193 UN member countries, in unison and lockstep, closed their borders, economies and live-societies. It marked the beginning of the planet’s economic and societal destruction – all for an invisible enemy, a corona virus that could never have hit the entire globe at the same time. So, what’s the plot?
On Thursday, China’s Central Committee official/Foreign Affairs Director Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will meet with Biden regime’s top “diplomat” Tony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan in Anchorage, Alaska.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his admirals are looking at a new horizon stretching through crowded seaways east from India to Japan and south from China to Australia.
Yemen’s Ansar Allah are unrelenting in their offensive, both on positions inside the country, and in attacks on Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure within the Kingdom.
China is upheld as an Enemy of America. America’s perceptions regarding China are manipulated both by the media and official government statements. This article documents the role of gallup polls in manipulating American perceptions concerning China.
More than 20 countries have either suspended or said they will delay Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccinations based on reports of deaths or injuries — in most cases related to blood clots — in healthy people who received the vaccine.
Almost forty years later: The 5000 page Saville Commission Report into the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, fails to identify who were the perpetrators, both within H.M government and the British Army.
Ten years ago, on March 19, 2011, US / NATO forces began the air-naval bombing of Libya. The war was directed by the United States, first through the Africa Command, then through NATO under US command.
The US has only one objective in Syria—regime change. The fact that it has been unable to achieve this after ten years of trying does not appear to deter the Biden administration from embracing failure.
Geert Vanden Bossche PhD, is an internationally recognised vaccine developer having worked as the head of the Vaccine Development Office at the German Centre for Infection Research.
Forced vaccination. Immunity passports. The erection of a biosecurity state. For the first time, the eugenics-infused philosophers of bioethics are on the verge of gaining real power. And the public is still largely unaware of the discussions that these academics have been engaged in for decades.
In the East Asia and Pacific region, the pandemic brought education provision in all of the 27 countries supported by UNICEF programmes to a standstill disrupting the lives and affecting the learning of over 325 million children at its peak in April 2020.
With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.
Mark Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more that six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism.
“Syria is an ancient land with a proud and forward-looking people, to which we sent mercenaries, hatred, bloodshed and destruction.
Syrians welcomed me to their country as one of their own. These are their stories; these are their voices.”
Reviews:
Mark Taliano exposes the barbarity of Washington’s latest regime change aspirations. The West’s political spin is laid bare in the words of the Syrian people.
–Felicity Arbuthnot, Veteran Middle East War Correspondent.
Canadian Mark Taliano has brought together an excellent mix of anecdotes and analysis to create a very accessible short book on the terrible Syrian conflict. It should serve as a primer for all those who feel curious, dissatisfied or cheated by the near monolithic war chorus of the western corporate media.
Mark is one of those few westerners who took the trouble to travel to Syria during this war, to talk to Syrians of all ranks and see for himself the human reality of this country which, in 2011, became the latest target of the Washington-led coalition.He deftly mixes stories from soldiers, doctors, politicians, clerics and ordinary citizens with his prior reading. That reading includes the invaluable insights of a new generation of investigative journalists, in particular Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley. Start with Mark’s first chapter ‘In Their Own Voices’ and you won’t put it down. He humanises the Syrian people, their culture and their nation in a way that is normally not permitted at wartime.
–Tim Anderson, Distinguished Author and Senior Lecturer of Political Economy, University of Sydney, Australia
Also available in PDF format delivered to your e-mail address:
The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance, by Tim Anderson
The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.
As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. This book tries to tell its story while rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, ethical principle and the search for independent evidence.
Reviews:
Tim Anderson has written the best systematic critique of western fabrications justifying the war against the Assad government. No other text brings together all the major accusations and their effective refutation. This text is essential reading for all peace and justice activists.
-James Petras, Bartle Emeritus Professor, University of Binghampton, New York.
Anderson’s excellent book is required reading for those wanting to know the true story of the imperialist proxy war waged on Syria by the U.S. and its Western and Middle Eastern puppet states. This account could also be titled “How to Destroy a Country and Lie About it”. Of course Syria is only one in a long line of countries destroyed by Washington in the Middle East and all over the Global South for more than a century.
Anderson’s analysis is particularly useful for dissecting the propaganda war waged by the U.S. to hide its active support for the vicious Islamic fundamentalists it is using in Syria. In spreading this propaganda the U.S. has been aided not only by the West’s mainstream press but also by its prominent so-called human rights organizations.
-Asad Ismi, International Affairs Correspondent for The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor.
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The Director of National Intelligence’s latest report about alleged Russian meddling in the US’ 2020 elections consists of a 15-page document which assesses with “high confidence” that President Putin “was aware of and probably directed Russia’s influence operations” aimed at shaping the outcome of America’s democratic process, including by relying on a proxy network of supposedly foreign intelligence-linked US contacts who “denigrat[ed] President Biden and the Democratic Party” in parallel with supporting former President Trump’s suspicions of mail-in ballots and social media censorship among other topics. This shockingly amounts to US spies unprecedentedly attempting to intimidate dissident Americans.
In The Words Of America’s “Intelligence Community”
What follows are pertinent excerpts from the report:
“We have high confidence in our assessment; Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect US public perceptions in a consistent manner…We assess that President Putin and other senior Russian officials were aware of and probably directed Russia’s influence operations against the 2020 US Presidential election…The primary effort the IC uncovered revolved around a narrative-that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014-alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other US officials and Ukraine. Russian intelligence services relied on Ukraine-linked proxies and these proxies’ networks-including their US contacts-to spread this narrative to give Moscow plausible deniability of their involvement.
…
Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud…Russian state media, trolls, and online proxies, including those directed by Russian intelligence, published disparaging content about President Biden, his family, and the Democratic Party, and heavily amplified related content circulating in US media, including stories centered on his son. These influence actors frequently sought out US contributors to increase their reach into US audiences. In addition to election-related content, these online influence actors also promoted conspiratorial narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic, made allegations of social media censorship, and highlighted US divisions surrounding protests about racial justice.
Russian online influence actors generally promoted former President Trump and his commentary, including repeating his political messaging on the election results; the presidential campaign; debates; the impeachment inquiry; and, as the election neared, US domestic crises…Moscow’s range of influence actors uniformly worked to denigrate President Biden after his entrance into the race. Throughout the primaries and general election campaign, Russian influence agents repeatedly spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine…Even after the election, Russian online influence actors continued to promote narratives questioning the election results and disparaging President Biden and the Democratic Party.”
21st-Century McCarthyism?
As can be clearly concluded from the above excerpts, America’s own spies openly accused dissident Americans of being Russian intelligence assets – if not outright agents – actively participating in a foreign influence operation aimed at meddling in their country’s elections.
This determination was reached solely as a result of their public criticisms of Biden, the Democrat Party, mail-in ballots, the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic (described by the author as WorldWarC), objectively existing social media censorship policies (including the undeniable example of former President Trump’s deplatforming), Antifa and “Black Lives Matter’s” HybridWarofTerroronAmerica, and the self-professed regime change “conspiracy” by a “well-connected cabal of powerful people” that Time Magazine proudly bragged about the Democrats successfully executing against Trump.
In other words, dissident Americans’ peaceful and responsible exercise of their constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech – including by repeating what their own president at the time was saying – is being held against them as supposed proof that they were secretly meddling in their elections on behalf of Russia.
This can only be described as 21st-century McCarthyism since the spy faction of America’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) is once again actively denigrating the country’s dissidents and therefore quite literally meddling in their own country’s democratic process despite ironically accusing Moscow of doing the exact same thing.
Not only is this meant to intimidate all those who dare to publicly voice their opposition to the ruling Democrat Party and its proxies (including the RINOs), but it’s also intended to revive the debunked conspiracy theory that Trump was actually a “Russian agent/asset”.
Concluding Thoughts
America is in for dark days ahead as Biden’s “Dark Winter” statement becomes a reality even quicker than some of the most critical voices such as the author himself could have predicted. The US’ spy agencies are sending the clearest signal yet that they’ll politically repress all those who dare to publicly oppose the ruling Democrat Party and its proxies.
This could predictably take the form of first harassing them with their taxes and then perhaps calling them into local FBI field offices to be interrogated, after which they might even have false espionage or other related charges filed against them in order to send a chilling message to all others. This unprecedented attack against American dissidents is arguably much worse than anything that the country ever experienced during the era of traditional McCarthyism, and it won’t improve anytime soon since the Democrats are solidly in control of the “deep state” and eager to snuff out all dissent whenever and wherever it arises.
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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.
Today March 17, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-NATO-Israel war against the people of Syria. Below is a review of Mark Taliano‘s book entitled “Voices from Syria”
Our thoughts are with the People of Syria.
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Telling the truth about the events taking place in Syria before world public opinion is an uphill battle because the real agenda of the terrorism-backers who are seeking to destroy the Middle East, must remain unspeakable.
This fact is clarified by Canadian author Mark Taliano, in his book entitled ‘Voices from Syria’ with a view to shedding light on the truth, refuting the lies, with a view to reaching global peace and destroying the cancer of terrorism.
“The ‘Global War on Terrorism’ also known as the ‘war on Terror’ is a fraud. It is literally a global war for terror. Empire creates and uses extremist terrorist proxies, including ISIS (also called by its Arabic acronym, Daesh), to advance its geopolitical goals,” Taliano says in his book, indicating that the neoconservative “West” and its allies want to destroy the Middle East so that they can control it.
Peace activist Janice Kortkamp wrote on her FB in November 2016:
FALSE: The Syrian war began when president Bashar al-Assad brutally put down peaceful protests.
TRUE: The Syrian war was planned in earnest by the US since 2005. The Syrian soldiers and police were not even allowed to carry weapons until the ‘peaceful protesters’ had slaughtered several hundreds of police and soldiers.
Scores of testimonies from Syrians, open-source western documents and historical memory are used by the Canadian author to prove that Syria, which refuses to be a vassal of US-led forces of predatory capitalism, is on the front line against the dictatorship of this globalizing economic ideology that favours the dominance of capital and markets over people and nation-state.
“Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Israel, and NATO are trying to impose this hidden driver of imperialism, called ‘International Capital’ on Syria,” the author asserts, quoting Robin Mathews as saying
“ A characteristic of imperial globalization is criminal manipulation of people and events for the profit of a few. It includes massive ‘disinformation’ about equality, benefits, social development, law, improved standards of living etc. the disinformation is spread by ‘authoritative’ news sources. In the hands of gigantic, wealthy, private corporations, globalization is a process which works to erase sovereign democracies and replace them with ‘treaties’ sub-states, economic colonies ruled by faceless, offshore, often secret, unaccountable power.”
Taliano says in the preface of his book (composed of 6 chapters) that the secular government of Syria is led by the elected president Bashar al-Assad, who is progressive and forward-looking. President al-Assad has earned the support of most Syrians by providing for them and by protecting them. Healthcare and education, including higher education, are free in Syria. Before the externally orchestrated and perpetrated war on Syria started, Syria was one of the safest countries in the world to visit.
Testimonies
Testimonies from Syrians living in Syria affirm that what is happening in the country is neither revolution nor civil war. Everybody in Syria knows that Washington is the mastermind and the main planner of the war and it supports terrorists by all means.
Those terrorists [ ISIS, al-Qaeda/ al-Nusra Front, White Helmets, Hayet Tahrir al-Sham HTS] are western proxies, none of them are moderate. They perpetrated hundreds of heinous crimes against Syrian civilians and in Syria.
A witness to the massacre at Adra area in Damascus countryside described the scene in these words:
“The ‘rebels’ began to attack the government centers and attacked the police stations- where all the policemen were killed after only a brief clash because of the large number of attackers. They (the attackers) then headed to the checkpoint located on the edge of the city before moving to the clinic where they slaughtered one from the medical staff and put his head in the popular market. They then dragged his body in front of town’s people who gathered to see what is happening. Bakery workers who resisted their machinery being taken away were roasted in their own oven. Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS fighters went from house to house with a list of names and none of those taken away then has been seen since.”
This is just one story out of hundreds of stories narrated by Syrians and obfuscated by Mainstream Media that has created a state of mass political imbecilisation amongst western media consumers.
The western media serves as an agency for imperial war rather than as an agency for truth and justice, according to Taliano, who underlined that voices of truth, justice and peace are suppressed.
Tim Anderson, Australian political economist and author, posted these words in July 2016:
“In my country (Australia) we have seen five years of a near monolithic war narrative on Syria, and associated wartime censorship of dissenting views. Although I have probably written more than any other Australian academic on the conflict in Syria I have been effectively black-listed from the Australian corporate and state media, because what I say does not fit the official line.”
Feigned humanitarianism
Moreover, the Canadian author talked in his book about feigned humanitarianism as a cover for crimes of the highest order and western crimes against law and order. He referred to Canada’s contribution to the cause of the disease metastasizing overseas when it chooses to ally itself with the cancer rather than the cure.
“The cancer is NATO and its allies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan. We are the countries funding the terrorists, and we are the cancer that wants to illegally impose regime change in Syria,” Taliano stresses, making comparison between Russia’s intervention to cure the terror disease in Syria and NATO countries’ intervention to enable and support terrorism in Syria.
Not only Syria, but also Libya, Iraq and Ukraine have been infested with terrorists to destroy these countries and subjugate the population. For example in Syria, the western terrorists attacked 67 of the country’s 94 national hospitals between 2011 and 2013.
The Canadian author mentioned a list of President al-Assad’ notable accomplishments since 2000. Among them we number: Construction and restoration of 10.000 mosques, 500 churches, 8000 schools, 2000 institutes, 40 universities besides development of tourism, public transportation.
He, in addition, elaborated strategies used by colonizers to achieve their goals in the region. These strategies are starvation, indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, illegal sanctions, and ‘divide and conquer’.
Taliano underscored that genocidal corporate media presstitutes follow the all-too-familiar script of blaming the victim for the crimes perpetrated by aggressor nations as it creates war propaganda.
He called for the need to build a consensus for truth, justice and peace, instead of building a consensus for war and first-strike nuclear attacks.
“As a first step, we would do well to boycott toxic mainstream media messaging, which favours lies, injustice and war…Mainstream media often uses public-relations-engineered sources for its stories- the ‘White Helmets’ and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) are good examples.”
“Historical memory teaches us that the dirty war against Syria is consistent with previous illegal wars of aggression and western-sourced evidence demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that we are, yet again, the terrorists,” Taliano says.
He concluded by saying in his preface:
“As a visitor I felt shame, but Syrians welcomed me as one of them.”
All in all, “Voices from Syria” is a very interesting documentary book that includes clues about lies and crimes of western media against people in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Iraq and beyond.
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
Today March 17, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-NATO-Israel war against the people of Syria.
Our thoughts are with the People of Syria.
Ten Years Ago: The onset of the The War on Syria
This article was first published on March 14, 2017
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They lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, but at least you can learn about what is going on in Syria with the help of people like Mark Taliano.
Mark, a retired Ontario teacher, visited Syria as part of the Third Tour of Peace. Through the contacts he made, he was able to write a booklet about the perspectives of Syrians under siege by the NATO/GCC assault on their country.
He discusses his book, Voices from Syria, and also the news about a team of Swedish doctors refuting the White Helmets’ pretensions of being first responders.
Excerpt from Foreword to Voices from Syria by Michel Chossudovsky:
We bring to the attention of our readers Mark Taliano’s Book entitledVoices from Syria. In contrast to most geopolitical analysts of the Middle East, Mark Taliano focusses on what unites humanity with the people of Syria in their struggle against foreign aggression. Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than five years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and more than two years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes which have largely targeted Syria’s civilian infrastructure.
Taliano refutes the mainstream media. The causes and consequences of the US-led war on Syria, not to mention the extensive war crimes and atrocities committed by the terrorists on behalf the Western military alliance are routinely obfuscated by the media. He is committed to reversing the tide of media disinformation, by reaching out to Western public opinion on behalf of the Syrian people. Voices from Syria provides a carefully documented overview of life in Syria, the day to day struggle of the Syrian people to protect and sustain their national sovereignty.
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Whenever US intelligence community reports claim foreign interference in or threats to federal elections, no credible evidence supports allegations because none exists.
House, Senate, and Mueller probes into alleged Russian US 2016 election interference ended with a collective whimper, not a bang.
Mueller’s much ado about nothing politicized probe notably stood out as a witch hunt fiasco.
His 19-lawyer team, 40 FBI special agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other professional staff spent around $25 million.
They issued 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, over 230 orders for communication records, interviewed about 500 individuals, and made 34 politicized indictments on dubious charges unconnected to his mandate.
The Mueller team discovered no evidence of Russian US election meddling, no collusion with Trump to triumph over Hillary, no obstruction of justice.
Time, energy, and millions of dollars spent amounted to a colossal waste of the above.
Whenever claims or allegations surface about Russian or other foreign interference in US election, they fabricated.
Left unexplained is why would Russia or any other country interfere in America’s one-party rule political process with two right wings?
Whenever farcical US elections are held, dirty business as usual continuity always wins.
Ordinary Americans have no say over how they’re governed or by whom.
Powerful interests decide who holds high office.
The US war party runs things, notably throughout the post-WW II period.
Its ruling authorities serve Wall Street, the military, industrial, security, media complex, and other corporate interests, along with high-net worth individuals — at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.
Americans get the best “democracy” money can buy, a fantasy version, never the real thing.
Yet on Tuesday, an unclassified version of a so-called US intelligence community assessment (ICA) maintained the myth of “foreign threats” to Election 2020.
Despite no evidence suggesting it, the report claimed — with “high confidence” — that Vladimir Putin authorized efforts to undermine Biden’s presidential campaign, saying the following:
“We assess that…Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the (Dem) Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US (sic).”
Whenever claims like the above aren’t corroborated by credible evidence, they’re groundless.
No evidence remotely suggests that Russia or any other nations ever interfered in the US electoral process — or threatened it in any way.
In response to the ICA, Russia’s Washington embassy sharply as follows, saying:
“The document prepared by the US intelligence community is yet another set of groundless accusations against our country of interfering in American internal political processes.”
“The conclusions of the report on the conduct by Russia of influence operations in America are confirmed solely by the confidence of the intelligence services in their correctness.”
“No facts or concrete evidence of such claims (are) provided.”
The March 10-dated ICA said “the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, will impose appropriate sanctions for activities determined to constitute foreign interference in a US election (sic).”
Yet the ICA also said that “(w)e have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” adding:
“Some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and results (sic).”
The ICA also dubiously claimed that Venezuela and Cuba acted in unspecified ways to “influence” Election 2020 results (sic).
Notably missing from the ICA was credible evidence to corroborate claims made.
The conclusion is self-evident.
Like virtually always before, claims about foreign interference in US elections or threats to undermine them — by Russia or other nations — are politicized rubbish when made.
They’re part of longstanding US war by other means on nations free from its control.
It’s waged by both right wings of the US war party.
Instead of fostering peace, stability, cooperative relations with other countries, and adherence to the rule of law, the US consistently goes the other way.
In so doing, it’s furthering its own decline. History’s dustbin awaits its arrival — where all former empires reside.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Geert Vanden Bossche PhD, is an internationally recognised vaccine developer having worked as the head of the Vaccine Development Office at the German Centre for Infection Research.
Coordinated Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation’s Ebola Vaccine Program and contributed to the implementation of an integrated vaccine work plan in collaboration with Global Health Partners (WHO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CDC, UNICEF), regulators (FDA) and vaccine manufacturers to enable timely deployment or stockpiling of Ebola vaccine candidates.
Highlighting the principle of using a prophylactic vaccine in the midst of a pandemic. Likely to create more more viral variants in the process.
Sharing his perspective on mass vaccination in COVID-19.
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“There is a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot.” – John F. Kennedy
On March 11, 2020, a year ago, the worldwide lockdown went into effect. 193 UN member countries, in unison and lockstep, closed their borders, economies and live-societies. It marked the beginning of the planet’s economic and societal destruction – all for an invisible enemy, a corona virus that could never have hit the entire globe at the same time.
So, what’s the plot?
In 1935, 86 years ago, Dr. Arthur Guett, Nazi Director of Public Health, said:
“The ill-conceived `love of thy neighbor’ has to disappear, especially in relation to inferior or asocial creatures. It is the supreme duty of a national state to grant life and livelihood only to the healthy and hereditarily sound portion of the people in order to secure the maintenance of a hereditarily sound and racially pure folk for all eternity….”
These words spoken almost a century ago by Dr. Guett, Adolf Hitler’s Director of Public Health, are sending shivers down the spine. Yet, they are ringing true and right down the alley of today’s Eugenists. Such thinking should be scary for the public at large – except, the public at large is being kept in the dark of what the Globalist Cabal’s real plan is behind the covid fraud.
It is three-fold – taking over total control of humanity, as in One World Order; shifting assets and resources from the middle and the bottom of society to the top few; and – drastically reducing world population.
The Video entitled Bioethics and the New Eugenics(39 min video – 8 March 2021, click below) produced by James Corbett illustrates best what the world’s eugenists have in mind, when they talk about Bioethics, Eugenics and – Death Panels.
Yes – Death Panels would decide who is to live and who is to die. The elderly, who do no longer contribute to civilization, but are rather a (cost) burden on society, should go first.
The eugenics people are talking freely about forced “euthanasia” and after-birth abortions, nothing else but infanticide, meaning killing infants, whom doctors or the “Death Panel” decide their life has no future, is not worth living, will not be contributing to society, but is rather a burden for humanity.
The age of 75 is mentioned as a possible “deadline” for people having to die. Whether those who decided this “deadline” included themselves is not known.
To come to grips with the pandemic, better called Plandemic, a massive worldwide vaccination program has been set in motion. According to Bill Gates, the world will not return to “somewhat normal” before at least 7 billion people have been vaccinated. And we are not talking about a normal or traditional vaccination. The predominant inoculations that are being promoted in the west, are mRNA-type injections.
mRNA stands for messenger ribonucleic acid. They’re single-stranded molecules that carry genetic code from DNA in a cell’s nucleus to ribosomes, which make protein in the cells. These molecules are called messenger RNA because they carry instructions for producing proteins from one part of the cell to another. www.nature.com, Nov 19, 2020
These mRNA vaxxes are experimental.
“[mRNA vaccines] prospects have swung billions of dollars on the stock market, made and imperiled scientific careers, and fueled hopes that it could be a breakthrough that allows society to return to normalcy after months living in fear” (See this).
The mRNA vaxxes have numerous serious side effects and have caused premature death, at the rate of a multiple higher than the traditional vaccines. See here and here.
This is not taking into account the potential long-term negative effects, of which there is today no experience available, but disturbing scientific predictions abound. See here Dr. Lee Merrittand more below.
Let it be clear. The push for mRNA-type vaccines only comes from the West. Russia, China, India, Iran and others have distanced themselves from this type of vaccines, which officially are not even allowed to be called vaccines, but were admitted under a special “Emergency Law” on a trial or “experimental” basis only (see this), making humans into guinea pigs.
Russia and China have developed their own tradition-based vaccines, i. e. injection of a weakened virus that will produce antibodies and trigger the immune system when it gets in contact with the real virus. Science has decades of experience with this type of preventive inoculation, but zero experience with the mRNA-type jabs.
They tell us that people in nursing homes or in hospitals with co-morbidities are the most vulnerable ones to catch covid. Therefore, they are given priority to get the jab. Is it a coincidence that these people are also the most vulnerable ones to become victims of serious “side effects” – and disproportionately many die – from the mRNA injections?
The ongoing vaccination programs everywhere in the west focus on the elderly – and the immediate death rate among vaxxed nursing home inmates, is indeed high, as shown in England, Spain and elsewhere. See thisand this.It so happens that people in nursing homes are also the least “productive” in term of contributing to societal well-being. They are a cost for society. Hence, they typically enter the attention of the eugenists.
Doesn’t this look like it’s all planned? Administering so-called vaccines (a misnomer and outright lie used by western governments) that potentially kill in the short and long-run, and that have been observed as including sterilizing and infertility agents – vaxx-injections for which western governments, US, Europe, including Switzerland – literally refuse to offer their population non-RNA alternatives, like the Russian Sputnik V and the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm?
One of the most flagrant cases is Switzerland. At the beginning of the “vaccination” campaign, when Switzerland like many other countries claimed a “shortage” of vaccines, Russia offered them Sputnik V. Switzerland apparently did not even have the curtesy to reply. In a recent press conference, the Swiss Health Minister was asked why they would not import Sputnik V. In a slightly arrogant tone, he replied, “we never even considered it.” – One cannot, but wonder why.
By the way, “shortages” are artificially induced. What is in short supply is wanted by the people. In this case, a vaccine in short supply, incites people to want it. Its mind manipulation 101. A method to increase the relatively low willingness to vaccinate.
In Germany, where the public pressure is high, and as a consequence, in the EU Commission and Parliament, the debate about approving Sputnik V has started. This all the while Sputnik V has passed WHO’s litmus test and has been permitted and is currently being used in more than two dozen countries.
The plan, as we know, is to “Reset” the world – according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) founder and CEO, Klaus Schwab, “Covid-19 – The Great Reset”. The caveat is, resetting the world in line with the methods and objectives of a super-rich financial and Big-Tech platform’s objectives – which include a massive population reduction.
This has been a little-veiled dream of Bill Gates, Rockefeller and a whole bunch of UK and US-American eugenists, who are actively at work – and the instrument to fulfill their diabolical project is the massive covid-vaccination campaign, imposed to various degrees by every one of the 193 UN member countries and by the UN body itself. Those on top of the UN and at the head of these 193 UN member governments know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.
In the meantime, several medical doctors, virologist and immunologists have broken their silence, exited the matrix and are expressing their conscience to the people, the potential victims of this massive vaccination crime.
One of them is Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, PhD. He is a vaccine research expert. He has a long list of companies and organizations he’s worked with on vaccine discovery and preclinical research, including GSK, Novartis, Solvay Biologicals, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dr Vanden Bossche also coordinated the Ebola vaccine program at GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization) in Geneva, with office buildings just next to WHO. – A coincidence?
Dr. Vanden Bossche, gave a stunning interview on 6 March 2021 on the Benefits versus Risks of mRNA-type injections.
Dr. Geert Vandem Bossche essentially says that the individual adverse effects and even deaths from the vaccines, do not provide a clue of the far bigger impending Global Catastrophe.
He said that the mRNA-type vaccines are destroying people’s immune system, and they will be utterly unable to cope with the more virulent versions of the virus that will emerge due to the vaccines. The result could result in significant levels of mortality a few months to a few years down the road after vaccination. He also said he could morally no longer remain silent.
This plays exactly into the eugenists agenda.
On March 7, 2021, Dr. Vandem Bossche, also wrote an Open Letter to WHO, calling for an immediate stop of the worldwide vaccination campaign, here. He warns, “We’re Risking Creating a Global, “Uncontrollable Monster.”
In the meantime, western countries are jumping from one wave to the next, from one lockdown to the next. Many European countries have already announced that a third wave may be not far off. Italy just announced their third-wave lockdown, covering at least the period over Easter 2021. Germany and Switzerland also warned their people of a third wave, if restrictions, aka repression, is not obeyed.
What most people do not know is that a virus infection, as is covid, doesn’t come in waves. It starts slow, then peaks, and finally it ebbs off – and is over. Call it herd immunity. This is being witnessed currently in India, whose approach of dealing with covid was and is very different from the west. It is not based on coercion into vaccination, but on treatment of the virus by traditional, inexpensive medication that has a long history of positive results of dealing with viral infections, such as Ivermectin and hydrochloroquine, and others. China also mastered their covid epidemic by medication, not by vaccination.
This is the typical graph of covid-19 in India. It peaks and then declines – and the disease is over. This is also a typical flu curve.
Below is the covid curve in Spain and is representative for many other European countries, as well as for the United States.
It is clear that the figures in the west are very much manipulated with the purpose of coercing people into accepting the vaccine.
People have a hard time understanding and accepting to what extent our western governments are “evil”, deceiving their electorate, those who pay their salaries and benefits. Once people grasp what is going on and accept the treacherous, deceptive and corrupt character of those they believed to be their leaders, the awakening may happen, and, with it, massive civil disobedience may put an end to this diabolical plan.
What has been prepared decades ago and is being played out in full sight since the beginning of 2020, looks like the world’s largest blackmail, coercion, corruption, and outright threats campaign of all times in the history of mankind.
And so far, none of the 193 UN member countries’ so-called leaders (sic) have come forward, have had the courage to follow their conscience – if they have one – and divulge to the globe’s 7.8 billion population what is going on, what is being planned by the Eugenists who raise the issue of “who is destined to die and who may live” – and why. – And who is behind it all? – Why are these heads of state following “Higher Orders” that may lead to a worldwide genocide, unknown in recent history?
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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We bring to the attention of our readers this important report by James Corbett
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At first glance, bioethics might seem like just another branch of ethical philosophy where academics endlessly debate other academics about how many angels dance on the head of a pin in far-out, science fiction like scenarios.
What many do not know, however, is that the seemingly benign academic study of bioethics has its roots in the dark history of eugenics. With that knowledge, the dangers inherent in entrusting some of the most important discussions about the life, death and health of humanity in the hands of a select few become even more apparent.
Concluding Comments of the Corbett Report on Bioethics
From its inception, the field of bioethics has taken its moral cue from the card-carrying eugenicists who founded its core institutions. For these academicians of the eugenics philosophy, the key moral questions raised by modern medical advances are always utilitarian in nature: What is the value that forced vaccination or compulsory sterilization brings to a community? Will putting lithium in the water supply lead to a happier society? Does a family’s relief at killing their newborn baby outweigh that baby’s momentary discomfort as it is murdered?
Implicit in this line of thinking are all of the embedded assumptions about what defines “value” and “happiness” and “relief” and how these abstract ideas are measured and compared. The fundamental utilitarian assumption that the individual’s worth can or should be measured against some arbitrarily defined collective good, meanwhile, is rarely (if ever) considered.
The average person, however—largely unaware that these types of questions are even being asked (let alone answered) by bioethics professors in obscure academic journals—may literally perish for their lack of knowledge about these discussions.
All things being equal, these types of ideas would likely be treated as they always have been: as a meaningless parlor game played by ivory tower academics with no power to enforce their crazy ideas. All things, however, are not equal.
Perhaps taking a page from the notebook of his brother, Rahm, about the utility of crisis in effecting societal change, Ezekiel Emanuel declared in 2011 that “we will get health-care reform only when there is a war, a depression or some other major civil unrest.” He didn’t add “pandemic” to that list of excuses, but he didn’t have to. As the events of the past year have borne out, the public are more than willing to consider the previously unthinkable now that they have been told that there is a crisis taking place.
Forced vaccination. Immunity passports. The erection of a biosecurity state. For the first time, the eugenics-infused philosophers of bioethics are on the verge of gaining real power. And the public is still largely unaware of the discussions that these academics have been engaged in for decades.
At the very least, Bill Gates can relax now: We can finally have the discussion on death panels.
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Trading places. What took so long?
From east of Suez to up the Yangtze. Customers at the bars in Beijing were celebrating but it wasn’t Britain’s pivot to Asia that had them chatting loudly and back slapping.
St Patrick’s Day, March 17, was the reason for their unmasked jollity in the bars and pubs. More than 50 years after the then Labour defence secretary Denis Healey announced the United Kingdom’s cash-strapped retreat in 1968 from east of Suez, Britain is back. Well, talking about it.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his admirals are looking at a new horizon stretching through crowded seaways east from India to Japan and south from China to Australia. Britain, or in reality the Tory high command, believes the European Union stifled the imperial drive, robbing Britain of its true place, a dominating global role. Britain’s decline, some Tories believe, can be traced to the EU, the introduction of comprehensive education and spreadable butter. Is a Covid-19-weakened but vaccine-rate –buoyed Johnson, in response, wrapping himself in the flag and embarking on an imperial fantasy?
Asia is the new economic center and the UK is lagging behind in its dealings with it. China is the only Asian country in Britain’s top 10 markets. The US, Germany and Ireland are the top 3, according to the Database of British Products & Verified British Exporters.
Clearly something is askew. Ireland, of course, has proximity but it also has a population of approx 5 million. That is about the size of my Beijing neighborhood. And here comes the contradiction. Britain is changing policy primarily not to boost trade with China but to counter it, politically, militarily and economically. Sure, London says, we’ll do business with Beijing if the right opportunity comes along. I wouldn’t count on it.
