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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)
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With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Madeline Roache
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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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***
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).
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***
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 Revisitedis 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
He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies
“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.
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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 82nd 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.
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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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All images in this article are from Unione Sindacale di Base
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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 website29,30 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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***
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…
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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Comments Off on French Lawyer Arrested for Treason After Helping Reiner Fuellmich Prove World Leaders Have Committed Crimes Against Humanity in the Name of COVID-19
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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).
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’ bookThe 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.
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.
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 21st 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.
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 Dangercenters 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.
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]
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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***
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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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.
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***
It’s thirty seconds to midnight on the Doomsday clock. Whenever this scenario was envisioned, the assumption was that everybody would be on roughly the same page, ready to unite and act as one people for the sake of humanity. However, something is terribly wrong in the USA. We can’t seem to even agree on the level of danger that we’re obviously in, let alone how to fix it. Why does one third of the country seem to be living on another planet, impervious to the evidence right before our eyes?
During the depths of the Bush Jr. regime there was a similar problem. As horrific war crimes were committed in Iraq, one third of the populace always seemed to ardently support him, no matter how foolish, corrupt, and sinister his administration.
But today our position is all the more precarious. The country has deteriorated in so many ways since then, and the crisis we’re facing has become dire in the extreme. This time around, it isn’t religious fundamentalists that are stubbornly compliant and conformist to the diktats of a government wildly out of control, working hand and glove with giant corporations and special interests.
However, the recalcitrants are said to be quasi-religious followers of secular scientism. “Follow the science,” is their mantra, but they don’t seem able to understand the basic science that’s been coming out for the past two years across the independent media.
When Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough each went onto the Joe Rogan podcast to breakdown the necessity of early treatment, the effectiveness of ivermectin, the inherently low mortality of Covid, and the fallacious nature of the PCR test, their explanations were lucid and compelling.
Immediately, Joe Rogan was vilified, and the vaccine rollout continued. When investment analyst Edward Dowd boiled down the voluminous data proving that year-over-year all cause mortality couldn’t be caused by anything other than the mandated shots, Pfizer and Moderna’s stock did not crash overnight– rather, they’ve just been approved to deliver another booster without FDA review! This, despite the fact that Pfizer’s own internal documents, which they were compelled to release by court order, show conclusively that the shot is twelve times as deadly as Covid itself, with nine pages of listed side effects by their own reckoning. While people quibble over masks and Fauci threatens the return of lockdowns, a democide is still unfolding in every country that permits or mandates the shots.
The founders of the UN, the architects of Agenda 2030, everyone at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, and the Wellcome Trust have all been preaching the depopulation agenda for the entirety of their existence.
What can explain the so-called cognitive dissonance, or more accurately, this mass formation psychosis of the depop denialists? All of the disastrous calamities leading up to the 2030 deadline were detailed in a Pentagon planning document leaked in 2004,[1] around the same time the DTRA started building BS3 & BS4 biolabs around the world and organizing regular pandemic wargame exercises. One thing is clear: to get past this impasse, we need to reach a higher level of national consensus, because like it or not we are in this together. Since the platitudinous distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ has been nearly drained of all meaning in the USA, it would behoove us to look at things from a fresh angle, as we need to get beyond the surface diatribes to achieve this greater consensus. To that end, I will employ the more accurate terms of party affiliation, Democrat and Republican. Likewise, ‘liberal’ hereon refers to the term from political science, not debased political theater.
To get well below the surface, let us reframe the socio-political landscape with a little bit of help from that scion of the 1970’s ‘New Left,’ Michel Foucault. His relentlessly innovative view on the world reached a peak of insight during the 1970’s, when the Left-Right distinction was far closer to historical and global notions of the terms. For clarity’s sake let us simply call the analysis post-structuralist, and see if we can untangle some of the mess that we’re in. The goal is to get beneath the terms of debate that we take for granted, to try to dislodge ourselves from this endless morasse of political inaction built into the structures of our interactions; built into the tropes of our lifeworld.
Why can barely half of the country seem to understand that we are under the boot of a tyrannical regime, and that time is of the essence?
In Foucault’s analysis, tyranny and despotism were part of the Ancien Régime, ruled by the sovereign under the guiding rationale of l’état, c’est moi–”I am the State.” Sound familiar? The reign of the sovereign harks back to the days of maniacal kings and queens in pre-revolutionary France. In a very rough summary of his schematic, we could say that the sovereign of the ancient regime gave way to the mercantilist state, guided by Raison d’État, an interventionist state fighting trade wars within the Westphalian system. From there the West proceeded to liberal governments in the classical sense, such as what we would recognize as revolutionary and Colonial America. Since then we have evolved into neoliberalism,[2] an outgrowth of The Chicago School which became popularly known when Pinochet forced austerity on Chile after seizing power in 1973,[3] and when Rockefeller forced austerity on a bankrupt New York City in 1975. Neoliberalism’s fame came to dominate our national political class with the Reagan and Thatcher Revolution.[4] From that miliu came the totalizing financialization of our economy and rampant globalization, which has brought us to the brink of total global economic collapse following the endless Wall Street bailouts since 2008.
People in the humanities studying liberal arts are always looking for the next new thing, trying for progress in the world of ideas. It hasn’t been an easy task since the theory of post-modernity, which is one reason identity politics and Trump derangement syndrome have become convenient islands for intellectual nomads to flock to. However, what we’re living through right now is a reality check; the Reality Check. And what that means is that we are at the inflection point of a major, catastrophic regress of world-historical proportions. What Catherine Austin-Fitts called the neoliberal, global tapeworm of globalization has morphed into an all-encompassing black hole, best represented by BlackRock, Vanguard, et al.
We are on the cusp of returning to a feudal condition whereby the sovereign not only threatens death against our person, but sustains a system where the peasant’s lifespan is nasty, brutish, and short. The hallmark of the Ancien Régime was that the king’s subjects were often brutally tortured; every criminal act taken as a personal affront. In the age of classical liberalism, brutality transformed into discipline, a plethora of practices to discipline the body and corral the mind without wasting resources. Foucault’s careful archeology of knowledge unearthed these loci of power: the clinic, the hospital, the asylum, the reform school, and the military barracks, to name a few. Not coincidentally, these are the very same loci of power where lockdowns and mandates are enforcing a discipline that is in fact a cover for the ruthless depopulation agenda: the worst of both worlds.
Foucalt’s turn to analyzing neoliberalism as the next morphology of power entailed a new critical ensemble that was post-Marxist. In his lens, this meant that every man had become an Enterprise unto himself, rather than a mere purveyor of labor power. As so-called entrepreneurs, we were meant to invest in ourselves as a unit of human Capital, ever eager to be more productive in our self-exploitation. This is what drove the new modalities of power from the mid 20th century onward. Because of each worker’s passion for producing income upon the merger of self and Capital, Marx’s foretold proletarian revolution never materialized in most countries. Rather than proletarian class-consciousness, the modern Western subject identifies as homo œconomicus, i.e., economic man. The fundamental schism between the forces of production and the relations of production became a dynamic frisson continually re-invested and re-distributed as we pioneered the digital age. The crisis we now face puts us on the borderline between the digital age and unbridled transhumanism.[5] The violence of power has evolved once again, but this time its central core is devolving backward in an unnatural spasm that rhymes with the Ancien Régime. Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, proclaims, “You will own nothing and be happy.” Could you ask for a more in-your-face Bond villain caricature with pretensions of absolute monarchy??
Relatedly, Homo sacer is Georgio Agamben’s concept of man as a creature who has no higher ambition than clinging to bare life, never rising above the bottom layer of Maslow’s pyramid.[6] Within the discourse of health in today’s biosecurity state, homo sacer must take risks. That is because homo œconomicus has been forced to merge with homo sacer due to the desperate times he finds himself in. This is my primary argument for why Democrats refuse to stand up to the ongoing democide and impending economic collapse and/or major war. Just as investing Capital entails risk, now the enterprising entrepreneur must take on an increased level of market risk and volatility as a unit of human Capital. In the neoliberal paradigm, the pandemic amounts to a temporary downturn in the capital markets of homo sacer’s longevity. We have all been programmed to ride out several bubbles and recessions since Black Friday, 1989.
It is the continuity bias of a permanent growth dogma that electrifies the neoliberal paradigm regardless of the postures one takes in civil society. Denial of our economic roots and shared fortunes obscures our impending devolution into neo-feudalism for some people. They cling to the idea that the risks of vaccine induced injury and world war are a safer bet than risk admitting that their idea of progress may have been completely erroneous for the past three decades, ever since the Democratic Leadership Council hijacked the party. These die-hard Clintonistas would rather drag us all down to hell than change course. The fundamental contradiction of the present moment is no longer between the forces of production and the relations of production. Rather, it is between the eternal narcissism of virtue signaling while ensconced in the status quo, versus the historical tragedy that we have signed a social contract that stipulates national suicide.
This essay is situated in a counter-narrative from the margins that exposes the return of the sovereign despot in a neo-feudal counter-revolution. In a blatant display of coercion, this counter-narrative is relentlessly censored and suppressed by the establishment. At the height of irony, RFK Jr.’s book, ‘The Real Anthony Fauci,’[7] can reach top rank on amazon.com, and yet the reality of the crimes exposed is ruthlessly censored and suppressed in the corporate media and the Big Tech platforms online. The book has been relegated to an economic-cultural ghetto, barred from entering into the legal sphere. For the public, the officially sanctioned discourse has long been health, productivity, and connectivity.
Foucault’s successor, Byung-Chul Han, has added the media and the Internet to our post-modern loci of power, places where the structure of discourse shapes our assumptions of reality.[8] It is because economic man’s drive to be productive entered into the digital realm that it became decoupled from physical reality and the limitations of the industrial age. He must now ascend an infinite series of yield curves through constant upgrades. For the plutocrats, the revealed text of the initiate has been a story of hyper-centralization and pushing the limits of technology into the techno-fascist realm. We face the prospect of a transhumanist future where the Panopticon has gone subcutaneous and the productive pleasure principle extends to the seamless merger of incepted dreams and Metaverse Matrix. Our total enslavement is the condition of their deification.[9]
What is to be done? Since the establishment of inalienable rights was what tamed the sovereign last time, it is at this point a juridical intervention that’s once again vital to reasserting our rights over and against the despotic, brutal figure of the rapacious tyrant. It is a tyrannical regime that hides in the Swiss chalets of Davos, in the offices of Edelman, in the crypto-Masonic temple on Epstein Island. We need a grass-roots renaissance of the rights and rule of law that came to curb the sovereign in the first place over the course of the 18th century. We are here again for the first time. Spiraling over the same vista on the currents of history, we need the rule of law to proscribe all egregious powers appropriated by the plutocrats and their police state. RFK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense offers one exemplary list of demands,[10] just in the field of medicine alone.
This intervention, a reassertion of our basic rights marks a return to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life must return front and center, reversing the tide of lethality as something that can be settled with a fine in civil court. To liberalism, an acceptable level of criminality is built into the economy.[11]
In neoliberalism, and more so in neo-feudalism, corporate criminality translates directly into the peoples’ mortality, with little consequence but a payoff to the magistrate. We must reassert our rights, and we must also place corporate persons under the purview of criminal law. Under equality of the law, they too must be subject to justice by the same logic. Re-interpreting classical liberalism, the punishment for causing the deaths of a thousand people should be a multiple times harsher than killing one. By every example we have seen since the hijacking of the fourteenth amendment, granting corporate persons indemnity has produced an unstable monopolist economy antithetical to human life, freedom, and principle. Every possible sign of psychopathy must be taken seriously in adjudicating justice upon monopoly capitalism and dictatorial government. The fact that Fauci, Gates, their corporate officers, minions, and cutouts walk free is both astounding and criminally insane. Their criminal behavior has been absolutely pathological.
In a concordant development to the resurrection of the king, we are likewise seeing the resurrection of epistemology. Part of the Reality Check means discerning truth from fiction has come back to center stage. This greatly disturbs the corrupt elite and feverish progressives, because they assumed post-modernism had dispensed with Truth once and for all.
To the layman, this was due to the structure of the metanarrative rather than having a grasp of the globalists’ ambitions. The proof of Russia-gate, of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Azov Nazis in Ukraine, the exposure of BLM leaders’ embezzlement, alongside the nomination of pedo apologist Katanji Jackson-Brown, serve to rapidly deconstruct the vaunted moral high-ground of the superficial progressive narrative espoused by Soros, the Democrats, and their apparachiks. As the emotional stakes of the dominant narrative were continually amped up during Obama’s reign, a labyrinthine maze of ideology, propaganda, and Big Tech stagecraft was conscripted to hide the ugly truth. Consequently, the depop deniers fear to enter the labyrinth of Truth. They fear an encounter with the Minotaur at the dark center. Others of us have encountered that Minotaur simply by paying attention: he is Klaus Schwab, the anti-Christ. The appellation fits because he is the resurrected king of the Ancien Régime posing as a false messiah of the NWO, himself the son of a Nazi.[12] The anti-Christ trifecta includes the Bill Gates beast system, Schwab the anti-Christ, and possibly Elon musk, the most likely candidate for false prophet.
Biblical metaphors aside, what is incumbent upon the American voter is to drop the dead-end identity politics from critical race theory. Instead, we must pivot from actual critical theory back into basic epistemology and acknowledge the Reality Check. It is no coincidence that academia and the Mockingbird media are penetrated by the same Deep State that was behind the Russia-gate hoax, Event 201, the arming of Ukraine, and Hunter Biden’s laptop cover-up,[13] the same Deep State that has a public-private partnership with Big Tech under PRISM.[14] The interplay of each party accusing the other of either fascism or communism is collapsing into de facto totalitarianism, as evidenced by the so-called ‘Left’ support for Ukrainian Nazis committing war crimes. Add to that their ardent and continued support for restrictions and mandates in spite of the copious volumes of evidence showing their inefficacy and deadly effects in excess of the virus itself.[15] For many of those denied effective early treatment, our hospitals were akin to gas chambers, incentivised to murder by the CMS.[16]
Proving Foucault’s analysis, the merger of homo œconomicus with homo sacer has produced a subject that is so dedicated to reflexive discipline and self-improvement so as to have become utterly alienated from the saner political discourse available in the counter-narrative. They fail to notice that the only people dropping dead in bed or at athletic events are the ones with vaccine induced heart attacks, stroke, myocarditis, and blood clots. They crave legal over-representation and economic security, but cannot connect with the wider community.
There is a parallax, or short circuit, between neoliberalism and the looming neo-feudalism that is tied up with climate eugenics. Let us try to situate them in Foucault’s trifecta wherein he united economic man with legalistic man inside the shared space of civil society. Obviously, neoliberalism falls into the economic sphere. We can place the maniacal political power grab of hyper-proggressives as an overflowing abundance in the sphere of those legal rights that marked the reforms of classical liberalism. That leaves climate eugenics, which we would have to locate in the naturalized sphere of civil society, where communal relations are experienced a priori to formal institutions. In fact, it is precisely in that reified space of political economy, of tribal loyalty, that we come to understand our problematic quite lucidly. What more brilliant stalking horse could the globalists have chosen than the climate, that literal space we all collectively inhabit everyday, from birth to death? There’s an irreducible bond between our lifeworld and the climate, right down to how many parts-per-million the atoms of carbon we exhale with every breath. This tactic itself marks an intensification of the mercantilist and liberal government’s police state biopolitics, also resurfacing with a vengeance. While Fin de siècle neoliberalism may be the domain of psychopolitics, the climate agenda is the apotheosis of biopolitics. Transhumanism marks the death of politics, because it is total slavery.
The Kabuki theater of Democrat versus Republican has been well funded and well orchestrated. The budget of the production has risen geometrically with every election cycle, necessitating numerous acts of deregulation in collusion with monopoly capital. It is a gimmick as old as party machine politics itself. We can mark the solidification of the two-party mirage descending into tyranny beginning with Iran-Contra, the Bush-Clinton alliance, and the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985. As the two parties came to agreement on Reagan’s neoliberal agenda, their social issue differences became more exaggerated in a display closer to pro-wrestling than theater. Party antagonism was pushed to its limits during the Obama and Trump years, funded generously by Soros, top donors like Harvey Weinstein, and their phalanx of super-PACs. Right on time, amidst the rapid fire succession of the BLM riots, plandemic, Ukraine, and hyperinflation, came a most useful mass formation psychosis. A decade of digitized identity politics agitation culminated in a politics of resentment so vitriolic that this new-New Left made their psychotic break with reality. Their naturally received notions of climate, health, and human rights all congealed into a crushing momentum that no amount of proven excess mortality or evidence-based medicine could shake apart. This gave the left wing of the war party carte blanche to dive into the Great Reset at full speed. Those whose entire ego identity hinges on receiving constant virus updates from the Microsoft-Media Complex have become NPCs.
Unpacking UN Agenda 2030, as well as carbon net zero, all of the source documents[17] show beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is nothing short of climate eugenics. And as if on cue, the blind fury and rage of the progressives is reaching with unimaginable fervor to grasp and behold new levels of technocratic slavery and self-inflicted democide. The dominant narrative of the past three decades has programmed them to imagine that rational climate policy and everything else within the metanarrative of infinite progress is being blocked unfairly, illogically by the Republicans, made painfully out of reach. The point of the Reality Check is that the excess mortality inflicted upon us by the medical Mafia should be an undeniable wake-up call that climate eugenics is coming to destroy society right on the exact same schedule proposed in Agenda ‘21, Agenda 2030, The Great Reset, etc. The salience of The Great Reset is that anti-Christ Schwab is openly describing a process that will be brutal, chaotic, and radically post-human. Only within the cognitive dissonance carefully cultivated within Foucault’s tripartite modern subject could one be so foolhardy cheering on goals of ‘sustainability’ that entail nothing short of mass death and destruction on a global scale. Not to be forgotten, it is the same failed mRNA gene therapy wreaking havoc on millions that Biden proposed to deploy against “ten other diseases,” via the newly created “Health DARPA.”[18] Very fitting, considering that plain old DARPA was instrumental to executing the plandemic.
Of course we have seen similar disasters throughout history, localized to specific theaters of operation. In Germany it was the Holocaust, in China it was Mao ZeDong’s Great leap Forward. And we can see today, the bait and switch; the short circuit. While busy playing the parties off against each other, those bi-color masks of tribe and clan, we have reached the crossroads of World War 3, famine, climate eugenics, and the plandemic democide that is well underway. Dizzied by these virtuoso dancing discourses, we suddenly find ourselves two and a half years into an era where depopulation is being normalized and accelerated at precisely the same rate that the vaccine side effects come to fruition.
The aggressive-progressive juridical subject continues to be a party to mass murder due to long conditioning, the economic myopia of enjoying world reserve currency status, and lingering resentment from their displacement in civil society. It is ironically their support for the Ukraine action that is bringing us to the brink of collapsing the petro-dollar system, and thus our entire way of life. This is the next stage of The Great Reset’s freefall descent into medieval ‘sustainability.’
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Pietrocelli has been a student of the world, living, teaching, and working in various parts of the US and East Asia. He has followed the work on Global Research for the past 20 years, ever since a rude political awakening on 9/11. He can be contacted via Twitter at https://twitter.com/Neutral_Netizen.
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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
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 Moonruled 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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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.
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.”
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).
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.
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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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Comments Off on 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
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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).
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: The U.S. Federal Reserve’s “Inflation Lies”. Ushering in a Global Economic Depression. Russia Sanctions and a New World Order
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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 Zelenskypleads 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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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.
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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.
