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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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This was originally published on TNT Radio.

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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

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

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The 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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This article was originally published on US Provisional Government.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NaturalNews.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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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.

Source: ipu.org

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 90^th on the index; by 2020, it had jumped to 5^th 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].

Featured image is from telesurenglish.net

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Ukraine-Russia and the World Economic Forum (WEF). A Planned Milestone Towards “The Great Reset”?

By Peter Koenig, March 28, 2022

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?

The MADness of the Resurgent U.S. Cold War with Russia

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, March 28, 2022

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.

On US Imperialism’s Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, March 28, 2022

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.

How the Anti-Russian Sanctions Were Planned

By Nick Beams, March 28, 2022

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.

Leading Provider of Financial Research Says US Is Headed for Third World Status

By Charles Gave and Kristina Borjesson, March 28, 2022

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.

Hunter Biden Did Help Secure Millions in Funding for US Contractor in Ukraine Specializing in Deadly Pathogen Research, Laptop Emails Reveal, Raising More Questions About the Disgraced Son of Then Vice President

By Josh Boswell, March 28, 2022

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.

We have gone from COVID-19 lockdowns to Trump-Biden election drama to the Russia-Ukraine crisis to the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings to Will Smith’s on-camera assault of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards Ceremony.

The distractions, distortions, and political theater just keep coming.

The ongoing reality show that is life in the American police state feeds the citizenry’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.

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.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

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.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

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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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

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

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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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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Pixabay

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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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.

In July, 1992, published in the CIA’s newspaper, The Washington Post, we learn

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.

An example may be the largely unverified reports of Ukrainian marksmen killing a number of Russian generals. If true, the murderous handiwork of the US Army Marksmanship Unit comes to mind.

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 Maire candidly 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 boss Janet 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.

Thus, as political operative Karl Rove bragged,

“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.

Quelle

Mitschrift des Vortrags durch den Autor sowie Artikel in der „Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung“ (NRhZ) vom 13. 01 2016: http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=22455&css=print

Featured image: ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)

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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.

Notes

[1] Three EU prime ministers visit Kyiv as Russian attacks intensify

[2] Secret Plan to Send 10,000 NATO “Peacekeeping Troops” Into Ukraine

[3] How Biden scuttled Polish aircraft deal

[4] Poland will not send fighter jets into Ukraine, Andrzej Duda

[5] Mark Milley visited an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border

[6] Pentagon shores up its NATO defenses in Europe

[7] NATO doubles battlegroups in ‘Eastern Flank’ States

[8] NATO chief warns Russia away from attacking supply lines

[9] Pentagon push to send more trainers to Ukraine was scrapped

[10] Russian airstrike killed 180 foreign mercenaries at Yavoriv

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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.

DTRA Acquisition Forecast 20200730 (CREDITS: Dilyana Gaytandzhieva)

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).

Now, pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim are facing class-action lawsuits from people who developed cancer after taking the drug.

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.”

Kennedy pointed out that people can still become plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit.

“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.

Watch the podcast here or click the image below.

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Susan C. Olmstead is the assistant editor of The Defender.

Featured image is from CHD

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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! #ID pic.twitter.com/qpcQyGTixQ

— Christine Anderson (@AndersonAfDMdEP) March 24, 2022

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. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/CXAHy2P4yu

— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) March 24, 2022

The story was different in Coutts. Just hours before Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland introduced the draconian Emergency Act, RCMP swooped down on three trailers at the Coutts camp at 3 am on Feb. 14. 

The police officers claim they discovered a cache of weapons which they displayed in a photograph without sharing with the press an interpretation of contents of the picture: 

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: 

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 Hall is 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”.

He is a regular contributor 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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***

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Risk benefit calculation. I have more than 10 methods that show that over 150K people have been killed by the vaccine and the Pfizer trial showed we’d save 1 life from COVID for every 22,000 vaccinated. So after vaccinating 220M people, we kill 150,000 people or more and we save 10,000 lives. If this is wrong, where is the mistake and what are the correct numbers?
4. 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?
5. 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?
6. 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?
7. 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?
8. What is causing the telltale clots? Embalmers have seen odd blood clots, never before seen before the vaccines rolled out, in up to 93% of cases. These are not normal clots and have never been seen before the vaccines rolled out. What are they caused by and why are they killing so many people?
9. 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?

12. CDC paper admits to negative vaccine efficacy. This is big. Finally, a paper by nine CDC authors published in JAMA in January 2022 (Association Between 3 Doses of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine and Symptomatic Infection Caused by the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron and Delta Variants) shows in Fig. 3 that the vaccines create negative efficacy for Omicron at month 7, just like the Denmark study showed too (in Denmark it was after 3 months). In other words, the CDC authors admit that the vaccines make you more likely to get Omicron starting in month 7. Isn’t this contrary to what the CDC has been telling us? The vaccines aren’t supposed to make things worse, right?

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.

16. Every randomized trial shows masks make no difference at all. If masks work, then how come the graph for purple cloth masks in the Bangladesh studyshowed absolutely no effect and why did they omit this graph from the published paper? I read through all 111 pages and couldn’t find the graph. Not only did they omit the graph, but nowhere in the paper did they point out that the purple cloth masks had no effect. Isn’t that scientific fraud? Also, if masks work, then why isn’t there any data supporting the mask policy in Israel?

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%).

19. How do you explain this data?

20. Can you answer any of the questions on this list?

I look forward to hearing from you. I’d love to get back to technology.

Bonus questions:

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. Informed consent. A military doctor briefs 3,000 soldiers on the vaccine for 30 minutes and 99.8% refuse the jab. Nothing he said was false, but the doctor is relieved of duty. So if the vaccine is so safe and effective, why doesn’t anyone want to take it?
5. 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 Asia reported 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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***

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.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

The 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 as  commodity 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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

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.

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This was originally published on TNT Radio.

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***

Below are excerpts of  an important article by London’s Daily Mail. Our thanks to the Daily Mail for having brought this article to our attention

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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.

The commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, claimed there was a ‘scheme of interaction between US government agencies and Ukrainian biological objects’ and pointed to the ‘financing of such activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the investment fund Rosemont Seneca, which is headed by Hunter Biden.’

Intelligence experts say the Russian military leader’s allegations were a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US.

But emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.

He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a ‘science project’ involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine.

And although Metabiota is ostensibly a medical data company, its vice president emailed Hunter in 2014 describing how they could ‘assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’ – an unusual goal for a biotech firm.

In April 2014, Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote a memo to Hunter outlining how they could ‘assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’. ‘Thanks so much for taking time out of your intense schedule to meet with Kathy [Dimeo, Metabiota executive] and I on Tuesday. We very much enjoyed our discussion,’ Guttieri wrote

Click here to read the full article.

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***

Eighteen months ago, reports started to surface that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in the U.K. was planning to detain would-be asylum seekers in places as far away as the South Atlantic. Some sites, such as Ascension Island, are 4,000 miles from Britain.

Johnson’s plan was actually a spinoff of a never-implemented idea put forward by the Labour government back in 2003 to “offshore” the country’s asylum process to “regional protection zones” in the vicinity of the conflicts and collapsing economies that were sending hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to the U.K. and other European countries. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his colleagues backed off of that idea after it received tremendous pushback from social justice and immigrant rights organizers, who averred that it would place large and unfair financial burdens on poor countries that had the geographic misfortune to be located on the periphery of war zones.

Since those initial reports — with asylum seekers finding ever-more creative ways to cross over to England from the continent, either via boats or, in some instances, being smuggled through the Channel Tunnel — Home Secretary Priti Patel has increasingly looked to penalize asylum seekers, to render their actions criminal and to deny them the right to a fair hearing in the U.K. The British government is mirroring U.S. government actions taken during the Trump administration against would-be asylees attempting to traverse the southern border into the U.S., such as the Orwellian-named Migrant Protection Protocols.

This past summer, Patel unveiled plans, contained in legislation called the Nationality and Borders Bill, to criminalize asylum seekers entering the country without the correct paperwork and to make it easier to deport them. The plans also sought to house asylum seekers in offshore facilities such as abandoned oil rigs, or on Ascension Island off the coast of southern Africa, while their cases slowly wend through the court system. This sort of offshore detention — a practice long utilized in Australia, and currently being proposed in Denmark — is one that immigrants’ rights groups view with deep suspicion. If implemented, it would also give the British home secretary unprecedented powers to revoke the citizenship of certain U.K. citizens deemed politically undesirable, a move that picked up steam in the wake of a number of high-profile cases of U.K. citizens operating within the ranks of ISIS.

So desperate is Johnson’s government to deliver on its electoral promise to anti-immigrant voters of curtailing immigration that it has reportedly turned to a range of countries, from Norway to Rwanda to Albania to host its detention facilities. All, apparently, have turned down the U.K.’s overtures, leaving the remote Ascension Island, with its once-a-week flight to South Africa, as choice number one. If this tough-on-asylum proposal becomes law, it could end up costing the U.K. a fortune: A similar offshoring policy in Australia ultimately cost the Australians roughly 2 million pounds per person per year held at these remote detention sites, and helped shred the country’s human rights record in the process. In addition to the immorality of such a measure, as a deterrent system this sort of off-shoring policy is shockingly expensive to implement.

Since the bill was first proposed, opposition parties, combined with a number of rebels from within Conservative ranks, have fought a rearguard action to try to prevent it being enacted into law.

Now, with war raging once again on the European continent and displacing millions of people, and with tens of thousands of British families having signed up for a government program to host Ukrainian refugees in their homes, one might imagine that Prime Minister Johnson and Home Secretary Patel would use the moment as cover to back off of the more inflammatory of their anti-immigrant proposals.

To the contrary, they have doubled down. Earlier this month, the government repeatedly made it clear that it was sticking by this bill, and sent the legislation over to parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, to be debated, amended and voted upon. But members of the House of Lords weren’t happy about the legislation, and in a series of hearings successfully defeated or amended many of its more contentious, more anti-democratic, provisions.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the bill is dead. The House of Lords is, these days, more of an advisory chamber than an institution with veto powers over legislation. And, at this point, it’s looking as if Johnson’s government intends to try to steamroll the legislation through Parliament later this month, when members of Parliament once more debate the merits of the proposals.

Yet, Johnson is, after months of political scandals, a wounded leader, and his hold on the Conservative Party is nowhere near as total as it was last year. In recent days, more than two dozen of his members of Parliament have indicated their discomfort with key parts of the legislation, including the part which refuses to grant asylum seekers temporary work permits while they are waiting for their cases to be heard.

The war in Ukraine is rapidly shifting the dynamics around refugees and asylees. For years, a growing number of countries in Europe, pushed by electorates increasingly wary of large-scale migration, locked down against poor (mainly non-white) migrants seeking asylum. But Ukrainians, forced to flee suddenly before a staggeringly violent Russian onslaught, aren’t seeking asylum, a process that can take years of legal hearings to complete; rather they are heading west as refugees — into refugee camps in countries bordering Ukraine, and then westward into other countries in Europe. And, unlike with the victims of other conflicts in previous years, aid agencies in Europe are watching, somewhat amazed, as governments welcome these displaced Ukrainians with open arms. This treatment is far cry from how European countries’ response to the civil war in Syria — a year after a mass migration into Europe in 2015, one country after another began locking its borders down against the refugees — and the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

In contrast, Ukrainians are being met with work permits, with free public transit passes and so on, despite the fact that these same European governments have steadily been turning away refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other non-European conflict zones in recent years after a populist backlash against the liberal entry policies of 2015.

After a slow start denounced by opposition politicians as “shameful,” Britain has begun easing its rules-of-entry to allow for large numbers of Ukrainians to be temporarily resettled in the U.K. As a result, somewhere in the region of 200,000 Ukrainians could end up living in the country over the coming months and years — a number roughly equal to the number of EU nationals who left the U.K. in 2020 as Brexit’s provisions began to kick in, and one that might go a long way to fill the labor shortage in key sectors of the economy that Britain has repeatedly experienced post-Brexit.

Some relief workers and experts argue that this is a moment for Europe to fundamentally rethink its obligations to those fleeing persecution and violence, finally bringing the continent more in line with the spirit of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

But, at least in the short term, that seems an unlikely outcome. In Britain, the political tradeoff is, perhaps, most obvious. The home secretary, with Prime Minister Johnson’s backing, is continuing to push the noxious Nationality and Borders Bill in the same month that the government has been forced, by public opinion as much as by internal party dissent, to roll out a much larger welcome mat for Ukrainians than it had initially intended.

The U.K. is rightly responding with generosity to the victims of Russia’s violence in Ukraine. But, unless the Conservative parliamentary rebels pick up more followers in the coming weeks, it will soon be going down an even nastier road than before in its responses to other displaced, traumatized people fleeing non-European conflicts, non-European economic collapse and non-European zones of despair.

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Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.

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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***

As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third week, and the number of Ukrainian immigrants has increased under the strain of war, Israel is witnessing sharp differences between one group that supports the reception of all immigrants and another that supports accepting only Jewish ones. A third group warns against dispersing the efforts of preserving the state’s so-called “ethnic purity”.

Meanwhile, this growing dispute within the Israeli government indicates a state of divergence on the Israeli vision of the ongoing war and the lack of consensus on its position. There is a division between those who reject the Russian invasion, those who consider that this position may incur Israel considerable prices and a third group that calls for a total alignment with the West.

When the war between Ukraine and Russia becomes bloodier, Israel is preparing for new waves of Jewish immigration from Ukraine. The population of the Jewish community in Ukraine is 48,000, and the Israeli government started to realise the need to prepare for the increase in applications to immigrate to Israel. These waves of migrations began to be organised by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the Ministries of Immigration, Foreign Affairs and Diaspora, the Jewish Agency for Israel and the prime minister’s office to communicate between Jews and their families in the former Soviet Union. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 6,000 new Jewish immigrants from Ukraine have immigrated to Israel.

In 2021, 3,080 new Jewish immigrants immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, but due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, Jewish immigration officials believe there will be a dramatic increase in the applications of migration requests by Ukrainian Jews. The Ministry of Aliyah and Integration stated a rise of 12 per cent in applications to open migration files, and the numbers are expected to increase further.

The Israeli currents that support receiving Ukrainian refugees claim that Israel is the protector of every Jew wherever they may be. Therefore, hundreds of Israelis in Ukraine assist at a field hospital on the border. Every day, 12 to 16 flights from Russia and the countries around Ukraine land at Ben Gurion Airport. It is expected that around 2,000 to 3,000 immigrants may arrive, besides those entitled to the racist “law of return”, specific to Jews and Jews alone.

The group with reservations about the comprehensive reception of refugees from Ukraine called for a ministerial committee to form a clear immigration policy for Israel to adapt to the situation and set parameters on the number of refugees received. So far, Israel does not have a specific and clear immigration policy, and the Ukrainian refugee crisis necessitates a governmental decision based on an agreement between the different components of the government. They do not agree on the current situation, but rather seem indifferent to what they call a “humanitarian disaster”.

A third Israeli current considers the request to implement a plan for refugees as “shameful” because it distorts Israel’s reputation and undermines its immigration policy since it cannot afford the cost of receiving refugees coming from Ukraine. This prompted hundreds of demonstrators to protest in front of the home of the Minister of Interior Ayelet Shaked, accusing her of discriminating between refugees according to religion, race and gender. This group believes that any government’s discrimination based on these grounds is shameful.

This Israeli racist policy towards Ukrainian refugees, compared with other policies regarding immigrants coming from other countries such as Ethiopia, has caused all ministers of the government to be accused of committing a “scandal” and causing a “disgrace” to Israel because they have demonstrated a racist policy separating Jews from others.

It is clear that Israel, the country that cared about its citizens in Ukraine and the Jews there, has closed its doors to victims more than any other country has. Israel has remained silent, turned its back and closed its doors. The world will not forget Israel’s silence. There will come a day when the world will hold Israel accountable because it has evaded punishment for its endless occupation.

Being aware of the Israeli concern about the Jews impresses those described as “lovers of the Jewish race”. But when the war refugees arrive at the Israeli airport and are requested to deposit a huge amount of money to experience freedom and security, it is evident that something in the Israeli conscience is completely distorted. Is there really a difference between a child from Ukraine who fled to search for security and safety, who does not have a Jewish grandmother, and a child from Ukraine who has a Jewish grandmother? What is the difference? Racism.

The Israelis fear that Ukrainian refugees will face personal difficulties, health conditions and other difficulties in Israel, such as not speaking Hebrew or understanding Israeli mentality and culture. As a result, Israeli studies reveal an increase in the diagnosis of depression among Jewish immigrants, and even suicide cases, prompting the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration to launch a health centre to deal with this. Based at the centre are mental health specialists, operating five days a week, offering services in five different languages: English, French, Spanish, Amharic and Russian.

At the same time, recent days have revealed that Israeli human trafficking networks are actively working to lure Ukrainian women and girls to work in prostitution under the guise of receiving them as refugees. The trafficking networks are based at Ben Gurion Airport and nearby hotels designated by the authorities to host refugees.

During their testimonies at Ben Gurion Airport, about a hundred female Ukrainian refugees mentioned that people offered them money to help flee the war areas in Ukraine. The women crossed the border and boarded a plane heading to Israel. However, upon their arrival, the same people informed the women that they would be forced to provide sexual or domestic services to pay back the money.

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A proposed amendment to a 2019 federal law would have allowed federal agencies to conduct vague, pandemic-related “drills and operational exercises” just before the onset of the COVID crisis – and an amendment eventually included in the bill may have had a similar effect.

This article provides more significant information which suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may be a falsified national and international hoax, ruse, ploy, national security operational exercise, or other falsified “activity.” While this article does not thoroughly discuss the question, one might reasonably ask if a falsified pandemic committed by U.S. government national security officials, public health officials, and politicians would be terrorism. Without being an expert, one could predict that a falsified pandemic would greatly harm America and other countries and thus could be used as terrorism.

FBI ‘linking public health and law enforcement’

Before getting to the information suggesting COVID-19 is a falsified exercise, it is necessary to mention again that in 2016, the Obama-Biden administration ordered the FBI and Department of Justice to link “public health and law enforcement” and to coordinate with countries such as China, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other potentially terroristic governments, through the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), “on the Global Health Security Agenda and its successful implementation.”

This may be significant in part because if the implementation of the Global Health Security Agenda included a falsified pandemic and is therefore terrorism and a crime against the United States, then the FBI would apparently be the entity to investigate such potential terrorism committed by U.S. government officials. But if the FBI is coordinating the terrorism, then, of course, there probably won’t be an honest investigation.

The Obama-Biden administration’s ordering of the FBI to “coordinate with INTERPOL on the Global Health Security Agenda and its successful implementation” may also refer to the use of law enforcement/police and intelligence entities to intimidate and/or eliminate potential whistleblowers; history shows that it sometimes only takes one good and honest person to bring down widespread corruption. “Successful implementation” of a falsified pandemic or “global health security agenda” might require intimidation and/or elimination of whistleblowers, judges deciding cases on government forced injections, etc.

The FBI’s and DOJ’s recent history suggests the use of covert “law enforcement” as corrupt political entities; and the U.S. federal government’s anti-freedom response to COVID-19 in itself suggests widespread corruption. Thus, the methods and advanced technologies used by the FBI and other law enforcement entities may be relevant to this discussion.

Discussing this topic often leads to the false label of paranoia, but it is going to be asked anyways: why do the FBI and other entities keep methods and technologies secret? What do they have to hide? Some might say that persons who do wrong might be able to avoid punishment if methods and technologies are known; that is unlikely due to the advancement in technologies. But hiding methods and technologies does allow entities like the FBI to hide their own crimes, which the FBI has done in the past.

False investigations can be used as a weapon against innocent Americans in that they may involve stalking and harassment with covert law enforcement or intelligence community employees. “Investigations” also may involve stalking and harassment of acquaintances of the target of the false investigation. (Page 5) Such methods, including deliberate committing of crimes, were used by the FBI or other intelligence agencies in the past. (Pages 5, 10-12, etc.)

One problem with the Obama-Biden Administration’s ordering of the FBI to link law enforcement with public health and successfully implementing the Global Health Security Agenda might be summarized best by a document from the U.S. Senate describing previous crimes committed by the FBI and U.S. intelligence community:

intelligence activity in the past decades has, all too often, exceeded the restraints on the exercise of governmental power which are imposed by our country’s Constitution, laws, and traditions. Excesses in the name of protecting security are not a recent development in our nation’s history…Intelligence activity, on the other hand, is generally covert. It is concealed from its victims and is seldom described in statutes or explicit executive orders. The victim may never suspect that his misfortunes are the intended result of activities undertaken by his government, and accordingly may have no opportunity to challenge the actions taken against him. (Pages 2-3, emphasis added)

The U.S. Senate document indeed implies that covert stalking with the intent to cause harm was used by the FBI and other entities. It is documented that the ultimate intent might have been to cause the targeted person to harm themselves. (Page 11) And rather than eliminate such covert activities, it appears as though President Joe Biden (as a U.S. Senator) and others U.S. officials greatly expanded the use of potentially covert intelligence and/or law enforcement personnel across the nation. (108 STAT. 1807-1808) The law implies potential use of covert employees. (Not all opinions in linked sources are endorsed.)

Here’s one way in which such covert government actions could cause harm and potentially death: as the above-mentioned U.S. Senate document mentioned, people who are victims of the covert actions of law enforcement or intelligence agencies like the FBI “may never suspect that…misfortunes are the intended result of activities undertaken by [the U.S.] government.” “Misfortune” often causes suffering.

In the modern Big Pharma society such suffering may be much worse. What is one possible consequence of a person experiencing “misfortunes” and covert stalking and/or harassment? Sometimes the victim may begin using illicit chemicals. (The contents of this article or other articles by this author are not medical advice.) Or, because the government actions may involve covert stalking or harassment with not-in-uniform law enforcement or intelligence agency personnel, others may be misdiagnosed and may be wrongly prescribed certain chemicals. And what is one of the common consequences of using certain illicit chemicals? And what is a major “adverse effect” of certain prescribed chemicals which act on the brain? Remember, the FBI’s previous intent was to cause misfortune and attempt to convince targeted persons to harm themselves.

In other words, if the U.S. federal and/or local governments wanted to remove certain political opponents or other persons from society as they did in the past, such covert methods that they have used in the past, combined with chemicals with sometimes torturous effects, may be a way to do so.

And, again, due to the potential use of advanced technologies that may remotely and covertly act on the human brain and/or body, the current actions of the FBI and other intelligence or covert law enforcement entities may be even worse than the past. Covert and remote torture is not beyond the realm of possibilities. It seems that Americans should demand that such entities are no longer allowed to operate with such secrecy.

Proposed amendment before COVID again suggests pandemic ‘exercise’

Those subjects cannot be further discussed here, though. This article provides even more information which suggests that COVID-19 may be a falsified pandemic. Previous articles discussed significant information in the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act of 2019. Before that became law, though, there was another version of the bill which implies that a falsified operational exercise with “emerging infectious disease” enacted by the U.S. government and others may have been in the planning phase. An “emerging infectious disease program” was proposed to be established as follows:

“(e) EMERGING INFECTIOUS DISEASE PROGRAM.—  The Secretary [of Health and Human Services], acting through the Director of BARDA,  shall establish and implement a program that supports research and development, and manufacturing infrastructure, activities with respect to an emerging infectious disease.” (Page 88, emphasis added)

And what was one of these potential “activities with respect to emerging infectious disease”? The same bill provides the suggested amendment entitled “Strengthening National Preparedness and Response for Public Health Emergencies” which would have enhanced the duties of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response to include “comprehensive, synchronized, and mutually supportive” “drills and operations exercises” with the “emerging infectious disease program.” The proposed amendment (Pages 3-4) is difficult to understand without the wording of the law to be amended. The proposed amendment is emphasized as it would have appeared if it was passed:

[Subject to the authority of the Secretary, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response shall utilize experience related to public health emergency preparedness and response, biodefense, medical countermeasures, and other relevant topics to carry out the following functions:]

(G) Drill and operational exercises

Carry out drills and operational exercises, in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and other applicable Federal departments and agencies, as necessary and appropriate, to identify, inform, and address gaps in and policies related to the pandemic influenza and emerging infectious disease program established under section 319L(d), or all-hazards medical and public health preparedness and response, including exercises based on—

(i) identified threats for which countermeasures are available and for which no countermeasures are available; and

(ii) unknown threats for which no countermeasures are available.

Such drills and operations exercises shall be comprehensive, synchronized, and mutually supportive. (42 U.S. Code § 300hh–10(b)(4)(G), proposed amendment emphasized, from pages 3-4)

The proposed amendment suggests that the U.S. federal government, apparently including at least some members of Congress, intended the U.S. government to “carry out drills and operational exercises…related to…the emerging infectious disease program” mentioned above. Coronaviruses are in the realm of “emerging infectious diseases.”