In a word, Britain wants to contain China. There are legitimate reasons to boost trade with Asia but containing China is ludicrous both in its reasoning and consequences. It is also impossible.
Britain has announced it will send its brand new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to the South China Sea and give Beijing a shot across the bows in a “that’ll teach ‘em’’ show of weakness. It meant to do so earlier but delays and cost overruns put back the deployment. It dare not go into the South China Sea alone, real politik demands that Washington set the timeline and sends its ships to, um, well, protect it and make sure matters do not get out of hand. No point going up the Yangtze without a paddle. Of course it will be described as allies working together, to send a united message. In truth, China is not worried.
They know how to deal with former 20th century concession holders of its territory.
In February 2019, the then UK defense secretary, Gavin Williamson, now an incredibly unpopular minister of education kept in his post as a lightning rod, announced HMS Elizabeth would travel to the South China Sea and be prepared to use lethal force to defend free and open waterways. China, after enjoying a fit of the giggles, responded by withdrawing its invitation to the chancellor, Phillip Hammond, to visit for trade talks.
The Chinese are not anti-English. Far from it. Every school in China teaches English or wants to if teachers and resources are available. In England about 13 percent of state schools and 50 percent of independent schools teach Chinese. The fortunes of English soccer teams are passionately followed in China. Who do you support is a common question. Pre-pandemic, students wanted to go to Britain to study. Many did. London and Edinburgh were top destinations for Chinese tourists.
China aside, Britain should not be under any illusion that its return to Asia will usher in a new age of the Raj.
The region is the powerhouse of the global economy. From the east bank of the Bosphorus to Tokyo Bay, it accounts for half of global economic output and more than half the world’s population. And this is growing. Within its geography it has the world’s two most populous nations, China and India and the second and third largest economies in the world, China and Japan as well as the world’s largest democracy, India.
The Asia pivot is a tantalizing prospect. But how well has lockdown London thought this through? Asian countries want visas for their nationals to study and work in Britain. Will the UK be prepared to give India and the other Asian countries access to UK markets, as well as tens of thousands of visas?
Asians were victims of rampant saber-led globalization in the age of empire.
They want, and will get, a better deal this time.
Anchors aweigh!
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On Thursday, China’s Central Committee official/Foreign Affairs Director Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will meet with Biden regime’s top “diplomat” Tony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan in Anchorage, Alaska.
It comes at a time of no easing of US war on China by other means, Biden continuing Trump’s hostile agenda toward Beijing.
Ahead of Thursday’s meeting, Blinken and US war secretary Lloyd Austin are visiting Japan and South Korea through Wednesday for discussions focused on China and North Korea — nonbelligerent nations threatening no one.
Last Friday, Biden’s double participated in a virtual summit with leaders of India, Japan and Australia, so-called Quad nations, their meeting discussed in a Monday article.
Their alliance is all about countering China’s growing prominence regionally and worldwide.
The US seeks to undermine Beijing’s political, economic, technological, and military development — what failed so far and is highly unlikely to fare better ahead.
Regional instability, to the extent that it exists, is because of Washington’s imperial presence, its rejection of peace, stability, and cooperative relations with all nations regionally and worldwide.
Thursday’s Sino/US meeting will be the first between officials of both countries since Biden replaced Trump by election theft.
According to Blinken’s spokesman Price, talks will be “difficult.”
“We’ll be frank, and explain how Beijing’s actions and behavior challenge the security, the prosperity, the values of not only the United States, but also our partners and allies (sic).”
The above reinvention of reality is one of many examples of how the US falsely blames other nations for its own hostile actions.
US relations with China and other countries free from its control are more likely to worsen ahead than improve with undemocratic Dems running the White House and Congress.
US politicians and bureaucrats time and again falsely blame China and other independent countries of things they had nothing to do with.
It’s why normal relations between these nations and the US are virtually impossible to achieve — ruling regimes in Washington bearing full responsibility.
Biden’s press secretary Psaki said his geopolitical team will work with regional nations to “pressure” Beijing.
Talks in Anchorage are certain to be tense with no prospect for breakthroughs on issues where significant differences exist between the US and China.
Price noted that there’s “a long litany of (bilateral) disagreements,” adding:
“We will certainly not pull any punches” in discussing them.
“Any follow-up engagements with the Chinese officials after Anchorage have to be based on the proposition that we’re seeing tangible progress and tangible outcomes on the issues of concern.”
“We’re not looking to engage in talks for the sake of talks.”
“We are looking for Beijing, again, to demonstrate that seriousness of purpose (sic).”
According to China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, both “sides are still deliberating on the agenda items.”
“We hope we can have candid dialogues on issues of mutual concerns. The Chinese side will present our position.”
“Both sides should have an accurate understanding on each other’s policy intention, manage our differences and to bring Sino-US relations back on the right track.”
Chances of achieving this aim are virtually nil. According to Political Science Professor Xiaoyu Pu:
“The Biden (regime) is not eager to significantly improve the bilateral relationship.”
“From the US domestic perspective, it is neither possible nor desirable…”
Heightened tensions between both nations are unlikely to ease because of US hostility toward countries free from its control.
Looking ahead, that dismal state is highly unlikely to change.
A state of war by hot and/or other means exists between the US and nations unwilling to sell their soul to a higher power in Washington.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Yemen’s Ansar Allah are unrelenting in their offensive, both on positions inside the country, and in attacks on Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure within the Kingdom.
The Houthis, as Ansar Allah are more widely known, released a video showing their recent raid on positions of Saudi-backed forces in the area Rashah Al-Gharbia in Najran province. It was purportedly successful, and one of many recent ones.
The battlefield is in flux, a constant back and forth. The Houthis push in one direction, and are pushed back in another. Heavy clashes continue in the Balaq mountain area, as well as on the Ghubari mountain in the Kadha region. These are two locations that are set very far apart, Balaq is near Marib and the battle for the city continues. Ghubari is to the very south, near Taiz. It is safe to say that the fighting is happening all along the contact line, and not at just at a single location.
In what has become a regular event, the Houthis carried out yet another drone strike within Saudi Arabia’s borders. On March 15th, they attacked attacked Abha Airport and King Khalid Airport in Khamis Mushait with 3 Qasef 2k drones. The Houthi spokesman claimed that the strike was successful and hit all of its targets.
Not all, however, is always successful and goes without a hitch, of course. A missile was reportedly launched by the Houthis from the Central Security Camp in the area of Shabban, near the Ibb city center. It malfunctioned and fell on the side of the al-Naqlin Mountian on the outskirts of Ibb city. A large explosion was heard. A similar missile was launched on the previous day, in the same direction. No impact was reported. Still, the Houthi’s successes has caused waves.
There are reports that Turkey, after sending militants to Azerbaijan and Libya, is now priming to send “Syrian mercenaries” to Yemen. They are to fight on behalf of the Saudi-led coalition against Ansar Allah.
In case of emergency, Iran is likely to provide the Houthis with some more support in the form of weapons and hardware, as it has done repeatedly in the past. On March 15th, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps revealed a brand-new advanced missile site, which is essentially an “underground city”.
Iranian state media dubbed it an advanced “missile city” containing cruise and ballistic missiles able to hit targets at “multiple ranges” and with a 360-degree firing radius. As such it can support its allies from the Axis of Resistance all around.
The fighting in Yemen is showing a promise of worsening in the coming weeks and months, and the Houthis will need all the help they can get, especially if Turkey indirectly joins the fray.
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China is upheld as an Enemy of America.
America’s perceptions regarding China are manipulated both by the media and official government statements
This article documents the role of gallup polls in manipulating American perceptions concerning China.
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Forty-five percent of Americans now say China is the greatest enemy of the U.S., more than double the percentage who said so in 2020. That year, Americans were equally as likely to say either China or Russia was the U.S.’s greatest enemy. The current shift coincided with a period when the global economy and human activity were severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China.
The Feb. 3-18 poll also finds favorable views of China among U.S. adults falling for the second straight year, putting the figure at a historically low 20%.
The rise in perceptions of China as the United States’ greatest enemy is accompanied by a sharp decline since 2020 in those mentioning Iran (down 15 percentage points to 4%), as well as four-to-five-point declines in mentions of Iraq and North Korea and smaller declines in a handful of other countries.
Perceptions of Russia as the United States’ greatest enemy, now 26%, were essentially unchanged from a year ago when 23% named it. But it is down from 32% who did so in 2019 when it ranked first overall. The 9% of Americans who view North Korea as their country’s greatest enemy is a noticeable turn from previous years when rhetorical tensions, military escalations and missile testing were more elevated. In 2018, 51% named North Korea as the greatest enemy.
Americans’ Perceptions Over Time
Over the past several years, there have been noticeable fluctuations between the country perceived as the nation’s greatest adversary; China last ranked No. 1 in 2014, Russia topped the list in 2020, 2019 and 2014, and North Korea ranked highest in 2018 and 2016.
Prior to China, Russia and North Korea’s top rankings, Americans named Iran (2006-2008, 2011 and 2012) and Iraq (2001 and 2005) as the United States’ greatest enemy.
While North Korea continues to hold the overall record high of 51% as the U.S.’s greatest enemy, that focus has now shifted to its ally and primary benefactor, China.
There are noticeable partisan differences in perceptions of the greatest enemy of the U.S, with Republicans naming China as the top country and Democrats citing Russia. While 76% of Republicans name China as the greatest enemy, 43% of independents and 22% of Democrats do so. Conversely, close to half of Democrats name Russia (47%) compared with one in four independents (24%) and just 6% of Republicans.
Who Is the World’s Leading Economic Power?
While Americans perceive China as the country’s top enemy, half also believe that China is the world’s leading economic power. This perception has noticeably increased since 2020, likely because of the COVID-related decline in the U.S. economy in the past year. While China has made strong progress in its overall GDP growth, it remains the world’s second-largest economy to the United States.
Since 2000, Americans have alternated between choosing China or the United States as the leading economic power, often influenced by the current health of the U.S. economy. The 50% of Americans perceiving the U.S. as the top economic power a year ago was the highest in two decades, reflecting the nation’s strong economic performance just before the pandemic.
Far fewer Americans select the European Union (5%), Japan (4%), Russia (2%) or India (1%) for this distinction. Of these, only Japan has been chosen by 10% or more in Gallup’s trend since 2000, with those instances occurring more than a decade ago.
A separate question in the survey asks Americans which country they think will be the leading economic power in 20 years. The public’s views are more evenly split on this question, with 46% choosing China and 40% the United States. Again, this is a switch from last year when the majority (53%) predicted the U.S. would have this role, nearly matching the record high 55% selecting the U.S. in 2000.
No more than 4% foresee the European Union, Japan, India or Russia achieving this distinction in 20 years.
Record High See Chinese Economic Power as Critical U.S. Threat
A new high of 63% of Americans says the economic power of China is a critical threat to the vital interests of the U.S. in the next 10 years. An additional 30% describe it as an important, but not critical, threat.
The 63% who believe China’s economic power is a critical threat is up from 46% the last time the question was asked in 2019 and is more than 10 points above the prior highs of 52% in 2013 and 2014.
Views that China’s economic rise is a critical threat to the vital interests of the United States have climbed among all party groups. Today 81% of Republicans, 59% of independents and 56% of Democrats view China’s economic rise as such a threat. In 2019, fewer in all party groups held that view, including 54% of Republicans, 47% of independents and 37% of Democrats.
Bottom Line
Perceptions of China as the greatest enemy of the U.S. are at a high point in Gallup’s trend at the same time its favorable rating is at a low point. The specific concern some Americans have over China, namely its economic power, is identified as a threat to the vital interests of the U.S. by most Americans. In addition, half of Americans view China as the leading economic power in the world today. These developments make U.S. foreign policy toward China especially important, as the tension between the two nations has only grown over the past decade during both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations.
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The US has only one objective in Syria—regime change. The fact that it has been unable to achieve this after ten years of trying does not appear to deter the Biden administration from embracing failure.
Back in 2001, former General Wesley Clark described a memorandum issued by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld which outlined a plan, as General Clark described it, on “how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Twenty years later, the world bears witness to the detritus of that vision. The US invaded Iraq, a seminal moment which saw a nation which espouses adherence to the so-called “rules-based world order” violate every rule in pursuit of the God-like power to dictate by force of arms the life and death of not only nations, but the millions of people who comprise the human element of what to the architects of these policies are merely lines on a map. Libya, Somalia, and Sudan have all become failed states because of US-led interventions. And, after ten years of incessant fighting, Syria serves as the front line of an ongoing US plan to take down that nation, together with Lebanon and Iran.
It was not supposed to be this hard. While Donald Rumsfeld and his band of merry warmongers avoided the temptation to follow-up the relatively easy defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by continuing to push into Syria, the Bush administration continued its regime-change fantasy by forming the “Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group” (ISOG), an interagency organization co-chaired by Liz Cheney (daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney) and Elliott Abrams (of Iran-Contra infamy) dedicated to toppling the governments of both nations.
While ISOG was disbanded within a year of its creation, the regime-change policies it espoused continued in the form of the pursuit of less militant “velvet revolutions”, with the US seeking to foment change from within through the empowerment of domestic constituencies through so-called “digital democracy”—in effect weaponizing internet-based social media platforms. These “soft power” policies (as opposed to the “hard power” of military action) were embraced by the administration of President Barack Obama. It used them to promote the failed 2009 “Green Revolution” in Iran and, in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” revolts of 2010-2011 which saw authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt collapse in the face of popular opposition, to mobilize similar grass-roots opposition to the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian “velvet revolution”, however, was hijacked early on by foreign-backed militant Islamists. By March 2011 heavy fighting broke out between the Syrian regime and Islamist forces. The US, together with its allies in Turkey and the Gulf Arab States, sought to exploit this fighting to destabilize and overthrow the Assad Presidency. By 2015 this plan had nearly succeeded, with more than half of Syria under the control of either al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, or US-backed Kurdish rebels. Only the intervention of Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia prevented the imminent collapse of the Syrian government.
Today, the rejuvenated Syrian armed forces have restored government control over much of its territory, with only Idlib province remaining as a last bastion of the Islamists who once threatened to raise the black flag of their movement over Damascus. But chaos still reins; northeastern Syria remains under Turkish and US occupation, with these two ostensible allies fighting a proxy war of sorts over the future of the Syrian Kurds living there.
The Islamic State, whose dreams of Caliphate were destroyed by the combined efforts of the Syrian government, Iran, Iraq, Russia, and the United States, continues to exist as an ideology capable of motivating tens of thousands of sympathizers to carry out terrorist attacks in support of their cause. And Israel is engaged in an increasingly hot war inside Syria to drive the forces of Iran and Hezbollah out of Syrian territory.
The primary facilitator of this chaos is the United States. Even after the intervention of Russia in September 2015 closed the door on any hope for regime change in Syria, the US continued to push the same failed formula, but this time expanding its scope and scale to include the goal of getting Russia and Iran to cease their support for the Assad government by making the cost of their continued presence in Syria too high.
Jim Jeffrey, the former US Special Representative for Syria Engagement under President Trump, openly bragged about policies designed to bring harm to the Syrian people as well as “inflicting pain” on both Iran and Russia in an effort to compel them to quit their support for Bashar al-Assad.
“We’ve ratcheted up the isolation and sanctions pressure on Assad, we’ve held the line on no reconstruction assistance, and the country’s desperate for it. You see what’s happened to the Syrian pound, you see what’s happened to the entire economy. So, it’s been a very effective strategy,” Jeffrey said in an interview.
This, in a nutshell, is the policy inherited by President Joe Biden today—the continued support of an illegal Turkish occupation of northern Syria, the continued support of an illegal Israeli bombing campaign targeting Iran on Syrian territory, a similar Israeli covert campaign which has targeted Iranian tankers seeking to deliver oil to Syria, and continued covert support to Islamist forces operating inside Syria under both the al-Qaeda and Islamic State banners for the purpose of destabilizing the Syrian government and inflicting losses on both Russia and Iran which the US hopes will become a political liability in both countries.
Any notion of Syria serving as the post-child for the Biden administration’s efforts to re-tool the US as the standard-bearer for a “rules-based international world order” has been quashed by the reality of a US policy which, while ostensibly designed to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State activity and deny the Syrian government access to more than half of Syria’s oil production capacity, is in reality just a continuation of the failed regime change policies of the past.
This point was driven home in classic US diplomatic double speak proffered up by State Department spokesman Ned Price in a press conference held on March 11, 2021. The Biden administration, Price noted, continues to view President Assad as an illegitimate ruler. “He [Assad] has done absolutely nothing to regain the legitimacy that he has lost through the brutal treatment of his own people,” Price said. “There is no question of the US normalizing relations with his government anytime soon,” he added. Price pushed the concept of a “political solution” to the Syrian crisis, noting that any such solution “must address the factors that drive the violence, that drive the instability in Syria”—in short, must address the continued rule of Bashar al-Assad. “We’ll use a variety of tools at our disposal,” Price concluded, “to push for a sustainable end to the Syrian people’s suffering.”
The “tools” Price referred to are the same “tools” used by past administrations—economic sanctions and both overt and covert military action designed to destabilize the Syrian government and make the price for continued support of that government by its allies in Russia and Iran prohibitive. It’s a policy roadmap doomed to fail, but sustaining policy failure over time has become a post 9/11 trademark of the United States.
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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
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There is evidence of competition and confrontation between Big Pharma conglomerates.
This article focusses on acts of sabotage directed against Russia’s and Cuba’s vaccines.
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As Brazil’s death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic nears 275,000, documents reveal that Washington pressured the Brazilian government not to buy Russia’s “malign” Sputnik V vaccine – a decision which may have costed many thousands of lives.
Malign influences
The US Department of Health and Human Services recently published its Annual Report for 2020.
“2020 was one of the most challenging years in the history of our country and in the history of the Department of Health and Human Services”, former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar introduces the report.
“There is an end to the pandemic in sight”, he continues, “with the delivery of safe and effective vaccines through Operation Warp Speed”.
Tucked away on page 48, the report shockingly reveals how the US pressured Brazil to reject Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
Under the subheading “Combatting malign influences in the Americas”, the report announces:
OGA used diplomatic relations in the Americas region to mitigate efforts by states, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia, who are working to increase their influence in the region to the detriment of US safety and security. OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill intentioned states. Examples include using OGA’s Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, and offering CDC technical assistance in lieu of Panama accepting an offer of Cuban doctors. [emphasis added]
It is also striking that the US dissuaded Panama from accepting Cuban doctors, who have been on the global front line against the pandemic, working in over 40 countries.
As well as Brazil, the US has despatched Health Attachés to China, India, Mexico and South Africa, likely charged with carrying out similar activities.
The documents demonstrate how Washington views global health in strict power terms, willing to sacrifice countless lives in order to deny Official Enemies a soft power victory.
Catastrophic response
Brazil has suffered the world’s second-worst number of Covid-19 death rates, with Bolsonaro’s Covid-19 policy being described as “homicidally negligent”.
Throughout 2020, the Brazilian government consistently refused to pursue any vaccine but AstraZeneca’s, baffling medical experts.
A group of Brazilian mayors urged Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello to resign, writing:
“His leadership did not believe in vaccination as a way out of the crisis and did not carry out the necessary planning for the acquisition of vaccines”.
With deaths soaring, Bolsonaro eventually and belatedly opened discussions for the delivery of Sputnik V vaccines.
Secret documents published by Brasil Wire also revealed that the UK had lobbied Brazil on behalf of AstraZeneca as well as British mining firms, showing that the US is not the only country leveraging power on behalf of pharmaceutical multinationals in Latin America.
This is only the latest scandalous episode in Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic, and malign US interference in the region.
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More than 20 countries have either suspended or said they will delay Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccinations based on reports of deaths or injuries — in most cases related to blood clots — in healthy people who received the vaccine.
Prosecutors in Northern Italy announced Monday they had seized a batch of 393,600 shots of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine following the death of a 57-year-old man hours after he was vaccinated, reported Reuters.
Meanwhile the World Health Organization (WHO) is standing firm in its support of the vaccine. In a press conference today, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “This does not necessarily mean these events [deaths and injuries] are linked to the vaccine, but it’s routine practice to investigate them, and it shows that the surveillance system works and effective controls are in place.”
According to news reports, WHO’s vaccine safety experts were meeting today to discuss the vaccine. WHO had previously said that an ongoing analysis by its vaccines advisory committee has not established a causal link between the vaccine and blood clots and countries should keep using it, reported The Telegraph.
Regulators in Europe also defended the vaccine telling news outlets that the “benefits outweigh the risks.” Still, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is investigating reports of blood clots in vaccine recipients and will release its findings Thursday, according to Nasdaq.com.
EMA Executive Director Emer Cookesaid today during a news conference that there was no indication the incidents, which she called “very rare,” had been caused by the vaccine, but experts were assessing that possibility.
The AstraZeneca vaccine, not yet approved for emergency use in the U.S., is being distributed under WHO’s COVAX program, funded by Bill Gates. The company plans to file for Emergency Use Authorization with the U.S Food and Drug Administration in the upcoming weeks.
In Italy, Piedmont’s regional government suspended use of AstraZeneca’s batch ABV5811, which is different than the batch of AstraZeneca vaccine seized last week in Sicily after the sudden deaths of two men who had recently been vaccinated.
The Italian government had previously said there was no evidence of a connection between the deaths and the vaccine, and had allowed the AstraZeneca vaccine to continue to be administered even after other countries had suspended use of the vaccine.
Other countries that have hit pause on AstraZeneca:
Norway, which is investigating reports of young healthy people who experienced brain hemorrhages and blood clots after being vaccinated. On March 12, the Norwegian Medicines Agency and Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) reported an unexpected death from a brain haemorrhage after an AstraZeneca vaccine was administered. A day later the agencies received three more reports of severe cases of blood clots or brain haemorrhages in younger people who had been vaccinated and were receiving hospital treatment. All of the patients showed reduced numbers of blood platelets.
Dr. Pal Andre Holme is treating the three health workers at Olso University Hospital. He told Norway’s VG newspaper that it was “very unusual” to see such young patients with such “low levels of blood platelets.” Holme’s said, “These are healthy young people who have not had any kind of disease before, who then get severe blood clots. You have to ask questions whether there is a connection with the vaccine, which I do not consider unlikely.”
In its report, the NIPH called for anyone under the age of 50 who experienced “large or small bruises” after being vaccinated to visit a doctor.
Sweden announced today it was suspending the AstraZeneca vaccine following reports of abnormal blood clotting in recipients, according to NPR. The Swedish Public Health Agency said it would suspend use of the vaccine until the EMA reveals findings from its ongoing investigation.
Bulgaria paused the vaccine as a precautionary measure last week after a woman died of heart failure 15 hours after receiving the shot, reported Reuters. “Until all doubts are dispelled … we are halting inoculations with this vaccine,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said in a statement.
Ireland said on Sunday it was suspending the country’s rollout of the AstraZeneca’s vaccine, The Telegraph reported. Dr Karina Butler, head of the National Immunisation Advisory Committee, told Irish state broadcaster RTÉ that the committee had made the decision after Norway reported a “cluster of four serious, very rare, very serious clotting events” in young healthy people.
Germany suspended the vaccine as a precautionary measure this week after the country’s health minister, Jens Spahn, said seven cases of cerebral vein thrombosis had been reported. Spahn said Germany’s vaccine authority, the Paul Ehrlich Institute, “considers further investigation necessary after new reports of cerebral brain thrombosis in connection with vaccination in Germany and Europe.”
The Paul Ehrlich Institute said the EMA should decide “whether and how the new findings will affect the approval of the vaccine.”
Indonesia Monday suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine saying it was waiting for a full report from the WHO before administering any more of the vaccines.
South Africa, as previously reported by The Defender, suspended plans to distribute the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine in February after a study showed only 10% efficacy at protecting against mild and moderate COVID-19 cases from the new South African variant.
Venezueladecided it will not authorize or license AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine at all due to complications in vaccinated recipients. The country had reserved 1.4 to 2.4 million doses through COVAX.
Some countries still on board:
Despite safety concerns, some countries are moving forward with the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Last week, Thailand became the first country outside Europe to temporarily suspend using the vaccine due to safety concerns, according to Associated Press. But Thailand’s health authorities reversed course and decided to move forward. The Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and members of his cabinet received the first shots.
“There are people who have concerns,” Chan-ocha said after he received the first dose. “But we must believe doctors, believe in our medical professionals.”
In the Philippines, presidential spokesperson Harry Roquesaid his country would not suspend use of the vaccine because the benefits outweighed any risks.
“There is still no clear data that shows that the blood clotting was caused by AstraZeneca. If such data will come out, maybe we will also stop the use of AstraZeneca,” Roque said. “As of now, our experts are saying again that the benefits we get from using AstraZeneca are larger than the side effects of this vaccine.”
Australia’sHealth Minister Greg Huntsaid his country “absolutely, clearly and unequivocally” supports the rollout of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine and would not suspend vaccinations, with plans to import and manufacture 70 million vaccine doses from the vaccine maker. Australia’s chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, said there was no evidence so far that the vaccine causes blood clots.
Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said Monday Health Canada regulators are “constantly analyzing all the available information about vaccines and have guaranteed those approved in Canada are safe for use.” The government’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization today approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for people 65 and older — it had previously limited the approval for people under age 65 due to “limited information on its efficacy,” MSN reported.
According to Reuters, AstraZeneca reviewed its own safety data and said on Sunday there was no evidence of increased risk of blood clots from its COVID vaccine. A monthly safety report will be made public on the EMA website next week, the company said.
WHO said global distribution of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine remained undisrupted, though TGR reported investigations into AstraZeneca concerns have triggered far-reaching reactions with thousands of cancellations of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. In Veneto Italy alone, 50% of planned vaccination appointments with AstraZeneca were cancelled since Saturday, reported the president of the region, Luca Zaia.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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The Kremlin on Tuesday called out what’s it’s dubbed the “unprecedented” propaganda war against Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. The words were issued by spokesman Dmitry Peskov in response to widespread allegations that the Untied States is actively trying to dissuade its allies from purchasing the Russian-produced vaccine. This despite the emerging scientific consensus that’s found it to be at least 91% effective while further preventing inoculated persons from becoming severely ill.
The Kremlin is responding to newly emerged proof that the US intervened with the largest country in South America, Brazil. The Washington Post details that “Buried deep in the dry, 72-page annual report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lay a startling admission:U.S. health officials under President Donald Trump worked to convince Brazil to reject Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.”
US Dep. of Health publicly confirmed that it pressured Brazil against Sputnik V. We believe countries should work together to save lives. Efforts to undermine the vaccines are unethical and are costing lives. 👇https://t.co/Ga5i4zvbCt P.48 pic.twitter.com/A6wyKOkc8t
Brazil has long stood as the second highest COVID-19 infected country in the world behind the US, with over 11.5 confirmed infections so far (with the US now approaching the 30 million mark).
Here’s the key controversial section from the 71-page document. The section is entitled “Combatting malignant influence in the Americas”…
“Examples include using OGA’s Health Attache office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine,” the government report spelled out explicitly.
Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since claimed it never received directives or “consultations” such as are described in the report from the US, with a statement saying, “the Embassy of Brazil in Washington has not received consultations or actions from United States authorities or companies regarding the possible purchase, by Brazil, of the Russian vaccine against Covid-19.”
Kremlin spokesman Peskov in his comments didn’t name the allegations specifically but only denounced generally that “In many countries the scale of pressure is quite unprecedented… such selfish attempts to force countries to abandon any vaccines have no prospects.”
“We believe that there should be as many doses of vaccines as possible so that all countries, including the poorest, have the opportunity to stop the pandemic,” Peskov added.
Thus far neither the US Embassy in Moscow nor the US Department of State have responded, according to Reuters.
However, the annual HHS report clearly constitutes a “smoking gun” admission which details that Washington does indeed have a covert policy of blocking the Sputnik V vaccine’s spread. This is ironic given one would think Washington would be more focused on combatting the spread of the pandemic itself, regardless of politics or geopolitical maneuvering.
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“It will be a bilateral agreement, which was already approved a couple of weeks ago,” government spokesperson Kyriakos Kousios told state radio.
“This issue is being handled by the minister of health and the relevant officials. Once we have the vaccine approved, we will proceed with the purchase,” Kousios said, explaining that more than 50,000 doses may be purchased, depending on the flows of the other vaccines.
Russia’s Sputnik has been in the EU drugs agency’s rolling review but no official application for authorisation has been made.
EU Commission spokesperson Stefan De Keersmaecker reiterated on Monday (15 March) that there were no official talks between the EU and Moscow.
However, the head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill Dmitriev, said in a statement on Monday that his organisation had secured agreements with companies from Italy, Spain, France and Germany to produce Sputnik V, AFP reported.
Hungary has already purchased Sputnik while the Czech Republic and Slovakia have made orders. Critics suggest that approving Sputnik would be a “major political defeat” for Europe and respectively, a “major diplomatic victory” for Vladimir Putin.
The issue has so far divided EU member states as some of them remain sceptical about what they think could be Moscow’s hidden agenda.
Poland’s former prime minister Donald Tusk, the current chief of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), recently called on Europeans not to be “naïve” when it comes to Russian and Chinese vaccines.
“I warn against such a naive approach to these very cynical players. I am talking about the Chinese and Russian authorities. And above all, I would warn the Polish authorities, and also other European countries, against buying and trying to vaccinate their citizens with a vaccine that has not been tested,” Tusk said.
The vast majority of Western Balkan countries have already started vaccinating their citizens with Sputnik while Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has said the EU had “abandoned” the region when it comes to vaccines.
‘Possible’ to approve Sputnik
EU sources have told EURACTIV that it is “possible” for the EMA to approve Russia’s Sputnik vaccine. “Negotiations could start if at least four member states ask so,” the sources added.
The same sources explained, though, that with the vaccines approved so far, the EU objective to vaccinate 70% of the EU population by September is “still possible”.
However, the delivery delays of approved vaccines and the new stalemate with AstraZeneca pave the way for reconsidering Sputnik.
“When it comes to public health, there is no room for political considerations. We fully rely on the scientific evaluation of EMA,” the sources added.
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March 17th, 2021 by International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
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Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of ICAN, said about the decision:
“A decision by the United Kingdom to increase its stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in the middle of a pandemic is irresponsible, dangerous and violates international law. While the British people are struggling to cope with the pandemic, an economic crisis, violence against women, and racism, the government choses to increase insecurity and threats in the world. This is toxic masculinity on display.”
“While the majority of the world’s nations are leading the way to a safer future without nuclear weapons by joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the United Kingdom is pushing for a dangerous new nuclear arms race.”
Current UK Nuclear Arsenal
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that as of January 2020, the United Kingdom possessed 215 nuclear warheads. UK nuclear warheads are launched from missiles on submarines. The UK has four submarines that can carry nuclear-warhead equipped missiles. When not on patrol, the submarines are docked off the coast of Scotland.
The UK is currently building new nuclear-capable submarines to replace its current fleet, which it states could cost up to £41 billion, although including all associated costs the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament puts the nuclear upgrade at £205 billion. ICAN research released May 2020 showed that the United Kingdom spent $8.9 billion to maintain and modernize its nuclear weapons in 2019 alone. The UK leases its nuclear-capable missiles from the United States and its nuclear warheads are very similar to the U.S. W-76 warheads placed on the same missile.
UK Public Opinion on Nuclear Weapons
More than 60 members of the House of Commons, along with dozens of members of the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly, have pledged to work for the United Kingdom’s signature and ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Many cities across the country, including Manchester, Brighton, Oxford, and Edinburgh, have also called on the government to join the treaty. In July 2020, the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, wrote that “the Scottish government is firmly opposed to the possession, threat, and use of nuclear weapons” and “I have called on the UK government to sign and ratify the treaty”.
A public opinion poll conducted in January 2021 by Survation on behalf of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) found that 59 per cent of Britons believe that their country should join the treaty, with just 19 per cent opposed to joining.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has 191 states-parties, and at its core, prohibits most of the world’s countries from acquiring nuclear weapons and commits five nuclear-armed states, including the United Kingdom, to pursue disarmament negotiations (Article VI).