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!
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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 yearsthe 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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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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Comments Off on COVID-19 Vaccine Massacre: 68,000% Increase in Strokes, 44,000% Increase in Heart Disease, 6,800% Increase in Deaths Over Non-COVID Vaccines
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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).
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
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.
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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].
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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 Pozharskyisent 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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Featured image is from Notes from the Twilight Zone
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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The 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.
Note that this is classified as an extreme urgent request.
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 Blinkensaid,
“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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.’”
“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
What neither Maddow nor Clinton mentioned when discussing volunteers going to fight for Ukraine is what The New York Timesreported 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
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)
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In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Richard Sprague said his wife, Jennifer, developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after the Pfizer COVID-19 shot and died within five months of the second dose.
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.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Richard Sprague said his wife received the first dose of Pfizer on Aug. 29, 2021, and her second dose on Sept. 21, 2021.
Although he remained unvaccinated, Sprague said his wife got the vaccine because she worked for the Perkins Restaurant Corporation, which required employees to get the shot.
“I told her to just lie about it and if they asked for a vaccination card, then she should ask them to make everyone show proof they had the shot,” Sprague said. “She felt bad lying about it, so she went ahead and got it.”
Four days after the second dose, Jennifer experienced her first episode of a “sudden strange event she couldn’t explain,” while she and her husband were at a dinner theater.
Sprague said:
“We had just finished our meal and were just visiting. All at once, she said, ‘There is something wrong. Please take me home now. I don’t know what it is and I cannot explain it.’ So we missed the theater and went straight home.”
The following week Jennifer called her doctor and asked if the episode she experienced could be related to the COVID vaccine.
“The doctor said if it was the shot, she would have known it after a couple of hours, not a couple of days,” Sprague said.
Jennifer started having more episodes and her left hand and side began to tremble. On Oct. 13, 2021, Jennifer went back to the doctor, who prescribed Xanax for anxiety.
Over the next few weeks, her symptoms worsened and her left side began to feel heavier than her right side, Sprague said. This continued throughout November and December. Jennifer’s doctor instructed her to stay on the Xanax because he thought it was anxiety.
Jennifer experienced another episode of the “events she couldn’t explain” on Dec. 24, 2021, only this time it was worse, Sprague said. She told everyone she needed to go home and apologized.
Later that evening, Sprague took his wife to the ER, where physicians treated her for anxiety and recommended pills she could take to “get her through the night.” The doctors could find nothing wrong with her, Sprague said.
The next morning, Jennifer went to work at Perkins, as all employees were required to work on Christmas day. But by 10 a.m., Richard got a call to pick up his wife.
“She had a very bad episode at work,” Sprague explained. “She couldn’t hold a tray or pour coffee.”
Sprague found a new doctor. At Jennifer’s appointment on Jan. 5, the physician said she was being over-medicated and stopped everything cold turkey, thinking this would resolve her symptoms, Sprague said.
A follow-up was scheduled for Feb. 10, but Sprague took Jennifer back to the doctor at the end of January because her symptoms were more severe.
Sprague explained:
“By this time, I’m having to tow her along when we walk. We would go to the mall and walk laps so she was in shape when she would return to work, but around January 23, to look at my wife — if this is Xanax withdrawal I felt I needed someone to encourage me.
“She was having a hard time dressing herself. It would take her two hours to get focused in the morning, and her brain fog was bad. She would lose her train of thought. After 30 minutes or so I’d walk in the bathroom and ask if she was okay and the shower would be cold again. At the time, we laughed about it.”
“When I took Jennifer back to the doctor, they took one look at her and knew something was going on,” Sprague said. Doctors performed blood work and MRIs, but the results came back normal.
“They recommended a neurologist — because something didn’t look quite right — and a psychiatrist to see if it was psychological, which scared Jennifer because she said she wasn’t crazy,” Sprague said. “If this was Xanax withdrawal this thing would be turning around any day.”
Sprague said:
“Early that evening something happened in her head. She did not like the neurologist because he wanted her to see the psychiatrist and she started repeating herself over and over: ‘This guy thinks I’m crazy. This guy thinks I’m crazy.’ She started stumbling around. She stumbled trying to get in the car. I called my son to help me and we took her straight home.”
After they arrived home, two of Sprague’s children — an RN and a chemist — came over. They persuaded Jennifer to go back to the ER.
“Doctors immediately did another MRI and admitted her around January 30,” Sprague said.
At the time, Jennifer was still able to sit up and walk independently.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but the neurologist had read the MRI and saw a significant change on the right side of her brain and suspected CJD,” Sprague said. “They didn’t tell me because they wanted to rule out everything else.”
Doctors did more scans of Jennifer’s brain and entire body to rule out infections and cancer.
“They said she was a 60-year-old in a 40-year-old’s body,” Sprague said.
At the end of the week, Jennifer’s doctors said they needed to perform a spinal tap, but by this time, she was unable to get out of bed by herself.
Sprague said:
“In one week she started regressing so fast it was unbelievable. She was fogged, having a hard time, was seeing snakes on the wall — like she had dementia — and it would only last about three days until that part of the brain was gone. But she never forgot who I was. She always remembered who I was.”
The spinal tap confirmed Jennifer had CJD, a prion disease. A study published last year in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases found a potential link between Pfizer’s COVID vaccine and prion disease in humans.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prion diseases are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.
The CDC’s website states:
“The term ‘prions’ refers to abnormal, pathogenic agents that are transmissible and are able to induce abnormal folding of specific normal cellular proteins called prion proteins that are found most abundantly in the brain. The functions of these normal prion proteins are still not completely understood. The abnormal folding of the prion proteins leads to brain damage and the characteristic signs and symptoms of the disease.”
Sprague said the doctors hoped Jennifer had the curable autoimmune disorder known as “Brain on Fire,” which is triggered by an attack on one of the key neurotransmitter receptors in the brain.
Brain on Fire mimics CJD but can be cured, Sprague said. So, they “immediately started treating Jennifer for it and giving her steroids, but it made absolutely no difference.”
Insurance quits paying for Jennifer’s care
After Jennifer was diagnosed with CJD on Feb. 12, Jennifer’s insurance company said it would no longer pay for her care and Sprague was told his wife would not recover.
“If I leave her in the hospital it’s out of pocket,” Sprague said. “Otherwise, it’s a care facility or I take her home on hospice.”
Sprague said:
“I talked the hospital into allowing her to stay one more day and I suggested they try rehab one more time. But the next day, it was worse. They tried to get her to sit up and to communicate with her, but by then … she could take things in but could not take anything out.”
Sprague made arrangements for hospice care at his home.
“During her final days, she was pretty much in a total coma,” Sprague said. “Although at times she would still try to talk or kiss me.”
Sprague said:
“Your brain is just disappearing. It’s crazy. You’re in this perfect healthy body and your brain just dies within the course of a few months.”
Sprague said doctors were “totally noncommittal” on whether the Pfizer vaccine caused Jennifer’s CJD, but the nurses became interested in the connection after reading an article in The Defender about Cheryl Cohen, who also experienced rapid-onset sporadic CJD and died within three months of her second Pfizer dose.
Sprague said he wants others to take the risks of COVID vaccines seriously and to understand the consequences of getting the shots.
He added:
“Never take one of these shots without full knowledge of what can happen … without full knowledge that this is experimental. This is not just something to run out and randomly do. You’re a guinea pig. Do you want to be a part of that or not?”
“I would take the consequences of not being able to do something because I’m not vaccinated over the risks of the shots,” Sprague said. “If you look at the risks and still choose to take it that’s one thing, but blindly taking it is totally wrong and unconstitutional.”
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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Suhail al-Mazrouei, a former president of the oil alliance, said that Russia, which exports roughly 10 million barrels of oil a day, is an important member of the global Opec+ energy alliance and no producer could substitute its production.
“Unless someone is willing to come and bring 10 million barrels, we don’t see that someone can substitute Russia,” Mazrouei said during the Atlantic Council’s global energy forum in Dubai.
The Opec+ alliance has so far stuck with a plan for gradual oil production increases based on a deal struck during the height of the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, when producers made deep cuts to output to make up for the loss in demand for fuel.
As oil prices have soared to around $100 a barrel, the United States and several European nations have been calling on Gulf Arab oil producers to do more to help bring down prices.
Earlier this month, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson travelled to the UAE and Saudi Arabia and raised the issue directly with the countries’ leaders.
Mazrouei, however, said that the Opec+ alliance was here to stay and shut down any suggestions that the UAE would break away from the pact and unilaterally increase production.
“Staying together, staying focused, and not allowing politics to kick into this organisation … we always believe that whatever we do as countries when it comes to production and to this work, it needs always to stay out of politics,” he said.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two close US allies and leaders of Opec+, have been constraining their criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while also dodging demands from the US regarding increasing oil outputs.
The UAE’s foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed, visited Moscow earlier this month to discuss ways to boost bilateral ties.
“They don’t want to risk the unity of the group. Having Russia being part of the Opec+ group is incredibly important, especially for the Gulf producers,” Amena Bakr, chief Opec correspondent for Energy Intelligence, said during a Twitter Spaces panel on Monday morning.
“We’re at a point where unity is considered one of the most important factors for the group, and nobody wants to risk spoiling that unity by suggesting any kind of policy change.”
Western demands for oil now
Mazrouei also used his speech to press for greater and long-term investment in oil and gas, even though the UAE has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“We are in an environment where everyone is saying raise your production,” he said. “We definitely at this time need all available resources,” he added, criticising efforts to pull back from investments in oil and gas.
The current oil supply crisis has highlighted that amid the international community’s push towards transitioning to renewable energy sources, the world continues to heavily depend on fossil fuel supplies.
Bakr said that the western demands were frustrating Gulf oil producers, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, because the calls were coming without a commitment to invest in the future of their countries’ oil production.
“You need years of investment and you need investment to happen today in order to secure the future of this supply,” she said on Monday.
“They’re frustrated with hearing constant requests for more oil when they are not hearing the same persistence with or encouraging future investment to secure supplies. All they are hearing is that we need oil now, but in two, three years time, we don’t need it anymore.”
Meanwhile, oil experts have said that with western sanctions on Russia likely to remain in place for the coming months, oil prices will continue to soar. Analysts previously told MEE that even a major boost in production from countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE would fail to bring down prices.
The price of Brent Crude, the standard benchmark for oil, remained steady at $110 a barrel on Monday morning.
“We think that the worst month in terms of supply impact is probably still ahead of us,” Abhi Rajendran, Energy Intelligence’s research director, said during Monday’s panel on Twitter Spaces.
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***
The old long war in Afghanistan has barely ended and already there is a new one, this time in Europe. Most governments, the media, and the United Nations General Assembly reached a consensus quickly: the contemptible aggressor is Vladimir Putin. Public opinion strongly supports Ukraine. Large demonstrations form almost daily to demand peace. The Global South, however, with much of the world’s population, is not eager to participate in sanctions against Russia. China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and much of Latin America will not join in. Several countries rely on grain imports from Ukraine and Russia, and worry about major shortages caused by supply chain disruptions. The efforts for peace are commendable—but could they fizzle out too soon? Is this well-meaning but perhaps myopic movement the best we can hope for, or could we aim for something better for Ukraine, for Russians, and for the rest of the planet if we step outside the framework of the Western neoliberal capitalist war machine?
During the early days of the invasion, Western media showed brave Ukrainians training for the 2022 war against the Russian Army with wooden replica rifles. While they may be brave, it is impossible to ignore that they started this fight with insufficient equipment against an army that well outnumbered them. Furthermore, according to the international law of armed conflict, civilians who take part in hostilities lose certain legal protections and can become targets. That is already happening before our eyes on TV. Even if the civilian resistance is partially successful, it will suffer too many casualties. Is this what freedom supporters want for the Ukrainians who have already borne much during their last 100 years of history? It is easy to fight proxy wars when you sit safely at home and have no skin in the game. Give them weapons, sure, so they can really fight! If they are heroic and resilient, this may turn into a nasty, longer-term struggle, house ruin to house ruin, street by street. It will brutalize the population, devastate the country, and damage the environment evermore. It could also evolve into a quagmire with fallout more devastating than the already-awful tragedy of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Incremental escalation also increases the risks for the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
And if the Ukrainians, despite their cheerleaders in the West, do not last long against a mighty military machine, then the coldly calculated net sum may just be an appalling waste of life and great sad futility that simultaneously triggered a big wave of bereaved women and children as refugees (with existing inequalities of race and nationality reflected there too). According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, “38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.” Are the architects of NATO expansion ready to accept responsibility for their deeds and take in huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees?
I am not drawn to these possibilities. It is eerie and disturbing to witness how fast people become nearly fanatical in blaming the newest villain or the momentary evil empire. It begins with Putin, proceeds to Russian vodka, and will end where? It also creates some type of love-of-freedom euphoria. But will it last when the time comes to face the costs of this catastrophe?
In any event, it may have been an unwise and rash move to invite newly independent countries of the former Warsaw Pact to become members of NATO. What’s the hurry? For those who lived under Soviet control in Eastern Europe, it will take more than the three decades that have passed so far to reduce the negative stockpiles of experience, emotion, resentment, and revanchist impulse. Providing incentives for building a healthy economy and showing the road to EU membership were good options, but using former Soviet-controlled countries to become a bulwark against the Russian bear was not. Finland, which again ranks as number one in the 2021 World Happiness Report, is a small successful country that has chosen a different approach while living next door to Russia. The bear is dangerous when rejected, provoked, and angered. So where was the strategic empathy? Russia knows that it is unloved in these former satellite countries. It understands that it is nearly encircled and almost under siege by the push against its borders and by efforts to pull even Ukraine into NATO. And so perhaps it is understandable that it has rolled itself up like a hedgehog facing peril, showing its prickly exterior. After all, it has been invaded repeatedly but has not done much westward invading itself, except when chasing intruders out. Yet the chance to loosen things up slowly after the Soviet era while supporting more democratic developments was squandered. The Russian people didn’t get much of a break.
There are Atlanticists who will not accept that Russia is part of Europe. But like it or not, it was, and is, and will be—at least up to the Urals. Denial will only maintain a festering trench of potential conflict, and it could drive that vast country into the “briar patch” of China’s Xi Jinping, as David P. Goldman recently put it in Asia Times. The political and economic leaders of the Western alliance who are used to things going their way are in need of a reality check; the rest of the world is no longer willing to tolerate their irrational addiction to the confrontational and rapacious behavior that is misnamed foreign policy. No, the end of the Cold War wasn’t the “end of history.” And as Andrew Bacevich wrote in the Boston Globe, “The argument made by several recent U.S. administrations that NATO expansion does not pose a threat to Russian security doesn’t pass the sniff test. It assumes that U.S. attitudes toward Russia are benign. They are not and haven’t been for decades.”
This is the key: passing the sniff test. A change in attitude is required. That is not a weakness. It is good sense and the positive will to help life and the living. The last thing the U.S., Europe, and the abused planet need is more obscene destruction, new stockpiles of mental contamination, and, as the UN reports, the additional 10 million fleeing and internally displaced Ukrainian people so far. It adds insult to injury. And the only participants you will hear laughing are the sanction-free oil and gas producers/promoters on their way to the bank. In addition, as it has repeatedly occurred, the dominant drumbeat of war drowns out much of diverse public communication. Such a one-dimensional mainstream narrative contributes nothing to de-escalation—it does the opposite. President Biden’s recent State of the Union speech barely touched on the existential threat of the climate crisis.
Yes, it is fantastic to see how the majority of the international community stands with Ukraine. But a Woodstock-like freedom frenzy will be too short in duration for the making of peace. That requires cool heads, warm hearts, at least half an ounce of humility, and the firm determination to stop the insanity of this preventable war.
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***
On Saturday, US President Joe Biden ended his week-long tour of Europe to mobilize NATO for conflict with Russia with a belligerent rant in Warsaw, Poland. Media coverage of Biden’s speech was focused on its final passage, apparently ad-libbed, in which the American president said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
But an even more important aspect of the speech went largely undiscussed: Biden’s declaration of a “commitment” by the United States to “decades” of war.
Against the backdrop of the largest land war in Europe since World War II, Biden declared,
“We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul. We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come.”
To what “fight” is Biden committing the United States?
Just nine months ago, when Biden announced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said,
“We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you’re 20 years old today, you have never known an America at peace.” He declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.”
Now, Biden is committing the American population to a new perpetual war—one that he said will have immense “costs” and “will not be easy.”
In his speech, Biden declared that the decades-long “fight” the US is initiating is a “great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
Biden picked a strange place to launch a struggle for “democracy.” This year, the Berlin-based Civil Liberties Union for Europe accused the Polish government of “seizing further control of the justice system, civil society and media, while cutting basic human rights and fuelling divisions by scapegoating migrants and other minority groups.”
The Polish government is controlled by the ultra-right, chauvinist, anti-Semitic and authoritarian PiS party. President Duda—Biden’s constant companion during his warmongering crusade—heads a government that has completely banned abortion as a form of family planning, persecutes the LGBT community, and criminalizes the exposure of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
As with the “war on terror,” which saw the most grievous violations of democratic rights in American history, Biden’s new decades-long war invokes “democracy” as a throwaway line that no one is to take seriously.
In his speech, Biden himself made clear the extent to which the United States had provoked Russia’s invasion by arming a NATO proxy on Russia’s border.
“In the years before the invasion, we, America, had sent over $650 million, before they crossed the border, in weapons to Ukraine, including anti-air and anti-armor equipment. Since the invasion, America has committed another $1.35 billion in weapons and ammunition.”
Everything that Biden has done over the past week has been intended to stoke up the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine. He called the Russian president every name imaginable, from “butcher” to “murderous dictator” to “war criminal” to “thug.” He has poured weapons into Ukraine and doubled the forces deployed on Russia’s borders. As Edward Luce of the Financial Times commented, “US liberals are at least as hawkish as conservatives.”
Biden’s speech in Poland followed the conclusion of the NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, where the leaders of the NATO alliance plotted out a major escalation of the conflict. At the summit, NATO announced a doubling of its forces on Russia’s border, and the New York Times reported plans by the US for full-scale war with Russia.
The actual causes of this new “forever war” are to be found in the documents of US military planners.
In 1991, amidst the dissolution of the USSR, then US President George H. W. Bush declared that the Gulf War against Iraq would usher in a “New World Order” led by the United States.
The following year, the Pentagon published a Defense Planning Guidance, termed the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” proclaiming that the United States’ “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.”
The outpouring of US militarism initiated by the first invasion of Iraq was followed by three decades of perpetual war, including the bombing and breakup of Yugoslavia, the destruction and occupation of Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the overthrow of the Libyan government and the years-long regime change in Syria.
Now, these wars are metastasizing into a direct US conflict with Russia and China, with potentially incalculable consequences.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy announced a pivot from US military engagements in the Middle East to efforts to combat Russia and China. “Inter-state strategic competition,” it proclaimed, “not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
In this context, it is clear that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was nothing but a redeployment of forces in preparation for military conflicts on an even greater scale.
Despite the efforts by the White House to walk back Biden’s statement, Biden’s ad-libbed declaration was the inescapable conclusion of the entire speech. Biden’s statements clearly reflect the actual US policy, the aim of which is the military isolation and economic ruination of Russia, the ouster of its government and the installation of a puppet regime that would turn it into a rump state.
Biden’s declaration of a new, decades-long commitment comes just days after his proclamation before leaving for Europe, that “there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”
Seven years ago, in his preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote:
The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.