The proposed amendment also wanted to make sure it was written into law that “such drills and operations exercises shall be comprehensive, synchronized, and mutually supportive.” “Synchronized…and mutually supportive” appears to imply that different government entities – potentially including the Department of Homeland Security/FEMA’s National Exercise Program – should synchronize and support “comprehensive” exercises with the Department of Health and Human Services’ exercises, including exercises related to “emerging infectious disease.”

Like other articles mentioned, why would it be necessary to attempt to put such wording into law unless a “comprehensive, synchronized, and mutually supportive” exercise was being planned and required more legal protection for those planning it?

And soon after the proposed amendment, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic – an “emerging infectious disease” pandemic – reportedly emerged. The timing of the proposed amendment followed by the emerging infectious disease pandemic could be coincidence but the reasonable person may suggest otherwise.

And while the proposed amendment was not included in the enacted law, one specific amendment was included which may have been intended to have the same effect as the proposed amendment above but with more broad language to provide secrecy for government officials potentially planning a falsified pandemic “operations exercise.” The amendment included in the enacted law is as follows:

(b) PROTECTION OF NATIONAL SECURITY FROM THREATS.—Section 2811 (42 U.S.C. 300hh–10) is amended by adding at the end the following:

“(f) PROTECTION OF NATIONAL SECURITY FROM THREATS.—

“(1) IN GENERAL.—In carrying out subsection (b)(3), the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response shall implement strategic initiatives or activities to address threats, including pandemic influenza and which may include a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agent (including any such agent with a significant potential to become a pandemic), that pose a significant level of risk to public health and national security based on the characteristics of such threat. Such initiatives shall include activities to—

“(A) accelerate and support the advanced research, development, manufacturing capacity, procurement, and stockpiling of countermeasures, including initiatives under section 319L(c)(4)(F);

“(B) support the development and manufacturing of virus seeds, clinical trial lots, and stockpiles of novel virus strains; and

“(C) maintain or improve preparedness activities, including for pandemic influenza. (133 STAT. 948-949, emphasis added)

The approved amendment included in the enacted law is broader than the initially proposed amendment, but it appears to have a similar effect: strategic initiatives and “preparedness activities” may include exercises (133 STAT. 940) and “any such agent with a significant potential to become a pandemic” would likely include coronaviruses. Thus, the amendment, like several other amendments, could be interpreted to mean that the U.S. government was planning a falsified pandemic exercise as a “strategic initiative” or “preparedness activity.”

When taken together, the proposed amendment and the approved amendment in light of the soon-to-follow COVID-19 pandemic are again extremely significant indications that the COVID-19 pandemic may be a falsified exercise. Of course, if it is a falsified exercise, it is likely being used as a form of terrorism to coerce large populations into doing things they would otherwise not do.

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According to a 2019  Rand report titled  “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”,  the US goal is to undermine Russia just as it did the Soviet Union in the cold war. Rather than “trying to stay ahead” or trying to improve the US domestically or in international relations, the emphasis is on efforts and actions to undermine the designated adversary Russia. Rand is a quasi-US governmental think tank that receives three-quarters of its funding from the US military.

The report lists anti-Russia measures divided into the following areas:  economic, geopolitical, ideological/informational, and military.  They are assessed according to the perceived risks, benefits and “likelihood of success”.

Screenshot from RAND

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. There is no mention of the cause of the Russian anxieties: they have have been invaded multiple times and had 27 million deaths in WW2.

Significance of Ukraine

Ukraine is important to Russia. The two countries share much common heritage and a long common border.  One of the most important leaders of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was Ukrainian. During WW2, Ukraine was one of Hitler’s invasion routes and there was a small but active number of Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany. The distance from the capital of Ukraine, Kiev, to Moscow is less than 500 miles.

For these same reasons of geography and history, Ukraine is a major component of a US/NATO effort to undermine Russia.  Current Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland,  said that over 20 years the US invested $5 billion in the project to turn Ukraine. The culmination was a violent coup in February 2014.  Since 2015, the US has been training ultra nationalist and Neo-Nazi  militias. This has been documented in articles such as “U.S. House admits Nazi role in Ukraine” (Robert Parry, 2015),  “The US is arming and assisting neo-nazis in Ukraine while the House debates prohibition.”(Max Blumenthal, 2018),  “Neo Nazis and the far right are on the march in Ukraine” (Lev Golinken in 2019) and “The CIA may be breeding Nazi terror in Ukraine” (Branko Marcetic Jan. 2022).

Rand suggested provocations

Prior to 2018, the US only provided “defensive” military weaponry to Ukraine. The Rand report assesses that providing lethal (offensive) military aid to Ukraine will have a high risk but also a high benefit.  Accordingly, US lethal weaponry skyrocketed from near zero to $250M in 2019,  to  $303M in 2020,  to $350M in 2021.  Total military aid is much higher.  A few weeks ago, “The Hill” reported, “The U.S. has contributed more than $1 billion to help Ukraine’s military over the past year”.

The Rand report lists many techniques and “measures” to provoke and threaten 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
• Withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty

These and many other provocations suggested by Rand have, in fact, been implemented. For example, NATO conducted massive war exercises dubbed “Defender 2021” right up Russia’s border.  NATO has started “patrolling” the Black Sea and engaging in provocative intrusions into Crimean waters. The US has withdrawn from the INF Treaty.

Since 2008, when NATO “welcomed” the membership aspirations of Ukraine and Georgia, Russia has said this would cross a red line and threaten its security. In recent years NATO has provided advisers, training and ever increasing amounts of military hardware. While Ukraine is not a formal member of NATO, it has increasingly been treated like one. 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.”

The alternative, which could have prevented or at least forestalled the current Russian intervention in Ukraine, would have been to declare Ukraine ineligible for NATO.  But this would have been contrary to the US intention of deliberately stressing, provoking and threatening Russia.

Ukraine as US client

In November 2021, the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership. This agreement confirmed Ukrainian aspirations to join NATO and rejection of the Crimean peoples decision to re-unify with Russia following the 2014 Kiev coup. The agreement signaled a consolidation of Washington’s economic, political and military influence. 

December 2021 Russia red lines followed by military action

In December 2021, Russia proposed a treaty with the US and NATO.  The central Russian proposal was a written agreement that Ukraine would not join the NATO military alliance.

When the proposed treaty was rebuffed by Washington, it seems the die was cast. On February 21, Putin delivered a speech detailing their grievances. On February 24, Putin delivered another speech announcing the justification and objectives of the military intervention to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine.

As Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov later said, “This is not about Ukraine. This is the end result of a policy that the West has carried out since the early 1990’s.”

Afghanistan again?

As earlier indicated, the Rand report assesses the costs and benefits of various US actions. It is considered a “benefit” if increased US assistance to Ukraine results in the loss of Russian blood and resources. Speculating on the possibility of  Russian troop presence in Ukraine, the report suggests that it could become “quite controversial at home, as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.” (p 99 of full report)

That historical reference is significant. Beginning in 1979, the US and Saudi Arabia funded and trained sectarian foreign fighters to invade and destabilize the progressive Afghan government. The goals were to overthrow the socialist inclined government and lure the Soviet Union into supporting the destabilized government. It achieved these Machiavellian goals at the cost of millions of Afghan citizens whose country has never been the same.

It appears that Ukrainian citizens are similarly being manipulated to serve US  goals.

A “disadvantageous peace settlement”

The Rand report says,  “Increasing U.S. military aid would certainly drive up the Russian costs, but doing so could also increase the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a disadvantageous peace settlement.”

But who would a peace settlement be “disadvantageous” for? Ukrainian lives and territory are currently being lost. Over fourteen thousand  Ukrainian lives have been lost in the eastern Donbass region since the 2014 coup.

A peace settlement that guaranteed basic rights for all Ukrainians and state neutrality in the rivalry of big powers, would be advantageous to most Ukrainians.  It is only the US foreign policy establishment including the US military media industrial complex and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who would be “disadvantaged”.

Since Ukraine is a multi-ethnic state, it would seem best to accept that reality and find a compromise national solution which facilitates all Ukrainians. Being a client of a distant foreign power is not in Ukraine’s national best interest.

The Rand report shows how US policy focuses on actions to hurt Russia and manipulates third party countries (Ukraine) toward that task.

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Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the sword of Damocles of a nuclear exchange between the great powers USA and Russia has been hovering over humanity. According to the American international law expert Francis Boyle, the very threat of nuclear weapons is “nuclear terrorism” and, since the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1945, a crime against peace and humanity. Boyle said this about ten years ago during a lecture at the XVIII “Courage to Ethics” Conference in Feldkirch, Austria.

Professor Boyle accused the US government of,

“after the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the incineration of 250,000 innocent people, to persist in the development of these weapons which threaten all humanity and thus to commit verifiable crimes like the Nazis. (…) Therefore, the government officials in all nuclear weapons states, not only those of the United States – they are of course the worst – (…) are criminals. They are criminals! For their threat to destroy all humanity! For their threat to repeat the Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide! (…).”

Then Boyle made an urgent appeal to all people:

“Humanity must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humanity!

Everyone around the world has the basic human right to be free from the criminal practice of nuclear threat/nuclear terrorism’ and its spectre of nuclear extinction. All human beings (…) possess the fundamental right under international humanitarian law to engage in civil resistance to either prevent, impede or end these threatened acts of international crimes.”

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Source

Transcript of the lecture by the author as well as article in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (NRhZ) of 13 01 2016: http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=22455&css=print

Featured image: ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)

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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is exploiting his now-American ally’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to add credence to the false speculation that Russia might end up using nuclear weapons in Ukraine or elsewhere. This is similar in spirit to what two German states just did in equating the Russian ‘Z’ with the Nazi swastika.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Saturday while visiting Hiroshima with US Ambassador Rahm Emanuel that “the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia is increasingly real” even though it was his country’s post-World War II mutual defense American ally that dropped atomic bombs on that city and Nagasaki in the final days of that global conflict. President Putin actually spoke about those unprecedented war crimes last week when reminding everyone that:

“When Japan annually commemorates the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, they either bashfully keep silent about who dropped the bombs on their cities, or they write flagrant nonsense, that some abstract allies did it. This is what their textbooks say. They simply prefer not to talk about the fact that it was the United States that committed such as a terrible and unjustified massacre at the end of World War II. They have cynically decided to ‘cancel’ this truth as well.”

It’s therefore not unsurprising to those who are aware of this historical truth and the “politically correct” historical revisionism that followed to find out that Japan is nowadays fearmongering about Russian nuclear weapons instead of American ones. Tokyo is motivated by its desire to become the “Asian Poland” in the sense of doing everything it possibly can to show fealty to its overlords in Washington vis-à-vis their top rival in each respective Eurasian theater of the New Cold War.

It seems inevitable that the Russian scenario of provoking Moscow into undertaking kinetic action in the region through its ongoing special military operation in Ukraine aimed at ensuring the integrity of its national security red lines will be replicated with China in the coming future. In preparation of that, Japan wants to play a leading role in provoking that sequence of events from China in East and/or Southeast Asia exactly like Poland presently is when it comes to Russia in Eastern Europe.

Russia just broke off peace talks with Japan after the US-led West’s unprecedented and preplanned sanctions campaign against it. Japan’s reversion to its fascist ways threatens regional peace, which is evidenced by Tokyo encouraging Washington to step up its meddling in the legitimately Russian-administered Southern Kuril Islands over which Japan recently reaffirmed its unilateral claims. Moscow’s response was to conduct more military drills there.

Former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev reviewed the circumstances under which his country would employ nuclear weapons in an interview with RT late last week. There’s no shift in its respective policy but the US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) misportrayed his citing of the preexisting facts as some kind of “nuclear saber-rattling” that in turn facilitates their ability to mislead their targeted audience with Kishida’s fearmongering.

Returning back to the topic of this analysis after having explained the strategic context in which the Japanese leader’s information provocation was unleashed, he’s exploiting his now-American ally’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to add credence to the false speculation that Russia might end up using nuclear weapons in Ukraine or elsewhere. This is similar in spirit to what two German states just did in equating the Russian “Z” with the Nazi swastika.

The average member of Western society naively assumes that post-World War II Germany become the global vanguard of anti-fascism in order for its society to eternally atone for the sins that the Nazis committed in their name. Similarly, they also naively assume that post-World War II Japan is the global vanguard of nuclear non-proliferation, with neither exploiting these artificially manufactured reputations. Nevertheless, exploit them they do, as evidenced by both examples.

Combining the equally false narratives being pushed by German and Japanese officials nowadays, who not coincidentally are the inheritors of the same two states that sparked World War II in their respective Eurasian theaters, the emerging weaponized information warfare narrative is that Russia is basically a “nuclear-armed Nazi state that already started World War III”

Add to it Poland’s de facto declaration of Hybrid War against Russia and Biden’s Warsaw speech where he articulated America’s aims and motivations in the New Cold War’s Western Eurasian theater, and it’s clear to see that this sequence of events was very likely preplanned for maximum impact in terms of comprehensively manipulating its targeted audience’s perceptions about Moscow. Untold millions will likely be misled by these interconnected psy-ops, but the truth is available for those who want to know.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: In this handout picture released by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about one hour after a nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945. Japanese officials say a 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II. City officials said Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified “hibakusha,” or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well. (AP Photo/U.S. Army via Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, HO) ** NO SALES, CREDIT MANDATORY **

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While the US seeks to distance China from Russia over the issue of Ukraine, the Chinese see Ukraine as a harbinger of things to come in the Pacific. By failing to communicate over the Ukraine issue, the US and China are inching closer to a direct military conflict over Taiwan.

On Mar. 18, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke via video link. The primary topic, according to a White House readout, was “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” Biden reportedly outlined the view of the US and its allies that the best way to respond to the invasion is to impose costs on Russia. Biden, the White House stated, “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia.”

Biden’s threatening language echoed that of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at a Mar. 14 meeting with the Director of China’s Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission, Yang Jiechi, in Rome. While the White House’s succinct readout merely said the talks involved “substantial discussion of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” the meeting lasted some seven hours, implying a conversation of much greater complexity. State Department spokesperson Ned Price hinted at this to the press in Rome:

“The national security adviser raised directly and very clearly our concerns about the [People’s Republic of China’s] support to Russia in the wake of the invasion, and the implications that any such support would have for the PRC’s relationships around the world.”

Biden and Sullivan’s concern reflected intelligence reports that China had received a request from Russia for military aid and had indicated a willingness to grant this request. Both Biden and Sullivan apparently emphasized to China that any such assistance would provoke US economic sanctions.

Every story has two sides. However, the Chinese version of the talks sounded like it was reporting on a completely different event. According to China’s official Xinhua News Agency, far from being a passive receptor of US angst, Yang controlled the tempo and tone of the Rome meeting, calling on the international community to “jointly support the Russia-Ukraine peace talks so that substantive results can be achieved as soon as possible,” and encouraging all parties to “exercise maximum restraint, protect civilians and prevent a large-scale humanitarian crisis.”

Yang also said the “historical context of the Ukraine issue” needs to be “straightened out.” He encouraged all parties to “get to the bottom of the problem’s origins” and respond to “the legitimate concerns of all the parties.”

This point was driven home by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. A few days after the Rome meeting, he stated that

“China is not involved in the [Ukraine] crisis, and we do not wish to be affected by the sanctions.” China “has the right to defend its own interests,” Wang declared, adding “[t]he Ukrainian crisis is a result of the accumulation of Europe’s security conflicts.” Both Wang and Yang avoided labeling the Russian operation in Ukraine as either an invasion or war, stating that “While China encourages Russia and Ukraine to cease fire, we wish to see fair peace talks between Europe and Russia.”

Xi left even less doubt as to whom he held responsible for the Ukraine crisis. The Chinese readout of the Biden-Xi phone call said the Chinese leader told Biden that, while China wants peace in Ukraine, it strongly opposes US and European sanctions against Russia. The US and Nato sparked the conflict and should take responsibility for solving it:

“He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off,” Xi told Biden, using a Chinese aphorism. The US and Europe should “conduct dialogue with Russia to solve the crux of the Ukraine crisis and resolve the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine.”

Russian-Chinese Partnership

If Sullivan and Biden’s goal was to create a divide between China and Russia over Ukraine, they failed. The Biden administration often appears indifferent to Xi’s characterization of Sino-Russian ties as the “best in history,” with both nations “each other’s most trustworthy strategic partners.” The concept of Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin having “built good working relations and a close personal friendship” seems foreign to both the US president and his national security adviser.

Xi and Putin in Beijing on Feb. 4 issued a 5,000-plus word joint statement detailing the substance of, and the common impetus behind, the Russian-Chinese partnership: It provides a vital counterforce to what they view as the unilateralist, aggressive global agenda of the US, which threatens not only their two nations, but the peace and security of the world.

The notion that China would be willing to desert Moscow over matters of critical national-security importance to Russia is all the more dubious given the emphasis China placed in the joint statement with Russia to its own national-security priority: the status of Taiwan. For Xi, there is an echo between how the US used Nato in Europe, and US efforts to rally regional support in the Pacific through quasi-alliances such as the “Quad” — comprised of the US, Japan, Australia and India — and the newer Aukus collaboration between Australia, the UK and US to confront China over its claims over both Taiwan and the South China Sea.

From the Chinese perspective, the same strangulation tactics used against Russia in Europe are being mirrored in the Pacific. There, the US and its allies have begun to aggressively challenge China militarily through freedom of navigation exercises in the Strait of Taiwan and South China Sea, and by the deployment of new advanced submarines, hypersonic missiles, and amphibious forces specifically acquired and configured for a military confrontation with China.

Actions Speak Louder

Biden repeatedly informed Xi during their call that the US is not seeking to have a new Cold War or conflict with China, alter its system of government, revitalize alliances against China, or support Taiwan independence. However, in his very first press conference as president, back in March 2021, Biden took an aggressive tone on China.

“They [China] have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch.”

Biden criticized the Chinese system of government as “autocratic” and held a global “Summit for Democracy,” where he actively promoted American-style democracy over Chinese autocracy. He has sought to strengthen the military aspects of the Quad, and created a new military alliance, Aukus, solely focused on China. The US continues to sell weapons to Taiwan and has dispatched US troops there on training missions, violating a long-standing taboo against such deployments. Finally, the US is acquiring long-range missiles, including hypersonic weapons, and has reconfigured the Marine Corps force structure in the Pacific for a military conflict with China in the South China Sea.

From Xi’s perspective, the US is saying one thing, and doing another.

According to Xinhua, Xi informed Biden that, in his view, the “direct cause” of the current strain on China-US relations is that “some people on the US side have not followed through on the important common understanding reached by us, neither have they acted on President Biden’s positive statements. The US has misperceived and miscalculated China’s strategic intention.” America, Xi added, has failed to deliver on virtually all of its promises to China regarding the avoidance of conflict, while simultaneously promulgating deep-seated notions of China as an “imagined enemy.”

The US, Xi added, is sending the wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” forces, which is “very dangerous.” Continuation of this would “exert a disruptive impact on China-US relations.” Xi’s remarks, made in the context of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, should not be seen as anything less than a clear warning that the US needs to start taking China’s security concerns seriously and exercise greater caution over its words and actions — lest it find that it has, again, tied a bell onto a tiger.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer whose service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving on the staff of US Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and later as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq from 1991-98. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

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The History of Nazism in Ukraine. Who Is Stepan Bandera?

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, March 27, 2022

It’s a tragedy in the making. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reprehensible and should never have happened, but it is a fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin for several years had been warning Washington and its allies of an impending danger, that NATO expansion to its borders could lead to military confrontation.

Tens of Thousands Threatened with Property Tax Foreclosures in Detroit

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 28, 2022

March 31 has been designated as the deadline for Wayne County residents to pay back property taxes from 2019 and before despite the failure of the relevant authorities to provide adequate assistance to working and impoverished households.

Uncovering the Corona Narrative

By Dr. Robert Malone and Ernst Wolff, March 28, 2022

Many who have followed this coronavirus “public health crisis” and the non-sensical response provided by most of the western nations (including the USA) have been perplexed by two big questions – how was this done (in such a globally coordinated fashion), and why was it done?

Will Humans be the Next ‘Freedom Fries’?

By Ray McGovern, March 28, 2022

Here’s the thing: the Russians have good reason to be on hair-trigger alert. Their early-warning radar system is so inadequate that there are situations (including those involving innocent rocket launches) under which Russian President Putin would have only a few minutes – if that – to decide whether or not to launch nuclear missiles to destroy the rest of the world – on the suspicion that Russia was under nuclear attack.

Reporting From Southern Ukrainian City of Henichesk along the Sea of Azov: “Russians Welcomed as Liberators”

By Sonja van den Ende, March 27, 2022

The Russian army, patrolling the city, went with us—the embedded journalists—for protection. But actually the protection was not really needed; the people in Henichesk, at least the majority with whom I spoke, were very happy that the Russian army was there.

Nightmare Scenario: Operational Miscalculation Triggering Nuclear War

By Nauman Sadiq, March 27, 2022

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have tried to set up phone calls with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov but the Russians “have so far declined to engage,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement Wednesday, March 23.

95% of Committee Members Advising on U.S. Dietary Guidelines Had Ties to Big Pharma, Big Food

By Michael Nevradakis, March 27, 2022

Describing their findings as “particularly worrisome,” the authors of a study published Monday in Public Health Nutrition noted that in the U.S., the Dietary Guidelines for Americans form “the foundation for all national nutrition programs,” which amount to nearly $100 billion annually.

Aroused by Power: Why Madeleine Albright Was Not Right

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 27, 2022

The late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will always be tied with the appallingly named humanitarian war in Kosovo in 1999, one that saw NATO attacks on Serbian civilian targets while aiding the forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army.  It was a distinct backing of sides in a vicious, tribal conflict, where good might miraculously bubble up, winged by angels.  Those angels never came.

NATO Wants a Ground-War in Ukraine?

By Mike Whitney, March 26, 2022

Didn’t Putin say that pouring arms into Ukraine would increase the likelihood of war? Yes, he did, but the US and NATO continue sending more shipments anyway. Why? And why does Ukraine need more weapons?

White House Plans Major Escalation of NATO’s Proxy War with Russia

By Andre Damon, March 27, 2022

One month since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden will begin a tour of the continent this week in an effort to mobilize the NATO powers in a major escalation of the conflict against Russia.

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March 31 has been designated as the deadline for Wayne County residents to pay back property taxes from 2019 and before despite the failure of the relevant authorities to provide adequate assistance to working and impoverished households.

For the last two years, Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree has not foreclosed on properties due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has had a disproportionate impact on area residents, particularly African Americans who make up approximately 80 percent of the Detroit population.

This issue is not a new one in Detroit and Wayne County. Since 2005, there have been tens of thousands of homes and small businesses seized due in part to over assessments which grew out of the mortgage crisis during the first decade of the century. Values of homes were artificially inflated by financial institutions in order to sell more first-time and refinancing loans which proved beneficial only to the banks and insurance companies.

Detroit and the state of Michigan were at the epicenter of the economic crisis leading up to and during the so-called “Great Recession” from 2007 to 2010. The impact of the mortgage home foreclosures was to create even more neighborhood abandonment and blight. Successive state and local officials refused to take effective measures through the implementation of long-term moratoriums along with legal actions against the banks which created the housing crisis.

Moreover, the working and poor people of the United States were saddled with bailing out the banks and insurance firms that engineered the economic downturn. Legislation passed by Congress during the final quarter of 2008 placed the burden of the recession on taxpayers within the proletariat. This bailing out of the banks coincided with similar efforts related to the automotive industry where both General Motors and Chrysler were subsidized by public funding in order save them from consolidation or liquidation.

These factors are largely responsible for the housing situation in Detroit and Wayne County where more than a quarter of the population (240,0000) were driven out of the region between 2000-2010. In Detroit, the population, according to the latest Census figures, has declined an additional 80,000 since 2010. At present, population estimates indicate that the state’s largest municipality has a population of 635,000.

Detroit demonstration outside Wayne County Treasurer’s Office downtown (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Detroit’s population reached its maximum in 1950 with approximately 1.8 million. Therefore, over the last 72 years, 1.2 million people have been relocated from the city. This massive displacement was both voluntary and forced when government entities such as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act facilitated the destruction of majority African American communities and the suburbanization of whites outside the city limits.

The deliberate downsizing and disinvestment in heavy and light industrial production from inside the city center to suburban, out-of-state and offshore locations fueled the migration from the municipality by workers seeking viable employment. The current property tax foreclosure crisis will only further depopulate and impoverish the city.

Corporate Restructuring and the Legacy of Residential Depopulation

Since the contrived and illegal bankruptcy which was imposed on Detroit during 2013-2014, the city has fallen into deeper poverty and community underdevelopment. The appropriation of city assets such as Belle Isle, public works, lighting, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and other institutions, has not reversed the economic trajectory of the municipality.

Tax incremental funding, popularly referred to as “tax captures”, are touted for their utility in fostering “development” largely centered in key areas of the city such as downtown, Midtown, New Center and industrial sites including the new Flex-N-Gate, Stellantis, and the now under construction Amazon facilities located on the eastside of Detroit. Yet these plants and the opening of three casino hotels since 1999, has not fostered sustainable development and a rise in household incomes.