Every five years, NPT states-parties meet to review progress on commitments and to adopt a consensus final document with additional commitments for treaty implementation. Past Review Conference documents in 2000 and 2010 have been sparsely implemented.
The 2020 NPT Review Conference has been postponed. At this conference, the five nuclear-armed states party to the treaty, including the United Kingdom, will answer to many non-nuclear-weapon states who argue they have not fully implemented the treaty, more than 75 years after its adoption.
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which currently has 86 signatories and 54 states parties, includes prohibitions of the use, testing, production and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, as well as positive obligations for states parties to provide assistance to victims of nuclear use and testing and environmental remediation for land contaminated by nuclear use and testing. It entered into force on 22 January 2021.
The treaty articulates two pathways for nuclear-armed states to join (Article 4). A nuclear-armed state may either join the treaty and the negotiate a time-bound plan for complete nuclear disarmament, or it may complete nuclear disarmament first and then join the treaty and cooperate with the designated international authorities to verify the “irreversible elimination of its nuclear-weapon programme.”
The United Kingdom has not yet joined the TPNW. States-parties to the treaty will meet late this year or early next year to advance the treaty’s implementation and universalization.
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Ten years ago, on March 19, 2011, US / NATO forces began the air-naval bombing of Libya. The war was directed by the United States, first through the Africa Command, then through NATO under US command. In seven months, the US / NATO air force carried out 30,000 missions, 10,000 were attack missions, with over 40,000 bombs and missiles. Italy – with Parliament multipartisan consent (Democratic Party in the front row) – participated in the war with seven air bases (Trapani, Pantelleria (Sicily), Gioia del Colle, Amendola (Puglia) Decimomannu (Sardenia), Aviano (Veneto), and with Tornado fighter-bombers, Eurofighters and others, as well as the Garibaldi aircraft carrier and other warships. Even before the air- naval offensive, tribal sectors, and Islamic groups hostile to the government had been financed and armed in Libya, and special forces, particularly Qatari, had infiltrated to ignite armed clashes inside the country.
In this way, the African State was demolished. As the World Bank documented in 2010, it maintained “high levels of economic growth” with an increase in GDP of 7.5% per year, and recorded “high indicators of human development” including universal access to primary and secondary education schools and, over 40%, to university education. Despite the disparities, the average standard of living in Libya was higher than in other African countries. About two million immigrants, mostly Africans, found work there. The Libyan State, which possessed the largest oil reserves in Africa plus other natural gas reserves, left limited profit margins to foreign companies. Thanks to energy exports, the Libyan trade balance was in surplus of 27 billion dollars a year. With these resources, the Libyan State had invested about 150 billion dollars abroad. Libyan investments in Africa were crucial to the African Union’s plan to create three financial organizations: the African Monetary Fund, based in Yaoundé (Cameroon); the African Central Bank, based in Abuja (Nigeria); the African Investment Bank, based in Tripoli. These bodies would serve to create a common market and a single currency for Africa.
It is no coincidence that NATO’s war for the demolition of the Libyan State began less than two months after the African Union Summit, on January 31, 2011, which started the creation of the African Monetary Fund to be realized within the year. This is proven by emails from the Obama administration’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, brought to light later by WikiLeaks: United States and France wanted to eliminate Gaddafi before he used Libya’s gold reserves to create a pan-African currency, alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc (currency imposed by France on its 14 former colonies). This is proven by the fact that, before the bombers went into action in 2011, the banks went into action: they seized the 150 billion dollars invested abroad by the Libyan State, most of which disappeared. In the great robbery, Goldman Sachs, the most powerful US investment bank of which Mario Draghi had been vice president, stood out.
Today, the revenues from energy exports in Libya are being captured by power groups and multinationals in a chaotic situation of armed clashes. The living standard of the majority of the population has collapsed. African immigrants, accused of being “Gaddafi’s mercenaries,” were even imprisoned in zoo cages, tortured, and murdered. Libya has become the main transit route of a chaotic migratory flow to Europe in the hands of human traffickers that has caused many more victims than the 2011 war. In Tawergha the Misrata Islamic militias supported by NATO (those who assassinated Gaddafi in October 2011) carried out a true ethnic cleansing, forcing almost 50,000 Libyan citizens to flee without being able to return. The Italian Parliament, who was also responsible for all this, on March 18, 2011, committed the Government to “take every initiative (ie Italy’s entry into the war against Libya) to ensure the protection of the populations in the region.”
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
It was not a protest movement, it was an armed insurgency integrated by US-Israeli & allied supported “jihadist” death squads. From Day One, the Islamist “freedom fighters” were supported, trained & equipped by NATO & Turkey’s High Command.
On this exact day ten years ago, NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey and Israel began a coordinated campaign of regime change against President Bashar al-Assad and the destruction of Syria.
For the third consecutive year, the Beijing-based South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) published a report on unacceptable US military activities in the South China Sea. In recent years, they’ve been increasing. The latest SDSPI report discusses US military operations in 2020.
So which American president is going to take full credit for supporting the rapid development of Big Pharma’s Covid-19 vaccines that are already killing and injuring people?
I cannot stress enough the overwhelming toxic spell that Cold War propaganda cast on the minds of three generations, including some of the most intelligent people, and its influence continues today. Relentless Cold War rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture.
The United States-NATO invasion of Libya was launched a decade ago this month, as the Western powers engineered the ousting of the country’s leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had been in power for more than 40 years.
As American economic power continues to decline, a division has emerged within the U.S. political establishment as to which of its designated adversaries is to blame for the country’s woes — Russia, or China.
We are more than 1,500 members (including professors of medicine, intensive care physicians and infectious disease specialists) from more than 30 countries. The lockdown has not only killed people, it has destroyed physical and mental health, economy, education and other aspects of social life.
As calls for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination grow around the world, it’s becoming ever more crucial to understand what these injections actually are. The mRNA “vaccines” created by Moderna and Pfizer are in fact gene therapies.
“The reasons for the police raid and arrest … have not yet been officially revealed. However, there are rumors [unconfirmed reports] that Dr. Andreas Noack provided medical assistance to hundreds of protestors during lockdown protests against the German government.
Reports also indicate that Dr. Andreas Noack was under investigation by the authorities for being non-compliant with the COVID-19 lockdown laws enacted by the German government. … The arrest was made after the German Parliament passed the “Infection Protection Law”.
In the live stream, policemen can be heard banging furiously on the door of the place, where Dr. Andreas Noack was broadcasting. “It’s the police,” a man can be heard saying off-camera in panic. The video then shows police barging into the building forcing Dr. Andreas Noack to the ground. The police then proceed to turn off his live stream.
People who were watching the live stream are currently questioning the reasons for his arrest. “I think the guy is guilty of expressing his opinions,” said one user.
“This happened to doctor Andreas Noack in Germany. After the unconstitutional approval of the infection law, police broke into his house while he was having a live transmission on YouTube. Those who cried against fascism have created the most criminal dictatorship in history.”
The arrest was made on a live video stream. The manner in which the arrest was made is extremely unethical, armed policemen just yell at Dr. Andreas Noack till he settles on the ground.
The police do not state their reasons for arresting him, nor do they show a valid arrest warrant. Arrests such as these are blatant violations of due process. Every citizen has the right to security against arbitrary arrests.
One user tweeted,
“German doctor Andreas Noack raided by armed police during youtube stream and arrested inside his home for breaking Covid laws. Really, he is just anti lockdown and expressing his views. FIGHT BACK PEOPLE. If u don’t now, it will b TOO LATE later!”. (Source: Insider Paper)
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Since seasonal flu was renamed covid early last year to kick off the greatest ever public health scam in modern memory, we’ve been lied to and mass deceived by duplicitous politicians, their public health handmaidens, and press agent media.
Virtually everything we’ve been told about covid, experimental drugs for mass-jabbing, lockdowns, quarantines, face masks, PCR tests, and social distancing is harmful to public health, well-being, and our fundamental rights.
Destructive policies instituted in the West and elsewhere flagrantly breached the Nuremberg Code, Hippocratic Oath, and in the US its Constitution.
Orwell explained that “(i)n a time of universal deceit, truth-telling is a revolutionary act.”
Truth-telling medical and scientific experts are explaining what dark forces in the US and West are going all-out to suppress.
Long before what’s going on now was instituted, Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn (1926 – 1988) was called “The People’s Doctor.”
His 1979 bestseller, “Confessions of a Medical Heretic” called vaxxing “a medical time bomb,” adding:
The “greatest threat to childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them.”
He urged parents to reject vaxxing for their children. In many states, they’re mandatory.
He debunked deceptive marketing practices and called pediatricians objecting to their “bread and butter” the equivalent of a priest denying the infallibility of the Pope.
He administered them early in his practice, later stopping “because of the myriad hazards they present.”
Summarizing his concerns, he said the following:
No evidence shows that vaccinations eliminate childhood diseases.
The Salk and Sabin polio vaccines don’t work.
Salk later admitting that mass inoculations for polio caused an epidemic of the disease after 1961.
Smallpox vaccinations are “the only source of smallpox-related deaths for three decades after the disease had disappeared” on its own.
Inoculation risks are real. Parents should avoid them when possible.
Doctors are derelict for not explaining their hazards and for “defend(ing) them to the death.”
Mass-inoculations dramatically increase autoimmune and neurological diseases, including leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, and numerous others ranging from annoying to lethal.
Mendelsohn asked: “Have we traded mumps and measles for cancer and leukemia?”
He blamed mass-vaxxing for causing enormous harm to human health.
“The best way to protect children is make sure they’re not vaccinated,” he said.
Today in the US, children are mass-vaxxed with dozens of drugs that cause diseases they’re supposed to protect against, and are responsible for an explosion of others later in life for countless millions of people.
In 2002, autism specialist Dr. Kenneth Aitken said:
“When I was in training, one in 2,500 (children were autistic). Now it is one in 250.”
“At the moment, the only logical explanation for this is MMR” vaccinations.
Longtime emergency medicine Dr. Mark Trozzi said after hundreds of hours researching so-called covid and his personal experience on the job, he learned that we’re “being deceived and manipulated.”
He called the so-called “first wave” of the “pandemic the quietest time in my career.”
“I have worked very hard and been very busy over the past twenty-five years in ER.”
“However, both in my regular ER and (covid) designated ER, there were almost no patients, and almost no work.”
“I had multiple long ER shifts without a single patient.”
From contacts with doctors and others in the US and Canada, he discovered “empty hospitals, and propaganda saying that they were full of patients dying of covid.”
He learned the effectiveness of “zinc and hydroxychloroquine” in treating flu as well as covid.
He discovered other cold hard facts that showed we’re being lied to and mass deceived.
“I have never seen a patient sick with (covid),” he said.
“I have seen some positive PCR tests in asymptomatic people, and watched people be imprisoned in their own homes and isolated from family and friends.”
“My research into the PCR test has convinced me personally that it is misleading, manipulatable, and” a scam.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration.
It expresses grave concerns about “about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing” covid related policies.
He and co-authors said what’s going on risks “greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.”
Pre-covid normality should be restored.
Separately he debunked lockdowns, calling them the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made…The harm to people is catastrophic.”
They’re the “worst public health mistake in the last 100 years.”
They served no beneficial purpose and caused catastrophic harm to countless millions of people.
Over 13,000 medical, scientific, and public health experts endorse Bhattacharya’s views and others expressing similar ones.
According to founder of Doctors for Truth Dr. Elke De Klerk:
“(W)e do not have a medical pandemic or epidemic.”
“We…should not be on list A for any longer, because we now know that (so-called covid) is a normal flu virus.”
Thousands of other medical and scientific experts in the US and Europe debunked the state-sponsored/media proliferated mother of all public health scams — based on Big Lies and mass deception.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Dieci anni fa, il 19 marzo 2011, le forze Usa/Nato iniziano il bombardamento aeronavale della Libia. La guerra viene diretta dagli Stati Uniti, prima tramite il Comando Africa, quindi tramite la Nato sotto comando Usa. In sette mesi, l’aviazione Usa/Nato effettua 30 mila missioni, di cui 10 mila di attacco, con oltre 40 mila bombe e missili. L’Italia – con il consenso multipartisan del Parlamento (Pd in prima fila) – partecipa alla guerra con 7 basi aeree (Trapani, Gioia del Colle, Sigonella, Decimomannu, Aviano, Amendola e Pantelleria); con cacciabombardieri Tornado, Eurofighter e altri, con la portaerei Garibaldi e altre navi da guerra. Già prima dell’offensiva aeronavale, erano stati finanziati e armati in Libia settori tribali e gruppi islamici ostili al governo, e infiltrate forze speciali in particolare qatariane, per far divampare gli scontri armati all’interno del Paese.
Viene demolito in tal modo quello Stato africano che, come documentava nel 2010 la Banca Mondiale, manteneva «alti livelli di crescita economica», con un aumento del pil del 7,5% annuo, e registrava «alti indicatori di sviluppo umano» tra cui l’accesso universale all’istruzione primaria e secondaria e, per oltre il 40%, a quella universitaria. Nonostante le disparità, il tenore medio di vita era in Libia più alto che negli altri paesi africani. Vi trovavano lavoro circa due milioni di immigrati, per lo più africani. Lo Stato libico, che possedeva le maggiori riserve petrolifere dell’Africa più altre di gas naturale, lasciava limitati margini di profitto alle compagnie straniere. Grazie all’export energetico, la bilancia commerciale libica era in attivo di 27 miliardi di dollari annui.
Con tali risorse lo Stato libico aveva investito all’estero circa 150 miliardi di dollari. Gli investimenti libici in Africa erano determinanti per il progetto dell’Unione Africana di creare tre organismi finanziari: il Fondo monetario africano, con sede a Yaoundé (Camerun); la Banca centrale africana, con sede ad Abuja (Nigeria); la Banca africana di investimento, con sede a Tripoli. Tali organismi sarebbero serviti a creare un mercato comune e una moneta unica dell’Africa.
Non è un caso che la guerra Nato per la demolizione dello Stato libico inizi nemmeno due mesi dopo il vertice dell’Unione Africana che, il 31 gennaio 2011, aveva dato il via alla creazione entro l’anno del Fondo monetario africano. Lo provano le email della segretaria di Stato dell’Amministrazione Obama, Hillary Clinton, portate alla luce successivamente da WikiLeaks: Stati uniti e Francia volevano eliminare Gheddafi prima che usasse le riserve auree della Libia per creare una moneta pan-africana alternativa al dollaro e al franco Cfa (moneta imposta dalla Francia a 14 ex colonie). Lo prova il fatto che, prima che nel 2011 entrino in azione i bombardieri, entrano in azione le banche: esse sequestrano i 150 miliardi di dollari investiti all’estero dallo Stato libico, di cui sparisce la maggior parte. Nella grande rapina si distingue la Goldman Sachs, la più potente banca d’affari statunitense, di cui Mario Draghi è stato vicepresidente.
Oggi in Libia gli introiti dell’export energetico vengono accaparrati da gruppi di potere e multinazionali, in una caotica situazione di scontri armati. Il tenore di vita della maggioranza della popolazione è crollato. Gli immigrati africani, accusati di essere «mercenari di Gheddafi», sono stati imprigionati perfino in gabbie di zoo, torturati e assassinati. La Libia è divenuta la principale via di transito, in mano a trafficanti di esseri umani, di un caotico flusso migratorio verso l’Europa che ha provocato molte più vittime della guerra del 2011. A Tawergha le milizie islamiche di Misurata sostenute dalla Nato (quelle che hanno assassinato Gheddafi nell’ottobre 2011) hanno compiuto una vera e propria pulizia etnica, costringendo quasi 50 mila cittadini libici a fuggire senza potervi fare ritorno. Di tutto questo è responsabile anche il Parlamento italiano che, il 18 marzo 2011, impegnava il Governo ad «adottare ogni iniziativa (ossia l’entrata in guerra dell’Italia contro la Libia) per assicurare la protezione delle popolazioni della regione».
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US forces are deployed in parts of the world not its own to wage forever wars by hot and/or other means against nonbelligerent nations threatening no one. That’s how its imperial scourge operates, an unparalleled threat to everyone everywhere.
For the third consecutive year, the Beijing-based South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) published a report on unacceptable US military activities in the South China Sea.
In recent years, they’ve been increasing. The latest SDSPI report discusses US military operations in 2020.
Calling them “intense” last year, they included three carrier strike groups, two amphibious ready groups, strategic bombers, nuclear attack submarines, reconnaissance flights near Chinese territory, and military exercises for what the Pentagon calls “Dynamic Force Employment” to deter China.
According to SCSPI’s director Hu Bo, the high intensity scale, number and duration of US military exercises in South China Sea waters last year were extraordinarily high compared to previous years.
According to Hu, dual US carrier group/warplanes exercises were “combat-oriented.”
“For example, the USS Ronald Reagan carrier repeatedly moved into and out from the South China Sea fast, and coordinated flank attacks with other carrier strike groups.”
“Second, US carriers operated in a wider area.”
“(T)he USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group practiced operational application of expeditionary forces near the Zhongsha Islands for the first time.”
“Third, the dual carrier exercises were also pointed ones, as they were conducted at a sensitive time coinciding with exercises by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) near the Xisha Islands and the Han Kuang exercises by the military on the island of Taiwan.”
P-8A anti-submarine warplanes and EP-3E electronic reconnaissance aircraft were involved.
All of the above and more are unjustifiably justified by so-called Freedom of Navigation pretexts.
They’re all about rehearsing war on China, notably by operating near its Xisha and Nansha islands, Taiwan, and waters near China’s mainland — what the SCSPI’s report called “sensitive areas,” including near PLA military facilities.
Reconnaissance flights used “fake” IDs, disguising themselves as civilian aircraft, what the SCSPI report called “gray operations.”
According to Hu, they increase the risk of “misjudgment” between PLA and Pentagon forces.
In 2020, the Pentagon conducted provocative “high frequency” island or reef-trespassing operations in the South China Sea, including transits through the Taiwan Strait 13 times.
Hu called the moves “dangerous signals to Taiwan independence” elements that threaten regional peace and stability.
So-called gunboat diplomacy is a longtime US belligerent practice.
Looking ahead, Hu believes that Biden regime hardliners will maintain hostile political, economic, and saber-rattling actions against China — heightening regional tensions instead of easing them.
While continuing “maximum pressure” on China, “the US is gradually losing such military dominance in the Western Pacific despite its evident military superiority globally, as China has been delivering much more targeted and effective countermeasures,” the SCSPI stressed.
What US hardliners call Chinese “threats and challenges” are invented, not real.
Pushing Beijing politically, economically and militarily risks confrontation by accident or US design.
What’s unthinkable is possible because of US rage to rule the world unchallenged by whatever it takes to achieve its imperial aims.
A Final Comment
Neither China nor Russia — or any other countries on the US target list for regime change — hold provocative military exercises off its east or west coasts or in gulf waters near its southern coastline.
If done, both wings of the US war party would consider them a casus belli and likely respond belligerently.
Separately, Biden regime secretary of state Blinken and national security advisor Sullivan will meet with their Chinese counterparts Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18.
According to Blinken’s spokesman Price on Friday, “(w)e will certainly not pull any punches in discussing our areas of disagreement” — describing bilateral relations as “competitive (and) adversarial.”
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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After more than half a year of calmness, the situation in Donbass is heating up again – there are more ceasefire violations, Kiev is transporting new troops towards the Line of Contact, and there is increased activity by Turkish-assembled Bayraktar TB2 drones used by the Ukrainian military. Many experts believe there is a high probability of hostilities resuming between the Ukrainian military and the Luhansk and Donetsk militias in Eastern Ukraine, known as Donbass.
There is no doubt that Kiev believes that inciting a conflict can help unite the country as Ukrainians are frustrated and outraged since major internal problems remain unresolved. These issues include increased poverty, a rise in gas prices and a collapsed health system, among many others. But Kiev seems emboldened and believe they can recover Donbass from militia control. It seems that Azerbaijan’s success in assuming control over seven districts surrounding the former Soviet Union’s Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast from Armenian control, partly thanks to Bayraktar drones, has encouraged Ukraine to follow a similar path – this is despite the fact that the Ukrainian army, as in mid-2010, is doomed to military defeat.
Although Turkey has ambitious plans to establish a self-reliant arms industry, it has been a catastrophic failure. In fact, even the so-called “indigenous” Bayraktar drones rely on nine foreign companies for parts, with at least four of those companies withdrawing their contracts in protest against the Turkish-sponsored invasion of formerly Armenian-controlled territories. With the struggle for domestic production, Turkey is turning to Ukraine.
It was announced on Sunday that Turkey’s ATAK 2 helicopters will use Ukrainian-made engines. In fact, Ukraine today stands out as Turkey’s main partner in a number of critical military technologies. These include inter alia turbo prop and diesel engine, avionics, drone, anti-ship and cruise missiles, radar and surveillance systems, space and satellite technologies, robotic systems, active and passive shielding systems and rocket engines and guidance systems – there are about 50 joint defense projects between the two countries.
Only last month, whilst addressing a special event on Crimea at the UN Human Rights Council’s 46th session, Turkey’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yavuz Selim Kıran vehemently denounced the so-called “illegal annexation of Crimea” and alleged that Russia persecutes the Crimean Tartars. Although Russia and Turkey have a partnership that includes the sale of the S-400 missile defense system, the construction of Turkey’s first nuclear powerplant that experts believe is the first step towards a nuclear weapon, and coordinate in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last October that “We have never considered Turkey as our strategic ally. Turkey is a close partner, that partnership has a strategic nature in many areas.”
Although Russia and Turkey coordinate on a variety of issues, Ankara enjoys a real alliance with Kiev, something it does not have with Moscow. According to recent research, 57% of Ukrainians want their country to join NATO. Erdoğan has also given his strong support for Ukraine to become a NATO member, despite knowing full well that the Atlantic Alliance is an obsolete organization existing only to pressure Moscow, and in more recent times Beijing.
Azerbaijan found success in last year’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh thanks to Turkish-assembled drones and wider support. It appears now that Ukraine has Turkish support, it is emboldened to renew the conflict in Donbass. However, it would be immensely naïve to compare the military capabilities of Armenia and Russia. Whereas Armenia allowed its military to become obsolete in the face of fifth generation warfare, Russia is a leading country in the production of military technology, which is why although the conflict in Donbass has not reached full-scale war yet, the militias are already downing drones.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said only last month that “We will never turn our backs on Donbass, no matter what.” Although the U.S., especially under President Joe Biden, would support Ukraine against the Donbass militias and attempts to invade Crimea, it appears that Turkey is serving as the main encouragement and instigator. The fact is that the international situation is favourable for Ukrainian ambitions as Moscow’s relations with the West are stagnant and many in Europe are actively and purposefully exploiting all opportunities to antagonize Russia.
Although experts believe the resumption of hostilities is imminent, Ukraine is currently experiencing rasputitsa – the melting of snow. That creates unfavourable muddy conditions to begin a war as it severely restricts supply lines and the movement of troops and equipment. None-the-less, with increased drone activity, the mobilization of troops and the transfer of equipment towards the Line of contact, it certainly appears that Ukraine, with Turkish support and encouragement, is gearing up for a resumption of hostilities against Donbass.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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For those of us who have no direct experience of drone warfare, popular culture is one of the major ways that we come to understand what is at stake in UAV operations. Movies, novels, TV and other cultural forms can inform our ideas about drone warfare just as much as, if not sometimes more than, traditional news media or academic/NGO reports.
Death TV is a new study that looks in depth at how popular culture informs public understanding of the ethics, politics, and morality of drone operations. It looks at a wide range of popular drone fictions, including Hollywood movies such as Eye in the Sky and Good Kill, prestige TV shows such as Homeland, 24: Live Another Day and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and novels by authors including Dan Fesperman, Dale Brown, Daniel Suarez, and Mike Maden. Death TV looks at these cultural products and gets inside the way they work. It identifies six main themes that can be found across many of them, and examines the ways that they inform and shape the drone debate.
In broad terms, Death TV argues that popular cultural representations often have the effect of normalizing and justifying drone warfare. Enjoyable narrative texts such as films, TV series, novels, and some forms of popular journalism play a role in the process by which drone warfare is made comprehensible to those of us without first-hand experience of it. Importantly, they also do so in a way which has, however critical any individual story may appear to be, the general effect of making drone warfare seem a legitimate, rational and moral use of both cutting edge technology and lethal military force.
In the first episode of 24: Live Another Day (2014), fictional US President Heller bluntly responds to criticisms of the drone program by remarking that “I’m uncomfortable with the drones also. The ugly truth is, what we’re doing is working.” Statements like this, when repeated often enough with an appropriate dramatic gravity, can feel true.
Just In Time
First of all, like many forms of military fiction, drone fiction engages repeatedly with the ethics of killing in war. The opening chapter of my study, “Just in Time”, shows that very often, films like Eye in the Sky and novels like Richard A Clarke’s Sting of the Drone streamline the ethics of killing into clear yet problematically oversimplified stories that show killing by drone strike as a routinely legitimate way of exerting military force. These stories often take familiar forms, articulating ideas like ‘the ends justify the means’, or showing that drone strikes can ‘avert catastrophe in the nick of time’. Though it is sad, these dramas say, and though tragic choices need to be made, drone warfare is an effective way of achieving necessary and legitimate military goals. Drone fictions repeatedly show drones as an effective military technology that can do good in the world.
Collateral Damage
Drone stories very often position civilian deaths as a tragic yet inevitable aspect of drone warfare. The second chapter of Death TV, “Collateral Damage”, explores how drone fictions address this important and sensitive issue. In short, drone fictions very often admit that civilian deaths are terrible, but insist that the good achieved by the drone program outweighs its negative impacts. There are many drone novels, for example, in which characters that we are encouraged to admire or agree with dismiss the deaths of innocent people in drone strikes as unfortunate but necessary, or worth it if they can stop the villains. Sometimes these dismissals are grimly glib and racist, demonstrating the way that people living under the gaze of the drone are dehumanized in order to facilitate military drone operations. If the targets of drone operations are not considered human, it is easier both for the pilots to pull the trigger and for us to consider it justified. This aspect of drone fiction is one of its most contentious.
Technophilia
In chapter three, “Technophilia”, Death TV shows how drone stories emphasize the technical perfection of drone systems. Their surveillance capabilities are routinely exaggerated, and the accuracy of their weapons is routinely overplayed.
Drone feed imagery, which in reality is sometimes so unclear that pilots cannot distinguish between objects and people, is routinely shown in drone films as being unimpeachably unambiguous, as crystal-clear, as high-definition, and as broadcast around the world with no lag, latency, or loss.
Drone weapons, too, are shown as being unfailingly accurate – always hitting the bull’s eye without deviation – and even, in one extraordinary passage from the 2012 novel Collateral Damage, as feeling like “a rush of air. Then nothing. If you were within the fatal range of the explosion, the warhead would kill you before the sound got to you. That would be merciful, if you could consider any death merciful.” Drone weapons are such a technological miracle, in these fictions, that not even their victims suffer.
Hijack and Blowback
But there is, of course, a colossal contradiction between the arguments of chapters two and three. How can drones be perfect machines if collateral damage is also an inevitable aspect of their operations? How can a technology that is precise and intelligent continuously accidentally kill innocents? The fourth chapter of Death TV, “Hijack and Blowback”, reconciles this tension by exploring the ways in which drones are represented as vulnerable to hijack. The espionage genre, of which many drone fictions are a part, is known for convoluted conspiracist storytelling which explains geopolitical mysteries through reference to a shadowy world of infiltration, double agents, and intrigue. There is no collateral damage, there are no accidents: drone strikes which cause civilian casualties are explained as the results of manipulations or secret plots that ordinary people can never understand. This chapter examines how drone fictions – notably Dan Fesperman’s novel Unmannedand the fourth season of Homeland, in which attacks that seem at first glance to be tragic accidents are laboriously explained as the deliberate results of labyrinthine conspiracies – foreclose more substantive criticism of drones by incorporating critical narratives about hijack and blowback into their structure of meaning.
Humanisation
Chapter five of Death TV, “Humanisation”, shows how drone stories sympathetically portray drone operators. By emphasizing the psychological toll that remote warfare exacts upon its participants, drone fictions aim to dispel preconceptions that many people may hold about drone pilots as ‘desk warriors’ or the ‘chair force’ and to show that they are ‘real’ war-fighters with authentic military experience. Drone operators repeatedly suffer doubt, regret, and reluctance in drone fiction, as they struggle to reconcile the experience of warfighting at work and domestic life at home. This has the effect of foregrounding the inner experience of drone operators and allowing us to sympathetically identify with them, to understand that they are not just playing a video game but engaging in life-or-death decisions. This focus on drone pilots, though, further distances us from the lives and feelings of the people watched and targeted by the drone.
Gender and the Drone
Finally, chapter six, “Gender and the Drone”, explores how drone fictions address widespread anxieties about how drone warfare troubles conventional conceptions of gender. Many writers and filmmakers address the preconception that drone warfare makes soldiers less manly or less tough – and they show that this is not true, by emphasizing the battle-hardened masculinity of many drone operator characters who remain tough and manly despite their use of UAVs. Drone warfare is also shown as a newly egalitarian form of warfighting, a method of killing that enables women to be combatants on an equal footing to men. In this way, drone fiction reintegrates drones into the heteronormative system of gender norms.
In sum, these six ideas form a potent normalizing discourse, showing drones as ‘war as usual’ and, importantly, directing audiences away from and downplaying any criticism of the ethics or geopolitics of drone operations. There are, of course, plenty of artworks and pieces of writing that challenge the justification of drone warfare. Death TV draws a conceptual anatomy of the way that popular culture justifies military violence.
Join us online at 7pm on Tuesday 30 March to discuss ‘Death TV’ and the presentation of drone warfare in popular culture with its author, Alex Adams and panellists JD Schnepf, Amy Gaeta, and Chris Cole (Chair). See our Eventbrite pagefor more details and to register.
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The American presence in Afghanistan appears to be far from over. Although Trump initiated the process of withdrawing troops from Afghan soil, recent data reveals that the numbers are still alarming and that the actual number of Americans is considerably greater than the officially reported data. In the midst of this scenario, the new president, Joe Biden, still remains indecisive about the future of American policy towards Afghanistan, but his interventionist posture generates some expectations about this topic.
This week, The New York Times published an article affirming that the actual US military force in Afghanistan is greater than what is officially announced. According to the article, which cites American, European and Afghan officials, there are at least 1,000 Americans in Afghanistan more than the figures reported by Washington. The Pentagon claims that there are currently only 2,500 soldiers in that country, figures that do not include the 1,000 soldiers appointed by the media. So, there is a clash of speeches and most likely a desire by the Pentagon to omit the actual numbers for some reason yet unknown.
Certainly, the American soldiers omitted are those who are part of the special operations forces and, in this sense, the reason for the omission of the data would be for absolutely strategic reasons. According to an anonymous NYT source, these special units deployed on Afghan soil perform secret services that mutually assist the Pentagon and the CIA. This means that, despite official figures indicating a withdrawal process, American intelligence continues to act strongly on Afghan soil. It is clear that such services cannot be stopped suddenly, especially in a danger zone disputed by several militias linked to international terrorism. However, considering that the Americans have open negotiations with the Taliban which is the main terrorist group active in Afghanistan, it is difficult to speculate what activities the special forces would actually be carrying out on Afghan soil.
Still, the number of soldiers is only one factor in a major problem. Regardless of what data is real and the secret services carried out by Americans in Afghanistan, the deadline for the total withdrawal of troops is approaching – May 1, 2021 – and Biden does not have many options to consider about it. Trump initiated the withdrawal of troops against the Pentagon itself, which established a minimum number of 8,600 troops in the country to guarantee American interests. Biden, despite appearing much more interventionist than Trump, during his years as Obama’s vice president, defended the decrease of American troops in Afghanistan – an agenda that at that time did not develop. Now, as president, Biden can choose one of two paths: either follow his old desire, already initiated by Trump, or toughen up an interventionist policy (which he adopted as a speech during the election campaign) and try to manage the deal with the Taliban.