The events of this week make one thing abundantly clear. The US’s plans for “great-power conflict” with Russia and China are leaving the planning stage and are being put into practice. Having instigated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States is seizing upon it to carry out plans, decades in the making, to assert US hegemony through military means against nuclear-armed adversaries.
The only way out of the disaster threatening mankind is the building of a movement of the working class against war, aiming to unify the working classes of Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the Americas against the capitalist system that is the root cause of war.
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***
Skyhorse Publisher Tony Lyons explains how Robert Kennedy‘s THE REAL ANTHONY FAUCI sold 1 million copies while heavily censored, recounting his exchange with the NY Times as an example, and explains why he publishes politically incorrect books.
According to Lyons,
“There’s a real corporate capture in the United States where all of these journalists are basically not doing their jobs, the government is not doing their jobs, both are just kind of working for the pharmaceutical companies and are not even willing to listen to arguments. … They have this pre-planned hit pieces that attack the concept and the author, ignore the book and the arguments.”
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***
The impression given was that of a temple burgled by blaspheming reprobates. But Australian politicians were having none of it. A draft official document published online by an adviser to the Malaita Provincial Government of Premier Daniel Suidani suggested that China was considering some military presence in The Solomons. In its current form, Beijing would be able to send police, armed police and military personnel.
The Canberra establishment got antsy: What were those wicked freedom-hating representatives of the Middle Kingdom up to? This was, after all, part of the Australian backyard they were poking their noses in. The response was predictable and quick: a promise of AU$20 million in extra aid, the creation of a spanking new radio network, budget support and an extension of the Solomons International Assistance force.
Spoon-full measures about sovereignty were readily distributed through the press outlets and public. Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan, the sober side of government paranoia, suggested that The Solomons was at risk of losing its sovereignty to China. Australia, in contrast, had made sure that everything it had done enhanced “the sovereignty of Pacific nations, to make sure everything we’re doing is to help and support them when it comes to their sovereignty.” The great regional helper, and local hope.
This was so clotting in arterial richness it ignored the fact that Australia’s own sovereignty, auctioned off to US troop rotations, base expansion, nuclear-powered submarines and Pine Gap, is not an example to emulate.
Australia’s Pacific backyard has become, over time, a default extension of US power, with Australian personnel keeping their eyes peeled at the incursions of any rivals. Australia’s relationship with the Pacific is also one governed by a traditional donor-charity relationship, lately characterised by a hunger for interference.
The most prominent interference in The Solomons, even if it came in the form of a request by various officials in the country, was the 2003 intervention by Australia to arrest the implosion of what was uncharitably termed a “failed state”. Prime Minister John Howard stated in July 2003 that, “We know that a failed state in our region, on our doorstep will jeopardise our own security.”
Cheering on this change of heart for an intervention was the Australian Strategic and Policy Institute, Washington’s cashed-up megaphone in Canberra. The situation had, wrote Elsina Wainwright with stern warning, “paralysed the country’s capital, stifled its economy, disrupted government, discouraged aid donors, and inflicted suffering and hardship on its people. It had virtually ceased to function as an effective national entity.”
The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was marketed as an exercise of generous paternalism, speckled with good traces of self-interest. It signalled a sharp departure from Australia’s previous policy that had been more disposed to the sovereignty of South Pacific states, if only because keeping one’s hands clean was a good idea.
With Canberra now more concerned about the possible exercises of independence by their Pacific neighbours, the desire to guide and meddle is stronger than ever. In late 2017, the Solomon Islands again featured in aggressive Australian efforts to influence the award of the contract to build an undersea internet cable between Honiara and Sydney.
The sovereignty of the island state was less significant then than ensuring that China’s Huawei Marine were not involved in the process. Jonathan Pryke of the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Island Program summed the matter up: “This was seen as a red line that Australia would not cross and so we jumped in with a better deal providing the cable as a grant that would be implemented with a procurement partner of Australia’s choosing – that wouldn’t be Chinese.”
Local politics is also playing its part. Solomon Islands Opposition Leader Matthew Wale has not been shy in claiming that the Australians have been asleep. Last year, he attempted to wake Canberra from its slumber regarding a potential national security agreement with Beijing. “I have intimated as much to the Australian High Commissioner and officials that this was in the offing, even as far back as last year – the indications were there and the Australian government did nothing about it – so I’m extremely disappointed.”
The penny should have dropped in November when Canberra hastily deployed police and military personnel to Honiara to help pacify anti-government riots. At the time, Beijing had made murmurings of a possible deployment of law enforcement personnel. This did not prevent a team of Chinese police officers being sent to the Solomon Islands last month, wordily known as the People’s Republic of China Public Security Bureau’s Solomon Islands Policing Advisory Group. Their mission: to aid the local police force to improve their “anti-riot capabilities”.
Wale is hoping that the bilateral security agreement between Honiara and Canberra can be refashioned and expanded as a weapon against any Chinese military presence. In a rather rambling statement, he claimed that his country had “benefited from that treaty with Australia, what does that treaty not able to give us, maybe that should be a subject of discussions with Australia, New Zealand as opposed to going into a new treaty altogether with China.”
The concern about Beijing is not uniformly shared, even within the ranks of the Australian government. Liberal MP Warren Entsch is optimistic about the inevitable demise of the Beijing-Honiara draft agreement. “There’s lots of things happening there that we can continue to work with them”. He regularly came across “Chinese announcements, but at the end of the day I’m yet to see anything come to fruition.”
Some of the politicians of the South Pacific are already realising that money and rewards can be made from such concerns. Paranoia can provide a rich quarry to mine. It’s time to cash in, and the governors of Solomon Islands should be advised to do so. To obtain resources and aid from both Beijing and Canberra would suggest an advanced form of admirable, sparkling cunning.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image is licensed under the public domain
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***
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. The use of the long arm of the law to blame the consequences of the privatization of medicine on nurses has dark implications as to what may be ahead for us when the use of hospitals to inject citizens with dangerous COVID-19 vaccines can no longer be suppressed and a scapegoat must be found.
Vaught delivered the wrong medication to a patient who then died as a result. Vaught clearly had no intention to harm the patient, although she should have checked the condition of the patient regularly after administering the medication.
The initial investigation of the incident by the nursing licensing board did not result in suspension or a loss of her license.
A year later, in 2018, Vaught was subject to a criminal investigation on the basis of a murky surprise investigation of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, followed by state and federal investigations that threatened sanctions for the hospital.
Thus a case that would normally be handled by a civil court, if the nursing licensing board’s decision was questioned, was suddenly transformed into a criminal case.
The decision to treat this case as a crime, and to hold her personally responsible (facing three to six years of jail time) as someone with no previous convictions, was extraordinary. The conviction suggests that we are not looking at simply the misjudgment of the Nashville district attorney’s office, but rather a conspiracy within the medical establishment to direct attention away from real crimes.
The criminalization of medical mistakes by nurses, while pharmaceutical companies that develop and promote harmful drugs, or the private equity firms that buy up hospitals, strip employees of benefits and subject them to grueling hours of work are not even mentioned, suggests that something is profoundly wrong.
If nurses and doctors learned anything from this case it is that if you make a mistake you should keep it secret and act as if you were not responsible.
Hospitals today in America are run as for-profit entities that treat patients, doctors and nurses as disposable commodities. There are numerous cases of poorly paid, harried, nurses and nurses aids who make mistakes because medicine is no longer a calling but rather a means of generating short-term profits for investors and pharmaceutical companies.
If an in-depth investigation of this case had been undertaken, it would have found that responsibility for this patient death lies with the privatized Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
When Vanderbilt University Medical Center was separated from Vanderbilt University in 2014, it was put under a new board consisting of “university and academic medical center leadership, and individuals with diverse experiences and talents including clinical practice, health care education, biomedical research, biotechnology commercialization, banking, capital financing, law and other disciplines,” according to the website.
Tellingly, the new VUMC is described as “an independent entity with direct capital market access to assure it can compete effectively in the health marketplace.”
In a word, VUMC is no longer run by doctors or professors, but rather by finance.
This court decision comes, not by accident, at the very moment that the deadly implications of the mandate for COVID-19 vaccines is at last receiving broad attention after the release of the Pfizer files.
These so-called vaccines, which have no properties associated with vaccines but are loaded with dangerous mRNA and other substances, are being administered at hospitals across the nation in blatant violation of the law and of the Hippocratic Oath.
When the truth eventually is out about the injection of millions of citizens with this deadly concoction, who will be responsible for the deaths and injuries that resulted?
The media tells us that the manufactures are not liable because of an exception from liability granted by Congress. That lack of liability, however, is only true if the law granting it was passed in a legal manner, without institutional corruption, and if the law is constitutional.
Neither is the case.
The enormous institutional and ideological conflict that will break out in the United States over the COVID-19 vaccines in the future is a threat to the banks and corporations behind this operation.
When corporate media can no longer suppress the facts, it will be critical for the investment banks who launched this fraud in the first place to find patsies on whom to pin the blame.
Making nurses criminally liable for dispensing the wrong medicine could be a part of this plan to fob off the entire COVID-19 operation on the people who administered the drug at hospitals.
We can imagine a future when nurses and doctors are dragged out and humiliated in public show trials and the corporate media highlighting their inhumanity in administering these deadly drugs.
The charge would be accurate, but it would ignore the role that investment banks and the super-rich played in planning this fake pandemic and in promoting this deadly “vaccine.”
Criminalizing the acts of the doctors and nurses bares comparison with the demonization of Doctor Josef Mengele, a man labelled by the press as the “angel of death” for his experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz.
There is no doubt as to the evil acts undertaken by Dr. Mengele. The rounding up and killing of millions across Europe in death camps, however, was not his responsibility. That was carried out by the Nazi Party and the German Government with the help of major pharmaceutical companies in Germany like Bayer and IG Farben, German banks, and even the American multinationals like IBM (as discussed in Edwin Black’s book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation) and Ford Motors.
Those planners and enablers of that Holocaust were never tried and their assets (in most cases) were not confiscated.
What did those business interests gain from the massive killing of people, and specifically from the experiments of Dr. Mengele? After all, the German Research Foundation funded Mengele’s research in return for regular reports and shipments of samples.
When the full truth of COVID-19 is out, it will be clear that the hospitals of the United States were transformed into death camps where, like Jews and Gypsies at Auschwitz, citizens were innocently led to take deadly injections at the hands of doctors pledged to defend their health. Who will take the blame for this massive crime?
It is no accident that as the COVID-19 holocaust reaches its peak, criminal charges are being levelled at a nurse for negligence while all other responsible parties are let off the hook.
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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
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Women, particularly those in the Third World, often find themselves with limited ability to participate in community organizations and political life because of the poverty and their traditional sex role imposes on them.
On them falls sole responsibility to care for their children and other family members, especially when sick; they maintain the home, cook the meals, wash the dishes, the clothes, bathe the children, clean the house, mend the clothes. This labor becomes unending manual labor when households have no electricity (consequently, no lights, no refrigerator, no labor-saving electrical devices), and no running water.
The burden of this work impedes the social participation, self-expectations, and education of the female population.
Women in the Third World (and increasingly in the imperial First World) face problems of violence at home and in public, problems of food and water for the family, of proper shelter, and lack of health care for the family, and their own lack of access to education and, thus, work opportunities.
In Nicaragua, before the 1979 Sandinista revolution, men typically fulfilled few obligations for their children; men often abandoned the family, leaving the care to women. It was not uncommon to hear the abuse that men inflicted on women, to see women running to a neighbor for refuge.
It was not uncommon to encounter orphaned children whose mothers died in childbirth, since maternal mortality was high. Common illnesses were aggravated because there were few hospitals and, if there were, cash payment was demanded.
After the 1979 Sandinista victory, living conditions for women dramatically improved, achievements the period of neoliberal rule (1990-2006) did not completely overturn. Throughout the second Sandinista period (2007- today), the material and social position of women again made giant steps forward.
The greatest advances have been made by poor women in the rural areas and barrios, historically without safety, electricity, water and sanitation services, health care, or paved roads.
The liberation women have attained during the Sandinista era cannot be measured only by what we apply in North America: equal pay for equal work, the right to abortion, the right to affordable childcare, freedom from sexual discrimination.
Women’s liberation in Third World countries involves matters that may not appear on the surface as women’s rights issues. These include the paving of roads, improving housing, legalized land tenure, school meal programs, new clinics and hospitals, electrification, plumbing, literacy campaigns, potable water, aid programs to campesinos and crime reduction programs.
Because half of Nicaraguan families are headed by single mothers, this infrastructure development promotes the liberation and well-being of women.
Government programs that directly or indirectly shorten the hours of household drudgery free women to participate more in community life and increase their self-confidence and leadership. A country can have no greater democratic achievement than bringing about full and equal participation of women.
Women participating in 1979 Sandinista revolution. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Women’s Liberation Boosted with the FSLN’s Zero Hunger and Zero Usury Programs
These programs, launched in 2007, raise the socio-economic position of women. Zero Hunger furnishes pigs, a pregnant cow, chickens, plants, seeds, fertilizers, and building materials to women in rural areas to diversify their production, upgrade the family diet,and strengthen women-run household economies.
The agricultural assets provided are put in the woman’s name, equipping women to become more self-sufficient producers; it gives them more direct control and security over food for their children.
This breaks women’s historic dependency on male breadwinners and encourages their self-confidence. The program has aided 275,000 poor families, more than one million people (of a total of 6.6 million Nicaraguans) and has increased both their own food security and the nation’s food sovereignty.
Nicaragua now produces close to 90% of its own food, with most coming from small and medium farmers, many of them women. As Fausto Torrez of the Nicaraguan Rural Workers Association (ATC) correctly noted, “A nation that cannot feed itself is not free.”
Market in Managua selling locally produced food. [Source: tortillaconsal.com]
The Zero Usury program is a microcredit mechanism that now charges 0.5% annual interest, not the world microcredit average of 35%. More than 445,000 women have received these low-interest loans, typically three loans each.
The program not only empowers women but is a key factor reducing poverty, unlocking pools of talent, and driving diversified and sustainable growth. Many women receiving loans have turned their businesses into cooperatives, providing jobs to other women. Since 2007, about 5,900 cooperatives have formed, with 300 being women’s cooperatives.
Poverty has been reduced from 48% in 2007 to 25% and extreme poverty from 17.5% to 7%. This benefited women in particular, since single mother households suffered more from poverty. The Zero Hunger and Zero Usury programs have lessened the traditional domestic violence, given that women in poverty suffer greater risk of violence and abuse than others.
Giving Women Titles to Property Is a Step Toward Women’s Liberation
Since most Nicaraguans live by small-scale farming or by small business, possessing the title of legal ownership is a major concern. Between 2007 and 2021, the FSLN government has given out 451,250 land titles in the countryside and the city, with women making up 55% of the property-owners who benefited. Providing women with the legal title to their own land was a great step toward their economic independence.
Infrastructure Programs Expand Women’s Freedom
The Sandinista government has funded the building or renovation of 290,000 homes since 2007, free of charge for those in extreme poverty, or with interest-free long-term loans. This aided more than one million Nicaraguans, particularly single mothers, who head half of all Nicaraguan families.
In 2006 only 65% of the urban population had potable drinking water; now 92% do. Access to potable water in rural areas has doubled, from 28% to 55%. This frees women from the toilsome daily walk to the village well to carry buckets of water home to cook every meal, wash the dishes and clothes, and bathe the children. Homes connected to sewage disposal systems have grown from 30% in 2007 to 57% in 2021.
Now 99% of the population has electricity compared to 54% in 2006. As we know from experiencing electrical blackouts, electricity significantly frees our lives from time-consuming tasks. Street lighting has more than doubled, increasing security for all. Reliable home electricity enables the use of electrical labor-saving devices, such as a refrigerator.
Today, high-speed internet connects and unites most of the country, reducing people’s isolation and lack of access to information. Virtually everyone has a cell phone, and free internet is now available in many public parks.
Nicaragua’s road system is now among the best in Latin America and the Caribbean, given it has built more roads in the last 15 years than were built in the previous 200 years. Outlying towns are now connected to the national network. Now women in rural areas can travel elsewhere to work, sell their products in nearby markets, attend events in other towns, and take themselves or their children to the hospital. This contributes to the fight against poverty and the fight for women’s liberation.
New roads on the outskirts of Ésteli, Nicaragua’s third-largest city. [Source: bcie.org]
Better roads and housing, almost universal electrical and internet access, as well as indoor plumbing, greatly lessens the burdens placed on women homemakers and provide them with greater freedom to participate in the world they live in.
The Sandinista Educational System Emancipates Women
The humanitarian nature of the FSLN governments, as opposed to the disregard by previous neoliberal regimes, is revealed by statistics on illiteracy. When the FSLN revolution triumphed in 1979, illiteracy topped 56%.
Within ten years they reduced it to 12%. Yet by the end of the 16-year neoliberal period in 2006, which dismantled the free education system, illiteracy had again risen to 23%. Today the FSLN government has cut illiteracy to under 4%.
The FSLN made education completely free, eliminating school fees. This, combined with the aid programs for poor women, has allowed 100,000 children to return to school. The government began a school lunch program, a meal of beans and rice to 1.5 million school and pre-school children every day.
Pre-school, primary and secondary students are supplied with backpacks, glasses when needed, and low-income students receive uniforms at no cost. Now a much higher proportion of children are able to attend school, which provides more opportunities for mothers to work outside the home.
Nicaragua has established a nationwide free day-care system, now numbering 265 centers. Mothers can take their young children to day care, freeing them from another of the major hurdles to entering the workforce.
Due to the vastly expanded and free medical system, the Zero Hunger, Zero Usury and other programs, chronic malnutrition in children under five has been cut in half, with chronic malnutrition in children six to twelve cut by two-thirds. Now it is rare to see kids with visible malnutrition, removing another preoccupation from mothers.
Schools and businesses never closed during the Covid pandemic, and Nicaragua’s health system has been among the most successful in the world addressing Covid. The country has the lowest number of Covid deaths per million inhabitants among all the countries of the Americas.
Nicaragua has also built a system of parks, playgrounds, and other free recreation where mothers can take their children.
Throughout the school system, the Ministry of Education promotes a culture of equal rights and non-discrimination. It has implemented the new subject “Women’s Rights and Dignities,” which teaches students about women’s right to a life without harassment and abuse and the injustices of the patriarchal system. Campaigns were launched to promote the participation of both mom and dad in a child’s education, such as emphasizing that attending school meetings or performances are shared responsibilities of both parents.
Women receive their diplomas from the National Technology Institute INATEC, where 62% of those enrolled are women. [Source:radiolaprimerisima.com]
Sandinistas’ Free Health Care System Liberates Women
In stark contrast to Nicaragua’s neoliberal years, with its destruction of the medical system, and in contrast to other Central American countries and the United States with their privatized health care for profit, the Sandinistas have established community-based, free, preventive public health care. Accordingly, life expectancy has risen from 72 years in 2006 to 77 years today, now equal to the U.S. level.
Health care units number more than 1,700, including 1,259 health posts and 192 health centers, with one-third built since 2007. The country has 77 hospitals, with 21 new hospitals built, and 46 existing hospitals remodeled and modernized. Nicaragua provides 178 maternity homes near medical centers for expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies or from rural areas to stay during the last weeks of pregnancy.
The United States is the richest country in the Americas, while Nicaragua is the third-poorest. Yet in the U.S. since 2010, more than 100 rural hospitals have closed, and fewer than 50% of rural women have access to pre-natal services within a 30-mile drive from their homes. This has disproportionately affected low-income women, particularly Black and Latino women.