These prestige projects where the owners are largely absolved from paying corporate and other taxes are profiting at the expense of the majority Black population. At present some plants have been forced to lay-off workers as a result of supply chain problems stemming from the continuing impact of the pandemic since 2020. Noise and other forms of environmental pollution caused by these plants are also forcing people from neighborhoods.

Moratorium NOW! Coalition Calls for Mobilization Against Tax Foreclosures

On March 30, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other housing activists are holding a press conference and rally outside the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office located at 400 Monroe in Greektown section of downtown. Sabree says he is being pressured to not extend the moratorium on home seizures despite the ongoing crisis related to the pandemic and the overall economic situation.

In a statement issued by Moratorium NOW! Coalition on March 23, it says that:

“There is no reasonable cause for the home seizures to resume when many households have not recovered from the economic and social impact of a public health crisis not witnessed in more than a century. We are calling on the Wayne County Treasurer to stop the foreclosures; protect renters from evictions where taxes are delinquent; and to work towards a long-term plan to put an end to the housing property tax disaster which has been in existence for more than a decade-and-a-half. A list of over 17,000 homes is being threatened with seizure. The problem is so severe that the Treasurer’s Office is not answering calls from the public seeking assistance. This is totally unacceptable. The only solution is to halt the foreclosures and work towards a sustainable solution.”

The ultimate solution to the housing crisis in Detroit lies within the necessity to change the rubric which guides property rights. Housing should be considered a human right and not a profit-making mechanism controlled by real estate firms and financial institutions. The existing model has only forced more people into homeless and poverty.

Housing Remains a National Crisis

Property tax foreclosures, rising rents, the current inflationary spiral plaguing the U.S. and the subsequent social instability, are all manifestations of the failure of the current administration of President Joe Biden and the Congress to pass legislation that would assist millions of households. None of the social spending initiatives proposed by progressive elements within the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed into law.

Therefore, the striking down of a public health moratorium enacted through the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) by the Supreme Court has never been reversed through legislative measures. This holds true as well for the programs to provide permanent child tax credits to working families along with investments in childcare and the lifting of the minimum wage to at least $15 per hour.

The Supreme Court since 2013 has eviscerated the enforcement provisions of 1965 Voting Rights Act while Congress even with a democratic majority in both the House and Senate have failed to take action to guarantee universal suffrage. A series of Civil Rights bills passed by Congress between 1957 and 1968 are effectively null and void. Due to the passage by states of restrictive voting laws, millions of African Americans and other people of color communities will be subjected to massive disenfranchisement across the U.S. in 2022 and 2024.

Yet these issues have been taken off the agenda by the Biden administration and the corporate media which are exclusively promoting sanctions and war against the Russian Federation. Biden travelled to the Western European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries during late March to drum up support for further hostilities against Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Meanwhile, workers are paying more than $6 per gallon for gasoline in California along with astronomical inflationary increases for the prices for automobiles, auto services, food and housing expenses throughout the length and breath of the U.S.

Consequently, the struggle to win housing rights is an important aspect of the overall movement against austerity and imperialist war. Working people and the nationally oppressed must organize independently of the Democratic and Republican parties in order to wage the necessary campaigns aimed at improving living conditions and social stability.

*

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

Featured image is from Abayomi Azikiwe

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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***

Many who have followed this coronavirus “public health crisis” and the non-sensical response provided by most of the western nations (including the USA) have been perplexed by two big questions – how was this done (in such a globally coordinated fashion), and why was it done?

In my case, I have tried to follow the various threads of facts and logic, to confront the perplexingly dysfunctional public policies, and to make sense of what is so deeply illogical. What I have found has been layers of lies, one on top of another, which seem to require an amazingly coordinated and globally comprehensive control and shaping of information in the form of propaganda and censorship on a scale which was previously unimaginable. Total information control, and total unrestricted, all encompassing information warfare. Modern media manipulation of thought and minds without boundaries, and without any ethical constraints.

One constant thread which runs through all of the mismanagement, all of the authoritarian policies, all of the totalitarian logic and messaging, has been the role of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its acolytes.

WEF is a key think tank and meeting place for global capitalism management, and arguably qualifies as the leading global Deep State organization. Under the leadership of Professor Klaus Schwab, it has played an increasingly important role in coordinating the globalized hegemony of transnational capital and large corporations over Western democracies during the last three decades.

Many of its members actively use Covid-19 as cover to carry out a “Great Reset” as described in Schwab’s writings.

This Great Reset involves implementation of digital tracking and control of people, ushering in techno-feudalism, and the WEF objective of a fourth industrial revolution incorporating technologies collectively referred to as “transhumanism.”

Western governments and WEF have identified genetic mRNA vaccines as a first step toward an inevitable transhuman society which they seek to guide us towards. The WEF has developed and implemented a training program which has yielded thousands of acolytes who have been placed into positions of power throughout the western world. A small representative sampling of these includes the following drawn from the ranks of the United States government and industry:

• Politics and policy: White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeffrey Zients, lobby group #Masks4All co-founder Jeremy Howard, California Governor Gavin Newsom, 2020 presidential candidate and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, former U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the UN and USAID administrator Samantha Power, Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer, U.S.-British financier Bill Browder, Jonathan Soros (son of George Soros), Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, economist Paul Krugman, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, Ivanka Trump, and former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).
• Legacy media: CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, Twitter personality Eric Feigl-Ding, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ABC News commentator George Stephanopoulos, Fox CEO and News Corp co-chair Lachlan Murdoch, Bloomberg columnist Justin Fox, and CNN commentator Anderson Cooper.
• Technology and social media: Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and Pfizer VP Vasudha Vats.

So how does this all tie together? How does reading and listening to the pronouncements of Klaus Schwab and his WEF organization help make sense out of the otherwise nonsensical? What is the underlying answer to the big “how” and “why” questions?

In August 2021, German author, journalist, International Monetary Fund and financial expert Ernst Wolff provided his explanation and hypotheses in a seminal lecture which many find useful as they try to make sense out of all that we have experienced and continue to find ourselves having to adapt to. The following is English language translation of the lecture, which was provided in German. Whether you agree or disagree, I suggest that his insights deserve consideration. I always recommend that you do your own thinking, and some may dismiss his thoughts as conspiracy theories, but this presentation certainly provides plenty to think about.

***

August 2021 presentation given by Ernst Wolff

The American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once said:

“Nothing happens accidentally in politics, and when something happens, you can bet on it that it was exactly planned that way.”

When one looks at what happened in the last year and a half, then these words are especially alarming.

Can it really be the case, that everything that we’ve experienced was planned?

I’ll say one thing right away. I can’t produce any evidence for such a plan, in the form of verified documents, but after studying this topic in detail for 18 months, I must say that there is an impressive number of signs and indications pointing in exactly this direction.

It is this and the consequences thereof that I want to talk about today. The current situation we find ourselves in is unique in the history of mankind. Never before has the whole world been thrown under the rule of this type of coercive regime as now in our time, and never have so many measures been taken which at first glance appear so unintelligible, partly so nonsensical, and in many cases so contradictory.

Officially, this is about the most serious health crisis in living memory, but the measures being used against this have not improved the situation but continuously made things worse. Every doctor today can confirm the health condition of people, the majority of people, is worse than before the crisis, and even from the point of view of those who ordered the measures we are faced with a shamble. The allegedly threatening 4th wave, and the announcement of the need for 3rd, 4th and 5th vaccinations, show that the purpose of the measures up to now, namely preventing the illness, has failed completely.

But that is not all by far.

As a consequence of the lockdowns up to now, we have a severe global economic crisis to manage.

Worldwide production hangs in complete disarray. Global logistics is on the floor, supply chains are broken, harvests are being lost, food supply bottlenecks, and on top of this a scarcity for a large part of the economy of essential semi-conductors. But also, in this we are seeing the problems are not being addressed and solved, but multiplied and magnified, via the application of further measures, and the constant threats of new restrictions.

The most recent example, in China, a port freight terminal, the 3rd largest in the world, has been closed down due to a single positive test from a worker there. Or, take New Zealand, where in all seriousness during the last week, 5 million people were put in lockdown for 3 days, because a single 58-year-old had a positive test.

A further crisis is affecting the small to medium business sector, which by a long way provides the most jobs worldwide and additionally, supplies the largest share of tax revenues. The Mittelstand (small to medium industry sector), is being driven from week-to-week further to the wall, through the incessant uncertainty and new regulations, and has never before been stuck in such a deep crisis as today.

But that is not all.

We are experiencing at present, a brutally increasing worldwide inflation, especially for raw materials, with produce prices and with food products. But also, here, nothing is being done to alleviate the situation. But rather the opposite. The flood of money printing continues, and will even be further increased. Countries and central banks, have, since the start of the crisis, thrown in almost USD 20 trillion into the worldwide monetary system. Without any end in sight! And the International Monetary Fund, as the most powerful financial organization in the world will give out next Monday, with USD 650 billion, the largest amount ever of its own currency under special withdrawing rights.

And the situation in society is no better.

Just one example.

In the USA, the strongest economy in the world, almost 4 million people are threatened with eviction because they cannot pay their rent or cannot cover their mortgage costs. And more than ten times as many, in the USA, note in the richest country in the world, are not in a position to feed themselves from their own income, and that, which the intentional destruction of the economy and the rising inflation have not managed to accomplish, politicians have managed to do.

A country wide fracture of the population as we have never witnessed before, and now, on top of this come vicious measures as the crowning of the whole thing. The premeditated change of power in Afghanistan managed by the USA. There, the Taliban have been deliberately handed military materials, to the value of $20 billion, a complete air force, with 11 airfield support bases available for use, which with absolute certainty will cause the next enormous flood wave of refugees. Why this, one asks oneself?

Why were worldwide measures taken which have caused one disaster after another and pushed the majority of humanity deeper towards the abyss, instead of lifting them out of their misery?

To answer this question, one has to ask two further questions, namely: Who has an interest in this global agenda, and who profits from this?

The answer to both questions is clear. The biggest profiteer of the current crisis, and the most important string puller behind the scenes, is the digital-financial complex. So, a type of special interest community, with the largest IT corporations and the largest asset managers of our time at its head.

The largest IT concerns, include: Apple, the Google parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. The market capitalization of these 5 companies alone at present amount to an incredible USA 9.1 trillion. Just for comparison, the gross GDP of Germany, France and Italy is USD 8.6 trillion.

Along with these digital concerns, we also have the large asset managers, namely, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity. They are significantly involved in all IT companies, and not only this, these four companies alone, currently manage a total USD 220.6 trillion. Again, for comparison, the GDP of all 28 nations of the EU last year amounted to USD 15.7 trillion.

But it is not just the monstrous financial clout of these concerns which makes the digital-financial complex so powerful.

Let’s first take the IT corporations. They don’t just have an enormous power themselves. They also control hundreds of thousands of other companies, because they organize the digital systems of these other businesses, and in this way have a constant overview of their data streams. The IT industry is nothing other than a tumor, which, in the course of the past years has metastasized into all other branches of the economy, to make them dependent upon it and in the meantime to completely dominate them.

And it is not any different with the asset managers They are involved in every large company in the world, and able to influence every popular brand in the world. The largest of them, BlackRock, supplies with the more than 40 years old data analysis system “Aladdin Data Cloud”, the greatest fund and financial information the world has ever seen. And in the background, BlackRock uses this knowledge, to advise the largest central banks in the world, the Federal Reserve and the EZB (European Central Bank). Through the huge information advantage which BlackRock has, it is very clear who is dependent upon whom.

So, this has to do with a unique historic mix, of raw financial power and the discretionary power over an unimaginable huge data pool. This combination allowed these corporations to make a business upswing, since the beginning of the crisis as never before.

And not only that. Their advantage is accelerating continuously. Alone, in the last quarter of this year, April, May and June, these companies have made the largest profits in their whole history and also, in view of these facts, there’s not much left to the imagination.

And to come to the conclusion, it is this digital-financial complex which is a global power center which drives everything.

The digital-financial complex stands far above all governments, and is ready at all times to bring every government cabinet in the world to its knees and make it compliant.

One must wonder, however, all the more about the methods introduced by the digital-financial complex since the start of the crisis. Because it seems almost as if, as if it is undermining the very system from which it benefits.

Here are a few examples:

If the digital-financial complex destroys small to medium businesses, then really it is destroying its own livelihood, because, s we just heard, the small to medium business sector (Mittlestand) pays the greatest share of taxes revenues and creates the most jobs, and when inflation increases that also hurts the digital-financial complex, and when it destroys social peace through increasing inequality, then it also destroys those who it makes its business from.

All these are valid objections. But they miss the reality.

Namely, this is how it works.

The digital-financial complex has no other choice other than to do what it does at present. What we currently experience is namely, is not something which is a formulated written agenda with which it will accumulate yet more money and power and then sit back to enjoy the fruits of its labors. What we are experiencing at this time is a gigantic act of desperation, probably the biggest that has ever occurred in the whole history of mankind.

The cause of this act of desperation, is that the system to which the digital-financial system owes its existence, can no longer be kept alive with the previous business model. It was very close to its demise already during the world financial crisis of 2007-8. If governments back then had not mobilized huge amounts of tax money and the central banks instructed oodles of money to be created out of nothing the system would have collapsed there and then.

But salvation was only temporary.

The amounts of money had to be continuously increased over a period of 12 years and the interest rates had to be reduced several times. So, the system was made ever more unstable. In the long term that could not go well. And last year it was to the point that the next collapse was threatening. And this collapse has been postponed through a final feat of strength namely the reduction of interest rates to zero and the injection of billions and billions for one final time.

With that however, a qualitatively new situation has come about. A further deferral would require interest rates to be dropped into the minus range, and this would destroy the foundation of the current banking system. Banks cannot operate long-term with negative interest rates. This means that a further deferral with the previously used approach will not be possible. In the present situation one can inject billions and billions into the system at maximum one more time. However, with the result that the already strongly growing rate of inflation will further overhead and will be driven into hyperinflation.

The situation in which the digital-financial complex finds itself is between the alternatives of, on one side the final collapse and hyper-inflation on the other side. So, the total loss of value of money. That means, historically we’ve arrived at a point in which the digital-financial complex, in the framework of the existing system, only still has the choice between two various forms of collapse.

So, what can they do?

Quite clearly, they have, in this situation, chosen to install a new system and a double strategy. On one side, in the background and away from public view, they are preparing a new system. And on the other side, they are using the end phase of the present dying system, to plunder it using all tricks at their disposal. This is exactly what we’ve seen since March 2020. The quite deliberate and premeditated destruction of the world economy, for the exclusive expansion of the digital-financial complex, with simultaneous preparation via the central banks of a new system and in collaboration with the IT corporations. And we already know how this system will look. It is about the complete removal of cash and banks in their previous form, and the introduction of digital money from central banks. The end goal as it appears, is that we will all have just a single account through which all transactions run. And this account will not reside in a business or high-street bank but with the central bank.

The background to this plan is the following: Digital central bank money is programmable, and because central banks can create unlimited money out of nothing, one can indeed operate in this way with negative interest rates without having to destroy the system. But that is furthermore, not the only feature of digital central bank money. It will allow governments to watch over all transactions made.

To assign us various tax rates and impose upon us individual fines. Governments can also place an expiry limit on a part of our money and require that we spend certain amounts within certain time periods. But it can also require the money to be used for specific purposes, and require that specific amounts be paid only for certain products, or that they be sourced only from certain regions. Above all, government will be in the position to cancel our ability to make all transactions with a single mouse click, and so, shut us down financially. Digital central bank money would be the most efficient tax collection method for society that has ever occurred in the whole history of man, and with that, nothing more and nothing less than the realization of an all-encompassing dictatorship brought about through money.

However, the whole thing has a huge snag. Namely, the expected resistance from the public. One can be very certain that a large proportion of people won’t accept this form of disenfranchisement. So, the introduction of digital central bank money would be expected to produce huge social unrest. And it is exactly this problem that the digital-financial complex has quite obviously thought about, to reverse the process of introducing this (digital) currency. So, they won’t try to make this switch to digital currency gradually, but and thereby risking huge resistance will do it exactly the other way around. They will drive society into chaos, in order to present the introduction of digital central bank money as the solution to all problems. Namely, in the form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

For anyone who thinks this is a “conspiracy theory” pulled out of the air, I recommend that you once again, take a close look at everything we’ve experience in the past 18 months. Under the pretext of fighting an illness devastating and irreparable damages have been done to health, economy and finances, whose full effects are only beginning to show up so far in traces. But at the same time, day by day work is being done to increase these damages, and in parallel, the social rift in society is being systematically deepened, by constantly driving new wedges between people. All of this leades us purposefully in one single direction, social unrest to the point of a civil war, and indeed, worldwide. Exactly that, according to all available information I have, is what is wanted (by the other side).

We are experiencing today is that by using all conceivable means, one is trying to create the maximum social chaos, and then at the high point of this chaos, bring in a panacea with the name “Universal Basic Income”, and in this way effect a change, from maximum chaos to maximum control.

By the way, there is a second reason why, from the perspective of these power brokers UBI must come. We are sitting right in the middle of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and expect, in the period ahead of us, the loss of millions and millions of jobs, due to the introduction of Artificial Intelligence.

This means, millions of consumers will disappear. The demand for consumer goods will increasingly collapse and because the current economic system is consumer driven, one must, to maintain life, break through this downward spiral. And that can only happen, if all these unemployed consumers who cannot find work are provided with an income.

We see that what has happened in the last 18 months and what is still going on is obviously all following a (prepared) plan. And the name of this plan is: “Deconstruction of the present economic system to the benefit of elites”. The generation of the maximum economic and social chaos and the establishment of a new system, under the guise of wanting to provide humanitarian help. This plan is however available to read and that is in both books about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and The Great Reset, by Klaus Schwab, whose World Economic Forum (WEF) plays a key role in this whole agenda.

The WEF has succeeded over the past 50 years to become the most important control center of the digital-financial complex. First of all, business leaders were brought together, then later all politicians, and still later, media creators, and in commanding roles, and prominent figure all networking with one another.

Additionally, in the 90’s, people were subjected to a targeted training program. We know today that since 1992 the “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” and since 2005 the “Young Global Leaders” always received a systematic onboarding schooling from the WEF, and it is exactly these same people who right now, occupy positions of political power and influence. Whether it is Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg from the IT area. Whether it is CEO Larry Rink of BlackRock, head of the IMF Kristalina Georgieva, or former head of the Bank of England Mark Carney from the finance sector. Or Emanuel Macron, Sebastien Kurz, or Angela Merkel from politics. All of these people have been either trained by the WEF or they sit on its leadership board.

And it is not just the 1300 members, of this closely networked elite leader group who pull the strings worldwide. Since 2012, there is also a further ten thousand under 30-year-olds, so-called “Global Shapers” who have joined the club and who have also been brought together by the WEF and in its sense, exert influence on the course of world events. And we know how these events should look. To see this, I recommend looking into the work of WEF founder, Klaus Schwab.

For those who still cannot believe that everything we have experienced follows a plan, they should check the publishing date of Schwab’s work, “The Great Reset”. This book appeared on 20th June 2020, not even 4 months after the worldwide lockdown and already gives exact instructions on how one should use Covid-19 in order to put it darkly creatively destroy the world and build up a new world in the image of the man he (Schwab) has drawn up, which is reminiscent of the darkest times of national socialism.

I know that all of this sounds shocking, like a carefully prepared apocalypse. Indeed, the agenda is being followed here is obviously not only planned but also, can hardly be surpassed in terms of evilness and deceitfulness. Who would ever have suspected that under the guise of protecting mankind from the effects of a disease, the world economy would be driven to a total collapse? To take away: people’s freedom to travel, their rights of association and free speech, their freedom to express opinions, and in addition, to condemn more than 100 million people to starvation, and all this allegedly “for their own protection”!

And who would have thought that an unapologetic eugenicist named Klaus Schwab would be put in a position to not only spread worldwide his gruesome vision of a melding of the human being with machine intelligence (AI), but also to have this vision driven forward by ten thousand helpers. All of these are deeply destructive developments with which we are now living and having to suffer under, and their details are enough to freeze the blood in the veins of any normal thinking and feeling person.

But now I am coming to the most important message that I have to give today.

The whole thing also has another side to it. A quite different side and above all one which gives us a huge boost and a great amount of power for our future work.

The plan of the elites, the visions of Klaus Schwab, are namely, are condemned to fail, and this is for several reasons, the most important is that the narrative of a deadly virus which is an existential threat to humanity cannot be sustained in the long run, we already see how the pack of lies is collapsing in on itself from all sides.

We see how, in efforts to legitimize it, resort is made to ever more absurd arguments and rabid defamation. It is important to recognize here, that the vehemence the media are displaying these days, testifies not to their strength but to their weakness. Whoever, with. Ever more emphasis, spreads ever more grotesque lies, like the pandemic of the unvaccinated, who declares healthy people public enemy number one, and whoever on the basis of a single illness or test “case”, locks down whole countries, they are doing this only because they have run out of arguments and in desperation are blindly lashing out.

Abraham Lincoln once said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”

Exactly that, the truth will appear in our time, and this naturally has an enormous meaning for us, because ironically, it opens up for us that which Klaus Schwab has termed “ a unique window of opportunity”, however, in exactly the reverse dynamic (to what he intended).

Namely, that via the collapsing narrative, the credibility of those who have led us into this situation is being buried by the day, and because of that, a unique window of opportunity has opened for all of us for a vast and comprehensive campaign of enlightenment. The objective conditions to enlighten others about the real background to the alleged “pandemic”, about the real balance of power in the world, and the real threats we face, have never been as good as now and they are getting better day by day because the other side are getting entangled in their increasingly unbelievable lies and even if the digital-financial complex should succeed in introducing the new currency that would also not be the end of the world. Digital central bank money can, namely only function as the basis of a comprehensive coercive system. One will always introduce new price controls, continuously increase the Universal Basic Income and create permanent inflation with emphatic pressure, which in turn will lead to a continuous impoverishment of the population and constant conflict with the state and the authorities.

What we need to understand is the following:

Without any doubt, we stand before turbulent and also dangerous times, but we hold an historic trump card in our hands. It consists in the fact that the other side does not act according to the rules of reason but strives out of motives of greed and power and therefore, cannot do anything other than bring itself into ever greater difficulties. We should use exactly that (weakness) and always keep in view, that the other side likes more money, more property and additionally, to have available all the weapons in the world. But their power is not based on their money, nor on their possessions or their weapons but relies solely upon one factor: And that is the ignorance of the majority of people. i.e., the majority doesn’t understand the evil game that this minority are playing with them.

As terrible as everything is that the digital-financial complex and it’s helpers have served up in the past 18 months, and still continue to serve up, it has put itself in a situation which it cannot get out of and in which, out of despair it must cross ever more “red lines.”

This means for all of us, that in this exceptional situation we should quite simply, keep the peace, consistently expose all the lies, and show people bit by bit, why, and by whom, they are being deceived.

When we do that, and in doing so reflect on the strength of our arguments, then, we can not only solve the current problem, but possibly, achieve something much bigger, namely, use one of the deepest crises of humanity to turn around the direction of human history, and so, open the door to a new (and better) era.

Thank you.

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***

U.S. pundits and strategic experts seem blissfully unaware of how close we all are to being fried in a nuclear strike by Russia. (Fair Labeling: if you are simply looking for yet another reason to demonize Putin, rather than to understand where he is coming from, save time and read no further.)

Here’s the thing: the Russians have good reason to be on hair-trigger alert. Their early-warning radar system is so inadequate that there are situations (including those involving innocent rocket launches) under which Russian President Putin would have only a few minutes – if that – to decide whether or not to launch nuclear missiles to destroy the rest of the world – on the suspicion that Russia was under nuclear attack.

“If that”? Yes, launch-to-target time is now so short that it is altogether likely that the authority to launch nuclear weapons is now vested in subordinate commanders “in the field,” so to speak. Readers of Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine are aware of how the US actually devolved this authority during the days of the first cold war. I, for one, was shocked to learn that. Worse: today the subordinate commanders might be non-commissioned computers.

Russia, of course, is not about to admit that its early-warning system is far inferior to the US’s world-wide, satellite-based capability. But such is the case. The implications could not be more serious.

This came to mind today as former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the Kremlin would never allow the destruction of Russia. He warned, however, that if Washington did achieve what he described as its destructive aims, the world could face a dystopian crisis that would end in a “big nuclear explosion.”

President Putin addressed this issue four years ago, shortly after unveiling Russia’s new nuclear arsenal, including hypersonic missiles and other highly advanced weapons. Commenting on nuclear war, Putin told an interviewer:

“Certainly, it would be a global disaster for humanity; a disaster for the entire world.” He added that “as a citizen of Russia and the head of the Russian state I must ask myself: Why would we want a world without Russia?”

