot of this is that, while the CIA was conducting two of the largest covert operations of all time—Iran-Contra and Operation Cyclone—it was largely absent from pop culture. Casey’s policy of trying to reinstitute the secrecy the Agency had enjoyed in its early years was working, at least as far as Hollywood was concerned.

Patriot Games and Mission Impossible

Then, things started to shift. In 1991 the CIA granted permission for the makers of the Tom Clancy adaptation Patriot Games to shoot at Langley. The film focused on the exploits of CIA analyst Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) who helps capture Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists.

Subsequently, the CIA set up its own entertainment liaison office modeled on the equivalents at the Pentagon and the FBI. The first major production it worked on was Mission: Impossible (1996), which was filmed at Langley, and where a dialogue was altered at the CIA’s urging in order to denigrate the Church Committee for allegedly trying to destroy the Agency.

Source: imdb.com

During an insert shot where a senator is being interviewed about the CIA on TV, the script originally had the senator saying,

“I’ll go you one further. I say the CIA and all its shadow organizations have become irrelevant at best and unconstitutional at worst.  It’s time we throw a little light on the whole concept of the Pentagon’s ‘black budget.’ These covert agency subgroups have confidential funding, they report to no one—who are these people?! We were living in a democracy the last time I checked.”

This scene was diluted to remove these lines, and in the finished film the insert shot instead has the interviewer say, “Senator, it sounds as if you want to lead the kind of charge – that Senator Church led in the 70’s, and destroy the U.S.’ intelligence capability.” The senator simply responds, “I want to know who they are and how they’re spending the taxpayers’ money.  We were living in a democracy the last time I checked.”

Instead of the dialogue being a pointed critique of the CIA and Pentagon’s secret, black operations, it became a dig at the Church Committee, denoting anyone who tries to provide oversight of the CIA as a threat to the nation.

The Pentagon Censors Black Operations in Hollywood Scripts

The Pentagon has also shaped and censored movies to cover up for black operations it would rather the public at large not know about. A database on its work with Hollywood shows how the CIA rejected Seven Days in May (1962), “in light of story of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff planning a coup because the president signed a disarmament treaty.” A few years later, the CIA pushed John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) to delete references to over-the-border raids into Laos.

Other films were not so lucky. In 1986 the producers of The Best Ranger approached the DOD for help, but were turned down “because the U.S. military becomes involved in a fictional military attempt on President Aquino’s life and a take-over of the government of the republic of the Philippines.” The film was never made.

Similarly, Counter Measures—a high-cast movie from the 1990s about a weapons-smuggling conspiracy on board a U.S. aircraft carrier—was turned down because the DOD saw “no reason to denigrate the White House or remind the public of the Iran-Contra affair.” It too was never made.

Iron Man to the Rescue in Afghanistan

Since the turn of the 21^st century and the arrival of the information age, the strategy appears to have changed. These days it is easy enough for anyone to simply search “CIA coup d’états” and find no end of open-source material, even Agency documents describing in detail how, for example, it used false-flag “sham bombings” during the coup in Iran in 1953.

This shifting of the outer limits of public knowledge means that simply denying that these sorts of operations take place is no longer a viable option, and so censoring them out of movie and TV scripts accomplishes very little. Instead, the CIA and DOD have switched gears and are now trying to normalize these actions, even using superhero movies to try to make them seem cool.

Iron Man (2008) got the ball rolling. An early script shows that the intention was to make a film castigating the military-industrial complex, with Tony rebelling against his father, a major weapons manufacturer. This version was due to go into production in 2005, but the project died before being resurrected as a vehicle to launch Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.

While the original script removed Tony’s Vietnam-era origin story—where he is kidnapped by Vietnamese soldiers and forced to make weapons for them—the newly updated version, with full Pentagon support, simply updated this to Afghanistan. Tony is shown in his full military-industrial glory demonstrating incredibly destructive weapons.

When Tony is kidnapped, the terrorist leader shows off his vast collection of modern weaponry, leading Tony to ask where he got them from. As the film’s director Jon Favreau admitted during an unofficial live commentary for the movie, the leader’s response was “Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush”—a reference to how U.S. foreign policy had resulted in vast quantities of weapons flooding into the region over recent decades. This was removed from the film.

With lines like this nixed from the movie, Iron Man spends most of the second act of the film acting as a hi-tech adjunct to the U.S. military, conducting violent covert operations in Afghanistan while being answerable to no-one. The implication is that being American and having access to high technologies gives one extra-legal rights to do almost anything.

At the same time as Iron Man was filming scenes at Edwards Air Force Base, the actual U.S. military’s Task Force 373 was in action in Afghanistan. In June 2007, armed with HIMARS—High Mobility Rocket Systems, not unlike those on the Iron Man set—they set out to assassinate Abu Laith al-Libi. They killed thirteen people—six that they claim were Taliban fighters, and seven innocent children.

The Suicide Squad Invades Latin America

The most recent collaboration between the Pentagon and the superhero genre was James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021). The original screenwriter, Adam Cozad, went on an Air Force-arranged tour of U.S. Space Command in the summer of 2017.

Source: medium.com

Once Cozad was replaced by Gunn he wrote a new script and, as soon as it was completed, the DOD “began a conversation with Warner Brothers Studios exploring possible DOD support of an upcoming feature film, a sequel to the 2016 film ‘Suicide Squad.’” Documents from the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison office show that “Producers request the use of CV-22 aircraft. General script notes have been provided to the producers.”

The CV-22 (also known as ‘the Transformer’ as it converts from a helicopter into a plane in mid-air) appears a few minutes into the film. It flies several small-time superheroes into the fictional Latin American nation of Corto Maltese where they are trying to overthrow the new government, which is considered a threat to U.S. interests. The backstory, as explained in The Suicide Squad, is that the previous government was a dictatorship but was U.S.-friendly, whereas the new government is not.

CV-22 featured in The Suicide Squad (2021). [Source: spyculture.com]

Combined with the first main action sequence—an amphibious assault whereby the low-grade superhero team is ambushed by Corto Maltese government forces—this storyline is clearly drawn from U.S. relations with Cuba.

A right-wing, U.S.-friendly dictator was deposed during the Cuban revolution and replaced by a more radical, left-wing government. The U.S. then set about destabilizing and trying to overthrow that government and assassinate its leader, including a failed amphibious assault at the Bay of Pigs.

In The Suicide Squad, the Corto Maltese radicals overthrow the government in bloody fashion—machine-gunning a room full of high officials and military brass—before appearing on TV talking about free and fair elections. Gunn’s film does not just promote this sort of covert action by the U.S., it rubs the audience’s faces in the great lie that the U.S. does these things in furtherance of democracy.

Scene from The Suicide Squad (2021). [Source: denofgeek.com]

Interrogating The Interview

Yet another government-supported production that promotes U.S. covert interventions is The Interview (2014), a comedy in part inspired by Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea in 2013. The story revolves around two TV stars who are invited to North Korea to interview Kim Jong-un, and are subsequently recruited by the CIA to attempt an assassination of Kim.

You could be forgiven for suspecting that a story about the CIA working with the entertainment industry in a covert capacity was quietly supported and encouraged by the CIA.

In an interview the writer/producer and star Seth Rogen said, “We made relationships with certain people who work in the government as consultants, who I’m convinced are in the CIA.” He elaborated, explaining that, when Kim disappeared for a week, he emailed one of the consultants who reassured him that Kim was having ankle surgery and “would be back in a couple of weeks.” Sure enough, Kim was back in the public eye two weeks later.

The North Korean government labeled the film an “act of war” and Sony Pictures, which had produced it, was hacked and thousands of internal documents were leaked online. These showed that senior Sony executives had discussed the film with the State Department, even showing it cuts of the movie.

Furthermore, according to leaked emails, during a press “visit the set” event, someone let slip that a “former CIA agent and someone who used to work for Hillary Clinton looked at the script.” One email exchange between executives Marisa Liston and Keith Weaver highlights concerns about this slip, but as Weaver put it, “Depending on how this comes up, this can go in any number of directions in terms of how it’s interpreted.”

Concerned about the film’s potential political impact, producers Rogen and Evan Goldberg reached out to Rich Klein of McLarty Media, to whom internal CIA documents refer as a “long time contact” of Langley’s Office of Public Affairs.

Months later, on the day before The Interview was released, Klein wrote an editorial in support of the film, calling it a “subversive and damn funny movie” and suggesting that, “if copies are pirated into North Korea, it is a very real challenge to the ruling regime’s legitimacy.”

Klein’s prediction proved prophetic: A few months after the film was released, South Korean activists started sending huge numbers of balloons into North Korea carrying tens of thousands of USB sticks and DVDs containing copies of The Interview.

This was before the film was available on DVD in many countries (including the UK), but none of the media coverage of the event addressed the large-scale copyright infringement inherent in this “activism.”

This is virtually identical to CIA efforts during the Cold War when balloons were used to drop millions of leaflets, copies of books and even terrorism training manuals to populations in Soviet republics or countries with left-wing governments.

It appears that the CIA not only softly helped to make The Interview but was also involved in using it as a weapon of psychological warfare against the North Korean government. Whether this was effective is unclear due to the near-total absence of reporting from inside North Korea.

Jack’s Back, and He’s Overthrowing the Venezuelan Government

Perhaps the most astonishingly blunt PR effort on behalf of the CIA and DOD’s black operations is Amazon’s Jack Ryan, a TV reboot of the Clancy franchise. Written by a former Marine, Jack Ryan has benefited from assistance from the CIA, the DOD, and the U.S. Coast Guard, which is both an adjunct of the U.S. Navy and a component of the Department of Homeland Security.

The DOD actually rejected season one after reading scripts for the first few episodes. A document from the summer of 2017 says they were “very well-written, ‘page-turners,’ but hopeless for DOD.” It seems that the depiction of a drunken, traumatized drone pilot gambling and cavorting in Las Vegas, and U.S. soldiers paying off Yemenis for the bodies of jihadis targeted in drone strikes was a bit rich for the Pentagon’s blood.

However, the episodes ultimately aired and the finished series was deemed acceptable, and heavily promoted by the U.S. military, with hundreds of uniformed servicemen attending the premiere aboard a U.S. battleship in San Pedro, near Los Angeles, during “LA Fleet Week.”

Season two of Jack Ryan shifted focus from the Middle East and the War on Terror to Russia and Venezuela. The opening episode sees Jack go down to Venezuela in search of supposed Russian nukes that had been smuggled into the country. His convoy is ambushed in a scene that is creepily reminiscent of a scene in Clear and Present Danger (1994) which, like Jack Ryan season two, was supported by the CIA and DOD.

Jack Ryan vs. Clear and Present Danger

A comparison between these two Clancy adaptations, produced more than 20 years apart, illustrates the shift in approach within the entertainment liaison offices.

Clear and Present Danger centers around the U.S. running black operations in Colombia to try to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.—a reversal of the Iran-Contra scandal whereby the CIA was colluding with major drug traffickers in order to raise money to support the Contras in Nicaragua.

An elite special forces squad is sent into Colombia to take on the drug cartel directly, in the form of sabotage and assassinations. Early versions of the script had the President, the National Security Adviser and senior CIA officials all conspiring to run this covert operation, but this proved problematic for the military’s PR staff.

Files on the film show that the first approach from the producer was in 1991, but a U.S. Army memo reviewing the script records a fairly critical response, saying, “My real difficulty is the way our soldiers are ‘shanghaied’ into a black—superblack operation. On a larger scale, I do not see how we can support unless DOD—with the concurrence of State, CIA, Justice and the White House—agrees to support.”

The filmmakers returned in 1993 but many of the same problems remained, with the Joint Staff objecting, “These are portrayed as unilateral U.S. actions, not coordinated with the governments of the countries in which the actions take place. Latin American countries are extremely sensitive to any violations of their sovereignty.”

If only the U.S. government were as concerned with the sovereignty of Latin American countries in real life as it is in the movies.

As a result, there were many months of negotiations with the DOD, and including representations from the CIA, White House, State Department, Justice Department, FBI and others, before support was granted.

The size of the conspiracy was reduced, to make it the result of a handful of bad actors rather than outright U.S. foreign policy. The President was removed from the conspiracy and his racist comments about South Americans were deleted. The CIA involvement in the operation was reduced to a single, rogue agent, and it is made clear that the Colombian government is aware of the covert invasion and approves.

By comparison, Jack Ryan is far more explicit. Jack and his merry band of CIA cohorts have no permission to be in the country, and set about influencing an election to try to sway it in favor of their preferred candidate, just like the real CIA has been doing in Venezuela for decades.

However, the series flipped the script for a modern audience, portraying the incumbent Venezuelan president as a right-wing dictator who is facing off against a liberal human rights activist. This inverts reality, whereby the CIA has frequently supported and even installed authoritarian dictators in Latin America, often overthrowing left-wing governments in the process.

Nonetheless, the second season of Jack Ryan openly depicts the CIA operating covertly in Venezuela to shape and influence its politics, and heroizes this as necessary for U.S. national security. Even when it means Jack and his buddies chopping off people’s fingers and keeping them in the fridge as mementos.

Remember, Jack’s a man-eating shark, but he’s our man-eating shark.

Both the CIA and the DOD were fully on board with this depiction, in sharp contrast to their approach to a very similar storyline in early scripts for Clear and Present Danger. The U.S. Navy lent the producers a warship, Black Hawk helicopters play a key role in flying Jack to the presidential palace to hunt down the dictator, and star Michael Kelly was given a tour of CIA headquarters—a benefit enjoyed in season one by John Krasinski and Wendell Pierce.

Stars of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan who visited Langley. [Source: ew.com]

CIA consultants worked on both seasons, with Krasinski commenting “They’re always checking in with us and we’re always checking in with them.”

Normalizing the Unthinkable

We have to conclude, therefore, that, while in the past the CIA and DOD have proven very sensitive about being depicted conducting worldwide black operations, they have shifted tack by trying to normalize these activities.

As economist and media scholar Edward Herman noted, “Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on ‘normalization.’ This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done.’”

Had Herman ever had access to the many thousands of pages of government documents now available on their relationship with Hollywood, he would undoubtedly agree that this normalization is reaching fever pitch.

The entertainment industry is openly portraying some of the darkest actions of the CIA and DOD, from death squads to coup d’états, often with the help of those selfsame agencies.

These depictions do vary, and on occasion still go too far.

For example, the most recent Clancy-verse film Without Remorse (2021)—which portrays a Navy SEAL torturing, murdering and going completely off-book—was rejected by the DOD.

Source: imdb.com

But the CIA and DOD are increasingly coming around to the view that normalization is more effective than censorship, and that portraying black ops as either heroic, or at least a necessary evil in a complex and hostile world, is working wonders for their ability to continue carrying them out.

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Tom Secker is a British-based journalist, author, and podcaster. His specialities include the security services, Hollywood, propaganda, censorship and the history of terrorism. Tom’s writing and research has appeared in The Mirror, The Express, RT, Salon, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Independent, Harpers, Insurge Intelligence, Shadowproof, TechDirt and elsewhere. Tom can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan flashing CIA card in Tom Clancy remake, Clear and Present Danger (1994). [Source: hollywoodreporter.com]

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***

March 19 passed without a mention of its ghosts. The day was the 19th anniversary of Iraq War 2.0, the one about Saddam Hussein’s weapons’ of mass destruction. What have we learned over the almost two decades since?

While the actual Gotterdammerung for the new order took place just six months ago in Afghanistan, as the last American troops clambered aboard their transports, abandoning American citizens and a multi-million dollar embassy to the same fate as Saigon, Iraq is so much more the better example. The Afghan War did not begin under false pretenses as much as it began under no pretenses. Americans in 2001 would have supported carpet bombing Santa’s Workshop. Never mind we had been attacked by mostly Saudi operators, the blood letting would start in rural Afghanistan and the goal was some gumbo of revenge, stress relief, hunting down bin Laden in the wrong country, and maybe nation building, it didn’t matter.

But if Afghanistan was a pubescent teenager’s coming to the scene too quickly, Iraq was a seduction. There was no reason to invade it, so one had to be created. The Bush administration tried the generic “Saddam is pure evil” approach, a fixture of every recent American conflict. He gasses his own people (also tried later in Syria with Assad.) Saddam is looking to move on NATO ally Turkey (substitute Poland in 2022.) But none of these stuck with the American public, so a narrative was cut from whole cloth: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, WMDs, chemical and biological, soon enough nuclear. He was a madman who Had. To. Be. Stopped.