If Biden fails to comply with the agreement, the Taliban will attack with full force. If Biden tries to renegotiate the deadline, the Taliban will refuse to accept. Finally, if Biden complies with the treaty initiated by Trump and totally withdraws troops, the American government will deapen its diplomatic crises with the Afghan government and the Taliban increases its attacks in order to take the power. It is important to note that the Afghan government felt hurt by the direct negotiations between Washington and the Taliban, as it was excluded from the peace process in its own territory.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been trying to manage the diplomatic crisis since he took office. He recently organized a meeting between leaders of the Taliban and the Afghan government, which was protested by both of them. In short, the American desire has not changed with Biden: Washington continues to want to raise the Taliban’s status to that of a formal belligerent group, capable of negotiating with National States, ending the classification as a terrorist organization. But some data on the Taliban’s praxis complicates American plans.
Last week, the Taliban carried out an attack in the Afghan city of Herat that left seven dead and more than 50 injured. The group previously attacked and dominated the central district of Faryab province, forcing the local police to surrender and bringing terror to the population. As we can see, the Taliban has not abdicated from any of its practices. Terrorist activity remains central to the group and this puts Washington in a situation of instability in the face of the Afghan government. In fact, the day after the withdrawal of American troops, the Afghan government will be forced to seek alternative alliances to confront the Taliban. The current situation in Afghanistan, being forced to release prisoners from a terrorist group in order to comply with the terms of an agreement in which it did not even participate, is truly humiliating and this will certainly lead to the breaking of ties with the American government.
An alternative to this scenario would be to return to the US the soldiers whose presence on Afghan soil is officially reported and to keep special agents at the disposal of the Afghan government for cooperation in counterterrorism. But this does not seem to be the interest of Washington, which keeps its agents in the country and yet remains inert in the face of several Taliban attacks and insists on prioritizing this group in negotiations than the Afghan government itself. In the end, the worst-case scenario appears to be the most realistic: the US will not actually end its presence in Afghanistan but will not use it to collaborate with the local government against the Taliban.
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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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The Biden administration is reportedly planning a “retaliation” against Russia in the next three weeks or so for last year’s massive “SolarWinds” hack of U.S. cyber infrastructure, for which Russia was allegedly responsible.
The New York Times has written that U.S. plans include both new sanctions against Russia and U.S. cyber hacking of Russian state institutions. According to the Times, this will include “a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks,” which U.S. intelligence has already prepared. According to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, the response is intended to show Russia “what (actions) the United States believes are in bounds, and out of bounds.”
We hope that wiser counsels can still prevail, and in particular, that someone in the administration will notice both the logical incompatibility of these two responses, and the fact that they could set a precedent that will be used against America itself in future.
Because, as Sullivan’s remarks indicate, the imposition of sanctions implies a belief that state cyber hacking is illegitimate in what the United States calls a “rules-based global order.” The threat of U.S. retaliation in kind declares out in the open that the United States also plans to engage in these supposedly illegitimate actions, and is an implicit acknowledgement that Washington has indeed repeatedly engaged in similar actions in recent years.
More importantly, the planned action reflects two very serious errors in judgement, which left unchecked, could increase in scope under the new Biden administration. The first is a tendency, amplified by much of the U.S. media, to attribute blame to Russia for negative developments based on inadequate evidence, which the American public is hardly given a chance to view or assess. Furthermore, there is a proclivity to base U.S. policy on information that may be unclear, exaggerated, or simply untrue.
Concerning the SolarWinds hack, U.S. intelligence services can only say that the Russian state was “most probably” or “very probably” to blame for the hack. The New York Times has reported this as a certainty, but it is in fact extremely difficult to pin down for certain the national origins of such hacks, and even more difficult to determine if they were the work of state forces or independent actors. We may well reasonably assume that Russian intelligence services were responsible, but action of the kind that the Biden administration is contemplating should be based on something more than probability.
The second error, as I pointed out in Responsible Statecraft on January 13, and as has been argued since in a paper by Major Juliet Skingsley for Chatham House in London, and in Wired by Andy Greenberg, is the use of the phrase “cyberattack,” reflecting an extremely dangerous confusion between cyber espionage and cyber sabotage.
Cyber sabotage is like all forms of sabotage: a deliberate attempt to damage public or private infrastructure. If it leads to deaths, then it can well be considered an act of terrorism or of war. This is indeed action that violates all traditional rules of international behavior in peacetime.
Writing about a “Russian cyberattack” against the U.S. Energy Department and Nuclear Security Administration suggests actual damage to those institutions and the infrastructure they control. Among other hysterical political reactions, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin called the SolarWinds hack (which of course he described as a “cyberattack” and attributed unconditionally to Russia) as “virtually a declaration of war.” This has been echoed by Senator Chris Coons and others.
No such attack happened. Nor is it at all likely that Russia would carry out such sabotage unless Russia and the United States were already on the edge of war. This suggestion is in keeping with the equally absurd warning last year from NATO officials that in time of peace, Russian submarines might attack undersea communications cables — in the process, by the way, doing great damage to Russia itself, and to Russian partners. This analysis appears to have emanated in the first instance from the British Navy, in an absolutely transparent attempt to save itself from budget cuts. As with most of the SolarWinds allegations, these suggestions involved a confusion —whether careless or deliberate — between espionage and sabotage operations
The SolarWinds hack was an act of espionage by contemporary means. As pointed out in the analysis for Chatham House, an interesting (and amusing) feature of the hack is that if it had not been voluntarily reported to the U.S. government by a private security firm, then — as with all the most successful espionage operations — nobody in America would ever have known that it had happened. Believe me, if Russia ever does decide to attack America, we will know about it.
All states conduct espionage, including most notably the United States itself. Edward Snowden revealed the massive scale of electronic and cyber espionage, not only against Russia and other U.S. rivals but against America’s closest allies. In 2015, Wikileaks revealed that for decades, the National Security Agency had been spying on top German government communications, including hacking the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Moreover, the United States is a global leader in cyber sabotage. As the Times itself has reported, not only has Washington carried out massive cyberattacks on Iran, it has planted malware in much of Russia’s energy infrastructure — though supposedly only to be activated in response to a Russian attack.
Under the new “Defend Forward” cyber-strategy, the Trump administration decided that the United States would itself set out to disrupt any potential cyberattack before it occurred. This is a cyber version of the Bush administration’s disastrous Preventive War strategy, and like that strategy, involves Washington in exactly the sort of aggressive actions that it condemns and seeks to prevent on the part of others.
If the Biden administration does respond to espionage with sabotage it will take national rivalry in cyberspace to a wholly new level of danger, and start a potentially disastrous vicious circle of retaliatory attacks. It will give a green light to all future targets of American cyber-espionage to respond with cyberattacks on the United States.
Furthermore, to retaliate in this way would be a clear break with ancient international conventions and with the longstanding policy of the United States itself. For example in 2014, Russian intelligence was credibly reported to have hacked into the emails of the White House, State and Defense Departments. The Obama administration classified this as traditional espionage and did not retaliate.
The planned response to the SolarWinds hack reflects a much deeper problem in the Washington establishment’s attitudes and policy: the belief that the United States can unilaterally set the rules of the international system, and yet set different rules for itself whenever it feels an urgent need to do so. This was never an approach that was going to be accepted by other powerful states. In the area of cybersecurity it makes even less sense, for the internet really is (in many bad ways, alas) a great leveler. To adapt a famous meme: on the internet nobody knows that you are the only superpower.
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Featured image: Russian President Vladimir Putin (ID1974/Shutterstock) and President Joe Biden (Stratos Brilakis/shutterstock)
March 16th, 2021 by National Vaccine Information Centre (NVIC)
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Pharmaceutical and medical device giant Johnson & Johnson, Inc. (J&J) announced on February 28, 2021, plans to test its experimental Ad26.COV2.S vaccine for COVID-19 on infant children (including newborns), pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems.
J&J did not include infants, pregnant women or the immunocompromised in the U.S. population in clinical trials on the experimental COVID-19 vaccine last year.1,2,3 A recent article in New York Magazine noted:4
“The initial clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines didn’t include children, which is standard practice; now, trials for younger children are happening in descending order of age, calibrating the best dosage for each cohort.”
The announcement by J&J came the day after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted J&J subsidiary Janssen Biotech Inc. an emergency use authorization (EUA) to distribute the vaccine in the U.S. for use by individuals 18 years of age and older. Currently, the single-dose Ad26.COV2.S vaccine cannot be given to anyone in the U.S. under 18 years old.5,6,7,8,9
According to a spokesperson for Janssen, which manufactures Ad26.COV2.S, the single-dose vaccine will first be tested on children between 12 and 18 years old. Afterward, J&J will proceed quickly to test the vaccine on infants, pregnant women and immunocompromised people.10
FDA Reviewed J&J Plans to Test COVID-19 Vaccine on Babies
J&J’s move to test its COVID-19 vaccine on very young children, as well as pregnant woman and immunocompromised people, was expected. The plans to perform these clinical trials were reportedly included in J&J’s application to the FDA for EUA and were discussed by members of the FDA advisory committee that reviewed J&J’s data on Ad26.COV2.S.11,12
“They (J&J) did not get into a lot of detail about it but did make it clear they will be pursuing pediatric and maternal coronavirus immunization studies,” said FDA advisory committee member Dr. Ofer Levy, Ph.D., director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Harvard University’s Boston Children’s Hospital.13
Other Companies Testing COVID-19 Vaccines on Older Children
J&J’s planned COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials will be the first to include infants. AstraZeneca plc, which has produced the experimental AZD1222 vaccine for COVID-19 in partnership with Oxford University, has been conducting clinical trials on children as young as 6 years of age, while Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. (in partnership with BioNTech SE) are currently testing their experimental mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccines on children as young as 12.14,15
J&J began shipping out 4 million doses of Ad26.COV2.S on March 1, 2021. The company has pledged that it will have 20 million doses of the vaccine ready to distribute by the end of March and 100 million doses by this summer.16
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As our nation continues to be occupied by the greedy, the exploitive and the arrogant Super Rich, we need to call them out for what and WHO they are.
The Rolling Stones 1968 hit song “Sympathy for the Devil” still resonates some 53 years later. At the end of my column please read carefully Mick Jagger’s account of this evil.
As one studies the ‘True’ history of our nation, one can see how every single war we have either created or participated in, excepting to some extent WW2, none of them had anything to do with humanitarian causes.
It was always about control and power over other peoples. Internally, it has always been the great cause to further Capitalism within our boundaries and you have a ‘Devil of a horror’.
The Super Rich who still run things do not give a ‘Rat’s Ass’ for the health and welfare of our citizenry, excepting of course their own ‘Class’ of Super Rich. They own all the means of production, media and of course our government.
Observe all our presidents, and not one was free of their control and orchestration. The sole president who had his Epiphany not even after a year in office was conveniently taken out.
{Watch the powerful 1973 David Miller film Executive Action starring Burt Lancaster (screenplay by Dalton Trumbo) and the great 1974 Alan Pakula film The Parallax View starring Warren Beatty to get a handle on how these ‘eliminations’ are done}.
Progressive writers like Chris Hedges, Ed Curtin, Caitlin Johnstone and a myriad of others continually reveal how far off the radar our so called ‘Democracy’ has trekked. They show us how propaganda, bastard child of what Goebbels accomplished so well in Germany over 80 years ago, is our ‘New Normal’. Our country is simply a feudal outpost in a Super Rich Man’s world.
The Devils are the War Economy, the Landlord Class, the Media Giants and the Corporate World… always protected by mostly ‘Bought and Paid For’ Politicians who serve them so well, for so long. They divide us so shrewdly by color and most importantly by Class. They have the Upper Middle Class hating the Middle Class, the Middle Class hating the Lower Class, and of course whites fearing blacks and browns.. and even blacks and browns fearing each other. Like ‘Ants at a picnic’ they have us fighting for the crumbs from their table.
The Two Party/One Party charade they created generations ago continues to dish out this ‘Lesser of Two Evils’ logic, or should I say Illogic? Meanwhile, us, the suckers, see our hard earned tax dollars continue to be used to destroy the Safety Net we were promised would save us from falling too hard. The only Safety Net is for the ‘Less than 1%’ who own America.
Socialism is the only cure to not only stave off but ostracize those Devils among us. Wake up Trump Thumpers, Republican and Democratic Party supporters, and realize as Cassius put it so succinctly: “The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long years
Stole million man’s soul an faith
And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a general’s rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
Ah, what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out
Who killed the Kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me
Let me please introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reached Bombay
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, baby
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what’s confusing you
Is just the nature of my game
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politnesse
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste, mm yeah
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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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As calls for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination grow around the world, it’s becoming ever more crucial to understand what these injections actually are. The mRNA “vaccines” created by Moderna and Pfizer are in fact gene therapies.
As I’ll explain below, there’s simply no way around this, and drug manufacturers and public health officials must be made to admit this fact. Why? Because it makes all the difference in the world. You cannot mandate a gene therapy against COVID-19 any more than you can force entire populations to undergo gene therapy for a cancer they do not have and may never be at risk for.
Interestingly enough, mainstream media, fact checkers and various industry front groups insist the gene therapy claim is bogus, even though every single detail about the vaccines shouts otherwise. Why are they spreading this disinformation? Why do they not want you to know what these injections actually are?
In short, they know labeling them as “gene therapies” would be like slapping a skull and crossbones label on them. Most people have enough common sense to realize that gene therapy is a different ballgame from a regular vaccination, and might be a bad idea, especially for children and younger individuals.
mRNA ‘Vaccines’ Fulfill None of the Criteria for a Vaccine
To start, let’s take a look at some basic definitions of words. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vaccine is:1
“A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”
Immunity, in turn, is defined as:
“Protection from an infectious disease,” meaning that “If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.”
That’s the medical definition. The legal definition, in the few cases where it has been detailed, is equally unequivocal:
Iowa code2 — “Vaccine means a specially prepared antigen administered to a person for the purpose of providing immunity.”
Washington state code3,4 — “Vaccine means a preparation of a killed or attenuated living microorganism, or fraction thereof …” The statute also specifies that a vaccine “upon immunization stimulates immunity that protects us against disease …”
These definitions, both medical and legal, present problems for mRNA “vaccines,” since:
mRNA injections do not impart immunity. Moderna and Pfizer both admit that their clinical trials aren’t even looking at immunity. As such they do not fulfill the medical and/or legal definition of a vaccine.
They do not inhibit transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection. As such they do not fulfill the medical and/or legal definition of a vaccine.
Dictionaries Attempt to Rewrite Medical Terms
We should not be fooled by attempts to condition the public to accept redefined terms. As of February 2019, Merriam-Webster defined5 “vaccine” as “a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease.” By February 26, 2021, they had updated the definition of “vaccine” to:6
“A preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious disease:
a: an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated … pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)
b: a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)”
Let’s be clear. Merriam-Webster does not dictate medical terminology. It can be used, however, to confuse people. For now, all medical dictionaries still show the traditional definition of vaccine,7 as Merriam-Webster did up until this year. That said, I would not be surprised if changes are made there as well, eventually, if the misrepresentation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines is allowed to stand.
mRNA Therapy Doesn’t Satisfy Public Health Measure Directive
There’s also the issue of whether a gene therapy can be mandated, and this may hinge on it being accepted as a vaccine. The 1905 Supreme Court ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts8 essentially established that collective benefit supersedes individual benefit.
Put another way, the ruling argues (although legal experts diverge on some of the finer details of its interpretation) that it’s acceptable for some individuals to be harmed by a public health directive as long as it benefits the collective. However, if vaccination is a public health measure meant to protect and benefit the collective, then it would need to accomplish two things:
Ensure that the vaccinated person is rendered immune from the disease.
Inhibit transmission of the disease from the vaccinated person to other individuals.
We’re now back to the original problem that mRNA therapies for COVID-19 do not accomplish either of these things. Since these gene therapies do not render the person immune, and do not inhibit transmission of the virus, they cannot qualify as a public health measure capable of providing collective benefit that supersedes individual risk.
On the contrary, the only one benefiting from an mRNA “vaccine” is the individual receiving the gene therapy, since all they are designed to do is lessen clinical symptoms associated with the S-1 spike protein.
In other words, they won’t keep you from getting sick with SARS-CoV-2; they are only supposed to lessen your infection symptoms if or when you do get infected. So, getting vaccinated protects no one but yourself. Since you’re the only one who will reap a benefit (less severe COVID-19 symptoms upon infection), the justification to accept the risks of the therapy “for the greater good” of your community is blatantly irrational.
Marketing mRNA Therapy as Vaccine Violates Federal Law
Since mRNA “vaccines” do not meet the medical and/or legal definition of a vaccine, referring to them as vaccines, and marketing them as such, is a deceptive practice that violates9 15 U.S. Code Section 41 of the Federal Trade Commission Act,10 the law that governs advertising of medical practices.
The lack of completed human trials also puts these mRNA products at odds with 15 U.S. Code Section 41. Per this law,11,12 it is unlawful to advertise “that a product or service can prevent, treat, or cure human disease unless you possess competent and reliable scientific evidence, including, when appropriate, well-controlled human clinical studies, substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made.”
Here’s the problem: The primary end point in the COVID-19 “vaccine” trials is not an actual vaccine trial end point because, again, vaccine trial end points have to do with immunity and transmission reduction. Neither of those was measured.
What’s more, key secondary end points in Moderna’s trial include prevention of severe COVID-19 disease (defined as need for hospitalization) and prevention of infection by SARS-CoV-2, regardless of symptoms.13,14 However, Moderna did not actually measure rate of infection, stating that it was too “impractical” to do so.
That means there’s no evidence of this gene therapy having an impact on infection, for better or worse. And, if you have no evidence, you cannot fulfill the U.S. Code requirement that states you must have “competent and reliable scientific evidence … substantiating that the claims are true.”
Making matters worse, both Pfizer and Moderna are now eliminating their control groups by offering the real vaccine to any and all placebo recipients who want it.15 The studies are supposed to go on for a full two years, but by eliminating the control group, determining effectiveness and risks is going to be near impossible.
What Makes COVID Vaccines Gene Therapy?
Alright. Let’s move on to the definition of “gene therapy.” As detailed on MedlinePlus.gov’s “What Is Gene Therapy” page:16
“Gene therapy is an experimental technique that uses genes to treat or prevent disease … Researchers are testing several approaches to gene therapy, including: … Introducing a new gene into the body to help fight a disease …
Although gene therapy is a promising treatment option for a number of diseases (including inherited disorders, some types of cancer, and certain viral infections), the technique remains risky and is still under study to make sure that it will be safe and effective. Gene therapy is currently being tested only for diseases that have no other cures.”
Here, it’s worth noting that there are many different treatments that have been shown to be very effective against COVID-19, so it certainly does not qualify as a disease that has no cure. It makes sense that gene therapy should be restricted to incurable diseases, as this is the only time that taking drastic risks might be warranted. That said, here’s how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines gene therapy:17
“Human gene therapy seeks to modify or manipulate the expression of a gene or to alter the biological properties of living cells for therapeutic use. Gene therapy is a technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease. Gene therapies can work by several mechanisms:
Replacing a disease-causing gene with a healthy copy of the gene
Inactivating a disease-causing gene that is not functioning properly
Introducing a new or modified gene into the body to help treat a disease”
November 17, 2020, the American Society of Gene + Cell Therapy (ASGCT) announced “COVID-19 Vaccine Candidates Show Gene Therapy Is a Viable Strategy,” noting that:18
“Two COVID-19 vaccine trials, both of which use messenger RNA (or mRNA) technology to teach the body to fight the virus, have reported efficacy over 90 percent.
These findings, announced by Moderna on Nov. 16 and by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech on Nov. 9 … demonstrate that gene therapy is a viable strategy for developing vaccines to combat COVID-19.
Both vaccine candidates use mRNA to program a person’s cells to produce many copies of a fragment of the virus. The fragment then stimulates the immune system to attack if the real virus tries to invade the body.”
mRNA Deliver New Genetic Instructions
As explained in the ASGCT’s video above, mRNA are molecules that contain genetic instructions for making various proteins. mRNA “vaccines” deliver a synthetic version of mRNA into your cells that carry the instruction to produce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the antigen, that then activates your immune system to produce antibodies. Then there’s Moderna’s trial website,19 where they describe their technology thus:
“Typical vaccines for viruses are made from a weakened or inactive virus, but mRNA-1273 is not made from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is made from messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), a genetic code that tells cells how to make protein, which help the body’s immune system make antibodies to fight the virus.”
November 18, 2020, Wired magazine made a big deal about COVID-19 vaccines being “genetic vaccines,” noting:20
“The active ingredient inside their shot is mRNA — mobile strings of genetic code that contain the blueprints for proteins. Cells use mRNA to get those specs out of hard DNA storage and into their protein-making factories. The mRNA inside Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine directs any cells it reaches to run a coronavirus spike-building program.”
Importantly, as reported by David Martin, Ph.D.,21,22 “Moderna … describes its product not as a vaccine, but as ‘gene therapy technology’ in SEC filings. This is because neither Moderna nor Pfizer … make any claims about their products creating immunity or preventing transmission.” Additionally, Moderna’s SEC filings specifically state that “Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA,” as well.23
In a February 2021 article, MIT Technology Review reviewed the history of mRNA technology in general, and Moderna’s in particular, stating:24
“Vaccines were not their focus. At the company’s founding in 2010, its leaders imagined they might be able to use RNA to replace the injected proteins that make up most of the biotech pharmacopoeia, essentially producing drugs inside the patient’s own cells from an RNA blueprint. ‘We were asking, could we turn a human into a bioreactor?’ says Noubar Afeyan, the company’s cofounder …”
Bloomberg, in August 2020, reported25 that the Moderna vaccine would seek to transform your body into “a vaccine-making machine.” The New York Times was more to the point. In May 2020, they reported26 that “Researchers at two Harvard-affiliated hospitals are adapting a proven form of gene therapy to develop a coronavirus vaccine.” Read it again — A proven form of gene therapy.
So, to summarize: The definition of “genetic” is something relating to genes, and the definition of “therapy” is the medical treatment of a disease. The definition of “gene therapy” is the process of modifying or manipulating the expression of a gene, or altering the biological properties of living cells.
mRNA are snippets of genetic code that instructs cells to produce proteins. mRNA COVID-19 therapies “deliver genetic instructions into your cells,” thereby triggering your body to produce a fragment of the virus (the spike protein). So, mRNA vaccines ARE gene therapy. There’s simply no way around this. They fulfill all the definitions of gene therapy and none of the definitions for a vaccine.
Defining ‘COVID-19’
There’s yet one more potential problem with the “COVID-19 vaccine” narrative as a whole, which Martin unpacked in a January 25, 2021, interview on the Wise Traditions podcast (above).27 In it, he explains:
“COVID-19 is not a disease. It is a series of clinical symptoms. It is a giant umbrella of things associated with what used to be associated with influenza and with other febrile diseases.
The problem that we have is that in February [2020], the World Health Organization was clear in stating that there should not be a conflation between [SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19]. One is a virus, in their definition, and one is a set of clinical symptoms. The illusion in February was that SARS-CoV-2 caused COVID-19.
The problem with that definition, and with the expectation, is that the majority of people who test positive using the RT-PCR method for testing, for fragments of what is associated with SARS-CoV-2, are not ill at all. The illusion that the virus causes a disease fell apart. That’s the reason why they invented the term asymptomatic carrier.”
In short, SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be definitively proven to be the actual cause of COVID-19. So, a gene therapy that instructs your body to produce a SARS-CoV-2 antigen — the viral spike protein — cannot even be touted as a preventative against COVID-19, as the two have not been shown to be causally linked.
“They have been willfully lying since the inception of this,” Martin says in the interview.“There is not a causal link between these things … It has never even been close to established.
We have a situation where the illusion of the problem is that people say, ‘I don’t want to get COVID-19.’ What they mean is they don’t want to get infected with a virus. The problem is those two things are not related to each other. A viral infection hasn’t been documented in the majority of what is called cases.
There is no basis for that conflation other than the manipulation of the public. That’s the first half of the problem. The second half of the problem is that what is being touted as a vaccination … is not a vaccine. This is gene therapy …
What is this doing? It’s sending a strand of synthetic RNA into the human being and is invoking within the human being, the creation of the S1 spike protein, which is a pathogen … A vaccine is supposed to trigger immunity. It’s not supposed to trigger you to make a toxin …
It’s not somewhat different. It’s not the same at all … It’s not a prohibiting infection. It’s not a prohibiting transmission device. It’s a means by which your body is conscripted to make the toxin that then, allegedly, your body somehow gets used to dealing with, but unlike a vaccine — which is to trigger the immune response — this is to trigger the creation of the toxin.”
Why the Misrepresentation?
As for why drug companies are misrepresenting this technology, Martin suspects “it’s done exclusively so that they can get themselves under the umbrella of public health laws that exploit vaccination.”
Experimental gene therapies do not have financial liability shielding from the government, but pandemic vaccines do, even in the experimental stage, as long as the emergency use authorization is in effect. This is indeed a major incentive to make sure this technology is perceived as a vaccine and nothing else.
So, by maintaining the illusion that COVID-19 is a state of emergency, when in reality it is not, government leaders are providing cover for these gene therapy companies so that they are insulated from any liability.
The take-home message here is that these injections are not vaccines. They do not prevent infection, they do not render you immune and they do not prevent transmission of the disease. Instead, they alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch. What’s happening here is a medical fraud of unprecedented magnitude, and it really needs to be stopped before it’s too late for a majority of people.
If you already got the vaccine and now regret it, you may be able to address your symptoms using the same strategies you’d use to treat actual SARS-CoV-2 infection. I review these strategies at the end of “Why COVID Vaccine Testing Is a Farce.”
Last but not least, if you got the vaccine and are having side effects, please help raise public awareness by reporting it. The Children’s Health Defense is calling on all who have suffered a side effect from a COVID-19 vaccine to do these three things:28
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.
The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.
In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.
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In an open letter to WHO and in a follow-up video interview, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, says that by vaccinating everyone with a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission, we are destroying people’s immune systems, and setting the stage for a global health disaster.
Bossche says the COVID vaccines approved so far have been developed by “just brilliant” people and he has no criticism of them But, as he tells Dr. Phillip McMillan in an interview, “please use the right vaccine at the right place. And don’t use it in the heat of a pandemic on millions of millions of people.”
Bossche says that a mass vaccination campaign in the middle of a pandemic, with vaccines that don’t prevent transmission, is disastrous at an individual — and at a global — level:
“We are going to pay a huge price for this. And I’m becoming emotional because I’m thinking of my children, of the younger generation. I mean, it’s just impossible what we are doing. We don’t understand the pandemic.”
In an open letter to the World Health Organization (WHO), Bossche wrote that “we are currently turning vaccinees into asymptomatic carriers shedding infectious variants.”
Bossche hasn’t heard back from WHO, which concerns him.
“It is about humanity … I mean, it’s about your children. It’s your family. It’s my family. It’s everyone. Right. And it’s simply for me, I put everything at stake because I’ve done my homework. And this is simply a moral obligation. A moral obligation.”
Watch the video:
Read the interview transcript:
McMillan: I think the first thing that we have to clarify is that we have to explain you are someone who is in the vaccine development business, so to speak. What has that background been like?
Bossche: Well, I have a background essentially in, as far as vaccines are concerned, in industry as well as in the non-for-profit sector. So I have been working with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI [The Vaccine Alliance] especially concentrating on vaccines for global health.
And I’ve also been working with several different companies, vaccine companies developing of course essentially prophylactic vaccines and my main focus of interest has always been, in fact, the design of vaccines. So the concept, how can we educate the immune system in ways that are to some extent more efficient than we do right now with our conventional vaccines.
McMillan: Right. And so any effect, this is the area of work you’ve been in. You develop vaccines, you are as well working with the Ebola vaccine as well. One of the really, really dangerous viruses we have out there in the world. How does that work? Is it, is that easy to do?
Bossche: Well, I was not, let me be very clear. I was a coordinator of the Ebola program at GAVI. So we were interacting with several different vaccine companies that were developing Ebola vaccines, because it was important for GAVI to make the right choice, the right vaccine in order for this vaccine to be rolled out in the Western African countries that had this severe Ebola crisis back a number of years ago. So that was not a, let’s say operational practical work.
This was more a role of coordination, but of course was also a role of assessing what would be the impact of using some of these vaccines in larger populations and in an area where an epidemic really is going on because that’s a very particular and peculiar situation.
McMillan: Yes. And so in effect, we’ve had so much success over the past hundred years with some very big breakthroughs with vaccines, smallpox, you know, measles, mumps, rubella, polio. But we have struggled with other vaccines. Without going into the details, because this is very difficult to get across, but is there a difference with how viruses operate that make some easier to get a vaccine for?
Bossche: Well, I think we have a, Philip. Essentially, we need to distinguish, of course, between what we call acute self-limiting diseases. These are diseases that naturally come to an end in a sense that ultimately the individual will eliminate the pathogen. Of course, some people may die. Of course, let’s be very clear. Those who survive will ultimately eliminate the pathogen.
That is the vast majority of the vaccines we have been developing so far. The, you know, I don’t need to tell you that with other viruses where we clearly see that they spread in a completely different way. They spread, for example, from cell to cell, they tend to be more intracellular.
They tend to develop chronic infections where it’s not self-limiting, it’s not acute self-limiting, it’s chronic. It is much more difficult. And the reason primarily is that most of the vaccines we are developing are still antibody-based vaccines.
So we need these antibodies in the blood, or we need these antibodies to translate to the mucosa, for example, in order to capture the pathogen and to neutralize it. So some of the other work, I mean, they have a very insidious strategy in the sense that they hide in cells, that they can already at the mucosal barrier penetrate, you know, immediately into cells. And then the cells may migrate, for example, to the lymph nodes.
So they are shielded from the antibodies and that makes it very, very difficult because we know that we can catch them to some extent in the blood, but what they do all the time is that they insert mutation and they escape, they fully escape to our antibody responses.
So that makes it way more difficult. It’s also the reason why also against cancer, et cetera, we have not been extremely successful with vaccines as I would say, stand alone therapy.
McMillan: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So it, it brings us into where we are with regards to COVID-19. Now, if we have 20/20 vision at the moment, when we look back at the pandemic and where we started from, and I’ve always said that at the time, when the pandemic started, when it got from China and Italy into Europe, into the UK. I thought that the only way that we could manage this is to lock down and to prevent the spread of this apparently, this very dangerous virus. We do have to stand back and to see whether or not those decisions were correct. But as we said, that hindsight is 20/20. What would you say now, as we look back at the decisions we made then, were we about on the right track? Did we make any mistakes?
Bossche: Well, frankly speaking, from the very beginning, and I mean, there are many people who can witness this or testify this. I always said that it was a bad idea to do lockdowns that would also affect the younger people.
That we would prevent younger people from having contact, from being exposed. Because remember, the big difference back then was, of course, that we had a viral strain, COVID strain, that was circulating, dominant strain, and that was not as highly infectious as those that we are seeing right now.
Of course, when a new virus gets into a population, it immediately gets to the folks that have, you know, weak immunity. And we know, we know these people, this is to a large majority, of course, elderly people, people that have underlying diseases or are otherwise immune suppressed, et cetera.
And of course, I mean, it was certainly the right thing to do, to protect these people, and for them also to isolate, but we have to distinguish, frankly speaking, and that is what we have not been doing, between those people that have strong innate immunity. I mean, it’s not a, you cannot see when you see a person, you don’t know this, but we know that young people have quite decent innate immune response and therefore they are naturally protected and even more, I mean, if they get in contact with coronavirus, it will boost their natural immunity.
So therefore from the very beginning, I disapproved, you know, the fact that schools got to close and universities and that youngsters were prevented even from having contact with each other. That situation is of course completely different.
If you look at vulnerable people, the virus, this comes to the population, there is no, you know, humoral immunity. There is no immunity at all. In fact, so nobody has been in contact.
So the youngsters, they can rely on good innate immunity. Elderly people, I mean, the innate immunity is waning. It gets increasingly replaced by antigen-specific, by specific immunity as people get older.
So these people very, very clearly needed to be protected, but it has taken a lot of time before we understood, in fact, how exactly the immune response and the virus were interacting.
So there’s been a lot of confusion. A lot of mistakes made. Mistakes, I mean, retrospectively. And that has also led to, you know, bad control right from the beginning. I would say.