Nicaragua has equipped 66 mobile clinics, which gave nearly 1.9 million consultations in 2020. These include cervical and breast cancer screenings, helping to cut the cervical cancer mortality rate by 34% since 2007. The number of women receiving Pap tests has increased almost five-fold, from 181,491 in 2007 to 880,907 in 2020.
In the pre-Sandinista era, one-fourth of pregnant women gave birth at home, with no doctor. There were few hospitals and pregnant women often had to travel rough dirt roads to reach a clinic or hospital. Now women need not worry about reaching a distant hospital while in labor because they can reside in a local maternity home for the last two weeks of their pregnancies and be monitored by doctors.
In 2020, 67,222 pregnant women roomed in one of these homes, and could be accompanied by their mothers or sisters. As a result, 99% of births today are in medical centers, and maternal mortality fell from 115 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006 to 36 in 2020. These are giant steps forward in the liberation of women.
Contrary to the indifference to women in the U.S., Nicaraguan mothers receive one month off work before their baby is born, and two months off after; even men get five days off work when their baby is born. Mothers also receive free milk for six months. Men and women get five paid days off work when they marry.
The Question of Abortion Rights
The law making abortion illegal, removing the “life and health of the mother” exception, was passed in the National Assembly under President Enrique Bolaños in 2006. There had been a well-organized and funded campaign by Catholics all over Latin America as well as large marches over the previous two years in Nicaragua in favor of this law.
The law, supported by 80% of the people, was proposed immediately before the presidential election as a vote-getting ploy by Bolaños. The Sandinistas were a minority in the National Assembly at the time, and the FSLN legislators were released from party discipline for the vote. The majority abstained, while several voted in favor. The law has never been implemented or rescinded.
Since the Sandinistas’ return to power in 2007 no woman or governmental or private health professional has been prosecuted for any action related to abortion. Any woman whose life is in danger receives an abortion in government health centers or hospitals. Many places exist for women to get abortions; none has been closed or attacked, and none is clandestine. The morning-after pill and contraceptive services are widely available.
Sandinista Measures to Free Women from Violence
Nicaragua has created 102 women’s police stations, special units that include protecting women and children from sexual and domestic violence and abuse. Now women can talk to female police officers about crimes committed against them, whether it be abuse or rape, making it easier and more comfortable for women to file complaints, receive counseling for trauma, and ensure that violent crimes against women are prosecuted in a thorough and timely manner.
Women make up 34.3% of the 16,399 National Police officers, a high number for a police department. For instance, New York City and Los Angeles police are 18% women and Chicago is 23%.
The United Nations finds Nicaragua the safest country in Central America, with the lowest homicide rate, 7.2 per 100,000 (down from 13.4 in 2006), less than half the regional average of 19.
It also has the lowest rate of femicides in Central America (0.7 per 100,000), another testament to the Sandinista commitment to ending mistreatment of women. The government organizes citizen-security assemblies to raise consciousness concerning violence against women and to handle the vulnerabilities women face in the family and community. Mifamilia, the Ministry of the Family, carries out house-to-house visits to stress prevention of violence against women and sexual abuse of children.
Nicaragua is the most successful regional country in combating drug trafficking and organized crime, freeing women from the insecurity that plagues women in places such as Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Women’s Leadership in the Nicaragua Government
The progress women have made during the second FSLN era is reflected in their participation in government. The 1980s’ Sandinista directorate contained no women. In 2007, the second Sandinista government mandated equal representation for women, ensuring that at least 50% of public offices would be filled by women, from the national level to the municipal.
Today, 9 out of 16 national government cabinet ministers are women. Women head the Supreme Electoral Council, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General’s office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and account for 60% of judges. Women make up half of the National Assembly, of mayors, of vice-mayors and of municipal council members. Women so represented in high positions provides a model and inspires all women and girls to participate in building a new society with more humane human relations.
No Greater Democratic Victory Than the Liberation of Women
The progress made in women’s liberation is seen in the Global Gender Gap Index: In 2007, Nicaragua ranked 90th on the index; by 2020, it had jumped to 5th place, exceeded only by Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.
Nicaragua is a country that has accomplished the most in liberating women from household drudgery and domestic slavery because of its policies favoring the social and political participation and economic advancement of poor women.
Women have gained a women’s police commissariat, legal recognition of their property, new homes for abused women and for poor single mothers, economic programs that empower poorer women, abortion is not criminalized in practice, half of all political candidates and public office holders are women, extreme poverty has been cut by half, mostly benefiting women and children, domestic toil has been greatly reduced because of modernized national infrastructure, women have convenient and free health care.
In their liberation struggle, Nicaraguan women are becoming ever more self-sufficient and confident in enforcing their long-neglected human rights. They are revolutionizing their collective self-image and ensuring their central role in building a new society. This betters the working class and campesinos as a whole by improving the quality of life for all and is a vital weapon in combating U.S. economic warfare.
As Lenin observed, “The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.” Nicaragua is one more living example that a new world is possible.
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Stansfield Smith is a member of Chicago ALBA Solidarity, formerly the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5. He has published in Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Monthly Review online, and other websites. Smith is a long time anti-war activist, and opposed U.S. interference over the years in Latin America. He produces AFGJ’s Venezuela & ALBA Weekly News. Stan’s website is ChicagoALBASolidarity.org and he can be reached at [email protected].
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The grocery store shelves are partially empty, thanks largely to the Covid lockdowns and restrictions, but if Joe Biden and his warmongering neocons have their way, the shelves will be almost completely empty. Americans are about to pay for the ruling elite’s decision to sanction Russia.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with 95 other Poles, among them political and military leaders, as they traveled to commemorate the Katyn massacre that occurred during the Second World War.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, interviewed Brent Wisner, an award-winning mass tort litigator with Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman, who is representing plaintiffs who allegedly developed cancer after taking Zantac. The plaintiffs are suing the pharmaceutical companies that sold the drug.
Calgary’s Street Church Pastor, Arthur Pawlowski, clearly has a target painted on his back by the police state apparatchik of COVID officialdom. Pastor Pawlowski recently received bail after sitting in jail for 45 days including 23 of solitary confinement. See this.
The currently ongoing and devastating Ukraine-Russia war is the result of such power obsession. Let’s look back and analyze what may unfold, when we connect the dots; how the WEF may be crucially involved in this war. A war of Power towards the Great Reset?
If Americans just echo U.S. propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take.
The US refused to acknowledge that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine, and repeatedly in 2021 refused when asked to clarify. Encouraged by these US statements and actions, Ukrainian president, Zelensky, became more strident in his request for US military protection, membership into NATO, and even began publicly saying Ukraine should be given nuclear weapons.
Details of the considerable planning that went into the sanctions, involving the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and top intelligence and military personnel, together with EU officials, were revealed in an article published in the Wall Street Journal on March 18.
Americans and anyone living in the US should listen intently to this one because according to Charles Gave of Gavekal, one of the world’s leading independent providers of financial research, there are very tough times ahead for us all. He explains how the US has triggered the dollar’s demise, lost reserve currency hegemony, and has hallmarks of a third world country.
Moscow’s claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military ‘bioweapons’ research program in Ukraine is at least partially true, according to new emails obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
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“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”—Professor Neil Postman
Once again, the programming has changed.
Like clockwork, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the latest crisis has shifted gears.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today: as long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.
We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).
“Living is easy with eyes closed,” observed John Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.
As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.
Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.
This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.
A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.
“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the government’s brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment as things happening to other people.
The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
This explains how we keep getting saddled with leaders in government who are clueless about the Constitution and out-of-touch with the needs of the people they were appointed to represent.
This is also what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.
Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.
Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.
This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.
In countries where tyranny hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.
As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses.
In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).
Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.
Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.
In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.
Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.
Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.
While television news cannot—and should not—be completely avoided, the following suggestions will help you better understand the nature of TV news.
1. TV news is not what happened. Rather, it is what someone thinks is worth reporting. Although there are still some good TV journalists, the old art of investigative reporting has largely been lost. While viewers are often inclined to take what is reported by television “news” hosts at face value, it is your responsibility to judge and analyze what is reported.
2. TV news is entertainment. There is a reason why the programs you watch are called news “shows.” It’s a signal that the so-called news is being delivered as a form of entertainment. “In the case of most news shows,” write Neil Postman and Steve Powers in their insightful book, How to Watch TV News (1992), “the package includes attractive anchors, an exciting musical theme, comic relief, stories placed to hold the audience, the creation of the illusion of intimacy, and so on.”
Of course, the point of all this glitz and glamour is to keep you glued to the set so that a product can be sold to you. (Even the TV news hosts get in on the action by peddling their own products, everything from their latest books to mugs and bathrobes.) Although the news items spoon-fed to you may have some value, they are primarily a commodity to gather an audience, which will in turn be sold to advertisers.
3. Never underestimate the power of commercials, especially to news audiences. In an average household, the television set is on over seven hours a day. Most people, believing themselves to be in control of their media consumption, are not really bothered by this. But TV is a two-way attack: it not only delivers programming to your home, it also delivers you (the consumer) to a sponsor.
People who watch the news tend to be more attentive, educated and have more money to spend. They are, thus, a prime market for advertisers. And sponsors spend millions on well-produced commercials. Such commercials are often longer in length than most news stories and cost more to produce than the news stories themselves. Moreover, the content of many commercials, which often contradicts the messages of the news stories, cannot be ignored. Most commercials are aimed at prurient interests in advocating sex, overindulgence, drugs, etc., which has a demoralizing effect on viewers, especially children.
4. It is vitally important to learn about the economic and political interests of those who own the “corporate” media. There are few independent news sources anymore. The major news outlets are owned by corporate empires.
5. Pay special attention to the language of newscasts. Because film footage and other visual imagery are so engaging on TV news shows, viewers are apt to allow language—what the reporter is saying about the images—to go unexamined. A TV news host’s language frames the pictures, and, therefore, the meaning we derive from the picture is often determined by the host’s commentary. TV by its very nature manipulates viewers. One must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the actual event but the edited form of the event. For example, presenting a one- to two-minute segment from a two-hour political speech and having a TV talk show host critique may be disingenuous, but such edited footage is a regular staple on news shows. Add to that the fact that the reporters editing the film have a subjective view—sometimes determined by their corporate bosses—that enters in.
6. Reduce by at least one-half the amount of TV news you watch. TV news generally consists of “bad” news—wars, torture, murders, scandals and so forth. It cannot possibly do you any harm to excuse yourself each week from much of the mayhem projected at you on the news. Do not form your concept of reality based on television. TV news, it must be remembered, does not reflect normal everyday life. Studies indicate that a heavy viewing of TV news makes people think the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.
7. One of the reasons many people are addicted to watching TV news is that they feel they must have an opinion on almost everything, which gives the illusion of participation in American life. But an “opinion” is all that we can gain from TV news because it only presents the most rudimentary and fragmented information on anything. Thus, on most issues we don’t really know much about what is actually going on. And, of course, we are expected to take what the TV news host says on an issue as gospel truth. But isn’t it better to think for yourself? Add to this that we need to realize that we often don’t have enough information from the “news” source to form a true opinion. How can that be done? Study a broad variety of sources, carefully analyze issues in order to be better informed, and question everything.
The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.
It’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.
If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.
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Two years in the making, John C. A. Manley’s long-awaited novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, will be released to the world during a Vaccine Choice Canada live online event on March 30, 2020 at 7 pm EDT. In a way only fiction can depict, this 500-page novel exposes the inhumanity of the COVID-19 deception and portrays the courageous non-compliance required to stop it.
“Much Ado About Corona weaves a fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes very sad story, full of irony and subtle humour,” says Dr. Éva Székely, retired psychologist, and author of Never Too Thin, “The protagonist’s narrative is full of sarcasm, openness and directness. Heart warming and outright hilarious.”
“With the dawn of COVID-19,” says author John C. A. Manley, “it was apparent that wordsmiths serving the established power had been hard at work coming up with a narrative, and even a new normal language, to lure people into accepting medical dictatorship. To counter the onslaught of this well-prepared attack on the minds and hearts of humanity, I began writing Much Ado About Corona at the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020.”
Manley’s “dystopian love story” begins shortly after that first lockdown ends in the fictional Canadian town of Moosehead, Northern Ontario. Twenty-four-year-old Vincent McKnight emerges from three months of stay-at-home orders into a surreal new normal of multi-coloured face masks, acrid hand sanitizers, and germaphobic neighbours standing six feet apart.
The new normal becomes even stranger when Vince’s Indigenous grandfather sends him to buy a loaf of bread from the town’s new baker. Stefanie Müller speaks five languages, has beautiful blue eyes… and is a certified conspiracy theorist. She believes the pandemic is a hoax being perpetrated to justify totalitarian “public health” measures.
But when the local cop pulls out his taser, Stefanie’s dystopian premonitions no longer seem so theoretical. And when the restrictions threaten Granddad’s life, Vince finds himself going face-to-mask with the emerging police state—forced to choose whether to follow senseless rules or to follow his pounding heart.
Former writer, director and producer of CTV’s W-5, CBC’s Beachcombers and NBC’s Dateline, Patrick Corbett, says: “Sometimes fiction is the best way to get the truth across. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens knew that and so does John Manley. He has crafted a ripping story of courage, awakening and love (with some good laughs thrown in) all in the time of COVID. As with the truth, you won’t want to put Much Ado About Corona down.”
John C. A. Manley launched one of the first websites to question the COVID measures. He’s worked as a freelance ghostwriter for over a decade, often writing on behalf of health professionals.
Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story is his debut novel and will be available in ebook and paperback formats from Amazon on March 30, 2022; followed by hardcover a week later, with distribution expanding to other retailers. One can register for the live event at wed.vaccinechoicecanada.com or find out more about the novel at muchadoaboutcorona.ca/the-novel
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***
The chaos we see around us every day is not arbitrary chaos. It is organized chaos.
It results from the fact that almost no one wants to take responsibility for their own lives and for the larger life of the planet and the biosphere.
Therefore, those whose desire is to control — fill the vacuum.
Everyone wants someone else to ‘take responsibility.’
They believe that their ‘freedom’ would be lost if they themselves took responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
Imagine: take responsibility for the way food is produced, for your health and the health of planetary ecosystems. Suddenly — no shopping at the supermarket. Supermarkets destroy food, the environment, the soil in which food is grown, and human health.
All because — like all global corporations — they put profit and power ahead of people, ecology and the well-being of all living things.
So no more supermarket shopping — what’s next?
Take a responsible stand on EMF/RMF pollution — and suddenly — no cell phone!
Radiating yourself and those around you with electromagnetic waves is designed to ensure the continued deterioration of the health of all concerned – including the environment in which we live.
There are thousands of peer-reviewed scientific publications supporting this thesis.
Adopt a responsible attitude toward healthy living? The list is too long, but let’s start with reducing dependence on pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is the richest killer in the world. Do we want to support it and kill ourselves at the same time?
Take a responsible position towards the leadership of your country — and suddenly you are amazed to find that no one meets the criteria needed for wise and responsible leadership. They are all power-hungry careerists.
And so on, and so forth…
The chaos we see around us has — more than most people would like to admit — a lot to do with ourselves. We are addicted to ‘passing the buck’.
So what do we do when there is an actual loss of what we call ‘our basic freedoms’ — our customary way of life?
We curse the government we ourselves elected — and demand another.
This ‘other’ is always worse than the previous one. Have you noticed?
And yet we keep dreaming — it MUST be better.
It is this — our delusional state of mind — that allows criminals to reach the highest positions of power.
It is so easy for them. They see that very few want to take responsibility for their lives — for life — so they fill that vacuum.
And then suddenly war breaks out. Everyone is desperately trying to figure out — who is responsible for this war?
They find every possible answer except the one that says: “we are”.
We who have turned away from taking responsibility for the life we inherited on this planet.
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Julian Rose is a an organic farmer, writer and international activist. He is co-founder of The Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology (HARE) and President of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside: www.julianrose.info
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***
David Petraeus, the disgraced general and former head of the CIA, recently told ABC’s “This Week” the “heroic” people of Mariupol, Ukraine are “fighting to the last defender, and pinning down multiple Russian battalions and doing so very heroically. But ultimately, it looks as if it’s going to have to collapse, it’s going to be taken. And when it does that is a moment of some peril for Ukraine, because now that port can be used by the Russians,” Newsweek reports.
Petraeus, of course, left out an important detail about the city of Mariupol, located on the Sea of Azov, an arm of the Black Sea. The besieged city is home base for the Azov Battalion, now known as the Azov Special Operations Detachment, a group of violent Neo-Nazis.Andriy Biletsky, the original commander of the far rightwing paramilitary, has said he believes the mission of Ukraine is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led subhumans.”
Members of the group wear Nazi insignia and blazon, including SS rune symbols. The Azov Battalion insignia features the Wolfsangel symbol, inspired by medieval wolf traps, and later adopted by the Nazis as a heraldry charge. The Wolfsangel was used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, an elite division of the Waffen-SS.
“Azov Battalion is reportedly a unit of the NGU [the National Guard of Ukraine], backed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs,” Huang Lanlan and Cui Fandi reported for Global Times on March 7. “Despite its possible official background in Ukraine, Azov Battalion is known in the West for its extreme neo-Nazi stance, and for its suspected involvement in a number of terrorist attacks and separatist incitement incidents in various countries and regions, including the riots in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019.”
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in a report dated May 15, 2016, details kidnappings, torture, rape, disappearances, and other violent acts committed by the Azov Battalion, as well as crimes committed by members of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, lately recognized by Russia.
The corporate media, prior to the Russian “de-nazification” incursion, ran stories on this group of white supremacists. However, because much of the corporate media is essentially state-run propaganda media, we now hear little about the Azov Battalion.
In fact, the propaganda media now insists the group is at the forefront of the effort to defeat Russia.
“There were no Nazi battalions roaming around the streets and trying to embed into [the government] system, as the Kremlin is trying to portray,” Ruslan Leviev, an analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, a group of investigative journalists tracking the Russian military in Ukraine, told CBS News.
Mariupol is a city of nearly a half million people. It is largely socialist and communist. The city’s political parties are pro-Russian; at the turn of the century, the Party of Regions (the largest party in Ukraine) dominated the City Council, followed by the Socialist Party of Ukraine.
Despite this, and contrary to corporate propaganda and the assertion made by Biletsky, the Azov Battalion served as a police detachment in Mariupol prior to its incorporation into the Ukrainian national guard. In other words, these violent, fanatical neo-Nazis were “roaming the streets” of Mariupol, and undoubtedly spreading their racist ideology. The OHCHR report underscores the repeated use of “arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment” that “remain deeply entrenched practices” by Azov and the state government in Kyiv. (See “You Don’t Exist, Arbitrary Detentions, Enforced Disappearances, and Torture in Eastern Ukraine,”Human Rights Watch, July 21, 2016.)
As history demonstrates, the CIA prefers radical, fanatical, and brutal groups to carry out its subversion operations abroad, thus the Azov Battalion is a natural. “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s accusation that Ukraine advocated Nazism, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion seemed proof of his claim. But further research seems to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in establishing and funding the white supremacist paramilitary,” Israel 365 reported in early March.
Beginning in January 2022, the CIA began secretly training the Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian military for war, according to a story posted by a national security correspondent for Yahoo News earlier this month.
According to the Global Times,
The multi-week program includes training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, said the former officials. In addition to the above-mentioned, the CIA also started “traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there by 2015,” Yahoo reported.