Use Them or Lose Them

Putin went on to say that, despite the disastrous consequences, Russia would be forced to defend itself using all available means, if its very existence were put at stake:

“A decision on the use of nuclear weapons may only be taken if our ballistic missile attack warning system not only detects a launch, but also predicts that the warheads would hit Russian territory. This is called a retaliation strike.”

That’s the rub. Some radar “detects” and “predicts,” and we’re all toast – or freedom fries. While Russia now has in its operation inventory sophisticated weaponry that can defeat any traditional Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense, it lags the US in the capability for early warning.

Think about it. Which should you fear more: getting fried on purpose, or getting fried by mistake? Macabre. Are not these choices incredibly stupid for rational human beings? If forced to choose, though, I think I’d resent much more getting fried by “Opps, pardon our mistake”. Please read what follows and ask yourself whether an immediate ceasefire is needed in Ukraine, or whether those who want to risk war with Russia should be given their head.

Russia: Limited Early-Warning Coverage

The US’s satellite “global situational awareness” alert system enables it to detect immediately the launch and location of a ballistic missile anywhere on the planet, including the sea. Russia lacks that worldwide capability. If this technical shortcoming is not taken into account (and there are signs that the Pentagon is paying it no heed), we could all suddenly be very dead – or “mostly dead” (to quote Billy Christal in The Princess Bride). (Ted Postol spelled this out in some detail at a Committee for the Republic virtual salon on March 17.

Postol, a retired MIT professor of physics and senior Pentagon adviser, provided a brief case study, which I summarize below:

On Jan. 25, 1995, Russian generals were focused on a rocket that was launched from Norway and detected by their automatic-alarm radar. Could this be the opening volley of a large-scale nuclear attack including sea-launched ballistic missiles? Given Russia’s inability to detect missile launches from submarines at sea, those generals could not rule out the possibility that Russia was already under attack by nuclear-armed Trident submarines.

A saving grace in 1995 was that those same generals had reliable intelligence that US ICBMs were not about to attack. At least equally important, in 1995 relations between Russia and the US were on a relatively even keel. Now? Not so much.

Postol added the following to indicate Russia’s redoubled concern over its early warning deficiency: the US has now increased the overall killing power of US ballistic missile forces by a factor of between two or three. This is exactly the kind of capability that a nuclear-armed state would build if it wanted to have the capacity to fight and “win” a nuclear war by a disarming first-strike.

The rocket from Norway? Scientists launched it to study the Northern Lights, but apparently no one had thought to tell the Russians.

Aside from asking the Norwegians to forewarn the Russians next time, what else can be done? The Washington can stop making relations still more tense over Ukraine. The Pentagon may boast about its formidable offensive strategic capabilities, but it has no way to protect us from a Russian nuclear attack. And if a false alert occurs a la 1995, this time sans the “saving grace” of a decent bilateral relationship with Russia, we could all end up as human fries. It should give us zero consolation to know that most Russians would too.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

Last week I was embedded with the Russian army and visited two towns in southeastern Ukraine. The first town was called Henichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov in Kherson Oblast (province) of southern Ukraine, bordering on Crimea.

The Russian army, patrolling the city, went with us—the embedded journalists—for protection. But actually the protection was not really needed; the people in Henichesk, at least the majority with whom I spoke, were very happy that the Russian army was there.

The people that I spoke to all said the same thing: They felt protected from the criminal gangs, with their Nazi ideology, who raged the towns. They in turn hoped that Ukraine will prosper again.

Source: wikipedia.org

Since the coup d’état of 2014, the economy of Ukraine has become very bad, according to many citizens in Henichesk.

I could see that people were standing in line to get money from ATM machines outside the banks, money which was barely there.

At the market, the food was scarce. The Russian army is providing humanitarian aid, which they do in every village and town, liberated from these criminal gangs. This is how many Ukrainians call them.

Sonja Vandenende with Henichesk resident. [Photo courtesy of Sonja Vandenende]

Numerous villagers in Henichesk told me that, as the Russians entered their town, they left everything intact. I heard this stated many times. No damage, no dead, no wounded. Most people, they said, are happy that the Russians were there.

The town of Henichesk was undamaged after the Russian army came. People were rushing on the streets to do their shopping or just talking and socializing on the street. The population was very diverse. It included ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars. They have churches and mosques.

According to residents, before the 2014 coup d’état,^[1] the people lived in harmony. Many Tatars originating from Crimea live in Henichesk. They have been allowed to go back to Crimea since Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president.

Photo courtesy of Sonja Vandenende

Propaganda has been spread on the Wikipedia page of Henichesk, stating the following:

“On 24 February 2022, Henichesk was captured by the Russian Army in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was where the famous incident occurred where an old woman confronted Russian soldiers and said ‘Put sunflower seeds in your pockets so they grow on Ukraine soil when you die,’ as well as the death of Vitalii Shakun blowing up a bridge to stop their advance.”

Indeed, Shakun tried to blow up the bridge connecting Crimea with southern Ukraine. But they neglect to say that he was not from southern Ukraine, but from Lviv, in the western part of Ukraine. He was also a combat engineer with the Ukrainian Army. The damage his explosives caused to the bridge was actually minor and the bridge is still passable. It is a pity generally that boys (Shakun was born in 1996) should die for a false ideology, by blowing up a bridge without success.

Fact Versus Fiction

Western propaganda claims that the Russian army is besieging towns and that the population is starving. From my observation, the latter was not true in Henichesk or in the next town called Melitopol, which I also visited (to be discussed in a future article).^[2]

The Western countries are pouring in weapons, most of them old Soviet weapons into Ukraine to shoot at the “evil Russians,” and imposing sanctions. Nothing positive is being done to help the long suffering people of Ukraine.

Photo courtesy of Sonja Vandenende

Waiting for humanitarian aid being distributed by the Russian army. [Photo courtesy of Sonja Vandenende]

Ukraine is left by itself to bleed.

Western countries have no interest in its economy or people, because Ukrainian people have many similarities with their “brother” countries—Russia and Belarus—and would naturally be aligned with them.

They share the same culture, language, and history of being invaded by the Nazis in World War II.

The West is only interested in benefits to their own economies.

Many buildings and factories are left to “rot” away and money for infrastructure was never there. Ukraine has been “bleeding” since 2014 and no one in the West has cared.

Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe and the largest producer of sunflower oil, while Russia is the largest producer of fertilizer necessary for growing crops. However, with the war, production will be affected and the whole world economy may suffer. But the leaders in the West, who helped provoke the war, do not care—the Ukrainian people to them are pawns in a larger geopolitical game that will cause potential disaster for all humanity.

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Sonja is a freelance journalist from the Netherlands who has written about Syria, the Middle East, and Russia among other topics. Sonja can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. In February 2014, the U.S. government supported an insurrection against the legally elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian leader who spurned an IMF structural adjustment program that would have been terrible for Ukraine. Victoria Nuland famously was photographed handing out cookies to the demonstrators, many of whom worshipped World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. For more details on these events, see Chris Kaspar de Ploeg, Ukraine in the Crossfire (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

2. These observations correlate with other eyewitness accounts. The Grayzone Project recently ran an important article pointing to misinformation about the destruction of the Mariupol theater, showing how the Azov Battalion was likely responsible for the destruction.

Featured image: Russian troops in Henichesk. [Photo courtesy of Sonja Vandenende]

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***

It’s a tragedy in the making. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reprehensible and should never have happened, but it is a fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin for several years had been warning Washington and its allies of an impending danger, that NATO expansion to its borders could lead to military confrontation. 

Meanwhile, the Western media is painting a picture of Ukraine as a democracy with a president by the name of Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is a brave soul fighting for freedom and democracy, a small country against the Russian bear, a modern version of David vs. Goliath.

Russia, the bully picking on an innocent Ukraine.  But what does the world know about Ukraine? 

The Western media has kept us in the Dark. Most Americans do not know about Ukraine’s politics or its history.

Do Americans, Europeans and others around the world know the truth about Ukraine and their history of Nazi ideology?

According to The Times of Israel ‘Hundreds in Ukraine attend marches celebrating Nazi SS soldiers’ reported on a Nazi celebration in 2021 in Ukraine’s city of Kyiv:

Hundreds of Ukrainians attended marches celebrating Nazi SS soldiers, including the first such event in Kyiv.  The so-called Embroidery March took place in the capital on April 28, the 78th anniversary of the establishment of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the 1st Galician. It was a force set up under German occupation auspices comprised of ethnic Ukrainian and German volunteers and conscripts. The marchers held banners displaying the unit’s symbol.

The Kyiv march by about 300 people was an import from the western city of Lviv, which for several years has hosted such events. A day earlier, hundreds attended a larger Embroidery March there.  Ukraine has a large minority of ethnic Russians, who oppose the glorification of Nazi collaborators. Such actions were taboo in Ukraine until the early 2000s, when nationalists demanded and obtained state recognition for collaborators as heroes for their actions against the Soviet Union, which dominated Ukraine until 1991

The Father of Nazi Ideology in Ukraine: Stepan Bandera

His name was Stepan Bandera, considered a Ukrainian hero who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and who was the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B), an extreme far-right organization.  Bandera was born to a Greek-Catholic family in Galicia which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but later in life he became a radical Ukrainian nationalist after his country of birth had collapsed thus becoming the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, but then it became part of Poland after the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918-1919.

In 1934, Bandera who was very angry with the new geopolitical development had organized the assassination of Poland’s Minister of the Interior, Bronislaw Pieracki.

Bandera was arrested for the crime, found guilty and sentenced to death but his conviction was later commuted to a life sentence.

In 1939, following the German–Soviet invasion of Poland also known as the September Campaign divided the country under the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty.  Soon after, Bandera was released from prison and moved to Kraków, Poland which was already occupied by the Nazis.

Bandera was convinced that working with the Nazis would allow him to establish his own government in Ukraine leading to an independent nation that would be allied with the Nazis and free from Soviet occupation.  It was well-known that the Nazis, Bandera and his lieutenants from his organization blamed Jews for establishing communism in Ukraine as a statement from Bandera at the time read that

“The Jews of the Soviet Union are the most loyal supporters of the Bolshevik Regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in the Ukraine.”

Then in June 1941, the Nazis invaded the USSR and occupied the East Galician capital of Lvov and this was where the OUN/B and the National-Socialist Greater Germany under Adolf Hitler collaborated and launched ‘pogroms’ of genocide against jews and poles including men, women and children of all ages over the duration of the war.

Then the relationship between the Nazis and the Bandera faction got complicated.  During the war, a declaration of independence or what is known as the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State was announced in homage to Bandera by his own lieutenants.

At the same time, the declaration for an independent Ukraine became a serious concern for the Nazi regime since they wanted Ukraine under their sphere of influence.  So, the alliance between the Ukrainian nationalists and the Nazis became problematic.

On September 15^th, 1941, the Gestapo began to arrest its leaders including Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko who was the prime minister of the Ukrainian National government for refusing to dismiss the Act of Renewal of Ukrainian statehood.

By January 1942, Bandera found himself in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for high-profile political prisoners.

In 1944, the Soviets and allied forces advanced on Nazi-occupied territories, so the Nazis recruited Bandera and Stetsko to create diversions to help destroy Soviet forces who were gaining ground.

Bandera who was still the leader of the OUN/B moved to West Germany with his family and continued to work with anti-communist organizations or we can say the fascists for many years to come such as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.

In 1959, Bandera was poisoned by cyanide gas and two years later, the German judiciary claimed that the KGB was behind his assassination.  In 2022, Bandera remains a hero to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.  The US and the European Union support Ukraine who happens to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world with proven human rights abuses that has strong ties to neo-Nazis who admire Adolf Hitler and Stepan Bandera, now if that is not hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.

The CIA and the Nazis: A Match Made in Hell  

According to author and journalist Wayne Madsen in 2016 entitled: ‘CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine Since 1953’ 

“the recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.”

Nazism has been in existence in Ukraine for a long-time under the CIA’s Project AERODYNAMIC which was “to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes” it included several groups including the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UBVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Foreign. Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as OUN/B will be utilized.

We can say that for close to 70 years, the CIA’s operation of Nazifying Ukraine had been a success.

However, the earlier version of Project AERODYNAMIC was intended to destabilize Ukraine with exiled Ukrainians who were trained by the CIA operating inside Soviet-Ukrainian territories.  

The CIA coordinated airdrops of communications, supplies, weapons and ammunition to its operatives inside Ukrainian territory who were trained in West Germany with the US Army’s Foreign Intelligence Political and Psychological (FI-PP) unit.  In other words, the CIA is Guilty as charged for helping cultivate the neo-Nazis or what we can call the ‘fascists’ in Ukraine in order to fight the communists.

Today, far-right neo-Nazi groups are a serious problem for the Ukrainian people since many of these extremists are embedded in various levels of the Ukrainian government including members from the notorious Azov and Aidar Battalions.

Both groups were also involved in the 2014 Maidan coup that overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, a coup that was backed by the US and the European Union.

Other far-right neo-Nazi groups who were also involved in the Maidan coup was the Right Sector and the Svoboda Party.  In other words, the US and its European allies have created a monster and it will only get worse for the people in Ukraine in the years to come.

Recently, a Ukrainian television journalist by the name of Fahruddin Sharafmal quoted Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal on live TV:

Click here to watch the video.

“And Given Russia calls us Nazis, Fascists anyway – I will allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann who said that in order to destroy a nation, it is imperative to first destroy their children because if you kill parents – these children grow up and seek revenge, but if you kill children – they never grow up and the nation dies out.”

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCN

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***

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have tried to set up phone calls with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov but the Russians “have so far declined to engage,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement Wednesday, March 23.

“A nightmare scenario would be a Russian missile or attack aircraft that destroys a U.S. command post across the Polish-Ukrainian border,” James Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told the Washington Post [1]. “A local commander might respond immediately, thinking the event was a precursor to a wider attack. This could lead to rapid and irreversible escalation, to include potential use of nuclear weapons.”

According to a CNN report [2] detailing a rare face-to-face meeting between Russian and US military officials last week, the US believes that the refusal for high-level meetings is due to Kremlin worries that the encounters would show them to be vulnerable if they allowed such meetings, because it risks a tacit admission that an abnormal situation exists, according to the readout of the meeting.

Though the assumption of vulnerability appears misconceived considering while the Pentagon has allegedly attempted to maintain high-level contacts with Russian counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict last month.

The real reason the Russian military leadership has allegedly shunned maintaining high-level contacts with the Pentagon’s top brass appears to be the duplicitous and treacherous role played by the transatlantic NATO alliance of significantly escalating the conflict by substantially increasing the NATO military footprint in Eastern Europe along Russia’s western flank, publicly providing billions of dollars’ worth lethal weapons to Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias while asininely claiming to be “peacemakers” extending chivalrous courtesies to the arch-rival.

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 [3] 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.”

Last week, President Biden announced an unprecedented package of $1 billion in military assistance to Ukraine in addition to $350 million previously pledged which was disbursed within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. The new package includes 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.

Besides providing abundance of anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied irregular militias, a senior US administration official told Reuters [4] Washington and its allies were also working on providing anti-ship weapons to protect Ukraine’s coast. Ukrainian forces claimed on Thursday to have blown up a Russian landing ship in a Russian-occupied port.

Nonetheless, what must have exasperated Russia’s military leadership is a secret plan [5] for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from the member states surreptitiously occupying western Ukraine and imposing a limited no-fly zone over Lviv and rest of towns which is allegedly being prepared by the Polish government.

The plan is seemingly on hiatus due to a disagreement between Polish President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the deputy prime minister of Poland and the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party. Duda wants Washington’s approval before going ahead, whereas Kaczynski appears desperate to obtain political mileage from the Ukraine crisis.

The prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled via train to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15 in a show of support for Ukraine. De facto leader of Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accompanied them. Speaking on the occasion, 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.”

In response, Russian officials condemned Poland’s proposal to send NATO “peacekeeping forces” into Ukraine as a “very reckless and extremely dangerous” idea that would risk a full-scale war between the alliance and Moscow.

“This will be the direct clash between the Russian and NATO armed forces that everyone has not only tried to avoid but said should not take place in principle,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

Regarding how operational-level miscalculations could lead to all-out war between belligerents, it’s pertinent to recall that on February 7, 2018, US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor province of eastern Syria that reportedly [6] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.

The survivors described the bombing as an absolute massacre, and Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost during its entire military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.

Washington’s objective in striking Russian contractors was that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – had reportedly handed over the control of some areas east of the Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military Council (DMC), which was the Arab-led component of SDF, and had relocated several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the onslaught of the Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian militant proxies during Ankara’s “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria’s northwest that lasted from January to March 2018.

Syrian forces with the backing of Russian contractors took advantage of the opportunity and crossed the Euphrates River to capture an oil refinery located to the east of the Euphrates River in the Kurdish-held area of Deir al-Zor.

The US Air Force responded with full force, knowing well the ragtag Arab component of SDF – mainly comprised of local Arab tribesmen and mercenaries to make the Kurdish-led SDF appear more representative and inclusive in outlook – was simply not a match for the superior training and arms of the Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently causing a carnage in which scores of Russian nationals lost their lives.

A month after the massacre of Russian military contractors in Syria, on March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.

In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, novichok.

Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.

In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018, the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats and Washington ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle.

In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American consulate in Saint Petersburg. The number of American diplomatic personnel stationed in Russia drastically dropped from 1,200 before the escalation to 120, and the relations between Moscow and Western powers reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in December 1991.

Notwithstanding, five years following a potentially catastrophic incident that could’ve inundated Islamic State’s former capital Raqqa and many towns downstream Euphrates River in eastern Syria and caused more deaths than the deployment of any weapon of mass destruction, the New York Times reported in January [7] that at the height of US-led international coalition’s war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, US B-52 bombers struck Tabqa Dam with 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-busting bomb that fortunately didn’t explode.

In March 2017, alternative media was abuzz with reports that the dam was about to collapse and entire civilian population downstream Euphrates River needed to be urgently evacuated to prevent the inevitable catastrophe. But Washington issued a gag order to the corporate media “not to sensationalize the issue.”

The explosive report noted that the dam was contested between the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian government and the Islamic State. A firefight broke out in which SDF incurred heavy casualties. It was then that a top secret US special operations unit Task Force 9 called for airstrikes on the dam after repeated requests from the Kurdish leadership of the SDF.

“The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground. A fire spread and crucial equipment failed. The flow of the Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise and authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.

“The Islamic State group, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the US military’s ‘no-strike list’ of protected civilian sites, and the commander of the US offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of US involvement were based on ‘crazy reporting.’”

It’s worth noting that it was the same rogue Pentagon General Stephen J. Townsend, currently the commander of US AFRICOM and then the commander of Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) – Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) responsible for leading the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, whose “operational miscalculation” was responsible for the reckless confrontation an year later in February 2018 when US B-52 bombers struck Russian military contractors, killing and wounding scores, a tragic incident that brought two nuclear powers engaged in the Syrian conflict almost to the brink of a full-scale war.

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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.

Notes

[1] Top Russian military leaders repeatedly decline calls from US

[2] Inside a rare US meeting with a Russian general in Moscow

[3] NATO doubles battlegroups in ‘Eastern Flank’ States

[4] Russia signals scaled-back war aims, Ukrainians advance near Kyiv

[5] Secret Plan to Send 10,000 NATO “Peacekeeping Troops” Into Ukraine

[6] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded

[7] A dam in Syria was on a ‘no-strike’ list. The US bombed it anyway

---

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

One month since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden will begin a tour of the continent this week in an effort to mobilize the NATO powers in a major escalation of the conflict against Russia.

The meetings, including those of NATO and the European Council, will seek to galvanize “international efforts to… impose severe and unprecedented costs on Russia,” the White House said.

Ahead of Biden’s trip, NATO military officials have been discussing plans, to be announced at the summit, to vastly expand the positioning of NATO forces on Russia’s borders in Europe as part of an effort to put the continent on a war footing, including potentially doubling the US troop presence in Europe.

The series of meetings being held this week are councils of war. According to the White House:

• On Monday, Biden held a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to discuss “providing security assistance to the brave Ukrainians who are defending their country from Russian aggression.” The same day, the European Union announced that it would send an additional €500 million in weapons to Ukraine
• Later that evening, Biden addressed the CEOs of America’s largest corporations to “discuss the United States’ response to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war with Ukraine.”
• On Wednesday, Biden will arrive in Brussels, Belgium, to attend a meeting of the European Council, which will also include UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, despite the UK’s exit from the European Union.
• On Thursday, Biden will attend a NATO summit focused on “ongoing deterrence and defense efforts in response to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine.”
• On Friday, Biden will travel to Warsaw, Poland, where he will hold a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda. Last week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki proposed the deployment of a NATO “peacekeeping mission” to Ukraine.

This series of meetings was preceded by clear signals from the White House that, despite statements from Ukraine that it is pursuing negotiations with Russia, the United States has no interest in finding a diplomatic solution to the war.

On Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said,

“From where I sit, diplomacy obviously requires both sides engaging in good faith to de-escalate.” He added, “The actions that we’re seeing Russia take… are in total contrast to any serious diplomatic effort to end the war.”

Following these statements, Biden seemed to do everything he could to personally antagonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, referring to him as a “thug,” a “dictator” and a “war criminal.”

Under conditions where a war is raging out of control, killing hundreds of people, and nuclear tensions are at the highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, these statements are a deliberate effort to escalate tensions. The Kremlin will see them as a US declaration of intent to carry out regime-change in Russia or massively escalate US involvement in the war.

In response to what Russia called “insults,” Russia’s foreign ministry announced that it had summoned US Ambassador John Sullivan to declare that “Russian-American relations [are] on the verge of rupture.” The “rupture” of relations between states generally signifies that war is imminent.

Indeed, Biden’s whirlwind tour of Europe in an effort to mobilize the United States’ European allies for war has been carefully prepared by extensive military discussions.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

“U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met at NATO headquarters last week with his counterparts from other alliance members to discuss beefing up forces even further. They directed military planners from all of the NATO members to draft plans that are likely to be discussed when President Biden meets with other alliance heads of government in Europe this week.”

“I expect there will be a rough doubling of the U.S. presence,” Douglas Lute, a former US ambassador to NATO and a retired Army lieutenant general, told the Journal.

The United States has deployed more than 15,000 additional troops to Europe since the outbreak of the war, and the US troop levels in Europe have reached over 100,000—the first time this figure has been surpassed since the end of the Cold War. If, as Lute suggests, the number of US troops deployed in Europe will double, this would mean the dispatch of 100,000 more US troops to Russia’s borders.

The Journal wrote:

“Troops deployed in Eastern Europe will likely be augmented with more ground units equipped with tanks, other armored vehicles, artillery and attack helicopters, instead of the primarily light infantry forces that are already positioned close to NATO’s eastern borders, current and former officials said.”

The greater significance and implications of war generally emerge as it develops. While the US succeeded in goading the Russian government to take the first shot, it is clear that the war in Ukraine is the first stage of a much broader conflict. Having provoked the Russian government into a desperate and disastrous invasion of Ukraine, the United States is using the war to reassert its global hegemony, building a war coalition for what the United States has termed “great power conflict” targeting not only Russia, but China as well.

On Friday, in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden threatened China with unspecified “consequences” if it provided any material support to Russia. A day earlier, Blinken declared that the US would “not hesitate to impose costs” on China.

This bullying language was turned into open military threats as Biden prepared to set off to Europe. U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. John C. Aquilino staged a press conference to the Associated Press aboard a military surveillance aircraft plane over territory claimed by China. “Should deterrence fail,” he declared, “my second mission is to be prepared to fight and win.”

The preparations for world war are being carried out behind the backs of the American population. Biden pledged to end America’s “forever wars,” promising to “close this period of relentless war” and initiate “a new era of relentless diplomacy.” Instead, the Biden administration is carrying out the greatest military escalation since the launching of the “war on terror” in 2001.

In the United States, the 2023 military budget is expected to total $800 billion: $60 billion more than the $740 billion authorized for fiscal year 2022. There are calls for an even more rapid funneling of money into the US war machine.

The bill for this massive expansion of military spending will be paid by the working class. It will be utilized to attack the living standards of the working class, criminalize working class political opposition and distract attention from the deadly surge of COVID-19.

The reckless military escalation threatens to spiral out of control, potentially precipitating the first use of nuclear weapons since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War.

There is no way out of this crisis within the framework of capitalist politics. Only one force can stop the looming catastrophe: the international working class, united in a struggle against imperialism, militarism, the historically obsolete nation-state system and the capitalist social order.

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***

President Vladimir Putin has accused the West of trying to cancel Russian culture, including the works of great composers such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

At a televised meeting with leading cultural figures on Friday, Putin compared the cancellation of a number of Russian cultural events in recent weeks with the actions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

“Today, they are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country,” Putin said.

“I am talking about the progressive discrimination against everything connected with Russia, about this trend that is unfolding in a number of Western states, with the full connivance and sometimes with the encouragement of Western elites,” Putin added.

“The proverbial ‘cancel culture’ has become a cancellation of culture,” Putin said, adding that works by Russian composers were being excluded from concerts and books by Russian authors were being “banned”.