That this was completely untrue mattered not at all. The American MSM took up the story with great energy, first as stenographers for the Bush Administration fed by public statements, and then as amplifiers of the message fed by leaks from senior officials. At the same time, dissenting voices were stifled, including a number of whistleblowers who had been working inside Iraq and knew the weapons claims were a hoax. In an age before social media, the clampdown on other ideas was near total. When their true editor-in-chief George W. Bush stood up, a mix of Ben Bradley and Lou Grant, to proclaim “you were either with us or with the terrorists,” the media stifled dissent in its ranks nearly completely.

It became obvious from the initial days of the invasion there were no WMDs, but that mattered little. The WMDs were only the excuse to start the war. Once underway, the justification changed to regime change, democratization, nation building, and then as America’s own actions spawned an indigenous terrorist movement, fighting the indigenous terrorist movement. When all that devolved into open Sunni-Shia civil was in Iraq, the justification switched to stopping the civil war we had started. It was all a farce, with the media fanning the flames, rewriting its “takes” and creating new heroes (Petraeus) to replace the old heroes they had created who had failed (all the general before Petraeus.) The NYT issued a quiet mea culpa along the way and then like a couple caught having affairs who decided to stay married anyway, vowed never to speak of this again.

That mea culpa is worth a second look in light of Ukraine 2022. The Times wrote its reporting “depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate.” In other words, sources with a goal of their own are not reliable. The Times noted that information from all sources was “insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.” In other words, stenography is not good journalism. A reporter should ask questions, challenge veracity, and especially should do so as new information comes to light. The NYT also said “Articles based on dire claims tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.” The memory hole.

Those are of course Journalism 101-level errors admitted to by arguably the most prestigious newspaper in the world. It would be easier to be more generous to the NYT (and of course they are just a placeholder for all MSM who committed the same sins) if they had not gone on to purposefully repeat many of the same crimes reporting on Libya and Syria, Russiagate, the Covid crisis (“two weeks to flatten the curve”) and now, the war in Ukraine.

The big change is that while in its previous abetting of propaganda the Times, et al, took the side of the US government in supporting war, in Ukraine they are working for the Ukrainian government. Almost all of the video and imagery out of Ukraine comes from the government and those anonymous sources of 2003 have been replaced by no real sourcing at all, simply scary pictures and nameless English-speaking peasants somehow conversant in Zelensky’s own talking points.

Here’s eight seconds of a tank blowing up. Where was it shot? When? Was the explosion caused by a mine, a missile, or something internal to the tank? In most cases the media has no idea of the answers. Even if they tumble on to the basic who-what-where, the exploding tank video is devoid of context. Was that the lead tank hit, blunting the Russian advance toward a village? Or was it a Russian tank that lingered in an open field and got picked off in a lucky shot, strategically without much consequence? It is just a little jolt for the viewer. Such videos were immensely popular among terrorists in Iraq; nearly every one captured had inspirational video on his phone of a US vehicle being blown apart by a roadside IED. Now the same thing is on MSNBC for us.

Remember that stalled Russian convoy? The media stumbled on online photos of a Russian convoy some 40 miles long. Within hours those images became a story — the Russians had run out of gas just miles from Kiev, stalling their offensive. That soon led to think pieces claiming this was evidence of Russian military incompetency, corruption, and proof Ukraine would soon win. It all fit with the narrative of plucky, brave Ukrainians standing up to Putin the madman, the deranged psychopath threatening NATO and indeed democracy itself. If only the U.S. would step in an help! The whole of the American media has laid itself available to funnel the Zelensky message westward — go to war with Russia. We’re shown a photo of a destroyed building, maybe from 2016 maybe from yesterday. It soon becomes a hospital bombing by the Russians. A photo of a stationary vehicle is narrativized as the Ukrainians are capturing Russian gear. The media is once again taking whole information provided by sources with an agenda, drawing the US into this war, and reporting it uncritically and unchallenged.

Any information from the Russian side is instantly misinformation, and the pseudo-media of Twitter and Facebook not only call it fake, they make efforts to block it entirely so Americans cannot even view it long enough to make up their own minds. Pro-war journalists in America demand dissenters be investigated as foreign agents. You can’t see Facebook in Moscow and you can’t see RT in America. That’s not the equivalency a democracy should ascribe to.

As with Iraq, the goal is to present a one-sided, coordinated narrative of a complex event with the goal of dragging America into a new war. Will it work again this time?

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Featured image is from Al-Masdar News

---

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Product Type: PDF File

Price: $9.40

Click here to order.

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***

 

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***

Newly reported cases of COVID-19 in Virginia’s children have dropped by a whopping 93% since Governor Glenn Youngkin ordered an end to school mask mandates upon taking office this January.

A graph from the Virginia Department of Health charting newly reported COVID-19 cases in Virginians aged 0-19 was recently released showing the wild success of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order bringing an end to Virginia’s school mask mandates, which were enforced on children against the will of their parents.

Despite hysterical warnings from those who claimed countless teachers and children would die were face freedom restored to Virginia’s youth, newly reported COVID cases in the state’s 0-19 age bracket have dropped by a whopping 93% since Governor Youngkin’s executive order restoring parental rights went into effect. Though a number of left-wing school districts resisted Youngkin’s order, claiming that state law allowed them the right to forcibly cover kids’ faces, Youngkin later signed a bill passed by the state’s legislature that made face freedom in schools the law of the land.

Even some Democrats, like Senator Chap Petersen, who tends to be more pro-freedom than the rest of his party, pitched in to help liberate Virginia’s kids, further isolating those on the radical left from normal Virginians.

“Two months after new Governor Glenn Youngkin ended school mask mandates, cases among kids aged 0-19 in Virginia are down 93%,” pro-freedom author Ian Miller, who has gone to great lengths to expose the oppressive COVID tyranny agenda wrote in a tweet, also including a Department of Health graph proving the drop in cases.

“There is quite literally no evidence or data based argument to support forcibly masking kids in schools,” Miller’s tweet went on, echoing the assertion of parents nationwide who are tired of being told how to raise and care for their children.

According to a Virginia Department of Health graph shared on Twitter by Miller, cases of COVID among Virginians aged 0-19 peaked under ex-Governor Ralph Northam and the Democrats’ school mask mandates. Some days, thousands of new childhood COVID cases were reported as kids were forced to sit in school for hours with a germ-collecting mask pressed to their face – and no right to remove it!

Immediately following the January 24th executive order to end school mask mandates in Virginia, the number of newly reported childhood COVID cases, which had reached as many as over 3,000 in one day, began a steady decline. By the end of February, cases had leveled out towards the bottom of the graph.

Two months after new Governor Glenn Youngkin ended school mask mandates, cases among kids aged 0-19 in Virginia are down 93%

There is quite literally no evidence or data based argument to support forcibly masking kids in schools pic.twitter.com/2g5578ycC8

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) March 26, 2022

Despite the good news that Virginia’s school kids are both safe and free to show their faces, some districts and pro-maskers within them have fought tooth and nail to keep masks on the faces of other people’s children. Just recently, US District Court Judge Norman Moon ruled that 12 medically unwell children in Virginia can force their classes to make “reasonable modifications” to their setting, including the forced masking of other children against their own will and that of their parents.

That case was brought to the court by pro-mask parents and the far-left ACLU, who celebrated the ruling, boasting that it will serve as a “blueprint” for the continued forced masking of kids in school.

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Featured image is from National File

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***

The Donbas region of eastern Ukraine is one of the reasons why the Russian invasion was planned. According to Western defense analysts, this area could also be decisive in how the war ends. An insight into Russian strategy.

Russia’s strategy has been much debated since the start of the invasion on February 24. In the initial phase, it was  not clear what the Kremlin was planning. But after a month, the contours of that plan begin to take shape. In a recent well-documented article, the Financial Times makes a commendable effort at unravelling the strategy of the Russian army.

Three fronts

According to the business newspaper, the Russian army is advancing along three fronts (see map). The armed forces involved are among the best trained in the country, according to analysts.

First, there is an offensive northeast of Crimea. The attack on the port of Odessa is said to be a diversionary tactic to detain Ukrainian troops in the south so that they cannot come and help their colleagues in Mariupol.

A second front is on the Russian border and is moving south, past the besieged city of Kharkov.

A third front consists of Russian-backed separatists who, along with key units of the Russian army, are advancing west from the Donbas.

Double strategy

The current strategy is twofold, focusing mainly on the Donbas region. The first objective is to bomb a number of cities with artillery and rocket attacks and to consolidate the area around those cities. These are strategically important cities such as Kharkiv. Those surrounded cities could then potentially be used as bargaining chips in peace talks.

According to Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss army and a strategic analyst, the Russian army has no intention – with exceptions – to occupy or conquer the cities themselves. This is something which seems to be confirmed by a recent Newsweek article.

The second objective is the most important: to defeat the troops in Mariupol and to encircle the Ukrainian troops in the Donbas (marked in yellow and blue on the map). Mariupol is important to establish a land corridor between Russia and Crimea.

Ukrainian troops in the Donbas account for a quarter of the army. If Russia manages to secure those troops there, they will no longer be able to defend cities further west, such as Kyiv.

A heavy blow

According to a NATO officer, Russia has made most progress in this region and ‘Russia has the military mass to break the JFO (the Ukrainian army), and the fact it seems to be acting more methodically is worrying’. If the Russian troops of the three fronts succeed in their encirclement, they can effectively defeat the troops stationed in the Donbas.

The neutralization of a significant part of Ukraine’s regular armed forces would deal a serious moral blow to Kyiv. According to an analyst from the Royal United Services Institute in London, that would make a prolonged siege of Kyiv unnecessary.

For Moscow, one of the main objectives of the invasion would then have been achieved: the demilitarization of Ukraine. It would also gain a strong negotiating position.

Of course, anything can still happen in the field. Nothing is more unpredictable than the outcome of a war. Moreover, the Russian army may have suffered significant losses and may have underestimated the resistance capacity of the Ukrainians.

But the victory bulletins in our mainstream media may mask the vulnerabilities of the Ukrainian army, according to the Financial Times. We must not make the mistake of believing our own propaganda.

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Marc Vandepitte is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Sadism is a marked feature of racist fascism, or “nazism,” and it’s proudly displayed in today’s Ukraine, such as in this string of cellphone videos.

It was posted as a string of tweets during March 20-22 by a “Juan Sinmiedo”, whose account then became “suspended” by Twitter, because it was publicly exposing truths about Ukraine that mega-corporate America assiduously suppresses U.S.-and-allied publics from knowing.

The tweets by Sinmiedo (probably a pseudonym in order to reduce the likelihood of his being imprisoned or even killed by government-agents) introduced them (as is shown in the archived copies that had been made of the string, and which are linked-to here, including some of his individual tweets here) by saying “Hundreds of civilians have been punished for diverse reasons in Ukraine by paramilitary groups and National guard. Strong footage. Tortures, abuses, humiliation, even of kids and girls.” Displayed there are painful humiliation rituals that treat victims as if they’re meat — animals that the perpetrators believe have no other value than their flesh (to whip or otherwise). These victims are “Untermenschen” (sub-humans), in the perpetrators’ view. 

When Sinmiedo’s Twitter account was active, during March 17th-19th, it included the following four posts:

https://threadreaderapp.com/user/Youblacksoul

4 captures

20 Mar 2022 – 22 Mar 2022

Mar 19 • 55 tweets •

Thread. Hundreds of civilians have been punished for diverse reasons in Ukraine by paramilitary groups and National guard. Strong footage. Tortures, abuses, humiliation, even of kids and girls. There is no[t] a clear motive for this [these] illegal abuses. They [the victims] are labelled as marauders. That can include men who don’t want to fight, who are suspected of russian sympathy, looters or people searching for food.

Mar 18 • 6 tweets •

Latest news, Zelensky it’s [is] a LGBTQ phobic [person], his party[’s] past legislation [were] targeting “homosexual and transgenderist propaganda” and [targeted] against gay marriage or adoption. It’s [Its] social politics regarding LGBTQ are a copy of Putin’s says [a] US think thank report. [t is] Targeting of “homosexual propaganda” by Zelensky.

Mar 17 • 15 tweets •

@MapsUkraine Testimony of Mariupol residents: Azov Battalion executed civilians triying to escape the city. More witnesses from Mariupol saying that Azov Battalion executed civilians trying to find a way out of the city.

Mar 17 • 11 tweets • 3 min read

The media keep lying about Mariupol Theatre after the Kiev government have already said there is no victims, as with the mosque, as with the missiles over the nuclear plant. All fake. But his testimony of a Mariupol resident is real. More testimony about the barbarities of Azov Battalion in Mariupol. Azov are nazis don’t let the media fool you.

The Azov Battalion are Ukraine’s elite nazi military forces, like Hitler’s SS were, and are trained and armed by the U.S. Government, including the CIA.

This Battalion lead the rest of the Ukrainian Government’s forces that had been, ever since 2014, shelling the breakaway Donbass region and trying to kill as many people as possible there, but were being restrained by the EU so that Ukraine would meet the rules to become acceptable to join the EU. Such flagrant nazism is unacceptable to the EU, though the U.S. basically hires such nazis to do its work in Ukraine, because Ukraine’s nazis hate Russians with a passion and are delighted even to risk their own lives in order to kill Russians — killing Russians has been their specialty ever since at least the 1930s. In fact, at least some of Ukraine’s soldiers are taking joy in torturing to death captured pro-Russia Donbass residents. That’s sheer sadism.

Another current example of the acceptance (and even encouragement) of nazis in today’s Ukraine was introduced to Western publics on March 21st by Patrice Greanville’s Greanville Post website, under the heading “Meet Ukraine’s Azov Figurehead Olena Semenyaka, Europe’s Female Führer”, an article by Adrien Nonjon, who is a Ph.D candidate in History at the Sorbonne in Paris.

His article there links to a fascinating 14-page article that he had done for The George Washington University, in which Semenyaka’s meteoric rise to leadership positions not only within Ukraine but within the broader European nazi movement is described, analyzed, and placed into its historical context going back to the 1930s, and even earlier. That latter article closes by saying that “Semenyaka has enabled the Azov movement to consolidate and diversify its ideological apparatus but also to strengthen its influence abroad — an ideological mutation on a rare scale observed for the very first time in the history of the Ukrainian far right.”

I had earlier written about the founder and leader of the Azov Battalion, Andrei Biletsky, and his adoption of Hitler’s advocacy of “Deutschland über alles” transformed to something like a “Ukraina über alles”, which is Biletsky’s “Great Ukraine” instead of Hitler’s “Third Reich,” so that, as Biletsky put it, “Social Nationalism raises to shield all old Ukrainian Aryan values forgotten in modern society. Only [by means of] their recovery and implementation by a group of fanatical fighters can we lead to the final victory of European civilization in the world struggle.” It would be Ukraine instead of Germany that would serve as such a hero-nation. Here is a brief propaganda video for Semenyaka.

This is the force that today’s American leadership hired (along with hiring Ukraine’s two overtly nazi political parties) to lead the new Ukraine, and Semenyaka has become the Azov Battalion’s chief ideologist. She has rooted Biletsky’s movement in so many European philosophers, so that it is a coming-together of White-Supremacist thinking that will have some appeal throughout the EU, not only in Ukraine. This will help America’s leaders to keep the EU’s leaders under control (like Nuland famously said, “Fuck the EU”), because if the overtly nazi faction are ultimately to replace today’s (less-boldly nazi) EU leaders, then there will be no effective resistance remaining against allowing Ukraine into the EU and into NATO, and consequent placement of America’s nukes only a 7-minute flight-time away from hitting Moscow.

America’s leaders were very cunning to hire the Azov Battalion (and other Ukrainian nazi organizations) to carry out their plan against Russia, because — unlike Germany’s nazism, which was obsessive against Jews — Ukraine’s nazis are obsessive against Russians (and now lead the military forces in the nation that borders the very closest of any nation targeting Moscow).

It’s much cheaper to use Ukrainian soldiers than to use America soldiers, to wage this phase of America’s long war to conquer Russia. And, so, during June 2011 through February 2014, Obama grabbed Ukraine in a very bloody coup. Then he had his stooge regime there kill as many of the pro-Russian voters as they could, especially in Donbass, which had voted 90% for the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom Obama had overthrown.

When Ukraine’s President Zelensky was asked (March 20th) by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about Russia’s allegations that Ukraine’s government is “Nazi,” Zelensky mocked the very idea, because he himself is Jewish and because “The Nazi regime occupied the entire territory of Ukraine and Ukraine fought against Nazis” (but Russia supposedly didn’t). However, in actual historical fact, the ONLY region of the Soviet Union that largely supported the Nazis was western Ukraine (around Lviv), no part of Russia (where the Nazis were overwhelmingly loathed). Zakaria failed to call out any of Zelensky’s blatant lies. Of course, that’s normal for ‘news’-media in The West. (And here can be found many of the truths that they likewise lie about to cover-up regarding the U.S.-and-allied imperialistic regime’s hiring and arming of Sunni-Islamic jihadist groups in order to overthrow and replace pro-Russian and pro-Iranian governments in the Middle East — the U.S. regime’s regime-change operations in a different part of the world, but for the same end, which is U.S. global control.)