McMillan: With that in mind and where we are now, as countries across the world have been drifting towards the Christmas period, there’s still a rise in cases. Countries had to try and lock down, mask mandates and so on, but we all had the hope that vaccines would come and break the cycle. This is where clearly now from your expertise, you seem to have a different thought about how we should have been thinking about vaccines then, and even now, what is your perspective?
Bossche: Well, my perspective was, and still is, that if you go to war, you better make sure that you have the right weapon and the weapon in itself can be an excellent weapon. And that is what I’m saying really about the current vaccines.
I mean, just brilliant people who have been making these vaccines in no time and with regulatory approval and everything. So the weapon in itself is excellent.
Question is, is this the right weapon for the kind of war that is going on right now? And there my answer is definitely no, because these are prophylactic vaccines and prophylactic vaccines should typically not be administered to people who are exposed to high infectious pressure.
So don’t forget we are administering these vaccines in the heat of a pandemic. So in other words while we are preparing our weapon, we are fully attacked by the virus. The virus is everywhere. So that is a very different scenario from using such vaccines in a setting where the vaccine is barely or not exposed to the virus.
And I’m saying this, because if you have a high infectious pressure, it’s so easy for the virus to jump from one person to the other.
So if your immune response, however, is just mounting, as we see right now with the number of people who get their first dose, they get the first dose, the antibodies are not fully mature, the titers are maybe not very high. So their immune response is suboptimal, but they are in the midst of this war while they are mounting an immune response, they’re fully attacked by the virus and every single time. I mean, this is textbook knowledge.
Every single time you have an immune response that is suboptimal in the presence of an infection, in the presence of a virus, that infected person, you are at risk for immune escape.
So that means that the virus can escape the immune response. And that is why I’m saying that these vaccines, I mean, in their own right, are, of course, excellent. But to use them in the midst of a pandemic and do mass vaccination, because then you provide within a very short period of time, the population with high antibody titers – so the virus comes under enormous pressure.
I mean, that wouldn’t matter if you can eradicate a virus, if you can prevent infection, but these vaccines don’t prevent infection.
They protect against disease because we are just, unfortunately, we look no further than the end of our nose in the sense that hospitalization, that’s all what counts, you know, getting people away from the hospital.
But in the meantime, we are not realizing that we give all the time during this pandemic, by our interventions, the opportunity to escape to the immune, to the immune system.
And that is of course, a very, very, very dangerous thing. Especially, if we realize that these guys, they only need 10 hours to replicate.
So if you think that by making new vaccines, a new vaccine against the new infectious strains, we going to catch up, it’s impossible to catch up. I mean, virus is not going to wait until we have those vaccines ready. I mean, this thing continues.
And as I was saying, the thing is, I mean, if you do this in the midst of a pandemic, that is an enormous problem.
These vaccines are excellent, but they are not made for administration to millions of people in the midst, in the heat of a pandemic. So that is my thoughts.
McMillan: Is this equivalent then, because you’ve mentioned this in your paper, is this equivalent to using either a partial dose of antibiotics in anti-microbial or in a bacterial infection where you then produce super bugs. Is this the kind of example that you’re alluding to?
Bossche: Well, that is a very good parallel. It’s also the parallel I’m using actually in the paper. We just post it on LinkedIn [bad choice, LinkedIn has been deplatforming and censoring scientists and doctors more than any other platform] which, you know, should be so open for everybody [wrong, they outsource to low paid “fact checkers” who aggressively censor according to left media news narratives].
I mean, it’s pure science because as you were pointing out, the thing is the rule is it’s very simple. I mean, same with antibiotics. Either the antibiotics do not match very well with the bug. That’s not good. That’s why we are making antibiograms, you know, to first identify which is the germ. And then we choose the antibiotics. We need to have a very good match. Otherwise there could be resistance.
So when I compare this to the current situation, do we have a good match with our antibodies? No, at this point in time, we don’t have a good match anymore because we have this kind of like almost heterologous variants.
So that differs from the original strain. So the match isn’t very good anymore. And hence we see people are still protected, but they are already shedding the virus. So that is one thing.
The other thing is the quantity, of course. You tell people, you know, you take your antibiotics according to the prescription, please don’t as soon as you feel well, that doesn’t mean that you can stop the antibiotics. Same here.
And I get just one example. If you give people just like one dose, I mean, they are in the process of mounting their antibodies. The antibodies still need to fully mature, et cetera. So this is a suboptimal situation. We are putting them in a suboptimal situation with regard to their immune protection. And on the other end, they are in the midst of the war. They are fully attacked by all, you know, by all these kinds of a highly infectious variants.
So, I mean, it’s very clear that this is driving immune escape and will ultimately drive resistance to the vaccines.
So my point is, yes, Philip, it’s very similar. There is one difference. The virus needs living cells. I mean, if you’re driving immune escape, but the guy has no chance to jump on somebody else, who cares?
This situation is now different because we are in the midst of a war, there is a high infectious pressure. So the likelihood that an immune escape immediately finds another living cell, that means another host is very, very high. It’s per definition. It’s the definition almost of a pandemic.
McMillan: So it raises a simple question that somebody has put in front of us here, which is, it’s perfectly common sense. What do we do?
Bossche: That question is very easy. I mean, we need to do a better job when we are confronted with situations that seem very dramatic. Like, you know, an epidemic. Our generation has not, you know, been living in times where there are epidemics or pandemics.
And so we immediately take action and jump on the beast with the tools we have instead of analyzing what is really going on. And one thing that I thought was extremely interesting was, and it’s something that was not really understood. We know that the number of people or asymptomatically infected, so they are infected, but they don’t develop severe symptoms. Of course they can have some mild symptoms of respiratory disease, whatever.
So the question is what exactly happens with those folks that they can eliminate the virus, they eliminate the virus, they don’t transmit it.
They will shed it for like a week or so. And then they eliminate this, or you could say, yeah, of course we know that antibodies eliminate … Oh, wait a minute. The antibodies come later, you have first the search of, you know, shedding of the virus.
And it’s only afterwards that you see, you know, a moderate and short-lived raise of antibodies. So the antibodies can not be responsible for elimination of the virus. So what is responsible for elimination of the virus? Luckily enough, we have a number of brilliant scientists, independent, brilliant scientists that have now increasingly been showing. And there is increasing evidence that what in fact is happening is that NK cells are taking care of virus.
So NK cells that the virus gets into, into these epithelial cells and starts to replicate, but NK cells get activated and they will kill, they will kill the cell, you know, in which the virus tries to replicate.
So I was saying that the virus needs to rely on a living cell. So you kill that cell. It’s gone, it’s all over. So we have the solution in the pathogenesis because some people eliminate it.
McMillan: Absolutely. I just wanted to clarify, because when you said NK cells, somebody may not quite know what you mean. So you mean non killer cells. So it’s a specific group of …
Bossche: Natural killer cells …
McMillan: Sorry. It’s natural killer cells, a special group of white blood cells that go and take out the viral infected cell. So, yes, you’re right. Because I have seen from a clinical perspective, very old patients who you would expect to be overwhelmed by the virus and they have a few symptoms and then they’re okay. So they, the body does manage to get rid of it in some cases.
And so it raises the point that I’ve always been saying is that we haven’t spent enough time understanding how the virus impacts the body and understanding how the pandemic then will impact the world. We’ve spent all of our time just going for solutions. Has that been a mistake?
Bossche: Of course, this has been the, you know, the most important mistake, I think. I’m not sure many people and I, I was part of them. So in all modesty, I was part of them. Not sure whether many people understand how a natural pandemic develops and why we have this first wave. We have the second wave. And we have this third wave.
And, I mean, these waves of disease and mortality and morbidity, they shift from one population to another. So I’m saying, for example, the second wave, this was typically also the case with influenza, World War I, when basically more soldiers, young people died in the trenches of influenza than from from injuries or whatever. So firstly, elderly, I mean, weak immune system, et cetera. Then it gets to the wave of morbidity and mortality to the younger people.
And then it gets back to people who have antibodies. So we have to understand this first, Oh, how does this come? Why all of a sudden does this wave of morbidity and mortality shift, for example, why are the three waves? How do we explain this? And also, how does it come that some people are naturally protected and others are not? What are these mechanisms, what are these molecular mechanisms?
Because if you make vaccines and all these things, at the end of the day, this is going to interact at the molecular level. And we have not been understanding this. I would just explain it. We don’t understand our weapon because we don’t understand that prophylactic vaccines should not be used in the midst of an epidemic. And we don’t understand exactly what the virus is, do we. So we go to a war and we don’t know our enemy. We don’t understand the strategy of our enemy. And we don’t know how our weapon works. I mean, how is that going to go? We have a fundamental problem to begin with.
McMillan: I understand, and I completely accept that, but at the same time, I am still thinking that if the governments don’t respond in some way, because they have to be seen to be doing something. They seem to be in a lose-lose situation. If they don’t do anything, they’re going to be criticized. And if they do do something, they’re going to be criticized. Is that a fair statement to make?
Bossche: I don’t think so. What was this, oath of, what’s the name of the guy? Hippocrates. You know the rule?
McMillan: The first. Do no harm.
Bossche: Okay. Well, I mean, it wouldn’t matter if you start vaccinating people and even if it doesn’t work. Problem is that we induce a long lived antibody response. And as a matter of fact, we know, I mean, that is not my knowledge. It’s all published.
Problem is that we fail to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Fact is that these long lived antibodies, which have high specificity, of course, for the virus. They out-compete our natural antibodies because they’re natural antibodies, they have a very broad spectrum, but they have low affinity. Right?
And so by doing this, even if your antibodies don’t work anymore, because there is resistance or, you know, that the strains are too different from the original strain, we still, these antibodies, specific antibodies will still continue to out-compete your natural antibodies. And that is a huge problem because I was saying just a few minutes ago, these natural antibodies, they provide you with broad protection.
This protection is, yes, it is variant nonspecific. Doesn’t matter what variant you get. It doesn’t even matter what type of coronavirus is coming in. They will protect you. Unless, of course, you suppress this level of innate immunity, or it is, for example, out-competed by long lived specific antibodies. And so it’s not like, okay, you know, you missed it. Okay, let’s try again. No, you did some harm. I mean, this is different from drugs.
Immunizing somebody is installing a new software on your computer. Don’t forget. I mean, these antibodies, they will be recalled every single time you’re encountering a coronavirus, right? I mean, you cannot just erase this. So this is very serious. This is very serious.
McMillan: So this is an important point because when I was looking at some of the research around the challenges that they faced with the initial SARS, called the first epidemic, and they tried to develop the vaccines. One of the things they found, certainly when they tested it on the ferrets, was that when they expose them to a coronavirus again, they got a very severe response to it. Is this what you’re saying? That we’re putting ourselves in a position where we can then have much more severe disease even to viruses that should normally be quite benign?
Bossche: Well, you know, you see all my passion and my conviction, but I mean, I’ve been the last to criticize the vaccines in terms of, would they, in some regard, could they, in some regard be unsafe because, you know, you would have even this exacerbation of disease due to antibodies that doesn’t match very well with the coronavirus they’re exposed to et cetera.
I know there is reports on this, and there is a lot of serious thoughts about this. But I think what we are talking about right now, the epidemic or the pandemic problem of having a population that is at no point during the pandemic and to large extent, due to our intervention, has not a strong immune response. I mean, this is already serious enough. This is more concerning than one or the other adverse events that could maybe elicited, I’m not downplaying it, but that could maybe be elicited because people have antibodies that do no longer match very well with the strain they were or with the strain they are exposed to.
And therefore, you know, they build a complex, they don’t neutralize the virus, they build a complex and this complex could maybe even enhance viral entry into susceptible cells and hence lead to exacerbation of disease.
I mean, this may be possible, but the problem I’m talking about is a global problem. It’s not an individual getting an adverse event. It’s a global problem of, you know, making this virus increasingly infectious because we live it all the time, a chance and opportunity to escape an immune system and to drive this.
So to wake this up, you know, up to a level where the virus is so infectious, that we can even no longer control it, because I mean, these highly infectious strains, some people think, Oh, the virus is going to calm down and it will insert a number of mutations, you know, just to be gentle and kind with us. That’s not going to happen. I mean, this highly infectious range remains.
It is not going to be spontaneous mutations that all of a sudden would become, would make this virus again harmless because such a virus would have a competitive disadvantage, could not be dominant anymore, so that’s not going to happen. So we’re talking about a very, very, very serious problem here.
McMillan: So I’ve seen the question many times and quite frankly, I get asked the questions. We’re coming to a point where people are going to have to take these vaccines. That looks as though it’s the reality. Either in the context of work or in the context of travel. Based on what you’re saying, they’re in a lose-lose situation. What does this mean?
Bossche: Well, what does this mean? It’s very clear. It’s very clear what this is going to mean.
So let’s consider the consequences of this both at a population level and at an individual level, because I would well understand if for the population is maybe not the best thing to do, but you know, on an individual level, it’s still okay. Yeah. Then it’s not an easy, that’s not an easy question.
But as a matter of fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Well, it’s not the opposite. It is detrimental both on a population level, as on an individual level. And I’m telling you why. I think the population level I explained to you, we are increasingly facing highly infectious strains that already right now, we cannot control because basically what we are doing is that we are turning — when we vaccinate somebody, we are turning this person in a potential asymptomatic carrier that is shedding the virus.
But at an individual level, I just told you that if you have these antibodies and at some point, and I’m sure this, people can challenge me on this, but, you know, reality will prove it.
Bossche: I think we are very close to vaccine resistance right now. And it’s not for nothing that already people start developing, you know, new vaccines against the strains, et cetera.
But what I was saying is that, okay, if you miss the shoot, okay, you could say nothing has happened. No. You are at the same time losing the most precious part of your immune system that you could ever imagine.
And that is your innate immune system, because the innate antibodies, the natural antibodies, the secretary IGMs will be out-competed by these antigen-specific antibodies for binding to the virus. And that will be long lived. That is a long lived suppression.
And you lose every protection against any viral variant or coronavirus variant, et cetera. So this means that you are left just with no single immune response with your, you know, it’s none, your immunity has become nil.
It’s all gone. The antibodies don’t work anymore. And your your innate immunity has been completely bypassed and this while highly infectious strains are circulating.
So, I mean, if that isn’t clear enough, I really don’t get it. And people please do read my, you know, what I posted because it’s science, it’s pure science, pure science. And as everybody knows, I’m a highly passionate vaccine guy, right?
And I’ve no criticism on the vaccines, but please use the right vaccine at the right place. And don’t use it in the heat of a pandemic on millions of millions of people.
We are going to pay a huge price for this. And I’m becoming emotional because I’m thinking of my children, of the younger generation. I mean, it’s just impossible what we are doing. We don’t understand the pandemic.
We have been turning it into an artificial pandemic.
Who can explain where all of a sudden, all these highly infectious strains come from? Nobody can explain this.
I can explain it. But we have not been seeing this during previous pandemics, during natural pandemics. We have not been seeing it. Because at every single time, the immunity was low enough so that the virus didn’t need to escape. So back at the end of the pandemic, when things calmed down and it was herd immunity, it was still the same virus circulating.
What we are now doing is that we are really chasing this virus and it becomes all, you know, increasingly infectious. And I mean, this is just a situation that is completely, completely completely out of control.
So it’s also, we are now getting plenty of asymptomatic shedders. People who shed the virus because if they are vaccinated or they have even antibodies from previous disease, they can no longer control these highly infectious variants.
So how does that come? Does anybody still understand the curves? I see all these top scientists looking at this curve, at its waves. Like somebody else is looking at the currency rates at the stock market.
All they can say is, Oh, it goes up, it’s stabilizing. It may go down, may go up, et cetera. I mean, that is not science. They don’t have any clue.
They don’t even know whether the curve is gonna go up exponentially or whether it’s gonna go down or whatever. They’re completely lost. And that is extremely scary. That has been the point where I said, okay, guy, you have to analyze. You have to, but you know, these people are not listening. That is the problem.
McMillan: So you are, in effect, putting your reputation on the line because you feel so passionately about this because I guarantee you that no government, no health system is going to want to hear what you are saying. You are, in effect, almost giving fuel to the fire for an anti-vaxxer who doesn’t want the vaccine.
Bossche: No, no, well, no. Because I’ve clearly also addressed some emails from anti-vaxxers. I mean, I’m not interested, but I’m clearly telling them that at this point, it’s so irrelevant, you know, whether you’re a pro vaxxer or an anti-vaxxer, et cetera, it is about the science. It’s about humanity, right?
I mean, let’s not lose our time now with criticizing people or, I mean, anti-vaxxer, okay. If you’re not an anti-vaxxer, you could be a stalker.
You could be, you know, we like to stigmatize because if you stigmatize people, you don’t need to bother about them anymore.
Oh, this guy’s an anti-vaxxer. Okay. I mean, he’s out of the scope. Oh, he’s a stalker. He’s out of the scope. I mean, that is a discussion that is completely irrelevant at this point.
It is about humanity. And of course I’m passionate. Of course, I mean, it’s about your children. It’s your family. It’s my family. It’s everyone. Right. And it’s simply for me, I put everything at stake because I’ve done my homework. And this is simply a moral obligation. A moral obligation.
McMillan: Wow. Wow. I mean, there’s very little one can say, as I said, when you position that you are in the business of developing vaccines and helping societies protect against infections through the use of vaccines, and in this circumstance, you are saying, hold it, we’re doing the wrong thing here. It’s very difficult to not listen to that. That’s the truth.
Bossche: Well, the answer is very easy. I mean, this is human behavior. If you’re, you know, having panic, we do something and we try to make ourselves believe that it is the right thing to do, until there is complete chaos and there is a complete disaster.
And then people say, well, you know, I mean, politicians will probably say, you know, we have been advised by the scientists and scientists, you know, will maybe point to somebody else, but this is now a situation.
I’m asking every single scientist to scrutinize, to look what I’m writing, to do the science and to study exactly the, I call these the immune pathogenesis of the disease. And because I like people to do their homework.
And if the science is wrong, you know, if I’m proven wrong, I will admit it, but I can tell you, I’m not putting my career, my reputation at stake.
I would not do this when I would not be 200% convinced. And it’s not about me, not about me at all. It’s about humanity. People don’t understand what is currently going on. And we have an obligation to explain this.
And I posted my paper on LinkedIn and I invite all independent scientists please to look at it because this can be easily understood by microbiologists, immunologists, geneticists, you know, plenty of biochemists, etc., etc., all the biologists, all these people who have elementary knowledge, it’s not rocket science, elementary knowledge of biology should be able to understand this.
And I mean, I can only appeal to these people, you know, to stand up as independent scientists and to voice their opinion.
McMillan: Yes, yes, yes. I mean, that was a long point that somebody put on about the innate immune response, the false overreacting of the innate immune response, leading to detrimental effects in other coronaviruses. So I think you’ve expressed this so well, Geert. I think that just hearing your explanation, the passion, the focus on the science, I think that that’s as much as you can do. I think that I don’t even want to say any more because I don’t want to lose that passion that you have just expressed.
How much you are doing in terms of trying to see if you can make a difference with regards to the impact that we are having in this pandemic. You know, we really, really appreciate that, Geert. We really, really appreciate that. I hope enough people share this, and listen to it, certainly because I’m connected with a lot of scientists. Please connect to Geert, take a look at his paper and see what you think. And as you said, let’s make decisions based on science. That’s the best that we can do at this point.
Wonderful. Just stay on the line there. We’re just going to close off now, Geert. So thank you again very, very much, Geert. And I hope maybe we can speak again in the near future to expand a little bit further on what you have said.
Bossche: Thanks, Philip, for having me on.
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Nestled in the heart of a seemingly innocuous business park in the hinterlands of Milton Earnest is a bleak, squat building contained within walls of taut barbed wire. This is Yarl’s Wood, the notorious detention centre where asylum seekers are detained indefinitely without trial, before being deported. People can get lost in its labyrinthine bowels for years, stuck on the punishing treadmill of our vast immigration bureaucracy. In recent years, reports of dehumanizing conditions within Yarl’s Wood have led to a gradual awareness amongst the public that the world inside its walls is a terrifying place, where a culture of impunity leads to gross abuses of power. What is to be done?
Certainly there is a powerful argument that the facility shouldn’t exist at all.
It has a nefarious reputation for a reason. Access to basic, vital rights to personal and social protection is denied to detainees, particularly harming those from vulnerable backgrounds. During a fire in 2007, officers complied with orders to lock detainees in the burning building, injuring five people and risking their lives. In another disturbing instance of heinous neglect, during a wildcat hunger strike by women at least 70 of them were locked in an airless corridor without water or toilet facilities by way of punishment for their dissent.
Moreover, there are numerous corroborated allegations that staff have sexually assaulted detainees, and in 2011 the High Court ruled that children were being kept in unlawful conditions. All of this raises questions about who is being entrusted with running this facility. If all they are good for is abusing inmates, it raises the question of whether Yarl’s Wood serves a public function at all. It is, in fact, very damaging, and embarrassing for a country with pretensions to being civilized.
Copyright the New Internationalist
A large part of the problem with Yarls Wood is the fact that it is privately owned and thus isn’t subject to measures of accountability, oversight and scrutiny which are the modus operandi for publically owned organisations. The reputation of the center has decreased noticeably during the period when Serco have been in charge. The corporation entrusted with running Yarl’s Wood has demonstrated severe deficiencies in their behaviour time and again, but they glide from scandal to scandal with near total impunity, rewarded for their ineptitude with eye-watering profits. Privatization of detention facilities has created a machine in which the relentless creation of profit triumphs over the duty of doing a good public service. Prisoners aren’t treated as people. In the eyes of the administrators the bottom line matters more than quality of life. That’s how prisoners end up sick, dead and abused.
Equally as disturbing as the frequency of abuse is the complicity of the government in letting Serco off the hook. The Home Office have refused Freedom of Information requests demanding statistics on the number of people sexually assaulted, on the grounds that it would jeopardise commercial interests. They have done everything in their power to shroud Yarl’s Wood in secrecy, rather than using their influence to force daylight on to the nefarious practices inside.
They are complacent in the face of abuse, and have made no efforts to stop it. At a time when even the conservative Australian government is agreeing to close a controversial detention center on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, it is perhaps surprising that Britain is not seriously considering the same future for Yarl’s Wood. Yet with the rise of xenophobia, politicians will choose to cynically scapegoat asylum seekers for the problems they created and try to turn us against each other, rather than against the real danger to our society: Yarl’s Wood itself.
In a climate where there is no political will to hold Serco to account, the bold and rancorous Movement For Justice By Any Means Necessary have called upon allies in the resistance against Yarl’s Wood to protest against the facility and its inhumane conditions once again. The movement campaigns against detention and deportation by the Home Office, working very closely with the detainees themselves in a grassroots campaign that has grown from strength to strength in recent years. Their tactics usually involve surrounding the building with a braying crowd of allies. It is firstly a way of reminding detainees they have noisy support on the outside. Secondly, it is supposed to remind the oppressors of the fragility of their perimeters. The gates and the guards and the barbed wire can easily be overwhelmed by enough people. The message proclaimed is that our society, with a positive regard for the lives of asylum seekers, is bigger than yours. People have the power.
It is a flaw in our thinking that we have a tendency to see problems as existing in the past, but never in the present. History remembers Ellis Island for violating its detainees. Similar experiences of oppression still burble under the face of our society, under the illusion of its progress, but politicians would sweep the truth under the rug in order to service the myth that we have become a more tolerant and open-minded society. The Movement For Justice By Any Means Necessary tries to break lethal inaction and silence with direct action, stirring up a cauldron of opposition which has shocked and frightened the detention services.
A fundamental and momentous question about public services and their purpose consists in the debate about the future of Yarl’s Wood: does it serve the needs of business, or the wider society? Do we even get a say? If there is no space for public consultation on its future, is democracy a ruse?
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The bloc thought that it could dispel suspicions of its motives by emphasizing that it came together for humanitarian reasons almost two decades ago but that narrative is nothing more than an attempt to deceive the rest of the world.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, popularly known as the Quad, held its first-ever leadership summit on Friday via virtual means. The leaders of the US, Australia, India, and Japan discussed a slew of issues that concern their mutual interests in the broad space that they describe as the Indo-Pacific. The bloc has long been suspected of tacitly harboring anti-Chinese intentions, but its leaders attempted to clarity that this isn’t the entirety of its purpose in their joint statement that was released after their video conference. In fact, they didn’t even directly address China at all, though they did imply that it was discussed during their meeting.
The only indirect reference to China was the joint statement’s claims that its members “will continue to prioritize the role of international law in the maritime domain, particularly as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and facilitate collaboration, including in maritime security, to meet challenges to the rules-based maritime order in the East and South China Seas.” Nevertheless, this is still very significant since it directly affects China’s national security interests in those two bodies of water considering its territorial claims there that are contested by several other countries.
The Quad’s joint statement also pointed out that this bloc was supposedly created after the 2004 tsunami, though without mentioning the growing consensus in their countries over the past few years that it’s actually a platform for attempting to contain China. Their talk about shared interests in the spheres of trade, humanitarian aid, disaster relief, cybersecurity, COVID-19, investment, and other such topics actually seem to be a smokescreen for strengthening coordination between them on these fronts in order to more rigorously compete with China.
Of particular concern is the Quad’s references to a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, “democratic values”, and “territorial integrity”, which can be understood by the larger strategic context as being directed against China. That’s because those countries have repeatedly accused China of allegedly undermining all three of those interests around which the Quad is converging. At face value, the bloc’s claims of ASEAN’s centrality seem innocuous enough but take on a more sinister meaning if one suspects the Quad of trying to court those countries for the purpose of containing China in the South China Sea.
With this in mind, the Quad’s first-ever leadership summit did indeed clarify the bloc’s purpose through its indirect strategic references to containing China, which are patently obvious to those observers that are capable of reading between the lines in the current strategic context. The bloc thought that it could dispel suspicions of its motives by emphasizing that it came together for humanitarian reasons almost two decades ago but that narrative is nothing more than an attempt to deceive the rest of the world. The Quad has always had tacit anti-Chinese intentions, though these don’t need to remain its raison d’etat.
For example, instead of excluding China and aiming to contain it, the Quad could incorporate the People’s Republic into this transregional platform through non-military outreaches focused on trade, investment, infrastructure, COVID-19, climate change, and disaster relief. It’s impossible to contain China, let alone in its home region, which is why the Quad should focus on cooperating with it. The overarching purpose of such outreaches could be to lay the basis for expanding the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) which Quad-members Australia and Japan are already part of with China to include the US and India with time.
The Indo-Pacific isn’t “free and open” when China is excluded from the Quad’s emerging transregional integration platform, nor are “democratic values” embraced by refusing to cooperate with it. To the contrary, the Quad is attempting to make the Indo-Pacific increasingly captive and closed in an anti-democratic way which threatens China’s territorial integrity in the East and South China Seas. It’s for this reason why the Quad must radically reconsider its raison d’etat by moving away from its doomed-to-fail attempts to contain China and towards actively cooperating with it instead.
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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.
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As American economic power continues to decline, a division has emerged within the U.S. politicalestablishment as to which of its designated adversaries is to blame for the country’s woes — Russia, or China.
The dispute came to a head during each of the last two presidential elections, with the Democratic Party first blaming Moscow for Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in 2016 over unproven “election meddling” by the Kremlin. After Joe Biden’s equally controversial victory over Donald Trump this past November, the GOP has retaliated by portraying the 46th president as “soft on China” just as their counterparts drew critical attention to Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — even though both men have taken tough stances toward each respective country. As a result of this neo-McCarthyist political atmosphere, détente has been criminalized. In order to understand what is driving this interwar between factions of the Anglo-American elite amid the rise of China and Russia on the world stage, a revisiting of the history of relations between the three nations is necessary.
From the first millennia until the 19th century, China was one of the world’s foremost economic powers. Today, the People’s Republic has largely recaptured that position and by the end of the decade is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, a gain that may beexpeditedby the post-pandemic U.S. recession compared with China’s rapid recovery. Unfortunately, the Western attitude toward China remains stuck in the ‘century of humiliation’ where from the mid-19th century until the Chinese Revolution in 1949, it was successively raped and plundered by the Western, Japanese, and Russian imperial powers. The reason the English-speaking world clings to this backwards view is because apart from that centennial period, the West has always been second place to China as the world’s most distinguished country providing the global standard in infrastructure, technology, governance, agriculture, and economic development. Even at the peak of the Roman Empire, the Han dynasty where the ancient Silk Road began was vastly larger in territory and population.
For two consecutive years in the early 1930s, the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. was Pearl S. Buck’sThe Good Earthwhich depicted the extreme poverty and famine of rural peasant life in pre-revolutionary China. In many respects, the picture of China in the Western mind remains a composite impression from Buck’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. The former Chinese Empire underwent its ‘hundred years of humiliation’ after suffering a series of military defeats in the Opium Wars which funded Western industrialization, where the ceding of territories and war reparations in unequal treaties left China subjugated as the “sick man of Asia.” Like Russia which lagged behind Europe after the Industrial Revolution until the Soviet centralized plans of the 1930s, China was able to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an industrial giant after its communist revolution in 1949. However, it was only a short time until the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 when China began to forge its own path in one of the most widely misunderstood geopolitical developments of the Cold War.
In 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave what is commonly known as his “Secret Speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a report entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, where the Ukrainian-born politician denounced the excesses of his deceased predecessor, Joseph Stalin. The news of the shocking address to the Politburo did not just further polarize an international communist movement already divided between Trotskyists and the Comintern but had geopolitical consequences beyond its intended purpose of accommodating Washington to deescalate the arms race. At first, China took a relatively neutral stance toward the Soviet reforms during its Hundred Flowers Campaign, even as Mao encouraged the USSR to put down the 1956 counter-revolution in Hungary.
The real turning point in Sino-Soviet relations came when the bureaucratic placation of the Khrushchev Thaw began to discourage movements in the developing world living under Western-backed dictatorships from taking up arms in revolutionary struggle. With the support of Enver Hoxha and Albania, China began to fiercely criticize de-Stalinization and accused the Soviet Union of “revisionism” for prioritizing world peace and preventing a nuclear war over support for national liberation movements, becoming the de facto leader of ‘Third Worldism’ against Western imperialism. Moscow reciprocated by freezing aid to China which greatly damaged its economy and relations soured between the world’s two biggest socialist countries, transforming the the Cold War into a tri-polar conflict already multifaceted with the Non-Aligned Movement led by Yugoslavia after Josep Broz Tito’s falling out with Stalin.
As the PRC continued to break from what Mao viewed as the USSR’s deviation from Marxism-Leninism, China went down the primrose path of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s amid the rise of the “Gang of Four” faction who took the anti-Soviet policies a step further by condemning the USSR as “social imperialist” and an even greater threat than the West. This led to several huge missteps in foreign policy and a complete betrayal of internationalism, as China aligned with the U.S. in support of UNITA against the MPLA in the Angolan civil war, the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge genocidaires in Cambodia against Vietnam, and the fascist Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. After years of international isolation, U.S. President Richard Nixon and his war criminal Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were received as guests in 1972. Despite the initial reasons for the Sino-Soviet split, it was ironically the Soviet Union which ended up carrying the mantle of national liberation as the USSR backed numerous socialist revolutions in the global south while China sided with imperialism.
In hindsight, the Cold War’s conclusion with the demise of the USSR was arguably an inevitable result of the Sino-Soviet split. Ultimately, mistakes were made by both sides that are recognized by the two countries today, as can be seen in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’s negative historical view of Khrushchev and the denunciation of the Cultural Revolution and Gang of Four by the CPC (not “CCP”). In fact, China has since even apologized to Angola for its support of Jonas Savimbi. Nevertheless, the break in political relations with Moscow also set the process in motion for China to develop its own interpretation of Marxism-Leninism that diverged from the Soviet model and eventually allowed a level of private enterprise which never occurred under the USSR, including during the short-lived New Economic Policy of the 1920s. If truth be told, this may have been the very thing which prevented China from meeting the same fate.
Starting in 1978, China began opening its economy to domestic private enterprise and even foreign capital, but with the ruling party and government retaining final authority over both the private and public sectors. The result of implementing market-oriented reforms while maintaining mostly state ownership of industry was the economic marvel we see today, where China has since become the ‘world’s factory’ and global manufacturing powerhouse. For four decades, China’s real gross domestic product growth has averaged nearly ten percent every year and almost a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, but with capital never rising above the political authority of the CPC. Unfortunately, the success of Deng Xiaoping’s reform of the Chinese socialist system was not replicated byperestroika(“restructuring”) in the USSR under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev who completely failed to revive the Soviet economy and eventually oversaw its dissolution in 1991.