That same year, the Global Times noted, Congress
removed a ban on funding neo-Nazi groups like Azov Battalion from its year-end spending bill, said an article by The Nation magazine in January 2016. In July 2015, two Congressmen drew up an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations bill that limited “arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion,” but the amendment was removed in November following “pressure from the Pentagon,” an insider told The Nation.
The CIA’s “Ground Department,” the latest permutation of the agency’s former “special operations” (subversion, overturning elections, assassinating foreign leaders), has been in eastern Ukraine since at least 2016. Officers of the Ground Department, according to Jack Murphy at SoFrep, are “among the baddest-ass military units—SEALs, Marine Force Recon, Air Force parajumpers, and the Army’s Combat Applications Group (formerly known as Delta Force).” However, according to the author, the CIA prefers to use the “quiet professionals” assigned to the US Army’s Special Forces unit.
In short, the CIA is sending professional killers and mass murder technicians to assist the Azov Battalion and the Zelenskyy government military in its terror and ethnic cleansing campaign in Donbas.
No longer able to fight conventional war against its adversaries—taking into consideration the “failures” of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria—the US decided some time ago to fight wars by proxy. Afghanistan and Pakistan under the directorship of William Casey are a case in point. The US funded and Pakistan trained tribal mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, later including al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, in their jihad against the Soviet Union’s western influence and its government in Kabul.
Casey’s visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire. (Emphasis mine.)
The CIA is involved in training and arming Ukraine’s fiercest fighters, that is to say primarily fanatical anti-Russian nationalists and neo-Nazis. They are on the frontline of the stalled effort to cleanse the Donbas of its Russian-speaking inhabitants and reclaim the territory for the government in Kyiv.
If we judge past history, we should assume many if not most of the weapons now flooding into Ukraine are being supplied by the United States. As of this writing, those weapons include the “Javelin, a shoulder-held anti-tank weapon that shoots heat-seeking rockets hurtling towards targets up to 4km (2.5 miles) away,” and other armaments, including “drones that can be turned into flying bombs and anti-aircraft weapons that can shoot helicopters from the sky,” in other words, the latest military tech.
Any rational person would conclude that by directly aiding and arming Ukraine and its nationalists and neo-nazis, we are currently at work with Russia. Vladimir Putin has said as much.
“These sanctions that are being imposed are akin to a declaration of war but thank God it has not come to that,” Putin said, warning that any country that imposes a no-fly zone over Ukraine is inviting retaliation.
“We will immediately consider them as participants in a military conflict, and it doesn’t matter members of which organizations they are,” Putin said. “It is impossible to do it, on the very territory of Ukraine, it’s possible only from the territory of some neighboring states. But any movement in this direction will be considered by us as participation in an armed conflict.” (Emphasis mine.)
So, here we are, at a momentary stalemate, if media reports can believed, and nobody knows how far the cerebrally deficient Biden will go. He has already slandered Putin, calling him a “butcher,” “war criminal,” and a “murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.”
For some, this sort of cartoonish rhetoric equals fighting words. For now we are spared the horrific prospect of nuclear war, no matter how limited, or “dialed down” the nukes are.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The West, following the lead of the United States, has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by introducing a “crippling” regime of sanctions. It is a “total economic and financial war” aimed at “caus[ing] the collapse of the Russian economy”, the French finance minister Bruno Le Mairecandidly admitted. And yet many of the current sanctions appear to be run-of-the-mill restrictions used against several countries in the past. A number of them — including export bans and the freezing of certain assets — have been imposed on Russia since its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Even the much-discussed exclusion of a number of Russian banks from the main international banking message system, SWIFT, is not new, having already been used against Iran, with mixed results.
The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.
So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.
Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.
So what should we expect from the sanctions?
Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime.
At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.
After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.
True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the ruble (for a while).
Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into rubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital.
These measures are aimed at bolstering the ruble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the ruble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.
Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.
In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.
As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.
Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.
Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.
Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.
While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.
China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia.
Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade.
Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).
However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.
Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that the US-led global Western order will suffer.
The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”
Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.
In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.
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Thomas Fazi is a writer, journalist and translator. His latest book ‘Reclaiming the State’ is published by Pluto Press.
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The grocery store shelves are partially empty, thanks largely to the Covid lockdowns and restrictions, but if Joe Biden and his warmongering neocons have their way, the shelves will be almost completely empty. Americans are about to pay for the ruling elite’s decision to sanction Russia.
Biden said the other day people will suffer under the escalating sanctions imposed on Russia.
“It’s going to be real,” the president said about the impact of sanctions.
“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,” Biden said.
“Both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”
You heard that right. Biden expects you to sacrifice for the sake of the Azov Battalion, a gaggle of ultra-nationalists and Neo-Nazis that have killed untold numbers of ethnic Russians in Donbas since 2014 and the “Revolution of Dignity” sponsored and funded by the US State Department and the neocon Victoria Nuland.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said not to worry, Americans will not go hungry.
She did not mention many Americans are already going hungry and homeless due to over two years of draconian Covid restrictions, broken globalist “just in time” supply chains of essential goods, rising inflation the government downplays, and unemployment due to the strangulation of business, particularly small business. Biden told the truth and Psaki tried to rollback the fallout.
The government routinely lies about the actual shape of the economy. As the corporate media attempts to downplay the real condition of the economy—relying on fudged numbers put out by the state—alternative economic monitors put the real inflation rate at 16.05%, the worst inflation rate since the end of WWII. According to the government, however, the inflation rate was 7.9% in February.
The Federal Reserve, primarily responsible for much of our economic pain, has predictably shifted the blame to Russia. “We have seen a very meaningful increase in gas prices, and my guess is that next month we’ll see further evidence of an impact on U.S. inflation of Putin’s war on Ukraine,” said former Fed bossJanet Yellen.
The “V-shaped recovery” touted by the state and its corporate media in the wake of Covid turned out to be a wishful thinking (more likely a flimsy palliative to placate shell-shocked citizens).
Biden is now in Poland rallying the troops, eating pizza, and embarrassing everyone with his cognitive decline. The day before, NATO held a summit in secret “with not only cameras and phones prohibited but even aides,” writes Andre Damon, “the leaders of the Western powers met to plan out the unthinkable: A full-scale war between nuclear-armed states.”
Following the summit, Biden pledged he will work to remove Russia from the G-20, or Group of Twenty.
“The single most important thing is for us to stay unified and the world to continue to focus on what a brute this guy is and all the innocent people’s lives that will be lost and ruined and what’s going on,” Biden said hypocritically.
Biden, as then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted to invade Iraq and kill over a million people.
Like many Democrats, Biden later declared he was against the war. In 2020, a video surfaced showing Biden praising George W. Bush’s neocon inspired invasion of Iraq. “In the 45-second clip, Biden can be seen taking a highly optimistic viewpoint toward the war and he also makes no effort to distance himself from the president who orchestrated it. Instead, he chastises fellow Democrats for their skepticism and pledges support and patience for Bush,” writes Reed Richardson for Mediaite.
During the Obama administration, he was part of the effort to undermine Syria, and not long after his disputed election victory he bombed Syria, a direct violation of international law. “The president’s decision appeared aimed at sending a signal to Iran and its proxies in the region that Washington would not tolerate attacks on its personnel in Iraq, even at a sensitive diplomatic moment,” never mind the unanimous demand of the Iraqi people that the US get its troops out of their country.
Joe Biden is and always has been an eager tool for the ruling elite and the neocon faction.
“In 2019, Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative, along with Antony Blinken [now Biden’s Secretary of State] wrote an article urging the US to abandon Trump’s America First policies and continue the policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Specifically, they called for a policy of ‘preventive diplomacy and deterrence’ against ‘US adversaries,’ calling for containment of Russia and China. According to The Daily Sabah columnist Hakki Öcal, ‘preventive diplomacy and deterrence’—‘is shorthand for sending boys and tanks wherever they can,” reports United World International.
Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland, Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. “This is currently the third-ranking position in the United States Department of State, after the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary. This way, Nuland will be promoted and will be able to pursue neoconservative policies more aggressively,” UWI continues.
“In a recent Foreign Affairs article, she called for a more ‘activist’ policy toward Russia, including ‘speaking directly to the Russian people about the benefits of working together and the price they have paid for (President Vladimir) Putin’s hard turn away from liberalism’,” which is corporatocracy, the very essence of fascism.
“The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on US power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that US power—and especially its military power—can be a highly effective tool of statecraft,” notes Stephen M. Walt.
Back in 2003, as the invasion of Iraq was gaining steam, Danny Postel quoted Shadia Drury, then professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. “The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right ,” Drury told Postel, “the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave.” The “masters” are the neocons and their associates, and the slaves are you and me.
Drury said leading neocon thinkers believe
“that man’s humanity depend(s) on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and creature comforts… The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that [Leo] Strauss [the late guru of the neocons] advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.”
As it now stands, people deluded by the philosophy of Leo Strauss have packed the Biden administration. “In early June [2020], a group of former officials from the George W Bush administration launched a political action committee (PAC) in support of Biden’s candidacy. The group, 43 Alumni for Biden, boasts nearly 300 former Bush officials and is seeking to mobilize disaffected Republicans nationwide,” write Marshall Auerback and James Carden.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The Biden-neocon “liberal hawk” coterie occupying the White House has long sought to confront Russia, as well as Iran and China. If they are serious about going to war with Russia over Ukraine, this will require great sacrifice on the part of every American. The sanctions placed on Russia alone will produce misery for millions who believe they live in a democracy and have a say in their “representative” government.
This is, unfortunately, the greatest delusion.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Seit Beginn des Krieges in der Ukraine schwebt das Damokles-Schwert eines atomaren Schlagabtauschs zwischen den Großmächten USA und Russland über der Menschheit. Bereits die Drohung mit Nuklearwaffen ist nach dem amerikanischen Völkerrechtler Francis Boyle „Nuklearterrorismus“ und seit dem Nürnberger Kriegsverbrecher-Tribunal 1945 ein Verbrechen gegen den Frieden und die Menschheit. Das sagte Boyle vor circa zehn Jahren während eines Vortrags auf der XVIII. „Mut-zur Ethik“-Konferenz in Feldkirch, Österreich.
Professor Boyle warf der US-Regierung vor,
„nach den Atombomben von Hiroshima und Nagasaki und der Verbrennung von 250.000 unschuldigen Menschen weiter an der Entwicklung dieser die gesamte Menschheit bedrohenden Waffen festzuhalten und damit nachweisbar Verbrechen wie die Nazis zu begehen. (…) Daher sind die Regierungsbeamten in allen Nuklearwaffenstaaten, nicht nur die der Vereinigten Staaten – sie sind natürlich die schlimmsten –, (…) Verbrecher. Sie sind Verbrecher! Für ihre Androhung, die ganze Menschheit zu vernichten! Für ihre Androhung, die Nürnberg-Verbrechen gegen den Frieden, die Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit, die Kriegsverbrechen und den Genozid zu wiederholen! (…).“
Sodann formulierte Boyle einen dringenden Appell an alle Menschen:
„Die Menschheit muss die Nuklearwaffen abschaffen, bevor die Nuklearwaffen die Menschheit abschaffen!
Jeder auf der ganzen Welt hat das grundlegende Menschenrecht, frei von der verbrecherischen Praxis nuklearer Bedrohung/nuklearen Terrorismus’ und seinem Gespenst der nuklearen Ausrottung zu sein. Alle menschlichen Wesen (…) besitzen das Grundrecht unter dem humanitären Völkerrecht, zivilen Widerstand zu leisten, um diese angedrohten Taten internationaler Verbrechen entweder zu verhüten, zu behindern oder zu beenden.“
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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.
Comments Off on Bereits die Drohung mit Nuklearwaffen ist „Nuklearterrorismus“ und ein Verbrechen gegen den Frieden und die Menschheit. Prof. Francis Boyle
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In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15.
The three leaders took hours-long train trip on their journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly “endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a war zone, though there was no risk to their lives as such because they had requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was graciously granted keeping in view diplomatic conventions.
Image on the right: Jarosław Kaczyński speaking during the inauguration of a monument to his brother Lech Kaczyński (November 2018, Warsaw) (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Accompanying the trio of premiers was a “special guest” of the Ukraine government, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—the deputy prime minister of Poland, the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime minister of Poland belong and the infamous “puppet master” who hires and fires government executives and ministers on a whim.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with 95 other Poles, among them political and military leaders, as they traveled to commemorate the Katyn massacre that occurred during the Second World War.
Subsequent Polish and international investigations led by independent observers conclusively determined that the crash-landing was an accident caused by fog and pilot error. Still, Kaczynski, 72, has long suspected [1] that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a role in provoking the accident, and is harboring a personal grudge against the Russian president.
Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Kyiv, Kaczynski said:
“I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”
Kaczynski’s escalatory rhetoric isn’t merely a verbal threat, as a secret plan [2] for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from the member states surreptitiously occupying Lviv and the rest of towns in western Ukraine and imposing a limited no-fly zone is allegedly being prepared by the Polish government that could potentially trigger an all-out war between Russia and the transatlantic military alliance.
The plan is seemingly on hiatus due to a disagreement between figurehead Polish President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, as Duda wanted Washington’s approval before going ahead, whereas Kaczynski appeared keen to obtain political mileage from the Ukraine crisis and was also desperate for settling a personal score with Putin, even if his impulsive and capricious attitude risked triggering a catastrophic Third World War.
In another diplomatic fiasco involving Kaczynski’s shady hand in the Polish policymaking, Secretary of State Tony Blinken suggested early this month that Poland could hand over its entire fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine, and in return, the United States government would “backfill” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s.
“We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes that Poland may provide to Ukraine, and looking at how we might be able to backfill it should Poland decide to supply those planes,” Blinken told a briefing in Chisinau on March 6.
The transfer might have been possible if the deal was kept under wraps, but that became impossible after Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy chief, declared unequivocally to reporters on Feb. 27 that the bloc would provide Ukraine with fighter jets.
The Ukraine government heard the proposal and ran with it, producing infographics claiming they were about to receive 70 used Russian fighter jets from Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. A Ukrainian government official told Politico [3] that Ukrainian pilots had even traveled to Poland to wrap up the deal and bring the planes back over the border.
Upon getting wind of the illicit deal, Russian defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov issued a stark warning that any attempt by an outside power to facilitate a no-fly zone over Ukraine, including providing aircraft to Kyiv, would be considered a belligerent in the war and treated accordingly.
Hours after the Russian warning, the Polish Foreign Ministry issued an emphatic denial, saying providing aircraft to Ukraine was out of question as the MiG-29 fleet constituted the backbone of the Polish Air Force.
The deal was categorically scuttled on March 3 by Polish President Andrzej Duda:
“We are not sending any jets to Ukraine because that would open military inference in the Ukrainian conflict. We are not joining that conflict. NATO is not party to that conflict,” Duda said [4].
In a bizarre turn of events overriding its own president’s categorical statement, the Polish government announced on March 8 that it was ready to transfer the aircraft to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany at the disposal of the United States which could then hand them over to Ukraine.
Clearly, there was a disagreement between Poland’s figurehead President Duda and de facto leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski over the aircraft transfer deal, too. Ultimately, Kaczynski prevailed and the Polish government announced it was ready to transfer the aircraft to Ukraine via an intermediary.
The denouement of the comedy of errors, however, came a day later on March 9, after the United States, while occupying a high moral ground, unequivocally rejected the “preposterous” Polish offer, initially made on Warsaw’s behalf by none other than the EU’s foreign affairs head and the US secretary of state.
The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon sanctimoniously revealed on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby dignifiedly added.
The only conclusion that could be drawn from the reluctant Polish offer of transferring its entire fleet of MiG-29s to Ramstein at the disposal of the United States is that it was simply a humbug designed to provide face-saving to its NATO patron while it was already decided behind the scenes that Washington would spurn Poland’s nominal offer.
Nonetheless, CNN reported March 6 [5] Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley visited a week before an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border that has become a hub for shipping weapons. The airport’s location remains a secret to protect the shipments of weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles, into Ukraine. Although the report didn’t name the location, the airfield was likely in Poland along Ukraine’s border.
“US European Command (EUCOM) is at the heart of the massive shipment operation, using its liaison network with allies and partners to coordinate ‘in real time’ to send materials into Ukraine, a Defense official said. EUCOM is also coordinating with other countries, including the United Kingdom, in terms of the delivery process ‘to ensure that we are using our resources to maximum efficiency to support the Ukrainians in an organized way,’ the official added.”
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 [6].
A spokesman for US European Command told CNN the United States was sending two Patriot missile batteries to Poland, and was also considering deploying THAAD air defense system, a more advanced system equivalent in capabilities to Russia’s S-400 air defense system.
Famous for hosting CIA’s black sites where alleged al-Qaeda operatives were water-boarded and tortured before being sent to Guantanamo Bay in the early years of the war on terror, in Poland alone the US military footprint now exceeds 10,000 troops as the majority of 15,000 troops sent to Europe last month went to Poland to join the 4,000 US troops already stationed there.
The airfields and training camps in the border regions of Poland have a become a hub for transporting lethal weapons and heavily armed militants to Lviv in west Ukraine, who then travel to the battlefields in Kyiv and east Ukraine.
President Biden arrived in Poland Friday and spoke to American troops bolstering NATO’s eastern flank. Biden shared a meal with soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division stationed in southeastern Polish city Rzeszow, which has been acting as a staging area for NATO’s military assistance to Ukraine while also serving as a waypoint for refugees fleeing the violence.
Ahead of the NATO summit attended by President Biden Thursday, 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 [7] 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.”
In an interview with CBC News [8] on March 8, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that a Russian attack on the supply lines of allied nations supporting Ukraine with arms and munitions would be a dangerous escalation of the war raging in Eastern Europe.
“Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. If there is any attack against any NATO country, NATO territory, that will trigger Article 5.”
Reminiscent of the Three Musketeers’ motto “all for one and one for all,” Article 5 is the self-defense clause in NATO’s founding treaty which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all 30 member nations. “I’m absolutely convinced President Putin knows this and we are removing any room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about our commitment to defend every inch of NATO territory,” Stoltenberg said.
NATO chief said there’s a clear distinction between supply lines within Ukraine and those operating outside its borders.
“There is a war going on in Ukraine and, of course, supply lines inside Ukraine can be attacked,” he said. “An attack on NATO territory, on NATO forces, NATO capabilities, that would be an attack on NATO.”
On March 13, Russian forces launched a missile attack [9] at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country. The military facility, less than 25 km from the Polish border, is one of Ukraine’s biggest and the largest in the western part of the country. Since 2015, US Green Berets and National Guard troops had been training Ukrainian forces at the Yavoriv center before they were evacuated alongside diplomatic staff in mid-February.
The training center was hit by a barrage of 30 cruise missiles launched from Russian strategic bombers, killing at least 35 people, though Russia’s defense ministry claimed up to 180 foreign mercenaries [10] and large caches of weapons were destroyed at the training center.
International diplomacy is predicated on the principle of quid-pro-quo. Russia evidently has no intention of mounting an incursion into NATO territory. But if the duplicitous Polish leadership is hatching treacherous plots to clandestinely occupy western Ukraine and impose no-fly zone over it, then Russia obviously reserves the right to give a response.
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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.
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***
A few days ago the discovery of 30 military biolabs in Ukraine was reported, and the Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva published the leaked documents showing the direct involvement of the US Department of Defense in the financing of the Ukrainian biolabs.