By coincidence, Ukraine’s parliament posted, shortly after that Zelensky interview, a tweet by them which alleged that Russia’s bombing of today’s Ukraine is evil just like U.S.-and-allied bombing of Nazi Germany was evil, and that therefore today’s Western countries should establish a no-fly-zone over Ukraine to shoot down Russian planes there (though doing that would cause WW III).

Web-posts immediately noted that for Ukraine’s parliament to say this proves that Ukraine (or at least its government) self-identifies with Nazi Germany and is therefore just like Russia is alleging Ukraine’s government to be; and, consequently, that embarrassing tweet was quickly removed. Fortunately, however, it had already been Web-archived, such as here. So, anyone who now says that Ukraine’s government isn’t nazi is contradicting what Ukraine’s parliament had said and displayed about itself. (Of course, there’s plenty more evidence of that government’s nazism, such as this.)

Putin stated as one of his top, if not absolutely top, objectives in his “Special Operation” in Ukraine, was to “denazify” it. (And that demand from him is the roadblock that terminated the negotiations: Zelensky is unalterably opposed to doing that.) But, in order for Putin to do it, he would first need to denazify America itself, because the nazis in Ukraine serve America’s billionaires, who effectively own America’s government — not necessarily the billionaires who own Ukraine’s government (who likewise contribute funding to the Azov Battalion and other nazi organizations). Putin’s — and Russia’s — only options now are therefore either, on the one hand, to conquer and retain for a number of years control over at least what had been the pro-Russian part of Ukraine (Ukraine’s southeast), in which case there will be a long-term possibility that America will become defeated; or else, on the other hand, for Russia itself to be defeated — swallowed up by the billionaires who control America and its vassal nations. (The third possibility would be WW III, which would be Russia-v.-America nuclear war, which would be the entire world, especially those two countries, being defeated — destroyed far worse than any country ever has been.) Those are the options. This is what has resulted, so far, from the operation (the “Cold War”) that U.S. President Harry S. Truman started on 25 July 1945, and that U.S. President G.H.W. Bush decided to continue on 24 February 1990 — and that therefore continues even today.

Here (starting at 5:00 in the video) is a stunning report and analysis, from someone whom I have always found to be an extremely reliably truthful reporter and analyst, Alexander Mercouris, regarding the actual current situation (as-of March 27th), in the war between Russia and Ukraine (Ukraine being currently the main battlefield in the now 77-year-long war by the U.S. regime to conquer Russia).

Concluding personal note 

What is said here is NOT an endorsement of Russia’s Government, but instead a condemnation of my own country’s Government, the imperial USA regime. For example, on March 28th, the New York Times, which routinely deceives the public (especially about foreign nations that the U.S. regime aims to conquer), headlined “Zelensky Gives Interview to Russian Journalists. Moscow Orders It Quashed.”, and I fully share the opposition that they expressed there to Russia’s censorship, but I go much further: I condemn censorship of any sort, by either a government (such as such media-shills do) or by a ‘news’-medium itself that (like that newspaper always does) is shilling for its own government’s regime. Just because one side in a conflict is profoundly evil (such as the U.S. Government has been ever since 1945) does not necessarily mean that the other side in that conflict is necessarily good. The assumption to the contrary (that one side must be good because the other side is so horrifically bad) is the basis of all propaganda. Internally within the U.S., that same false assumption ‘justifies’ each political Party by the other Party’s scudziness. Democracy and censorship simply cannot coexist. (The U.S. itself is permeated with censorship.) But the basic reality is that imperialism — especially of a type like America’s that aims to control the whole world — is so evil that it must be crushed, entirely ended. For me, that is the bottom line.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Supratim Barman

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***

FDA made it very clear what its standards were for COVID vaccines.  

FDA repeatedly told its advisory committee, the public and vaccine manufacturers what it required in order to issue an EUA for a COVID vaccine.  I have copied 4 of the FDA’s power-points below so we can all agree on what, precisely, those standards are.

Then we can all agree on something else.  Those standards turned out to look like a high-jumper’s bar.  The vaccine, like the high-jumper, only has to get up over the bar for a brief moment in time.  That moment occurred exactly 2 months and 2 weeks after getting a second mRNA shot.  Earlier than that, the vaccine couldn’t reach the bar.  After that brief moment, vaccine efficacy, like the high-jumper, came crashing down.

The slides below come from a presentation that was given before the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on December 10, 2020, when the committee was considering giving Pfizer’s vaccine an Emergency Use Authorization.  The slides echoed what had been said at earlier meetings of the VRBPAC and the guidance for industry FDA had published.

Notice the loose terminology:  the medical product “may” be effective.  Not exactly what you were expecting from the FDA, right? But this is the statutory standard built into all EUA products.  When Congress passed the statute they thought they were shielding us against some brief emergency, it would be okay just to hope a medical product worked.  After all, the FDA is here to protect the public health, right?  They would never give us a bad product.  They would never withhold the safety and efficacy data now, would they?

The statute simply says that to issue an EUA, the known and potential risks are outweighed by the known and potential benefits.  Not a high bar.  That pesky term “potential” is a loophole you could drive a truck through.  Looked at another way, the vaccine is only expected to kill less people than it saves.

Is that the standard you want for injecting the entire country (or world) with an entirely novel bit of technology, which includes mRNA and two different lipids (3 separate molecules) never before injected into humans?

The last criterion on the second slide (#5) says there must be no adequate, approved (i.e., licensed) available alternative in order to issue an EUA for an experimental product.  That is exactly the language in the statute, and FDA echoes it in many of its presentations and documents.

For those who have not yet heard me rant on this subject, this is precisely why FDA and the other federal agencies can NEVER, no matter how much evidence accrues, admit that hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin or any other licensed drug can treat and/or prevent COVIID–because if they admitted it, they will have admitted that they illegally issued EUAs to other drugs, vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, convalescent serum, etc.

The third slide (#6) says manufacturing should be of good quality and product should be uniform.  We know that under the best of circumstances, the intact mRNA at the factory varied form about 50% to 75% and the so-called degradation products or visible particulates were not characterized.  The important thing is what is in the product after it has withstood multiple episodes of shipping.  (The components are made in different places and bottling may occur in a third place.) I don’t know if such studies were performed.  I doubt FDA did inspections on-site during 2020 in Germany and other countries where components were made, because elsewhere I read FDA did no international inspections that year.

(#6) also says there should be extensive (“clear and compelling”) safety and efficacy data, sufficient to using the product in hundreds of millions of people.  And that the collection of these data should be ongoing.

The final slide, (#7) is quite interesting.  It specifies that efficacy should be at least 50%. Furthermore, FDA wants to study cases of severe disease.  It says there need to be enough of them, especially because severe disease can also indicate antibody-enhanced disease aka vaccine-enhanced disease (VED).

In other words, FDA was concerned about the possibility that being vaccinated might lead to a worse COVID outcome, as had happened in animal studies of older coronavirus vaccine prototypes, and in an RSV vaccine trial in infants, and in a very early, licensed measles vaccine around 1960. And in the Dengue vaccine (Sanofi’s Dengvaxia) in some Philippino children, where dozens died.  Sanofi employees and health officials in Philippines stood trial for manslaughter over that debacle.

What did FDA do?  FDA quietly licensed the identical vaccine in the US for kids aged 9 through 16, if they have evidence of a prior Dengue infection, which is thought to prevent VED. CDC recommended it.

Back to COVID vaccines.  So to issue an EUA, FDA wanted severe COVID cases in the vaccinated to be evaluated, to be sure there was no VED occurring, in other words, to be assured the vaccine was not making their COVID worse.

Fast forward from December 2020 to April 2022.  FDA is about to consider issuing an EUA for Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in the 6 month up to 5 year age group.  But there were no serious cases of COVID in Moderna’s clinical trial, and supposedly there were no severe cases in earlier Pfizer trials of older children.

Therefore, the standard FDA laid out in 2020 can’t be met.

There is also no 50% efficacy.  Moderna claimed its vaccine was 40% efficacious in the littlest kids (they claimed 94.5% for adults).  CDC claimed Pfizer’s vaccine was 31% effective in 5-11 year olds at about 7 weeks, and the NY Department of Health said Pfizer’s vaccine had dropped to 12% efficacy in about 7 weeks.

So what’s a poor FDA to do?

Only we can stop them from issuing that EUA.

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***

The New York Times thinks that Putin might use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, but there is a flaw in the Times’ reasoning. Putin has nothing to gain from a nuclear blast and everything to lose. A nuclear weapon will not help Putin win the war in Ukraine, in fact, it would further deepen Russia’s isolation, strengthen the position of Russia’s enemies, and create a justification for NATO to enter the war. Putin would become a global pariah overnight inviting even harsher economic sanctions and criticism while greatly undermining his prospects for success in Ukraine. Detonating a nuclear device in Ukraine would undoubtedly prove to be the biggest mistake in Putin’s 22 year-long political career.

Only Washington stands to gain from a nuclear explosion in Ukraine because only Washington would benefit from a wider war that involved NATO. But the Times never mentions Washington in its analysis because–according to the Times–the only person capable of such perfidy is Vladimir Putin which strongly suggests that the list of suspects was determined before the article was even written. But, why? Why is the Times’ trying to incriminate Putin for an incident that has not yet taken place and for which other suspects have a clear motive? Is this a preemptive frame-up intended to shape public opinion on some future event? It sure looks like it. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“The White House has quietly assembled a team of national security officials to sketch out scenarios of how the United States and its allies should respond if Russian President Vladimir Putin — frustrated by his lack of progress in Ukraine or determined to warn Western nations against intervening in the war — unleashes his stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

The Tiger Team, as the group is known, is also examining responses if Putin reaches into NATO territory to attack convoys bringing weapons and aid to Ukraine, according to several officials involved in the process.” (“U.S. Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons“, New York Times)​

Notice how the information is presented. The author assumes the tone of an objective and well-informed observer who is imparting his privileged information to 5 million of his closest friends. He provides zero hard-evidence to support his claims nor does he positively identify any of the officials in this elusive “Tiger Team”. In fact, by Sanger’s own admission, the members of this clandestine club only “spoke on the condition of anonymity,” which basically relieves the author of any responsibility to verify his claims.

But let’s ignore the article’s shortcomings for a minute and focus on the central assertion, that “White House has quietly assembled a team of national security officials” to explore the possibility that Putin might use WMD in Ukraine because he is “frustrated”. That seems particularly unlikely, after all, it takes more than a “hunch” about Putin’s mental state to convene a special advisory panel at the highest level of the national security state. So, while it might sound believable within the context of Sanger’s overall storyline, it’s highly improbable. There would have to be some extremely compelling intelligence suggesting that something serious was afoot, like the suspected transfer of nukes to locations closer to the front. That would certainly do the trick; that would precipitate the kind of response that Sanger is talking about, not just someone’s psycho-babble analysis of Putin’s alleged mood-swings. That’s not how government works.

Of course, we cannot prove that Sanger is lying, but the lack of any corroborating evidence or positive identification of the officials involved, coupled with the sketchy assertion that a special “hush-hush” Team was slapped together in response to Putin’s “frustration” makes us suspect that Sanger is not objectively reporting on events but crafting a narrative for some unknown agenda. Even so, we don’t dismiss what he says out-of-hand because the issue of nuclear weapons is too serious to ignore. So, we’ll move on to the next two paragraphs:

“Just a month ago, such scenarios seemed more theoretical. But today, from the White House to NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, a recognition has set in that Russia may turn to the most powerful weapons in its arsenal to bail itself out of a military stalemate.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg underscored the urgency of the preparation effort Wednesday, telling reporters for the first time that even if the Russians employ weapons of mass destruction only inside Ukraine, they may have “dire consequences” for people in NATO nations. He appeared to be discussing the fear that chemical or radioactive clouds could drift over the border. One issue under examination is whether such collateral damage would be considered an “attack” on NATO under its charter, which might require a joint military response.” (“U.S. Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons”, New York Times)

Once again, the author’s analysis draws mainly from conjecture and the incendiary statements of public officials, but where are the facts? So far, there is not a scintilla of evidence to back up Sanger’s claims. Having heard many similar unverified claims in the last few weeks, we have to assume that the allegations may be nothing more than talking points that were conjured up to smear Putin and to lay the groundwork for a false flag operation that could be used to justify NATO’s intervention in the war. Is that Sanger’s real assignment, building a case for NATO intervention?

What is noticeably absent from Sanger’s analysis is the fact that Putin would be the last one to initiate a nuclear attack knowing that any such incident would be used by his enemies to widen the conflict and, possibly, derail the Russian military operation. No, the only people who stand to gain anything are the neocons in the State Department (and their allies in the Intel agencies and media) who see NATO involvement as critical to their geopolitical ambitions. If NATO stays out of the war, Russia wins, it’s that simple. And that is the outcome the neocons want to avoid at all cost. Here’s more:

“These are questions that Europe has not confronted since the depths of the Cold War… and many (leaders) have never had to think about nuclear deterrence or the effects of the detonation of battlefield nuclear weapons, designed to be less powerful than those that destroyed Hiroshima. The fear is that Russia is more likely to use those weapons, precisely because they erode the distinction between conventional and nuclear arms.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who heads the Armed Services Committee, said on Wednesday that if Putin used a weapon of mass destruction — chemical, biological or nuclear — “there would be consequences” even if the weapon’s use was confined to Ukraine. Reed said radiation from a nuclear weapon, for instance, could waft into a neighboring NATO country and be considered an attack on a NATO member….” (“U.S. Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons”, New York Times)

Wait a minute: It wasn’t Putin who withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF) nor did Russia develop an entire new regime of low-yield “usable” nuclear weapons. That was the United States; just like it was the US under Obama that refused to abandon its first-strike policy (National Posture Review) that allows Washington to preemptively use nuclear weapons if it thinks its national security is threatened. So, if we had to hazard a guess about ‘Who might use a nuclear weapon in a false flag operation in Ukraine’, Uncle Sam would top the list.

Uncle Sam’s Grab-bag of “Usable” Nukes

The only country to use nuclear weapons on a civilian population is back for more

Check out this blurb from an article at the Arms Control Association:

“There now is a push to overturn existing U.S. policy barring the development of new nuclear warheads or nuclear weapons for new military missions in order to build new types of “more usable” nuclear weapons. In December 2016, the advisory Defense Science Board recommended the development of a “tailored nuclear option for limited use”… The pursuit of new nuclear weapons, however, would represent a radical reversal of existing U.S. nuclear policy and practice, which stipulates that the “fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack.” (New, ‘More Usable’ Nukes? No, Thanks, Arms Control Association)

He’s right, the “fundamental role of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack,” but that doctrine has changed. In fact, there are a number of fanatics in the Deep State who appear to be looking for the right opportunity to use one of these low-yield nukes. Naturally, this has the Russians quite concerned. Here’s how Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergie Ryabkov, summed it up recently:

“This reflects the fact that the US is actually lowering the nuclear threshold and that they are conceding the possibility of the waging a limited nuclear war and winning this war. This is extremely alarming.” (You Tube)

And here’s one more from Maria Zakharova, Director of Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation:

“The US arguments for fielding low-yield nuclear warheads is intended to blur the lines between strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons which inevitably leads to the lowering of the nuclear threshold and the growing threat of nuclear war…. Those who like to theorize about the flexibility of US nuclear capability, must understand in line with Russian Military Doctrine, that such actions (using low-yield nukes) will be seen as warranting retaliatory use of nuclear weapons by Russia.” (“Russia slams US argument for low-yield n-warheads”, You Tube)

It’s not Russia that’s “lowering the nuclear threshold” and making the case that nuclear weapons are “usable”, it’s Washington. And that is why we think there is a constituency in Washington for using a nuclear device in Ukraine.

That’s also why we are spending so much time parsing Sanger’s article which appears to have been maliciously crafted to prepare the public for a false flag operation that will undoubtedly be quickly blamed on Putin.