“The last time such a mass campaign to destroy unwanted literature was carried out was by the Nazis in Germany almost 90 years ago … books were burned right on the squares,” Putin said.

Since Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on February 24, the West has piled sanctions on Moscow that have seen Russia increasingly isolated, politically and financially, and extending to spheres such as sports and culture.

Speaking about “cancel culture”, Putin singled out British author JK Rowling, who was criticised following controversial tweets about transgender people.

“Not so long ago children’s author JK Rowling was cancelled because she, a writer of books that have sold millions of copies around the world, didn’t please fans of so-called ‘gender freedoms’,” Putin said.

A number of events involving Russian cultural figures who have voiced support for the war have been cancelled, including some involving Valery Gergiev, general director of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre, who spoke to Putin during Friday’s meeting.

Our thanks to Al Jazeera for bringing this article to our attention

Click here to read the full article.

 

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***

When involved in war, those who feel like benefactors are bound to congratulate the gun toting initiators.  If you so happen to be on the losing end, sentiments are rather different.  Complicity and cause in murder come to mind.

The late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will always be tied with the appallingly named humanitarian war in Kosovo in 1999, one that saw NATO attacks on Serbian civilian targets while aiding the forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army.  It was a distinct backing of sides in a vicious, tribal conflict, where good might miraculously bubble up, winged by angels.  Those angels never came.

Through her tenure in public office, Albright showed a distinct arousal for US military power.  In 1992, she rounded on the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell for refusing to deploy US forces to Bosnia.  “What’s the point of having this superb military machine you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

Too many apologists have come out to explain why Albright was so adamant about the use of such force.  Biographical details are cited: born in Czechoslovakia as Marie Jana Korbelová; of Jewish roots rinsed in the blood wine of Roman Catholicism.  She fled with her family to Britain, eventually finding refuge in Notting Hill Gate.  She went to school, spent time in air raid shelters, sang A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall.

The NATO intervention – and this point was never lost on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reiterated it in his February address – took place without UN Security Council authorisation.  For the law abiders and totemic worshipers of the UN Charter keen to get at Russia’s latest misconduct in Ukraine, this served to illustrate the fickleness of international law’s supporters.  At a given moment, they are bound to turn tail, becoming might-is-right types.  The persecuted, in time, can become persecutors.

NATO, in fact, became an alliance Albright wished to see expanded and fed, not trimmed and diminished.  The historical role of Germany and Russia in central and eastern Europe became the rationale for expanding a neutralising alliance that would include previous “victim” countries.  A weakened Moscow could be ignored.  “We do not need Russia to agree to enlargement,” she told US Senators in 1997.

Paul Wilson, considering the Albright legacy, wrote in 2012 about the danger of following analogies in history to the letter.  “Historical analogies are seductive and often treacherous.  [Slobodan] Milošević was not Hitler and the Kosovar Liberation Army was not a champion of liberal democracy.”

In fact, the KLA was previously designated by the State Department to be a terrorist organisation.  “The Kosovar Albanians,” wrote the regretful former UN Commander in Bosnia Major General Lewis MacKenzie in April 2003, “played us like a Stradivarius violin.”  In his view, NATO and the international community had “subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo.  We have never blamed them for being perpetrators of violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary.”

Such is the treacherous nature of the sort of perverse humanitarianism embraced by Albright and her colleagues.  Such a policy, Alan J. Kuperman remarks with gloomy accuracy, “creates a moral hazard that encourages the excessively risky or fraudulent behaviour of rebellion by members of groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation, but it cannot fully protect against the backlash.”

One such encouraged individual, Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani, was all gushing over Albright’s legacy.

“She gave us hope when we didn’t have it.  She became our voice and our arm and when we had neither voice nor an arm ourselves.  She felt our people’s pain because she had experienced herself persecution in childhood.”

The first female Secretary of State will also be linked with the Clinton Administration’s sanctions policy that killed numerous citizens and maimed the country of Iraq, only for it to then be invaded by the venal architects of regime toppling in the succeeding Bush Administration.  This sickening episode sank any heroic notions of law and justice, showing that Albright was content using a wretched calculus on life and death when necessary.

On May 12, 1996, Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on the CBS program 60 Minutes about the impact of the sanctions that served to profitlessly kill hundreds of thousands.  “We have heard that half a million children have died.  I mean, that’s more children than have died in Hiroshima.  And, you know, is the price worth it?”  Then US Ambassador Albright did not flinch.  “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

In September 2000, she was still crazed by the sanctions formula against Iraq, telling the United Nations in an absurd address that Baghdad had to be stood up to, being “against the United Nations authority and international law.”  Meek acknowledgment was given to the fact that “the hardships faced by Iraq’s people” needed to be dealt with.  What came first was “the integrity of this institution, our security, and international law.”

Albright could be sketchy on sanctions.  In instances where Congress imposed automatic sanctions, Albright could express furious disagreement.  When this happened to both India and Pakistan in 1998 in the aftermath of nuclear weapons testing, she could barely conceal her irritation on CNN’s Late Edition.  “I think we must do something about it, because sanctions that have no flexibility, no waiver authority, are just blunt instruments.  And diplomacy requires us to have some finesse.”

The hagiographic salutations have been many.  One, from Caroline Kelly at CNN, is simply too much.  Albright “championed the expansion of NATO, pushed for the alliance to intervene in the Balkans to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing, sought to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, and championed human rights democracy across the globe.”

As Secretary of State, she presided in an administration of the world’s only surviving superpower, uncontained, unrestrained, dangerously optimistic.  There was much hubris – all that strength, and lack of assuredness as to how to use it.  The Cold War narrative and rivals were absent, and the Clinton Administration became a soap opera of scandal and indiscretion.

In her later years, she worried about the onset of authoritarianism, of power going to people’s heads, the inner tyrant unleashed in the playpen of international relations.  She had much to complain about regarding Donald Trump, Putin and Brexit.  In encouraging the loud return of the US to front and centre of international politics, she ignored its previous abuses, including some perpetrated by her office.  When given such power, is it not axiomatic that corruption will follow?

*

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

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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***

 

Assuming that America can avoid a nuclear war with Russia, the American people would be well-served to ponder and reflect on some of the good founding principles of our country. One of those good founding principles was “no entangling alliances.”

It would be difficult to find a better example of an entangling alliance than NATO, which is really nothing more than a Cold War dinosaur. Having been called into existence as part of the U.S. national-security establishment’s Cold War racket, it should have gone out of existence at the ostensible end of the Cold War. 

Instead, not only was it kept in existence, it actually became the root cause of the current crisis in Ukraine. That’s because it continued moving eastward, absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact and ultimately threatening to absorb Ukraine, knowing full well that Russia had made it very clear that it would never permit U.S. military bases, missiles, troops, tanks, and other weaponry to be established on its border, just as the Pentagon would never permit Russian military bases, missiles, tanks, troops, and weaponry to be established in Cuba or along the Mexico-U.S. border.

By now, every American should be aware of the dangers surrounding America’s involvement in NATO. If Russia attacks any of the Eastern European countries that are furnishing weapons to Ukraine, that means that the United States and Russia are now automatically at war with one another. That’s because the entangling alliance with NATO automatically commits the United States to go to war with any nation that attacks any other member of NATO.

Once the United States and Russia are in a state of war, the chances of the war going nuclear expand exponentially. That’s because it is in the interests of each nation to unleash its nuclear weapons first in the hope of disabling the other nation’s nuclear capability as much as possible.

As John Quincy Adams put it in his famous speech, “In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” Europe has always been besieged with wars. The United States, he said, is in a unique position given that the Atlantic Ocean stands between the U.S. and Europe. Therefore, he counseled, the United States should continue staying out of Europe’s incessant conflicts and instead devote ourselves to establishing a free, prosperous, peaceful and harmonious nation here at home. 

And yet, with NATO, it’s the exact opposite. In the event Russia or any other nation attacks Moldova, Poland, North Macedonia, or any other NATO member, the American people are now automatically at war. No national debate. No congressional declaration of war. No protests. Automatically at war, thanks to the Pentagon’s decision to entangle America in the old Cold War dinosaur NATO and, in the process, invite some 30 (yes, 30!) nations to join.

It’s time to get out. It’s time to make this Cold War dinosaur extinct. Our national well-being and perhaps even our very existence turn on returning to sound founding principles, especially “no entangling alliances.”

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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An article by Yahoo national security correspondent Zach Dorfman praising U.S. intelligence agencies for accurately predicting Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine inadvertently highlights the extent of Washington’s military provocations in Ukraine during the period before the outbreak of hostilities. Those measures went well beyond the ill-advised political decision on the part of George Bush’s administration and its successors to push for Ukraine’s admission to NATO.

Earlier warnings from realist scholars that NATO’s eastward expansion to Russia’s border was poisoning relations with Moscow are finally getting attention in the establishment news media and generating a vigorous debate. A few analysts outside the realism and restraint camp even have conceded that trying to gain NATO membership for Ukraine may have been imprudent. But the magnitude of the aggressive moves taken by the Pentagon and CIA are just now becoming apparent.

For years, the Kremlin made it emphatically clear that inviting Ukraine to join NATO would cross a red line that threatened Russia’s vital security interests. However, it was never merely an issue of Kiev’s formal accession to the alliance. Comments from Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials signaled that the truly intolerable development was Ukraine becoming a NATO military asset and an arena for the deployment of U.S. and NATO forces. That danger could—and ultimately did—arise, even though France and Germany continued to block a formal membership invitation.

Evidence grew in recent years that the United States had begun to treat Ukraine as a NATO ally in all but name. Steps included pouring nearly $3 billion in “security assistance” (primarily weaponry) into the country since 2014. Such armaments included the deadly Javelin anti-tank missiles. Military collaboration also included joint military exercises between U.S. and Ukrainian troops—and between NATO and Ukrainian forces. A segment on National Public Radio in 2019 featured U.S. officials preening about how such measures had strengthened Ukraine’s deterrence capabilities.

In his article, Dorfman documented the extent of other provocative military measures Washington pursued with respect to Ukraine. The CIA “made a series of covert moves that have helped prepare the Ukrainian security services for the current crisis. Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the agency initiated secret paramilitary training programs for Ukrainian special operations personnel in the U.S. and on Ukraine’s former eastern front.” (The eastern front was the Donbas region where Ukrainian forces were attempting to suppress Russian-backed separatist fighters.) Current and former intelligence officials clearly thought that those programs were especially clever initiatives, insisting that they “helped teach forces loyal to Kyiv the skills that have enabled it to mount an unexpectedly fierce resistance to the Russian onslaught.”

An earlier article by Dorfman noted that coordination between the United States and Ukraine on intelligence matters also expanded greatly after 2014 (following U.S. support for the Maidan revolution that overthrew Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president and Moscow’s subsequent annexation of Crimea). “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian government targets, according to former officials. CIA officials have also regularly traveled to Ukraine on intelligence exchanges, and Ukrainian intelligence officials have made reciprocal visits to the U.S. to swap information.” Dorfman quoted another “former senior official” who asserted that “in many ways the U.S.-Ukraine intelligence relationship “is about as robust” as Washington’s intelligence collaboration with “just about anybody else in Europe.” That last comment implicitly referred to NATO members.

Once again, the United States was treating Ukraine as a full-fledged, albeit still informal, NATO strategic ally. One has to wonder whether U.S. leaders were so arrogant and obtuse that they believed such missions could be pursued without Russia learning about them. If so, it was a serious miscalculation, if not an epic blunder. Conversely, if policymakers in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations realized that Moscow would get wind of the intelligence and military collaboration, then they embraced an extraordinarily reckless set of provocations.

Engaging in a mental exercise based on role reversal illustrates the inherent danger of Washington’s policies. How would U.S. leaders (and the American people) react if China or some other major power engaged in ever-growing levels of intelligence and military cooperation with an anti-U.S. government in Canada or Mexico? The answer is rather obvious: Washington would be warning Beijing to back off, and it would be threatening Ottawa or Mexico City with dire consequences if such collaboration continued. It is difficult to explain why U.S. officials and members of the foreign policy elite were unable or unwilling to comprehend that Moscow would have a similar reaction to Washington’s provocations in Ukraine.

Predictably, such conduct ultimately produced a geopolitical explosion. U.S. and NATO officials used Ukraine as a strategic pawn against Russia and are now fuming with outrage at Moscow’s decision to go to war. Russia’s invasion was indeed a horrid overreaction, but it was far from being unprovoked. The Ukrainian people, unfortunately, are the ones paying a high price in blood for the gullibility of their country’s leaders and the shocking arrogance of U.S. leaders.

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

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Joe Biden spoke to troops with the 82nd Airborne in Poland Friday, telling them what to expect to see when they go to Ukraine. Biden also appears to have let slip that some troops have already been in Ukraine. The White House later clarified there has been no change in U.S. policy about not sending troops to Ukraine. Who to believe, Biden or his handlers?

Transcribed by Gateway Pundit.

The Ukrainian people, Ukrainian people have a lot of backbone, they have a lot of guts. And I’m sure you’re observing it. And I don’t mean just the military which is, we’ve been training since back when they uh, Russia moved into the southeast, southeast um, Ukraine. But also the average citizen. Look at how they’re stepping up. Look at how they’re stepping up. And you’re gonna see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see, you’re gonna see women, young people standing, standing in the middle, in front of damn tank just, just saying, “I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground.” They’re incredible. But they take a lot of inspiration from us. And you know, woman who just died, the secretary of State used to have an expression, she said, “we are the essential nation.” It sounds like a bit of uh, hyperbole but the truth of the matter is you are the organizational principle around which the rest of the world, the free world is moving.”

Note: In addition to not remembering her name, Biden misquoted the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She said in 1998,

“Let me say that we are doing everything possible so that American men and women in uniform do not have to go out there again. It is the threat of the use of force and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.”

Joe Biden, perhaps accidentally, tells US troops they're going to Ukraine.

"You’re going to see when you’re there," he told 82nd Airborne Division in Poland.

You’re going to see women, young people standing in the middle, in the front of a damn tank saying I’m not leaving." pic.twitter.com/utCoYAnczI

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) March 25, 2022

Shorter version:

Biden tells the 82nd Airborne they're going to Ukraine:

"You’re going to see when you’re there, you’re going to see women, young people standing in the middle, in the front of a damn tank saying 'I’m not leaving.'" pic.twitter.com/M2nu77yUw7

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 25, 2022

The White House clarified: “UPDATE: A @WhiteHouse spokesperson tells me: “The President has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”

UPDATE: A @WhiteHouse spokesperson tells me: "The President has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position."

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) March 25, 2022

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Kristinn Taylor has contributed to The Gateway Pundit for over ten years. Mr. Taylor previously wrote for Breitbart, worked for Judicial Watch and was co-leader of the D.C. Chapter of FreeRepublic.com. Mr. Taylor studied journalism in high school, visited the Newseum and once met David Brinkley. Mr. Taylor is on Twitter.

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Describing their findings as “particularly worrisome,” the authors of a study published Monday in Public Health Nutrition noted that in the U.S., the Dietary Guidelines for Americans form “the foundation for all national nutrition programs,” which amount to nearly $100 billion annually.

A study released Monday found 95% — 19 of the 20 members — of the U.S. government-run committee responsible for establishing dietary guidelines for Americans have one or more conflicts of interest (COIs) with industry actors in Big Food, Big Ag and Big Pharma.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee (DGAC) sets the guidelines used by U.S. policymakers, healthcare providers, nutrition educators and federal nutrition program operators, including those responsible for school lunch programs, on what foods and beverages “meet nutrient needs, promote health and prevent disease.”

According to the study, 129 industry actors had relationships with the 20 DGAC members, based on the COI disclosures submitted by the members of the committee.

Describing their findings as “particularly worrisome,” the authors of the study explained why this is a matter of public concern, noting that in the U.S., the Dietary Guidelines for Americans form “the foundation for all national nutrition programs,” which amount to nearly $100 billion annually.

The DGA also offers guidance to state and local governments, as well as healthcare professionals, hospitals, and community groups, among others, as “overarching dietary recommendations.”

The study’s authors added:

“Trustworthy dietary guidelines result from a transparent, objective, and science-based, process. Our analysis has shown that the significant and widespread COI on the committee prevent the DGA from achieving the recommended standard for transparency without mechanisms in place to make this information publicly available.

“Our findings here are particularly worrisome, as industry influence and COI can result in diverting the scientific process underpinning the U.S. national dietary guidelines, to one that is responsive to profit-driven interests rather than the public health.”

The study appeared in Public Health Nutrition, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Nutrition Society, a UK-based nonprofit whose mission is to advance the scientific study of nutrition.

The DGAC, first convened in 1977, operates under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The report, since its introduction in 1980, is revised and re-released every five years.

The DGAC’s latest report, issued in July 2020, led to the publication in December 2020 of the ninth version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Did committee members influence policy on breastmilk substitutes to promote product sales?

In an example of the depth and extent of the conflicts of interest identified, the authors of the study highlighted examples such as the following, involving food and nutritional products produced for infants and young children:

“[T]he Pregnancy and Lactation Subcommittee of the DGAC had six members, four of whom, or two thirds, had COI involving manufacturers of breastmilk substitutes: SD, RK, KD, JS [referring to DGAC committee members] all had instances of COI with Mead Johnson, and SD had COI with Wyeth and Abbot [sic].

“The Birth to Age 24 Months Subcommittee, which also addressed infant and young child nutrition, had four of its six members having COI involving manufacturers of breastmilk substitutes: SD, RK, KD also served on the Pregnancy and Lactation Subcommittee, with the same COI mentioned above; and TD had at least one COI with Abbott.

“There is evidence that those companies producing breastmilk substitutes regularly use science and try to influence policy in order to protect and promote the sales of their products, and their relationships with DGAC members may have had a direct impact on the work of those members.”

The study also highlighted the following findings:

“Our analysis found that 95% of the committee members had COI [conflicts of interest] with the food, and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon, and the International Life Sciences [Institute or ILSI] had connections with multiple members.

“Research funding and membership of an advisory/executive board jointly accounted for more than 60% of the total number of COI documented.

“We observed the existence of extensive, varied and long-standing relationships between some DGAC members and industry actors whose products are directly affected by the DGAC report ́s recommendations as well as the DGA themselves.

“[W]e can observe that Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, ILSI, General Mills and Dannon are well-positioned to advance their interests within the DGAC given the existence of relationships (in some cases long-held) with several DGAC members.

“The most prevalent type of COI was research funding, followed by DGAC members being on a board/committee in a company, and consultant positions. Some industry actors, such as Mead Johnson, General Mills and Kellogg’s and the industry-funded organization, ILSI, have interacted with an extensive number of DGAC members.

“Conversely, other industry actors have prolonged relationships with only a handful of DGAC members. Amongst the top 15 industry actors by overall number of COI are ILSI and three trade associations or programs funded by them (California Walnut Commission, Almond Board of California and Beef Checkoff). Each of these actors has diverse means and ends to potentially influence scientific research and the DGA process.”

How ‘revolving door’ policies come into play

The apparent conflicts of interest also extend beyond the committee members themselves, as noted in the study:

“The use of what is called a ‘revolving door’ might also be problematic, with for example the Secretary of Agriculture, who spent much of his career in the agribusiness sector, having the ultimate say over the final content of the guidelines.

“In both cases, there seems to be an interplay between the strategic interests of industry actors, the professional interests of the researcher and, ultimately, the scientific work produced by the former.”

The study’s authors identified a possible “strategy by corporations to develop relationships that maximize their impact on science and policy,” and stated:

“DGAC members appear to disclose relationships each with a different group of industry actors, which are largely a reflection of how their own research speaks to a different industry sector, albeit most of them exhibit ties to corporations both in the food and pharmaceutical sectors.”

A fundamental lack of transparency?

Uncovering information about the 20 members of the DGAC, or even ascertaining who the members of the committee are, is challenging, in part, because the names of the members are buried in an appendix beginning on page 822 of the committee’s 835-page report.

While the report states that it provides “brief biographical information for each member of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee as it relates to the Committee’s scope and charge,” none of the information provided appears to provide any indication of the conflicts of interest for any of the committee members.

This is of particular significance in light of the study’s finding that 95% of the committee members had at least one conflict of interest.

Indeed, according to the study, the top three committee members in terms of COIs identified were Sharon Donovan, Jamy Ard and Heather Leidy, with 152, 92 and 84 COIs identified, respectively, and identified connections to 31, 12 and 31 industry actors, respectively.

Another committee member, Richard Mattes, had 33 connections to industry actors, in addition to 65 COIs.

The authors of the study further noted the above figures may, in fact, understate the extent to which conflicts of interest actually exist, due to the criteria and time frame involved in the above determinations:

“Nonetheless, given that our method is also prone to underreporting, these percentages illustrate what are effectively the two main pillars underpinning long-term relationships between scientific experts and industry actors: (1) funding for research projects and (2) advisory roles in corporate boards.

“The current process for assessing COI, based on annually self-reported disclosures, does not capture the long-standing relationships between the DGAC and industry actors that we identified here.

“A ‘COI timespan’ of at least three-to-five years is normal, although our paper demonstrates that a longer timespan would be beneficial to understanding the breadth and depth of an expert’s long-term relationships with industry.

“Moreover, to be as thorough as possible, COI declarations should include past positions, revolving door situations, and COI involving third parties, such as industry front groups (e.g., ILSI).”

The study’s authors also questioned the transparency with which the members of the DGAC were selected in the first place, noting that the process was less than fully public:

“There is, in addition, a need for more transparency in the process for selecting DGAC members — a process where all pertinent information is made public (e.g., information contained in Form 450).

“The DGAC report states that Forms 450 were posted online, but we could not find them on the DGA website at the time of our data collection.

“It is this paper’s contention that the USDA-HHS should publicly post all COI of appointed DGAC members, as recommended by the 2017 NASEM [National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine] report permanently during and after completion of the DGA.”

According to the study, members of the DGAC are considered temporary federal workers, thereby requiring them to follow USDA ethics rules, and to “place loyalty to the United States Constitution, Federal laws, and ethical principles above private gain,” adding that they “may not ‘participate personally and substantially in a ‘particular matter’ in which [they] have a financial interest.”

Nevertheless, according to the study:

“In particular, the food industry has historically been observed to seek to influence the DGA process in its favor, for example by pushing for recommendations for particular foods or food groups, such as dairy products, grains or meat.

“For instance, of the comments submitted by organizations to the public consultation for selection of topics for the development of the 2020-25 DGA … nearly 70% were from industry actors, particularly those in the food industry.

“Moreover, trade associations such as the American Beverage Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (now the Consumer Brands Association), and the National Potato Council, as well as companies like Unilever, nominated experts to be appointed to the DGAC through an informal step.”

The study’s methodology

The study was conducted between January and February 2022, with the purpose of measuring the “incidence of conflicts of interest (COI) with food and pharmaceutical industry actors on the advisory committee for the 2020-2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) and assess the adequacy of current mechanisms to disclose and manage COI among the committee’s members.”

Searches were conducted by the study’s authors during the two-month period, utilizing publicly available data.

The authors defined a conflict of interest as any relationship “between a DGAC member and an industry actor in a given year.”

Specifically, according to the authors:

“We documented the year in which the COI was disclosed as the year for which the COI existed, even if the relationship between the DGAC members and the organization might have been maintained for a longer period of time than that disclosed.

“Furthermore, lacking evidence to the contrary, we considered funding from industry to be a COI for any DGAC member who is a co-author on a study sponsored by industry.

“We argue that the time dimension is important in order to shed light on long-term relationships between industry and DGAC members. Therefore, we considered COI without date restrictions, allowing us to go as far back in time as information is publicly available.

“We focused on the COI of DGAC members with corporate actors from the food, drink and pharmaceutical industries, as well as third parties working with them such as trade associations or front groups.

“We included pharmaceutical companies, because some sell infant nutrition products and often offer devices or drugs that compete with food-based solutions to chronic diseases.

“We took a conservative approach using exclusively primary data to obtain evidence of a COI. We considered primary data sources as those platforms where information about COI is disclosed either directly by a DGAC member (e.g., scientific publication or a Curriculum Vitae), or by the institutions to which they were affiliated (e.g., bios on institutional websites).

“Primary data sources were excluded where a COI was discussed without a reference to the original information source.”

Further remarking on the possibility that there are even more COIs that were not identified by the study, Nina Teicholz of The Nutrition Coalition, one of the study’s authors, told The Defender in an email:

“It is true that some evidence of COI has disappeared from the Internet after various groups (including the Nutrition Coalition here and here) published articles on the committee’s COIs.

If these were not on the internet at the time of this paper’s search, then we did not include them.”

In summarizing the significance of their findings, and the importance of the DGA’s role in providing nutritional guidance to the American public, the authors did not mince words:

“It is critical to underscore the DGA’s impact on public health, especially for communities who are most impacted by diet-related diseases.

“For Americans to be able to trust the guidance from the DGA as sound, objective, and science-based, it is imperative to ensure that each step of the process, from the selection and appointment of the DGAC to the final release of the DGA, is publicly accessible, transparently administered, and largely free of COI and influence from actors whose profit-driven interests are often at odds with those in public health.