The Pentagon program in the Ukrainian biolabs is "sensitive information". The government of #Ukraine is prohibited from public disclosure of this sensitive information and Ukraine is obliged to transfer to the US Department of Defense dangerous pathogens for biological research pic.twitter.com/4HhZxyi9v0
— Dilyana Gaytandzhieva (@dgaytandzhieva) March 9, 2022
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated on Tuesday, March 15, that in addition to the 30 biological laboratories in Ukraine, the United States has set up hundreds of such laboratories in other countries, highlighting that “many were established in several countries of the former Soviet Union precisely along the perimeter of Russia’s borders, as well as on the borders of China and on the borders of the other countries located there.”
Russia strongly denounced the development of biological weapons programs and demanded a response from the U.S. government to the evidence.
Earlier this week, US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and with a whiff of hope, Senator Marco Rubio expected her to debunk the claims of biological and chemical weapons being developed in the network of laboratories in Ukraine.
But Nuland confirmed what was expected:
“Ukraine has biological research facilities…we are now quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be trying to control. So we’re working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they get close.”
During the hearing, Rubio interrupts and does the typical damage control maneuver: “Would there be any doubt that Russia would be behind an attack?” to which Nuland replied, “I have no doubt, Senator, and it’s a classic Russian technique to blame the other person for what they’re planning to do themselves.”
Nuland’s confirmation of the existence of a network of biolaboratories reconfirms the credibility of the Bulgarian journalist’s research. Gaytandzhieva published documents of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), attached to the Pentagon, confirming the financing of biological research in Ukraine, under the aegis of the U.S. company Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. The U.S. agency allocated $80 million in 2020.
But this was not the only company. The U.S. engineering company, CH2M Hill, was awarded a $22.8 million contract to equip two new biolabs in Ukraine.
In addition, access to the biolabs was forbidden to independent expert supervisions, with the excuse that the pathogens they were handling were dangerous, and so shows this leaked letter from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health when access to scientists from the Problems of innovation and investment development journal was denied.
Letter Ministry of Health of Ukraine (CREDITS: Dilyana Gaytandzhieva)
European countries were also involved in the biolaboratories
Igor Kirillov, Head of the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, explained this week the results of the analysis of documents found in Ukrainian military biolabs:
The U.S. funded biolabs in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov, awarding $32 million, in order to “study” pathogens of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis and hantaviruses. Their use can be disguised as natural disease outbreaks.
Six families of viruses (including coronaviruses) and three types of pathogenic bacteria (causative agents of plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) have been identified as having characteristics suitable for infecting humans from animals. Research has even been carried out on the transmission of diseases through bats.
There are a number of documents confirming the transfer of biological samples taken in Ukraine to the territory of third countries, including Germany, Great Britain and Georgia.
The transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza by wild birds was studied at the Kharkiv Institute of Veterinary Medicine.
The transfer of 5,000 blood serum samples taken from Ukrainian residents to the Pentagon-supported Richard Lugar Center in Tbilisi, Georgia, was confirmed.
Another 773 assays were transferred to the United Kingdom, while an agreement was signed to transfer “unlimited quantities” of infectious supplies to the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, Germany’s leading animal disease center.
The findings of these biolabs cannot be ignored. Ukraine as one of the satellite states of the United States served as a space for biological weapons to start gaining ground in the new forms of warfare against Russia (and the world, looking at it in perspective).
It is at least suspicious that the Ukrainian-US biolabs are located along the perimeter of the Russian border, considering that these facilities were also reported to have used samples from people of different ethnicities living in the Russian Federation and other Eurasian countries.
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The once widely used heartburn drug Zantac was the topic of a recent episode of the “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, interviewed Brent Wisner, an award-winning mass tort litigator with Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman, who is representing plaintiffs who allegedly developed cancer after taking Zantac. The plaintiffs are suing the pharmaceutical companies that sold the drug.
Kennedy and Wisner are colleagues. They worked together during the landmark lawsuit Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto Company, the first Roundup cancer lawsuit to proceed to trial. The jury awarded groundskeeper Johnson $289.2 million.
“Brent Wisner arguably is the best lawyer in the country,” said Kennedy. “He’s won every award that you can possibly win for litigation. He is a versatile lawyer and he’s an extraordinary performer. He has a chemical link to jurors like I’ve never seen before.”
Wisner is now working to hold accountable the makers of Zantac for allegedly concealing knowledge of a cancer-causing ingredient in the drug.
Zantac, an over-the-counter medication, was withdrawn from the market in 2020 when it was determined that it contained the human carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA).
Wisner claims that the product was sold for decades with the knowledge that NDMA caused harm. He said,
“We’re talking 40 years they sold this product and they knew it. And we have the documents. … I mean, we have documents where they straight up say, ‘this stuff causes this cancer.’”
Wisner explained:
“NDMA is a very, very potent human carcinogen discovered in the thirties, in the development of rocket fuel. And it literally has no purpose in our world, except for the fact that it causes cancer. It’s actually used in laboratory experiments to induce cancer in animals.
“It’s probably something that has caused an innumerable number of people’s cancers, because it was such a widely used product.”
The cancers that MDNA are more likely to cause include those of the bladder, liver and stomach, as well as colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer, said Wisner.
“It’s a complex scientific inquiry, but we think that we have the science to really push those cancers forward,” he said. “And we’re litigating them actively right now in our proceeding in California, which is exciting.”
“If people who are listening to this podcast — or people who are friends or family of those who are listening to this podcast — have any of those kind of cancers and can show that they took Zantac for a period of time, they have an opportunity to … become part of this litigation,” he said.
Wisner is confident the litigation will be successful, although he warned it will take some time.
“These things take many years and involve many, many thousands and thousands of people,” he said. “But, you know, we have a good track record of taking care of our clients like we did in the Roundup litigation. And we’re planning to do the same here.”
A California state court judge has scheduled the first Zantac trial to take place on Oct. 10.
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Susan C. Olmstead is the assistant editor of The Defender.
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Calgary’s Street Church Pastor, Arthur Pawlowski, clearly has a target painted on his back by the police state apparatchik of COVID officialdom. Pastor Pawlowski recently received bail after sitting in jail for 45 days including 23 of solitary confinement. See this.
Pastor Pawlowski is one of three Alberta clergymen to be apprehended, convicted and jailed for conducting church services that violate the COVID restrictions enforced by Alberta Health Services. The AHS is a murky organization in crisis that is busy both suing and being sued on a number of fronts. See, for instance, this.
The police state persecution of Pastor Pawlowski belongs in the context of the intrusive violations on the religious freedoms of the Pastor James Cameron’s Grace Life Church in Spruce Grove. Canada’s RCMP went so far as to put up a dark, barbed wire fence around the Grace Life structure to keep parishioners away.
Pastor Tim Stephens’ Baptist Church in Calgary was also shut down by the COVID police in Alberta. Law enforcement officials and their accompanying media entourage arrested Pastor Stevens at his own home as his children cried out in despair at what they were witnessing.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney seems to have found common purpose with Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, in making a spectacle of aggressively shutting down Christian churches. One result is that the steady assaults on the religious freedom of Albertans and Canadians have made both jurisdictions notorious internationally. For instance, Josh Hawley, a US Senator representing Missouri, reported Canada as a violator to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. See this and this.
Justin Trudeau was just warming up with his warrior attack on religious freedom in Alberta. Trudeau’s outrageous treatment of the Canadian Truckers and their supporters has put a conspicuous international stain on the reputation of Canada’s Prime Minister.
Before Trudeau spoke at the European Parliament, he was made to witness the intervention on the part of parliamentarian Christine Anderson. In building up to her request that he should exit the building, Anderson described Trudeau
“As a man who tramples on fundamental rights by persecuting and criminalizing his own citizens as terrorists just because they dared stand up to his perverted concept of democracy, should not be allowed to speak in this House at all.”
Anderson concluded by asserting,
“Mr. Trudeau you are a disgrace for any democracy. Please spare us your presence.”
🇨🇦🇬🇧|Yesterday, Canada's Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau visited the #EU Parliament to give a speech. I took the opportunity to give him an appropriate "welcome" there. Short, concise and right hitting the bull's eye! #IDpic.twitter.com/qpcQyGTixQ
Croatian MEP, Mislav Kolakušić, presented another critique of Trudeau’s regime “as a dictatorship of the worst kind” now known to “many citizens throughout the world.” Again with Trudeau present, Kolakušić explained that under the Prime Minister’s “quasi-liberal boot…. Canada has become a symbol of civil rights violations.” See this.
Judges Forcing Canadian Citizens to Become Liars
Pastor Arthur Pawlowsky is one of those being treated by the Canadian government and Canada’s captive judiciary as a terrorist of sorts. Christine Anderson was astute in noticing the fixation of Trudeau and his “Deputy Prime Minister Chystia Freeland in setting up some of the truckers and their supporters as terrorists.
Pastor Pawlowski was charged on February 7 not for giving a religious sermon in his Church, but for delivering a political speech urging Canadian truck drivers not to pull back from the on-and-off blockade at the Coutts/Sweetgrass border crossing between Montana and Alberta. One of the charges faced by Pastor Pawlowski was according to the new Critical Infrastructure Defence Act. See this.
Some think that if it had not been for Pastor Pawlowky’s speech, the truckers at Coutts would have abandoned their positions. The truckers cooperated in taking a collective position at a fairly busy Canada-US border crossing. Their objective was to express support for the positions being brought forward from the main truckers action then unfolding in Ottawa.
The treatment of Pastor Pawlowski is fairly indicative of the monstrosity of government injustice and stupidity that caused Christine Anderson to ask Trudeau “to spare us your presence” in the EU on 24 March.
Pastor Pawlowski is engaged in a number of court processes, all connected in one way or another to his very vocal and assertive condemnation of the COVID restrictions. An Alberta judge made a ruling that he must initiate any public presentation with the following prelude,
“While I may disagree with them, I am obliged to inform you that the majority of medical experts favor social distancing, mask-wearing, and avoiding large crowds to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Most medical experts also support participation in a vaccination program unless for a valid religious or medical reason you cannot be vaccinated. Vaccinations have been shown statistically to save lives and to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms.” See this.
The absurdity of this shameful ruling is indicative of where things still seem to be headed until sensible Canadians take back from the Davos devotees our parliament, our media, and our courts. All these institutions and more are still entrapped in a web of lunacy. In commenting on this denial of free speech with an order requiring mandatory speech, Pastor Pawlowki has observed,
“I have to become a liar every time I open my mouth in order to appease the corrupted judges and the corrupted court systems and the corrupted politicians…. it’s one law for the peasants, for the slaves and another for the kings and the judges.”
Oftentimes Pastor Pawlowki speaks while prominently displaying an Israeli Star of David on his sleeve. Pastor Pawlowski seems to feel no need to grapple with the problem that many aspects of the current playbook in the West for criminalizing political opponents draws on the ongoing maltreatment of Palestinians.
Israel has made a big business of instructing police and military officers from many countries on how to suppress political dissidents by demonstrating the sometimes brutal techniques they deploy for keeping Palestinians under Israeli control. Canada is a country where the process of the Palestinianization of political dissents is already far advanced. Trudeau seems to think of non-compliant Truckers in Canada much like some in Israel think about non-compliant Palestinians.
Pastor Pawlowski is often outspoken in incorporating into his public commentaries abundant references to Canadian law enforcement officials as “Nazis.” Unfortunately, this characterization of Trudeau, Freeland and their inner circle, seems increasingly relevant given recent revelations.
The Russian military intervention into Ukraine has revealed many harsh international realities. We are discovering that many Western governments, including the Liberal/NDP regime in Canada, are supportive of many actual National Socialist units in the Ukrainian government. Trudeau has been funnelling weaponry, resources and military training to the outgrowths of Hitler’s Waffen SS in Ukraine. The Nazi attachments of the Trudeau/Freeland crowd are starting to come to light, a phenomenon I have written about in “Nazification and Denazification in Our Times.” See this.
The most concerted effort to criminalize the Truckers and classify them and their supporters as terrorists and insurrectionists, has taken place in Coutts where Pastor Pawlowski arrested. Although police tried, they did not find weapons in trucks parked in Ottawa throughout the peak of the protest.
After several attempts by CPC MP @DaneLIoydMP to get a clear answer, Ottawa Police Interim Chief Steve Bell finally admits there were no firearms found at the freedom convoy protest in Ottawa. #cdnpolipic.twitter.com/CXAHy2P4yu
RCMP slow to release status of weapons seized at Coutts protest
Due to the main investigator being away and the RCMP “managing other cases at the same time,” information “didn’t get conveyed to our media spokespeople,” said Fontaine.”
The RCMP charged thirteen people with crimes. Four of them were charged with something called “conspiracy to commit murder.” The other 9 were charged with weapons related matters. When I add Pastor Pawlowski to the group I come up with the name, the Coutts 14.
Tamara Lich and Pat King, both front and centre at the Ottawa political action, seem to be subject to the process that Christine Anderson described at the European Parliament. It seems Lich and King are being smeared. According to the CBC:
“Those conditions include leaving Ottawa within 24 hours, refraining from using social media, and having no contact with certain co-organizers.
In his decision, Johnston said Lich had a job where she was a “valued employee” and she had lived a “crime free” life, while the risk in Ottawa — where streets have mostly returned to normal — has now been “minimized.”
He noted Lich’s trial likely won’t be held for several months and her time on remand would exceed that of her sentence should she be convicted, saying “it is not likely Lich would face a lengthy imprisonment.”
They are being criminalized “as terrorists just because they dared stand up to Trudeau’s perverted concept of democracy.”
The Coutts 14 is the main group being put on display to embody the concept of Truckers as terrorists and insurrectionists. Since Feb. 14 the Coutts 14 has provided Freeland, for instance, with her justification for invoking the Canada’s Terrorist Financing Act. How are we to know if Trudeau isn’t still operating as if the Emergency Act is still operative?
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Dr. Anthony Hallis editor in chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
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***
I can’t get a single one of these questions answered. I promise to stop spreading misinformation if you can just publicly answer just these questions with truthful and accurate answers.
An open letter to the White House, Surgeon General Murthy, Twitter censors, Medium censors, LinkedIn censors, YouTube censors, the medical community, the mainstream media, all members of US Congress, world leaders, all public health officials anywhere in the world, all “fact checker” organizations, and members of the California legislature especially Assemblymember Evan Low and Senator Dr. Richard Pan.
Dear folks,
I know you want to stop COVID misinformation. I agree. It’s a problem.
In my view, you are the ones spreading it, not me.
Unfortunately, not everyone sees it the same way. According to CCDH, who is arguably a world authority on misinformation spreaders (they created the original Disinformation Dozen list relied on by the White House), I’m one of the worst offenders: I’m #3 on their list.
The problem I have is simple: the data clearly shows that it is the CDC and other government agencies that are spreading misinformation, not me.
In order to resolve the conflict, I’m going to make the following offer in good faith: I will happily stop spreading “misinformation” if you all would just take a few minutes to answer a few questions for me. Fair enough? Will you do that?
If not, please tell me why not since this is your only chance of convincing people like me to get the jab.
I know this is important to you because you have a list of misinformation spreaders you want to silence. Just answer all these questions and you’ll silence us (the right way).
Here are my questions:
Why no debates? Why won’t any mainstream doctors or scientists or public health officials (or any other health authority for that matter) debate me or any of my colleagues in a live, recorded debate? I even offer some people (members of the ACIP and VRBPAC committees) $1 million just to come to the debate table and it made no difference. We can’t even get any of them to propose any ground rules that they will accept! For example, Professor Makary proposed debate terms (which weren’t a debate) and then ignored me when I tried to accept them.
VAERS safety signals flashing red since January 2021. How could the CDC and the FDA possibly miss all the safety signals in VAERS which have been flashing red since January 2021 for thousands of symptoms, some elevated by 1,000X or more? Why did they ignore all attempts to bring this to their attention (if it wasn’t already obvious). They clearly must have known in January that the data coming in didn’t match the claims in the clinical trials.
Why no investigation into Maddie de Garay? Why did the FDA not investigate the Maddie de Garay case after agreeing to look into it? Why is the press silent on this as well? She was 12 years old in the Pfizer clinical trial and became paralyzed less than 24 hours after injection. Why were her symptoms reported as mild abdominal pain and not paralysis? What is causing her to now progress to being a quadriplegic? And if her symptoms weren’t caused by the vaccine (as claimed by the “fact checkers,” then why are her symptoms virtually identical to other vaccine victims and not explainable any other way?
More people died who took the drug than those who didn’t take the drug. The Pfizer 6 month study showed that more people died who got the drug than who got the placebo (they conveniently forgot to mention this in the abstract or conclusion). Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Where is the RCT showing an all-cause death benefit? See this article for updated numbers in the pre-unblinding phase showing 21 dead who took the drug vs. 17 dead who took the placebo. And how was Pfizer certain that none of the people who got the drug was killed by the vaccine? What tests were done during the autopsies that exonerated the drug? These tests were never revealed and they are still being kept hidden for some odd reason. Since the vaccine wasn’t the cause, why not make the autopsy reports and tests done public that prove this?
Elevated myocarditis rates. How is a 559-fold increase in the reporting rate of myocarditis in VAERS (see slide 19) considered to be a “slightly elevated risk” of myocarditis? Why wasn’t this noticed in January 2021? How did the CDC completely miss this signal (they admitted it was the DoD who spotted it). How do you explain 4 cases of myocarditis at the Monte Vista Christian School (with only 800 students, half of them male and perhaps half of those not vaccinated)? That’s a 1 in 50 rate. Is that just bad luck? And how is it possible that multiple military doctors I’ve asked about the rates in the military both give me numbers over 1%? Am I just unlucky?
How do you explain Schirmacher’s study? Dr. Peter Schirmacher, one of the world’s top pathologists, reported that in 40 cases examined 2 weeks after vaccination, the vaccine killed 30% to 40% of them. Immediately after he reported this, his family was threatened if he spoke out. So Dr. Schirmacher has been silenced. See my article for details. Do you support intimidation techniques to silence legitimate scientists with dissenting views? The Federal Association of German Pathologists has called for autopsies, but the government has silenced them as well. Do you support my call for autopsies? If not, why not? Also, Schirmacher’s results have been validated by Bhakti and Burkhardt. Did all of them get it wrong? How were they fooled?
Excess deaths. What’s causing the excess deaths observed by insurance companies? Insurance company deaths rose in Q3 and Q4 of 2021 at the same time the boosters rolled out. The fact checkers say it is due to COVID, but the data doesn’t line up which they fail to point out. Delta started in June and was 93% by August. You’d never know that from the graph:
10. The more you vaccinate, the worse the outcomes. Why do over 10 studies (including one covering 145 countries) all show that the more we vaccinate, the worse the infection and fatality rates? Since nobody has been able to refute any of these studies, shouldn’t we at least put the mandates temporarily on hold until the studies are refuted?
11. Negative efficacy. The latest UK government report shows that for most age groups, you are now more than 3 times more likely to get COVID if you are triple vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated. It seems the more you vaccinate, the worse the disparity. It’s clearly tied to the number of vaccinations. How do you explain this if the vaccines are protective?
13. VAERS underreporting factor. What is the URF for VAERS this year? Why didn’t anyone calculate it? Why didn’t the FDA simply admit they don’t know what it is when asked by a reporter? Why does John Su never talk about the proper URF when he talks about the VAERS data? He knows how to calculate the URF since he was one of the authors on the CDC paper for how to do this. So why is he silent?
14. How can you do risk benefit calculation without estimating the VAERS URF? This is elementary, yet none of the outside committee members of the CDC or FDA ever asks about this. Why not? I keep bringing this up in my public testimony, but they just ignore me.