So, is there a constituency in Washington for usable nukes? Check out this blurb from an article titled “Pentagon Deployment of New, “More Usable” Nuclear Weapon Is a Grave Mistake”:

“The Pentagon argues the weapon is necessary to counter what it says is Russia’s willingness to use low-yield nuclear weapons, first to gain an advantage over the United States and its allies in a regional conflict and secondly, to prevail in such a war…. the stated purpose is to make their use “more credible” in the eyes of U.S. adversaries, which means that they are meant to be seen as “more usable.” (“Pentagon Deployment of New, “More Usable” Nuclear Weapon Is a Grave Mistake“, Just Security)

See what I mean? The Pentagon is making the case that low-yield Nukes–which can blow up a city the size of Hiroshima, and which are already deployed on Trident subs around the world– are “usable”. This is a fundamental change in US Nuclear Doctrine. (which emphasizes “deterrence”) Also, it is wrong to say that Russia has developed low-yield nuclear weapons. That’s not true. Russia’s nukes come in a range of sizes, but they have never explicitly developed nukes with the intention of reducing their impact so they could be used on the battlefield. Russia’s nuclear doctrine ONLY allows the use of nukes if the country faces an existential crisis, that is, if Russia’s very survival is at risk. For Russia, nuclear weapons are the last resort. Here’s more from Sanger’s article:

“A U.S. official said Biden remained adamant about keeping U.S. forces out of Ukraine. But the official said the administration believed it would be misguided not to closely examine the thresholds, if any, under which the president would reverse himself, or to be prepared to deal with the consequences of the use of weapons of mass destruction.

A senior administration official said any use of a “small” tactical nuclear bomb by Russia — even inside Ukraine and not directed at a NATO member — would mean that “all bets are off” on the United States and NATO staying out of the war. But when pushed, the official declined to lay out the responses under discussion.

The official said American and NATO intelligence communities had not seen any activity by Russian military officials that suggested preparations to use a nuclear weapon. But he said that during internal discussions, administration officials were urging caution, because there was more at stake than just Ukraine…” (New York Times)

Repeat: “The official said American and NATO intelligence communities had not seen any activity by Russian military officials that suggested preparations to use a nuclear weapon.”

So, Sanger waits until the very end of his article to tell us what we should have figured out from the very beginning; that he’s got nothing; no facts, no reliable intelligence, and no expert corroboration to support the basic thesis. Nada.

So, what was the purpose of the article if the author could not produce any proof that Putin intends to “unleash his stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons”?

The article is an exercise in perception management. That’s all. Sanger’s job is not to produce evidence or convey the truth. His job is to put the seed-thought into peoples’ minds that if a chemical or nuclear attack takes place in Ukraine, the motive and the identity of the perpetrator will have already been revealed by the Times. Sanger is using the power of insinuation and innuendo to divert attention from other, more likely, suspects, (Like Uncle Sam) in order to frame Putin. More importantly, he is building the case for a broader and more violent conflict which, as always, will be spearheaded by the New York Times.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

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

Featured image is from TUR

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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  

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s “Inflation Lies”. Ushering In A Global Economic Depression. Russia Sanctions and a New World Order

By F. William Engdahl, March 29, 2022

The Federal Reserve and most other world central banks are lying about how interest rates affect inflation. It’s no small matter, as it clearly is being used to usher in a global economic depression, this time far worse than in the 1930s, using Russia as the scapegoat to blame, as the powers that be prepare to push the world into what Joe Biden recently called “a New World Order.”

New Batch of Ex-ISIS Members Transferred from Syria to Ukraine: Report

By The Cradle, March 30, 2022

Dozens of extremist fighters have made their way from Syria’s northern Idlib governorate to Ukraine to fight against Russian troops, according to a report by Sputnik Arabic. At least 87 former members of ISIS were allegedly transferred to the Syrian-Turkish border on 26 March under the direct supervision of the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) armed group, Abu Mohammad al-Julani.

Turkey Will Not Impose Anti-Russia Sanctions Despite Offer to Re-enter F-35 Program

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 30, 2022

Ankara continues its efforts to mediate between Moscow and Kiev while maintaining a neutral stance, however the US and NATO are trying to pressure Turkey to impose sanctions on Russia. In an effort to entice Turkey to impose sanctions, the US is suggesting for the country’s Russian-made S-400 missile defense system to be handed over to the Ukrainian military in exchange for a return to the F-35 fighter jet program.

COVID-19 Vaccine Massacre: 68,000% Increase in Strokes, 44,000% Increase in Heart Disease, 6,800% Increase in Deaths Over Non-COVID Vaccines

By Brian Shilhavy, March 29, 2022

The greatest threat to the national security of the United States today is our own government, and the Wall Street Billionaires and bankers who fund Big Pharma who seem to have the government in their pocket, and that includes both political parties.

Ukraine: And What About Those Biolabs? Stop the Narrative I Want to Get Off!

By Philip Giraldi, March 29, 2022

The biolab controversy began when the United States government’s State Department number three Victoria Nuland recently admitted to a congressional panel that the labs exist and also added that Ukraine possesses chemical and biological weapons.

Deeply Compromised Biden Is Driving the West Toward a Nuclear War with Russia

By Vasko Kohlmayer, March 29, 2022

On Thursday, March 24, the Russian government held a press conference in which it presented evidence that Hunter Biden, the disgraced son of American president Joe Biden, helped to finance bioweapons research in Ukraine.

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War: “Regime Change in Moscow”

By Joe Lauria, March 29, 2022

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

Exclusive Interview: Woman Dies from Rare Brain Disorder After Second Pfizer Shot, Husband Says We’re ‘Guinea Pigs’

By Megan Redshaw, March 29, 2022

Jennifer Deason Sprague, a healthy 60-year-old woman from Missouri, died Feb. 21, five months after receiving her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Jennifer died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a fatal degenerative brain disorder.

Institutional Collapse of Medicine in the U.S.: How Jailing a Nurse Could Help Paper Over Responsibility for “Operation COVID-19”

By Emanuel Pastreich, March 29, 2022

The conviction of the nurse RaDonda Vaught for negligent homicide on March 25 in Nashville, Tennessee, was a profoundly meaningful event highlighting the institutional collapse of medicine in the United States.

Prophetic RAND Corp. Report: “Destabilize and Undermine” Russia. Recommended “Provocative Actions”

By Nauman Sadiq, March 29, 2022

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. RAND Corporation is a quasi-US governmental think tank that receives three-quarters of its funding from the US military.

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 at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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Dozens of extremist fighters have made their way from Syria’s northern Idlib governorate to Ukraine to fight against Russian troops, according to a report by Sputnik Arabic.

At least 87 former members of ISIS were allegedly transferred to the Syrian-Turkish border on 26 March under the direct supervision of the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) armed group, Abu Mohammad al-Julani.

The report indicates that most of the fighters are Iraqi, Chechen, Tunisian, and French nationalities.

On 8 March, 450 HTS militants arrived in Ukraine to join the fight against the Russian army.

According to the family members of the militants, high-ranking HTS leaders have been coordinating with senior leaders of the Turkistan Islamic Party group, Ansar al-Tawhid, and Hurras al-Din groups, to facilitate the passage of the extremists from Idlib to Turkey and then on to Ukraine.

Since early March, the foreign intelligence service of Russia (SVR RF) has issued warnings that the US and NATO are providing ISIS fighters from Syria with special training at the US army’s Al-Tanf military base in Syria, and then sending them to Ukraine.

The SVR statement detailed the history of the secret operation they uncovered, saying:

“At the end of 2021, the US released from prison … several dozen Daesh terrorists, including citizens of Russia and CIS countries. These individuals were sent to the US-controlled Al-Tanf base, where they underwent special training in subversive and terrorist warfare methods with a focus on the Donbass region.”

Foreign mercenaries from around the globe have joined in on the side of Ukraine, as President Volodymyr Zelensky pleads for global assistance in the wake of the Kremlin’s special military operation.

Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine on 24 February after responding to the call for assistance by the newly-recognized republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Despite recognition of their independence by Russia, Ukrainian armed forces continued to shell civilian targets and to breach the borders of the two republics, prompting the leaders of the republics to formally ask Russia for military assistance.

*

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Featured image is from Twitter/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).

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

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Ankara continues its efforts to mediate between Moscow and Kiev while maintaining a neutral stance, however the US and NATO are trying to pressure Turkey to impose sanctions on Russia. In an effort to entice Turkey to impose sanctions, the US is suggesting for the country’s Russian-made S-400 missile defense system to be handed over to the Ukrainian military in exchange for a return to the F-35 fighter jet program.

Commenting on the proposal from Washington, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated:

“Our position has not changed. This is not for discussion. This issue is closed for us. This is our equipment for defensive purposes.”

Sanctions against Russia has already affected the global economy, with food and energy prices in the West reaching unprecedented heights. Given the reality of Turkey’s struggling economic situation, the country will only suffer more if sanctions are imposed. Erdoğan cannot politically afford greater economic decline, even at the enticement of a return to the F-35 program, as his popularity is plunging. More importantly, Turkey’s desire for these jets has diminished anyway, especially as experts continue to negatively review the American fifth-generation fighter jet.

The effectiveness of sanctions is already highly questionable and Erdoğan will not take a huge risk for little reward. For now, Turkey is gaining far more by maintaining the greatest balance between Ukraine and Russia out of all NATO members. Erdoğan understands that maintaining a balance in the face of a very serious conflict in the region will bring Ankara significant benefits. In this way Turkey continues to pursue this strategy and for now has received far less condemnation for not imposing sanctions or closing its airspace to Russia than a traditionally non-aligned country like India.

Ankara’s unapologetic policy of neutrality has also emboldened other countries like Hungary to not just impose sanctions for the sake of foreign interests that are contrary to national and ethnic interests.

On March 25, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó said that his country does not support any sanctions on Russian energy shipments as it would endanger Hungary’s energy security. This received the ire of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who implored Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “to decide who you are with” and attempted to shame him for his disinterest in allowing Hungary to be a conduit of weapons for Ukraine.

Although many in the EU celebrated Zelensky’s shaming of Orbán, it is recalled that on January 26, less than a month before the war started in Ukraine, Szijjártó warned that Kiev’s racist policies towards minorities, including against the 140,000+ Transcarpathian Hungarian minority, “will very much limit the Hungarian government’s ability to provide any kind of support to Ukraine, even in this conflict.”

Ukraine’s parliament in 2017 adopted the law “On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language,” which Budapest says violates the rights of the Transcarpathian ethnic minority to study in Hungarian. This is similar discrimination faced by the Polish, Greek and Romanian minorities in Ukraine, but ignored by Warsaw and Athens, and less-so by Bucharest.

With Turkey and Hungary, remembering that the latter is an observer member of the Turkic Union, not joining the entire sanctions regime against Russia, it could lead to a serious rift in NATO. For this reason, the US is trying to restore its relations with Turkey over the S-400 by offering a way out. However, the proposal is unrealistic when considering the country purchased the S-400 from Russia, and expects proper compensation, not just a re-entry into the F-35 program. It is recalled that Turkey has also paid for the F-35 jets, which have not yet been delivered to the country because of its purchase of the S-400.

As the proposal puts Turkey in an obvious disadvantage as they do not want to hand over the S-400 to Ukraine without compensation, it will likely be rejected. The other issue is that if the S-400 is delivered to Ukraine, Moscow could in turn retaliate by listing Turkey as an “unfriendly country” – and how that might impact the many points of cooperation that the two countries have, such as the construction of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, is unknown.

In addition, Turkey sees deep systemic rifts between the Euro-Atlantic Axis and Eurasia. In this way, Ankara leverages its NATO membership and EU candidacy to pivot to the West, whilst taking advantage of its Eurasian geography to also engage with the East, particularly in mind of a Turkic Order. In this way, Ankara has a policy of waiting to see which Great Powers will win and lose in the long run, just as did in World War II and other key moments in modern history, having learnt its lesson from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I for backing the wrong axis.

Judging by Turkey’s assessment, it appears that it believes Eurasia will be the ultimate victor in this ideological struggle over Ukraine, and for this reason it will not accept the American S-400 proposal or impose the ultra-aggressive sanctions as demanded by the West.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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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If you have donated to the Ukraine cause you might like to see what your money has bought you. And reconsider. Please read the following open letter to Dominic Raab and every MP at Westminster.

Dear Dominic Raab and all MPs,

Thank you for pushing for an investigation into war-crimes in Ukraine by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Hopefully, also, a cross-party parliamentary committee will investigate these thoroughly and question why we are giving support to Kiev with its own history of war-crimes.

During the Second World War Russia was our ally. Russian forces were integral in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Today they are fighting neo-Nazism and President Putin has pledged to rid Ukraine of this evil. We are not their ally this time. Why not?

Sadly, our government and our media, are on the side of the Banderist Nazis – and even deny that ultra fascism exists in Ukraine. Therefore I am submitting this evidence to your enquiry.

How Kiev treats prisoners

Russian soldiers captured by neo-Nazis are shot in the legs, left on the ground, and questioned afterwards while lying helpless in their own blood. These are disturbing images to which minors should not be exposed.

This phone footage was taken by one of the neo-Nazis as a trophy to their bravery

How Russia treats prisoners

By contrast Ukrainian soldiers near Kiev are treated as human beings within the strict guidelines of combat. This is footage of 61 Ukrainian soldiers captured at one of their command posts at Nikolaevna over the weekend. All the soldiers laid down their weapons and surrendered “due to an acute shortage of material, ammunition and food”. They were given food and medical attention if needed.

Source: Russia Today (RT)

If the war-crimes above are not disturbing enough I want to include video footage and images from my blog that the Donetsk and Lukansk National Republics have put together since 2014 and which Russia wants investigated.

Please set up your cross-party inquiry and don’t be one of those politicians who says one thing and does another.

This war has been going on for nearly eight years not reported in the west. It is time the UK made clear why we are supporting Ukraine.

Thank you for your attention.

Update (28 March 2022, 12.30 pm)

It is claimed that the shootings took place at Malaya Rogan, Kharkiv, where Russian prisoners were subjected to a mock execution before being taken away in a Multivan to be shot. The “exact place” is alleged to be a dairy, the owner of which let his estate be used as a torture base for Konstantin Nemichev’s “Shidny Corps”.

Further claims relate to the identification of one of the perpetrators of this crime, Sergey Velichko.

The Russian soldiers were allegedly captured following a raid on the village of Biskvitnoe.

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What follows is a segment of the show March 25, 2022 Global Research News Hour program. It featured Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and outspoken columnist and commentator elaborating on some of the points surrounding the Russian intervention in Ukraine that have gone under -mentioned in standard media narratives.

In this interview (complete transcript available below) Ritter spoke of the role of Nazis in Russia’s move, the fact that the Russians will soon achieve a victory, the role of Zelensky in his public demands, and the role sanctions ultimately played in Vladimir Putin’s favor.

Scott Ritter is a U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence officer, former UN Chief Weapons Inspector from 1991 -1998, and is currently engaged as a commentator and columnist on Huffington Post, consortiumnews and the American Conservative.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Transcript – Interview with Scott Ritter, March 23, 2022

Global Research: The last time you were on the show, about a month before Russia authorized a military incursion into Ukraine you mentioned that if it did happen it would not be trying to occupy the country. It would be in your words “lancing the boil.” An attempt to demilitarize and destroy Ukraine as a modern nation-state. It seems based on mainstream media coverage that it is in fact trying to occupy the country. Millions of Ukrainians are literally leaving the country as we speak, and this is not an operation that would end in days. It’s now approaching a month. Several Russian soldiers have been killed. They seem to be bogged down outside of cities. Certainly NATO is not yet going to engage them it’s true. Russia isn’t succeeding, no doubt due in part, it seems, to the resistance of the Ukrainian soldiers.

So let me ask you if you’ve changed your mind about what you said two months ago. I mean, did you err in your assessment of the Russian logistics in the situation?

Scott Ritter: NO! I’m a hundred percent correct! I mean, the fact of the matter is Russia isn’t occupying Ukraine!

Ukraine is a nation of forty one million people. Now, they say ten million of those are displaced, some internally some have fled. That still leaves thirty million people occupying expansive areas of terrain, including cities such as Kiev where you have over three million people. Russia came in with two hundred thousand troops. Military math just simply says no, you’re not occupying Ukraine with two hundred thousand troops!

So, let’s just stop that kind of nonsense right off the bat! This is politicized rhetoric, what people say, that Russia is trying to occu – because what you’ve done now is create a straw man that says therefore Russia has failed in its objectives!

Russia is succeeding wildly in its objectives! I don’t have to speculate. Russia has stated what its objectives are! There are two military objectives that will lead to one political objective.

The first military objective is de-Nazification. That is, the absolute destruction, liquidation, annihilation of the neo-Nazi and ultra-right wing nationalist military formations and the political parties that sustain them, along with any legislation that empowers them.

For instance, legislation passed in January of 2021 which made Stepan Bandera, a right wing Nazi supporting, Jew killing Ukrainian nationalist, elevated him to the status of national hero! And then went around – they passed additional legislation which named streets after him, named boulevards, named places, raised monuments and then also brought back into the mainstream people of his ilk. Nazis, people who had enlisted and served in Waffen SS units during World War II. People who had served in Einsatzgruppen that killed Jews during World War II. These people are now rehabilitated, and their names are put up in places of honour!