During the 1990s, Russia underwent total collapse as its formerly planned enterprises were dismantled by the same neoliberal policies to which Margaret Thatcher once phrased “there is no alternative” (TINA). The restoration of capitalism sharply increased poverty and unemployment while mortality fell by an entire decade under IMF-imposed ‘shock therapy’ which created an obscenely wealthy new class of Russian “oligarchs” overnight. So much so, the fortunes of the Semibankarschina (“seven bankers”) were compared to the boyars of tsarist nobility in previous centuries. This comprador elite also controlled most of the country’s media while funding the election campaigns of pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin who transformed the previously centralized economy into a free market system. That was until his notorious successor assumed power and brought the energy sector back under control of the Russian state which restored wages, reduced poverty, and expelled corrupt foreign investors like Bill Browder. Needless to say, the U.S. was not pleased by Vladimir Putin’s successful revival of the Russian economy because the U.S. already faced a geopolitical contender in China.
As China has been the world’s ascending economic superpower through its unique mixture of private and state-owned enterprises, the U.S. economy has shrunk as trade liberalization and globalization de-industrialized the Rust Belt. Simultaneously, the expense of the military budget has grown so gargantuan that it can’t be audited while rash imperialist wars in the Middle East following 9/11 marked the beginning of the end for American hegemony. In 2016, Donald Trump rose to power railing against the political establishment over its “endless wars” and anti-worker free trade deals, abandoning the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on his first day in office and imposing protectionist tariffs which kickstarted a U.S.-China trade war. Unfortunately, any efforts to return U.S. productive power outsourced to China by multinationals and scale back American empire-building were destined to fail.
Trump was also politically persecuted by the Democrats and the intelligence community for daring to embrace détente with Moscow as a candidate and spent his entire administration trying to appease the deep state in Washington with little result. Oddly enough, it wasreportedlynone other than Henry Kissinger who encouraged Trump to ease the strained relations with Russia as a strategy to contain China, the traditional enemy he once convinced Richard Nixon to make steps toward peace with. The GOP, representing the interests of the military-industrial complex, has reciprocated the anti-Russia hysteria by accusing incumbent Joe Biden of being weak on China, even though the previous Obama-Biden administration presided over an unprecedented military buildup in the Pacific as part of the U.S. “pivot to Asia.” The views of constituents from both parties also seem to fall on partisan lines, as indicated in arecent Gallup pollwhere only 16% of Democrats held a positive view of Russia and a mere 10% of Republicans regard China favorably.
The rise of Russia and China on the global stage presents such a threat to Washington’s full spectrum dominance that the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, recentlywarnedof the very real possibility of a nuclear war in the future with both countries. Under the administration of Xi Jinping, China has reshaped the geopolitical order with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project, also known as the New Silk Road. At the same time, Russia has reintegrated several of the former Soviet republics with the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Conceivably, the return of Russia to world politics has the potential to transform the sphere of competition between the U.S. and China into a multipolar plane where the balance of power can shift toward a more stable geopolitical landscape in the long run. Nevertheless, the challenge made by the Xi-Putin partnership to the dominion of Western capital is the basis for the bellicosity toward Eurasia by the U.S., as is their joining forces to repair the Sino-Russian political relations broken decades ago.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, the tentative US–China alliance effectively ended and Sino-Russian rapprochement began. But what prevented the PRC from going the same route as the Eastern Bloc? Why did Deng succeed and Gorbachev fail? After all, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were concurrent with the numerous ‘Color Revolutions’ behind the Iron Curtain, even though the Western narrative about the June Fourth Incident omits that among the “pro-democracy” demonstrators were many Maoists who considered Deng’s market reforms a betrayal of Chinese socialism. As it happens, Xi Jinping himself correctly identified one of the main reasons why the USSR dissolved in a 2013speech:
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party fall from power? An important reason was that the struggle in the field of ideology was extremely intense, completely negating the history of the Soviet Union, negating the history of the Soviet Communist Party, negating Lenin, negating Stalin, creating historical nihilism and confused thinking. Party organs at all levels had lost their functions, the military was no longer under Party leadership. In the end, the Soviet Communist Party, a great party, was scattered, the Soviet Union, a great socialist country, disintegrated. This is a cautionary tale!”
Xi is correct in that China, unlike the Soviet Union, never made the crucial error of playing into the hands of the West through the condemnation of its own history as Khrushchev did in his “Secret Speech.” Despite the fact that the report by the Soviet leader contained demonstrable falsehoods such as the absurd claim that Stalin, one of Russia’s most formidable bank robbers as a revolutionary, was a coward deathly afraid of the Nazi invasion as it neared Moscow during WWII, the self-serving speech split the international communist movement and laid the internal groundwork for the USSR’s eventual downfall. As for the economic reasons for the different outcomes, the late Marxist historian Domenico Losurdoexplained:
“If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now understand the decision to move to Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was often interpreted as a return to capitalism. The increasing threat of war pushed Stalin into sweeping economic collectivisation. The third experiment produced a very advanced welfare state but ended in failure: in the last years of the Soviet Union, it was characterised by mass absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace; this stalled productivity, and it became hard to find any application of the principle that Marx said should preside over socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered. The history of China is different: Mao believed that, unlike “political capital,” the economic capital of the bourgeoisie should not be subject to total expropriation, at least until it can serve the development of the national economy. After the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it took Deng Xiaoping to emphasise that socialism implies the development of the productive forces. Chinese market socialism has achieved extraordinary success.”
Since China’s economic upswing has been simultaneous with the downturn of American capitalism, it has left the U.S. with only one option but to equate the PRC with its own crumbling system. Sadly, in most instances it is the Eurocentric pseudo-left which has parroted the propaganda of Western think tanks that China is “state capitalist” and even “imperialist.” This also means that its unparalleled economic gains must therefore be a result of capitalism, not state planning, which is another fabrication. Has there ever been a clearer case of neocolonial projection than the baseless accusation of “debt-trap diplomacy” hurled at China’s BRI by the West?
It is true that China seeks to profit in the global south, but based on terms of mutual benefit for developing nations previously plundered by Western financial institutions which actually impose debt slavery on low income countries. In reality, Beijing is only guilty of offering a preferable win-win alternative to states exploited under the yoke of imperialism. Once upon a time, the U.S. itself envisioned a peaceful world of mutual cooperation and trade under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, a forgotten legacy that Xi’s BRI is fulfilling.
None of this is to say China is undeserving of any criticism. To the contrary, its paradoxes are as deep as its achievements and it would be naive to think that Chinese capital, if left unchecked, doesn’t have the potential to be as predatory as the Western variety. Free enterprise is so inherently unstable that its destructive nature will be impossible to contain forever even by a party like the CPC and must be disassembled eventually. Without the retention of a large state sector maintaining vital infrastructure and public services, the market relations in China would wreak havoc as it did in post-Soviet Russia. Not to mention, the biggest progress made by the PRC was in the years prior to the pro-market reforms and ultimately served as the foundation upon which “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is able to thrive. The lesson of the fall of the USSR is that even a society capable of the most incredible human advancements is not invincible to a market environment. The Soviet Union withstood an invasion by more than a dozen Allied nations during the Russian Civil War and an onslaught by the Nazi war machine in WWII, but succumbed toperestroika. While Russia may be under the free market, both nations are a threat to Western capital because they represent a new win-win cooperative model in international relations and an end to American unipolarity.
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Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Max may be reached at[email protected]
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Reuters in a new report has admitted the “unthinkable” now looks very possible: despite Europe’s fierce public criticism of Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, it found that “Behind the scenes, the bloc is turning to Moscow’s Sputnik V shot as it tries to get its stuttering efforts to vaccinate its 450 million people back on track, EU diplomatic and official sources told Reuters.”
At least four EU states are now said to be seeking procurement via the bloc and Brussels has greenlighted formal talks with Sputnik V’s developers at a moment anger and public pressure is mounting over a slow vaccine roll-out.
“Hungary and Slovakia have already bought the Russian shot, the Czech Republic is interested, and the EU official said Italy was considering using the country’s biggest vaccine-producing bioreactor at a ReiThera plant near Rome to make Sputnik V,” Reuters notes.
Somewhat absurdly, and as a reminder that actual science and public health more often takes a far backseat to political calculation and questions of ‘perception’, resistance to dealing with Russia in addition to the six Western vaccine makers the EU currently has agreements with has more to do with not allowing Moscow a “win”.
This is precisely what’s at issue, as Reutersalso admits:
If Sputnik V were to join the EU’s vaccine arsenal, it would be a diplomatic triumph for Russia, whose trade with the bloc has been hamstrung for years by sanctions over its annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine.
It would also risk dividing the bloc between those states dead set against giving Moscow any kind of win and those in favor of showing that Brussels can cooperate with the Kremlin.
As a prime example of this kind of fear-driven motivation fueling the controversy and debate, just last week Charles Michel, who chairs summits of EU leaders, reiterated a commonly echoed theme among diplomats and Western officials: “We should not let ourselves be misled by China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they organize highly limited but widely publicised operations to supply vaccines to others,” he said.
Michel added, “Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes.”
Thus the bloc’s mere willingness to even enter talks with Sputnik V developers shows Brussels is fast changing its tune amid vaccine roll-out delays, with the pragmatists on the issue appearing to now take the driver’s seat.
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On this exact day ten years ago, NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey and Israel began a coordinated campaign of regime change against President Bashar al-Assad and the destruction of Syria. This has led to the death of over 500,000 people, millions of refugees, destroyed infrastructure and an economy in crisis. Despite numerous political maneuvers, this alliance against Syria catastrophically failed and could not achieve regime change. Not only did Assad survive the onslaught, but the geopolitical situation dramatically changed as a result.
Each aggressor had its own ambitions in Syria but was united in the goal to achieve regime change. Thanks to the contributions made by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the Syrian government survived the coordinated aggression. Whilst NATO and Turkey continue to insist on regime change, Arab states, most prominently Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were forced to normalize their relations with Syria to counter the growing threat of Turkish expansionism and influence into the Arab World that they had not anticipated when they decided to destroy Syria ten years ago.
Although a U.S.-dominated unipolar system was consolidated with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s 2008 intervention to defend the de facto republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia against NATO-encouraged Georgian forces was the first sign of an emerging multipolar system. A multipolar system, where there is a more equal distribution of power compacted into spheres of influence, was strengthened whilst the US could only helplessly watch as Russia successfully defended South Ossetia and Abkhazia in a region that falls under Moscow’s sphere of influence.
It was Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria, which began on September 30, 2015 that truly consolidated 21st Century Multipolarity. As the US had Pentagon-funded jihadists battling CIA-funded jihadists, Moscow had clear goals and policies towards Syria – the survival of the state and government. Not only did Russia successfully defend the government, despite the fact that large areas of Syria remain occupied by US and Turkish-backed forces, it put its military footprint by assuming control of the Khmeimim Airbase and extended its lease over Tartous Port. In this way, Russia ensures that regime change is not possible in Syria, rendering the American and Turkish occupation of large areas of northern and eastern Syria as extremely cynical policies that prolong the suffering and economic catastrophe in the country.
Prior to the war, Damascus and Ankara had amicable relations, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even once describing Assad as “my brother.” However, the so-called Arab Spring provided Erdoğan with the opportunity to pursue his neo-Ottoman policy. Not only has this resulted in large areas of northern Syria being illegally occupied by Turkey, but an intense Turkification process is underway with the Turkish school curriculum, currency and language being imposed on the local population.
What Turkey had not anticipated in Syria though was the re-emergence of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) under the guise of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). In fact, before the war, Syria, which once supported the PKK, expelled the group and ended its support for it to improve its relations with Turkey. By Ankara supporting the collapse of the Syrian state, it allowed the conditions for the PKK to return to Syria and once again find a new base of operations to continue its insurgency against Turkey. In addition, Turkey wrongly believed that regime change would be a quick endeavor, and the prolonged war saw millions of refugees flood into the country, not only putting a major strain on the economy, but also a rapid increase in terrorist attacks across the country.
Israel is the only aggressor country that has not suffered due to regime change attempts against Syria. Israel’s main interest is not necessarily the removal of Assad from power, but the complete destruction of the country. The continuation of the war serves Israel’s interests as Syria was the only Arab state that posed an existential threat to the Jewish State. The destruction of the economy and weakening of the military has ensured that Syria will not pose a threat to Israel for several decades as it will have a long path towards recovery.
Ten years on since the beginning of the Syrian War, U.S.-led NATO, Turkey and participating Arab States failed to achieve their goal of regime change to implant their own puppets in Damascus. The US failed to sever the Axis of Resistance (Iran-Syria-Hezbollah), the Arabs failed to install a Sunni president that would be against Iran and completely aligned with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey not only failed to install a neo-Ottomanist into power, but also reinvigorated the PKK that had not existed for years in Syria.
More importantly, the initial coalition against Syria has collapsed, with Turkey frustrated over the US’ sustained support for the YPG and the Arabs pivoting back to Syria as they now find greater concern over Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and interference in Arab affairs. In fact, the US finds itself in a weaker position in the region as the Axis of Resistance is preserved and Russia now has greater military presence and influence in Syria that it did not have prior to the war. Russia’s success in preserving the Syrian state is the strongest indicator that the unipolar world system has collapsed and a new multipolar system has taken its place in the 21st century.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Trump administration’s position on the International Criminal Court at a Wednesday congressional hearing and refused to say whether U.S. sanctions against war crimes investigators would be lifted.
Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the Biden administration wants a “productive relationship” with the ICC, but echoed the Trump administration’s “concerns” about the Hague-based war crimes court attempting to investigate Israeli and U.S. troops.
“Are you saying there is legitimacy to the sanctions that were placed under Trump on the ICC?” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) asked.
“No, all I’m saying is that it’s something that is under review, and at the same time we have real concerns about some of the assertions of jurisdiction with which we disagree,” Blinken replied.
He declined to answer why the sanctions had not been lifted, or whether they would be lifted at all.
The Hague had angered the Trump administration last year by opening investigations into alleged war crimes by multiple sides — including U.S. and Israeli forces, as well as their opponents — in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. The investigation is also looking into the CIA’s alleged torture of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and rendered to third countries.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded by freezing the assets of two ICC prosecutors, Fatou Bensouda and Phasiko Mochochoko, and banning their family members from entering the United States.
“The Trump administration’s perverse use of sanctions, devised for alleged terrorists and drug kingpins, against prosecutors seeking justice for grave international crimes, magnifies the failure of the U.S. to prosecute torture,” Richard Dicker, international justice director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement at the time.
The Trump and Biden administrations have maintained that the ICC lacks the jurisdiction to investigate Americans or Israelis, as neither country had ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.
Afghanistan, however, is a signatory to the Rome Statute. So is the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority, which the ICC recognizes as a state but the United States and Israel do not.
Blinken reaffirmed in a statement last week that the United States does not recognize Palestinian Authority as an independent state.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has argued that the court’s ruling places Israel’s “heroic and moral” troops “under attack” and represents “the essence of antisemitism.” The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is also under investigation for alleged war crimes, welcomed the ICC’s investigation.
The current standoff is not the first disagreement between a U.S. administration and the ICC.
The Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but the Bush administration reversed course soon after to the extent of threatening other countries that ratified the Statute with a cut-off in U.S. assistance. In 2002, then-President George W. Bush signed the American Servicemen Protection Act, also known as the “Hague Invasion Act,” which bans U.S. support to the ICC and authorizes the use of military force to free American citizens held by it.
The Obama administration took a middle path, adopting a policy of “positive engagement” with some ICC investigations while also attempting to exempt U.S. forces from prosecution.
The Biden administration seems to be framing its policy in similar terms.
“We of course share the goal — the broad goal — of international accountability for atrocity crimes. That’s not the issue,” Blinken said at Wednesday’s hearing. “We have the capacity ourselves to provide accountability.”
“We’ve spoken out, we’ve been clear, and we’ll see going forward how we can most effectively engage the ICC to avoid these assertions of jurisdiction when they’re not warranted,” he concluded.
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Featured image: Tony Blinken At His Confirmation Hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jan. 19, 2021. Screenshot. via Mondoweiss
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A relaxing, profitable and, quite frankly, secure job has turned into a nightmare. It is now dangerous, difficult, and simply stressful. And it is all due to the actions of the “cowardly Assad regime” and its Russian backers.
Indeed, this relates to being an oil trafficker in Northern Syria. In the past be it the ISIS oil fields, or those in the Syrian Democratic Forces-controlled areas, “exporting” oil to Turkey was an easy and simple business. This has all changed.
On March 14th, a large-scale strike with missiles and heavy rockets hit oil traffickers in the Turkish-occupied areas. The were two targets. The first was the al-Himran crossing, which is located near the town of Jarabulus on the border with Turkey. The second was the village of Tarhin north of the town of al-Bab, featuring a network of makeshift refineries and oil storage facilites. Videos and photographs showed an apocalyptic sight, with massive fires and nothing but destruction.
On March 6th, catastrophic losses were suffered by oil traffickers from missile strikes on Tarhin and al-Himran in Aleppo. More than 200 oil tankers were destroyed. The White Helmets “rescue organization” said that four people were killed in the strike. At least 42 others were injured, some of them are reportedly in critical condition.
There are a plethora of videos and photographs of attacks on oil traffickers starting from early January 2021 onwards. Initially, the strikes were attributed to unknown attackers.
In the first days of the new year, there were numerous reports of “mysterious missile strikes” targeting oil smugglers. It turned out to be a sort of tradition – tankers exploding, so that they can’t provide the almost free oil to Turkey taken away from the Syrian people.
Still, another point of view should be considered – that of the oil traffickers. If the Western establishment were asked, they would say that they are a part of the moderate opposition and that they are doing the Syrian people a favor. Taking oil away from the “bloody Assad regime” is, after all, a good thing. The Syrian government, with Russian help, ruined yet another business opportunity.
It is clear that Damascus and Moscow have joined forces to impede the business development of Northern Syria. They began by dismantling ISIS’ (illegal) oil business, and then moved on to the Turkish-backed one.
Turkey itself claims that the “Syrian regime” is simply targeting civilian settlements. According to the Turkish Defense Ministry, this was uncalled for, and warranted a response from Turkey and its proxies. There was some shelling, but ultimately it led to nothing. The tyranny of destroying the democratic oil businessmen from the “moderate opposition” has no end.
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Perhaps what is most startling about the etchings of Francisco Goya, presently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the artist’s intensity of focus, his obsession with understanding the nature of human evil. Goya was a child of the Enlightenment, and he knew what it was to see humanity as the pinnacle of creation, the paragon of animals, the embodiment of reason, “in form and understanding how like a god?” as Hamlet would say. Yet this same creature, the light of reason in the world, was capable of the most barbaric cruelty. In one series after another Goya’s etchings attempt to grasp the universality of evil, to see it as an essentially human problem to be understood in terms of our capacity for moral choice. Evil is universally human, for Goya – a propensity in human beings that is at once basic and inextinguishable.
Among the exhibition’s opening prints are works from a series based on paintings by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, including “A Court Jester, El Primo” (1778) – and like his venerated predecessor, Goya emphasizes his subject’s interiority; even going beyond Velázquez in his accentuation of El Primo’s penetrating, and rather defiant gaze.
The “Garroted Man” (ca 1775-78) is an important piece in that it indicates the humanitarian concerns that would return with full force in the Disasters of War series, created between 1810 and 1820. Goya has removed from the image anything that could draw the viewer’s attention away from the man who has just been strangulated – he sits with his legs outstretched, his eyes swollen and shut, and his back against a wooden post, outfitted with a lever to choke the life out of him.
“Garroted Man” (ca 1775-78) (Source: Public Domain)
Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos, created between 1793 and 1798, is one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of printmaking. The series of eighty aquatint etchings, published in 1799, may be said to constitute and convey a pessimistic appraisal of the human condition. There is little if any relief from its frank, uninhibited exploration and depiction of human folly, error, and superstition. If there is any hope of salvation, it lies in the unity of reason with the infinite fecundity of human imagination.
The Caprichos can be fiercely critical of Bourbon Spain, underscoring the pervasive hypocrisy, corruption and ignorance; made only worse by the “Lamentable abuse of early education,” as he writes in the caption to plate three, entitled “Here comes the bogeyman.” Goya included ironic, satirical, or ambiguous captions to accompany each of the eighty prints – generally reflecting his disillusionment and increasing bitterness towards a world he saw slipping into chaos and confusion.
In plate twelve, “Out hunting for teeth,” we find Goya’s first reference to witchcraft, a theme which would recur and develop as the series progressed. A woman is attempting to pluck the teeth from the dangling corpse of a hanged man, as these were popularly believed to possess magical properties: “without this ingredient there’s not much you can do,” as Goya writes with typically biting irony. Once again, the poverty of education allows the common people, and women in particular, to continue to “believe such nonsense.”
Goya explicitly and vehemently rebukes the Spanish Inquisition in the twenty-third plate’s depiction of an auto-da-fé, beginning and ending his caption with the same two words, Mal hecho, (“For shame!”). A condemned woman sits atop a raised platform, her head bowed in abject humiliation: during such ceremonies of public penance the accused would wear a capirote, a pointed hat of conical form indicating their supposed crimes. This ritual was generally followed by the execution of the heretic, by public burning or some other suitably horrific method.
Plate forty-three, “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” is among the most recognizable images of the entire series: a figure, presumably the artist himself, cradles his head, face down, within his folded arms, in an attitude of profound anguish and desolation. Surrounding him are a frightful bevy of nocturnal creatures, owls, bats, and felines. Goya himself was no stranger to severe depression, undoubtedly exacerbated by repeated bouts of severe illness which left him essentially deaf at the age of 46.
Witches and witchcraft, sorcery and supernatural creatures are recurring themes and Goya does not flinch from examining the darkest corners of the human mind, the nightmarish, and what we might call metaphysical evil. Plate forty-five, “There is plenty to suck” reveals a basketful of dead infants whose life has been “sucked” out of them by two witches or vampires, who are now taking a pinch of snuff after their ghastly meal. This is an especially striking example of Goya’s exploration of what we may call the horror of evil.
Plate sixty-four, “Bon Voyage” offers perhaps the darkest vision of the entire series, a group of witches and demons swoop through the nighttime fog carried on the back of a loathsome creature with human legs, batlike wings, and one of Goya’s most terrifying of faces – turning the scene into something at once spellbinding, dreadful and appalling to behold. The series concludes with the return of dawn in Plate eighty, “It is time” – as we see four men in ecclesiastical robes stretch and yawn; but their deformed and distorted features remind us that, for Goya, it is the corrupted and fraudulent clergy who are the true witches and hobgoblins.
Bon Voyage (Source: Public Domain)
Evil is something real and substantial for Goya. He rejects the long-held belief that evil is nothing in itself, mere privation, an absence of being. Saint Augustine for example would argue that evil lacked any positive reality of its own. As he states in Book XI, Chapter nine of City of God: “[Evil] is not a positive substance: the loss of good has been given the name ‘evil’.” Augustine’s notion of evil as a negation or mere lack of being predominated well into the modern era, and indeed may be seen to linger on to this day. But it is far from perfect and seems to fly in the face of abundant experience to the contrary. In “God save us from such a bitter fate,” (1816-20) a bandit has seized on a young woman and boy and is leading them away to meet a cruel end, underscored by the exaggerated use of the dagger which he keeps pointed at his victims.
The horror we register in facing evil arises from realizing far from being a mere absence of being, evil overruns, it spills over; not simply because it can be awful and unendurable, but because, as Goya is well aware, we cannot adequately comprehend evil. Like Shakespeare, Goya sees evil as something existing in itself – indeed, the horror of evil arises precisely from its excess. It overflows and refuses to be contained by or integrated into our categories of reason or comprehension. By its very nature, evil refuses to remain within prescribed bounds – to remain fixed, say, within an economy where evil is counterbalanced by good. Evil is always excess of evil.
Nowhere is this more evident than in war. Goya offers us a profound and sustained meditation on the nature of war that does more than anticipate Sherman’s dictum that war is hell. The image of a Napoleonic soldier gazing indifferently on a man who has been summarily hanged, probably by his own belt, expresses the tragedy of war – its dehumanization of both war’s victims and victors. War destroys the bonds of our shared humanity. Goya was a witness to the scenes he portrays and part of his aim is documenting history, rescuing the fallen and the defeated from the oblivion of time. “Cartloads to the cemetery” (1812-14) is one of several prints that Goya devoted to Madrid’s 1811-12 famine, during which some fifteen percent of the city’s population died. Even in invoking the anonymity of mass burials, Goya does not lose sight of the individual, unique and irreplaceable.
There are moments when Goya appears almost ready to despair – for example, in plate seventy-nine, “Truth has died” (1814-15), we see a radiant young woman – the personification of Truth – lying lifeless on the ground. In its companion piece, however, plate eighty, “Will she rise again?” the young woman has opened her eyes and light appears to be streaming from her to the anger and amazement of those around her. The enticement to evil is indeed a defining characteristic of the human condition; but Goya is unwilling to despair, even amidst the darkness of war – the child of the Enlightenment holds out hope in the final victory of Truth, and Imagination united with Reason.
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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Part of history is reading historical documents, and it is in this light that reading “Bible and Sword” by Barbara Tuchmann should be considered. It is beyond current events, but still within the lifetimes of a few, and is written about a series of earlier epochs. It is not Tuchmann’s best work and while it makes an interesting read and provides a good general thematic approach to the subject, it has a few problems.
Problems
The title suggests that this is about England and Palestine, but more correctly it is about England’s perspective on Palestine and very little on Palestine itself. The Middle East in general is portrayed from the ‘Orientalist’ western viewpoint of a rather primitive and backward place – which to be fair under the Ottoman empire it was allowed to be neglected during the last decades of its control and under pressure from various European empires for concessions and alliances.
Palestine itself, while not directly described, carries the narrative quite directly through cited sources as being the stereotypical western view as being an “empty land”, a land without people, a desert, with a few Bedouins wandering around. Further its biblical heritage is consistently upheld as truth backed by “science” although the scientific evidence is not presented.
The author herself is aware of her bias, but does not overcome it. Having a Jewish background she writes in the later preface (1984) “As regards the fortunes of the Jews and of Israel, I am not detached but emotionally involved.” When her publisher tried to have her write the history up to the 1948 nakba (certainly not a word she would have used) she objected that her “advocacy…invalidates the work of a historian” and for her to write that part of history “was all impossible to relate without outrage.”
The preface then continues with what at the time probably seemed like reasonable propositions. Tuchmann writes, “Sovereignty in Israel has imparted dignity, confidence, self-respect and a straighter stature to Jews wherever they live.” She sees Jews as no longer being the “butt for persecution….because Jews will no longer feel like victims. It is the vulnerable and the helpless who invite persecution, but…Israel [has] gained the courage and confidence of self-defence.”
This has some truth, but the majority of it – no longer the victim, no longer vulnerable and helpless – is not. Those two ideas are a large part of the ongoing Israeli narrative as to why it acts in the manner that it does. The Jews are forever proclaiming victimhood as per the holocaust and all the various holocaust memorials and memorial societies available. The politicians constantly advertise their vulnerability, and helplessness against attack in order to control their population as well as the susceptible populations of Europe and the U.S.
Yes, they have gained courage and confidence, backed up by their massive militarized security state, their arsenal of nuclear weapons, and their support and manipulation arriving from the U.S. Unfortunately, a lot of that “courage and confidence” involves subjugating another people to military rule in an apartheid state.
Christianity, while not directly denigrated, is certainly considered a lesser moral structure, with a touch of preaching by the author when she writes, “the Ten Commandments represent a code that men can follow…the Sermon on the Mount has been, so far, a code beyond the grasp of society.”
Eras
In a book that covers several different eras, some 2500 years generally, a narrow focus is required. With that, Tuchmann maintains a strong focus on how the British public, politicians, and religious leaders viewed Palestine.
Her first chapter “Origins: A Fable Agreed Upon” is a bit of a stretch, relying more on inventions and fables than historical or scientific work. She begins with pre-Celt Britons as having originated “from the same part of the world” – which is true as all people in Europe – apart from genetic lines that may have transferred back across Eurasia during the time of the Mongol hordes – all had to pass through this narrow neck of land to access the Levant and on into Europe. She goes on to say, “When the truth – that is verifiable fact – is unobtainable, then tradition must substitute.” Having acknowledged that, the first chapter becomes mostly substitute information and seems to be too much of an attempt to tie the British heritage directly back to the Israeli heritage.
After that, she works through more factual history, sourced through other older historical documents but not based on original research based on more current document discoveries (keeping in mind this was written in 1955). Following chapters do have a stronger more data based thematic approach to what British perspectives were on Palestine.
Themes
Broadly speaking there are two themes as indicated by the title: the sword, being the military and strategic interests of politicians and business; and the Bible, being the moral rationalizations and attitudes towards Palestine [and as a side note here, Tuchmann does constantly use the reference to Palestine, indirectly negating the Israeli pretext that Palestine does not and never has existed]. The military as usual in western society supports the latter in its self-righteous efforts to control other people and places.
All the above criticism aside, Tuchmann does proceed through the different eras of British history demonstrating the rise and fall and rise and fall again of sentiments and actions towards Palestine and the Middle East. She looks critically at the crusades, passes on into the fundamentalism of the Puritan Christian Zionists, followed by an era of only passing interest while Britain sorted out her own religious power structures, and ending with the rise of a renewed Christain Zionism aligned with the efforts of Herzl and Weismann.
There are sub themes. Britain wanted Palestine for its control of East Indian trade routes and to stop Russian, French, and German interests – hints of approaching World War I. Britain also developed a “moral” obligation to right the wrongs of Christianity imposed on the Jews over the centuries, an attitude willingly adopted by those interested in strategic purposes. Along with the moral purpose is the all inclusive imperial belief in “civilizing benefits” and “manifest destiny”, attributes all empires call upon for domestic arguments – and alive and well in the current Anglo-American empire globally and still in the Middle east.
Another part of the search for a Jewish homeland was the desire to keep the east European Jews, considered undesirable, out of Britain. This latterly became a focus for Herzl and Weissmann as the assimilated Jews, now quite powerful in British political and social life, were quite unwilling to give money or moral support to the endeavour of renewing the Jewish homeland.
The Ottoman empire, long considered on its way out, was also a consideration in establishing a British presence in Palestine through its avowed desire to settle Jews in the region. Not successful in obtaining concessions from the Ottoman leaders for transferring a Jewish population to Palestine, a more militaristic intention developed. Once the Ottoman empire was gone, its pieces were distributed between France and Britain with varying degrees of failure.
Postscript
Her postscript, where her outrage prevented her from going further, implies the outrage stems from British weakness and the enmity the British created in the region.
Tuchmann was alive during the 1967 war, at the time considered to be an attack upon Israel by combined Arab forces. What later documents have revealed is that the war was pre-emptive against Egypt, and then having succeeded so well there, proceeded on into Syria. She died shortly after the first intifada (1987) in December 1989. Since then, much has been revealed about Jewish methods in ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and the establishment of illegal settlements on Palestinian land (it’s all Palestinian) and the control of the indigenous people under military rule and many discriminating domestic laws, and the creation of an apartheid state.
I wonder where her “outrage” would be directed now, if her own personal timeline had permitted her to see how Israel currently operates in the region? She would have two choices: outrage at the manner in which Israel is currently being harassed by charges of humanitarian and war crimes against the Palestinians; or outrage at the manner in which Israel is treating the Palestinians under draconian military and domestic laws? Where would she stand on the label of apartheid by B’Tselem, on the IHRA defintion of antisemitism, on the nature of the BDS movement?
Obviously there are no answers to those questions as people can and do change perspectives with more time and more information.
Having presented a somewhat negative view of “Bible and Sword – England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour” it is worth the read, partly for its perspective on how much of the western powers thought of Israel only seven years after its war and declaration of its creation, and partly because it does outline the major themes involved in British perspectives towards Palestine, very few of them honourable from an indigneous viewpoint.