15. Pfizer Phase 3 trial exclusions. How do you explain the gaming in the Pfizer trial on exclusions (311 vs. 60)? (see Slide 65). That couldn’t have happened by chance. And while you have that slide deck open, if you can answer any other questions in that deck, that would be super helpful.
17. Why don’t we have any autopsies done by a competent authority? Why don’t we just do autopsies of 100 people who died within 2 weeks of vaccination? We can have people like Peter Schirmacher, Ryan Cole, Sucharit Bhakdi, and Arne Burkhardt observe this work. That would settle the argument and end the vaccine hesitancy for sure.
18. Why is there a 5% rate of neurological damage after vaccination? If the vaccines are perfectly safe, then how do you explain how a California neurologist can have 1,000 vaccine injured in their practice of 20,000 patients. That’s a 5% neurological injury rate. This closely matches the vaccine injury rate discovered by the Israeli Ministry of Health (which was 4.5%).
I look forward to hearing from you. I’d love to get back to technology.
Bonus questions:
FDA’s Steven A. Anderson. He promoted himself as the top guy at the FDA on safety in his slide presentation on October 22, 2020. This was the famous presentation with Slide 17 which was a list of adverse events that was skipped over quickly. It’s remarkable how well it matched up with the safety signals that showed up in VAERS in January after the vaccines rolled out. I reached out to him multiple times by phone and email when the VAERS data showed clear safety signals. He ignored all attempts. This seems like really odd behavior for someone who is obsessed with finding a safety signal. He has never found a single safety signal himself, so when he gets a call from anyone who claims there might be a signal, how can he ignore it? He should be embracing it, right?
Brook Jackson. Watch the video. Explain to me why there isn’t an independent investigation into the allegations in this video. And how is it possible that the day after Brook went to the FDA that she was fired from her position?
Vaccine mandates: In Santa Clara County, they mandate vaccination for first responders. But vaccinated and unvaccinated first responders get COVID at the same rates in Santa Clara County, so why is vaccination mandated?
UVGI technology. Why wasn’t UVGI technology (ultraviolet light) recommended by the CDC when the outbreak happened? Why aren’t they saying anything about it now? It’s quite effective everywhere it has been deployed as far as I’m aware. Industrial hygienists have been using this technology for their clients since early 2020. Here’s a note I received:
I know the CDC had a page early on that had controls listed in the various control categories but I haven’t seen anything this specific about prioritizing engineering controls like this, especially with the UVGI technology. We started rolling that tech option out to our clients in 2020. Nobody in government was touting UVGI tech at all. We’ve had that in our office since 2020 and have seen first hand how successful that option is. Our UVGI equipment is set to sanitize the air and surfaces every 6 minutes. Though we had infected people in our office at times, there was never an outbreak. Clients that implemented this system had similar success. This would’ve been a game changer for schools, instead of them shutting down and putting PPE on kids. It’s been difficult to watch this buffoonery from public health officials who are clearly out of their lane of expertise.
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***
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a surprise video appearance at the Doha Forum in Qatar on 26 March to plead with the oil-producing Arabian Peninsula nations to increase their oil output.
Oil prices have seen record increases since the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine and the unprecedented sanctions placed on Russia since then.
Alternative supplies of fuel to Europe serve as a counterweight to Russia’s ability to use European and global dependency on its fuel to maintain economic viability during the global economic boycott of Russia.
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states are torn between their loyalty to Washington and their partnerships with Moscow.
Most visibly, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have snubbed Washington in favor of Moscow. Saudi Arabia has refused requests to increase output, even snubbing phone calls from US President Joe Biden. The UAE has similarly refused to increase output and has reaffirmed its ties with Moscow.
Qatar’s Minister of State for Energy Affairs Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said in a CNN interview on 25 March that they will continue to supply Europe with gas.
Qatar, however, balances its ties with Moscow. A recent meeting between Russian and Qatari foreign ministers on 14 March demonstrated that the two seek cooperation in the energy market.
The meeting came after President Biden designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally of the US on 10 March.
Kuwait leans considerably more towards the US. Aside from Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain share similar designations as major non-NATO allies of the US.
Nikkei Asiareported on 26 March that major Japanese banks are teaming up with banks from the US and Europe to lend Kuwait $1 billion and bolster its oil output, in the hopes of increasing crude production in order to weaken Russia’s position in the energy markets.
Western powers continue to pressure GCC member states to increase crude output. Under NATO pressure, German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck visited Qatar and the UAE on 19 March to urge them to increase oil output.
NATO expects Germany to boycott Russian gas, a move that would leave the EU member state with insufficient fuel to heat homes during winter or to power industrial centers. Neither Qatar nor its neighboring states have the capacity to replace Russian oil and gas in a short period of time.
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Featured image is from AMMAR ABD RABBO / MOFA / DOHA FORUM
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The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power.
The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.
Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments.
Meanwhile, U.S.-backed coups in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have sooner or later been reversed by grassroots movements to restore democratic, socialist government. The Taliban are governing Afghanistan again after a 20-year war to expel a U.S. and NATO army of occupation, for which the sore losers are now starving millions of Afghans.
But the risks and consequences of the U.S. Cold War on Russia are of a different order. The purpose of any war is to defeat your enemy. But how can you defeat an enemy that is explicitly committed to respond to the prospect of existential defeat by destroying the whole world?
This is in fact part of the military doctrine of the United States and Russia, who together possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. If either of them faces existential defeat, they are prepared to destroy human civilization in a nuclear holocaust that will kill Americans, Russians and neutrals alike.
In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree stating,
“The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”
U.S. nuclear weapons policy is no more reassuring. A decades-long campaign for a U.S. “no first use” nuclear weapons policy still falls on deaf ears in Washington.
The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) promised that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. But in a war with another nuclear-armed country, it said, “The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
The 2018 NPR broadened the definition of “extreme circumstances” to cover “significant non-nuclear attacks,” which it said would “include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allies or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment.” The critical phrase, “but are not limited to,” removes any restriction at all on a U.S. nuclear first strike.
So, as the U.S. Cold War against Russia and China heats up, the only signal that the deliberately foggy threshold for the U.S. use of nuclear weapons has been crossed could be the first mushroom clouds exploding over Russia or China.
For our part in the West, Russia has explicitly warned us that it will use nuclear weapons if it believes the United States or NATO are threatening the existence of the Russian state. That is a threshold that the United States and NATO are already flirting with as they look for ways to increase their pressure on Russia over the war in Ukraine.
To make matters worse, the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending has the effect, whether either side intends it or not, of increasing Russia’s reliance on the role of its nuclear arsenal when the chips are down in a crisis like this.
NATO countries, led by the United States and United Kingdom, are already supplying Ukraine with up to 17 plane-loads of weapons per day, training Ukrainian forces to use them and providing valuable and deadly satellite intelligence to Ukrainian military commanders. Hawkish voices in NATO countries are pushing hard for a no-fly zone or some other way to escalate the war and take advantage of Russia’s perceived weaknesses.
The danger that hawks in the State Department and Congress may convince President Biden to escalate the U.S. role in the war prompted the Pentagon to leak details of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) assessments of Russia’s conduct of the war to Newsweek’s William Arkin.
Senior DIA officers told Arkin that Russia has dropped fewer bombs and missiles on Ukraine in a month than U.S. forces dropped on Iraq in the first day of bombing in 2003, and that they see no evidence of Russia directly targeting civilians. Like U.S. “precision” weapons, Russian weapons are probably only about 80% accurate, so hundreds of stray bombs and missiles are killing and wounding civilians and hitting civilian infrastructure, as they do just as horrifically in every U.S. war.
The DIA analysts believe Russia is holding back from a more devastating war because what it really wants is not to destroy Ukrainian cities but to negotiate a diplomatic agreement to ensure a neutral, non-aligned Ukraine.
But the Pentagon appears to be so worried by the impact of highly effective Western and Ukrainian war propaganda that it has released secret intelligence to Newsweek to try to restore a measure of reality to the media’s portrayal of the war, before political pressure for NATO escalation leads to a nuclear war.
Since the United States and the U.S.S.R. blundered into their nuclear suicide pact in the 1950s, it has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. As the Cold War evolved, they cooperated to reduce the risk of mutual assured destruction through arms control treaties, a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and regular contacts between U.S. and Soviet officials.
But the United States has now withdrawn from many of those arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms. The risk of nuclear war is as great today as it has ever been, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns year after year in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The Bulletin has also published detailed analyses of how specific technological advances in U.S. nuclear weapons design and strategy are increasing the risk of nuclear war.
The world understandably breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Cold War appeared to end in the early 1990s. But within a decade, the peace dividend the world hoped for was trumped by a power dividend. U.S. officials did not use their unipolar moment to build a more peaceful world, but to capitalize on the lack of a military peer competitor to launch an era of U.S. and NATO military expansion and serial aggression against militarily weaker countries and their people.
As Michael Mandelbaum, the director of East-West Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, crowed in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.” Thirty years later, people in that part of the world may be forgiven for thinking that the United States and its allies have in fact unleashed World War III, against them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Yemen and across West Africa.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin complained bitterly to President Clinton over plans for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but Russia was powerless to prevent it. Russia had already been invaded by an army of neoliberal Western economic advisers, whose “shock therapy” shrank its GDP by 65%, reduced male life expectancy from 65 to 58, and empowered a new class of oligarchs to loot its national resources and state-owned enterprises.
President Putin restored the power of the Russian state and improved the Russian people’s living standards, but he did not at first push back against U.S. and NATO military expansion and war-making. However, when NATO and its Arab monarchist allies overthrew the Gaddafi government in Libya and then launched an even bloodier proxy war against Russia’s ally Syria, Russia intervened militarily to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian government.
Russia worked with the United States to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped to open negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But the U.S. role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s subsequent reintegration of Crimea and its support for anti-coup separatists in Donbass put paid to further cooperation between Obama and Putin, plunging U.S.-Russian relations into a downward spiral that has now led us to the brink of nuclear war.
It is the epitome of official insanity that U.S., NATO and Russian leaders have resurrected this Cold War, which the whole world celebrated the end of, allowing plans for mass suicide and human extinction to once again masquerade as responsible defense policy.
While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine and for all the death and destruction of this war, this crisis did not come out of nowhere. The United States and its allies must reexamine their own roles in resurrecting the Cold War that spawned this crisis, if we are ever to return to a safer world for people everywhere.
Tragically, instead of expiring on its sell-by date in the 1990s along with the Warsaw Pact, NATO has transformed itself into an aggressive global military alliance, a fig-leaf for U.S. imperialism, and a forum for dangerous, self-fulfilling threat analysis, to justify its continued existence, endless expansion and crimes of aggression on three continents, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya.
If this insanity indeed drives us to mass extinction, it will be no consolation to the scattered and dying survivors that their leaders succeeded in destroying their enemies’ country too. They will simply curse leaders on all sides for their blindness and stupidity. The propaganda by which each side demonized the other will be only a cruel irony once its end result is seen to be the destruction of everything leaders on all sides claimed to be defending.
This reality is common to all sides in this resurgent Cold War. But, like the voices of peace activists in Russia today, our voices are more powerful when we hold our own leaders accountable and work to change our own country’s behavior.
If Americans just echo U.S. propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take.
But if we campaign to change our country’s policies, de-escalate conflicts and find common ground with our neighbors in Ukraine, Russia, China and the rest of the world, we can cooperate and solve our serious common challenges together.
A top priority must be to dismantle the nuclear Doomsday machine we have inadvertently collaborated to build and maintain for 70 years, along with the obsolete and dangerous NATO military alliance. We cannot let the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of the Military-Industrial Complex keep leading us into ever more dangerous military crises until one of them spins out of control and destroys us all.
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Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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The takeaway from the US President Joe Biden’s European tour on March 25-26 is measly. Dissenting voices are rising in Europe as western sanctions against Russia start backfiring with price hikes and shortages of fuel and electricity. And this is only the beginning, as Moscow is yet to announce any retaliatory measures as such.
The unkindest cut of it all is that the Russian Defence Ministry chose Biden’s trip as the perfect backdrop to frame the true proportions of success of its special operation in Ukraine. The US and NATO’s credibility is perilously close to being irreparably damaged, as the Russian juggernaut rolls across Ukraine with the twin objectives of ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘denazification’ in its sights.
The Russian General Staff disclosed on Friday that the hyped up Ukrainian Armed Forces, trained by the NATO and the US, have sustained crippling losses: Ukrainian air force and air defence is almost completely destroyed, while the country’s Navy no longer exists and about 11.5% of the entire military personnel have been put out of action. (Ukraine doesn’t have organised reserves.)
According to the Russian General Staff’s deputy head Colonel General Sergey Rudskoy, Ukraine has lost much of its combat vehicles (tanks, armoured vehicles, etc.), one-third of its multiple launch rocket systems, and well over three-fourths of its missile air defence systems and Tochka-U tactical missile systems.
Sixteen main military airfields in Ukraine have been put out of action, 39 storage bases and arsenals destroyed (which contained up to 70% of all stocks of military equipment, materiel and fuel, and more than 1 million 54000 tons of ammunition.)
Interestingly, following the intense high-precision strikes on the bases and training camps, foreign mercenaries are leaving Ukraine. During the past week, 285 mercenaries escaped into Poland, Hungary and Romania. Russian forces are systematically destroying the Western shipment of weapons.
Most important, the mission to liberate Donbass is about to be accomplished.Simply put, the main objectives of the first phase of the operation have been achieved.
Apart from Kiev, Russian troops have blocked the northern and eastern cities of Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov and Nikolaev, while in the south, Kherson and most of Zaporozhye region are under full control — the intention being to not only to shackle Ukrainian forces but to prevent their grouping in Donbass region. (See my article Dissecting Ukraine imbroglio, Tribune, March 21, 2022)
“We did not plan to storm these cities from the start, in order to prevent destruction and minimise losses among personnel and civilians,” Rudskoy said. But, he added, such an option is not ruled out either in the period ahead.
It stands to reason that Washington and European capitals are well aware that the Russian operation is proceeding as scheduled and there is no stopping it. Thus, the NATO’s extraordinary summit on March 24 confirmed that the alliance is unwilling to get into a military confrontation with the Russian Army.
Instead, the summit decided to strengthen the defence of its own territories! Four additional multinational NATO combat groups of 40,000 troops will be deployed in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia on a permanent basis. Poland’s proposal to deploy NATO military units in Ukraine was outright rejected.
However, Poland has certain other plans, namely, to deploy contingents to the western regions of Ukraine to support the ‘fraternal Ukrainian people” with the unspoken agenda of reclaiming control over the historically disputed territories in the those regions. What Faustian deal has been struck in Warsaw on March 25 between Biden and his Polish counterpart Duda remains unclear. Clearly, vultures are circling Ukraine’s skies. (See my blog Biden wings his way to the borderlands of Ukraine, March 24, 2022)
Indeed, if Poland makes a bid for Ukrainian territory (with Biden’s tacit support), would Belarus be far behind to take control of the regions of Polesie and Volyn in Ukraine? Possibly not. Suffice to say, in the period since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 when the US moved into the driving seat, Ukraine has lost its sovereignty and is now perilously close to vanishing altogether from Europe’s map!
Washington — Biden personally, having been the Obama administration’s point person in Kiev in 2014 — should carry this heavy cross in history books.
As for European leaders, they find themselves in a surreal world, out of touch with the stunning realities of a new world order. Eighty-year old Biden with limited grasp of the torrential flow of events, made an astounding proposal in his press conference in Brussels on Thursday that Ukraine should replace Russia in the G20!
But Biden has a soulmate in the European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen whose latest threat is that Russian oil and gas companies “will not be allowed to demand payment for fuel in rubles.” She is blissfully unaware that the EU has no more effective means to pressure Russian companies!
Russian President Vladimir Putin caught the western leaders huddled in Brussels by surprise with his announcement that Russia will promptly start charging “unfriendly” countries in rubles for gas supplies. There are over 45 unfriendly countries on the list — the US and EU members plus the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore, Montenegro and Switzerland. (See the RT’s explainer What buying gas in rubles means for Russia and the West.)
Effectively, Moscow is on the one hand strengthening the weakened ruble, while on the other hand, messaging that it is pioneering a new wave internationally to bypass the dollar ascommodity currency.
Yet, Moscow is also continuing to routinely supply Russian gas for transit to Europe through Ukraine to meet the requests of European consumers (109.5 mln cubic meters as of March 26!) The point is, despite rhetoric and grandstanding, Europe recently increased its gas purchases from Russia significantly against the backdrop of astronomically high spot prices!
The European Council meet at Brussels on March 25 with Biden in attendance failed to adopt any concrete measures to address the energy price growth, and could not come up with a unified approach to Russia’s decision to receive payments for its gas only in rubles.
Apropos the European Commission’s proposal to establish a new system of common purchase of gas to prevent outbidding, the final statement of the European Council merely says that the leaders agreed to “work together on voluntary common purchase of gas, LNG and hydrogen,” meaning that common purchases may be carried out only by those EU countries who are willing to unite. [Emphasis added.]
It is a long haul for Europe to dispense with Russian gas. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said yesterday:
“There are gas shortages, and that is why we need to talk to Russians. Europe will move towards reducing its dependence on the Russian gas, but can this happen in the coming years? This is very difficult.”
“Europe consumes 500 billion cubic meters of gas, while America and Qatar can offer 15 billion, up to the last molecule… That is why German and Austrian politicians told me: “We cannot just destroy ourselves. If we impose sanctions on Russia in the oil and gas domain, we will destroy ourselves. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot before rushing into a fight.” This is how certain rational people in the West see it today.”
With the doomsday predictions of Russian military failure in Ukraine coming unstuck and the blowback from Russia sanctions beginning to bite, Europeans are caught in a bind. They will be resentful as time passes.
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Here is my analysis of what’s going on in Ukraine after one month. It may not prove acceptable to many. Certainly not liberals, the ruling elite in Washington, or even some left liberal and socialist left. But I’ve always spoken my mind on this blog and will continue to do so, with no allegiances to any political forces or organizations. So here goes:
First, this is a proxy war engineered by US neocons and political elites, that has its origins going back as far as 1999, when the neocons began to gain greater control over US foreign policy. The dress rehearsal for the current conflict originates with the Clinton administration. Once Clinton could not keep his zipper shut and the radical right used the opportunity to exact whatever concessions they wanted from him in his final two years in office, the shift in US foreign policy began and has gained momentum ever since.
In Bill’s last two years, in domestic policy a shift began to a more hyper neoliberalism in tax, spending, war, monetary, industrial and trade policy. In foreign policy, the main elements were a rejection of the prior US position not to move NATO east that was given to the remnants of the Russian elite in 1991-2 after the collapse of the USSR. The ‘old guard’ of US foreign policy, led by advisers like George F. Kennan and other US ambassadors was abandoned in the late 1990s. NATO led by the USA became an offensive organization. Its first victim was Yugoslavia-Serbia and the bombing of Servbia-Kosov0. That same year the march of NATO east also began.