The Russians want to eliminate this. They want legislation passed in Ukraine which de-legitimizes Nazis instead of praising Nazis.

The Russians are doing very well on this front! They’re in the process of finishing off the last Nazi defenders of the city of Mariupol. This is where the Azov battalion, now a regiment, was headquartered. These are right-wing neo-Nazi extremists, many of whom have swastikas and other Nazi symbols tattooed on their bodies. This is where they tormented the Russian speaking population for the past eight years! They are now in the process of being killed, or captured by the Russians.

 

That is what de-Nazification looks like. Similar de-Nazification processes are taking place elsewhere in Ukraine anywhere where the Russian forces find a neo-Nazi national unit of Ukrainian army. So anybody who thinks that the Nazis are doing well against the Russians, think again!

The second is de-militarization! This means that Russia is going to dismantle the NATO army that had been built in Ukraine. A lot of people don’t realize that there were 260,000 active duty Ukrainian military personnel, most of whom have been trained by NATO in the past eight years to NATO standards. That means that Ukrainian military units were inter-operable with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. You could take a battalion, a NATO trained Ukrainian troops, and place them under NATO command and they would perform well.

This isn’t theory. This is reality. Ukrainian troops participated in numerous NATO-led operations around the world and in Europe. So, Russia has said that this – the existence of a NATO proxy-force is unacceptable, and that its goal is to de-militarize Ukraine.

Now, this could be done peacefully with Ukrainian soldiers staying in their barracks, while the Russians dismantled and removed from Ukraine all NATO provided equipment and oversaw the reorganization of Ukrainian military in a manner which made it no longer a de-facto proxy of NATO. Or if they wanted to resist, Russia would destroy them.

Now Russia came in a little soft handed early on. They didn’t bomb the barracks. They went out of their way to avoid unnecessary deaths among the Ukrainian troops. But the Ukrainians decided to fight!

Lets be clear here. This is a big army: 260,000 active duty, 310,000 reservists and security forces. Normally in the military if you want to launch an offensive operation, you want a three-to-one advantage. That is, for every single defender, you want three of your own troops. Russia went into Ukraine with a three to one disadvantage! Meaning for every single Russian, there were three Ukrainians. And yet, Russia is winning on the battlefield. They are advancing at a rate faster than the German army advanced during the Blitzkrieg of World War II! They are engaging the Ukrainian forces on large scale combat operations the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since World War II. And they are prevailing.

They are in the process of entrapping 60-100 thousand Ukrainian troops in Eastern Ukraine, one of the largest bedlam development cauldron type operations seen since World War II. They are doing the same around Kiev. And they are doing the same in the area of Odessa.

A lot of people will look at video-tapes that have been put out on YouTube and elsewhere showing destroyed Russian columns, dead Russian troops. This is war on a scale that people can’t imagine! It’s well beyond anything the United States and its allies undertook in Iraq and Afghanistan. When you have war on this level, there will be tactical setbacks.

Ukrainians who are extremely hard fighting, well-trained, well equipped groups are capable of limited combat success. And they are enjoying limited combat success on the battlefield. There is multiple occasions where they had defeated the Russians. Where they have inflicted serious casualties on the Russians. But from an operational and strategic stand-point, the Russians are winning and winning decisively. Ukrainians cannot sustain their defence. They lacked a logistical depth. They’re running out of gas. They’re running out of ammunition. They’re running out of food and water. Their troops are worn out, worn down, and are rapidly disintegrating as we speak. As we speak!

The Ukrainian defences in Eastern Ukraine are collapsing. They’re starting a panicked retreat westward. They’re going to be cut off by the Russians, and probably killed by the Russians if they don’t surrender to the Russians. So no, the Russians are doing quite well. People are…

GR: Did you say the Russians, I mean, put on your military and analyst glasses for a moment. Is Russia going to prevail? And how far away is the victory? IS it weeks away, or…

SR: Russia will prevail. And I believe that Russia is closer to victory than they were starting this conflict. Meaning that Ukrainian military is collapsing as we speak, and the ability for Ukraine to sustain large scale resistance is diminishing if not being eliminated.

This war’s over! It’s all over but the shouting! That’s all just a statement of fact.

GR: If you’re right about this, then what do you make of the role of Zelensky in this situation? Because he’s been speaking to governments around the world, and he’s a national hero and everything. But dies he think that he can still win this? The forces will, you know, “close the sky” and all the other things? Or is there something more going on in terms of seeing the writing on the wall as it were?

SR: Well, Zelensky knows what the outcome of this will be.

Think about it for a second. Every time he says, “if you just close the skies, if you just give us a no-fly-zone, we can win!” But what’s he really saying? That the Russians are winning the war! Okay? I mean there’s no other way of interpreting that!

GR: Yeah…

SR: He’s not saying, “hey, don’t worry about not closing the skies because we’re doing pretty well on the battlefield. We’re going to win this thing!” He’s saying that if you don’t close the skies, we have lost this war!

GR: Ahhh! Okay…

SR: And that’s exactly what’s happening. Because NATO is not going to close down the skies, and Ukraine is losing the war. He knows this. His generals know this. His troops know this. This is why at every single chance, everybody involved in the Ukrainian resistance is demanding a no-fly-zone because without this, they’re doomed, and they know it!

GR: What about the sanctions aspect of it. I mean, are they going to wear down the Russian public over time? Or will the boomerang effect of the sanctions wear down the US, Canada, and the EU first? How do you see that the sanctions aspect playing out?

SR: Well, let’s look at this strategically for a second. Joe Biden looked Vladimir Putin in the eye last June and threatened him with massive sanctions should he act on Ukraine. Sanctions like you’ve never seen before! Alright, now Putin as soon as he got done changing his pants and everything because I’m sure that just scared him to death. He had months to sit down with his inner circle and say, “how do we prepare for this?” Nothing the U.S. and its allies are doing has taken the Russians by surprise. NOTHING! They anticipated EVERYTHING! And they have a plan in response.

As for instance today, when the sanctions came out, remember Russia had 650 billion dollars in sovereign fund in reserves – foreign reserves, gold reserves – and half of that was dispersed in banks around the world. And people went, “why would you do that?” Because the West is going to freeze them, which the West did. And the answer is because Russia was setting the West up for a trap, which was sprung today.

 

Today, Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he said the following: “Because you froze our assets illegally, you have defaulted on every obligation you have in regard to Russia. Therefore, Russia will not only never again accept foreign currency, you know, for payment for Russian services or goods, we are going to demand from this moment on that all nations that are on the non-friendly list that is everybody who sanctioned them must now pay in Russian Rubles for natural gas.

Okay Europe cannot survive! One of the big things that came out of this economic sanctions was that the United States had been promising Europe, “Don’t worry about Russia gas! We have a plan B! We will be able to bring together resources and make sure that you have the gas you need!”

Well, there is no plan B. There aren’t the resources available. There’s not enough gas. And Europe will shut down immediately.

Now, Russia hasn’t shut off the pipelines. Because Russia was laying a trap. Russia now has confirmed that Europe is addicted. Germany has admitted right now that if Russia turns off the gas pipelines, Germany won’t have any gas for next winter. It’s over! All she wrote! Their economy will collapse! The French economy will collapse! Every economy in Europe will collapse! And there will be a rebounding effect in Canada and the United States.

So now, Europe is in the difficult position of if they want to keep the gas going, that they must keep going in order to survive, they’ve got to pay in Russian Rubles. Take a look at what’s happened to the Russian Ruble just today! IT’s rebounding! Everbody said the Ruble is collapsing. No! It’s the dollar that’s collapsing right now! Because the Russians have laid a trap. They set the trap. And this is just the first of many! The Russians have many other traps out there that they have set, and they can initiate at a time of their choosing. So, the notion that the sanctions…

Look, the sanctions are hurting Russians right now. There’s no doubt about that. But the sanctions also liberated Putin for the first time since he took power to be able to divorce Russia from the Western economy. And in doing so, eliminate in totality any leverage the West had over Russian domestic political affairs. The West used to be able to threaten sanctions. And the Russians are saying, “gosh, maybe we don’t want to do that so we’ll…” The West no longer has – the West has sanctioned everything. It’s over!

Putin has said, “thank you very much! Thank you! You’ve done me a big favour! The first thing you’ve done by freezing all the assets is that you have disembowelled the oligarchs!” You know that corrupt class of Russian businessmen that came to life during Boris Yeltsin’s ten years as a president. That Putin inherited!

Putin was able to neuter them politically by telling them that if they get involved in domestic politics he will destroy them, and he did. Several of them have been forced to flee to London and elsewhere because Putin will put them in jail for life. The others that remained were able to retain their riches and continue to get rich, but they were not allowed to be involved in politics. But their existence has always been a thorn in Putin’s side. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t want them. And he hates the fact that he needed them. But now that the West has gone in and seized all their assets, they’re bankrupt and broke! And guess what! Putin doesn’t want them now! He’s told them to get the heck out of Russia! HE has no use for them! Go live where you wanted to live over there! You’re no longer welcome here!

The other thing that’s happened is about 20 percent of the Russian population that was relatively apolitical, who tended to vote for the status quo, meaning vote for Putin would have turned on Putin had Putin initiated a divorce with the West. These are the Russian middle class whose economic well-being had become so intertwined with the West that there could be no thought of breaking with the West. If any move by Russia, by Putin, by anybody, to do so would have caused a backlash that any democracy, and Russia is a democracy, would have cost the incumbent the vote. Putin would have been voted out.

But now that the West has sanctioned Russia, it is not Putin that has made the divorce, it’s the West! Putin is now applying shock therapy to these people, seeking to rapidly reinstate their middle class status, by pivoting eastward to China, to India, to elsewhere, to recapitalize the Russian economy. And now that he has made gas based upon the Ruble standard, those Rubles that these Russians had in the bank that last week were worth nothing, they’re worth twice as much today! And this time next week, they’ll double in value again! And the middle class is going to forget the West ever existed.

GR: Amazing analysis! Scott Ritter, it’s been a pleasure hearing your unique take on this situation. We thank you so much for your time!

SR: Thanks for having me!

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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Reputed foreign policy think tanks, lavishly funded by security establishments and the military-industrial complex, are the real terrorist organizations that have a long and checkered history of cheerleading Western nations into pursuing militarist and belligerent state policies, clandestinely orchestrating proxy wars, publicly pleading for imposing no-fly zones and mounting purported “humanitarian interventions,” oftentimes on the ostensible pretext of so-called “responsibility to protect” and upholding capitalist and neocolonial exploitation in the garb of promoting bourgeois democracy in the developing world.

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. RAND Corporation is a quasi-US governmental think tank that receives three-quarters of its funding from the US military.

While designating Russia as an “intractable adversary,” the report notes that “Russia has deep seated anxieties” about Western interference and potential military attack. These anxieties are deemed to be “a vulnerability to exploit.”

The RAND report lists several “provocative measures” to insidiously “destabilize and undermine” Russia. Some of the steps include: repositioning bombers within easy striking range of key Russian strategic targets; deploying additional tactical nuclear weapons to locations in Europe and Asia; increasing US and allied naval force posture and presence in Russia’s operating areas (Black Sea); holding NATO war exercises on Russia’s borders; and withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

Almost all the provocative actions recommended in the RAND report have practically been implemented by the successive Obama, Trump and Biden administrations since the 2014 Maidan coup, toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

The US Air Force has flown B-52 strategic bombers and RC-135 reconnaissance planes over eastern Ukraine in months before the invasion, as part of its effort to deter Russia. To stiffen Ukraine’s ability to resist, the United States and NATO dispatched teams of military advisers in months before the invasion to survey air defenses, logistics, communications and other essentials.

Besides deploying 15,000 additional troops in Eastern Europe last month, total number of US troops in Europe is now expected to reach 100,000. “We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN on March 9.

Ahead of the NATO summit attended by President Biden Thursday, March 24, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced the transatlantic military alliance would double the number of battlegroups it had deployed in Eastern Europe.

“The first step is the deployment of four new NATO battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, along with our existing forces in the Baltic countries and Poland,” Stoltenberg said. “This means that we will have eight multinational NATO battlegroups all along the eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”

NATO issued a statement after Thursday’s emergency summit attended by Joe Biden and European leaders:

“In response to Russia’s actions, we have activated NATO’s defense plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and placed 40,000 troops on our eastern flank, along with significant air and naval assets, under direct NATO command supported by Allies’ national deployments. We are also establishing four additional multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.”

Regarding RAND’s recommendation of “augmenting naval force posture in the Black Sea,” it’s worth recalling that before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva last June, the British Royal Navy Defender breached Russia’s territorial waters in the Black Sea and as many as 20 Russian aircraft conducted “unsafe maneuvers” merely 500 feet above the warship and Britain also lamented shots were fired in the path of the ship.

“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not say whether he had personally approved the Defender’s voyage but suggested the Royal Navy was making a point by taking that route,” a Politico report alleged in June. A Telegraph report noted that former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had raised concerns about the mission, proposed by defense chiefs, and that Boris Johnson was ultimately called in to settle the dispute.

Among the 50-page Ministry of Defense documents discovered at a bus stop in Kent and passed to BBC were papers showing that ministers knew that sending a Royal Navy warship close to Crimea last June would provoke Russia, and did it anyway, sparking an international incident.

Similarly, signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, the United States withdrew from the Cold War-era agreement, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in August 2019. Intermediate range missiles are considered particularly destabilizing because the missiles can reach their targets within ten minutes, giving little warning and time for decision-making and, consequently, raising the specter of miscalculation.

The full RAND report says:

“While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington’s pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”  (emphasis added)

In November 2021, the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership. The agreement confirmed “Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO” and “rejected the Crimean decision to re-unify with Russia” following the 2014 Maidan coup.

In December 2021, Russia 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. When the proposed treaty was contemptuously rebuffed by Washington, it appeared the die was cast.

The Intercept reported on March 11 that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.

Last April, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”

In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last June. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

Current Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said that over 20 years the US invested $5 billion in the project to destabilize Ukraine and provoke Russia. The culmination was a violent coup in February 2014. Since 2015, the US has been training ultra-nationalist and Neo-Nazi militias.

Prior to 2018, the US only provided “defensive military assistance” to Ukraine. The RAND report assesses that providing lethal (offensive) military aid to Ukraine will have “a high risk but advantages will far outweigh the cost.”

Accordingly, US lethal weaponry to Ukraine skyrocketed from merely a trickle to $250 million in 2019, $303 million in 2020 and $650 million in 2021. Total military aid is much higher. A few weeks ago, the Hill reported, “The US has contributed more than $1 billion to help Ukraine’s military over the past year.”

On March 16, President Biden announced an unprecedented package of $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which included 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 2,000 anti-armor Javelins, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems and 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones.

The $800 million will mean more than $2 billion in the US military assistance has gone to Ukraine since Biden entered office in Jan. 2021, as the Biden administration had previously pledged $200 million days before announcing the $800 million package, $350 million were disbursed immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the administration provided $650 million in military assistance to Ukraine during Biden’s first year in office.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels ahead of the European Union foreign ministers meeting last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the EU would provide $1.1 billion in armsto Ukraine. The United States and its allies have reportedly infused over $3 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan coup.

Recently, the Congress announced $1.5 trillion package for funding the federal government through September, boosting national defense coffers to $782 billion, about a 6 percent increase. On top of the hefty budget increase, the package is set to deliver $13.6 billion in emergency funding to help Ukraine, nearly twice the assistance package initially proposed, including $3 billion for US forces and $3.5 billion for military equipment to Ukraine, plus more than $4 billion for US humanitarian efforts.

Nonetheless, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month was only a logical culmination of a long-simmering, eight-year war of attrition initiated by NATO powers against Russia in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region after the 2014 Maidan coup.

In an explosive scoop, Zach Dorfman reported for the Yahoo News on March 16:

“As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.

“When CIA paramilitaries first traveled to eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s initial 2014 incursion, their brief was twofold. First, they were ordered to determine how the agency could best help train Ukrainian special operations personnel fight the Russian military forces, and their separatist allies, waging a grinding war against Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region. But the second part of the mission was to test the mettle of the Ukrainians themselves, according to former officials.”

Besides the CIA’s clandestine program for training Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied neo-Nazi militias in eastern Ukraine and the US Special Forces program for training Ukraine’s security forces at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country bordering Poland that was hit by a barrage of 30 cruise missiles killing at least 35 militants on March 13, Dorfman claims in a separate January report that the CIA also ran a covert program for training Ukraine’s special forces at an undisclosed facility in the southern United States.

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

“While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it.”