Her other writings – I have read all of them now – are much stronger and are well worth reading. Her style makes history accessible, removing it from the dryness of timelines and dates, making it more of a story than a history. Bible and Sword stops at the Balfour letter, but the whole era is better represented in her two works on the leadup to World War I: The Proud Tower (Random House, 1996/originally 1966) and The Guns of August (Presidio Press, 2004/originally 1962).
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The United States-NATO invasion of Libya was launched a decade ago this month, as the Western powers engineered the ousting of the country’s leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had been in power for more than 40 years.
A central reason behind this military assault, which began on 19 March 2011, was to reinforce Western control over Libya’s oil wells. Libya has long held the largest oil reserves in Africa, and it contains greater quantities of this resource than either the superpowers of America or China.
The quality of Libya’s oil is particularly high and its cost low; 92% of the nation’s revenue came from trading in it. What’s more, Western oil specialists believe it likely that Libya possesses large volumes of undiscovered oil deposits, on top of the ample sources which it already has. With good reason, much of Libya remains unexplored. The country consists mostly of a treeless, barren landscape which stretches out for hundreds of miles over the horizon. Libya is a highly complex nation, a semi-tribal society with an array of beliefs, loyalties and kinship.
As part of the Middle East and North African countries (MENA), the significance of Libya becomes apparent. Former US president Dwight Eisenhower called the Middle East “the most strategically important area of the world”, mainly due to its enormous oil sources. Libya has a broad coastline resting on the Mediterranean Sea, a body of water critical to the exportation of raw materials for the world market.
Fears over radical nationalism prevailed also regarding Libya. The US-NATO attack involved the elimination of the independent nationalist threat from Libya; both through the removal of Gaddafi, and by nipping the Arab Spring uprising in the bud, while encouraging a civil war. It was no coincidence, just as Libya was being bombarded by NATO warplanes, that the Arab Spring protests had been taking off in parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
Before the US-NATO intervention started, political leaders such as Fidel Castro of Cuba wrote of the Americans on 9 March 2011,
“The empire is now attempting to turn events around to what Gaddafi has done or not done, because it needs to militarily intervene in Libya, and deliver a blow to the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world”. (1)
The spectre of uncontrollable nationalist movements has been a leading concern of Anglo-American governments for decades. Henry Kissinger, former US National Security Advisor (1969-1975), summarised the feeling in Washington by saying that an area which falls outside of US auspices can become a “virus” that will “spread contagion”, and which must be inoculated.
Civilian welfare in Libya again proved a low priority – and was cynically exploited as a justification for the Western intervention following their procurement, on 17 March 2011, of UN Security Council Resolution 1973, calling for a “no-fly zone” over Libya.
Moniz Bandeira, the experienced Brazilian historian, wrote that,
“The United States, Britain and France didn’t establish the no-fly zone to protect civilians, an ambiguous and questionable concept introduced through resolutions on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, and approved by the UN Security Council. They carried out the war against Libya through air strikes and by allying themselves openly with the rebels, just as Nazi Germany had done during the civil war in Spain (1936–1939), when it not only bombed Guernica, but several other cities”. (2)
Among the NATO goals was to prevent a peaceful, negotiated settlement that may have favoured the unreliable Gaddafi; and, in turn, could have harmed Western hegemony across North Africa and beyond. Gaddafi accepted in principle the careful diplomatic proposals put forth by the African Union (3), and which had the consent of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Gaddafi’s attempt, to seek dialogue through a position of strength, was brushed aside in the West. As though he were a global police chief, Barack Obama said on 3 March 2011 that Gaddafi “has lost the legitimacy to lead and he must leave”.
Moreover, China’s growing presence in North Africa was viewed in Washington as an encroachment on its regional interests. By the start of 2011 China had invested around $18.8 billion in Libya, through 75 companies (4). More than 10% of Libya’s oil exports were being sold to Beijing. Three of China’s biggest oil corporations had developed projects in Libya at this point: the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the Sinopec Group, and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).
Some of these Chinese sites were attacked in Libya, as the upheaval grew. Around the time of the NATO bombardment, there were 36,000 Chinese in Libya, mostly construction workers employed on infrastructural programs. They thereafter had to be evacuated from the country. It reveals something about international affairs, that while China was involved in strengthening Libya’s industry and infrastructure, the Western powers were more intent on raining down bombs from the air.
The no-fly zone had been a grotesque notion, and was violated instantly, beginning with air strikes from French Rafale and Mirage aircraft. In coming months, NATO warplanes would carry out around 9,600 air raids over Libya, destroying approximately 5,900 targets (5). These attacks led to a sharply increased rate of civilian casualties, which rose at least tenfold following the US-NATO invasion (6), leaving Libya in the hands of warring militias and fanning the flames of terrorism even further. NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” in Libya also sent a wave of refugees from North Africa to Europe. Another of Washington’s unstated aims here, was to take over lucrative regions of Africa that had traditionally been under French control.
Meanwhile, the Arab Spring was looked on with much concern in Washington, London and Paris, whose staunch allies in the Middle East are the oil dictator countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait. The Arab Spring protests, we can note, barely took off the ground in these states, where few calls were heard from the western democracies that the autocrats be removed. Such an outcome, whereby the masses seek to influence their own affairs, could easily result in a diminishing of US control over the Middle East’s oil, as is well known.
A Gaddafi victory against the insurgents would have enhanced his prestige and independence, an unacceptable outcome for US-NATO. Gaddafi was viewed with some misgiving in the West; he did not routinely obey orders, was unpredictable and erratic. Having met Gaddafi on a number of occasions through the decades, Castro described him in March 2011 as “a Bedouin Arab soldier of unusual character and inspired by the ideas of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser”. (7)
Nasser had strong nationalist beliefs, was independent-minded and a social reformer. As a result, he was viewed with alarm from the mid-1950s onward. Panicky officials in Washington and London called Nasser “a new Hitler”. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed Nasser to be “an extremely dangerous fanatic” with a “Hitlerite personality”, and the Americans were grateful when Israel put the brakes on Nasser during the Six-Day War.
By 12 March 2011, Gaddafi was on course for victory versus the anti-government forces, as his army captured strategically important Libyan towns such as Ra’s Lanuf; before the US-NATO attack, beginning the following week, quickly turned the tables on him. Bandeira observed how, “Without NATO’s logistical support and bombing campaign” and “without the flow of CIA intelligence supplied by the drones, the so-called rebels would not have advanced far beyond Benghazi”.
The “freedom fighters” opposing Gaddafi, whom the Western media were championing, comprised largely of contingents tied to terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG); along with hundreds of other men with extremist pasts, previously pardoned by Gaddafi and who were roaming freely in Libya. Among them initially were 350 militants with backgrounds mainly from the LIFG, who in 2009 had moved on to Benghazi. By early 2011, this number rose to 850 in Benghazi (8). Many of the freed insurgents would link up with Al Qaeda, in a bid to foment unrest and topple Gaddafi, who was hated by conservative Islam and the above terrorist groups.
Furthermore, radical Muslims, Salafists who had been exiled by Gaddafi, were returning to Libya through Mali, Egypt and other nations. Benghazi was a centre of radical, Salafist Islam in Libya, as was the city of Derna just over 150 miles east of Benghazi.
Among the members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was Abu Yahya al-Libi, a hardline extremist from Libya and top level member of Al Qaeda. Al-Libi was described by ex-CIA analyst Jarret Brachman as a “rising star within Al Qaeda, and I think he has become the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden in terms of taking over the entire global jihadist movement” (9). While pursuing jihad against Gaddafi, Al-Libi publicly supported the terrorist campaigns aimed at Chinese authorities in Xinjiang province, north-western China.
Bin Laden himself gave his blessing to the terrorists in Libya. He called such “revolutions” made by his “Libyan brothers” as “a great and glorious event”. The elusive Egyptian-born Al Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri – who would shortly succeed Bin Laden – had dispatched veteran jihadists to Libya in early 2011, so as to build a base of operations there against Gaddafi (10). The first revolts in opposition to the Gaddafi regime began between the 13th and 16th of January 2011, in the cities of Benghazi and also Beyad and Derna, all in north-eastern Libya; that is, in the region of Cyrenaica, a province of Libya with traditionally separatist leanings, and which happens to contain about 80% of the country’s known oil reserves.
During these opening actions, public buildings and police barracks were attacked, as the terrorists killed dozens of soldiers and policemen (11). Some were executed, either decapitated or hanged. These acts were not spontaneous but had clearly been planned and coordinated, as an air base and police station were captured.
Since Gaddafi’s taking of power in 1969, Benghazi had never completely accepted his rule. To complicate matters, some of the indigenous groups in Libya, such as the Tuareg, Warfalla and Hasawna tribes, were far from friendly to Gaddafi. They would support the armed revolts.
Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, admitted in late March 2011 that Al Qaeda members were operating under his command (12). For instance, they were engaging in combat against Gaddafi’s troops in the town of Ajdabiya, north-eastern Libya. Al-Hasidi said that the Al Qaeda fighters he was leading were “good Muslims”.
The US-NATO alliance was supplying many of the extremists with funds, weaponry and logistical assistance. This included information pertaining to the planning of operations, and the guiding of bombings such as drone attacks, in which the CIA was instrumental. Autocratic, Western-backed countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan had all dispatched elite soldiers to bolster Gaddafi’s foes, as likewise did Bulgaria, a NATO and EU state (13). Qatar and the UAE further provided airplanes to NATO over a six month period during the bombing campaign, while other nations like Bahrain and Oman co-operated with NATO.
Mustafa al-Gherryani, spokesman for the anti-Gaddafi insurgents, said that arms were being imported to Libya from neighbouring countries such as Egypt. The weapons were paid for by the Americans. Passing through Libya’s eastern frontier, this military hardware was sent with Washington’s consent by the Egyptian Army. It was delivered to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and to jihadists of Al Qaeda’s factions in North Africa. NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, acknowledged at the end of March 2011, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that US intelligence services had detected “flickers” of Al Qaeda among the rebel forces. (14)
There is clear evidence that the anti-Gaddafi revolt was, in fact, at least partly instigated by the imperial powers to begin with. France at this time was led by the unpopular right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy. He was recently sentenced to jail for corruption, amid other damaging claims that his successful 2007 election campaign received significant funding from Gaddafi (15). The Italian journalist Franco Bechis wrote on 23 March 2011 that, under Sarkozy, France’s foreign intelligence agency DGSE “had probably started planning the rebellion in Benghazi on October 21, 2010”, many weeks before the uprising began.
Also during October 2010, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief Nuri al-Mismari fled Libya, passing through neighbouring Tunisia as he sought exile in France. Once on French soil, Al-Mismari met with France’s military and started to scheme against Gaddafi – a plot which involved enemies of Libya’s government based in Benghazi.
Present on Libyan soil prior to the March 2011 US-NATO invasion were: CIA advisors, US Navy SEALs, British MI6 spies, and Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers from the British Army (16). In Libya too were French secret agents from the above-mentioned DGSE, and commandos from the French Army Special Forces Command. These elite units from the triumvirate of America, Britain and France were often dressed as Arabs, therefore posing as “false flaggers”; in order to conceal their identities from Libyans, and allow them to provoke resistance unmolested. So much then for the Western powers not having “boots on the ground” in Libya.
For example on 24 February 2011, just over three weeks before the NATO assault started, a British frigate HMS Cumberland sailed into the port of Benghazi, and disembarking from this vessel were British SAS commandos. (17)
London had already dispatched MI6 agents and SAS officers to consult with forces headed by Libya’s former Minister of Justice, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a strong critic of Gaddafi who was co-operating with the West. From March 2011 until August 2012, Jalil was chairman of the so-called National Transitional Council (NTC), which was seeking to replace Gaddafi. From early on, allying itself with the NTC were the extremists of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (18), as members of this latter organisation had announced to the press in March 2011.
Another high-ranking Gaddafi official who defected to the West was Moussa Koussa, Libyan Minister of Foreign Affairs from March 2009 to March 2011. Koussa was previously co-opted by MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency (19). On 28 March 2011, he travelled by car across Libya’s north-western border to Tunisia, where he got in contact with London. Koussa then climbed aboard a Swiss private airplane at Djerba Airport in Tunisia, and flew directly to the English capital.
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
1 Fidel Castro Ruz, “NATO, war, lies and business”, Granma, 9 March 2011
2 Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA, (Springer 1st ed., 23 June 2017) p. 176
3 Noam Chomsky, Who Rules The World? (Metropolitan Books, Penguin Books Ltd, Hamish Hamilton, 5 May 2016) p. 251
5 Sebastian Moffett, “NATO underplayed civilian deaths in Libya: HRW”, Reuters, 14 May 2012
6 Chomsky, Who Rules The World?, p. 251
7 Castro, Granma, 9 March 2011
8 Bandeira, The Second Cold War, p. 160
9 Fred Burton, Samuel M. Katz, Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi (Icon Books Ltd., 2 Oct. 2014) Part One, The Dawn Before Benghazi
10 Bandeira, The Second Cold War, p. 161
11 Ibid., p. 157
12 Praveen Swami, Duncan Gardham, Nick Squires, “Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have Al Qaeda links”, Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2011
13 Bandeira, The Second Cold War, p. 178
14 Lara Marlowe, “’Flickers’ of Al Qaeda among rebels, says NATO chief”, Irish Times, 30 March 2011
15 Kim Willsher, “Gaddafi ‘contributed €50m to Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election fund’”, The Guardian, 12 March 2012
16 Bandeira, The Second Cold War, p. 176
17 Ibid.
18 Konye Obaji Ori, “Libya: The mosque and the State”, The Africa Report, 5 December 2013
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Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva showed on Wednesday that his political career is far from over. Lula, as he is more commonly known, returned to address the nation after the annulment of his corruption convictions.
Lula was previously known for his casual attire, including many red shirts, in honour of the Workers’ Party, which he founded in 1980. This time, sporting a sharp dark suit with a powder blue dress shirt, the 75-year-old’s message was clear. He is back.
Last Monday, a justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court annulled Lula’s two bribery convictions, clearing the way for the former president to run in the 2022 elections and challenge the far-Right president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula, who led Brazil between 2003 and 2011, said he remained unsure about whether to seek a third term.
Barely looking down at his notes during a speech that lasted nearly two hours, Lula showcased his trademark confidence and charisma throughout. A metalworker who rose to prominence in the 1980s as a union leader, Lula used everyday language to discuss the economy and to criticise Bolsonaro for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis that has besieged the country, claiming that Brazil currently “has no government”.
Although it remains unconfirmed whether his name will be on the ballot next year, many pundits and members of the public are certain it will. Certainly, his public appearance this week bore all the hallmarks of a presidential campaign.
Addressing journalists while standing in front of a famous picture of himself being held aloft by a crowd of supporters, and with a banner in the top right-hand corner reading; “Health, jobs and justice for Brazil”, Lula immediately took aim at the injustice that had been bestowed upon him.
Many harboured suspicions that his arrest was engineered to ensure a Bolsonaro victory
Declaring himself “the victim of the biggest judicial lie told in the country’s 500-year history”, Lula went on to describe the suffering he endured in prison from April 2018 to November 2019, when the Supreme Court ruled that defendants may remain free while their appeals are pending.
Lula was sentenced to 26 years after being convicted of accepting bribes from Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned, multinational oil company, in two separate corruption and money-laundering cases.
He was investigated as part of the largest anti-corruption effort in Brazil’s history, Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato), which was led by a mega taskforce from the federal police’s Curitiba branch.
Scandal, ambition and Operation Car Wash
Lula’s conviction and subsequent arrest prevented him from running in the 2018 presidential elections, which took place six months after his sentencing. While sitting in jail, Lula still led Bolsonaro in the polls, with many harbouring suspicions that his arrest was engineered to ensure a Bolsonaro victory.
While Lula’s star dimmed in jail, the man who was hailed by many to be the solution to Brazil’s deep-seated corruption problems, Sergio Moro, shot to stardom. The former judge gained widespread recognition for his active role in the taskforce and for ordering Lula’s arrest. He became a hero in the eyes of half of the population in a divided nation.
The other half believed him to be a self-serving careerman with political aspirations. When Bolsonaro announced he had picked Moro as his justice minister, the accusations of bias grew louder. Nevertheless, admirers of Operation Car Wash stood by his decision to accept a political office.
Lula is now free to run for office until he is re-tried in the country’s capital, which could take years
However, the situation changed in mid-2019, just six months into Bolsonaro’s presidency and Moro’s new role. On 9 June, the online publication The Intercept Brasil, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, began publishing a series of leaked messages exchanged on Telegram between figures involved in the taskforce. Many of them seemed to suggest that Judge Moro communicated frequently with prosecutors and that he even counselled the team behind Lula’s corruption charges.
That was to prove the beginning of the end for Moro. After falling out of favour with Bolsonaro, the former judge resigned in April 2020, less than a year after the scandal that became known as Vaza Jato (roughly translated as Car Wash Leaks).
Even before The Intercept’s bombshell revelations, jurists often pointed out the inconsistencies and contradictions in the case against Lula. In the eyes of his supporters, Lula was a political prisoner, and inspired the Free Lula movement (Lula Livre). The leaked messages renewed hopes among his supporters that his convictions would be overturned.
Lula’s defence team asked the Supreme Court to judge whether Moro had acted with the necessary impartiality. On Tuesday, the five justices assigned to the case tabled the decision. They tied in a 2-2 vote after the fifth judge, who joined the court in November, said he was unable to cast an opinion because he lacked sufficient knowledge of the case.
Pathway to the presidency
While connected to the accusations against Moro, this week’s annulments stemmed from a different argument.
Justice Edson Fachin – who voted against the prejudice charge against Moro back in December – ruled that the four cases against Lula fell outside of the jurisdiction of the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, contending that the crimes did not happen in the city, located in the southern state of Paraná. The cases will be forwarded to the capital of Brasilia for reconsideration.
Fachin’s decision does not exonerate Lula, as the judge did not determine whether the former president was innocent or guilty of the charges brought against him. Regardless, Lula is now free to run for office until he is re-tried in the capital, which could take years. To become ineligible again, Lula would have to be convicted before submitting his candidacy in mid-2022, which is unlikely to happen.
Brazil’s attorney general’s office has appealed against Fachin’s decision, asking the Supreme Court to reverse it. However, Fachin’s arguments are in line with previous decisions taken by the country’s highest court, which legal experts claim are unlikely to be overturned.
Seeing that Fachin sided with Moro in the prejudice accusations against him, the internal assessment in the Supreme Court is that he opted to overturn the convictions against Lula to prevent others from using the same argument against the former judge, starting a domino effect that could jeopardise the entire Car Wash inquiry.
Economic decline and the Amazon
Though Lula is now free to run for office, the political landscape has changed since he left the president’s office in January 2011 with a record 83% approval rate, which made him Brazil’s most popular president in modern history.
Lula’s re-emergence comes at a time where Brazil is still struggling with the pandemic, with a death toll of more than 270,000 – the world’s second highest. Bolsonaro has consistently been criticised for downplaying the pandemic and his denial of science, aggravating the problem in a country where implementing social distancing measures is already challenging given that 41.4% of the population depend on informal jobs and at least 13.6 million live in overcrowded, marginalised neighbourhoods known as favelas.
Despite Bolsonaro being elected partly thanks to his ultraliberal economic promises, Brazil’s GDP, which had grown by a disappointing 1% in the first year of his presidency, has shrunk by 4.1% amid the pandemic – the worst setback since 1996.
Bolsonaro, with his growing far-Right agenda, has lost support among the financial elite and investment in the country has fallen by half. His disregard for the environment – particularly the Amazon, which has had record deforestation rates under his administration – has also hurt Brazil’s relationship with some of the world’s most powerful economies: US President Joe Biden has threatened Brazil with sanctions, while European companies have threatened boycotts of Brazilian products.
Although Brazil’s current predicaments may encourage Lula, especially after the events of the past week, there is still room for caution. The annulment of his conviction is not a definitive victory for him or his supporters. In a country with a 400-page constitution and a complex judicial system, decisions can be made and unmade in a matter of days. But Lula and his supporters will certainly be celebrating while they can. After all, Bolsonaro seems shaken.
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So which American president is going to take full credit for supporting the rapid development of Big Pharma’s Covid-19 vaccines that are already killing and injuring people?
Both Trump and Biden are claiming that it was their efforts that deserves global recognition for fighting a devastating pandemic by rolling out life-saving experimental vaccines. Fox News was one of the first networks to report on how former President, Donald Trump bragged about his success when he pre-maturely pushed the untested experimental Covid-19 vaccine by “arguing that without him, Americans wouldn’t receive a vaccine for years.”
“I hope everyone remembers!”Yes Donald, eventually everybody will remember how you pushed an experimental vaccine under Operation Warp Speed, in fact, they will also remember how you even bragged about it!
“Trump’s Wednesday comments came after an event earlier in the day when President Biden announced he would order 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson (J&J)” the report said “after meeting with CEO’s from J&J and Merck, Biden celebrated their partnership to produce the former’s vaccine.”
The Covid-19 vaccine was produced in less than one year. The actual time frame to produce a safe and effective vaccine takes anywhere from 10-15 years and sometimes even longer because of the complex nature of testing along with various rules and regulations led by government agencies in collaboration with multi-national pharmaceutical companies and they still in many cases, are untrustworthy.
By early April almost 80 companies and institutes in 19 countries were working on vaccines, most gene-based instead of using traditional approaches, such as those that have been employed in influenza vaccines for more than 70 years. The labs predicted that a commercial vaccine could be available for emergency or compassionate use by early 2021—incredibly fast, given that vaccines to brand-new pathogens have taken a decade to be perfected and deployed
The article explains how the Ebola vaccine took at least 5 years before any trials, “even the Ebola vaccine, which was fast-tracked, took five years to reach widespread trials. If Barouch and his counterparts can offer a safe, effective concoction in a year, “it will be the fastest vaccine development in history,” he says. What is interesting is that the article itself admits that there has been several labs who created gene-based vaccines for other viruses in the past, but none have been “commercialized for a human illness.” Instead of using the traditional way of creating a vaccine, (although most vaccines still have many problems regardless of how safe Big Pharma claims they are) they went along with the new gene-based approach of creating a different kind of vaccine as they explain:
Scientists use information from the genome of the virus to create a blueprint of select antigens. The blueprint is made of DNA or RNA—molecules that hold genetic instructions. The researchers then inject the DNA or RNA into human cells. The cell’s machinery uses the instructions to make virus antigens that the immune system reacts to. Cells respond to the instructions as a normal part of their daily existence. This is the same trait infectious viruses exploit; they cannot reproduce on their own, so they use a cell’s machinery to make copies of themselves. They burst out of the cell and infect more cells, widening the infection
Labs were using three ways to deliver the artificial spike protein:
Virtually all the labs want to find a way to train human cells to make an antigen called the spike protein. It juts out from SARS-CoV-2 like a stud on a tire, allowing the virus to bind to a human cell and sneak inside. Almost all the labs are using one of three approaches to deliver the spike blueprint. The first is a DNA plasmid, typically a small, hoop-shaped molecule. A plasmid is a handy tool because if a virus mutates, researchers can readily swap in a new blueprint. DNA-plasmid vaccines have been made for veterinary uses in fishes, dogs, swine and horses, but human applications have lagged, mostly because the vaccines have had difficulty passing through a cell’s protective outer membrane to reach the machinery inside. One recent improvement is to inject the vaccine with an instrument that administers brief electrical charges to cells near the injection site, which open pores in the cell membranes so the vaccine can enter
The scientists use DNA-plasmid vaccines which are programmed to infuse the RNA with the genetic blueprint code within the cell machinery that produces what is called the spike antigens “but scientists can skip the plasmid step by embedding a blueprint in a strand of RNA—a second approach known as RNA vaccines.”
The next step is to “mobilize” the immune system to create antibodies.
“The RNA is carried in lipids that are injected into the body; lipids are fatty molecules that can pass easily into cells.”
Scientific American also mentioned Johnson and Johnson’s (J&J) approach by
“inserting the DNA blueprint into a common cold virus. When injected, this adenoviral vector, as it is called, infects human cells and delivers the blueprint it is carrying.”
The Children’s Health Defense commented on J&J’s rollout with their own experimental vaccine:
Rather than use the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology being deployed for the first time in the Pfizer and Moderna injections, J&J’s vaccine (made by the company’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals subsidiary) features a genetically engineered “viral vector” design reliant on a weakened common-cold virus called adenovirus 26.
Adenovirus vaccines have a lengthy history of use in the U.S. military, but the FDA’s emergency green light for J&J’s COVID injection represents the first time the agency has authorized an adenovirus-vectored vaccine for civilian use.
Despite the fact that the latest data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) under the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System(VAERS) which does record deaths and injuries shows how dangerous these vaccines are.
It has been reported that since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines between December 14th, 2020 and February 8th, 2021 there were approximately 19,907 incidents that have been reported in terms of adverse events’ that includes 1,095 deaths and more than 3,767 serious injuries.
Right at the start of the vaccine rollout, there was already a handful of cases caused by Trump’s beautiful shot. In as early as December 10th, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine already had caused injuries, one of the injuries is called‘Bell’s Palsy’ which is a case of temporary facial paralysis.
The FDA said the issue should be monitored as the jab becomes more widely available.” The report FDA Briefing Document titled ‘Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting’ on the outcome of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine:
Among non-serious unsolicited adverse events, there was a numerical imbalance of four cases of Bell’s palsy in the vaccine group compared with no cases in the placebo group, though the four cases in the vaccine group do not represent a frequency above that expected in the general population. Otherwise, there were no notable patterns or numerical imbalances between treatment groups for specific categories of non-serious adverse events (including other neurologic, neuroinflammatory, and thrombotic events) that would suggest a causal relationship to BNT162b2 vaccine
Shortly after, a registered nurse from Nashville, Tennessee by the name of Khalilah Mitchell got Bell’s Palsy after taking the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine:
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The Tennessee Department of Health confirmed to The Associated Press that there is no record of a registered nurse under that name. Though four people in the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial and three people in the Moderna trial who received vaccines reported Bell’s palsy, a disorder that causes paralysis on one side of the face and is temporary for most people, at this time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not established a link between the vaccines and the condition
At the start of the new year, a tragedy occurred in South Florida with the death of a beloved obstetrician, Dr. Gregory Michael. The Sun-Sentinel of South Florida reported on the death of Dr. Gregory Michael, a Miami-Beach obstetrician ‘A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why’ said that “two weeks after getting a first dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, a 56-year-old doctor in South Florida died this week, possibly the nation’s first death linked to the vaccine.” the report said that health officials from Florida and the CDC are investigating if the vaccine had anything to do with his death although his family said that Dr. Michael was in good health.
On December 18th he received a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and a few days later
“small spots began to appear on his feet and hands and he went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai where he has worked in private practice for 15 years.”
One of the after-effects was a low blood count. The report said that “experts from all over the country were involved in his care” according to his wife Heidi Neckelmann. Dr. Michael had a stroke and died before he was to undergo “a last resort surgery.”
On January 15TH more than 10 people had died in Germany due to the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine according to the Paul Ehrlich Institute who was investigating the incident. Yahoo Newsoriginally published the report from Asia News International (ANI) and Sputnik:
Specialists from Germany’s Paul Ehrlich Institute are looking into the deaths of 10 people who passed away soon after having been inoculated against the novel coronavirus disease, Brigitte Keller-Stanislawski, the head of the institute’s department of the safety of medicinal products and medical devices, said on Thursday. According to the medical expert, the deceased were aged from 79 to 93, all with antecedent diseases. The time between vaccination and death ranged from several hours to four days.
“Until yesterday we had nine cases; we have to wait for the data from Lower Saxony [about another alleged case], then there will be 10. We are talking about patients in extremely grave condition, with multiple diseases, who were receiving palliative treatment. I have already said that we are studying these cases … Based on our current data we assume they died from their main diseases, coinciding in time with the vaccination,” Keller-Stanislawski said at a press conference
It was reported that Pfizer (US) and BioNTech (Germany) had 842,000 people in line for the vaccine with the elderly and the staff at nursing homes being the first people to be vaccinated. However, it came with a heavy price with the rushed vaccine:
The institute also reported six anaphylaxis cases. So far, there have been 325 cases of side-effects allegedly related to the vaccine, including 51 severe ones. Keller-Stanislawski stated that those results are within expectations and correspond to the US vaccination statistics
On January 16TH, The Jerusalem Post’13 Israelis suffer facial paralysis after corona virus vaccine – report’ originally from a Ynet News source based in Israel reported the following:
Some 13 people have experienced mild facial paralysis as a side effect after taking the COVID-19 vaccine, the Health Ministry reported, and estimates are that the number of cases could be higher. Health officials have raised questions about whether or not to administer the second dose to these individuals, but the Health Ministry is recommending that the second dose be given
One person described his ordeal after the vaccine “For at least 28 hours I walked around with it [facial paralysis],” one person who had the side effect told Ynet. “I can’t say it was completely gone afterwards, but other than that I had no other pains, except a minor pain where the injection was, but there was nothing beyond that.” Another reaction was described by a medical director who met someone that was vaccinated and ended up with paralysis:
I recently came across, for example, someone vaccinated who was dealing with paralysis, and decided not to give her a second dose,” Prof. Galia Rahav, director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at Sheba Medical Center told Ynet. “It is true that it can be given according to the Health Ministry, but I did not feel comfortable with it
The following day, Dr. Erica S. Pan who is based in Sacramento, California said that“a higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions were reported with a specific lot of Moderna vaccine administered at one community vaccination clinic. Fewer than 10 individuals required medical attention over the span of 24 hours.”
On January 18th, following the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination campaign in Norway, 33 people who were over the age of 75 years-old had died. According to Bloomberg News“In Norway, 33 people aged 75 and over died following immunization, according to the agency’s latest figures. All were already seriously ill, it said.”
Norway has vaccinated more than 48,000 people in nursing homes. “The reported fatalities are well under 1 out of 1,000 nursing-home patients to be vaccinated, he said. The side effects of immunization can, in some cases, “tip the patients into a more serious course of the underlying disease,” Madsen said. “We can’t rule that out.” In a January 15th report from Bloomberg News ‘Norway Warns of Vaccination Risks for Sick Patients Over 80′ said the following:
Norway said Covid-19 vaccines may be too risky for the very old and terminally ill, the most cautious statement yet from a European health authority as countries assess the real-world side effects of the first shots to gain approval.
Norwegian officials said 23 people had died in the country a short time after receiving their first dose of the vaccine. Of those deaths, 13 have been autopsied, with the results suggesting that common side effects may have contributed to severe reactions in frail, elderly people, according to the Norwegian Medicines Agency
These are just a few examples of what happened with the release of various Covid-19 vaccines right from the start. This is just the beginning.
No one knows what the long-term effects will be but from what the early reports are showing, the Covid-19 experimental vaccines will unfortunately kill or injure many more people in the foreseeable future. Trump’s “beautiful shot” will be part of his legacy, one that will remember him as the propagandist who sold himself to Big Pharma and the deep state, the same entities he supposedly tried to remove from power.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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“We are willing to help people who believe the way we do.” —Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, 1947
Introduction
I cannot stress enough the overwhelming toxic spell that Cold War propaganda cast on the minds of three generations, including some of the most intelligent people, and its influence continues today.
Relentless Cold War rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture.
Religious institutions, academic and educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school, professional associations, political associations from local to national, scientific community, economic system, entertainment industry from radio and TV to Hollywood and sports, fraternal organizations, boy scouts, etc.—all systematically colluded and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling pathological, rabid, paranoid fear of “enemies”— in our midst as well as “out there”—in order to rationalize otherwise pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world as well as at home.
The atrocities committed in the name of defeating communist bogeymen are nearly beyond belief. As this example shows, our cultural schooling is so pervasive as to generate a universally compelling mythology powerful enough to conceal its own contradictions.
Our cultural corruption was so complete we proudly utilized B-52s blessed by God-fearing chaplains flying five miles high to bomb unarmed, mostly Buddhist peasants living nine thousand miles across the Pacific. It is very difficult to recognize in ourselves what would be considered criminally insane behavior if carried out by others.
Forty years of fanatical “good us versus evil them” leads directly from the 1917 Russian Revolution, the authentic beginning of the Cold War, leading to Korea and Viet Nam.