In 2005 the US supported the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine that ended in a stalemate between pro-US and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. The US next moved on Georgia encouraging it to invade south Russia, which it did but lost. NATO moved further into east europe in the wake of that conflict. In the Ukraine in 2010 the pro and anti-US elements came to an uneasy truce. The US then built up its influence by courting the ground forces of fascists as a popular uprising force, led by US under secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who bragged the US had spent $5 billion financing the coup that occurred in 2014. The election of that year was narrowly won by the pro-Russian president. The street forces were then unleashed in mass protests in Kyiv that winter, 2014-15 and the pro-Russian president fled the country. Buttressed by publicly declared fascist elements in the street, many of whom then took seats in the new Parliament, the US deepened its economic and political involvement in Ukraine further. Victoria Nuland was appointed by the new Kyiv government as ‘economic czar’ over the Ukraine economy. (Made possible by Ukraine suspending its constitution that foreigners could not assume such a position. She was made an honorary citizen). Following her appointment the floodgates of US capital and business opened wide and US companies absorbed, purchased, and joint ventured with former Ukrainian companies. The US military advisers descended on Ukraine.
Russia responded by supporting the pro-Russia Donbass region. A local war in that area began. 14,000 pro-Russian Ukrainians died, as the fascist forces were organized in special military units and unleashed on the Ukrainian east (aka the Azov battalion). A peace armistice was arranged at Minsk in 2016 and the fighting and attacks slowed but never ceased. NATO moved east once again, a third time since 1999, absorbing the three Baltic countries after having already brought the rest of eastern Europe into the NATO fold.
Trump was elected president in 2017 and for the next four years a hiatus of sorts in the conflict followed. The Democrats believed Russian intervention in the US election of 2016 stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton and they never forgot. They waited their turn.
In 2020 Biden won and the preparation to step up the political pressure on Russia began anew: In late summer-fall 2021 the Biden administration deepened its military and political cooperation with Ukraine, as it pulled out quickly from Afghanistan. Joint US-Ukraine military exercises occurred. More US advisers poured into Ukraine to train the Ukrainian army. In November 2021 a preliminary agreement was signed by the US with Ukraine to bring it into the European Union, a necessary precursor to NATO membership. (Over the previous two decades the US withdrew from several missile treaties with Russia and set up advanced early warning radar in Poland and Romania.) All of eastern europe and baltics was now under NATO by 2021. Only Ukraine, which had repeatedly requested membership remained.
The US refused to acknowledge that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine, and repeatedly in 2021 refused when asked to clarify. Encouraged by these US statements and actions, Ukrainian president, Zelensky, became more strident in his request for US military protection, membership into NATO, and even began publicly saying Ukraine should be given nuclear weapons. Zelensky was being played like a violin by the US. A plausible explanation is the US was taunting and provoking Russia to invade. It had much to gain by a Russian invasion on a proxy country soil. (See my prior article ’10 Reasons Why the US May Want Russia to Invade Ukraine’ posted on this blog in February)
Russia began its military build up last winter in response. The US and neocon elements running US foreign policy used the threat of a Russian invasion to re-establish its hegemony over NATO among European nations which were showing signs of distancing from NATO, especially under Trump. US business interests, especially the oil and gas companies, had much to gain from a US policy of driving Russian out of Europe–not only in energy but in all areas of business. There was much profit to be gained by US corporations entering the European economic vacuum that would be left by a Russian exit.
Russia took the US bait and invaded on February 24, 2022. The US media-propaganda corporation machine immediately went to work to freeze out any and all global alternative commentary on the origins and state of the military conflict. The American public was force fed carefully selected stories about the plight of refugees, estimates of civilians killed, heroic Ukrainian fighters, and how the US was again the leader of protecting Democracy and Freedom. Little or nothing slipped through the US media to provide an actual picture of what was going on in Ukraine on the ground. The story was Russian military forces were bogged down, poorly equipped and led, being killed by the thousands and about to be defeated. Much of the reporting taken directly from Ukrainian government press releases.
Then the US media drumbeat began to assume an ominous character: the Russians were preparing chemical or biological weapons under a ‘false flag’ (but whose?); the Russians were prepared to continue on to invade NATO countries; and, most concerning, talking heads began to appear increasingly proposing how a tactical nuclear war could be won with Russia. Biden in recent days assumed the even more disconcerting public position declaring Putin was a ‘war criminal’ and that ‘Putin had to go’. The former declaration made it difficult to negotiate a truce at some point; the latter a virtual declaration of ‘regime change’ for Russia that would make Russia assume no hope in negotiating a truce whatsoever. It almost amounts to evidence the US does not want a truce or end to the conflict. It wants to debilitate Russia economically with its sanctions for some time to come, foment popular unrest in Russia, and humiliate it into a virtual surrender instead of a negotiated compromise at some point. The US still has much to gain geopolitically and economically from an extension (and perhaps even intensification) of the Russian-Ukraine conflict. How else can one interpret the US president’s declaration of Putin as ‘war criminal’ and need for ‘regime change’?
But Putin and Russia are not Milosevic and Yugoslavia. Nor Quaddaffi or Saddam Hussein. Nor Noriega of Panama. Nor the Taliban. Russia is one tenth of the global economy and source of much of its economic resources. And it’s a country with 6500 nuclear weapons.
One may ask, how can US neocons pushing the conflict in Ukraine be so short sighted? To that one can only recall their disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that they drove the US into. Biden appears increasingly unable to halt the US neocon insistence on further extending NATO and provoking Russia into a deeper conflict. Thoroughly neutralizing Russia is a necessary strategic precursor to taking on China in Taiwan or South China sea.
We are in an era of US imperialism running amuck. The same year, 2021, that the US ended its 20 year long disastrous war in the middle east, it is slouching toward another in Ukraine. Biden says US won’t get involved in Ukraine directly. But it already is. Ukrainian forces have many US advisors fighting side by side, directly tactics on the ground and use of US made weapons. US weapons like drones are likely US directed, being used with some effect to ambush Russian advanced forces. There’s also the very likely use of US satellites and AWACs helping Ukrainian forces identify where Russian forces are advancing on the ground so they can be ambushed. The US is sending thousands of javelin and stinger missiles, and training thousands of Ukrainian troops is the far west of Ukraine. As the conflict continues, it is almost inevitable NATO & even US forces will be drawn into the fight–under the cover as mercenary or volunteers.
My Position on the Conflict
Ukraine is a proxy war between US and Russia that has its origins in the US, going back to 1999 and continuing and growing ever since. It is US imperialism that is at play here. It’s not a Russian imperialism. Russia is desperately trying to prevent further penetration of US imperialism, not advance to the west. Russia lost whatever empire it had with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The US media-Neocon narrative that Russia in planning to restore the former Soviet empire into the baltics and eastern europe is nonsense. Russia clearly lacks the military resources to do so if it wanted. Even its 150,000 troops in Ukraine are dangerously spread thin along four fronts. Russia has plans to attack the baltics or Poland is a neocon narrative used to restore US leadership over NATO and serves as an excuse to increase US military combat forces in eastern europe.
The foregoing is not to approve of the current Russian invasion. It is just to acknowledge the Russian security reasons, fears and concerns driving it. One can only imagine if Mexico joined the former USSR ‘Warsaw Military Pact’ and began joint military exercises with the former Soviet Union, what the US response would have been. It would have been a US Mexico invasion in a New York minute, as they say. That’s how Russia views the situation in Ukraine. It knows if Ukraine joins NATO, then Finland and Sweden would quickly follow. The next US/NATO destabilization ‘targets’ would be Belarus and Kazakhstan (where popular uprisings have already occurred with no doubt some degree of US encouragement). A Ukraine in NATO would mean a Russia completely surrounded by NATO and it would either have to capitulate to US/NATO demands (including demobilizing its nuclear forces) or else in desperation fight a war next time using those nuclear weapons–an even worse scenario than the present. Russia no doubt believes it is either a fight in Ukraine now, before Ukraine joins NATO, or a much worse conflict later. Today’s Ukraine proxy war may be the last non-nuclear war in the 21st century.
To continue to see the conflict as a moral issue of unjustified invasion will not bring a resolution to the conflict any closer; in fact, it will perpetuate and risk a deeper conflict as public opinion is corralled in support of war hawks, neocons, and elites’ plans to continue it.
This is not to deny that Russia is a capitalist country and economy and its government deeply integrated with greedy capitalist Oligarchs. But the US is not any different: it’s a capitalist country with its own gaggle of even greedier oligarchs (bankers, shadow bankers, oil corps, and the more visible tech versions-Musk, Zuckerman, Bezos, et. al.)
Leftists and socialists are wrong to assume the position of “a plague on both their houses. They’re both capitalists and oligarchic and therefore we should support neither and call for a workers revolution to overthrow them all (as per Lenin’s call in 1914).” Their demand is Europe out of NATO! And Russia out of Ukraine!
But a workers revolution is not even remotely on the agenda anywhere. That therefore will not stop the conflict from escalating into an even wider, or more dangerous nuclear, confrontation.Nor is Europe about to exit NATO. Quite the opposite. So this left position sounds good but is completely naive. The demand should be to oppose US imperialism, even if it means another capitalist country (in this case Russia) is being attacked by that imperialism. The socialist left position sees Russia and US imperialism as equivalents. And in taking that view it in effect abstains. But to take an abstentionist position with regard to US imperialism, which is now running amuck in the 21st century, is tantamount to supporting it. It ignores which is the greater threat to world peace? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or US imperialism intent on driving NATO east into Ukraine (and likely points to follow)? It should be asked which policies originated the conflict and now show indication of a desire to perpetuate and even deepen the crisis?
The demand should be an immediate truce and halt to the fighting. Ukraine and US/NATO should immediately sign a formal agreement of no extension of membership in NATO and no US military presence in Ukraine as part of the truce agreement. Ukraine should assume a model of Finland neutrality in its relation to Russia. Finally, Russian speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine should be allowed an independent international observed vote as to what country they want to join as independent republics. All sanctions should be rescinded within 30 days of a settlement. And no Ukrainian military units should tolerate soldiers or officers with extremist political associations or views.
There is no denying that fascist elements have been present in Ukraine since 2014 at least, and have a deep role within the Ukrainian military and influence within the Ukrainian Parliament and government itself. The US and west does not understand how deep the memory and fear of anything fascist runs in Russia. Russia may be over-estimating the fascist threat. But what the unleashing of the Azov battalion and other such forces did in 2015-16 and after is a stark reminder. And is it also a fact that the Azov and other forces were once again shelling and attacking the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lughansk in 2021.
The greatest danger to world peace is US imperialist interests now reacting irrationally to growing indications that the American empire is now under threat like never before; that the US global unipolar world order since 1991 can no longer be sustained. With neocons largely in control of US foreign policy since the late 1990s it is likely the US is about to engage in another, even more dangerous adventure in Europe than it did in the middle east in the previous two decades. That conflict ended with a tremendous loss of life, trillions of dollars of wasted US resources, a region left in shambles from Libya to Syria to Iraq to Afghanistan. A repeat of that policy on the Eurasian continent will prove many times more destructive and very likely lead to a tactical nuclear conflict that cannot be contained.
This proxy war in Ukraine is not at all about freedom or democracy. That’s just bullshit propaganda. It’s about money and power. It’s about restoring US imperial hegemony over Europe, breaking Russia as a global challenger to the US, and a dress rehearsal for then going after China.
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Jack Rasmus blogs at http://jackrasmus.com and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern time. Join him at twitter for daily updates at @drjackrasmus.
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Within days of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the US and the European Union imposed a series of sweeping sanctions on Russia aimed at crippling its economy by cutting off major banks from the SWIFT international financial messaging system and preventing the Russian central bank from using its foreign currency reserves to prop up the rouble.
The rapid action was the outcome of planning that had been developed for at least three months. The expectation was that the refusal of the US and NATO to even consider Russian demands for an end for NATO’s continued expansion to the east and engage in negotiations to address its legitimate security concerns would soon provoke military action.
Details of the considerable planning that went into the sanctions, involving the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and top intelligence and military personnel, together with EU officials, were revealed in an article published in the Wall Street Journal on March 18.
According to the article, the planning began shortly before Thanksgiving (the last Thursday in November) when Yellen met with senior officials and said she would contact her counterparts in Europe and elsewhere “to urge them to begin preparations for an economic response” to a Russian invasion.
The meeting was the launch of “an unprecedented financial sanctions program by the West aimed at a major economy” and “that program, along with [a] massive arms shipment, were the front lines of the West’s engagement.”
The senior Treasury officials involved in the planning were Yellen, her deputy Wally Adeyemo, who oversees sanctions operations, and Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary on terror financing issues.
Contact with the White House was through Daleep Singh, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official who is now at the National Security Council. He was in constant touch with Björn Seibert, a former German defence official, who is head of cabinet to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The working out of an agreement with the EU was crucial to the implementation of the sanctions because of the impact they would have on the EU economy—particularly for Italy and Germany that are heavily dependent on natural gas supplies from Russia. Singh and Seibert began discussions on the effects of any blowback in December.
According to the WSJ article, citing several of the participants, there was an “unprecedented level of co-operation and scope between the Treasury, the White House, the Commerce Department and the European Commission.”
The US was able to bring to the table its experience in imposing sanctions and other measures directed against Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, as well as the action it has taken to cripple the giant Chinese telecommunications maker Huawei.
However, the action against Russia, the world’s 12th largest economy, and a major supplier of oil, gas, grains, and many important industrial metals, took these operations to a new level.
In early February, several weeks before the Russian invasion, key US officials went to Brussels where they “spent hours at European Commission headquarters thrashing out the plan.”
Throughout this period, the White House insisted that Russia was set to invade based on “intelligence” reports.
But the certainty with which these pronouncements were made was not the result of any advanced spying operations. It was grounded on the understanding that the US refusal to entertain any diplomatic negotiations had backed Russia into a corner. As Biden said on January 20, Putin would have to “do something.”
Further plans are now being made to extend the sanctions both against Russia and more broadly.
Yellen said earlier this month that it was “certainly appropriate for us to be working with our allies to consider further sanctions.”
China is coming into the firing line. Last week US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the US was considering “secondary” sanctions directed against countries deemed by the US to be providing aid to Russia by assisting it to circumvent the measures applied to it. In effect, this means the US can interpret normal trade and financial dealings as providing such assistance if it chooses to do so.
“We have a number of tools to ensure compliance, and one of those tools is the designation of individuals or entities in third-party jurisdictions who are not complying with US sanctions or are undertaking systematic efforts to weaken or evade them,” he told reporters.
Secondary sanctions are a controversial subject in the EU because it opposed their imposition on European companies dealing with Iran after the Trump administration had sanctioned it. However, the EU was not able to do anything about it.
Asked about the issue on Friday, von der Leyen said the allies were looking “deep” into the sanctions regime to see if there were any loopholes. Action would be taken to close them, he added, making circumvention impossible.
On the issue of China, the US President Biden has said Beijing will face “consequences” if it were to assist Russia.
Speaking to the business channel CNBC on Friday, Yellen said it was premature to impose sanctions on China and it would be inappropriate at this point. But her remarks carried an implicit threat.
“We, as senior administration officials, are talking privately and quietly with China to make sure they understand our position,” she said.
In other moves, the G7 grouping of major imperialist powers has said it will act against any sale of Russian gold reserves aimed at supporting its currency.
A statement from the White House said G7 leaders and the EU would work jointly to blunt Russia’s ability to deploy its international reserves to prop up its economy. It made clear that “any transaction involving gold related to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation is covered by existing sanctions.”
The sanctions regime imposed by the US has implications that go far beyond Russia.
The measures imposed so far make clear that any country, including major powers, that crosses the path of US imperialism in its drive to open new regions of the world for plunder can be immediately excluded from the global financial system based on the US dollar.
In a significant comment in his letter to shareholders last week, Larry Fink, the head of the giant investment fund BlackRock, said: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.”
In other words, the period that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, supposedly based on market mechanisms and the free movement of finance, is over and a new situation is emerging.
Fink said companies and governments would be looking to onshore or nearshore more of their operations. As it did in the 1930s, this movement back to the “national hearth” has geo-economic and strategic implications.
The US actions against Russia constitute a major blow to the international financial system. Henceforth every country must consider that its foreign reserves, denominated in dollars, can be rendered essentially worthless overnight.
The outcome will not be the establishment of a new global financial system based on another currency such as the euro, let alone the Chinese yuan.
Rather the tendency will be towards the division of the world into conflicting currency and economic blocs, akin to those of the 1930s, which played a significant role in creating the conditions for World War II.
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In the now month-long mainstream media coverage of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, much attention has been paid to the actions of the ‘Ukrainian Resistance’.
In a manner not dissimilar to its coverage of the ‘Syrian rebels’ a decade ago, a romanticised image of ‘Ukrainian freedom fighters’ fighting bravely against a militarily superior Russian foe has been widespread amongst corporate outlets, alongside their fawning over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his calls for the implementation of a No Fly Zone – a move that would undoubtedly trigger nuclear war.
This Hollywood-style PR makeover of the Ukrainian military by the corporate media, including the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, also shares a strong similarity with the aforementioned ‘Syrian rebels’ in that it highlights the strong presence of CIA involvement in the background.
Indeed, the training of Ukrainian military personnel by the CIA to engage in guerrilla warfare against Russia was recently outlined in a Western corporate media report, indicating that a plan was in place to draw Moscow into an Iraq-war style military quagmire in Ukraine – the second largest country in Europe.
Such a tactic has historical usage against the Kremlin, when in 1979, then-US President Jimmy Carter would launch Operation Cyclone, a CIA programme which would see the arming, funding and training of Wahhabi insurgents known as the Mujahideen, who would go onto wage war on the USSR-aligned government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan – with Kabul, previously Western-friendly, having come under Soviet influence following the 1978 Saur Revolution.
This romanticised image of ‘Ukrainian freedom fighters’ by the corporate media however, lies in stark contrast to their coverage of Ansar Allah, more commonly known as the Houthis, currently waging an armed resistance campaign against Western-allied Saudi Arabia’s seven year long war and blockade on neighbouring Yemen – leading to mass-starvation in what is already the most impoverished country on the Arabian Peninsula.
Indeed, this was evidenced as such on Friday, when the Yemeni armed forces launched air strikes against a key oil refinery in the Saudi city of Jeddah, to a noticeable absence of articles by the Western media celebrating the actions of the Yemeni resistance against the Western-backed might of Riyadh, unlike their coverage of Ukraine and Russia.
To understand this contrasting approach to both Yemen and Ukraine by the corporate media, one must look further into the wider geopolitical and historical context in the West’s relationship with both countries.
In 1979, the same year as the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Islamic Revolution in Iran saw the anti-Western and anti-Zionist Ayatollah Khomeini come to power in Iran following the overthrow of the US and UK-aligned Shah Pahlavi – who had himself come to power following 1953’s Operation Ajax, an MI6 and CIA-orchestrated regime change operation launched in response to then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s decision to nationalise Iran’s vast oil reserves.
In order to counter the influence of Khomeini’s newly-established anti-Imperialist state and to maintain hegemony in the Middle East, the United States adopted the strategy of using Saudi Arabia – separated from the Islamic Republic by the Persian Gulf – as a political and military bulwark against Iran.
This is where the media coverage of the Yemen conflict comes into play, with Tehran long being accused of backing the Houthis, whose seizure of the capital Sana’a in March 2015 led to Riyadh launching its current air campaign – involving US and British-supplied bombs – in a bid to restore its favoured Presidential candidate, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to power.
Therefore, with the aims of Ansar Allah consequently being opposed to the aims of the US-NATO hegemony, this explains why no heroic descriptions such as ‘Yemeni resistance’ or ‘freedom fighters’ are ascribed to the Houthis by the Western media, in stark contrast to their coverage of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – supported by the West since the 2014 Euromaidan colour revolution and their subsequent war on the breakaway Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, a situation that has escalated to the point where nuclear war has now become a distinct possibility.
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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News.
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