By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also “started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine” to advise and assist Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias there. The multiweek, US-based CIA program included “training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like cover and move, intelligence and other areas.”

One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.” Going back decades, the CIA had provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up a US-allied Kyiv and undermine Russian influence, but cooperation ramped up after the Crimea annexation, a former CIA executive told Dorfman.

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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 Af-Pak and Middle East 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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The corporate media is now controlled by the interests of Big Pharma which has spent over $1 BILLION in promoting COVID-19 vaccines. See: Local, National Media Paid $MILLIONS To Push COVID-19 Vaccines

Even last night’s Oscar’s show was sponsored by Pfizer and BioNTech.

So when this corporate media now switches their focus to trying to convince the American public that Russia and Putin are a threat to our national security, that’s an indication to look around and see what they are trying to cover up and hide.

And one does not have to look very far to see the damaging effects of their COVID-19 vaccines. The government’s own database of Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) through March 18, 2022 shows that there are unprecedented increases in recorded deaths and injuries following COVID-19 vaccines for the past 15 months since they were issued emergency use authorizations (EUAs), as compared to recorded deaths and injuries reported following all FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years.

These government statistics show there is no greater danger to the lives of Americans today than our own government which is sitting on data that show the following increases of reports in VAERS following COVID-19 vaccines:

• 68,000% increase in strokes
• 44,000% increase in heart disease
• 6,800% increase in deaths
• 5,700% increase in permanent disabilities
• 5,000% increase in life threatening injuries
• 4,400% increase in hospitalizations

This is mass murder and genocide.

If the corporate media switched from covering the war in Ukraine and published this data directly from the government’s own database, there would be riots all across the U.S. right now, if not a Civil War.

But the largely brain-dead American consumer is content to watch their corporate news and blame all the world’s problems on Russia right now instead, as we face huge labor shortages and supply chain bottlenecks due to all these deaths and injuries from the COVID-19 vaccines that will now be blamed on Russia.

A false flag attack on American soil that will be blamed on Russia seems imminent now.

Here is a summary of the raw data in VAERS for the past 15 months following COVID-19 vaccines. (Source.)

Here is the same raw data in VAERS following all non-COVID vaccines for the previous 30 years. (Source.)

The majority of cases now found in the 31+ year history of VAERS are from after 12/1/2020 when the FDA granted emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccines.

To check our math on the percentage increase, take the numbers from the non-COVID vaccines and divide by 360 months for the previous 30 years to get the monthly average, and then take the numbers from the COVID-19 vaccines and divide by the 15 months since they were approved in December of 2020.

The number of strokes following COVID-19 vaccines is found here, and the number of strokes following all vaccines for the previous 30 years is found here.

The number of cases of heart disease (all cases of *carditis) following COVID-19 vaccines is found here, and the number of cases of heart disease following all vaccines for the previous 30 years is found here.

The greatest threat to the national security of the United States today is our own government, and the Wall Street Billionaires and bankers who fund Big Pharma who seem to have the government in their pocket, and that includes both political parties.

Government is the problem, NOT the solution.

A sampling of the hundreds of tragic stories we have covered since the COVID-19 vaccines started.

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Featured image is from fiercepharma.com

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The Federal Reserve and most other world central banks are lying about how interest rates affect inflation. It’s no small matter, as it clearly is being used to usher in a global economic depression, this time far worse than in the 1930s, using Russia as the scapegoat to blame, as the powers that be prepare to push the world into what Joe Biden recently called “a New World Order.”

I have made the case many times that every major economic depression or recession of the past century or so, since creation of the US Federal Reserve, has been the deliberate political result of Fed actions. The present situation is clearly a repeat of that. Recent statements and actions of the Fed on combating inflation indicate that they plan to provoke a full blown global depression in the next several months. The conflict in Ukraine and the insane flood of NATO country sanctions on everything Russian will be used to accelerate the process of global inflation in food, energy and everything else, and allow blame to be put on Russia while the Fed gets away unscathed. Follow the money creators.

If we look at the recent statements of the Fed, far the most powerful central bank in the world regardless of predictions of the dollar’s imminent demise as the global reserve currency, it becomes clear they are openly lying. Keep in mind the same Fed deliberately kept interest rates at near zero for more than 14 years since the 2008 crisis to bail out Wall Street at the expense of the real economy. Now they claim they must reverse rates for the good of that economy. They are simply lying.

The Bogus Phillips Curve

Over the past several years Turkish President Erdogan has been severely attacked for claiming that higher central bank interest rates are not effective in controlling Turkey’s high inflation. Ironically, he is right as far as he goes. He dared to attack today’s monetary orthodoxy, for which financial markets punished him by attacking the Lira. The basis of the theory on interest rates and inflation today goes back to an article in 1958 published by A.W. Phillips, then at the London School of Economics. Philips, reviewing UK economic data on wages and inflation over a century concluded there was an inverse relation between wages and inflation.

 

Basically Philips, who put his data into what is now known as the Philips Curve, concluded that inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship. Higher inflation is associated with lower unemployment and vice versa. Yet correlation does not prove causality, and even the Fed’s own economists have published studies showing the Philips Curve invalid. In 2018 Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a former Vice‐​Chairman of the Fed, noted that “the correlation between unemployment and changes in inflation is nearly zero… Inflation has barely moved as unemployment rose and fell.”

Despite that, the Federal Reserve, as well as most central banks worldwide since the 1970s, have used this Philips Curve notion to justify raising interest rates to “kill” inflation. The most infamous in this was Fed chairman Paul Volcker who in 1979 raised key US interest rates (at the same time as the Bank of England) by 300% to near 20% levels where he triggered the worst US recession since the 1930’s.

Volcker blamed the extremely high inflation of 1979-82 on worker wage demands. He conveniently ignored the true cause of global inflation then, soaring prices of oil and grains through to the 1980’s as a result of geopolitical actions of Volcker’s patron, David Rockefeller, in creating the oil shocks of the 1970’s. I write about this extensively in my book A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics.

Since the brutal Volcker interest rate operation it has become orthodoxy for the Fed and other central banks to say rising inflation must be “tamed” by rising interest rates. In fact the ones to gain are the main banks of Wall Street who hold US Treasury debt.

Causes of Recent Inflation

The cause of the alarming inflation rises since the 2020 COVID lockdowns has little or nothing to do with rising wages or a booming economy. Raising rates to create a “soft landing” or so-called mild recession will have virtually no effect on real inflation.

Prices are soaring for the very necessities that families must spend on. According to a study by US economist Mike “Mish” Shedlock, more than 80% of the components of the US Consumer Price Index used to officially measure inflation is made up of so-called “inelastic components.” That includes above all cost of housing, gasoline fuel, transportation, food, medical insurance, education. Most families are not able to seriously reduce any of these necessary living costs regardless of higher interest rates.

Food cost is soaring as global shortages of grain, sunflower oil and fertilizers appear, owing to skyrocketing cost of natural gas to make nitrogen fertilizers.

This was well before the Ukraine conflict. Eliminating Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports because of sanctions and war can cut up to 30% of world grain supply. Drought in USA Midwest and South America, and heavy floods in China are adding to exploding food costs. Natural gas is rising because of the foolish EU and Biden Zero Carbon agenda to eliminate all hydrocarbon energy in the next years. Now because of the suicidal sanctions by the West against Russia, a major source of global diesel fuel, Russia, is being eliminated. Russia is the second largest crude oil exporter in the world after Saudi Arabia. It is the largest natural gas exporter in the world, most to the EU.

Sanctions, Urea and Microchips

An example of how interconnected the globalized world economy has become, in October, 2021 China imposed severe export controls on export of urea, a key component of not only fertilizer but also of a diesel engine additive, DEF or AdBlue, which most modern diesel engines need to control Nitrogen Oxide emissions.

Without AdBlue the engines don’t run. That threatens trucks, farm tractors, harvesters, construction equipment. U.S. military uses diesel fuel in tanks and trucks. Now with the sanctions on Russia, the world’s second largest exporter of refined diesel fuel is being forced out. The EU imports half of its diesel from Russia. Shell and BP have warned German buyers of potential supply problems and prices are soaring. The diesel loss comes as diesel fuel stocks in Europe are at their lowest since 2008. In the US according to OilPrice.com, the situation is graver still. There, diesel fuel inventories are 21 percent lower than the pre-pandemic five-year seasonal average.

Neon gas is a byproduct from steel production. Some 50% of world semiconductor high-purity neon gas critical for the lasers needed for lithography to make chips comes from two Ukrainian companies, Ingas and Cryoin. Both got their neon from Russian steel plants. One is based in Odessa and the other in Mariupol. Since the fighting there began a month ago, both plants have shut down. Moreover, according to the California-based firm TECHCET, “Russia is a crucial source of C4F6 which several US suppliers buy and purify for use in advanced node logic device etching and advanced lithography processes for chip production.” As well Russia produces about a third of all world palladium used in car catalytic converters and in sensors and emerging memory (MRAM).

Oleg Izumrovov, a Russian computer data expert points out further that Russia today “accounts for 80 percent of the market of sapphire substrates – thin plates made of artificial stone, which are used in opto- and microelectronics to build up layers of various materials, for example, silicon. They are used in every processor in the world – AMD and Intel are no exception.” He adds, “Our position is even stronger in the special chemistry of etching chips using ultra-pure components. Russia accounts for 100 percent of the world’s supply of various rare earths used for these purposes.”

Not to mention Russia is the world’s second largest producer of Nickel and of aluminum.

As Washington continuously escalates sanctions against Russia it is only a matter of weeks before these supply chain links impact global and USA inflation to a degree not seen in recent memory. At the March 24 Brussels NATO meeting Joe Biden tried (unsuccessfully for now) to push the EU member states to sanction Russian oil and gas. Energy prices are already soaring globally and Biden admitted to a reporter that prices are going to go much higher for food and energy, blaming it on the Ukraine conflict.

None of these effects, most of which are only beginning to impact the cost and even availability of food and other essentials, can be altered by raising Federal Reserve Fed Funds rates. And the Fed knows that. They are literally throwing kerosene onto a burning economic fire with their actions. They will point to alarming rises in inflation by May and double-down on their false “cure”, namely higher interest rates that risk plunging the US and world into a global depression that will make the 1930s seem mild. We can expect much talk about introducing a digital central bank currency to replace the dollar at that point. Welcome to the Davos Great Reset.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-9879389-2-3

Year: 2007

Product Type: PDF File

Price: $9.50

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

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***

This March 24, on the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, after a pause of two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Argentines took to the streets across the country to pay homage to the victims of the last military dictatorship

March 24, 2022, marked 46 years since the US-backed civic-military coup overthrew the left-wing government of President Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina (July 1974-March 1976). The coup installed the bloodiest dictatorship in the history of the country, led by General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera and Brigadier-General Orlando Ramón Agosti (March 1976-December 1983). The dictatorship period was marked by state terrorism and grave human rights violations.

During over seven years of dictatorship, Argentine security forces, along with right-wing death squads such as Triple A, hunted down anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement. It is estimated that over 30,000 students, activists, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and any citizens suspected of being left-wing activists were kidnapped, tortured and disappeared. The military junta silenced any political or ideological dissidents, even those seen as antithetical to its neoliberal economic policies.

The armed forces even seized their property and their babies. According to available data, around 500 children, who were detained with their militant parents or born in captivity, were appropriated as war trophies by the repressive forces and handed over to military families, sold or abandoned in state institutions.

In the years following the return of democracy, government authorities took some steps in order to honor the victims and ensure that those horrible times are never repeated. In 2002, the Argentine Congress declared that this tragic day would be remembered as the National Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, with the purpose of making it a day of reflection on recent history. In 2006, it was declared a public national holiday in Argentina.

For over three decades, every year, on March 24, hundreds of thousands of citizens, relatives of the disappeared people, members of social movements, human rights organizations and left-wing political parties march to the Plaza de Mayo in the capital Buenos Aires to commemorate the victims of the last dictatorship and demand justice for the crimes against humanity committed by the State during that period.

This March 24, after a pause of two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, once again, hundreds of thousands of Argentines took to the streets across the country to pay homage to the victims and their revolutionary spirit.

In Buenos Aires, wearing white scarfs, shouting “memory, truth and justice,” members and sympathizers of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the human rights organizations that have been at the forefront of the struggle to justice for and truth about their disappeared relatives, marched from 9 Julio Avenue to Plaza de Mayo, carrying a large flag with the photos of the 30,000 victims. Over one hundred thousand people flooded the plaza and surrounding streets.

Massive demonstrations and marches were held in the cities such as Santa Fe, Rosario, Salta, Cordoba, Tucumán, Neuquén, among others.

In Buenos Aires, members and sympathizers of human rights organizations Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo marched from 9 Julio Avenue to Plaza de Mayo, carrying a large flag with the photos of the 30,000 victims. Photo: @dicoluciano/ @emergentemedio

Human rights activist and one of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Nora Cortiñas, addressed the multitudinous crowd and delivered the annual speech prepared by human rights organizations, such as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained for Political Reasons, the Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence (HIJOS), among others.

“46 years after the genocidal coup, and two years after taking care of ourselves, we march again to the Plaza de Mayo, our Plaza, as it is being done today throughout the country. Once again, we arrive with the photos of those who were victims of the genocide. Their absences continue to hurt us, but we bring high their flags, their faces, their names, their stories, their lives, their militancy, and we make them present,” said Cortiñas.

She stressed that “they are present because we have never abandoned our fight against impunity. The annulment of the full stop and due obedience laws allowed the times of justice to return,” and recalled that “16 years of effective trials for crimes against humanity with 1,058 convicted is an achievement that we must never minimize.” At the same time, Cortiñas said that “we are concerned about the increase in benefits granted to convicts and detainees with preventive prisons,” and highlighted that “currently, 579 have the benefit of house arrest. Of the total number of people investigated at this time, there are 764 people in detention, while 1,532 remain free.”

She emphasized that

“it is necessary that the appointment of judges be resolved urgently; that resources be strengthened to deepen the investigative work in the investigation stage; that the gender and diversity perspective be incorporated into the judicial view; that the orality stage be accelerated by adding days of hearings; that the endless times in the recursive routes before Cassation and the Court end.”

Norita concluded the speech by stating that

“we, the people, are the strength of the struggles that were born in this country to make it fair, free and supportive. We are the identity of a nation that continues to build Memory, Truth and Justice, that defends sovereignty and independence. We will not allow any damage to democracy. Since we recovered it, the people will take care of it forever.”

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Featured image: On March 24, hundreds of thousands of Argentines flooded the Plaza de Mayo and surrounding streets in capital Buenos Aires to commemorate the victims of the last dictatorship and demand justice for them. Photo:Leandro Mastronicola / Emergentes

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***

Western countries and their closest allies imposed new sanctions on Moscow after Russian troops crossed into Ukraine on February 24 in what Moscow calls a special military campaign to demilitarise the NATO-aspiring country. Although the EU enthusiastically followed Washington’s lead in engaging in an economic war with Russia, the harsh realization of sanctions are beginning to set in, with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis telling CNN on March 25, when referring to rising energy costs, that “Europe must be very careful not to allow them [sanctions] to harm Europe more than Russia.”

A similar sentiment was shared by German economist Aika Hamer, who said that the EU could face backlash from anti-Russian sanctions and warned that if the German economy collapses, then the whole of Europe will fall apart.

“If the German economy collapses because of these measures, then the whole of Europe will fall apart,” he said. “We may face the fact that diesel fuel or gasoline will cost €4-5 or even €6 per liter. We may also face the fact that most Europeans will no longer be able to afford to drive. Without this, the great prosperous West is nothing more than an illusion.” Hamer also noted that the losers in this situation “will be the middle class and the poorest people in Germany, Europe and the United States.”

Hamer’s warning comes as fuel prices have already reached unprecedented heights and broken different records in the US, the UK and across different EU countries. German motorists have been hit at the pump by the skyrocketing fuel prices — forking out €2.14 for a liter of gasoline and at one point in March paying as much as €2.25 per liter for diesel, thus making it more expensive than gasoline for the first time in history despite government subsidies.

It is recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on March 23 that the transfer of gas supply payments from so-called unfriendly countries will from now on be conducted in rubles in light of Russia’s exclusion from SWIFT, and effectively from the US Dollar. The demand for rubles was the obvious outcome as it made no sense to supply energy to the EU and the US whilst receiving payments in their own currency that Moscow in turn cannot use or face having frozen.

For her part, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU will not allow the payment of Russian gas in rubles as it is, in her view, “a unilateral decision and a clear breach of contract. We will not allow our sanctions to be circumvented. The time when energy could be used to blackmail us is over.” At the same time, she announced a new partnership between the EU and the US, which involves providing more American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the bloc as a replacement for Russian gas.