Prior to 1917, Russia has been a semi-colonial possession of European capital that had settled into typical “Third World” patterns, supplying raw materials to industrial countries while primarily internally developing with foreign capital while experiencing dramatic escalation of debt and impoverishment.
The Russian Revolution was a radical break from western-dominated exploitation, very unacceptable to the capitalist west, the so-called “advanced” industrial countries. It was, in effect, a radical alternative to the way things had been settling in among “moderns” around the non-indigenous global capitalist world.
During Russia’s 1918–1920 Civil War, a number of the allied nations and Japan invaded Russia in efforts to crush socialism.
Winston Churchill, England’s Minister for War and Air (1919–1921), sought desperately “to strangle at its birth” the Bolshevik state.[1] A determined effort by 11 Western nations and Japan to nip the revolution in the bud formed expeditionary forces that invaded Russia in 1918 with nearly nine hundred thousand troops in three regions.
Archangel in northern Russia, including five thousand US troops; the Odessa region and Crimea in Southern Russia; and Vladivostok in eastern Russia, including seven thousand US troops who remained there until 1920. US casualties during the occupation in northern Russia were nearly 2,900. The State Department told Congress: “All these operations were to offset effects of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia”.[2]
This US intervention into Russia occurred on President Wilson’s orders without a Congressional declaration of war. It also occurred during peace negotiations that had gotten underway on January 4, 1919 in Versailles, France, to formally end the First World War.
The Versailles Treaty was signed June 28, 1919, by Germany and Britain, France, Italy, and Russia, but not by the US.
The intervention into Russia illustrates how terrified the US and the West were of the ideological alternative to capitalism that the Bolsheviks represented.
“High level US planning documents identify the primary threat as ‘radical and nationalistic regimes’ that are responsive to popular pressures for ‘immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses’ and development for domestic needs, tendencies that conflict with the demand for a ‘political and economic climate conducive to private investment,’ with adequate repatriation of profits and ‘protection of our raw materials.’”[3]
In essence, the Soviet Union was considered a gigantic “rotten apple,” a “challenge . . . to the very survival of the capitalist order.” As Europe was beginning to self-destruct, the US was for the first time becoming a decisive world influence. The Bolshevik revolution, i.e., Communism, was seen as a global enemy that had to be crushed.[4]
The Truman Doctrine Ushers in a National Security State
Truman’s March 12, 1947 containment speech, often described as the formal declaration of the Cold War between the Free World and the forces of Communism, helped entrench the idea that the entire world is the specific business of the United States.
Expressing fear of an international Communist threat and marking the beginning of US containment policy, his appeal to congress officially launched the first of thousands of US covert and overt interventions around the world.
Despite Truman’s focus on Greece and Turkey in this speech, internal documents reveal that South Korea was as important, if not more important in terms of needing to be contained. This was made clear in 1949, when both Secretary of State Acheson and the head of State’s policy planning, George Kennan, (image right) concluded that successful suppression by Syngman Rhee of a Korean people’s independence movement would be a key litmus test of the US’s emerging policy of global containment of Communism, despite the Korean’s passion for self-determination.
Quelling popular self-determination aspirations (autonomy, democracy) around the world became critical for the assurance of continued global Western hegemony. Thus, the Cold War really was a series of hundreds of smaller, but brutal hot wars against popular and revolutionary movements in the “Third World” seeking liberation from historic colonialism (the essential lessons of the Russian Revolution), movements that were essentially supported by the alternative represented by the Soviet Union, in addition to the major post-WWII Third World revolutions in Korea and Viet Nam. In the first, we were stalemated in 1953; the second we lost militarily/politically in 1973, though in each case we decimated and destroyed each culture’s infrastructure while murdering a combined 10 million plus people.
NSC-68: The US, Not the Soviets, Possessed a Global Monolithic Plan
On April 14, 1950, President Truman approved a comprehensive National Security Council study known as NSC 68 (1949-1950). The most fundamental document of the US Cold War, its recommendations began to be implemented on the eve of our hot war in Korea.
NSC-68 asserted that the US had the unique right and responsibility to impose our chosen “order among nations” so that
“our free society can flourish. . . . Our policy and action . . . must be such to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system” and “foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system” that will “hasten” its “decay.”
It added,
“The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”
The foundation of the strategy was a “view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected satellite countries” and “to reduce the power and influence of the Kremlin inside the Soviet Union.” Any less global imperial policy would have “drastic effects on our belief in ourselves and in our way of life.”
US ability to act had apocalyptic ramifications: “fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization.”
NSC-68 concluded that “the assault on free institutions is world-wide” and “imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership” such that we must seek “to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.” “Any measures, covert or overt, violent or nonviolent” will be called upon as necessary for “frustrating the Kremlin design,” which included “overt psychological warfare” as well as various kinds of “economic warfare.” Utmost care “must be taken to avoid permanently impairing our economy and the fundamental values and institutions inherent in our way of life”.[5]
NSC-68 went on to claim that even “if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem of the free society . . . of reconciling order, security . . . with the requirement of freedom.”
The subsequent Korean War was the first time the CIA operated in a hot war. Its arguments became the foundation for tripling the “Defense” budget, stationing troops in Europe, and significantly boosting US conventional and nuclear weapons systems, thus further escalating the arms race.[6]
NSC-68 reveals this incredible irony: Throughout the Cold War years, we were taught to fear the evil Soviets, while our government spent literally trillions of dollars defending our real monolithic plan from their fictional one. Further, the Cold War and its consequent expensive arms race only ensured preservation of an obsessively consumptive Western way of life that is literally destroying life on the planet as we face eco- catastrophe due to global warming. Industrial civilization is an intense heat engine.
Staggering Soviet Losses in WWII Ignored by the West
The US government knew that the Soviet Union was so devastated from the war that it had no capacity or will to imagine or carry out a monolithic plan to control the West. Yet, post -World War II hostility toward the Soviet Union resumed anti-Bolshevik and anti-Communist hatred that had begun in 1917-1918. This, despite the fact, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, that the Soviet armies essentially were responsible for the final defeat of the Nazis in World War II, a war in which the Soviets suffered incredible losses.
A 1994 study published by the Russian Academy of Science estimated USSR casualties at 26.6 million, or 13.5 percent, of its pre WWII war population of 196.7 million.[7]
Before their defeat in 1945, the Nazis had leveled or crippled 15 large Soviet cities, more than 1,700 towns, 70,000 villages, and nearly 100,000 collective farms, while devastating most of its factories, railroads, highways, bridges, and electric power stations.[8] In contrast, the US suffered less than 420,000 deaths, or only three-tenths of a percent of its population, and did not lose any infrastructure.
US Naval Intelligence reported in January 1946 that the USSR was “exhausted . . . not expected to take any action during the next five years which might develop into hostilities with Anglo-Americans.”
Its policies were determined to be defensive in nature, designed only “to establish a Soviet Monroe Doctrine for the area under her shadow, primarily and urgently for security”.[9] Honest historians, academicians, and political leaders knew the basis of Stalin’s insistence on having friendly neighbors and secure borders on its west flank. Unlike the US, the Soviet Union had no oceans to protect it from external aggression.
In 1812, Napoleonic France invaded Russia through Germany. Imperial Japan invaded Siberia in 1906.
Germany invaded Russia in 1914 and again in 1941.
And Poland invaded Russia in 1920 over an old territorial dispute and new ideological fears of Bolshevism.
Thus, Russia’s Western border had been invaded at least four times.[10] George Kennan, architect of the US containment policy, ultimately concluded that
“the image of a Stalinist Russia poised and yearning to attack the West was largely a fiction of the Western imagination.”
He reminded US Americans that the Russian people believed profoundly in “decency, honesty, kindness, and loyalty in the relations between individuals, in fact that the Russians are human beings after all”.[11]
It has been our delusions and arrogance under “God” ever since our own cultural origins in forceful dispossession of hundreds of “strange” Indigenous cultures, both in the Western Hemisphere stealing land and in Africa stealing chattel labor, that we have possessed the cultural DNA of selfishness and narcissism at the expense of others and the Planet Earth. Our Age of stupid and ecocide/suicide is not recognized, as we have depended upon the techniques of denial and the comforting trick of basking in the arrogance of exceptionalism.
And this pattern of US-inflicted atrocities around the globe continues as a bi-partisan political plundering project of Democrats and Republicans, recently accentuated especially since Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 election with the hoax of Russophobia.
This 400-year bestial history of racism, classism, and sexism imposed by primarily White men, on virtually everyone else for 20 generations, was captured perfectly in the 8 minute 46 second video taken by a 17-year-old teenager of a Minneapolis White police officer with the full force of his knee on Black George Floyd’s neck as he tortured, then murdered him.
That knee is on all of our necks now. This has caused more reasons for millions of Whites people to intensely preserve their fantasy of denial.
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Brian Willsonis a Viet Nam veteran and trained lawyer. He has visited a number of countries examining the effects of US policy. He wrote a psychohistorical memoir, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson (PM Press, 2011), and in 2018 wrote Don’t Thank Me for my Service: My Viet Nam Awakening to the Long History of US Lies(Clarity Press). He is featured in a 2016 documentary, Paying the Price for Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson, and others in the Peace Movement, (Bo Boudart Productions). His web essays: brianwillson.com. He can be reached: [email protected].
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Notes
[1] Michael Zezima, Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of the ‘The Good War’ (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2000), 26-7.
[2] Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 515-516; D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1920, Vol I (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1961), 16-35; Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People’s History (New York: Perennial Library/Harper & Row, 1984), 110-111; David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War AgainstBolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 2-9, 272-3.
[3] Noam Chomsky, “The Face of Colonialism a Century Later” (PeaceWork, July/August 1998), 19.
[4] Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 67; Chomsky, Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 37.
[5]National Security Memorandum No. 68 (NSC-68) on “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” written by a Joint State-Defense Department Committee, under the supervision of Paul Nitze, Director of the Policy Planning Staff, in April 14, 1950, pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950.
[6] John Lewis Gaddis, We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 84, 109.
[7] Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, “Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4, 1994, 671-680.
[8] Harvey Wasserman, America Born & Reborn (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1983), 168; Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold war, 1945-1971 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972), 14.
[9] Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America (New York: Praeger, 1974), 9; Edward Pessen, Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 63; Wasserman, 168.
[10] Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 23.
“Founding Father” John Jay possessed a vision that “the people who own the country ought to govern it”. This referred to those who owned land, slaves, and commercial enterprises. Jay also believed that the upper classes “were the better kind of people”.
“Draconian public health measures are imposed on society with little proof of effectiveness, and much proof of collateral damage, there is little debate covered in the commercial media about public health issues.”
Several European countries have now suspended the mRNA AstraZeneka Vaccine including Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Bulgaria. And more recently: Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, France, Italy, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Romania.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned last Friday that the US’ reportedly planned deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Japan “will certainly entail our retaliation”, which could realistically take the form of informally creating a Russian-Chinese-North Korean missile alliance.
The renowned physicist, thinker and activist Vandana Shiva proposes ecofeminism as a response to the current moment, in which the capitalist patriarchy is leading us to destruction and death, after having colonized nature, women and the future.
Progressive members of Congress are demanding that President Joe Biden bring pressure to bear on Saudi Arabia to end its yearslong blockade on Yemen—which has been maintained with U.S. help—after new reporting provided a closer look at the horrific suffering caused by the kingdom’s ongoing obstruction of food, medicine, and other essential supplies.
Last year, former US President Donald Trump announced very clearly, that part of the US forces mission in Syria is to protect the oil fields and to take a share of them. This statement was an official admission of the US forces’ plundering of Syrian natural resources.
The recent disclosure by the Wall Street Journal that Israel has been waging a covert war against Syria-bound Iranian oil tankers, using water mines and other explosives does not come as a surprise.
“As Canadian medical doctors, we’re gonna tell you what the best science now has to say and we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Research now shows that the PCR test is practically worthless. Only 3% of patients with a positive test actually have the coronavirus.”
Somehow, the opinion-makers in the media, the bloated military brass, and the members of Congress who like to gin up fears among the voters so they’ll keep voting for them have gotten everyone thinking that Russia is still hell bent on world communist takeover and that China it trying to replace the US as global hegemon.
COVID vaccine makers have not only introduced new primary ingredients to the U.S. vaccine stage, but they’ve bundled these new ingredients with “inactive” ingredients in unprecedented ways that raise the risk for dangerous allergic reactions.
In a world built of spin, our goal has always been to present you with the facts.
We act as a global platform for much needed debate and dialogue within the context of several very complex crises. We need to stand together to find our way amid misled politicians, media misrepresentations, and the suppression of independent thought.
We are powered by our readers and are indebted to your support. If you too believe in the preservation of critical thought and discourse, we ask you to support Global Research by making a donation or becoming a member today.
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Out of habit, American economists worry about federal debt. But federal debt can be redeemed by the Federal Reserve printing the money with which to retire the bonds.The debt problem rests with individuals, companies, and state and local governments.They have no printing press.
We have explained that the indebtedness of the population means there is little discretionary income with which to drive the economy.The offshoring of middle class jobs lowered incomes, and after paying debt service—mortgage interest, car payments, credit card interest, student loan debt—Americans’ pockets are empty.
This situation has been worsened by Covid lockdowns.In the US the federal government has sent out a few Covid payments to help keep people’s heads above water as they face expenses without income.The financial press refers to these Covid checks as “fiscal stimulus,” but there is no stimulus.The Covid checks do not come close to replacing the missing wages, salaries and business profits from lockdowns.
Corporations have indebted themselves and impaired their capitalization by borrowing money with which to repurchase their stock. This has built up their debt in the face of stagnant or declining consumer discretionary income.
We propose to deal with the debt crisis by forgiving debts as was done in ancient times.Our basic premise is that debts that cannot be paid won’t be. Widespread foreclosures and evictions would further worsen the distribution of income and wealth and further contrain the ability of the economy to grow.Writing debt down to levels that can be serviced would clear the decks tor a real recovery.Income that would be siphoned off in debt service would instead be available to purchase new goods and services.
A few economists muttered that we were overlooking the “moral hazzard” of absolving people of their debts.But leaving the economy stagnated in debt is also a moral hazzard.
Policymakers did not endorse our proposal, but, in effect, policymakers adopted our policy.However, instead of forgiving the debt itself, they forgave payment of the debt service.Individuals and businesses who cannot pay their landlords or lenders cannot be evicted or foreclosed until June.This doesn’t hurt the lenders or banks, because the loans are not in default, and their balance sheet is not impaired. The banks add the unpaid payments to their assets, and their balance sheets remain sound.
When June arrives, the prohibition against eviction and foreclosure will have to be extended as the accrued debt service cannot be paid.Extending the moratorium on foreclosures and evictions will just build up arrears. Is the implication a perpetual moratorium?
The question is: If policymakers are willing to forgive debt service, why not just forgive the debt.The latter is neater and clears the decks for an economic renewal.
The US economy has been financialized. Debt has been built up without a corresponding gain in productive capital investment in order to carry the mounting debt.
In financialized capitalism, the main purpose of bank loans is to refinance existing investments, not to expand productive capacity with which to service the debt.It is not possible to grow out of debt in a financialized economy, because too much income is used for debt service.The way to deal with this problem is to write down debts.
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Michael Hudson is an American economist professor of economics at the university of Missouri Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.
Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.
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***
Prominent signatories and five former OPCW officials are calling on the chemical watchdog to address the cover-up of its chemical weapons investigation in the Syrian city of Douma, and to hear out the dissenting scientists whose findings were censored.
Five former officials from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have joined a group of prominent signatories to urge the OPCW to address the controversy surrounding its investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.
Leaks from inside the OPCW show that key scientific findings that cast doubt on claims of Syrian government guilt were censored, and that the original investigators were removed from the probe. Since the cover-up became public, the OPCW has shunned accountability and publicly attacked the two whistleblowers who challenged it from inside.
The “Statement of Concern” is signed by five former OPCW officials, including the organization’s founding leader, José Bustani, and others including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Tulsi Gabbard, John Pilger, Lord West of Spithead, as well two former senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck.
“The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security,” the statement says. “It is simply not tenable for a scientific organization such as the OPCW to refuse to respond openly to the criticisms and concerns of its own scientists whilst being associated with attempts to discredit and smear those scientists.”
Pushback host Aaron Maté details the letter and airs clips of his and Tulsi Gabbard’s recent “Tucker Carlson Tonight” appearance discussing the OPCW controversy.
Statement of Concern: The OPCW investigation of alleged chemical weapons use in Douma, Syria March 11, 2021
We wish to express our deep concern over the protracted controversy and political fall-out surrounding the OPCW and its investigation of the alleged chemical weapon attacks in Douma, Syria, on 7 April 2018.
Since the publication by the OPCW of its final report in March 2019, a series of worrying developments has raised serious and substantial concerns with respect to the conduct of that investigation. These developments include instances in which OPCW inspectors involved with the investigation have identified major procedural and scientific irregularities, the leaking of a significant quantity of corroborating documents, and damning statements provided to UN Security Council meetings. It is now well established that some senior inspectors involved with the investigation, one of whom played a central role, reject how the investigation derived its conclusions, and OPCW management now stands accused of accepting unsubstantiated or possibly manipulated findings with the most serious geo-political and security implications. Calls by some members of the Executive Council of the OPCW to allow all inspectors to be heard were blocked.
The inspectors’ concerns are shared by the first Director General of the OPCW, José Bustani, and a significant number of eminent individuals have called for transparency and accountability at the OPCW. Bustani himself was recently prevented by key members of the Security Council from participating in a hearing on the Syrian dossier. As Ambassador Bustani stated in a personal appeal to the Director General, if the Organization is confident in the conduct of its Douma investigation then it should have no difficulty addressing the inspectors’ concerns.
To date, unfortunately, the OPCW senior management has failed to adequately respond to the allegations against it and, despite making statements to the contrary, we understand has never properly allowed the views or concerns of the members of the investigation team to be heard or even met with most of them. It has, instead, side-stepped the issue by launching an investigation into a leaked document related to the Douma case and by publicly condemning its most experienced inspectors for speaking out.
In a worrying recent development, a draft letter falsely alleged to have been sent by the Director General to one of the dissenting inspectors was leaked to an ‘open source’ investigation website in an apparent attempt to smear the former senior OPCW scientist. The ‘open source’ website then published the draft letter together with the identity of the inspector in question. Even more alarmingly, in a BBC4 radio series aired recently, an anonymous source, reportedly connected with the OPCW Douma investigation, gave an interview with the BBC in which he contributes to an attempt to discredit not only the two dissenting inspectors, but even Ambassador Bustani himself. Importantly, recent leaks in December 2020 have evidenced that a number of senior OPCW officials were supportive of one OPCW inspector who had spoken out with respect to malpractice.
The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security. It is simply not tenable for a scientific organization such as the OPCW to refuse to respond openly to the criticisms and concerns of its own scientists whilst being associated with attempts to discredit and smear those scientists. Moreover, the on-going controversy regarding the Douma report also raises concerns with respect to the reliability of previous FFM reports, including the investigation of the alleged attack at Khan Shaykhun in 2017.
We believe that the interests of the OPCW are best served by the Director General providing a transparent and neutral forum in which the concerns of all the investigators can be heard as well as ensuring that a fully objective and scientific investigation is completed.
To that end, we call on the Director General of the OPCW to find the courage to address the problems within his organization relating to this investigation and ensure States Parties and the United Nations are informed accordingly. In this way we hope and believe that the credibility and integrity of the OPCW can be restored.
Signatories in Support of the Statement of Concern:
José Bustani, Ambassador of Brazil, first Director General of the OPCW and former Ambassador to the United Kingdom and France.
Professor Noam Chomsky, Laureate Professor U. of Arizona and Institute Professor (em), MIT.
Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor, Harper’s Magazine.
Daniel Ellsberg, PERI Distinguished Research Fellow, UMass Amherst. Former Defense and State Department official. Former official of Defense Department (GS-18) and State Department (FSR-1).
Professor Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University.
Tulsi Gabbard, former Presidential candidate and Member of the US House of Representatives (2013-2021).
Professor Dr. Ulrich Gottstein, on behalf of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW-Germany).
Katharine Gun, former GCHQ (UKGOV), whistleblower.
Denis J. Halliday, UN Assistant Secretary-General (1994-98).
Professor Pervez Houdbhoy, Quaid-e-Azam University and ex Pugwash.
Kristinn Hrafnnson, Editor in Chief, Wikileaks.
Dr. Sabine Krüger, Analytical Chemist, Former OPCW Inspector 1997-2009.
Ray McGovern, ex-CIA Presidential Briefer; co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (rtd); member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
Professor Götz Neuneck, Pugwash Council and German Pugwash Chair.
Dirk van Niekerk, former OPCW Inspection Team Leader, Head of OPCW Special Mission to Iraq
John Pilger, Emmy and Bafta winning journalist and film maker.
Professor Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Antonius Roof, former OPCW Inspection Team Leader and Head Industry Inspections.
Professor John Avery Scales, Professor, Pugwash Council and Danish Pugwash Chair.
Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator (Iraq).
Alan Steadman, Chemical Weapons Munitions Specialist, Former OPCW Inspection Team Leader and UNSCOM Inspector.
Jonathan Steele, journalist and author.
Roger Waters, Musician and Activist.
Lord West of Spithead, First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff 2002-06.
Oliver Stone, Film Director, Producer and Writer.
Colonel (ret.) Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army, Visiting Professor at William and Mary College and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.
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Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. He is also is contributor to The Nation magazine and former host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!. Aaron has also presented and produced for Vice, AJ+, and Al Jazeera.
All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
This is the first of a number of interviews with women from all continents who are committed to life. A project that has led us to a collective process that is allowing us to grow as individuals and as a whole.
The renowned physicist, thinker and activist Vandana Shiva proposes ecofeminism as a response to the current moment, in which the capitalist patriarchy is leading us to destruction and death, after having colonized nature, women and the future.
What do all the causes she defends have in common? She confesses,
“Everything comes out of me, like the love of life and freedom, whether it is the defense of seeds or being with my peasant sisters defending the land… [everything I do] has to do with the defense of life and freedom, from a place of love and resistance also in the face of the lack of freedom.”
Dr. Shiva proposes to take advantage of the ten-year window we still have to decolonize ourselves and change the direction we are taking, relying on feminist movements and young environmental defenders, thus saving the planet and, therefore, humanity and life.
Don’t miss the strength of her expression and listen to the words of a woman who is convinced and convincing about the fight for the future and life. Enjoy it!
Attached is the link to the Earth University courses, including the Ecofeminism course:
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Prof. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers’ rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993. She is executive director of the Navdanya Trust.
Vandan Shiva is a frequent contributor to Global Research
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The Netherlands will suspend the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine until at least March 29 as a precaution, the Dutch government said on Sunday (Mar 14).
The move, which follows a similar decision by Ireland earlier in the day, is based on reports from Denmark and Norway of possible serious side effects, the government said.
No such cases had been found yet in the Netherlands, the Dutch Health ministry said in a statement, adding that there was no proof yet of a direct link between the vaccine and the reports from Denmark and Norway.
The government said it would now wait for an investigation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
“We can’t allow any doubts about the vaccine,” Dutch Health minister Hugo de Jonge said.
“We have to make sure everything is right, so it is wise to pause for now.”
The Dutch late last week said there was no reason to stop using the vaccine, following reports of the formation of blood clots in some people who had been injected with it.
The EMA and the World Health Organisation have said there is no indication that these events were caused by the vaccination, and AstraZeneca has also said it had found no evidence of increased risk of deep-vein thrombosis.
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Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned last Friday that the US’ reportedly planned deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Japan “will certainly entail our retaliation”, which could realistically take the form of informally creating a Russian-Chinese-North Korean missile alliance in defensive response to that destabilizing scenario.
The US is so obsessed with attempting to “contain” China that it might ultimately be responsible for creating a Russian-Chinese-North Korean missile alliance if it doesn’t reconsider its reportedly planned deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Japan. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned last Friday that such a move “will certainly entail our retaliation” because it “would have an extremely destabilizing effect from the standpoint of international and regional security.” The Neo-Realist theory of International Relations preaches that states will always put their security interests first, which in this case could realistically lead to Russia, China, and North Korea coordinating their defensive response to America’s emerging missile-driven threat as is their right under international law. Such an outcome would arguably be against the US’ regional security interests, including those of its Japanese and South Korean allies.
It must be remembered that the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership received an enormous boost in 2014 following the simultaneous onset of Western sanctions against the Eurasian Great Power during the Ukrainian Crisis in parallel with the US’ doubling down on its provocative actions in the South China Sea. The US’ strategic rivals as it officially considers them to be nowadays were pushed closer together than ever before due to their shared interests in responding to these provocations along their peripheries. Nevertheless, neither feelscomfortable becoming the other’s military ally because they don’t want to get caught up fighting their partner’s possible wars in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia respectively. That calculation might informally change as a result of the US’ reportedly planned intermediate-range missile deployment to Japan since such a move goes against both of their security interests in Northeast Asia, as well as that of their shared North Korean partner.
Russia and China already closely cooperate in the military sphere, with Moscow even helping Beijing construct a missile-attack warning system. This speaks to how much they trust one another. With that in mind, it’s only natural that they’d be pressed to take their military cooperation even further in the face of the US’ possible missile threats against them in Northeast Asia. North Korea might also coordinate with them in the event that it decides to double down on its missile program in response, thereby likely scuttling the already stalled denuclearization talks and possibly leading to another related crisis in the region. More multilateral pressure being put upon North Korea in that scenario would only push it closer to its Russian and Chinese neighbors, who both share Pyongyang’s concerns about the possible deployment of the US’ intermediate-range missiles in Japan. As such, an informal missile alliance between them wouldn’t be surprising.
The US doesn’t want Russia and China increasing their military cooperation even further than they already have, yet those two would have little choice but to do so as was argued, including through possible coordination with North Korea in the missile sphere. Some have previously speculated that such a scenario would be nightmarish for the US, but that’s exactly what the US is practically forcing them to do. In other words, from the American strategic standpoint, this outcome would be completely counterproductive for its interests. This observation raises the question of why responsible policymakers aren’t warning about that scenario considering how obvious it is. It can’t be known for sure, but it might very well be that the American strategic community has been captured by Sinophobic ideologues who are so blinded by their hatred of the People’s Republic that they don’t see how disadvantageous their so-called “missile diplomacy” with China is.
From the opposite perspective, those in favor of accelerating the onset of the Multipolar World Order will probably cheer the informal creation of a Russian-Chinese-North Korean missile alliance as a long-overdue development. They’ve been hoping that Russia and its partners would take such a step for a while already, yet it might ironically turn out that they needed American pressure to do so. It’ll remain to be seen what happens of course, but it seems unlikely that the US will hold back on its reported decision to deploy intermediate-range missiles to Japan or elsewhere in the region, thus catalyzing some form of the predicted response from Russia and its partners and thus potentially turning that scenario into a fait accompli. In any case, the world will find out soon enough what will ultimately happen, with the outcome interestingly being decided by none other than the US since its decision whether or not to provoke an Asian missile race will prove pivotal.
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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.
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This report, No-First Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Policy Assessment (by William A. Chambers; Caroline R. Milne; Rhiannon T. Hutton; and Heather W. Williams), mandated by Congress to assess No First Use (NFU), argues strongly and unambiguously against any change in declaratory policy, and concludes that “the weight of all the evidence indicates significant potential for NFU to impart more harm than good”.
It appears written as a justification for prior determined positions, and rehashes familiar arguments for the status quo.
It claims an extensive research base from interviews with unnamed individuals (presumably representative of defence establishments) in defending speculative conclusions expressed in robust and definitive terms with little to no evidence. This in spite of its initial acknowledgement that it is near impossible to verify any conclusions in this area.
The essence of the argument repeated many times in the report is outlined on page 30. A US NFU would reduce uncertainties in the minds of adversaries and potentially embolden them in crises. But for this to be significant there would need to be a strong presumption on the part of adversaries and allies that the US currently plans to and would intend to use nuclear weapons first in plausible scenarios. And if accepted it is an argument that would apply in all circumstances and in perpetuity, relevant against any proposal that limits the freedom of action of a US President to authorize nuclear use in any circumstance.
In other words, the arguments marshalled against NFU in this report are not specific to an NFU, but rather are arguments in favour of maximising the practice of strategic ambiguity. In arguing this point the report singularly fails to address the most important negative consequence of strategic ambiguity, namely its undermining international solidarity and trust, and its tendency to drive arms races amongst defence establishments predisposed to worst case scenario planning. It ignores the immeasurable damage to US credibility and interests within the international community arising from its attachment to strategic ambiguity and exceptionalism.
The reaction of allies
Chapter 5 on the reaction of allies is particularly depressing and is the focus of this response. It hinges essentially on the idea that an NFU declaration would be interpreted by allies as a signal that the United States is less committed to extending military capabilities to defending its allies, and so would demand compensation elsewhere (such as increased deployments of conventional capabilities in theatre). The logic is fallacious, and the idea that allies have the power to demand ‘material compensation’ from an NFU declaration is equally bizarre.
There is no direct connection between an NFU and actual reduced commitment, other than clarifying what must already be known by allies and adversaries… that there are no realistic scenarios in which the United States would benefit from using nuclear weapons first in any regional conflict. Yet the fallacy has swayed previous decisions in Washington over NFU, and this report argues should do so again. If this link is misperceived by allies and an NFU interpreted as a reduction in commitment, then US officials need to better explain the situation as they consult allies over the decision. An explicit NFU would simply clarify the situation and bring greater transparency and stability to nuclear diplomacy. The fact that the United States continues to offer an extended nuclear deterrent underlines its commitment to the defence of its allies in those remaining scenarios where an aggressor might contemplate nuclear first use.
The report even goes as far to suggest that an NFU would create a discomfort within the UK and France, and divergence within NATO that could then be exploited by adversaries.
This argument is bizarre and erroneous, and the fact that it is used damages the report’s credibility. Both states have a nuclear posture already very divergent to that of the United States. They both, for example, have a completely different force posture, policies of minimum deterrence, a different targeting approach, and no formal arms control arrangements that involve inspections and verification.
Should the United States declare NFU some defence officials may experience some discomfort. There may be political pressure internally to follow the lead of the United States. But there would be no logical or strategic reason that would force such a change, particularly if the United States made it clear that they themselves would not expect them to follow suit. The report’s conclusion that Russia and China “will seek to leverage [US NFU] to gain diplomatic capital and undermine alliances” [p.37] has no evidence or explanation, and is without merit. What possible diplomatic capital could accrue to these states from tighter US declaratory policy? The idea explicitly referenced in the report that any such difference would be interpreted as disarray and could embolden Russia in a crisis is preposterous, suggesting a fragility to the Alliance that borders on the paranoid.
So-called ‘deterrence gaps’
The chapter makes reference to ‘deterrence gaps’, a controversial concept resuscitated by the Trump Nuclear Posture Review. It implies a wide acceptance of the concept and its applicability that is simply not there. The example given is in relation to the possibility that a country like Russia might consider limited use of nuclear weapons to force the United States and allies to back down in a regional conflict. There is no suggestion that the United States does not have global military superiority over its competitors – this would clearly be preposterous. The issue is whether a competitor might believe it has a window of superiority in a particular region in a particular moment, such that they act fast and hard to deter any US response. It would be a fearsome and risky calculation for any adversary, given the global capabilities fielded by the United States. Yet these so-called deterrence gaps need to be filled with capabilities in that region, so the thinking goes.
The implied requirement for full spectrum dominance in every region rapidly deepens negative threat perceptions of the United States, forcing an extended arms race and driving counter moves that are destabilising (consider Putin’s announcement of novel nuclear weapons in March 2018). It illustrates an insatiable desire for total security through military dominance if states have the capacity to pursue it, or making alliance with other states willing to provide cover.
If there is any use in this report it is in exposing the poverty of thinking that has obstructed moves towards an NFU in the past. We can only hope that clearer thinking within the new US Administration and within allied governments prevail and that an NFU gets a fair hearing.
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Paul Ingram is an independent commentator on nuclear deterrence and disarmament and director of Emergent Change. He was Executive Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) 2007-2019, and is now working closely with the Swedish Foreign Ministry on the Stepping Stones Approach, the basis of the 16 state Stockholm Initiative on global nuclear disarmament. He is also a core member of Middle East Treaty Organisation (METO), the civil society group working to realise a WMD free zone.