“Our analysis of COI of DGAC members has shown that this is far from true.”

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.

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“While the US succeeded in goading the Russian government to take the first shot, it is clear that the war in Ukraine is the first stage of a much broader conflict. Having provoked the Russian government into a desperate and disastrous invasion of Ukraine, the United States is using the war to reassert its global hegemony, building a war coalition for what the United States has termed “great power conflict” targeting not only Russia, but China as well.” Andre Damon, World Socialist Web Site

“What is important to our managerial and foreign policy elites, is, above all, the major effort and push for a globalist “Great Reset” using the Ukrainian conflict to finally accomplish their objective of bringing the entire world in accord with their plans for a New World Order. And to do that, Russia, which now stands athwart their designs, must be diminished and brought into line.” Boyd D. Cathey, The Unz Review

Why is NATO sending more lethal weaponry to Ukraine?

Didn’t Putin say that pouring arms into Ukraine would increase the likelihood of war?

Yes, he did, but the US and NATO continue sending more shipments anyway. Why?

And why does Ukraine need more weapons?

Could it be that Ukraine’s 600,000-strong military is collapsing like a trailer park in a hurricane? Is that it? Is that why NATO had an emergency confab in Brussels on Thursday to restate their support for a NATO-trained army that has not successfully launched even one major counteroffensive against the Russian military?

The media insists that the Russian offensive “has stalled”. Is that what you call it when your opponent captures an area the size of the UK in less than 3 weeks or when all your air and naval assets have been obliterated or when your Command-and-Control centers have gone up in smoke or when most of your combat troops are either encircled by Russian forces or fleeing to locations west of the Dnieper River? Is that what “stalled” looks like?

Do you get the impression that the media is not being entirely straightforward in their coverage of the war in Ukraine? Do you think that maybe their WEF-linked owners might have a dog in this fight? Here’s how Archbishop Vigano summed it up recently in an article linking “Covid tyranny” to the war in Ukraine:

“The ideological continuity between the pandemic farce and the Russian-Ukrainian crisis continues to emerge, beyond the evidence of the events and statements of the subjects involved, in the fact that the ultimate perpetrators of both are the same, all attributable to the globalist cabal of the World Economic Forum.” (“Exclusive: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò”, Gateway Pundit)

Truer words were never spoken. It’s all manipulation by globalist “stakeholders” pursuing their own narrow interests. As for the war, check out this analysis from a post at Larry Johnson’s new blog A Son of the New American Revolution. I can’t vouch for the author, but he sounds a lot more credible than CNN:

“Official claims of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kiev are completely fake; it’s totally made-up, it never happened—they simply don’t have a coherent military force in the Kiev area that’s capable of conducting an organized counteroffensive. All they have in and around Kiev is various bits and pieces including police and army special forces, civilian militia, regular police, some air defense, and a few artillery batteries. It’s not an offensive force—it’s a crazy quilt. …

What’s left of the Ukrainian army east of the Dniepr river is running out of diesel, and should be out of tube and rocket artillery munitions (and in fact, artillery) by the first week of April. Outside of the Donbass, it’s a war of attrition, with Russia wearing away the Ukraine’s ability to fight, using stand-off weapons (air and missiles) first and foremost. On Sunday, Russia hit a cache of munitions that was being hidden—Hamas-style—at a “vacant” retail and sports complex in downtown Kiev. Russia is finding tons and tons of Ukrainian army materiel, and methodically destroying them….

Russian and Donetsk/Lugansk forces have picked up so many U.S. and British antitank weapons, it’s visually documented they’re now using them on the battlefield. ..

And, the Stinger missile project has failed totally—Uncle Sam & Co. have moved and continue to move hundreds of Stingers into the Ukraine, but it’s only been documented to have brought down about seven manned aircraft since the invasion, and none in the last ten days or so. Some of those hundreds will get out and be sold and… perhaps you shouldn’t fly internationally anymore…

I’m not looking to sugarcoat it for Russia—those Ukrainian military units that did not simply melt away and disappear in the first days, are putting up a fight. But at some point, very likely in the first half of April, they will simply run out of everything, and they will crumble and then the Russian and Donetsk/Lugansk forces will take all or most of “Left Bank” (east of the Dnieper) Ukraine. (“Dreizin Report–Poland prepares to intervene, Ukraine slides into dictatorship”, Jacob Dreizin, The Son of a New American Revolution)

Yes, but can the author be trusted?

I don’t know but– let’s face it– when the media lies relentlessly for 4 years about “Russian collusion” followed by another 2 years of “Everyone’s going to die from the flu”; any critical thinking person is going to look for other sources of information, right? It’s a credibility issue, and, regrettably, “credibility” is a term that is never applied to the mainstream media.

So, where do we go from here?

Good question; and you can see from NATO’s statement that leaders in Washington and across Europe are determined to throw more gas on the fire. That’s the message they’re sending to the world; ‘We are united in our determination to defeat Russia whether we blow up the planet or not.’ Got it? Here’s a clip from their declaration on Thursday:

“Since 2014, we have provided extensive support to Ukraine’s ability to exercise that right. We have trained Ukraine’s armed forces, strengthening their military capabilities and capacities and enhancing their resilience. NATO Allies have stepped up their support and will continue to provide further political and practical support to Ukraine as it continues to defend itself. …..We remain determined to maintain coordinated international pressure on Russia. We will continue to coordinate closely with relevant stakeholders and other international organizations, including the European Union.

Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine represents a fundamental challenge to the values and norms that have brought security and prosperity to all on the European continent” (“Statement by NATO Heads of State and Government”, NATO)

Are you surprised that NATO would openly boast about arming and training thousands of Ukrainian combatants since 2014? What if an enemy of the United States did the same thing in Mexico or Canada. How would the US react? Here’s how Noam Chomsky put it:

“… for Ukraine to join NATO would be rather like Mexico joining a China-run military alliance, hosting joint maneuvers with the Chinese army and maintaining weapons aimed at Washington. To insist on Mexico’s sovereign right to do so would surpass idiocy. Washington’s insistence on Ukraine’s sovereign right to join NATO is even worse, since it sets up an insurmountable barrier to a peaceful resolution of a crisis that is already a shocking crime and will soon become much worse unless resolved — by the negotiations that Washington refuses to join.” (Truthout)

It looks to me like Chomsky thinks arming Ukraine was a deliberate provocation. Which it was. NATO stuffed the country full of weapons, trained its combat troops and paramilitaries, conducted military operations with NATO, ordered their army to the east so they could terrorize the ethnic Russian population, and then– to top it off– threatened to develop nuclear weapons. In short, they put a gun to Putin’s head and threatened to blow his brains out. If that’s not a provocation, then what is? Here’s more from an article at the WSWS:

(NATO chief) Stoltenberg’s historical reference point was not the Russian invasion of Ukraine last month but the 2014 fascist-led coup that turned Ukraine into a proxy for NATO. “Since 2014, [NATO] Allies have trained Ukraine’s armed forces and significantly strengthened their capabilities. They are putting that training into practice now, on the front lines, with great bravery.”

Stoltenberg made no effort to conceal NATO’s massive military buildup of Ukrainian forces over the past eight years. NATO, he said, has been “providing anti-tank and air defense systems, drones, fuel and ammunition. As well as financial aid.”

He went on, “I would like to commend the courage and the professionalism of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I have met them in Ukraine, and we are all aware that compared to where they were back in 2014, this is a totally different force than eight years ago. The Ukrainian Armed Forces today is much bigger, much better equipped, much better trained, much better commanded. They have much better logistics than they had back in 2014.” (“NATO meets to plot next stage in Ukraine proxy war”, World Socialist Web Site)

Stoltenberg can hardly conceal his elation over the ‘courage and the professionalism” of his NWO army that is acting as cannon fodder in a US proxy-war with Russia. But do the brave Ukrainians that are fighting in this fiasco, know what they’re fighting for?

No, they don’t. They think they’re risking their lives for their country, but, actually, they’re fighting to preserve US global hegemony by annihilating Russia, encircling China and establishing America’s dominance over the world’s most populous and prosperous region of the next century. That’s what they’re fighting for, Washington’s “pivot to Asia”. As the author of the WSWS article admits:

“It is clear that what is involved is not only a war in Ukraine, but a campaign by the US and NATO imperialist powers for war against Russia and a redivision of the world.”

Yes, that’s right, and Biden doesn’t even try to hide it. Here’s what he said just two days ago:

“Now is a time when things are shifting. … There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.” (Biden Talks NWO,You Tube)

“New World Order”? You mean, this isn’t about “Ukraine’s borders”, after all?

Nope. That’s all patriotic claptrap dolled-up for the serfs. Here’s how Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov summed it up on Tuesday:

“This is not about Ukraine, this is about a world order in which the United States wants to be the sole sovereign and dominate… This all is about removing the obstacle in the form of Russia on the way to building a unipolar world.”

Indeed, that is the objective, and the US is not going to be timid in pursuing its interests. China and Russia are under the illusion that the emergence of various “power centers” will inevitably bring about change in the global order. But the world doesn’t work that way. The world leader will not willingly concede defeat or graciously abdicate the throne. He must be knocked from his pedestal much like the schoolyard bully must be subdued through force. Regrettably, Ukraine is shaping up to be the battleground where these matters are going to be resolved through force of arms.

In any event, we should try to go beyond the media’s propaganda and see if we can identify the real causes of the current conflict. Why, for example, is the US targeting Russia? In what way is Russia an “obstacle” that is blocking Washington’s strategic ambitions?

The former Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, answers that question in one short paragraph written more than two decades ago. It is as relevant today as it was then:

“Our 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. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

In short, Washington sees Russia as a “hostile power” because it sits atop an ocean of oil and gas reserves and because it “defiantly” conducts its own independent foreign policy. For these reasons, Russia is Uncle Sam’s mortal enemy.

Second, Russia’s has been gradually strengthening ties with Europe posing a serious challenge to US economic dominance. The building of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline– which would have greatly increased Europe’s dependency on Russian gas– meant that Washington’s influence would steadily erode while Europe and Asia would move closer to a common economic area in which neither the US Dollar nor NATO security would be necessary. This is why Washington went to such great lengths to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine. They needed to force the severing of economic ties to prevent further integration with EU markets.

The third reason why Russia has become Washington’s Enemy Number 1, is because the US is currently “rebalancing” assets and resources to the Asia-Pacific to take advantage of the anticipated growth-surge in the region. Hillary Clinton famously referred to this as “the pivot to Asia”, a term that was coined in a speech she delivered in 2011. Here’s what she said:

“Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology…..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia…The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action…” (“America’s Pacific Century”,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton”, Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)

Those are the geopolitical imperatives driving the conflict:

1. “To prevent the re-emergence of a new rival on the territory of the former Soviet Union that can dominate their own resources and, thus, challenge US power.
2. The threat of further economic integration that would unavoidably lead to a massive free trade zone spanning Europe and Asia.
3. The “pivot” plan to dominate the world’s most populous and prosperous region of the next century.

These are the three strategic policies that are fueling the war. They only relate to Ukraine inasmuch as Ukraine is the unfortunate staging-ground for the “Great Power Conflict” which is steadily gaining momentum. Tuesday’s recommendation, by Polish political leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynsk, that he would recommend that peacekeepers be sent to Ukraine shows that NATO is planning a major escalation of the conflict in the very near future. According to Reuters, Kaczynsk, will propose that:

“An international peacekeeping mission should be sent to Ukraine and be given the means to defend itself….

“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 told a news conference.”

“It will be a mission that will strive for peace, to give humanitarian aid, but at the same time it will also be protected by appropriate forces, armed forces,” said Kaczynski, who is seen as the main decision-maker in Poland.” (“Top Polish politician calls for peacekeeping mission in Ukraine”, Reuters)

Think about that for a minute. Think about what it would mean. The peacekeeping mission:

1. “will operate on Ukrainian territory (where Russia is carrying out its military operation)
2. will be able to defend itself. (which means they will be armed.)
3. will be (protected by) “some wider international structure” (NATO)

Does anyone think this sounds like a good idea? Won’t this  force Russia to treat the NATO personnel as enemy belligerents that are interfering with their military operation?

Of course, it will. So, what are they trying to achieve; WW3? Is that the point? And what does this tell us about Washington’s strategy for Ukraine?

It also tells us that NATO is preparing to engage Russia militarily within Ukraine. That’s what it tells us. Until today, most people had assumed that NATO would not engage Russia militarily because they believed that would greatly increase the prospects of a nuclear exchange. But that is not how the foreign policy establishment sees things. After dealing with Putin for over 20 years, they see Putin as a rational actor who will not escalate unless Russia faces an imminent existence-threat. (A nuclear attack) In other words, the foreign policy mandarins have made the calculation that they can engage Putin in a bloody and protracted ground-war– that will drain Russia’s resources and destroy its economy– without Putin using his nuclear arsenal. It is a risky strategy but not entirely unreasonable given Putin’s behavior in the past. Putin has always been extremely cautious and never impulsive. The foreign policy wonks think they can use that against him. Like we said, it is a high-risk strategy.

Naturally, Russia is appalled by the ‘peacekeeper idea’ as it makes a clash between the two nuclear-armed superpowers almost unavoidable. Here’s what Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in response to the news:

“Our Polish colleagues have already stated that there will be a NATO summit now, and peacekeepers should be deployed. I hope they understand what is at stake. This will be a direct clash between the Russian and NATO armed forces, which everyone not only wanted to avoid but said that it should never take place in principle.”

Is Lavrov being overly courteous?

Yes, he is. If the United States had issued the warning, they would have said something much more ominous, like this:

“Any armed formations will be treated as legitimate enemy targets and destroyed. Full stop.”

That’s how you deliver a warning. You don’t try to ingratiate yourself with the person who wants to kill your soldiers and erase your country from the map. That doesn’t make any sense at all. If there was ever a time for straight talk, this is it. Lives are at stake.

The “peacekeeper” incident suggests something I’ve suspected for quite a while; that Washington is itching for a land-war in Ukraine, and to some extent, it makes sense. It further polarizes and weakens Russia, it unites the allies around a common cause, and it reinforces NATO’s role as guarantor of regional security. The downside, of course, is that the conflict could quickly escalate leading to a full-blown nuclear war. I believe the neocons at the State Department do not see that as a plausible scenario, so they are pushing as hard as they can to intensify the fighting. Here’s a short clip from the piece by veteran Jacob Dreizin who appears to see things the same way:

“I am confident that, out of impotent rage if nothing else, NATO forces will move into western Ukraine from Poland by mid-April at the latest, if the war is still on by then. The heavy equipment is already there near the border; bringing in the personnel to link up with it is the easy part. With the recent Russian bombing of the U.S./UK “Ho Chi Minh trail” hub at the Yavorov base near the Polish border, they will get in on the ground … to make a statement like, “Not again, because we’re here openly now.”

No, Brandon doesn’t want to do it, but the hawks in Congress and the MSM are running the show now. There will be escalation. It is baked into the cake. In fact, I predicted before the invasion that Poland would take advantage of the war to create a protectorate in western Ukraine, and I stand by my prediction…” (“Dreizin Report–Poland prepares to intervene, Ukraine slides into dictatorship”,Jacob Dreizin, The Son of a New American Revolution)

I think Dreizin is onto something here. Brandon is not on board with the planned escalation, but it might not matter, because the State Department is a hotbed of neocons that are doing whatever they can to grease the skids for a scorched earth, no-holds-barred cage-match with their most-reviled rival, Vladimir Putin.

It’s the State Department, the Intel agencies, the Congress and the media that are steering the ship of state now, not Biden. Perhaps, you wondered why the NY Times suddenly decided to ‘come clean’ on the Hunter Biden laptop story? You probably know that it’s not because the Times editors had a change-of-heart and wanted to inform the public or “speak truth to power”. Of course, not. The Times trotted out the laptop dossier to let Biden know that they “got him by the shorthairs” and if he doesn’t play ball, he’s toast.

Blackmail? Would the neocons really blackmail the President of the United States in order to escalate in Ukraine?

You bet, they would.

The neocons have their heart-set on a land-war war in Europe, and from the looks of things, they might just get one.

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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.

Featured image is from TUR

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First published on March 24, 2022

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“We must recommit ourselves to the work of strengthening our democracies, and demonstrate the principled leadership people are looking for,” said Trudeau at the European Parliament.

See what happened after Trudeau’s historic failed address to the European Parliament. (Scroll down)

No analysis by Canada’s mainstream media.

 

Video: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addresses the European Parliament

 

Earlier statement by Romanian MEP Christian Terhes, followed by March 23 statement.

Romanian MEP @CristianTerhes absolutely mops the floor with PM @JustinTrudeau in Brussels this week over how he's handling the Ottawa #FreedomConvoy2022 protests.

"He's exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He's like Ceaușescu in Romania," said Terhes. pic.twitter.com/Ox87jL3XJr

— Cosmin Dzsurdzsa 🇷🇴 (@cosminDZS) February 20, 2022

MEP @CristianTerhes has put out a statement after refusing to attend @JustinTrudeau's EU speech today

In the statement, Terheș blasts Trudeau for having horses trample protestors during the Freedom Convoy crackdown

I've translated it and will tweet relevant parts below

THREAD pic.twitter.com/KUR10j0s5b

— Cosmin Dzsurdzsa 🇷🇴 (@cosminDZS) March 23, 2022

Trudeau is going to come home from Europe VERY angry. He was just forced to sit and listen while he was labelled a "dictator," in front of the entire European Union, one who "trampled women with horses," and "blocks the bank accounts of single parents." https://t.co/GiPU69MboE pic.twitter.com/83662XKyrb

— Keean Bexte (@TheRealKeean) March 23, 2022

🇨🇦🇬🇧|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! #ID pic.twitter.com/qpcQyGTixQ

— Christine Anderson (@AndersonAfDMdEP) March 24, 2022

I tried to prevent the speech of 🇨🇦 PM #Trudeau in the #EU Parliament because he recently trampled on the core values of democracy. Unfortunately, the enemies of democracy are also on the rise in #Europe, as the reaction of my colleagues clearly shows.#TrudeauTyranny pic.twitter.com/Mji44OsnxU

— Bernhard Zimniok (@BernhardZimniok) March 24, 2022

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First published on February 25, 2022

 

 

 

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.  A promotional video from the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) helps to neatly connect all the dots about why the Canadian government made such a quick reversal in their bank asset seizures in the last 24 hours {Go Deep}.  And yes, as we suspected, it was almost certainly contact from the World Economic Forum to Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland that triggered the change in position.

When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced they would use the Emergency Act declaration to target the financial support systems, banks and accounts of the people who were protesting against COVID mandates, they not only undermined the integrity of the Canadian banking system – but they also inadvertently stuck a wrench into the plans of the World Economic Forum and the collaborative use of the Canadian Bankers Association to create a digital id.

Against the backdrop of the Canadian government action, WATCH THIS VIDEO:

If the Canadian government can arbitrarily block citizen access to their banking institution without any due process, what does that say about the system the Canadian Banking Association (CBA) was putting into place as part of their Digital ID network?

If the CBA digital identity were in place, the same people targeted by Trudeau’s use of the Emergency Act would have their entire identity blocked by the same government measures.  The realization of the issue, reflected by a severe undermining of faith in the banking system, is a dramatic problem for those working to create and promote the Digital ID.

It is not coincidental the financial targeting mechanism deployed by Trudeau/Freeland, the Canadian banking system, is the same system being used to create the digital identity.  As a result of the government targeting bank accounts, Finance Minister Freeland just created a reference point for those who would argue against allowing the creation of a comprehensive digital identity.

The motive for the World Economic Forum and Canadian Bankers Association to immediately reach out to Trudeau and Freeland and tell them to back off their plan is crystal clear.  THAT is almost certainly why Freeland appeared so admonished, shocked and incapable of getting her footing yesterday {Go Deep}, and why the Canadian government simultaneously informed Parliament they were unfreezing the bank accounts.

Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland essentially broke the financial code of Omerta, by highlighting how easy it is for government to seize your bank accounts, credit cards, retirement accounts, insurance, mortgages, loan access and cut you off from money (without due process).

The unintended consequence was an immediate and clear reference point if government did the same action with a digital ID in place.

However, this undermined confidence and faith in the banking system cannot be restored quickly.  The toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube. The horse has left the barn.

Quickly this becomes a moment for immediate damage control by the Canadian government. This explains why Justin Trudeau dropped the declaration of the Emergency Act.

It all makes sense now.  All of it.

Indeed, the government leaders who take their instructions from the multinational corporations in charge of the World Economic Forum, which is to say almost all of them, are so entrenched in their need to use COVID-19 as the pry bar for the Build Back Better agenda, they simply cannot let it go.

Without COVID-19, they can’t keep the vaccination push.  Without the vaccination push, they can’t keep the vaccine passport process in place.  Without the vaccination passport registration process to track and monitor human behavior, the governing authorities cannot fulfill the mission of a comprehensive digital identity and social credit tracking system.  Indeed, everything they seek is contingent upon keeping the premise of COVID-19 alive.

It is not accidental the World Economic Forum is at the epicenter of this

As we previously noted, the architects of the Build Back Better society (WEF) are guiding various governments on ways to create efficient registration and compliance systems, i.e. ways that permit citizens to prove their vaccinated and compliant status.  As these discussions are taking place, it is prudent to pause and think very carefully, wisely.

We all know, as we are reading this, under the guise of enhancing our safety, the U.S. Federal Government is in discussions with the medical community, multinational corporations and employers of citizens to create a more efficient process for you to register your vaccine compliance.

We know their conversation under the terminology of a COVID Passport.  The current goal is to make a system for us to show and prove our authorized work status, which, as you know, is based on your obedience to a mandated vaccine.

Beta tests are being conducted in various nations, each with different perspectives and constitutional limitations, based on pesky archaic rules and laws that govern freedom.

For the western, or for lack of a better word ‘democratic‘ outlook, Australia, New Zealand, France and Europe are leading the way with their technological system of vaccination check points and registered state/national vaccination status tied to your registration identification.

New York City joined the vaccine checkpoint process, as their city now requires the vaccine to enter all private businesses.  Los Angeles soon followed.

The Australian electronic checkpoints are essentially gateways where QR codes are being scanned from the cell phones of the compliant vaccinated citizen. Yes comrades, there’s an app for that.

Currently, the vaccine status scans are registered by happy compliance workers, greeters at the entry to the business or venue. Indeed, the Walmart greeter has a new gadget to scan your phone prior to allowing you custody of a shopping cart.

In restaurants, the host or hostess has a similar compliance scanner to check you in prior to seating or a reservation confirmation.

It’s simple and fun. You pull up your QR code on your cell phone (aka portable transponder and registration device), using the registration app, and your phone is scanned delivering a green check response to confirm your correct vaccination status and authorized entry.

The Australian government, at both a federal and state level, is working closely with Big Tech companies (thirsting for the national contract) to evaluate the best universal process that can be deployed nationwide.

As noted by all six Premiers in the states down under, hardware (scanners) and software (registration) systems are all being tested to find the most comprehensive/convenient portable units to settle upon. Meanwhile in the U.S., cities like Los Angeles and New York await the beta test conclusion before deploying their own version of the same process.

In Europe, they are also testing their vaccine checkpoint and registration processes known as the EU “Green Pass.”

The “Green Pass” is a similar technological system that gives a vaccinated and registered citizen access to all the venues and locations previously locked down while the COVID-19 virus was being mitigated. What would have been called a “vast right-wing conspiracy theory” 24 months ago, is now a COVID passport process well underway.

As with all things in our rapid technological era, you do not have to squint to see the horizon and accept that eventually this process will automate, and there will be a gadget or scanning gateway automatically granting you access without a person needing to stand there and scan each cell phone QR code individually.

The automated process just makes sense. You are well aware your cell phone already transmits an electronic beacon enabling your Uber or Lyft driver access to your location at the push of a touchscreen button, another convenient app on your phone. So, why wouldn’t the gateways just accept this same recognizable transmission as registration of your vaccine compliant arrival at the coffee shop?

The automated version is far easier and way cooler than having to reach into your pocket or purse and pulling up that pesky QR code on the screen. Smiles everyone, the partnership between Big Tech and Big Government is always there to make your transit more streamline and seamless. Heck, you won’t even notice the electronic receiver mounted at the entry. Give it a few weeks and you won’t remember the reason you were laughing at Alex Jones any more than you remember why you are taking off your shoes at the airport.

However, as this process is created, it is worth considering that you are being quietly changed from an individual person to a product. Some are starting to worry in the beta test:

[…] “you must become an object with attributes sitting in a database. Instead of roaming around anonymously making all sorts of transactions without the government’s knowledge, Australians find themselves passing through ‘gates’. …

All product-based systems have these gates to control the flow of stock and weed out errors. It is how computers see things. The more gates, the more clarity.