However, it was naïve for the Europeans to believe that Russia would tolerate such a situation where they are excluded from Western financial mechanisms but are expected to continue receiving payments in Dollars and Euros. In this way, the main aim of wanting rubles for energy is to support the national currency against such pressure.

Although von der Leyen speaks bravely about replacing Russian LNG with the 15 billion cubic meters (15 bcm) of LNG that Washington had pledged, it does nothing to stop European countries from buying an additional 150 bcm of Russian natural gas that is delivered via pipeline.

“Europe has an import capability that is limited, and they don’t have any additional infrastructure that is going to come online,” Charlie Riedl, executive director of the Center for Liquefied Natural Gas, told VOA regarding greater LNG use in Europe. “Infrastructure that’s currently operational is basically running at capacity right now, and I would expect that it will run at capacity for the remainder of this year.” He added that coming into 2022, the amount of gas held in storage by European countries was well below recent averages, making the continent especially vulnerable to potential supply disruptions.

In effect, in the drive to wean off Russian energy, it will be the West’s Middle Class and poorest who will be most affected by drastically rising costs. At the same time, gas storage amounts throughout 2022 will be at a high-risk level, meaning that if there is a disruption in the supply or there is another unexpected global event akin to a pandemic or to the magnitude of the conflict in Ukraine, it very well could be the case that the EU has allowed sanctions to harm Europeans more so than Russia. Already rising energy and food costs suggests that average European citizens are already suffering.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

The semi-official United States government plus media lie machine knows that constructing a plausible reason to bomb the crap out of someone all depends on where you begin your narrative. If you keep starting your accusations at a point where the target has done something bad, all you have to do is repeat yourself over and over again to drown out any alternative backstory that surfaces. And if you really want to demolish all contrary views, all you have to do is liken the targeted foreign leader to Adolph Hitler and keep repeating. That tactic was used with Saddam Hussein of Iraq and is now being employed against Vladimir Putin of Russia and it always works.

In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia the trick has been to tie everything to the invasion by Putin’s armed forces over four weeks ago, an undoubted act of aggression. Once you establish that as your launching point, preceding developments are rendered moot. Who cares about US promises not to expand the NATO alliance eastwards after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991? And there is also Washington’s role in regime change in Ukraine in 2014? Or even the relentless demonization of Russia linked to the 2016 US presidential election followed by any unwillingness by Washington to negotiate even the most reasonable of Putin’s demands? Fugged about it! And also forget about considering whether or not the US has any national interest in going to war over Ukraine. Only Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard seem inclined to challenge the basic premise, which is to raise the question “Since Russia does not threaten us why are we doing this? Do we really want a possible nuclear war over Ukraine?”

Just read the New York Times and you will learn that it is not about what’s good for America at all. It is all about a big bully country attacking a “democratic” neighbor with the US and its brave allies standing up as the standard bearers of a Washington imposed “rules based international order.” And now the US is upping the ante by pushing ahead with its insistence that Russia is committing war crimes. But convincing the world on that point is a bit more difficult to accomplish. If one were to ask the question “Which nation in the world commits the most war crimes?” the general international response might well be Israel or the United States. Part of the problem would be working out an acceptable definition for a war crime while also developing a methodology for defining “the most.” If Israel attacks Syria four times in a week is that four separate war crimes or only part of one continuous war crime. As the United States has military bases in both Syria and Iraq that the respective governments have not authorized, and have in fact, asked the Americans to leave, is that a single war crime of illegal invasion and occupation or a continuous one punctuated only by the occasions when US troops kill a few of the natives?

In any event it is difficult to “convict” Russia as neither Israel nor the US has ever been held accountable for the war crimes they have committed, to include shooting and bombing civilians, hospitals, schools at random and occasionally wedding parties and other social gatherings. President George W. Bush even started a couple of wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq based on fabricated “intelligence” and the greatly beloved Barack Obama did the same to Libya and Syria. Both are now regarded as venerable elder statesmen even though they should be in prison and there is lately some talk among Democrats of seeing Obama or his wife run again in 2024 for the highest office in the land. And is that Hillary waiting in the wings for a second try? Either way, it will be a bad day for anyone trying to establish a modus vivendi for working with Russia.

America’s blood lust vis-à-vis Russia is completely bipartisan, with the few sensible voices in Congress drowned out by the drumroll in high places accompanying the avalanche of propaganda pouring out of the mainstream media. It has long been axiomatic that the first victim of war propaganda is truth, but the United States only needs the stimulus of the possibility of war or conflict to begin its pattern of lying. And, as the current situation illustrates, it is quite prepared to designate enemies that in reality do not threaten the country. It did so to bring about a greatly enlarged US commitment in Vietnam and also through the Cold War by deliberate CIA overestimates of the power and reach of the Soviet Union. Since 9/11 there has been a succession of presidents who have lied about nearly everything relating to national security and foreign policy, leading to invasions, assassinations, other types of interventions, and a “sanctions” prone government that has denied ordinary citizens of food and medicines while leaving the leadership of the targeted countries untouched.

One of the recent lies is a replay of the old “let’s get Saddam Hussein” playbook. Remember those savage Iraqi soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators and throwing them onto the floor? Of course, it was all a lie concocted by the Kuwaiti ruling family and US government largely neocon accomplices. Now we are learning that the vile Russians bombed a maternity hospital! Except, of course, that it may have turned out to be completely untrue. And the media is now exclaiming that “Russia is putting the planet on the brink of World War 3!” while the New York Timesis indicting political conservatives as purveyors of Russian propaganda. Actually, it was the United States and NATO that have opened the door to a possible nuclear holocaust, but one hates to dispute what is an apparently a profitable and well-received story line.

But the best bit of lying has to be the ongoing propaganda war over twenty-six biological laboratories in Ukraine funded at least in part by the Pentagon. “Nothing to see here” says the Biden White House, while Russia is saying “Just a minute, folks…” Meanwhile the plot thickens as emails have now surfaced indicating that Joe Biden’s son Hunter was involved in obtaining, and profited from, the US government’s funding of the labs.

The biolab controversy began when the United States government’s State Department number three Victoria Nuland recently admitted to a congressional panel that the labs exist and also added that Ukraine possesses chemical and biological weapons. She then realized her error and both backtracked and elaborated that “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities [and] we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

The statement is absurd as the Russians undoubtedly already possess their own stocks of bioweapons. The existence of the labs themselves may be linked to the legacy of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when, by one account, the US provided assistance through its “Cooperative Threat Reduction Program” to manage the existing bio and chem labs lest their toxic chemicals and pathogens fall into the wrong hands. But the US has actually done much more than that, Ron Unz observes how “Over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on ‘biodefense,’ the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and [has] had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat.”

Currently, the US government claims blandly that the labs, which are run by America’s Department of Defense, remain active for “peaceful research and the development of vaccines.” The US Embassy in Kiev described the activity in greater detail as working “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”

Some Ukrainians have, however, been suspicious of their purpose, particularly as their activities are secret and are managed by the Pentagon rather than some civilian agency. And if the original objective was to prevent the development of bioweapons, why is the US still hanging around seventeen years later? Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who held the post under President Viktor Yanukovych, spoke about how the decision to start collaborating with the Americans was taken by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s office and subsequently implemented under President Viktor Yushchenko in 2005. It was generally believed in the government that the agreement was focused on Ukrainian biosecurity, but all its related activities were and are classified and Ukrainian citizens were not even allowed to work together with the Americans.

There was some pushback on the labs, to include a cursory inspection in 2010-2012 and by 2013 the Ukrainian government sent an official letter demanding that the labs be closed. The 2014 regime change intervened however, and the decision was never implemented by the new regime.

It should be noted that if one is to protect against toxins and pathogens one must first create them in order to manipulate them or prevent them. If one thinks back to the notorious Anthrax scare in the United States in 2001, investigators determined that the lethal strain of the pathogen had actually been created in a US Army biological weapons lab at Fort Detrick Maryland. One might also consider COVID and the widely held belief that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been manipulating various coronavirus strains to make them more contagious and lethal.

Nuland clearly admitted that there were US-funded bioweapons in Ukraine when she expressed concern that Russia might occupy one of the labs and be tempted to acquire the material for its own use against Kiev. And the Biden Administration, clearly embarrassed by the admission, has attempted to turn the tables by rejecting Russian suggestions that the labs might be seeking to design biological pathogens that target certain ethnic groups, which is why the existing labs have been placed all around the world, including Ukraine. As far back as 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his concerns about US collection of biological material from ethnic Russians, as Unz puts it “certainly a very suspicious project for our government to have undertaken.”

If these Pentagon funded laboratories are indeed involved in propagating mutated strains of pathogens like anthrax and plague as biological weapons, like may have taken place at Wuhan, it would be a violation of Article I of the “UN Biological Weapons Convention,” making the United States government indisputably a War Criminal, with its leaders subject to the death sentence under the Nuremberg Laws which were in large part established by the United States Government itself in 1946. That aside, the real concern right now should be that the US/NATO will stage some kind of false flag incident which will lead to calls for direct military intervention. Watching Biden’s serial blunders and cover-ups suggests that there is nothing that Biden and Blinken will not do, up to an include started some kind of hopefully manageable war to boost the presidents sinking approval ratings. Now that Joe Biden is talking tough, it is hard to imagine how he will get off of the horse that he is riding without stepping into some sort of armed conflict. As the former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts has astutely observed “The evil that [now] resides in Washington is unprecedented in human history.”

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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.

Featured image is from TUR

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***

Previewing President Biden’s trip to Europe last week, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that, “the president is traveling to Europe to make sure we stay united.”

That sure didn’t go as planned. This may have been the most disastrous – and dangerous – Presidential overseas trip ever.

The US and its NATO allies have repeatedly proclaimed that “protecting Ukraine’s democracy” has never been about threatening Russia. Holding out NATO membership and sending billions of dollars in military equipment to Ukraine, starting under Trump, was not threatening Russia. CIA training camps in eastern Ukraine, where paramilitaries were trained on US weapons systems, was not about threatening Russia.

But at every stop, President Biden seemed to undermine the narrative his own Administration had carefully crafted. First up, warning that Russia might use chemical weapons in Ukraine, Biden promised it would “trigger a response in kind,” meaning the US would use chemical weapons as well. That would be a serious war crime.

National Security Advisor Sullivan had to be brought to explain that the US has “no intention” of using chemical weapons.

Later, speaking to the 82nd Airborne in Poland, President Biden told them that US troops would soon be in Ukraine. He said to the troops, “you’re going to see — you’re going to see women, young people standing — standing the middle of — in front of a … tank, just saying, ‘I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground.’”

A White House spokesman had to clarify that, “the president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”

Clear? Well, not really. He had just said the opposite to our own troops!

Then, at the end of Biden’s final speech in Poland, the President inadvertently told the truth: the US involvement in Ukraine is all about “regime change” for Russia. Speaking of Russian President Putin, he told the audience, near the border of Ukraine, “for God‘s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The President’s disaster control team immediately mobilized in the person of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who offered this pained interpretation of Biden’s clear statement, “I think the president, the White House, made the point last night that, quite simply, President Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else.”

No, that’s not what he said. The president has a leading Constitutional role in the formation of US foreign policy, and he said in a public speech that “regime change” in Russia is US policy. Any attempt by his staffers to try to explain it away looks terrible: either the President has no idea what he’s saying so we should not take seriously what is essentially a declaration of war on Russia, or the President took the opportunity on the border with Ukraine to essentially declare war on Russia.

Presidents Reagan, Ford, and Bush Jr. were all known for their gaffes. Some were funny and some were serious. But none of them declared war on a nuclear-armed adversary in that adversary’s own backyard and then afterward had to send out staff to explain that the president didn’t mean what he just said.

Interestingly, Biden saved his most hawkish and bombastic statements for this final speech in Poland, at which none of the more cautious NATO partners like Germany and France were present. So much for “unity” being the prime purpose of the trip.

There is a real problem in the Biden Administration and the sooner we face it the better.

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***

On Thursday, March 24, the Russian government held a press conference in which it presented evidence that Hunter Biden, the disgraced son of American president Joe Biden, helped to finance bioweapons research in Ukraine.

Hunter’s untoward activity took place in 2014. The proof comes from emails and other forms of communication found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he recklessly abandoned in a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019.

When Hunter was facilitating bioweapons research in Ukraine, his father, Joe Biden, served as vice president of the United States. Because of his background in foreign affairs, Joe Biden was tasked by then President Obama with overseeing America’s foreign policy. Joe Biden relished the assignment and took deep personal interest in countries such as Ukraine, Russia, and China.

But rather than advancing the interests of the United States, the Bidens used Ukraine – and other countries – to enrich themselves through brazen influence peddling schemes. Hunter Biden was paid, for example, one million dollars a year by a shady gas and oil Ukrainian company called Burisma. Since Hunter Biden does not appear to know much about oil or gas, he was obviously given his appointment and lavish pay because the company’s owners believed he could influence – through his father – American policy in ways that were favorable to the company.

Joe Biden would get a cut from Hunter’s takings, a fact which was communicated by Hunter in his emails. In their drive to enrich themselves, the Bidens would go into business with some of the unscrupulous characters around. Burisma, for instance, was co-founded by a well-known corrupt Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky who is now a fugitive from justice.

When Burisma was being investigated for money laundering, tax evasion and other serious offences by Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, a Burisma executive by the name of Vadym Pozharskyi sent an email to Hunter Biden asking him how he could use his political influence on Burisma’s behalf. This is what he wrote, in part, to Hunter:

“We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.”

When Joe Biden subsequently visited Ukraine in his role as vice president of the United States, he pressured Ukrainian government officials to have the prosecutor fired. This he did by threatening to withhold one billion dollars in US aid which had been promised by Barrack Obama. After some resistance, the Ukrainian government officials caved in and fired the prosecutor. Joe Biden later boasted about it in a talk which was recorded on video.

Joe Biden brags about having effected firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating a company by which his son was paid a million dollars per year

Notice what Joe Biden was doing: He was using US taxpayers’ money to bully a foreign government for the purpose of enriching his own family.

While Joe Biden served as vice president of the United States, the Bidens ran their influence peddling ploy in numerous places across the world. By directing US foreign policy in ways that would enrich himself and his family, Joe Biden sold out his country and betrayed the trust of the high office he held.

Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor himself, called the Bidens a “crime family.” It is painful to admit, but the contents of Hunter’s hard drive clearly show that this is, indeed, an apt description of their activities.

As you may know, Joe Biden and other American high-level officials have been repeatedly calling in recent weeks for a regime change in Russia. They have been openly urging the Russian people to remove or kill Vladimir Putin.

Just the other day, Joe Biden declared on his visit to Poland that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” According to a report by CNN:

“President Joe Biden declared forcefully Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin should no longer remain in power, an unabashed challenge that came at the very end of a swing through Europe meant to reinforce Western unity.”

In response to the calls of US politicians, Russian government called a press conference and showed its people the incontrovertible evidence of Biden’s corruption and malfeasance. In the process, they used Hunter Biden’s crooked dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere to paint the United States as a corrupt and hypocritical nation.

The Russian government officials showed that the United States was involved with bioweapons labs in Ukraine, a country that borders with the Russian Federation. Such labs are illegal under American and international laws. The Biden administration had until recently denied the existence of such facilities, calling those who said otherwise “conspiracy theorists.”

A couple of weeks ago, however, Victoria Nuland, American Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and one of the architects of the 2014 Orange Revolution in Ukraine haltingly admitted the existence of these labs while testifying under oath before a senate committee.

Victoria Nuland admits the existence of a biolabs in Ukraine in a Senate hearing

Using material from Hunter Biden’s hard drive, the Russians showed the world that the president’s own son was involved in this illicit enterprise. Hunter tried to profit from it by investing in a company called Metabiota. Metabiota is a Department of Defense contractor that specializes “in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.”

Hunter raised millions for that company and also put half a million of his own cash into the project. He also connected the leadership of Metabiota with that of notorious Burisma, the corrupt enterprise on whose board he served.

This is what we read in the Mail Online:

Emails and defense contract data reviewed by DailyMail.com suggest that Hunter had a prominent role in making sure Metabiota was able to conduct its pathogen research just a few hundred miles from the border with Russia.

What do you think was the Russian people’s reaction when they were shown this evidence by their government last Thursday?

Do you think that they feel like rising against Putin as Joe Biden urges them to do?

Quite to the contrary, they must have been enraged at the Americans’ apparent malfeasance.

They must have been shocked that such a corrupt man as Joe Biden could hold the highest public office in the United States.

It is Joe Biden who should be removed from office for betraying his nation and by selling his influence to corrupt foreign entities through his lamentable son Hunter.