You are updating the government like a parcel pings Australia Post on its way to a customer. If a fault is found, automatic alerts are issued, and you are stopped from proceeding. In New South Wales, this comes in the form of a big red ‘X’ on the myGov vaccine passport app (if you managed to link your Medicare account without smashing the phone to bits).

Gate-keeping systems have been adapted from retail and transformed into human-based crowd solutions to micromanage millions of lives with the same ruthless efficiency as barcodes tracking stock. There is no nuance or humanity in this soulless digital age. Barcodes are binary. Good – bad. Citizen or dissident.

Even if you have all the required government attributes to pass through the gates – two vaccines, six boosters, and a lifelong subscription to Microsoft – something could go wrong. If your data fails the scan, you’ll slip into digital purgatory and become an error message. (read more)

It could be problematic if your status fails to register correctly, or if the system identifies some form of alternate lifestyle non-compliance that will block you from entry. Then again, that’s what beta tests are for, working out all these techno bugs and stuff. Not to worry…. move along….

Then again… “For those in the privileged class allowed to shop, take note of Covid signs which encourage cashless transactions under the guise of ‘health’. Messaging around cards being ‘safer’ will increase until the Treasury tries to remove cash entirely, almost certainly with public approval.”

Wait, now we are squinting at that familiar image on the horizon because we know those who control things have been talking about a cashless society for quite a while.

We also know that data is considered a major commodity all by itself. Why do you think every system you encounter in the modern era requires your phone number even when you are not registering for anything. It, meaning you, us, are all getting linked into this modern registration system that is defining our status. We also know that system operators buy and sell our registered status amid various retail and technology systems.

Yeah, that opaque shadow is getting a little clearer now.

Perhaps you attempt to purchase dog food and get denied entry into Pet Smart because you didn’t renew the car registration.  Or perhaps you are blocked from entry because you forgot to change the oil on the leased vehicle you drive, and Toyota has this weird agreement with some retail consortium.   You head to the oil change place that conveniently pops up in the citizen compliance App –it’s only two blocks away– they clear the alert after they do the oil change, and you are gateway compliant again.

Missed your booster shot? We’re sorry citizen, your bank account is frozen until your compliance is restored… please proceed to the nearest vaccination office as displayed conveniently on your cell phone screen to open access to all further gates (checkpoints)…. tap to continue!

Vote for the wrong candidate?  Attend, or donate to, a trucker protest?

Yes, it seemed transparently obvious where this was heading, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just awakened the masses:

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Over the past month, both the mainstream and alternative media worldwide have focused on the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. It was launched in response to almost nine years of Western provocations since the Euromaidan colour revolution saw the democratically elected Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych overthrown and replaced with the successive pro-Western governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose eight year long war on the breakaway Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, involving the use of neo-Nazi paramilitaries such as the Azov Battalion and the ethnic cleansing of both Republics’ predominantly ethic Russian populations, would act as a catalyst for the Russian Federation to intervene militarily in its Western neighbour – with attempts to resolve the situation peacefully by Moscow over the past several months having ultimately amounted to nothing following Kiev’s refusal to implement its’ side of the Minsk Agreements, which would have granted Donetsk and Luhansk a degree of autonomy while still remaining under Ukrainian rule.

In the past week however, the corporate media, has noticeably, in lockstep, switched its focus back to COVID-19, specifically the new ‘BA.2 variant’, and the positive tests of high-profile figures such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jen Psaki and Doug Emhoff, husband of US Vice President Kamala Harris  – media attention which has not been seen since multiple countries worldwide simultaneously dropped all restrictions at the end of January, during the highly coincidental timing of the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda virtual event.

This sudden coordinated pivot back to the Covid mainstream media narrative, one that was  suddenly dropped in a similar lockstep fashion two months ago, raises many questions. And with the recent confirmation by current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland – herself instrumental in the original Euromaidan regime change operation – that US-funded labs in Ukraine were developing bioweapons, as well as allegations by the White House that Russia is planning to use chemical weapons as part of the current military operation, there is indication that the sudden media switch to Covid may be used as a means to clear the stage for a deadly escalation in Ukraine – a false flag chemical attack or lab leak, blamed on Russia by the West, and used as means for NATO to launch a ‘No Fly Zone’ over Ukraine, clamoured for by current Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.

Indeed, the staging of a false flag chemical attack as a means to encourage a US-led military intervention is a tactic with very recent usage by Washington’s Neocons.

In 2017, the Syrian Arab Republic had been in the grip of a six-year long regime change operation launched in response to President Bashar al-Assad’s refusal to allow Western-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country. Unlike Libya however, subjected to a similar regime change operation at the same time and overrun and destroyed in the space of eight months by Western-backed terrorists, Syria had been successfully able to withstand the similar Western-backed onslaught launched against its territory, thanks in part to interventions by its’ allies Iran and Russia, which would lead to the regime-change lobby taking reckless measures.

On the 4^th of April 2017, a false flag chemical attack would be launched in the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, resulting in the then-US administration of Donald Trump launching a cruise missile strike against the Syrian government-controlled Shayrat airbase three days later, the first direct military engagement between the West and Damascus since the regime change operation began, though one that just stopped short of the full-scale military intervention that the Neocons had hoped for.

Undeterred, a similar false flag attack would be launched almost a year to the day later in the city of Douma, this time resulting in the US, Britain and France launching air strikes against Syrian government targets, though again stopping short of a Libya-style ‘No Fly Zone’.

Now with the near inevitability that the stage is being set for the same script to be played out in Ukraine – possibly around the end of May when the World Economic Forum is due to hold its’ first in-person summit in two years – the world must prepare itself for preventing the possible consequences, of a ‘limited’ strike against Russian military infrastructure, similar to what happened in Syria, which could potentially result in the gravest consequence of all – World War III.

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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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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On Monday, President Joe Biden said “evolving intelligence” indicates Russia is preparing a massive cyberattack against the United States in response to its support for Ukraine. “The magnitude of Russia’s cyber capacity is fairly consequential and it’s coming,” Biden said.

Days prior to Biden’s remarks, an FBI advisory issued to US businesses warned “Kremlin-linked hackers could target US organizations as the Russian military continues to suffer heavy losses in Ukraine and as Western sanctions on the Kremlin begin to bite,” reports CNN.

Anne Neuberger, Biden’s national security adviser, said during a White House press briefing on Monday Russia is preparing “preparatory activity” for a cyber attack on the United States and its allies. She declared the coming attacks are “not about espionage, it’s probably very likely about disruptive or destructive [cyber] activity” in response to US assistance to Ukraine. The following day, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly made similar remarks to business executives, according to CNN.

(It should be noted Neuberger is a Zionist and thus an ardent defender of Israel; the Yehuda and Anne Neuberger Foundation has “donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby known as AIPAC, for its efforts to influence the US government and public opinion,” David Corn reported for Mother Jones in 2021.)

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in February a Russian cyberattack “on one will be regarded as an attack on all,” a statement that invokes NATO’s Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. “Article 5 provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked,” explains the NATO web page.

The United States, and especially Joe Biden and his  son, Hunter Biden, have a vested interest in making certain Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the color revolution installed government of Ukraine remain in power.

The fact is the US, under the State Department and Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and the US Ambassador to Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt, were responsible for orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

This is a taboo subject for the corporate media as it reports a one-sided blow-by-blow account of the war in Ukraine. Never mentioned is the fact the US orchestrated  color revolution in Ukraine (and those in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) violate the United Nations Charter and international law.

Prior to leaving office, President Obama looked into “an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.” As we now know—and some of us claimed at the time—the supposed effort by Russia to get Donald Trump elected was pure fantasy and rank political expediency. It took almost two years for ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller to discover the obvious—there had been no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Despite this, many Americans, in particular Democrats, believe the conspiracy theory is true.

The effort to destabilize Russia continued under the outlier president Trump. He gave the CIA carte blanc to launch cyber attacks on Russia. “The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets, undoing many restrictions that had been in place under prior administrations. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House,” reported Yahoo News in 2020.

The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. These countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — which are mentioned directly in the document — but the finding potentially applies to others as well, according to another former official. “The White House wanted a vehicle to strike back,” said the second former official. “And this was the way to do it.” (emphasis added.)

Those of us who study history and geopolitics know the CIA has had a free hand to conduct subversion and surveillance activities around the world and at home despite its charter. “When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the U.S. The legislation creating the CIA contains those limitations,” writes Andrew Napolitano.

“Populations from at least 25 countries were denied the right to choose their own leaders,” writes Thomas Swan. “This is perhaps the main reason why America is hated so much around the world. The excuse given by CIA supporters is that Soviet influence over certain governments had to be curtailed. However, in many cases, no proof of Russian activity was ever found. The CIA had taken to dismantling any leftist or anti-US government, regardless of the regime’s domestic or foreign support.”

The CIA, following Trump’s “presidential finding,” engaged in a new round of computer and network subversion against Russia and Iran. The 2018 finding gave a green light to the CIA to wipe or dump hacked banking data and target foreign intelligence services, media organizations, charities, religious institutions, or other non-state entities for disruptive or destructive cyber actions, according to a report posted at Axios.

In fact, Trump’s finding was little more than a formality. In addition to overthrowing elected governments, the CIA has engaged in assassination, the distribution of heroin and cocaine, and making certain local officials, most notably state governors, are onboard with the establishment’s program (see “Former Governor Jesse Ventura Explains That CIA Embedded In Many State Governments”).

“Recently we have noted a significant increase in attempts to inflict harm on Russia’s informational systems from external forces,” Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily in January of 2017, prior to the US election.  Patrushev said the Obama administration had “deliberately ignor(ed) the fact that the main Internet servers” complicit in the attacks “are based on the territory of the United States and are used by Washington for intelligence and other purposes aimed at retaining its global domination.”

In short, the intelligence apparatus of the US was engaged in subverting Russia’s computer networks (and those in China, Iran, and North Korea) years before the current crisis in Ukraine and the contested US election. This was accomplished under the bogus assertion that Putin and Russia colluded with the Trump team to get him elected, thus painting the real estate magnate as a Russian tool.

“The U.S. CIA’s hacking unit has been conducting attacks over the last 11 years on Chinese aviation firms, technology companies, oil sector companies and other critical industries,” Emily Fang, a correspondent in Beijing, told NPR in 2021.

China, Russia, North Korea, Israel, and other nations have probed the networks of adversaries for years, and may have indeed engaged in cyberattacks. However, as Wikileaks discovered in 2017, the CIA is at the forefront of this activity. Its sophisticated arsenal of cyberattack tools include “malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems,” according to WikiLeaks “Vault 7” archive of documents purloined from the CIA.

The “Year Zero” documents introduce “the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of ‘zero day’ weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

The events of 9/11 gave the agency the emphasis it needed to expand its cyberattack efforts.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.

All of the above represents factual information, not a conspiracy theory. I believe—and this is my opinion based on years of dedicated research—that the majority of cyberattacks launched against US corporations and the government originated with CIA hackers who leave behind traces implicating the above roster of official enemies.

In the days to come, as the war in Ukraine continues, we may face cyberattacks on critical infrastructure here in the US. The warfare state is dedicated to confronting Russia and China, even if it results in a nuclear conflagration. There is no better way to get Americans onboard with criminal behavior than to let them sit in the dark for a week or more without access to streaming television and their precious smart phones that are in effect surveillance devices.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

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

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

Global Research does not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The history of this war must be understood.

The bombing and shelling led by Ukraine’s Armed Forces directed against the people of Donbass started eight years ago, resulting in the destruction of residential areas and more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

A  bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been widely condemned for its unjustified aggression. There are legitimate fears of a revived Russian empire and even a new world war. Less discussed is the almost half-trillion dollar defense industry supplying the weapons to both sides, and the substantial profits it will make as a result.

The conflict has already seen massive growth in defense spending. The EU announced it would buy and deliver 450 million euros of arms to Ukraine, while the US has pledged US$350 million in military aid in addition to the over 90 tons of military supplies and $650 million in the past year alone.

Put together, this has seen the US and NATO sending 17,000 anti-tank weapons and 2,000 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, for instance. An international coalition of nations is also willingly arming the Ukrainian resistance, including the UK, Australia, Turkey and Canada.

This is a major boon for the world’s largest defence contractors. To give just a couple of examples, Raytheon makes the Stinger missiles, and jointly with Lockheed Martin makes the Javelin anti-tank missiles being supplied by the likes of the US and Estonia.

Both US groups, Lockheed and Raytheon shares are up by around 16% and 3% respectively since the invasion, against a 1% drop in the S&P 500, as you can see in the chart below.

BAE Systems, the largest player in the UK and Europe, is up 26%. Of the world’s top five contractors by revenue, only Boeing has dropped, due to its exposure to airlines among other reasons.

Defence company share prices vs S&P 500

Orange = Lockheed Martin; cyan = Boeing; yellow = Raytheon; indigo = BAe Systems; purple = Northrop Grumman; blue = S&P 500. Trading View

Opportunity knocks

Ahead of the conflict, top western arms companies were briefing investors about a likely boost to their profits. Gregory J Hayes, the chief executive of US defense giant Raytheon, stated on a January 25 earnings call:

We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE … And of course, the tensions in eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defence spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.

Even at that time, the global defense industry had been forecast to rise 7% in 2022. The biggest risk to investors, as explained by Richard Aboulafia, managing director of US defense consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, is that “the whole thing is revealed to be a Russian house of cards and the threat dissipates.”

With no signs of that happening, defense companies are benefiting in several ways. As well as directly selling arms to the warring sides and supplying other countries that are donating arms to Ukraine, they are going to see extra demand from nations such as Germany and Denmark who have said they will raise their defense spending.

The overall industry is global in scope. The US is easily the world leader, with 37% of all arms sales from 2016-20. Next comes Russia with 20%, followed by France (8%), Germany (6%) and China (5%).

Beyond the top five exporters are also many other potential beneficiaries in this war. Turkey defied Russian warnings and insisted on supplying Ukraine with weapons including hi-tech drones – a major boon to its own defence industry, which supplies nearly 1% of the world market.

And with Israel enjoying around 3% of global sales, one of its newspapers recently ranan article that proclaimed: “An Early Winner of Russia’s Invasion: Israel’s Defense Industry.”

As for Russia, it has been building up its own industry as a response to Western sanctions dating back to 2014. The government instituted a massive import substitution programme to reduce its reliance on foreign weaponry and expertise, as well as to increase foreign sales. There have been some instances of continued licensing of arms, such as from the UK to Russia worth an estimated £3.7 million, but this ended in 2021.

As the second biggest arms exporter, Russia has targeted a range of international clients. Its arms exports did fall 22% between 2016-2020, but this was mainly due to a 53% reduction in sales to India. At the same time, it dramatically enhanced its sales to countries such as China, Algeria and Egypt.

According to a US congressional budget report: “Russian weaponry may be less expensive and easier to operate and maintain relative to western systems.” The largestRussian defence firms are the missile manufacturer Almaz-Antey (sales volume $6.6 billion), United Aircraft Corp (US$4.6 billion) and United Shipbuilding Corp ($4.5 billion).

In the face of Putin’s imperialism, there are limits to what can be achieved. There appears little credible possibility for Ukraine to demilitarize in the face of Russia’s continued threat.

There have nevertheless been some efforts to de-escalate the situation, with NATO, for example, very publicly rejecting the request of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to establish a no-fly zone. But these efforts are undermined by the huge financial incentives on both sides for increasing the level of weaponry.

What the west and Russia share is a profound military industrial complex. They both rely on, enable and are influenced by their massive weapons industries. This has been reinforced by newer hi-tech offensive capabilities from drones to sophisticated AI-guided autonomous weapons systems.

If the ultimate goal is de-escalation and sustainable peace, there is a need for a serious process of attacking the economic root causes of this military aggression. President Joe Biden has said that the US will directly sanction the Russian defense industry, making it harder for them to obtain raw materials and sell their wares internationally to reinvest in more military equipment.

Having said that, this may create a commercial opportunity for Western contractors. It could leave a temporary vacuum for US and European companies to gain a further competitive advantage, resulting in an expansion of the global arms race and creating an even greater business incentive for new conflicts.

Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US-made Javelin missiles during military exercises in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, on December 23, 2021. Photo: Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service

In the aftermath of this war, we should explore ways of limiting the power and influence of this industry. This could include international agreements to limit the sale of specific weapons, multilateral support for countries that commit to reducing their defense industry, and sanctioning arms companies that appear to be lobbying for increased military spending.

More fundamentally, it would involve supporting movements that challenge the further development of military capabilities.

Clearly, there is no easy answer and it will not happen overnight, but it is imperative for us to recognize as an international community that long-lasting peace is impossible without eliminating as much as possible the making and selling of weapons as a lucrative economic industry.

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Peter Bloom is Professor of Management, University of Essex.

Featured image: F-15 Eagles from the 493rd Fighter Squadron at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, taxi to the runway during the final day of Anatolian Eagle June 18, 2015, at 3rd Main Jet Base, Turkey. The 493rd FS received the 2014 Raytheon Trophy as the U.S. Air Force’s top fighter squadron. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Eric Burks)

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First published on March 13, 2022

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“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine  

As a former officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, I am appalled at the direction this great nation has taken. If someone had told me twenty-five years ago that one day citizens of Canada would be arrested for peacefully demonstrating in the streets of our nation’s capital, I would not have believed it possible. And yet here we are today, watching the government shred our Charter of Rights and Freedoms by threatening and trampling—sometimes literally with police horses—Canadians who wish to send a message of love and a plea for freedom.

@benswann___ Police in Ottawa Trample Peaceful Protestors With Horses #Protesters #Trampling #Ottawa ♬ original sound – Ben Swann

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has subjected 38 million people to the first and only invocation of the sweeping Emergencies Act we have ever seen in this country. Shockingly, he has done so without any justification. Even more egregiously, he has asserted these powers in order to solve a problem that he himself created and deliberately exacerbated. 

Both before and after he made this unprecedented motion—which the House of Commons approved on February 21, 2022, but which was rejected by the Senate two days later—Trudeau has been acting equal parts coward and tyrant. He has refused to engage in negotiations—or, for that matter, in any dialogue whatsoever—with representatives for hundreds of thousands of working-class protesters, deeming them a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views.” What he means is that they do not share the vision of his puppet-masters at Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF).

Throughout the thus-far-month-long standoff, the Prime Minister has uttered a string of pejoratives, painting anyone who dares dissent from his (read: the WEF’s) technocratic agenda and totalitarian tactics as a “racist,” a “misogynist,” a “terrorist.” He has even resorted to the vile term “Nazism” as an excuse to dodge face-to-face meetings with his Canadian brothers and sisters from all walks of life. Rather than listening to what they have to say, as a true leader would, he has treated citizens with callous, arrogant disregard for their human rights, their legitimate demands, and their state-imposed suffering.

Klaus Schwab on Trudeau’s loyalty to the World Economic Forum & not to the Canadian people. pic.twitter.com/8VaTKMAnb6

— TheNo1Waffler (@TheNo1Waffler) February 15, 2022

All of this is to say that, from everything I have seen or studied, the current regime in Ottawa has become the most dangerous, lawless government in Canada’s 155-year history as an independent nation. Over the past two years, it has displayed a wanton disregard for the rule of law and the legislative process, putting in place mandates that have not been voted upon by Parliament. In so doing, Trudeau and his cabinet have illegally and incrementally restricted the rights and freedoms of all Canadian citizens.

To wit: In the last two years, the Prime Minister, his administration, and his Liberal Party have been relentlessly coercing Canadians into being violated with an experimental injection that is neither safe nor effective. 

To wit: In the same two years, rates of small business failures, depression, suicide, domestic violence, and deaths-by-overdose have skyrocketed across the nation.

To wit: In the past month alone, peaceful protestors—including sympathetic military and police veterans—have been beaten, harshly shoved to the ground, psychologically intimidated, and verbally threatened for exercising their constitutional right to assemble and speak freely. 

To wit: In the past week, the Trudeau government has invoked the Emergencies Act and has used it to prepare and execute—even before waiting for ratification by Parliament—a ruthless, privacy-invading plan to track down and disclose the personal information of citizens who financially contributed to Freedom Convoy 2022 or who attended the Ottawa protest—and freeze the bank accounts of some of them.

Thus, even though the Emergencies Act was defeated in the Senate, I believe a new era of authoritarian control is sweeping through our nation’s halls of power. This control grid has been designed to work in concert with the equally authoritarian technocratic agenda of the WEF.

Like most governments in the West, the ruling party in Canada has been heavily infiltrated by members who subscribe to the WEF’s “Great Reset.” Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder and executive chairman, admitted as much in a 2017 interview, when he boasted:

“Yesterday, I was at the reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I would know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are for or are actually Young Leaders of the WEF.”

Sure enough, a list of names on a WEF sister website reveals that both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland are graduates of the influential Forum of Young Global Leaders. (Freeland is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and four years ago gave a talk to that globalist body.) Yet, despite such easily verified evidence, “fact checkers” and Ottawa officials call the existence of this group of globalist technocrats-in-training a “conspiracy theory.” 

Given that the Liberal Party has fallen under the WEF’s spell, it should come as no surprise to see the government now fast-tracking brand-new vaccination regulations to be added to the Canada Labour Code. Once implemented, these regulations will require all federal employers and federally regulated industries to mandate and enforce the COVID-19 “vaccination” of employees as a condition of employment. (I put “vaccination” in quote marks because the mRNA doses are actually a gene-altering therapy, not a traditional vaccine that is said to immunize against a disease.) Never before have Canada’s federal workers been required to undergo vaccination to keep their jobs. 

Of even more concern is that the soon-to-be-adopted federal vaccination regulations will supersede the provincial governments’ longstanding authority over and administration of healthcare.

Why would such a change in the administrative structure be taking place?

I believe it’s because passing the buck to the federal government provides a great excuse for provincial premiers to relax their unpopular vaccine passport requirements for all Canadians who want to travel and enter public spaces.

The impeccable timing of this change in policy will take the pressure off their political fortunes—a kind of sure-win strategy for the upcoming provincial elections set to take place between June and December of 2022. The unsuspecting voters will be deceived into believing they are free from the shackles of the vaccine passport, when in fact only the goalposts have been moved. 

But that is not the worst of it. No, the federal workers’ vaccine mandate and the expected post-elections imposition of a vaccine passport at the provincial and/or federal level are just the beginning of a far more sinister plan.

What Lies Ahead

These envisioned edicts in Canada are simply the initial steps Trudeau and fellow globalist technocrats are taking in their attempt to enslave all the planet’s inhabitants—except, of course, their own kind.

But even if the vaccine passport plan is dropped in Canada and elsewhere, what will definitely come to pass, as sure as night follows day, is a worldwide digital ID system. My confidence in making that claim stems from the constantly articulated aim of the WEF—and of all the central banks—to implement a global system in which everyone’s personal data will be incorporated into the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) network. 

Once that goal is accomplished, every aspect of our lives will be controlled, from womb to crematorium, by the so-called 1% who run the world’s most influential institutions and comprise its bluest bloodlines.

(Yes, bloodlines. As in the Rockefellers, Morgans, du Ponts, Rothschilds, British royals, and Dutch royals, to name a few of the supposedly superior families whose wealth and power have been dominating the global population for centuries.) 

What do I mean by “every aspect of our lives”?

For starters, what we can purchase with our CBDC money.

And from there . . . whom we may—or may not—associate with. How much electricity we can use in our (rental) dwellings. What we are allowed to read, see, hear, say—and even eat.

Whether and where we can travel. The list of “forbiddens” will keep growing. And so will the social demerits we pile up for bad behavior. That is, for disobeying our slave masters. A similar version of this scheme already exists in China. 

I don’t mean to sound hopeless. Despite this bleak peek at an economy being purposely destroyed by the “Build Back Better” architects and engineers at the WEF (and, not to be forgotten, at its parent, the United Nations), I do not think we should despair. For, believe it or not, we are beginning to win the battle for freedom in Canada and in other countries. 

It helps that more of us than ever before are “awake” to the globalists’ intentions. Our ranks will only expand in coming months as more and more of the wrongdoing at the top is exposed. (Thankfully, the sunlight of truth is the best disinfectant.) 

Moreover, Canadian politicians’ wild misuse of state authority is a sure sign of their desperation—a desperation born of their futile attempt to stop the sudden crumbling of the pseudo-pandemic narrative. The COVID-19 story has been a ruse from its inception, planned over many decades and constructed on a bed of lies. In the end, the current Canadian government, like so many rotten regimes in the past, will be relegated to the dustbin of history. 

I implore all active members of Canada’s military and police forces to uphold the highest law of our land.

Promise you will never forget your solemnly sworn oath to defend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Your country is depending upon you to guard it well.

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David Skripac has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Aerospace Engineering. He served as a Captain in the Canadian Forces for nine years. During his two tours of duty in the Air Force, he flew extensively in the former Yugoslavia as well as in Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.

He is author of a recently published e-book, “Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified” and a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified. Are We Witnessing Humanity’s March Toward Extinction? Viruses Are Our Friends, Not Our Foes

Author: David Skripac

Click here to read the e-Book.