The incriminating evidence of his crimes and betrayal of his nation is on his son’s own laptop. But when this laptop was presented to the authorities in 2019 by Rudy Giuliani, they refused to do anything about it.

Rather than doing what is right, the establishment turned on Giuliani and those who tried to call attention to the corruption that exists at the highest places of our government.

They claimed that the hard drive was a product of a Russian misinformation campaign even though they knew full well that it was not the case. Their false claim has been soundly disproved and now even the hyper-partisan New York Times admits that the incriminating hard drive is genuine.

What in the world has happened to America? How can our country be led by such corrupt people?

The evidence of their malfeasance is right there for everybody to see on Hunter Biden’s own computer, but our agencies tasked with investigating these kinds of crimes refuse to touch it.

And now the compromised Joe Biden, the man who has cynically sold out his country, is leading us toward World War III.

As part of the US foreign policy elite for decades, Joe Biden has been pushing for NATO’s expansion to the very doorstep of Russia. Russia has correctly and rightly perceived this as a vital national security threat.

Over the years the Russian government pleaded and warned against NATO’s incursion into the former Soviet republics. Rather than acknowledging Russia’s legitimate concerns, Joe Biden upped the ante as president by treating Ukraine as a de facto NATO partner by arming, equipping, and training its army.

When Russia finally responded, he falsely called its president “a war criminal” and demanded a regime change. This is an astonishingly arrogant and reckless way to treat the leader of a nuclear superpower.

One thing is quite certain: Having been shown evidence of Joe Biden’s shocking corruption, the Russian people are not going to heed his call. They doubtlessly see him as a crooked bully who should be despised and not listened to.

Yet Biden’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric and actions leave less and less room for compromise or peace. If Joe Biden and his globalist cronies are not stopped soon, these dishonest operatives will wreck the whole world in a nuclear holocaust.

The American people must insist that their government investigate the crimes of Joe Biden and his family. The authorities have hard evidence of their misdeeds on Hunter Biden’s own hard drive. Not acting on this evidence constitutes a gross dereliction of duty.

Appointing an independent counsel to investigate their sordid business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and beyond would be a good start.

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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  

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

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***

The British MHRA expected many vaccine adverse reactions, in October 2020, months before the vaccine rollout started. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued a tender for “an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software tool to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction (ADRs).”

The MHRA urgently seeks an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software tool to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction (ADRs) and ensure that no details from the ADRs’ reaction text are missed.

But they went ahead with the vaccine program anyway and passed it off as “Safe and Effective,” even though they knew it would cause serious harm.

The tender was issued by the MHRA Buyer Organisation and on 2 March 2022, it was still displayed on the European Union’s Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) website. TED is a Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU.

For reasons of extreme urgency under Regulation 32(2)(c) related to the release of a Covid-19 vaccine MHRA have accelerated the sourcing and implementation of a vaccine specific AI tool.

Strictly necessary — it is not possible to retrofit the MHRA’s legacy systems to handle the volume of ADRs that will be generated by a Covid-19 vaccine. Therefore, if the MHRA does not implement the AI tool, it will be unable to process these ADRs effectively. This will hinder its ability to rapidly identify any potential safety issues with the Covid-19 vaccine and represents a direct threat to patient life and public health.

Reasons of extreme urgency — the MHRA recognises that its planned procurement process for the SafetyConnect programme, including the AI tool, would not have concluded by vaccine launch. Leading to a inability to effectively monitor adverse reactions to a Covid-19 vaccine.

Events unforeseeable — the Covid-19 crisis is novel and developments in the search of a Covid-19 vaccine have not followed any predictable pattern so far.

The tender document has been stored in multiple places in case they try to erase this evidence by removing it from the tender website. View or Download it here.

The contract was awarded to the only applicant, Genpact (UK) for 1.5 million GBP.

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***

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark.

But it is too late.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said,

“As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” the last words inserted for comic relief.

Biden first gave the game away at his Feb. 24 White House press conference — the first day of the invasion. He was asked why he thought new sanctions would work when the earlier sanctions had not prevented Russia’s invasion. Biden said the sanctions were never designed to prevent Russia’s intervention but to punish it afterward. Therefore the U.S. needed Russia to invade.

“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said.  “That has to sh- — this is going to take time.  And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them.  That’s what this is all about.”

It is all about the Russian people turning on Putin to overthrow him, which would explain Russia’s crackdown on anti-war protestors and the media.

It was no slip of the tongue. Biden repeated himself in Brussels on Thursday:

“Let’s get something straight …  I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him.  Sanctions never deter.  You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter.  The maintenance of sanctions — the maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain … we will sustain what we’re doing not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year.  That’s what will stop him.”

It was the second time that Biden confirmed that the purpose of the draconian U.S. sanctions on Russia was never to prevent the invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. desperately needed to activate its plans, but to punish Russia and get its people to rise up against Putin and ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow. Without a cause those sanctions could never have been imposed. The cause was Russia’s invasion.

Regime Change in Moscow

Biden’s speech in Warsaw. (Office of the President/Wikimedia Commons)

Once hidden in studies such as this 2019 RAND study, the desire to overthrow the government in Moscow is now out in the open.

One of the earliest threats came from Carl Gersham, the long-time director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Gershman, wrote in 2013, before the Kiev coup: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, then “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post in 1999 that the NED could now practice regime change out in the open, rather than covertly as the C.I.A. had done.

The RAND Corporation on March 18 then published an article titled, “If Regime Change Should Come to Moscow,” the U.S. should be ready for it. Michael McFaul, the hawkish former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has been calling for regime change in Russia for some time.  He tried to finesse Biden’s words by tweeting:

On Putin, Biden expressed what billions around the world and millions inside Russia also believe. He did not say that the US should remove him from power. There is a difference.

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) March 27, 2022

On March 1, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the sanctions on Russia “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” No. 10 tried to walk that back but two days earlier James Heappey, minister for the armed forces, wrote in The Daily Telegraph:

“His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union and throughout the 1990s Wall Street and the U.S. government dominated Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, asset-stripping former state-owned industries and impoverishing the Russian people.  Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 and starting restoring Russia’s sovereignty. His 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted Washington’s aggressive unilateralism, alarmed the U.S., which clearly wants a Yeltsin-like figure to return.   The 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev was a first step. Russiagate was another.

Back in 2017, Consortium News saw Russiagate as a prelude to regime change in Moscow. That year I wrote:

“The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for ‘regime change’ in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents.”

JUST NOW: ""I think Ukrainians were waiting for a long time for such a statement. I think this statement is absolutely correct."

–Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on President Biden's controversial statement about Putin's removal.pic.twitter.com/6ucqdJS0oM

— John Berman (@JohnBerman) March 28, 2022

The Invasion Was Necessary

The United States could have easily prevented Russia’s military action. It could have stopped Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war from happening by doing three things:  forcing implementation of the 8-year old Minsk peace accords, dissolving extreme right Ukrainian militias and engaging Russia in serious negotiations about a new security architecture in Europe.

But it didn’t.

The U.S. can still end this war through serious diplomacy with Russia. But it won’t. Blinken has refused to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Instead, Biden announced on March 16 another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine on the same day it was revealed Russia and Ukraine have been working on a 15-point peace plan. It has never been clearer that the U.S. wanted this war and wants it to continue.

NATO troops and missiles in Eastern Europe were evidently so vital to U.S. plans that it would not discuss removing them to stop Russia’s troops from crossing into Ukraine. Russia had threatened a “technical/military” response if NATO and the U.S. did not take seriously Russia’s security interests, presented in December in the form of treaty proposals.

The U.S. knew what would happen if it rejected those proposals calling for Ukraine not to join NATO, for missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed and NATO troops in Eastern Europe withdrawn. That’s why it started screaming about an invasion in December. The U.S. refused to move the missiles and provocatively sent even more NATO forces to Eastern Europe.

MSNBC ran an article on March 4, titled, “Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable: The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine’s NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake.” The article said:

“The abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.”

Senator Joe Biden knew as far back as 1997 that NATO expansion, which he supported, could eventually lead to a hostile Russian reaction.

Biden in 1997 saying that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states pic.twitter.com/i0yfEgIGZA

— . (@ImReadinHere) March 7, 2022

The Excised Background to the Invasion 

It is vital to recall the events of 2014 in Ukraine and what has followed until now because it is routinely whitewashed from Western media coverage. Without that context, it is impossible to understand what is happening in Ukraine.

Both Donetsk and Lugansk had voted for independence from Ukraine in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych.  The new, U.S.-installed Ukrainian government then launched a war against the provinces to crush their resistance to the coup and their bid for independence, a war that is still going on eight years later at the cost of thousands of lives with U.S. support. It is this war that Russia has entered.

Lindsey Graham & John McCain in Ukraine in December 2016 preparing for a proxy war with Russia all the way back then.

Then, Trump came in and stopped it all from happening. https://t.co/5PkYe4vjv1

— ⭐️Amy Tarkanian⭐️ (@MrsT106) March 4, 2022

Neo-Nazi groups, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, who revere the World War II Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, took part in the coup as well as in the ongoing violence against Lugansk and Donetsk.

Despite reporting in the BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN on the neo-Nazis at the time, their role in the story is now excised by Western media, reducing Putin to a madman hellbent on conquest without reason. As though he woke up one morning and looked at a map to decide what country he would invade next.

The public has been induced to embrace the Western narrative, while being kept in the dark about Washington’s ulterior motives.

#Russia co-existed with #Ukraine until the 2014 US-backed coup and Kiev's war against ethnic Russians who resisted it. Everything goes back to 2014–a now 8-year civil war. Airbrushing that out of the story, as Western media does, amounts to deliberate deception.

— Joe Lauria (@unjoe) March 1, 2022

The Traps Set for Russia

Six weeks ago, on Feb. 4, I wrote an article, “What a US Trap for Russia in Ukraine Might Look Like,” in which I laid out a scenario in which Ukraine would begin an offensive against ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass, forcing Russia to decide whether to abandon them or to intervene to save them.

If Russia intervened with regular army units, I argued, this would be the “Invasion!” the U.S. needed to attack Russia’s economy, turn the world against Moscow and end Putin’s rule.

In the third week of February, Ukrainian government shelling of Donbass dramatically increased, according to the OSCE, with what appeared to be the new offensive. Russia was forced to make its decision.

It first recognized the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, a move it put off for eight years. And then on Feb. 24 President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.

Russia stepped into a trap, which grows more perilous by the day as Russia’s military intervention continues with a second trap in sight.  From Moscow’s perspective, the stakes were too high not to intervene. And if it can induce Kiev to accept a settlement, it might escape the clutches of the United States.

A Planned Insurgency 

Biden and Brzezinski (Collage Cathy Vogan/Photos SEIU Walk a Day in My Shoes 2008/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain/Picryl)

The examples of previous U.S. traps that I gave in the Feb. 4 piece were the U.S. telling Saddam Hussein in 1990 that it would not interfere in its dispute with Kuwait, opening the trap to Iraq’s invasion, allowing the U.S. to destroy Baghdad’s military. The second example is most relevant.

In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the C.I.A. set a trap four decades ago for Moscow by arming mujahiddin to fight the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan and bring down the Soviet government, much as the U.S. wants today to bring down Putin.  He said:

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. 

He then explained that the reason for the trap was to bring down the Soviet Union. Brzezinski said:

“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’  Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

Brzezinski said he had no regrets that financing the mujahideen spawned terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?,” he asked.  The U.S. today is likewise gambling with the world economy and further instability in Europe with its tolerance of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and controlling the governments in Moscow and Beijing. What Brzezinski and U.S. leaders still view as Russia’s “imperial ambitions” are in Moscow seen as imperative defensive measures against an aggressive West.

Without the Russian invasion the second trap the U.S. is planning would not be possible: an insurgency meant to bog Russia down and give it its “Vietnam.” Europe and the U.S. are flooding more arms into Ukraine, and Kiev has called for volunteer fighters. The way jihadists flocked to Afghanistan, white supremacists from around Europe are traveling to Ukraine to become insurgents.

Just as the Afghanistan insurgency helped bring down the Soviet Union, the insurgency is meant to topple Putin’s Russia.

An article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency” was published Feb. 25, just one day after Russia’s intervention, indicating advanced planning that was dependent on an invasion. The article had to be written and edited before Russia crossed into Ukraine and was published as soon as it did. It said:

“If Russia limits its offensive to the east and south of Ukraine, a sovereign Ukrainian government will not stop fighting. It will enjoy reliable military and economic support from abroad and the backing of a united population. But if Russia pushes on to occupy much of the country and install a Kremlin-appointed puppet regime in Kyiv, a more protracted and thorny conflagration will begin. Putin will face a long, bloody insurgency that could spread across multiple borders, perhaps even reaching into Belarus to challenge Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s stalwart ally. Widening unrest could destabilize other countries in Russia’s orbit, such as Kazakhstan, and even spill into Russia itself. When conflicts begin, unpredictable and unimaginable outcomes can become all too real. Putin may not be prepared for the insurgency—or insurgencies—to come.

WINNER’S REMORSE

Many a great power has waged war against a weaker one, only to get bogged down as a result of its failure to have a well-considered end game. This lack of foresight has been especially palpable in troubled occupations. It was one thing for the United States to invade Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003; likewise for the Soviet Union to enter Afghanistan in 1979. It was an altogether more difficult task to persevere in those countries in the face of stubborn insurgencies. … As the United States learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, an insurgency that has reliable supply lines, ample reserves of fighters, and sanctuary over the border can sustain itself indefinitely, sap an occupying army’s will to fight, and exhaust political support for the occupation at home.’”

As far back as Jan. 14, Yahoo! News reported:

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. …

The program has involved ‘very specific training on skills that would enhance’ the Ukrainians’ ‘ability to push back against the Russians,’ said the former senior intelligence official.

The training, which has included ‘tactical stuff,’ is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,’ said the former official.

One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. ‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’”

In his Warsaw speech, Biden tipped his hand about an insurgency to come. He said nothing about peace talks. Instead he said: “In this battle, we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves of a long fight ahead.”

Hillary Clinton laid it all out on Feb. 28, just four days into Russia’s operation. She brought up the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, saying “it didn’t end well for Russia” and that in Ukraine “this is the model that people are looking at … that can stymie Russia.”

"Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980," Hillary Clinton says. "It didn't end well for the Russians…but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan." pic.twitter.com/iirtXI4vz4

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 1, 2022

What neither Maddow nor Clinton mentioned when discussing volunteers going to fight for Ukraine is what The New York Times reported on Feb. 25, a day after the invasion, and before their interview: “Far-right militias in Europe plan to confront Russian forces.”

The Economic War

Along with the quagmire, are the raft of profound economic sanctions on Russia designed to collapse its economy and drive Putin from power.

These are the harshest sanctions the U.S. and Europe have ever imposed on any nation. Sanctions against Russia’s Central Bank sanctions are the most serious, as they were intended to destroy the value of the ruble.  One U.S. dollar was worth 85 rubles on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion and soared to 154 per dollar on March 7.  However the Russian currency strengthened to 101 on Friday.

Putin and other Russian leaders were personally sanctioned, as were Russia’s largest banks. Most Russian transactions are no longer allowed to be settled through the SWIFT international payment system. The German-Russia Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was closed down and become bankrupt.

The U.S. blocked imports of Russian oil, which was about 5 percent of U.S. supply. BP and Shell pulled out of Russian partnerships. European and U.S. airspace for Russian commercial liners was closed. Europe, which depends on Russia gas, is still importing it, and is so far rebuffing U.S. pressure to stop buying Russian oil.

A raft of voluntary sanctions followed: PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and McDonalds have been shut down in Russia. Coca-cola will stop sales to the country. U.S. news organizations have left, Russian artists in the West have been fired and even Russian cats are banned.

It also gave an opportunity for U.S. cable providers to get RT America shut down.  Other Russia media has been de-platformed and Russian government websites hacked. A Yale University professor has drawn up a list to shame U.S. companies that are still operating in Russia.

Russian exports of wheat and fertilizer have been banned, driving the price of food in the West.  Biden admitted as much on Thursday:

“With regard to food shortage … it’s going to be real.  The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.  And — because both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

The aim is clear: “asphyxiating Russia’s economy”, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian put it, even if it damages the West.

"We are going to wage a total economic and financial war on Russia" declared Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of the Economy and Finance today.

"We will therefore cause the collapse of the Russian economy" until "Putin returns to better intentions in Ukraine" https://t.co/IWuGeZRSWX

— Aki Heikkinen (@akihheikkinen) March 1, 2022

The question is whether Russia can extricate itself from the U.S. strategy of insurgency and economic war.

To be continued: How Russia Can Escape the US Traps. 

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Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe  

Featured image: President Biden departs Brussels en route to Poland early Friday morning. (White House)