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A sometimes overlooked factor which influenced the Nazi-Soviet War is the effects of the weather, chiefly the rain, ice and snow, the type of conditions for which the Russian or Soviet climate was famous for.

It must be mentioned, however, that the adverse climatic situation had started to impact on the Nazi-led invasion in October 1941, four months into the attack, when Adolf Hitler‘s forces had by then expected to be victorious, but instead were pressed for time. The weather only became an issue because the invasion had not gone as planned.

Why were the Germans pressed for time? In the main because of the strategic blunders, committed by the German high command and Hitler; between the dates of 22 June 1941 when the invasion was launched across an enormously broad front, which ultimately weakened the force of the blow; and on 21 August 1941, when Hitler postponed the advance on the all important Moscow for a month and a half, sending his divisions to the north (Leningrad) and south (the Ukraine) in what proved a critical mistake.

 

Taking these causes into account, the suggestion is inaccurate that either heavy rainfall, or freezing cold, were primarily responsible for Operation Barbarossa‘s failure. Before analysing German misfortune regarding the weather, it can be noted that Hitler initially got lucky with what he believed, to the end, was the late start of his invasion.

Barbarossa had been scheduled to commence on 15 May 1941, but this was too early for an attack on Russia to proceed (Goodspeed, The German Wars, p. 390). Having not been informed of the relevant weather reports, Hitler was unaware that the spring of 1941 was exceptionally wet in the western USSR, including the eastern half of Poland, which the USSR occupied as part of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Many of the Polish-Russian river valleys were still flooded in late May and early June 1941, such as the strategically placed Bug river, which flows for almost 500 miles across Poland, western Ukraine and south-western Belarus. Barbarossa, therefore, could not have been successfully executed until weeks after 1 June 1941.

Due to the April 1941 Wehrmacht offensives in Yugoslavia and Greece, the attack on the Soviet Union was delayed for 5 and a half weeks (38 days). It has been claimed down the years that this hold up was fatal to German plans, an attractive idea, but something quite different is the case. Military historian Donald J. Goodspeed observed “since the initial thrust had to go rapidly to yield the best results, Hitler probably gained more than he lost by the postponement”.

This was because the ground in the western Soviet Union had dried out by 22 June 1941. There were no overflowing rivers or flooded fields in sight. The hard, flat surfaces were suitable for the panzer formations to advance relatively unhindered, at 30 miles per hour, inflicting terrible damage on the Soviet military. German Army Group Centre reached the Belarusian capital of Minsk, on just day 6 of the invasion. In the weeks to come the strategic errors and, to a lesser extent, growing Soviet resistance, the vast terrain and poor weather would lead to the slowing of the German advance.

Overall, the Red Army’s performance in 1941 and into 1942 was decidedly inept, many of its divisions suffering from poor morale and training. This was not the typical Soviet soldier’s fault. The culpability lay mainly with Joseph Stalin, for decimating the Red Army high command of experienced officers with his purges. British scholar Evan Mawdsley noted, “Many Soviet soldiers fought badly in 1941 or surrendered without a fight, demoralized troops in a demoralized society”.

There was some fierce Red Army resistance on display from June 1941, but this was not a widespread occurrence along the front, and should be put into perspective. The statistics on casualties demonstrate that the Nazi-Soviet War was one-sided in its opening months. By the end of September 1941, according to Mawdsley the Germans had inflicted 2,050,000 personnel losses on the Red Army, while the invaders by then had suffered 185,000 losses (a ratio of 11:1 in favour of the Germans). The casualty figures for the remainder of 1941, and for the first 6 months of 1942, continued to heavily favour the Wehrmacht, hovering at a ratio of between 7:1 and 8:1.

In the closing weeks of 1941, the Russian rains and debilitating winter can be regarded as secondary factors in Barbarossa’s demise. Yet, as stated, the inclement weather still contributed to the Wehrmacht’s failure in toppling the USSR. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Stalin’s top wartime commander, wrote in his memoirs,

“For the benefit of those who are inclined to hide behind the mud, as the real reason for the Germans’ defeat near Moscow, I would like to add that the period of slush in October 1941 was comparatively short. Cold weather set in and snow fell in early November, making the terrain and roads passable everywhere”.

Zhukov’s viewpoint is accurate relating to the mud; though he does not mention quite how severe the winter of 1941-42 was, a subject which will be discussed further on here. The winter that was to come shortened what the Russians call the Rasputitsa, when the rains turn poor quality roads, pathways and fields into rivers of mud. Zhukov reminisced how the mud stuck to everything, from human feet “to the wheels of the barrows” and “the blades of the spades”.

Meanwhile, on the opposing side to Zhukov was the Austrian-born SS lieutenant Otto Skorzeny. Like Zhukov, Skorzeny was located on the frontline in 1941. Skorzeny wrote in his memoirs that rainfall did not arrive near Moscow until “October 19” when “torrential rain fell on the area of Army Group Center, which in three days literally sank into the morass”. Hitler had already said in August 1941 that the “autumn rain season of the Moscow region begins about mid-October”.

The autumn Rasputitsa lasted for 3 weeks, until 10 November 1941. Even before 10 November the mud was solidifying, with the temperature dropping considerably in the first days of November. The colder conditions were at first welcomed by German soldiers, who had no idea of the winter that lay in store. Skorzeny wrote, “We thought: long live the cold! It froze during the night of November 6 and 7. Slowly the supplies began to flow again. We received ammunition, fuel, some food and cigarettes. Finally the wounded could be evacuated, and preparations were made for the final offensive”.

With the Rasputitsa at its worst during the second half of October 1941, there is no doubt it had a very serious impact on the German invasion. The following August of 1942, on the 9th of that month, Hitler insisted, “Had it not been for the rain and mud last October, we should have been in Moscow in no time. We have now learnt that the moment the rain comes, we must stop everything”.

Eminent climatologists Hermann Flohn and Jehuda Neumann, in a co-authored study on how the weather impacted the Nazi-Soviet War, recognised that “At the time of WWII, there were very few paved roads in the USSR. Rains and low evaporation rates of the fall season would turn unhardened roads and fields into quagmires, in which many of the tanks, pieces of heavy artillery, and other mechanized transports would dig their own graves by trying to move on”.

The respite gave the Soviets time to strengthen their rearguard. In the first fortnight of November 1941, the Kremlin dispatched 21 fresh divisions from Siberia and Central Asia to the Moscow front, the sort of reserves which the Germans did not have.

The Rasputitsa also impinged on Soviet divisions but, altogether, the inhospitable surfaces had a more negative outcome for the attackers which was inevitable. Fighting a war based largely on defence in the early 1940s, the Red Army was less reliant on mobility than the Germans. Russian tanks, like the T-34, had wider tracks than the panzers and they moved more efficiently across the soggy soil. Supplies and logistics were not as great an issue for the Russians, who had a working railway system directly behind them, while the German lines were increasingly stretched.

In the first half of October 1941, the Germans had almost annihilated the defences in front of Moscow, destroying 86 Soviet divisions around the Russian towns of Vyazma and Briansk, both about 130 miles from the capital. When the rain clouds arrived on 19 October, Army Group Centre on that day captured Mozhaisk, just 65 miles west of Moscow. It is little wonder that Zhukov considered the dates, from the 10th to the 20th of October 1941, as the most dangerous time for the Red Army in the war.

The Red Army’s resistance was at a low ebb by mid-October. With the town of Mozhaisk under German control, the road to Moscow lay open. Skorzeny believed at this period, “We were convinced that we would be in Moscow at the beginning of November”.

The earlier strategic errors, committed by the Nazi hierarchy, now caught up with them. Frontline commanders were aware that rainfall was coming. One Wehrmacht general recalled how “the reality far exceeded our worst expectations”; but he remembered too that the rains began “slowly enough in mid-October” and “became steadily more intense”. The rainfall’s slow start partially enabled the German 6th Army to take the Ukrainian metropolis of Kharkov, the USSR’s 4th largest city, on 24 October 1941. Forty-five miles north of Kharkov, the Germans also captured on 24 October Belgorod, a medieval Russian city.

The Wehrmacht victories then began to dry up, with the German approach halted by the mud as the climatologists, Flohn and Neumann, have highlighted. In early November with the mud hardening, the Germans were able to sort out their transportation lines. The advance on Moscow did not resume in full flow until 15 November 1941. By then it was too late. Hindsight is always useful but with the biting cold and snow emerging, the German offensive should not have recommenced at all in 1941. On the night of 11 November, the temperature dropped suddenly to minus 20 degrees Celsius.

Flohn and Neumann have outlined in their paper that the Russian winter of 1941-42 “turned out to be one of the most severe winters on record” and “there is no comparison between German and Russian winters; even a ‘normal’ Russian winter would be considered a very cold winter in Germany”.

A table produced in the Flohn-Neumann study provides the figures regarding winter temperatures in Moscow, for example, compared to other winters in the capital. Temperature recordings in Moscow, for November 1941, show that month was on average 6.8 degrees Celsius colder when compared to November 1940. December 1941 in Moscow was, on average, 5.2 degrees Celsius colder in comparison to December 1940. January 1942 was 6 degrees colder than January 1941, February 1942 was 1.2 degrees colder than February 1941, and March 1942 was 3.4 degrees colder than March 1941.

It is also worth comparing the winters of 1941-42 to 1939-40, in order to provide a broader picture. November 1941 in Moscow was on average 4.7 degrees Celsius colder than November 1939. December 1941 was 5.4 degrees colder than December 1939. January 1942 was 0.8 degrees colder than January 1940. February 1942 had the exact same average temperature as February 1940, and March 1942 was 4.5 degrees colder than March 1940.

The winter of 1939-40 was somewhat colder than 1940-41, but still nowhere as severe as 1941-42, when the war was raging beside Moscow. The average temperature in Moscow for November 1941, which takes into account both day time and night time recordings, was minus 5.3 degrees Celsius. December 1941 showed an average temperature of minus 12.8 degrees.

In January 1942, it dropped again to minus 20.2 degrees Celsius in Moscow. February 1942 showed a recording of minus 11.8 degrees. Even March 1942 had a well below zero reading, with an average temperature of minus 9.7 degrees. This winter was extraordinarily brutal and nor were the above temperatures limited to the Moscow region. Similar figures were posted at Leningrad, over 400 miles from Moscow. By 20 February 1942 the Germans had suffered 112,627 cases of frostbite.

Hitler, who at length was examining meteorological studies and forecasts at the Wolf’s Lair, continually declared the winter of 1941-42 to be  “the worst in 150 years, and had come on four weeks earlier than expected”. This was perhaps only a slight exaggeration, and the Flohn-Neumann paper would add weight to Hitler’s argument. Nevertheless, Hitler, like Napoleon before him, was exploiting the weather as the chief reason for the inability to conquer Russia. The weather conditions, as mentioned earlier, were a secondary factor in Barbarossa’s derailing.

A significant part of the Ukrainian population, in the centre and west of the country, greeted the Wehrmacht and SS soldiers as “liberators” in the summer of 1941. This was particularly so in western Ukrainian cities like Lvov (Lviv) – where many of its citizens warmly welcomed the fascist forces from 30 June 1941, as the gold and blue Ukrainian flag flew beside the Nazi Swastika. Lvov’s Jewish community, aware of the racist roots of Nazism, remained fearfully at home.

For the German soldiers, when night came the pain was really felt. Late on 4 December 1941, the thermometer near Moscow sank to minus 31 degrees Celsius. The following night, it dropped again to minus 36 degrees. Flohn and Neumann wrote that these temperatures “gravely hit the German armies that were not appropriately clothed, and which were not equipped with armaments, tanks and motorized vehicles that could properly function even in a ‘normal’ winter in the northern parts of the USSR, let alone a winter as rigorous as that of 1941-42”.

Similar to the Rasputitsa, the Soviets did not suffer as much as the invaders during the cold. They had much greater quantities of warm clothing, anti-freeze for their tanks and lubricants for their guns, etc. They were closer to home and used to fighting in the winter, having experienced such a conflict in Finland just 2 years before (the Winter War). Night time temperatures would sink lower still in the coldest month of all, January 1942.

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Shane Quinn is a Journalist and renowned Historian, focussing on geopolitics and the history of World War II, based in Ireland. 

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

Sources

J. Neumann and H. Flohn, Great Historical Events That Were Significantly Affected by the Weather: Part 8, Germany’s War on the Soviet Union, 1941–45. Long-range Weather Forecasts for 1941–42 and Climatological Studies, American Meteorological Society, June 1987, Jstor

Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Hodder Arnold, 23 Feb. 2007)

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

Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of Victory: The Autobiography of General Georgy Zhukov (Pen & Sword Military, 3 Feb. 2020)

Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, New Foreword by Gerhard L. Weinberg (Enigma Books, 30 April 2008)

Otto Skorzeny, My Commando Operations: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando (Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1 Jan. 1995)

Alexander Hill, “’General Mud’ has Usually Been on Russia’s Side in War. Not This Time”, Slate Magazine, 11 March 2022

Christoph Mick, Lemberg, Lwow, and Lviv 1914-1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (Purdue University Press, 30 Nov. 2015)

John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 3 Feb. 2007)

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The following article documents the failure on the part of  Russia’s Central Bank to secure control over its gold and  foreign currency assets.

Only 21.7% of Russia’s Central Bank reserves are deposited in Russia. Our thanks to Statista for bring this article to our attention.

With the sanctions regime, a large share of the Russian Central Bank’s gold and forex deposits will be affected. See  the analysis by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.

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According to a now unavailable report by Russia’s Central Bank saved by internet archive Wayback Machine, China was the single-biggest foreign holder of Russian central bank reserves as of June 30, 2021. 13.8 percent of the total of Russia’s reserves, held in gold and foreign currency, was located in China, roughly the same share of assets held in Chinese currency Yuan Renminbi.

The biggest share of reserves was that held in Russia itself – in the form of gold, making up 21.7 percent of reserves. With the sanctions against its central bank progressing, this means Russia would likely remain in charge of around one third of its currently $630 billion strong reserves through domestic gold and Chinese Yuan. The location of another 10 percent of reserves are not specified by the report, while 5 percent are held by international financial institutions.

EU countries, along with the UK, U.S. and Canada, on Saturday moved to freeze assets under their jurisdiction associated with Russia’s central bank. According to the latest report, around 25 percent of Russia’s reserve assets were held in France, Germany and Austria. The total reserves held in Euro stood at around 32 percent.

Following the de-dollarization of Russia’s reserves over the past years, dollar assets made up only around 16 percent of Russia’s stockpile. The U.S. was holding only 6.6 percent of Russia’s reserves as of last year, with other dollar reserves held elsewhere. In Japan, it is the other way around as the country holds more Russian reserves (10 percent) than are in its currency. Japan said on Monday it was also coordinating with the G7 on releasing sanctions against Russia’s central bank.

More than three quarters of Russia’s central bank reserves are foreign currency assets. Around half are foreign currency securities, like government bonds, which never leave their country of issuance. Around 25 percent are tied to foreign national banks, private foreign banks, the Bank of International Settlements and the IMF. On top of the approximately 20 percent held in gold, additional small amounts exist in IMF SDR reserve assets, reserves held for Russia by the IMF and reverse repo securities, which Russia has sold but is contracted to buy back.

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Katharina Buchholz is a Data Journalist. [email protected]

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The spike protein present in Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines is one of the most bioactive and potentially damaging substances known to mankind. It penetrates the blood-brain barrier, cell nucleus and even affects DNA replication.

The spike protein appears to reprogram the immune system in a strange way. The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against the COVID-19 virus has been shown to reprogram both adaptive and innate immune responses. When it penetrates the cell nuclei, the free-floating spike protein inhibits DNA repair. (Related: Pfizer vaccine data shows far more damaging side effects than initially expected.)

There had been immune system problems in the vaccinated, and it is becoming apparent that they do not actually develop broad natural immunity. Instead, they produce more S antibodies against the spike protein that they were originally vaccinated with.

A recent surveillance report from the U.K. Health Security Agency showed that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following two doses of the vaccine.

This means that the vaccines interfere with the immune system’s ability to produce antibodies against the virus following infection. In the case of the N antibody, this is shown to be against the nucleocapsid protein, which serves as the shell of the virus and is an important part of the immune system response of the unvaccinated population. (Related: After you are vaccine damaged, if you complain about symptoms you will be REQUIRED to take psychiatric medications until your “disorder” is cured.)

If any mutations to the spike protein of the COVID virus occur in the future, the vaccinated will be more vulnerable and may possibly be unprotected due to their inability to produce the N antibody.

Meanwhile, the unvaccinated would have much better immunity to any mutations due to their ability to produce both S and N antibodies after infection.

America’s Front Line Doctors also warned that vaccines are turning people’s bodies into walking spike protein factories, which causes the body to create antibodies to them.

“First, these vaccines ‘mis-train’ the immune system to recognize only a small part of the virus [the spike protein]. Variants that differ, even slightly, in this protein are able to escape the narrow spectrum of antibodies created by the vaccines,” AFLDS explained. “Second, the vaccines create ‘vaccine addicts,’ meaning persons become dependent upon regular booster shots because they have been ‘vaccinated’ only against a tiny portion of a mutating virus.”

The group also cited Australian Health Minister Dr. Kerry Chant, who said that COVID will become endemic and people will have to get used to taking endless vaccines.

Finally, there is the simple fact that the vaccines do not, in any way, prevent infection in the nose and upper airways, which is where fully vaccinated people tend to show the highest viral loads.

Immune problems and other vaccine infections

Vaccinated individuals have also encountered immune problems and reinfections. These conditions, dubbed VAIDS (or Vaccine Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), have been very concerning as they could be damaging to individuals.

While not an official scientific term, it is important to bring attention to VAIDS, especially for those who are concerned about the immune health of their vaccinated loved ones.

In late January, an anti-mandate rally in Italy reiterated the claim that COVID-19 vaccines were toxic and that they could cause a variety of medical catastrophes down the line.

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Two leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed the lies of mainstream media about how Russia is conducting the Ukraine war in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict, writes Joe Lauria.

The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war.

President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin earlier this month. (The administration plan is to bring down the Russian government through a ground insurgency and economic war, not a direct military one.)

But pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and especially the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. (Secretary of State Antony Blinken who initially backed a plan to send NATO planes from Poland to Ukraine has backed down and now opposes the no-fly zone.) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.

(The Pentagon’s mettle will be tested if there is a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine. Biden has said Russia would be a “severe price” but who the perpetrator would be might be murky.)

Meanwhile, Western corporate media, depending almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources, report that Russia is losing the war, with its military offensive “stalled,” and in frustration has deliberately targeted civilians and flattened cities.

Biden has bought into this part of the story, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” He has also said that Russia is planning a “false flag” chemical attack to pin on Ukraine.

But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying,

“The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added:

“We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

The article says:

“As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). …

A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

‘I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,’ says the DIA analyst. ‘But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.’”

A second retired U.S. Air Force officer says:

“I’m frustrated by the current narrative—that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, that it is demolishing cities, and that Putin doesn’t care. Such a distorted view stands in the way of finding an end before true disaster hits or the war spreads to the rest of Europe. I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so. In fact, I’d say that Russia could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”

These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.

Until these Pentagon leaks it was difficult to confirm that Russia was entirely telling the truth and that corporate media were publishing fables cooked up by Ukraine’s publicity machine.

No Evidence of Chemicals

The second article directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported:

“The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defense official said.”

It quoted the Pentagon official as saying,

“There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.” Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published the Reuters article, which appeared in the more obscure U.S. News and World Report. 

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story — even if it could lead to the most devastating consequences in history.

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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: The Pentagon. (Source: Joe Lauria)

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***

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on March 23 that natural gas payments from so-called unfriendly countries will be made in rubles from now on. He stressed however that Russia will continue to supply gas to other countries according to the volume and price specified in previously signed contracts. With Western countries making it difficult for Russia to trade in dollars, euros and pounds, there was no choice left but for gas trade to be conducted in rubles – which will not only ultimately benefit Russia in the long run, but also China.

By selling gas, oil and other products in rubles, it limits, or perhaps even entirely rules out the freezing of Gazprom’s accounts, thus protecting this money from Western sanctions. But to attain rubles to make payments to begin with, so-called unfriendly countries will need to sell foreign currency on the stock exchange. In this way, Russia’s revenue will not only be directly from Gazprom, but also from the Russian foreign exchange market. It is hoped that such a measure will lead to a demand in rubles, thus supporting the Russian monetary system.

The biggest issue Russia faces is whether Europe will instead buy energy from elsewhere, even at a higher price. None-the-less, it does express Moscow’s intentions to reciprocate and respond to economic provocations made by the West, especially as it is very likely that this payment policy will lead to an increase in the price of gas in the European market.

In response to Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, Western countries have announced large-scale sanctions against the country, mainly in the banking sector and the supply of high-tech products. Moscow calls these measures an economic war and listed 48 countries including the US, Canada, EU member states, the UK, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore as “unfriendly countries.”

In 2021, these hostile countries paid roughly $69 billion for gas from Gazprom, the Russian state-owned company. To make a similar scale of payments this year, countries will have to procure around 6-7 trillion rubles. As Quartz explained, as yet,

“most of these ‘hostile nations’ buying Russian energy have few options but to continue their purchases. If the demand for rubles steadily increases as a result, the drastic fall in the currency’s value will halt and even reverse. After Putin made his announcement, the ruble gained 7% against the dollar.”

The outlet also explained that

“if Western governments pursue these avenues, the Central Bank of Russia doesn’t have to spend its own dollars and euro reserves to prop up the ruble—which is just as well, since more than half of Russia’s foreign reserves have been frozen by sanctions.”

German experts have already said that technically, paying in rubles is possible but takes time to create some additional mechanisms to facilitate the attainment and payment of rubles. However, the decision of EU countries will not only depend on the technical aspects.

US President Joe Biden will most likely continue to persuade the EU to give up Russian energy sources, even though this is practically impossible despite the American assurances. However, with Europe unable to realistically cut itself from Russian energy in the short and medium term, the American suggestion will only lead to a weakened European economy as they will inevitably pay exorbitant prices for alternative energy sources.

Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius has warned, according to FT, that a European ban on Russian energy imports would cause a 2.2% hit to production and trigger a eurozone recession. In addition, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak has been telling colleagues that the hit would be larger and would quickly cause a downturn worth £70 billion, or 3%, of gross domestic product in the UK, given its still-close ties to the continental European economy.

This comes as Russia announced that it will diversify its oil and gas supplies if Western countries completely refuse to import. In preparation for this, Russian companies have been developing new logistics plans. Although Russia will undoubtedly earn less, it will be able to rebuild the oil industry and the wider economy to not be so heavily hinged on the West.

In this way, it will not only be the ruble that benefits, but also the Chinese yuan. After the West froze Russia’s gold and foreign exchange reserves, many experts saw the Chinese yuan as an alternative to the dollar. China’s currency correlates with the dollar exchange rate at 97%, meaning that if the dollar rises against the ruble, then the yuan will also rise. Effectively this means that the yuan is currently almost a full replacement for the dollar.

As Quartz explained, the US and the EU may then have to run ruble exchange payments through a third, intermediary currency such as the yuan. Effectively, the Russian demand for rubles for oil and gas will stabilize the Russian currency whilst also propping up the yuan, thus weakening sanctions.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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The director of the Institute of Oncology and Radiology of Serbia explained that chemical plants and various dangerous industries were bombed, which, as she says, created an ecological catastrophe and poisoned Europe.

According to Grujičić, the use of NATO bombs with depleted uranium and the destruction of environmentally dangerous facilities during air strikes have led to Serbia being now the leader in the number of cancer deaths in Europe, with almost 60.000 new cancer patients a year.

“The North Atlantic Alliance did not pay attention to civilian casualties. Everyone knows the famous conversation between former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, who said that Belgrade would be levelled to the ground (if it does not accept the ultimatum),” Grujičić added.

“If we had a nuclear power plant, they would definitely hit it, because they attacked everything on the list of facilities dangerous for the environment. They knew that a local environmental catastrophe would be created in every oil refinery, chemical company. They did it on purpose”, she said.

Grujičić recalled that about 15 tons of depleted uranium were officially dumped on Serbia, but emphasized that “no one knows how much it really was, and it will never be known.”

“We have taken the initiative to determine with mathematical precision, not only medical, but also environmental consequences. The data we received show that the whole of Europe was polluted. Europeans who were looking forward to the bombs over Belgrade and Serbia are also endangered and do not know what they were breathing, eating, drinking,” she added.

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The U.S. justifies wars of aggression in the name of human rights. The term has no meaning domestically either, as the people’s needs are subordinated to those of the ruling class.

Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.

It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.

The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.

In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!

Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.

But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.

These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.

For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be,  just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.

The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis

The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.

Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.

The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.

War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project.

The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.

It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisies, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.

In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.

In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.

The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.

No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunkey allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.

This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War ”:

Until the philosophy

Which hold one race superior and another

Inferior

Is finally

And permanently

Discredited

And abandoned

Everywhere is war

Me say war

*

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Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the steering committee of the Black is Back Coalition.